Discussion about this post

User's avatar
An ordinary papist's avatar

I believe it was Einstein who said that 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.'

Expand full comment
Robert Keim's avatar

This is an excellent essay, on a topic that is not sufficiently discussed. Romanticism is probably the most ambivalent cultural movement in Christian history—there seems to be so much good hopelessly entangled with so much bad that one hardly knows what to think about it in the end. Even for secular scholars just trying to understand Romanticism from a philosophical or aesthetic standpoint, contradictions abound. A hundred years ago, the philosopher Arthur Lovejoy gave an influential lecture in which he basically said that no one can really make sense of Romanticism: “The word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign. When a man is asked, as I have had the honor of being asked, to discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or tendencies he is to talk about.” He offers this (somewhat exaggerated) conclusion with a note of despair, since “philosophers, in spite of a popular belief to the contrary, are persons who suffer from a morbid solicitude to know precisely what they are talking about.”

In any case, I really like the way you’ve attempted to parse out the nature and implications of the movement from a traditional Christian perspective. This needs to be done because the influence of Romanticism, sometimes beneficial and sometimes baleful, is still with us. But to end on a positive note, we must thank the Romantics for defending the imagination—or what might be more accurately termed, in their case, the “fullness of the interior life”—from the onslaught of rationalism and empiricism. Keats captures it memorably in “Lamia,” where by “philosophy” he means something closer to what we call “science”:

...Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Expand full comment
6 more comments...

No posts