What is the Romantic Imagination? Part IV
"Marxism," "Feminism," "Leftism" do not get to the root of our cultural degeneracy.
Primitivism, paganism, romantic naturalism, the occult, and a crusading humanitarianism that manifests at the individual and national levels are, I would contend, inheritances of Romanticism. Not all that is Romantic is bad. However, at this late stage of cultural and political degeneracy, we should consider where these trends originated and examine their defining features. The blanket diagnoses of “cultural Marxism,” “neoliberalism,” “Leftism,” etc., although often accurate, require further digging to get to the root of the pathologies, which lies in a particular quality of imagination. As Christians, we know that the real font of evil is human sinfulness, but trying to understand the “sham spirituality” of the Rousseauistic variety will help us better to recognize pernicious trends within modernity and help us to resist them.
This series on Romanticism has tried to give an assessment of some of the main channels and tributaries of a very complex historical movement. As I have mentioned, the Romanticism that modernity has inherited has not been of the more restrained and measured variety of Coleridge and Burke but of the sentimental and utopian variety of Rousseau and Shelley. While often aesthetically pleasing if not brilliant, the work of many Romantic artists can lead in a utopian direction.
The unreal, dreamy quality of Romantic art is what gives it its allure, but it is also what makes it potentially dangerous. It is easy to fill in the gaps of a vague and impressionistic work with hopes and dreams that are untethered to reality—such was the goal of Romantic art. Friedrich Schiller, the influential German Romantic, in his “Aesthetic Letters” contends that the imagination must be left entirely free to “play” as it wishes. It is only “when imagination incessantly escapes from reality, and does not abandon the simplicity of nature in its wanderings” that it is able to operate at its full potential. For many Romantics, the imagination itself, as a creative force is the standard, it is the means for accessing truth, divinity, reality.
The problem with this apotheosis of imagination is that it lacks a center to hold it. We began with the pristine beauty of Thomas Cole, but we ended with Jasper Johns:
It is no coincidence. Romantic valorizing of “original genius” and individual spontaneity eventually resulted, paradoxically, in a tradition of individualism—meaning that one had to push the boundaries ever further in order to break free from existing currents and assert oneself as “original.” This reactionary dialectic has resulted in the modern celebration of freakishness. Artist and priest Fr. Michael Rennier recalls his personal journey from this kind of romantic belief in “originality” to his recognition that “beauty is created within the boundaries and formal structure of tradition.”
Now this was not the Romantics’ original intent. Here I am studying the evolution of art and ideas that have played out politically and sociologically. But it is no accident that we are surrounded by snowflakes anxious to be recognized for their special uniqueness. Rousseau proudly declares in his Confessions, “I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.” The irony, of course, is that Rousseau and our snowflakes have become types.
This Romantic belief that to be “original” is a moral standard in itself is particularly pernicious. Schiller insisted that the imagination must be entirely free from “the narrow limits of the present . . . in order to strive on to an unlimited future.” Novalis illustrates this desire for the limitless imagination and “pure poetry” in his “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” Its opening scene represents the quintessence of Romantic dreaming, full of “unutterable longings,” and rapturous desire—of what, the narrator knows not. In this tale, as Babbitt summarizes it, Novalis goes beyond his original intent of an “apotheosis of pure poetry” and winds up with “above all an apotheosis of the wildest vagabondage of the imagination.” I highly recommend simply reading the first several paragraphs of Novalis’s fragmentary novel if you are curious about the tenor of Romanticism that I am here exploring.
This heralding of the untamed imagination alongside the cult of nature-worship resulted in the Romantic desire to throw off limits and to reject cultural, social, and religious inheritances as burdensome constraints on the mind (and body). Hölderlin writes in “The Death of Empedocles”:
So dare it! your inheritance, what you’ve earned and learned,
The narratives of all your fathers’ voices teaching you,
All law and custom, names of all the ancient gods,
Forget these things courageously; like newborn babes
Your eyes will open to the godliness of nature
The Romantic love of nature, which seems only natural in the wake of the Enlightenment deracination of humanity, went so far as to turn into a wholesale rejection of inherited norms. The Romantics threw out the baby with the bathwater. Paradoxically, the Romantics turned out an image of man that was equally deracinated:
The Loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself, just, gentle, wise
—(from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”)
The World Economic Forum perhaps would have welcomed Shelley as its poet laureate. And this leads to our discussion of sentimental humanitarianism, Romanticism’s moral-spiritual ethos. Romantic nature-worship, the cult of primitivism, and the worship of the individual and at the same time “humanity,” have gone way beyond the aesthetic expressions of a movement. These aspects of Romanticism have coalesced into an entire worldview—one that prevails in the West and even in the Catholic Church.
