What is the Romantic Imagination? Part III

Starbucks "artist merch," Instagram romanticism, and the spirit of the Romantic movement

“To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems” -Homer Simpson.

Only here I will argue that Romanticism (instead of alcohol? in addition to?) is the cause of and solution to modernity’s ills.

Unfortunately, out of the abundant beauty and creativity and imagination of the Romantic movement, the legacy that Romanticism has left us is less Tolkienian or Coleridgean than it is Rousseauean.

A bottle of the fermented tea popular among hippies and crunchy-cons alike (I guess that would put me in the latter camp) says on its label: “WORDS OF ENLIGHTENMENT: ‘YOU ARE MEANT TO SHINE IN THE LIGHT AND THE DARKNESS. LIKE THE SUN AND THE MOON, YOU ARE HERE TO BLESS THE WORLD WITH YOUR BRILLIANCE.’”

Such sentimental claptrap is so ubiquitous that it’s like the air we breath, but it’s worth considering where it came from, because it goes way beyond all these empty slogans on consumer goods. This romantic sentimentalism has infected everything from the family to foreign policy. More than Marxism, feminism, post-modernism, or liberalism, the spirit of Romanticism has permeated the cultural landscape of the West. All other “isms” seem to be colored by Romanticism—“One Ring to rule them all.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophical and literary writings exemplify the spirit of Romanticism that the West has inherited. Between his Confessions and his Social Contract, we find the essence of the prevailing moral and political beliefs in the West. Rousseau influenced many Romantics and his literary writings capture what would become the general mood of the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century.

Some of the most stirring and beautiful works of Romanticism nonetheless point in the direction of Rousseauean romanticism, as I will explore here. At the same time, there is a competing strain within Romanticism that points in the direction of Tolkien, for example, and in general toward some profound truths that the West would do well to recover. In fact, I believe that some of the epistemological insights of Romanticism into the role of imagination could help to guide a revival of Christianity in the West.

Romanticism was a complex and multifaceted movement that thrived especially in France, Germany, and England in the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth centuries. I gave a brief history and overview in previous posts (part I and part II). One of its major themes was the aesthetic and even spiritual exploration of the natural world. This focus combined and melded with an intense longing for communion with the divine. Feeling abandoned and alone in the universe under the cold winds of rationalism and utilitarianism, many Romantics turned to mysticism, but not of the Christian sort.

They looked to the wild beauty of nature as an antidote to Enlightenment scientism and the mechanization of human life. This was no mere aesthetic appreciation but implied an entirely new moral and spiritual philosophy. The idea of “nature” changed dramatically, and represents this revolutionary shift. Where Aristotle looked to man in civilization in order to understand his nature, the Romantics look to man outside of civilization to know his true nature. Nature itself, in a mystical way, partakes of and reveals our nature.

Wordsworth captures the Romantic philosophy of nature and the new morality that it implies:

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

We ought to listen to the call of the wild, to heed the “cry of nature,” as Rousseau put it. The Romantic fixation on nature implied an entire moral philosophy—one that would combat the equally flawed moral philosophy implied within Enlightenment rationalism. Rather than a geometrical morality, the Romantics turned to a naturalistic one. Yet both of these moral systems rejected the traditional Christian morality based in the person of Jesus Christ for an abstract ideal.

Wordsworth’s celebration of the “impulse from a vernal wood” was at the same time a celebration of the sort of human impulsivity that Christianity has long sought to restrain. The Romantic desire for communion with nature tended seamlessly toward a desire for spontaneity, unrestrained imagination and emotion, and a rejection of classical standards, both in art and in morality. Again, Wordsworth:

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Walt Whitman would later riff on this same idea:

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious

clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

For these Romantics, the confines of life in society and traditional ideas of morality, dissolve under the overmastering beauty and awe of nature and the emotion it inspires.

Percy Bysshe Shelley shows how easily art, imagination, and a new morality unfold together in an impressionistic sort of way:

The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

Why not I with thine?—

Of course, Shelley’s predilection for philandering rendered his imagination particularly willing to blur lines. Yet he shows the imaginative ease with which “One Love” melds into “Free Love”—and now we might add, “Love is Love.” The blurring of boundaries and erosion of traditional religious norms did not stop at the appreciation of nature but continued as a matter of course until we reached our current station of sexual unrestraint.

As J. G. Robertson puts it in his unmatched A History of German Literature, “Romanticism thus stood for synthesis in the things of the spirit. Religion, philosophy, science, the arts and the conduct of social and individual life al had their share in the new poetry; and in turn were suffused by that poetry.”

