This provocative title, Romantia, evokes an alternative world from the same kind of imagination as Novalis’ Christenheit oder Europa or indeed the ideas expressed in Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme. Novalis is a pen name of Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenberg, (1772-1801), an early German Romantic poet and theorist who greatly influenced later thought. The name Romantia suggests a utopian country, an imaginary world opposed to the “reality” of our world of human competition, hostility and dominance. I am not the first to think of this name, but those who did have forgotten it and had a very different idea from my own. However we understand the word and the idea it might conjure up within us, my notion is essentially philosophical, beyond cultural expressions of the past that might appeal to us aesthetically. Paradise is within our most transcendent selves to hope for and search. This is the essence of Romanticism and the imaginary nation and empire of Romantia. Though I have plagiarised the term Romantia, for me it goes much further than imitating externals of life in the 1900’s, 1930’s or 1950’s. I went a little further and coined the term Romantia Christiana to distinguish my own Weltanschauung from certain forms of paganism.
I have written a number of articles on this theme, but perhaps a little less philosophical.
- The Lighter Romantia
- The Invisible Empire of Romantia
- The Gas-driven Ferrograph
- From Despair to Light
- The Lost Chord
Romantia is essentially a Platonic universal idea that transcends the types and shadows of so-called realism, which is little more than an illusion. The Romantic reverses the role of idea and reality! I have a feeling that Romantia could become an image for individual persons who seek something more profound in their thought and way of life. Christianity uses the images of the Kingdom of God (Βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ), which is not a kingdom or a worldly state, but an elevated state of consciousness, a mystical experience of another world.
Like Christianity itself, Romanticism seeks to transcend meaningless “reality”, nothingness, nihilism, the void. Perhaps it is not even the Ungrund of Jakob Böhme which contains the potential of all there is, all creation, even God himself. The nihilism of Nietzsche and the “religionless Christianity of Bonhöffer reveal something very profound in the German spirit. The word Ungrund makes me think of the gigantic open pit diamond mine in Siberia. It is more than 525 metres deep, with a diameter of more than a kilometre. A nightmarish idea would be to dig into the sides of the pit and install concrete micro-apartments and have an automatic system for releasing the inhabitants for work in some kind of factory at the bottom of the pit. The imagery, like Dante’s Inferno, is quite striking and reminiscent of some of the most dystopian of the science fiction films of our times. Another example is the secret underground laboratory described in the novel The Andromeda Strain by the medical doctor and author Michael Crichton, a facility with increasing levels of sterility as one descended towards the bottom, where there was an atomic bomb for complete destruction should a biological weapon get out of control and escape. It can be perceived as a symbol of our existing spiritual nihilism in our cities and ideologies. I too am struck by the cult of ugliness, spiritual toxicity and refusal of the transcendent, the evils of modern politics, deceit and greed. Indeed some have called the modern world The Pit.
Like Christianity, Romantia is seen as a way of life, a sign of contradiction against the world. What St John calls the World (κόσμος): He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. The Greek philosophers had various interpretations of the word κόσμος, but John seems to have an idea of an entity opposed to God and autonomous in its order and being. It is the world that occupies the mind of St Paul:
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.
In the 1980’s, I saw the film The Mission, and I remember two quotes in particular:
No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world… thus have I made it. (…) If might is right, then love has no place in the world, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that.
That was the world of the mid eighteenth century, the beginnings of modernity and imperialism of money and power over humanity. The philosophical meaning of the world goes much deeper. It is not merely the human order or the planet Earth, but the Cosmos, the conscious universe, both the Ungrund of Jakob Böhme and the order brought by the λόγος of God.
Unfortunately the way of dualism is not the right one. We are in the world but not of the world. A simplistic interpretation might be the image of a boat floating on the water, but there no water in the boat. There is a margin of reserve, where we accept our incarnate reality, but keep our measure of freedom and detachment. This notion of not being of this world is often described by the experiences of people with autism. The way an autistic person functions makes him incomprehensible to society at large and non-autistic persons. There is also a vast cultural difference. An autistic person lives in the world as an incarnate human being, but keeps his inner world, his “secret garden”, his soul. It is this “secret garden” that we might like to call Romantia.
Romantia is a figment of the imagination, an analogy of a utopian country. Novalis’ Christenheit oder Europa is a similar, yet more profound, vision of utopia without some of the less pleasant aspects of the period like religious fanaticism and a lack of what we call health and hygiene. It is a state of mind, one of spirits going through a material experience rather than the contrary which is our default materialist way of thinking.
Romanticism is a wide and recurring theme in history, often a human reaction to adversity and emergence into an era of turmoil and incomprehensible suffering. An important component in this world view is Nobility of Spirit which is a theme that has been discussed or implied by a number of “idealistic” thinkers, including the Russian émigré Nicholas Berdyaev who spent much of his life in France and the contemporary Dutch author Rob Riemen. My own thought and experience form the idea in a different mould, and this is where my own ideas, and those formed by the writings of others converge.
I cannot pretend to produce an idea or formula that would apply to others in their own search for the inner Kingdom, but I can relate some of my own thought and experience. Many of these ideas have been with me in fragmentary form all my life, some from childhood, and they were refined in adulthood.
We enter an extremely confusing time that I would be tempted to compare in some respects with the 1930’s. However, we live in a time of advanced technology and polarised ideologies. This little piece of work attempts to study human nature from a philosophical point of view with some references to specialists in the medical profession and anthropology. There are points in common with my previous book Romantic Christianity, but I am presently more concerned with humanity rather than with religious specifics.
