Romanticism, the Nones, and the Future of Christianity

William Blake, “The Morning Stars Sang Together” (detail) from The Book of Job

Among other things, this semester I am teaching an undergrad course of my own devising, Love & Romanticism. I taught it once before, in that ill-fated semester of 2020 when C0VID blew the whistle on teaching halfway through the semester and we all went home and online. Until that dreadful day, it had been the best course I’d ever taught—and the most enjoyable. The students were spectacular. It was not all that enjoyable once we went online, certainly not due to the students, but because of the weirdness and uncertainty of the times. So I was happy to have another go at it this semester.

Behold! The reading list:

W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Peterson (ed.), The Portable Romantic Poets (Penguin, 1950)

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford, 1970)

John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings, rev. Jon Mee (Oxford, 2002)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Penguin, 1993)

Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans, Dick Higgins (McPherson, 1988)

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans, Stephen Mitchell (Vintage, 1998)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love (Lindisfarne, 1985)

We also look at two films: Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion and based on the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne (much of the dialogue comes directly from Keats’s poetry and letters) and Wim Wenders’s masterpiece Wings of Desire. We also consider bits from Hans Jurgen von Syberberg’s epic and imaginative treatment of Wagner’s Parsifal as an ancillary text to Nietzsche.

The course starts with Solovyov’s Meaning of Love so we can start thinking about what love is. As with many things in human existence, we often think we know what love is; but, on serious consideration, we find that maybe we don’t after all. Then we proceed through the English Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Robert Burns and John Clare—before returning to the Germans—Nietzsche, Wagner, Rilke, and Wenders.

Admittedly, this is an unconventional way to teach Romanticism to undergrad English majors—but consider the source! We also get to talk about Jacob Boehme’s influence on Romanticism, Sophiology (because you can’t talk about Boehme or Novalis or Blake without doing so), Gnosticism, and the various other flowerings of Romanticism (which is where Rilke comes in—and I sprinkle in some Yeats, Milosz, Robert Kelly’s sublime “The Heavenly Country” and so forth).

Milosz’s wonderful “On Angels” as presented by Kathryn Oliver. Romanticism sit!

I’ve written a fair amount about Romanticism in the past, including an essay in The Midwest Quarterly, a section of The Submerged Reality, and on this blog. And recently I had a great conversation about Sophia in Exile with the wonderful Piers Kaniuka which had Romanticism as one of its main themes. It’s a subject I can’t keep away from, for, in my estimation, Romanticism is a kindred spirit to Sophiology.

This week, my class finished our section on William Blake, having covered Novalis the week before. It is impossible to read either Novalis or Blake without talking about Christianity, as idiosyncratic as their iterations of it are. But, being a guy whose iteration of Christianity is also pretty idiosyncratic, I’m just the man for the job.

Many of my college students come from families where no one really professes a religious allegiance, though they might be called “culturally Christian” in the way that the families of Ann Frank and Simone Weil were considered “culturally Jewish” in the early 20th century. Some come from “spiritual but not religious” backgrounds, some have atheist parents, and, to be sure, some also come from religiously observant families, but not many. This group of students is not different.

But I had a pleasant surprise this week.

After class yesterday, one young woman from the course came to my office about her research project for the year. We talked about her plan, but we—actually she—also talked about what is happening with her generation. “After class I was talking to Bridget,” she told me, “and we think that people our age really want a religion—or something like religion—because we know it’s missing from our lives. That’s why we love talking about Novalis and Blake. Blake is my guy! But we don’t see anything like that available to us in the various forms of Christianity out there. Where is it?” The week before another student had told me that she thought the lockdowns and madness of the past two years have had at least one good unintended consequence—they’ve made some people in her age group more thoughtful, more preoccupied with “the Life Questions” (my words, not hers), more interested in reading and looking for meaning. I told them about John Vervaeke’s lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and about my own work in Sophiology that is nothing if not invested in addressing this crisis by proposing a genuine engagement with the Real. And it’s not only this random selection of college undergrads. I hear from people almost weekly who have discovered my work to their great relief at finding that meaning still has meaning in this cold and technocratic environment.

Unfortunately, I don’t place much trust in the institutional churches as places in which such souls will find a home. Even though I wrote in The Submerged Reality that the “noble failure” of the Romantics was due to their seeming inability to ground their Romanticism in tradition or the established churches (though Franz von Baader gave it a shot), the Church of This Our Age is more or less crumbling along with all of the other institutions—in education, in economics, in government—and does not seem to me to be up to the task of welcoming these idealistic spirits in a way that will not smother the spark that moves them. I cannot help but think that Jacques Derrida was right when he proposed the possibility of “a religion without religion.” As we read in Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” this week:

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro’ the Eye,

Which was born in a Night to perish in a Night,

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.

God appears and God is Light,

To those poor souls who dwell in Night,

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.

Or, as the great Jamaican Romantics Bob Marley and Peter Tosh would have it:

You see, most people think

Great God will come from the sky

Take away everything

And make everybody feel high

But if you know what life is worth

You would look for yours on earth

And now you see the light

You stand up for your rights

As I’ve written before, just as the German and English Romantics were rejecting the cold and anti-human values of the Enlightenment (what a misnomer!) and the Scientific Revolution, so there will be thinkers, poets, artists, politicians, and yes, scientists, who will reject The Great Reset, the Metaverse, and the scientism (“I’m not religious; I believe in science!”) of our times. It’s happened before—and not just in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s happened with the Celtic Twilight, with Rilke, with Milosz, with Apollinaire, with T. S. Eliot, and there were whispers of it in the idealism of the sixties, and in the New Romantics of the 80s. Romanticism, that is, is always/already happening.

