Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

My understanding of Romantic Christianity is that there were several periods since the Industrial Revolution began; where events were aligned (presumably under divine influences, because this was Man's destiny) such that issue became clearer in The West.

I mean times and places when there was a significant awareness of a choice between the path of continued modernisation (based on continual growth based on increased technology, specialisation, trade etc); and a very different kind of religion, spirituality, ideology, way-of-being - that was Christian and also Romantic.

In none of these eras was that choice made. There were a few individuals, a small following of Romantic Christians - but the powerful and influential people and a large majority of the Western 'masses' chose instead to follow the path of increasing atheism, secularism, materialism, scientism, positivism and bureaucracy.

A smaller proportion adhered (in dwindling numbers, with diminishing conviction) to some form of traditional - Church-driven and externally-orientated - Christianity; or else chose an anti-or un-Christian Romanticism of (either or both) utopian politics and the secular revolution.


The first such era was the beginning of Romanticism itself in the late 1700s and early 1800s, originating in Farnce, Germany and Britain. It dissipated into the characteristic combination of atheism, leftist politics and sexual license that we see in the circle of Byron and Shelley.

At this time, the world's population was at its agrarian/ medieval level about one billion - and from a materialist point-of-view there was no problem about switching to a different and more spiritual way of life. The extra productivity/ efficiency of the agrarian/ industrial could - in principle - have been directed to alleviating absolute poverty, then reducing the quantity of drudgery and labour; and freeing more time and energy for 'higher things'.

The next Romantic era came at the end of the 19th century; but this again was dissipated into sex and politics; and creativity went-into radical experiments in the arts. There was the establishment of a 'Bohemian' lifestyle for drop-outs from the aristocrats, upper and professional classes. World population was about one and a half billion - about a quart of which was of European descent.

The next significant Romantic revival was not until the middle 60s-70s; when world population had grown to about three and half billion; and had reached the point at which an adoption of the Romantic lifestyle would have caused a very significant reduction in the standard of living people had become used to.

Nonetheless; there was among some people a clearly articulated sense that that material production had reached the point of 'more than enough'; and that it would be valuable to scale back on industialisation, trade and labour in order to have a life that was more free and more spiritual.

But, instead there was an expansion of the Bohemian lifestyle - radical politics, sex, drugs, and rock & roll - beyond the young upper-crust and to include pretty much anyone who wanted it: at first the middle classes, later everybody. There was a brief burst of creativity in the populist arts (pop music, pop art, modern dance etc); but before long, all of these were channelled into varieties of consumerism and bureaucracy.

We got to the present situation where most people are some kind of manager working for a branch of the global bureaucracy, and deploying their leisure in doing, watching, day-dreaming about whatever hedonic activity is favoured.

Since the middle 1970s there has never been any serious or large-scale attempt to move towards the Romantic Christian idea; instead the genuine problem has been lost sight of in a world of increasing diversions, short-termism and dishonesty taken to a level of ingrained habit.

Thinking has never been at a lower ebb - with high status intellectuals unable to follow a couple of steps in reasoning and unable to recognise even simple explanatory patterns behind observations.


The above is (very approximately, painted with a very broad brush) how we in The West (or the developed world) now find ourselves where we currently are; at the end of that era which began in the 1700s with the agrarian then industrial revolutions; after a sequence of chances and failures and evasions.

This end was inevitable because the situation was unsustainable - for many, many reasons; but mainly because generation upon generation of spiritual evasion, dishonesty, and outright lying has reached a point where people have decided - en masse - that things must be brought to an end.

We are observing as vast act of rejection of Life, at all the levels in which Life is manifested in this world. By the revealed preferences of hundreds of millions of people; nothing (including radical politics, sex, and hedonism generally) is valued enough to risk anything for it - all has been unceremoniously dumped.

As Thoreau accurately commented more than 150 years ago, and the situation has increased several-fold since: The mass of Men lead lives of quiet desperation; and in the past few weeks desperation has (for most of the mass) turned to despair, and an end is sought.

And perhaps (as was prophesied by various people at various times) most of those who have apparently been among the most devout of self-identified Christians are - it turns-out - as bad as everybody else.


Naturally enough - in a Godless, Christ-rejecting and repentance-denying world - this colossal act of global suicide is being dishonestly self-denied. But that is what's afoot.

Yet, because God is the creator, our loving parents and we his children - for every person at every moment there is an 'instant' solution to this suicidal despair; and the promise of everlasting, Heavenly, resurrected life to come.

(Everybody is an unique individual, but) At some level, we all know (from our pre-mortal life as spirits) the nature of this promise and that this promise is real; but the mass of Men are now so deeply corrupted that such a basic act of acknowledgement is beyond them - or else they know, but choose otherwise - choose sin, or choose annihilation of The Self.

It is better to make such choices during this mortal life; because that is what this immortal life was designed-for; but even if the choice is evaded and denied there will come a point (maybe at the moment of death, manybe sometime after) when we will be confronted with this choice.

Best be prepared.