Evangelical Christianity and Romanticism

Evangelical Christianity and Romanticism D.W. Bebbington Dr. Bebbington is Senior Lecturer in History at the University ofStirling, Scotland. This article is the second in a series ofthree entitled 'Evangelical Christianity and Western Culture Since the Eighteenth Century' and was presented by the author in the Staley Lectures at Regent College in April1989. (The first lecture in the series was published in the December 1989 issue ofCrux.) The lectures were based on research for his book Evangelicalism in Modem Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Unwin Hyman, 1989). he ftrst of the articles in this series dealt was a feeling in the Romantics for the numinous, in with the relationship between Evangelical mountains and seas, in dramatic panoramas. The T Christianity and the Enlightenment. Evan- artist John Martin, for instance, depicted vast scenes gelical Christianity was defmed in terms of four with rocky crags, precipitous drops and tiny human salient characteristics: conversionism; activism; beings perched on the edge. A sense of awe was biblicism; and crucicentricity. It was argued that created by the painters and the writers alike. The Evangelical Christianity was started by the imping simplicity that marked Enlightenment poetics was ing of the Enlightenment on the Protestant tradition very much out of vogue. Metaphysical systematiz and that in the eighteenth century and on into the ers were in favour, the greatest being Hegel with his nineteenth much Evangelical religion displayed great vista of world history. In Hegel and in many Enlightenment characteristics. There was therefore other thinkers of the era there were distinct signs of an alignment with the progressive thought of the pantheism. The world was charged with the spiri eighteenth century. tual. We can now turn our attention to Romanticism, In the area of epistemology there was change to the new cultural mood which supplanted the also. Knowledge was now held not to be the result Enlightenment at the very end of the eighteenth of passive experience but to be the fruit of creative century and in the early years of the nineteenth. activity by the mind. Reality was primarily mental. Perhaps Romanticism is best known in the English This is the tradition of idealism that stemmed from speaking world through the Lake Poets, especially Immanuel Kant in Germany. It was to impinge William Words worth andS.T. Coleridge. The mood increasingly on Anglo-Saxon thought as the nine that is the subject of this article, however, extended teenth century wore on. Knowledge was often beyond the generation of poets who flourished at the thought in the Romantic age to be the result of beginning of the nineteenth century long into that intuition, a perception outside the categories of sci century and indeed on into the twentieth. The ence. Thus, for example, the great music of the age Romantic phenomenon was the incoming cultural was felt to be the result of spontaneous apprehen wave of the nineteenth century. sion. There was a cult of the genius. The music of What, then, were the features of Romanticism? Berlioz, of Schumann and ofVerdi in different ways Essentially it replaced the Enlightenment's stress on testiftes to the spirit of the age. Many of the musical reason with a new stress on will and emotion. More trends culminated in Wagner. The music of the specifically, in the area of metaphysics there was a period illustrates the surges of feeling which were greater awareness of the spiritual. According to a characteristic of the new cultural mood. literary critic of the early twentieth century, T.E. There was a further major emphasis, on history. Hulme, Romanticism was "spilt religion."' A sense There was a fundamental movement of thought of the divine ran out from religious institutions to associated with Romantic sensibility which has consecrate the world of nature and history. There sometimes been called "historicism." The ideal Crux: March 1990Nol. XXVI, No.1 9 Evangelical Christianity and Romanticism form of society was located not in the future (as it had vespers and the confessional. All this was an expres been by the Enlightenment's idea of progress), but sion of Romantic taste impinging on organized reli rather in the past. The past was felt to be a time when gion. In the Church of England it is generally affairs were much better than in the present. Further accepted that the Oxford Movement of the 1830s more, according to historicists, groups of human represented to a large extent the impact of Romantic beings create their own values over time. There is thought. John Henry Newman' s style is quintessen therefore no permanent set of values which has tially Romantic. Ritualism, which extended the absolute intrinsic worth. Thus historicism created a legacy of Oxford movement by imitating Roman sense of tradition, of