 As F.W.J. Schelling had done in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art of 1803, what Schlegel emphasizes about the transition from paganism to Christianity is that it involved the realization of an insurmountable breach between subject and object, between the I and the World, i.e., between consciousness and nature. Christianity, he argues, awakened the consciousness of the internal rupture or fundamental discord between the finite and the infinite which, in Schlegel’s analysis, is constitutive of modernity. In other words, for Schlegel, modernity arises from the painful realization of an insurmountable fissure, and the subsequent insight that real happiness can never be attained, i.e., “that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls; and that every mortal enjoyment is but a fleeting and momentary deception” (LDA: 9). As a result, in Schlegel’s view, to understand modern and especially Romantic literature means to understand art as the eternal longing for the reconciliation of this fissure between the subject and the universe, the finite and the infinite or the divine. Both the realization of the insurmountable fissure as well as the longing for its reconciliation are part of a particular way of experiencing nature, the self, and the infinite.