There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and the various neo-medievalist movements which were its fruits. The most important is that society is not progressing inexorably in one “progressive” rationalist direction.

The eighteenth century was a time of religious skepticism which seemed to foreshadow the eclipse of the age of religion by the age of rationalism. For people living in those times, it seemed that the supercilious spirit of the age, which would become known to its adherents as the “Enlightenment” or the “Age of Reason”, had triumphed over the faith and philosophy of Christianity. The spirit of secularism and empiricist materialism was destined to replace the spirit of Christendom. Or so those of the eighteenth century thought.

But then the most surprising thing happened.

At the end of the eighteenth century, a new movement emerged, which would become known as Romanticism.

The rise of Romanticism represented a reaction against the spirit of rationalism. It was animated by an animus against the Enlightenment and by an insistence on the reality of non-empirical and transcendental truths, such as beauty, which withstood and contradicted the reductionism of philosophical materialism.

In England, the age of Romanticism was heralded by the publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads by two young poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Throughout the nineteenth century this Romanticism was made manifest in neo-medievalism, which sought to leapfrog over the whole period of the Enlightenment in pursuit of a clearer and purer understanding of reality. This is seen in individual works, such as “Lochinvar” by Sir Walter Scott, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats and “The Lady of Shalott” by Tennyson but also, and most especially, in new cultural movements which ushered in an age of religious revival.

There were three distinct neo-medieval movements in the nineteenth century. The first was the Gothic Revival, led by Augustus Pugin, which leapfrogged over the neo-classicism of the Enlightenment with a visionary return to the splendour of the age of gothic architecture in the high Middle Ages. The most famous of the neo-gothic edifices designed by Pugin are the Houses of Parliament in London but his buildings and those of his followers can be found all across England. Most especially, in the wake of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Pugin and his followers built new Catholic churches across the country in the neo-gothic style.

The second manifestation of neo-medieval cultural renewal was the Oxford Movement within the Church of England. Led by John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey and John Keble, the Oxford Movement sought to leapfrog not merely the Enlightenment but the Reformation also. Seeking a clearer and purer understanding of the Anglican Church, the Oxford Movement endeavoured to graft the modern church onto the medieval English church, which was of course Catholic. This movement within the Church of England became known as Anglo-Catholicism and would result in a division in the Anglican Church between high church “Catholics” and low church “Protestants”.

The conversion of John Henry Newman to the Catholic Church in 1845 and the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England five years later led to a fully-fledged Catholic revival. This is seen in the growth in the number of Catholic churches. In 1840 there had been 469 Catholic churches and chapels in England; by 1890 the number had risen dramatically to 1,335.

The third neo-medieval cultural movement to emerge as part of the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As the name of the Brotherhood suggested, its members were seeking a clearer and purer vision of art, “pre-Raphael”. In essence, the pre-Raphaelites had not only leapfrogged over the Enlightenment but also over the late Renaissance, returning to the aesthetic of medieval and early Renaissance art. They were inspired by the neo-medieval literature of the nineteenth century, with Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” being the subject of several Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The Arthurian legends were also a significant inspirational source, as were Dante’s Divine Comedy and the plays of Shakespeare.

A comparison between Pre-Raphaelite art and the art of the impressionists will highlight the aesthetic abyss which separates their respective artistic visions. Whereas the impressionists could be seen to be reacting against the definitive empiricism of the Enlightenment in their spurning of definition in favour of the mere impression to be gleaned from ambivalent pastel shades, the Pre-Raphaelites spurned the Enlightenment by leapfrogging over it to an era in which faith and reason were joined in scholastic union and in which art was alive with the fruits of such a union. This is not to say that the Pre-Raphaelites embraced the faith and the philosophy which inspired the medieval aesthetic. They did not. They simply preferred the vivid beauty of the Middle Ages to the chill drabness of Enlightenment materialism.

There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and the various neo-medievalist movements which were its fruits. The most important is that society is not progressing inexorably in one “progressive” rationalist direction. On the contrary, human culture is always in a state of tension between those who look forward to a fictional future and those who seek inspiration and genuine enlightenment from the traditional wisdom and multifaceted beauty of the past. The other lesson, from a Christian perspective, is that the past shows that there are times when the Faith is crucified or abandoned or apparently killed but that each time an age of resurrection has followed. “Christendom has had a series of revolutions,” wrote Chesterton, “and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” Echoing Chesterton, we might safely say to those who fear the defeat of the Faith that, paraphrasing Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

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The featured image is “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (c. 1901) by Frank Bernard Dicksee, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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