Wordsworth, Whitman, and Shelley gave poetic expression to something that Rousseau had already articulated in The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. To the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification or morals?” Rousseau responds with an emphatic, no. The arts and sciences, along with culture, custom, and mores—in short, civilization—has severed mankind from nature, from communion with his fellow men, and from knowledge of himself. “Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our mores were rustic but natural,” Rousseau said.

But these lovely-sounding ideas, so beautiful in their unsophisticated “naturalness” must be held up to the light and examined. We must judge the truth of their beauty. We didn’t arrive at this late stage of woke capitalism because of the rationally convincing power of Marxist materialism (indeed, this paradoxical state in which we find ourselves would cause Marx to roll in his grave).

The Romantic origins of Woke Capitalism at its finest: “Starbucks artist merch collaboration” (their words, not mine).

We arrived here because the ideas behind woke capitalism have attracted the imagination (yes, you get to have the designer jeans and cashmere top all and be considered virtuous for buying it). This attractiveness derives from a sort of beauty. Even Marx was a poet. Marx’s supremely romantic image in The German Ideology of communist society in which it is “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner,” presents something of a tantalizing vision, or at least it did to some influential members of the European intelligentsia at a critical moment in history. The same could be said of Rousseau’s declaration that “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” It inspired Robespierre, anyway, who quoted the Social Contract as the blade of the guillotine whooshed behind him.

These dreamy visions—of nature, communion, and a future entirely different from the present—encourage us to desire something radically different from what we’ve got. They are revolutionary. I am not equating Wordsworth and Whitman with Marx and Rousseau, but I am suggesting that vague, poetical language can be dangerous, and that this was the style of many Romantics.

The Romantic erosion of clear and defined ideas, helped to erode traditional Christianity in the West. Christianity tended to reject Romanticism and instead try to reconcile itself with Enlightenment rationalism. “What I don’t understand cannot make me wiser, cannot improve me, and can never become the motivation for morally good actions, and consequently cannot help me towards my eternal bliss,” confesses one Enlightenment Catholic. It is this attitude that, I would argue, contributed to Christianity’s wane in modernity while at the same time the mystical faith in art and imagination within Romanticism led to its ascendency.

The Romantic’s desire for communion with nature often overlapped with a desire for communion with the divine. Many Romantics looked to antiquity for an example of a primitive people who had unmediated access to the Universal. They saw this access in myths of the Greek gods.

“[T]he earth was boundless — the abode of the gods and their home,” Novalis writes in Hymns to the Night. “Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth.”

Apollo, Shelley wrote, is “the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.” The ancient mind, at least in Shelley’s interpretation, was in a mystical way connected with the Universe.

Hölderlin believed that the ancients were able to access truth directly, in a way that we moderns cannot:

“Not you, the blessed, who have appeared,

The painted gods in the ancient land,

I’m not allowed to call you anymore . . .”

Friedrich Schiller spells out this Romantic sentimentalizing of antiquity in his (un-ironically named) “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”:

If one remembers the beautiful nature, which surrounded the ancient Greeks; if one reflects how intimately this people under its happy sky could live with free nature, how much closer its mode of conception, its manner of feeling, its morals lay to simple nature, and what a faithful impression of the same its poetics works are . . .

In other words, the Greeks intuited the Universal in nature and conveyed this pure intuition through, for example, Homeric epic. This nostalgia for an imaginary past led, in some cases, to the desire to re-enchant the world with new gods.

“[T]he gods who’ve fled,” Hölderlin, believed, might one day return again. “[T]he earth may be new” and we will recover what has been lost.

The Romantic project, as a whole, was motivated by a desire to recover a lost connection with the Universal, and some Romantics believed it would be possible, in a mystical way, through art.

Just to remind the reader that this is no mere academic discursus but relevant to making sense of modern pathologies, see Exhibit A:

(See the video here, but for those of you who hate internet videos, this screen grab captures the essence, no pun intended).

My neighbor kindly sent this to me, knowing it would be relevant here at The Christian Imagination. “Roseuncharted” is apparently an Instagram personality who marketed herself as Christian but has since posted this now infamous “First torch activated” video. After pouring water out of an earthen vessel and performing some sort of New Age ritual, she faces the camera to tell of a time “before the world told me who to be.” Lacking the originality of the first Romantics but nonetheless channeling their desire for communion with nature and with the divine “Roseuncharted” lights a torch that, she says, “is a light that no priest, no king, no system can mediate.” And, in a mystical and poetical way, this light is part of her “remembering.” “The Earth remembers with me. The sky remembers with me.”

Here, I would argue, is someone who, like the Romantics before her, is longing for connection in a world that she feels is disenchanted. Having been brought up in a system that, paradoxically, produces “expressive individuals,” she tries clumsily to invent rituals and symbols that would provide the sort of communion of which she feels deprived. You can’t get a more perfect distillation of Romanticism’s legacy than this video.