So the students in this course, rather unexpectedly, have given me a greater hope for the future. And they are not outliers. As Thomas Vaughan writes in his bombastic introduction to The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R.C., commonly, of the Rosie Cross, “the School-men have got the Day, not by Weight but by Number,” we Romantics might say that the technocrats, likewise, have the day, not by weight but by number. Number, data, is all a technocrat understands. Some understand more of reality, and it is to them the future of Christianity belongs.

A performance of “Jerusalem” that brought ol' Professor Martin nearly to tears

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

The Mystical Body of Romanticism

'The Funeral of Shelley' by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889), detail.

Some people, it seems, have a tendency to over-idealize the life I live, as if on our biodynamic farm my family and I shimmer in some agrarian dreamworld in the manner of rather tall hobbits. Ours is certainly a world foreign to that of most of those in my social class (intellectuals, academics, and other learned professionals), but it’s far from idyllic. Farming is hard work, for one thing, and we often put in 12-14 hour days at the height of the growing season. For another, it’s unpredictable—and weather, insects, animals, and a host of other variables can often destroy that which we so earnestly and carefully seek to preserve. And I won’t even get into the human interactions that can often be, well, complicated. In short, farming in this way is not unlike living in a realm somewhat like that depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. But it is a good life. It’s just not an easy one.

My wife and I undertook this life because we wanted something more tangible, more sacred, than that available to us in the wastelands of modernity, overshadowed by corporate superstructures and technocracy and characterized by endemic alienation from the Real. We turned to the land, not only to work it biodynamically as a way to heal the land itself, but also to heal ourselves. Nevertheless, some people think what we do is very quaint, charming even, but dismiss it as nothing but an iteration of Romanticism. I’m fine with that. If the alternative is postmodern alterity and distanciation from the Real, then I’m a card-carrying Romantic.

Paul Kingsnorth, whom I’ve written about recently, also gets smeared with the label of Romantic—and he doesn’t mind, either. And he pushes back. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that Romanticising the past, in our culture at this point in time, is less common than Romanticising the future. The only difference is that Romanticising the future is socially acceptable.” [1] Think about that next time the WEF peddles the chintzy wares of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they of the “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (which has mysteriously disappeared from the WEF website. HA!) future. Kingsnorth lives a life not unlike mine (from what I can tell) and even gives workshops on using a scythe. Which is so cool. And I’m sure he understands the challenges and hardships of such a life and doesn’t get lost in misty-eyed fantasies of an agrarian Elysium. We are not, as of the moment, exactly dead.

But Romanticism is not only about returning to the land, though Wordsworth and many of the great Romantics, not to mention Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, have certainly endorsed such an idea. It’s also about fighting, and even dying, for an ideal. What is really worth fighting, let alone dying, for? Certainly not “strategic governmental objectives,” though Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—however one interprets them—surely are. Lord Byron, profligate that he was, gave his life for an ideal (or tried to) when he left his scurrilous lifestyle to fight for Greek independence, a failed but noble cause. As I write this, citizens of Cuba and France show signs of a willingness to fight for an ideal—freedom. What would you fight for?

Romanticism, that is, is messy, hard to nail down, and, therefore, more human than the technocratic promises of Utopia that are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s hollow project. H. G. Schenk in his The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History, puts it as well as anyone. For him Romanticism is

“a unity […] characterized as contrariness, dissonance and inner conflict of the Romantic mind. Utopian dreams for the future side by side with nostalgia for the past; a marked nihilistic mood accompanied by a fervent yearning for faith; serious attempts to bring about a Christian revival followed, in an admittedly marginal case, by the very abandonment of faith on the part of the former apologist; the long tug-of-war between the old religion and the new ideologies—these are some of the unresolved contradictions which lie at the core of the movement. No shorter formula can be devised to define the essence of Romanticism. All short-cut definitions that have been put forward—well over a hundred—are unsatisfactory.” [2]

Christianity, then, can be construed as a kind of Romanticism. This may be because the god of Christianity is a human god, thereby making Christianity the most human of religions.

Romanticism has, I have to confess, inhabited every phase of my life—from my youth as a musician, my work as a poet and teacher, in my scholarship and writing (Sophiology—hello?), as a husband and father, no less than my thirty years in biodynamics. For me, it’s all about hope: the belief that we can make the Kingdom present in our lives. I heard this in the music that inspired me as a young man—in Kate Bush and The Waterboys, for example—and I felt it in the poets, from the Romantic period and after, who continue to nourish me. They say, with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, “Yes” to this business of being human. The point is that to be human is to be a Romantic. It’s the default position.

One of the great moments of late-20th Century Romanticism.

The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met his end in Italy while sailing into a storm. Unfortunately, though a decent sailor, the poet could not swim. When the Tyrrhenian Sea’s waves brought Shelley’s sodden corpse back to land, a volume of Keats was found in one of his jacket pockets, a volume of Sophocles in the other. At Shelley’s funeral, while the poet’s body burned on the shore of Leghorn, his friend Edward Trelawney poured libations of incense, wine, and oil into the flames and consigned Shelley’s remains to the love of Nature. Then, just before the flames devoured it, Trelawney grabbed the poet’s heart.

The mystical body of Romanticism continues to burn, and we are in no danger of running out of fuel. No matter. What needs transfiguring in the fire of time will be transfigured. The treasures we find in its pockets we will cherish, despite fads and the affectations and disaffections of taste. What will remain is the heart, even if some need to risk burning in order to retrieve it. And how beautiful is fire.

A clip from the 2015 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Graywold Press, 2017), 37.

2. H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Frederick Ungar, 1966), xxii.