Adult Education Spring 2016 – The Church and the World Part III:
Revolution and the Modern Age
CLASS 3 – MAY 1: THE ROMANTIC REVOLT (1800-1850)
RETURN AND THE AUTHORITY OF INWARDNESS
Romanticism embodied “a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms,
a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the
unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten
sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of
expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.
—Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1965)
I. WHAT IS “ROMANTICISM”? (romantic, romantique)?
A. Definition: The nineteenth-century movement in philosophy, art and literature that emerged in
response to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Emphasized subjective inwardness, vitality,
emotion, intuition, imagination, authenticity, sincerity and even the irrational over and against
the Enlightenment celebration of objective reason.
B. A Narrative of Decline: Rejects the Enlightenment’s philosophical claim regarding reason and
the Enlightenment’s historical account of human progress in favor of the philosophical
primacy of vitality and a historical narrative of decline/return in which mankind has regressed
from a primitive wholeness and virtue, both moral (virtue) and martial (virtù) to a modern
decadence. Cf. Rousseau’s role in le querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (the quarrel of the
ancients and the moderns). See also Leo Strauss’s “Three Waves of Modernity.” The romantic
solution is return.
Enlightenment
Romanticism
Order
Universal
Material (Immanent)
Objective
Dispassionate
Observation
Progress/Modern
Scientist
Mechanical
Democratic
Self-Interest
Vitality
Particular/Individual
Transcendent
Subjective
Personal
Imagination
Decline/Return to the Ancients
Artist
Organic
Aristocratic (Fascistic?)
Virtue
II. INWARDNESS: A FOURTH ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY:
A. Medieval Christendom: The Church’s ecclesial authority and tradition.
B. The Reformation: Holy Scripture—but the problem of interpretive authority.
C. The Enlightenment: Human reason—empiricism in the sciences, rationalism in philosophy.
D. The Romantic Revolt: Inwardness, subjectivity. Enlightenment emphasis on reason strips
away the deepest elements of the human person—inwardness, emotion, instinct and vitality.
III. THE ROMANTIC RESPONSE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN THREE CONCEPTUAL
DIMENSIONS:
A. Nature (Vitality): Nature as providential order (Christian) vs. nature as a mechanism
understood by science (Enlightenment) rejected in favor of nature as vitality.
1. Nature as Mechanism versus Nature as Vitality: Enlightenment science objectifies and
dominates what should be encountered subjectively and experienced in its primeval state.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Arts and Sciences have corrupted man’s original virtue.
Artifice has supplanted authenticity (First Discourse, 1750);
3. Political Implications—Aristocratic and (arguably) Fascistic: Though the individual is
celebrated, the tendency is toward collectivism and aristocratic greatness. Rousseau’s
“General Will,” German romanticism’s celebration of blut und boden (blood and soil),
Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superman, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883) contrasted to
egalitarian modernity’s der letzte Mensch (the last man).
B. Reason vs. Subjective Inwardness: Divine revelation (Christian) vs. objective human reason
as a means of discovering truth, both moral and scientific (Enlightenment), rejected in favor of
the inwardness of subjective experience, intuition.
C. History (Decline and Return): The Enlightenment account of history as the progressive
movement from bondage to freedom is rejected in favor of a narrative of decline or devolution
from a primitive past/golden age. A secularized Edenic narrative.
1. Scientific advance has corrupted an originally good human condition: Man-in-nature
was content and good. The creation of property and the advancement of knowledge has
corrupted this original goodness and alienated man from his natural state (Rousseau,
“Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” (Second Discourse)
(1754)), Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848).
Where there is no effect, no cause need be sought: but here the effect is certain, the depravation real, and
our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced towards
perfection.
—Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts?” (First Discourse) (1750)
2. Return: The ancients were superior in virtually every respect. Rather than continuing
modern progress, we should seek a return to the virtues of the ancients.
3. Anthropological Claim: Man is basically good (no original sin); evil derives from the
unnatural constraints of an overly elaborated social order, which may be overcome through
a return to man’s natural, uninhibited condition.
IV. Some Key Figures
A. France: Rousseau—See supra.
B. Germany: Two Responses to Hegel
1. Marx: Complicated, strands of both Enlightenment and romantic thought—claims to
“scientific” materialism, but historical account resembles a decline narrative.
2. Nietzsche: Nietzsche insists on the vitality of will-to-power as the fundamental ground of
existence; directly attacks Judeo-Christianity and the entire history of Western thought from
Plato forward (calls Christianity “Platonism for the people” Beyond Good and Evil, Preface
(1886)). For Nietzsche, all moral values must be subverted and rejected.
The romantic tradition . . . is compounded of Rousseauistic primitivism on the one hand and Christian pietism on the
other. From Rousseau it derives its emphasis on the non-rational forces in human personality, upon emotion,
imagination and will. From pietism it takes the sense of the individual’s unmediated relation to God; which it
secularizes so that the individual is not only directly related to God, as the source and center of meaning, but becomes
himself self-justifying and autonomous.
—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man
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