And one final anecdote to illustrate the point: I recently saw a young woman wearing what I assumed was a miraculous medal of Our Lady. I was so surprised by this public display, which is so rare to see “in the wild,” that I complemented the necklace and asked her if it was the Virgin. “It’s actually an ancient Celtic goddess.” Ah, I thought. That makes more sense. “Oh,” I said. “Which one?” She informed me that she didn’t know which one, but that this goddess was “really old” and also that she herself “is part Irish.”

Again, someone longing for connection with her ancestry, with the divine, and for symbolism that represents truth.

The danger that is latent in the aesthetic dimension of Romanticism finds political expression in Rousseau’s Social Contract. He takes this profound longing for nature, communion, and an Arcadian past and bases a political philosophy on it (just imagine if roseuncharted were to draw up a political plan—it would, like Rousseau, doubtless demand brotherhood—or probably sisterhood).

Rousseau’s theory of democracy prefigures the modern totalitarian state that coexists with the glorification of the “expressive individual.” His ingenious, if altogether diabolical, idea of the General Will captures the essence of this tension: “Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody.”

We are at the point, I think we can safely say, that we are being tyrannized by the expressive individual. This, I would argue, is a result of the Romantic tendencies that I have been discussing. On the one hand, Romanticism desires a re-enchantment and communion with the divine, which is something that is beyond the mere individual and involves the entire community (roseuncharted is emphatic, you’ll notice, that you in fact believe her). If only one person is enchanted with imaginary deities, then he is probably on his way to the institution (where many Romantics, as it happens, spent their final days). What is important, to paraphrase Dostoevsky’s famous Grand Inquisitor, is that we are all in it together.

On the other hand, Romanticism lauds the original genius, the individual who obeys nothing but his impulse and instinct for creativity (no priest or king or system to mediate the truth). He is not to be hemmed in by any convention or pre-existing standards. This attitude within the Romantic movement, of course, was always a matter of degree.

As always, Kobi Yamada’s popular children’s book What do you do with an Idea? is instructive. I have a post dedicated to this book. It perfectly, almost to a tee, illustrates the modern iteration of Romantic thinking. In this book, a boy has a wonderful, original, creative idea that is all his own, but that is somehow alarming or simply too novel for his traditional community. The “plot” of this story is the boy caring for and tending to his personified idea until at the end, he is proven right and his idea “changes the world.”

This is the modern romantic story of the creative individual who must go against the parochial grain in order to bestow upon the world his earth-shattering brilliance.

So where does the tyranny come into Yamada’s story? The tyranny is implied on the final page of the story, in which the crown that had been sitting atop the head of his personified “idea” is now on top of his own head, implying his own kingship. He inherited power from his idea coming to life. This is the romantic dreamer. Implied in the “beautiful” dream is the need for power to be given to the dreamer so that he can change the world. You, dear reader, know all too well where the tyranny comes in when we have an idealist wanting to make the world a better place.

But how does this relate to the sentimental musings of Shelley and Wordsworth? Shelley and Wordsworth simply put forth the idyllic dream, the poetical vision of a different sort of existence. This, to be sure, is nothing new or unique to Romanticism. But its ubiquity and its tenor, its proposal that we intentionally erode the civilization that we’ve built up in favor of the dream, is unique to Romanticism. And therein lies one of the dangers. The Romantic dream of a past golden age and the projection of that past onto a future in which a mystical re-enchantment might be possible (sans Christianity, of course) has inspired countless disciples (see above) and wholesale political programs.

Romanticism’s general moral-spiritual ethic may be called sentimental humanitarianism, following Irving Babbitt’s apt description. Under this new moral dispensation, personal ethical struggle is not required. Sin and salvation are corporate, rather than individual, so persons must work to make political changes, not personal improvements. Moreover, virtue is something “engraved in all hearts.” As Rousseau laments, there should not be “so many difficulties and so much preparation in order to know [virtue].” Virtue ought to be as easy and rustic as the meandering rivers in Thomas Cole’s paintings.

This imaginative longing for a type of existence and a type of virtue that required little effort was an attractive one. Just look at the moral philosophy that underlies Yamada’s story. The boy is not expected to restrain his impulses or to show charity to his neighbor or to work on his character in any way. He has no chores or responsibilities. And the story shows him experiencing no moral growth. The entire story is simply one of the boy holding fast to his great idea until the time is ripe and the idea changes the world. This is the essence of sentimental humanitarianism, which derives in large measure from the Romantic reinterpretation of nature and virtue.

Having no doubt tried the patience of the reader, I will save for the next post the important discussion of how insights of Romanticism, rightly understood, can point the way forward for Christianity.

See the final installment of this series here.