How Romantic!
One of my most formative educational experiences came in the first weeks of my first class as an undergraduate in the English Department. The impassive professor of my British Literature survey called on me to define the term ‘romantic.’ I offered a vague, listless response, which revealed nothing but that I had not adequately prepared for our seminar that day. With a stern gaze through thick glasses he stared at me and declared, “Butler, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
It was both devastating and necessary to hear these words. My professor’s words were a kind of apocalypse revealing my ignorance. Yet they also acted as a grace-- a gift of knowledge that challenged and defeated the false confidence I might have had in my understanding. I did not know it at the time, but this intrusive mercy was especially apt given the cultural movement we were discussing in class that day.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature characterizes romanticism as a cultural movement defined by individualism, subjectivism, sentimentalism, and naturalism. As always, it is helpful to define our terms:
Individualism here means a tendency to privilege the unique place of each person in a given situation. Our definition of self is negotiated in the tension of our particular existence and the many things we share in common with the groups of which we are a part. Individualism errs on the side of favoring the one over and against the pressures of the many.
Subjectivism is a matter of where we go looking for the voice of truth. It’s been proverbially said that ‘truth comes from within and from without.’ A balanced sense of truth weighs experience versus input from others, from the past, and from the sciences. For the subjectivist, though, the voice that says ‘this is so’ in the interior space is the voice they come to trust.
Sentimentalism continues this narrowing of the sense of truth, locating it in the emotive experience of and response to reality. In a dichotomy of reason and sentiment, here we find an erring to the latter to the point that the emotional content of something is the substance of it. As Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Naturalism here refers to a tendency to seek exposure to the essence of life without the artificiality of things that are engineered. Generally, this is a distrust of societal norms as being imposed on an imagined, pristine ‘nature.’ If only humans could listen and get out of the way, the naturalist might say, the patterns of nature would open the door to find truth. Put together with the three tendencies above, the romantic naturalist goes into nature to ‘find themselves’ in their individual, subjective, and sentimental experience without the impediment of other agenda-driven human voices.
Romanticism is a backlash against rationalism. It is a reactive response to the tendency to regard as legitimate and real only that which is based in logical method, empirical evidence, and scientific consensus. Romanticism reactively swings away from these constraints into the tendency to favor the experiential, intuitive, numinous, and narrated. With these traits in mind, I’ve come to think that we might be living in a season of romanticism. Our hyper-focus on identity, for one, seems to be a renewal of romantic subjectivism. Add to this the increasing segmentation of communities through a growing list of identity markers by which we create an unrepeatable chain of tags by which to differentiate from others. The more we mark the ways we belong, the more we reinforce how much we don’t belong.
This is amplified by the impassioned sense of fervor involved with personal advocacy--the degree of our willingness to fight for who we are is a primary indicator of that identity’s right to exist. “I exist!” is the call for empathetic assent to this thing we know about ourselves, the truth we’ve retrieved from the sacred space within ourselves, unapproachable to all others. This is the new naturalism, the distrust of constructs as necessarily antagonistic to that inner knowledge--the diminishing sense of nature out there--again through the violence of society--heightens the need to seek that landscape within where people cannot tread upon it.
Romanticism understandably champions the person among an often callous abstraction of people. Rationalism may tend to strip and sterilize us into a post-humanity, but romanticism makes in response a hyper-humanism to a manic extent. Left to themselves, romanticism and rationalism cannot be reconciled--they are too skeptical of one another. They will tear each other apart. If the rift is to be healed, a third something is necessary.
It’s here that I’m reminded of another sense of romance. While studying Shakespeare in graduate school, a couple of my professors set straight my understanding of his ‘romantic’ plays by defining romance as ‘a near tragedy’ or ‘a tragedy that becomes a comedy.’ Tragedy refers to a play in which a critical fault of character brings very low those who begin in an exalted position. Generally, it is the ruin of the person by their inability to see beyond their own limited knowledge--this usually ends in death. Comedy refers to a play in which chaos is restored to order through the contained humiliation of characters. They are restored to society out of their idiocy. They end well who began poorly. Romance, then, is that kind of play in which what seems like it can only end in tragedy is redeemed to become a comedy. This kind of play is the hardest to understand and study. It requires a miracle.
And so we return to my humiliation in the classroom that day. I had a romantic sense of romanticism, but left to myself that sense would have been to me the beginning of tragedy. I needed the benevolent humiliation to be restored to a better sense of my smallness. Confronted with my ignorance, I was able to begin learning. My false identity as a tragic hero became capable of the real romance of redemptive grace. Later, in a season of profound wandering, this search for the voice that would surprise and disrupt me is what led me back to the Church.
Christians, however, can inhabit the tendencies of rationalism or romanticism while professing the Faith. Even in a traditionalist context like ours, which does seem to attract a disproportionate amount of rationalists, it is still possible to find romanticists. The traditional respect for mystery attracts many subjectivists who can use the language of the Church to justify their over-reliance on their inward voice of truth, attributing it to spiritual insight. Likewise, the traditionalist is often prone to a kind of Christian nostalgia that longs for an age of the Church that no longer exists and maybe never existed at all as they imagine it. That melancholic longing, even in the Christian register, can be as forlorn as an urban British poet longing for the idylls of ancient Greece.
A mature practice of the Faith meets both the rationalist and the romanticist with equal force. For the former, a life of prayer calls them into a sacramental participation that honors their love for what can be sensibly known and reasonably inferred even while chastising their empiricism and calling them to entrust themselves beyond their sense of certainty and control. For the latter, a life of prayer calls them into the common life of the Church, honoring their unique place in the Body of Christ while bestowing a horizon of meaning beyond it that calls them outward from their self-regard and reminds them that even they have not seen what the Lord knows and is making them to be.
Christianity may be the only thing that can take the commitment to total war and ideological conquest that is necessary in cultural romanticism and restore it to a redemptive kind of romance. Put another way, it is in the life of the Church that we learn best that the romance we want is not the romance we need, and that the romance we are given always exceeds the romance we deserve. Only Christ can hold in perfection the irreplaceable one sheep who stands apart from the ninety-nine while also marrying Himself to the Church as one bride in one body. Only God the Trinity can make a cosmos that is unmistakably not God and unite that cosmos to Himself such that the cosmos shares in the life of God becoming more like God.
If you’ve made it past the book-nerd talk, hear this: Jesus loves you and always will, not as you know you but as He knows you to be. But Jesus will always call you beyond your sense of self into a fellowship where your true self will be revealed. You are not dispensable in the plan of God, but you are not yet the you that you are destined to become. Don’t settle for anything less.
As St. John writes: “Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”