Many of the Romantics reacted to the hopes raised and dashed by the French Revolution, whose effects went far beyond France, especially during the Napoleonic wars. This world view responded directly to the conditions of modernity, especially to the spiritual misery experienced by all classes under a socio-economic system based on money and competition. Of course, I am writing about the 1790’s about something that is still with us in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Their liberal system brought social fragmentation and the isolation of individuals. The Romantics expressed their feelings and thoughts by a sense of loss and nostalgia for an age when any hard-working and skilled person could succeed and live a decent life.
The Romantia of the Romantics could be real and historical, or it could be mythological or allegorical like Christenheit oder Europa. The essential characteristic is a highly idealized metaphysical expression of an aspiration. Nostalgia for a lost paradise brings us to a quest to recovery that lost world, usually in our own imaginations. For Novalis, it was a construction based on the middle ages. Others would aspire to something founded on Greek or Roman antiquity. The common aspiration is to recreate ideal values and conditions of life. Wordsworth sang the praises of the French Revolution before his dreams were shattered by the sight of cart-loads of headless corpses and dogs lapping up the dripping blood. It was a bourgeois revolution whose goal was nothing more than competition, power and money.
Karl Marx came from the same utopian aspirations, but also marked a transition from early Idealism to the “new orthodoxy” of the Soviet empire. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin (1756-1836), thought along similar lines by describing a utopia in relation to the state, private property, class hierarchy and marriage. He argued that if these institutions would be abolished, human beings would organise society by means of direct democracy ruled by reason. It did not seem to be a recipe for violent revolution but an evolution of mind. It is eye-opening to read these concerns from the 1790’s because they are exactly our own in 2020. Godwin was worried about a finite planet with finite resources sustaining an ever expanding earthly paradise. Of course I have expressed this in modern language. He predicted that humans would achieve immortality and cease to reproduce. Without doubt, we have the recipe of his daughter’s portrayal of Victor Frankenstein and his Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley was showing her critical reflection on this kind of post-humanism – from her own father. At this point, enter Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) who debated with Godwin on questions of “Malthusian” economics and demographics.
This early post-humanism helped to establish Romantic utopianism. After a time, Godwin moved to a more Romantic position, more critical of Malthusian capitalism and its disregard of humanity. Utopianism flip-flopped constantly between one vision of utopianism and another, and Karl Marx was never far behind, appropriating the methodology of the Malthusian system. Marxism remains a temptation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and I dare say, that of the present coronavirus presently infecting the entire world. The French Revolution not only set out to destroy the aristocracy and the Church, but also an entire social order that was not always very just. I would characterise present-day utopianism as a kind of Romanticism in whatever form it takes.
The phenomenon of Luddism is interesting. What part would technology play in a utopia? We know what part it would take in a post-humanist paradigm. Science fiction is full of it. The Luddites broke machines as a part of their industrial action for better wages. Marx saw the potential of machines to replace human workers, evoking the soul-less monster of Frankenstein. It all depends on whom the machines are serving. Small businesses and self-employed people also use machines to enhance their own work and means of production. I am using a computer to write this book. Machines in themselves are not harmful.
The various theories characterised as Socialism, Marxism and Communism are interesting to study and compare. It is when we see the humanist or post-humanist roots that we see the origins of modern totalitarianism. It is important to learn something of the thought of Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891-1937) and the critical theory of the School of Frankfurt. I see these ideas as offshoots from German Idealism and Romanticism. Critical theory started out as criticising capitalist, fascist and communist socio-economic systems in the 1930’s. They sought something new, but retained an essentially Freudian, Hegelian and Marxist basis. Could positivism, materialism, and determinism be surpassed by returning to the theories of Kant and Hegel? I find the language and concepts of Jürgen Habermas extremely difficult to understand and follow. We need all the same to make the effort.
The Frankfurt School was essentially left-wing in its social theories. As Nazism took over in Germany from 1933, these thinkers turned their attention to America and saw capitalism everywhere, especially in the media and the “culture industry”. One significant point is the power of culture and mass media as a political tool. What is culture? In this context, it may seem to be something extremely nebulous and distinct from art. The culture industry uses art to maintain the status quo, consumerism. It controls the masses like Fascism did in the 1930’s.
I can see this mass media age as one of propaganda. I have witnessed this myself by the way the Covid pandemic was reported and exploited by diametrically opposing political ideologies. Then came the woke ideology of “cancelling” western culture. Before that, there was the revolting lead-up to Brexit. If this smokescreen of lies and blustering gibberish can be criticised, I sympathise with the critics. There is no intellectual or rational content in modern politics! Ideologies, whether nationalist or consumerist, involve humanity operating as a crowd, a mass or a mob. I do appreciate something of the critical theorists: their ability to identify totalitarian tendencies on the left and the right. One characteristic in our time is the shutting down of debate and rational criticism. A post-rational world would fulfil George Orwell’s worst nightmares. The critical theorists are, in a way, Marxist-lite. I keep independent from any collective school of thought, but it does not mean that I will reject ideas simply by association.
We will see that the descendents of Romantic and Idealist thought have become very diverse and confusing. This is why I do not attempt to impose any view as the one and true, but rather relate things through the prism of my own experience.
The Blue Flower 