the importance of inherited Catholic developments in the liturgy within the wisdom, of the significance of the customary. The Church of England, was likewise Romantic in inspi historical emphasis is clearly exemplified in the ration. And certain aspects ofBroad Church thought novels of Sir W alter Scott with their colour, their within the Church of England, especially the theol awareness of the distinctiveness of past ages and ogy of F.D. Maurice, professor at King's College, their folk spirit. This folk spirit, a dimension of the London, were deeply influenced by Coleridge and historicism of the period, undoubtedly gave an his circle and so bore the stamp of the Romantic. impulse to the nationalism which is one of the most What is less appreciated is that Romanticism significant creations of nineteenth-century thought. affected Evangelicals too. Evangelical assump Nationalism was the driving force behind many of tions, as we have seen, had been integrated with the the political developments of the age. So in meta Enlightenment world view. But during the course of physics, epistemology and history there were sig the nineteenth century, in different fields at different nificant breaks with the past. stages, Evangelicalism came to terms in many ways The consequence was a different understanding with Romantic thought. It is that process that is ofhumanity. Whereas the Enlightenment had tended concentrated on here- the ways in which Evangeli to see human beings as machines on the model of calism was modified by the Romantic influences. Newtonian science, Romanticism saw them as or ganisms, as part of the growing world of nature. A central figure was Edward Irving. Born in favourite Romantic metaphor for man was a tree. 1792, Irving became a minister of the Church Biology rather than physics supplied the imagery. A of Scotland as a protege of the leading Evan Human beings, furthermore, were typically treated gelical Thomas Chalmers. In 1822 he went to as members of communities. Trees, after all, grow London to serve largely a Scottish congregation. He in the soil of a particular land. The notion of was a striking figure: he stood 6'2" tall, possessed a organism led on to a sense of group solidarity. very strong voice and had a squint which added to his Perhaps the greatest representative in Germany of pulpit power. His hair was parted to right and left in nearly all these trends was Goethe. His nature affected disorder in the manner of a Romantic gen mysticism of colour and substance was near the ius. According to a great friend, Thomas Carlyle, the heart of the new ways of thinking. All the move greatest Romantic writer of that generation, Irving's ments of opinion can be summed up as Romanti desire to be loved motivated a great deal that he did. cism. The Romantic tone gradually made inroads His preaching swept London by storm. He was during the nineteenth century into different fields - mentioned in the House of Commons, carriages into wallpaper design as much as poetry, challeng brought members of the peerage to his church and he ing Enlightenment norms and usually winning the became the talkofthe town. Why? Because his style victory. was Romantic. He appealed to the elite who admired It is well known that this way of thinking affected the Lake poets. In idiom and content he was very the churches. It transformed the style of Roman Coleridgean. He was, in fact, a close friend of Catholicism during the nineteenth century. Ultra Coleridge. He regularly visited Coleridge' s house in montanism, the movement exalting the role of the Hampstead and was deeply swayed by the poet's papacy within the Catholic Church, was very much way of thinking. As Irving put it in addressing on its cultural side an expression of Romanticism. Coleridge, "You have been more profitable ... to my The deliberate adoption outside Italy of the customs spiritual understanding of the Word of God ... than of Rome bears all the hallmarks of the Romantic. any or all of the men with whom I have entertained There was a revival of pomp and colour, of Marian friendship.''2 It is not surprising that Irving read 10 Crux: March 1990Nol. XXVI, No.1 Evangelical Christianity and Romanticism Scripture through Romantic spectacles. And that feeling for Wordsworth," it was said, "amounted produced many fresh interpretations. Aspects of the almost to a passion."4 A copy of W ordsworth was Bible that perhaps had lain dormant in previous always on his desk and when h,e was unwell the best generations sprang to life. medicine was Wordsworth. Needless to say he took Most strikingly, Irving discerned the second his holidays in the Lake District and he would point advent as a major category that had been neglected. out spots connected with Wordsworth to his long In 1827 he published a translation of a strange work suffering wife.

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