Sentimental humanitarianism is to be found in almost every aspect of life in the West, from children’s books and shows to corporate trainings, academic research projects, corporate media “news,” homilies at Mass, and even foreign policy. It frames how Western man views himself and the world. At its core is the replacement of the Christian exhortation to love God and love neighbor with emotionalism and the vague desire to “return to nature” and to “love humanity.”
These projections of a future paradise in which humanity lives in harmony with each other and with Mother Earth are modern extensions of Wordsworth’s lament in “The World Is Too Much With Us” that “we are out of tune” with nature:
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckles in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn
Wordsworth’s dreaming, at least, was pastoral and beautiful, even as it helped in the unfolding of a new, romantic worldview. For Romanticism is, foremost, a state of mind.
For an understanding of what Romanticism’s moral-spiritual worldview is take a look at the WEF’s sustainability goals—or simply walk into any Whole Foods and take a look at product packaging: “fair trade,” “sustainable,” “clean energy,” “alleviating poverty,” “women-owned,” “person of color business,” etc. etc. We roll our eyes when we see these labels, but they are expressions of an all-pervasive moral system that has been set up in direct opposition to the Christian moral worldview.
What Leslie Stevens wrote in 1892 of the quality of Shelley’s poetry has, you might say, aged rather well (forgive me, but it’s so good that I must quote it at length):
[W]e may admire the melodious versification, the purity and fineness of his language, and the unfailing and, in its way, unrivalled beauty of his aerial pictures. But it is impossible to find much real satisfaction in the informing sentiment. The enthusiasm rings hollow, not as suggestive of insincerity, but of deficient substance and reality. Shelley was, in one aspect, a typical though a superlative example of a race of human beings which has. . . no fault except the fault of being intolerable. Had he not been a poet (rather a bold hypothesis, it must be admitted), he would have been a most insufferable bore. He had a terrible affinity for the race of crotchet-mongers, the people who believe that the world is to be saved out of hand by vegetarianism, or female suffrage, or representation of minorities, the one-sided, one-ideaed, shrill-voiced and irrepressible revolutionists. I say nothing against these particular nostrums, and still less against their advocates. I believe that bores are often the very salt of the earth, though I confess that the undiluted salt has for me a disagreeable and acrid savour.
Stevens is indirectly making the connection between Romanticism and sentimental humanitarianism that I am here trying to make: to dwell in the Romantics’ “shifting phantasmagoria of cloudland,” to borrow another choice phrase of his, is to cultivate an imaginative worldview that prioritizes the unreal over the real.
I think Babbitt gets it right when he says,
The momentous matter is not that a man’s imagination and emotions go out towards this or that particular haven of refuge in the future or in the past, in the East or in the West, but that his primary demand on life is for some haven of refuge; that he longs to be away from the here and no and their positive demands on his character and will.
The Romantic of this type sets up the ideal in opposition to the real, and goes well beyond mere flights of fancy or momentary escapism. This type of Romantic (or romantic) is so wedded to his idyllic fantasy that he is unwilling to part with it. We witness this today in modern iterations of the 5-year plan (and in the actual 5-year plans of yesteryear), from a future that is “carbon neutral” to gender and race quotas in the workplace to the anxious young person who cannot square the idealism he was taught to love by his college professors with the actual requirements of life.
Where the Rousseauistic romantic goes beyond ordinary dreaming is, Babbitt says, “in his proneness to regard his retirement into same land of chimeras as a proof of his nobility and distinction.” Mere feelings, “I stand with (fill in the blank with the Cause du jour),” changing a Facebook banner, or slapping up a yard sign declaring what your house “believes,” is the substitute morality of sentimental humanitarianism that has its roots in the Romantic movement.
But the self-righteous longing that the world be otherwise has the dangerous tendency to lure out of a person’s soul the will to dominate. We know how insufferable the crusading humanitarians are, criticizing the very people nearest to them for failing to be “sustainable” or for committing thought crimes against humanity. This insufferability emanates from the idealist’s belief that he knows the truth, and if only we could understand, we would do things his way.
