History does not repeat itself, but it seems to produce analogies of itself in more or less predictable cycles. This is the fourth time on this blog that I have introduced a posting by this famous and poignant quote from William Wordsworth:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

Each time, I approached it with a different and more or less profound understanding. So, here is another one.

We find here an expression of exhilaration as the world reached a cusp between an era of increasingly contrasting wealth and poverty, power and helplessness. It was the beginning of joy experienced by those who were sick and tired of the madness of George III, the opulence of the French King Louis XVI (though he was trying to introduce reforms) and the political power of the Church. Revolutions were happening everywhere in the late eighteenth century: American independence, the emancipation of slaves, the later reaction against Napoleon. The Industrial Revolution employed starving country folk in factories, but they were hardly better off in terms of wages and working / living conditions. The Romantics responded, not by political activism and violence, but by poetry and the liberty of the spirit. Perhaps some of the most powerful poetry in this movement were Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Ode to Liberty. As the world changed for good or for evil, noble souls sought to understand the inner workings of the collective consciousness.

The initial elation of change in France of the 1780’s quickly became a revolting sight of guillotined heads on an industrial scale, since it sufficed to be opposed to Robespierre’s Jacobin ideology to be condemned to die. Wordsworth fled back to England and the peace and safety of my native Lake District.

Our own world is beset by so many problems in society and politics. Economically, we all become poorer as house prices soar, as do food and energy costs. On the other side it becomes more difficult to find employment or succeed in business. Wages and salaries stagnate. Homelessness is at monstrous rates, all over – the UK, Europe, the USA and all over the world. Illegal immigration is at such a level as it is not only an economic problem but a cultural one too. Liberalism and democracy faced being replaced by any number of possibilities: Islam, techno-feudalism and The Machine, cultural Marxism aka “woke”, the stuff of dystopian novels written by Orwell, Huxley and others. We are governed increasingly by fear or force, threatened by fines for things we took for granted only a few years ago – all in the name of apocalyptic climate change. At the same time, we still find catastrophic quantities of plastic and toxic substances dumped in the sea by industry. Is all that about to change?

There will be activists of all political tendencies, left and right, but the concern of my own thought is to do something about the problems in another way entirely. We have to renew our own minds, just a few of us, but with the weapons of the spirit in the words of St Paul.

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

The weapons of war are therefore truth, righteousness, preparing the Gospel of peace, faith, the Spirit, the word of God, prayer, boldness. Plato would have added beauty and goodness to this knowledge of truth. These weapons do not kill, destroy or devastate, but they build a new world. Novalis sought to make a way ahead over new paths, to innovate in the ways of tradition and in what has proven to be good. His key to understanding his vision of a renewed medieval Christendom was a concept known as magical idealism.

Atheists use this notion to condemn Christianity for lacking realism. What is real? Power, money and sexual satisfaction? Materialism? Magical idealism is built on German Idealism but with an added human dimension on top of the use of reason. I am presently reading Laure Cahen-Maurel’s Novalis’s Magical Idealism: A Threefold Philosophy of the Imagination, Love and Medicine which claims to demonstrate that “Novalis’s views on both magic and idealism, not only prove to be perfectly rational and comprehensible, but even more philosophically coherent and innovative than have been recognised up to now“. I have yet to get my mind round this concept, so much that I have been indoctrinated to consign children’s fairy tales to the dustbin of things we put aside on becoming adults. We all have gone from this sense of imaginative wonder to the ugliness of modernity!

Everything is converging in my mind with Jakob Böhme, Nicholas Berdyaev whose books I “devoured” when I was at seminary to counter the semi-nominalism of scholasticism, with Novalis and the Jena group, Steiner, Owen Barfield and the Inklings. Every single mind who has inspired me found the same Gnosis, Sophiology and spiritual wisdom. What I have not yet understood philosophically, I feel in the depth of my being.

Romanticism was born of the early dreams and aspirations of the Revolution and the run-up in the second half of the 18th century. There have been other currents of thought and human experience since that time, perhaps using other names and labels. Cynics who “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde) will call our world Cloud-cuckoo land. There will be a new Romanticism, a new world brought about by divine souls. This Romanticism never died because it is a part of the immanence of God in those human souls that accept it. Those who call us deluded or mad are challenged to produce their own fruits of truth, beauty and goodness.