Romanticism and the Critique of the Enlightenment
Romanticism and the Critique of the Enlightenment
In the closing decade of the eighteenth century, increasing misgivings came to be expressed concerning the arid quality of rationalism and its marginalization of the imagination and emotions. Reason, once seen as a liberator from damaging religious divisions, came increasingly to be regarded as spiritually impoverishing. These anxieties were not expressed so much within university faculties of philosophy as within literary and artistic circles, particularly in the Prussian capital, Berlin. The Romantic movement, which emerged in the late eighteenth century in England and Germany, replaced a reliance on pure reason by recognizing the importance of human intuition, imagination, and feelings.
“Romanticism” is notoriously difficult to define. The movement is perhaps best seen as a reaction against certain of the central themes of the Enlightenment, most notably the claim that reality can be known to the human reason. It protested against any reduction of reality to a series of rationalized simplicities. Instead, Romanticism made an appeal to the human imagination, which it held to be capable of providing a synthesis of the complexities and tensions that it observed in nature and in human feelings. The Enlightenment, according to its Romantic critics, failed to do justice to the complexity of the world, in an attempt to reduce the “mystery of the universe” – to use a phrase found in the writings of Augustus William Schlegel (1767–1845) – to neat logical formulae.
The development of Romanticism had considerable implications for Christianity in Europe. Rationalism came to be seen as experientially and emotionally deficient, incapable of meeting real human needs that were traditionally addressed and satisfied by Christian faith. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, following the attempted suppression of religion at the time of the French Revolution, the statesman François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) declared that “there was a need for faith [among the French population], a desire for religious consolation, which came from the very lack of that consolation for so long.” Similar views were common in Germany in the closing years of the eighteenth century.
It is clear that rationalism had failed to displace religion in England, Germany, and North America. The new strength evident in German Pietism and English evangelicalism in the eighteenth century points to the failure of rationalism to provide a cogent alternative to the prevailing human sense of personal need and meaning. Philosophy came to be seen as sterile and academic in the worst sense of the word, in that it was detached from both the outer realities of life and the inner life of the human consciousness.
It is against this background of growing disillusionment with rationalism, and a new appreciation of the importance of human “feeling,” that the contribution of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is to be seen. Schleiermacher argued that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was a matter of feeling or “self-consciousness.” His major work of systematic theology, The Christian Faith (1821, revised 1834), is an attempt to show how Christian theology is related to a feeling of “absolute dependence.” The structure of the Christian Faith is complex, centering on the dialectic between sin and grace. The work is organized in three parts. The first deals with the consciousness of God, concentrating upon such matters as creation. The second part handles the consciousness of sin and its implications, such as an awareness of the possibility of redemption. The final part considers the consciousness of grace and deals with such matters as the person and work of Christ. In this way, Schleiermacher was able to argue that “everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”
Yet Romanticism was ambivalent toward traditional Christianity. While recognizing the importance of religious feeling and acknowledging the importance of the quest for a transcendent dimension to life, some Romantic writers – such as Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) – saw this quest as having no necessary connection with the Christian faith. This naturally leads us to consider what is widely described as the “Victorian crisis of faith,” which is often seen as setting the context for many themes in modern theology.