The danger is when this idealist is given real political power, as happened with Woodrow Wilson, America’s first romantic president. That he wanted to achieve universal peace and democracy through a world war is typical of the romantic (small r) mind. The beautiful dream justifies almost any cost. Jefferson, for his part, went so far as to say “were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.” These types of romantic fanatics simply cannot come to terms with the parameters of life. They immerse themselves in the dream to such a degree that their interpretation of reality is dangerously deluded.
Two of the Romantics I’ve mentioned here, Hölderlin and Rousseau, struggled against insanity at the end of their days. They were unable to reconcile reality to their abstract visions of beauty. Certain academics frown on such “ad hominem” attacks against poor Rousseau, but I am simply pointing out that here we have an example of the very real connection between poetical hallucinations and actual loss of touch with reality.
The French Revolution blessed sentimental humanitarianism as the new morality of modernity. Robespierre showed how flexible a term “virtue” could be when he declared that “Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.” Drawing strength from the Romantic belief that we are “equal and unclassed,” the Jacobins helped to translate the Romantic aesthetic into a political program. Virtue-signaling the new revolutionary faith of liberty, equality, and fraternity became a requirement. To question the trajectory of the revolution, to express a desire to continue worshiping the God of one’s ancestors, to refuse to adopt the new language mandated by the revolution (addressing one’s fellows as “citizen” rather than madam or sir, for example), became a criminal act. What had become state policy in the French Revolution has made an interesting reappearance in recent years. Demanding that we “choose pronouns” and declare our allyship with whatever unconscionable cause, we must display our devotion to the ever-shifting progressive creeds, or else.
As Babbitt observed, sentimental humanitarianism “actually promotes the reality of strife that it is supposed to prevent.” The abstract longing, the belief in the vision can lead the dreamer to the conviction that he has been set apart from the rest of humanity, that he is a sort of prophet or messiah. Like the boy who must work against the wishes of his community in Kobi Yamada’s children’s book What do you do with an Idea?, the romantic dreamer sees himself as a unique visionary who must work against most people, despite his protests that he is the ultimate lover of humanity!
The abstract goals of the sentimental humanitarian—to get back to “nature” or to eradicate social classes or to make the “future sustainable”—are not goals that allow for diversity in the meaningful sense. Rousseau sees no contradiction between the belief that he is a great lover of humanity and his political conviction that “every malefactor who attacks the social right” can be killed “as a public enemy.” Scholars of Rousseau hate to see this connection made between Rousseau the Romantic and Robespierre but the line is pretty direct. Robespierre gave force to Rousseau’s belief that an enemy of the state “is not a moral person, but a man, and in this situation the right of war is to kill the vanquished.”
Rousseau is representative of the strain of Romantic thought that has prevailed in coloring the imagination of the West. It is this type of romanticism that one must be on guard against, especially in works of imagination for children. These are especially dangerous to young, tender minds.
Instead, we ought to take what is good from Romanticism: its recognition of the power and beauty-creating potential of the imagination, the role of symbol in conveying reality, its emphasis on the innocence of childhood as a place of truth. Rather than permit a “wild vagabondage” of imagination, we can encourage a highly imaginative child who is nonetheless ordered by moral reality. Rather than fantasize about a mythical past and invent symbols to try to transport us there, we can turn to the living symbols of Christ that have been revealed and given to us. Rather than exalt the abstract idea of childhood, we can “become as little children.” Rather than despair that life is not otherwise, we can experience the manifold complexity of reality and wonder at it.
This all looks like another attempt to replace Heaven with an earthly utopia. Why is there a perennial human desire to do this--"ye shall be as gods"?
To think that in days gone by (nearly three decades ago) I had listened along to The Lady of Shalott by Loreena McKennitt and was 'moved' at that time to abandon all but a remnant trace of Catholic morality that I had inherited from my forebears. The sirens of naturalist romanticism are powerful indeed. Throw in the Celtic Women in their stage personas and we men are sitting ducks.
Fortunately for me, I had chosen Francis as my confirmation name and the humble saint from Assisi eventually held sway over my sentiments guiding me back to the Goodness, Truth and Beauty of our faith. It was quite a battle.
Thank you Emily for reminding me to Thank God for my deliverence.