The New Romanticism: Hope and Caution for the Church Today

If you are plugged into the delightfully strange and provocative world of Substack, you may well be aware that a veritable storm of debate has broken out over the “New Romanticism.”

Given the fervor with which this revival has boiled, we should ask: What is this all about? Could it be good for the Church? Or bad? Or both?

Here I’ll suggest that the Church ought to be simultaneously excited about and wary of this New Romanticism. First, though—what is it, and why (and how) has the New Romanticism come to be?

What is it, and why?

Back in late 2023, Ted Gioia published a brief essay on his massively popular Substack platform, The Honest Broker. In the piece, “Notes Towards a New Romanticism,” Gioia noted that “technocracy had grown so oppressive and manipulative it would spur a backlash”; and he argued that today’s backlash “resemble[s] the Romanticist movement of the early 1800s.”

This article catalyzed an ongoing discussion: What would a New Romanticism look like today (as opposed to the original Romanticism)? What would we want it to look like? Should we want such a thing?

To put it simply, the New Romanticism is largely, like the original Romanticism of the late-18th to early-19th centuries, reactionary. In the debris of a fading Christendom, it understood itself largely in contradistinction to the socioeconomically and spiritually oppressive, calculating Enlightenment which preceded it.

The philosopher Charles Taylor tells us the original Romantics “were rebelling against a dead, mechanical view of Nature…and against a purely instrumental approach to nature”—and that the fuel of this rebellion was channeled through “creative expression.” Even as a religious worldview became less and less universal, they retained a strong intuition that man was meant to inherit something supernatural—and that language and the arts were particular channels for realizing this. They acknowledged—or attempted to will into existence—a world of preternatural beings. “Hölderlin’s gods,” “Rilke’s angels” were not always benign—but they did bespeak an enchanted worldview. These Romantics followed with abandon where passion led, eschewing social and moral norms, often into either a quasi-nihilistic ennui or into some other truly tragic and destructive conclusions.

Today’s Romantics likewise put a premium on the heart—and damned be the consequences. Taylor Swift offers the most concise anthem in her song “New Romantics”:

We’re all bored
We’re all so tired of everything
We wait for trains that just aren’t coming
We show off our different scarlet letters
Trust me, mine is better…
Baby, we’re the new romantics
Come on, come along with me
Heartbreak is the national anthem
We sing it proudly

In postmodernity especially, Romantics elevate aestheticism over and against reason. The New Romantics are, moreover, influenced by a speedier and headier kind of technological progress than was developing two centuries ago. The New Romantics especially have to grapple with the implications of omnivorous artificial intelligence and the specter trans-humanism: Does a true Romantic embrace or reject such things?

Why did Gioia’s short piece instigate such a wide and ongoing response? It seems to have struck a chord within the hearts of many who feel the alienating pinch of the rising AI tide—and the parallels between the reactionary rise of Romanticism against Enlightenment rationalism are all too apparent. “Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution,” writes Gioia, “and people started resisting the forces of progress.”

As it was then, so it is today. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was artists, Gioia notes, who led this resistance. Today, artists once more take up this mantle.

Potential red flags

So, what does this mean for the Church? There are several things to be wary of. I’ll highlight only a couple here.

The original Romanticism, as Matthew Gasda has recently argued, “was genius plus criminality in an attempt to make the outer world resemble the inner world—beautiful, wild, insane, primitive and unconscious.” Romanticism unbound pledges its allegiance to an inner madness that may—or may not—run explicitly contrary to rationality. It is not that Romantics are against Truth as such; it’s more that they have fully embraced the possibility that I myself can create my own Truth. This can be, as Nietzsche demonstrated, an exhilarating idea. It is not that Romantics are against Truth as such; it’s more that they have fully embraced the possibility that I myself can create my own Truth.Tweet This

Taylor observes the latent danger here. When man feels alienated from creation, he has two choices: 1) seek out and reunite with the eternal truth of things which underlies creation, or 2) create a new way of understanding reality. Implicit here is not just an existential but a moral choice: Do I cede to God as Creator, or do I become God? To state plainly why the Church must be wary here: if man is created with a particular end in mind—the vision of and union with God—then there are particular means that do and do not lead to this end. If we make the god-like decision to determine an entirely new end, it follows that we must turn to new means to accomplish this—and these means have proven to do violence to the human person and to creation.

Gasda goes on to argue that “we shouldn’t really want a Romantic age. A Romantic age is one of destructive revolution and, in a sense, absolute ruin.” It is typical of the Romantic ethos to elevate the Beautiful above its sisters the True and the Good. When this happens, though—when the heart divorces itself from its partner reason—man opens himself up to a wildly varied and confused field of ends. If the Beautiful is not subject to the True and the Good, there is nothing to stop the pure Romantic from transforming into, as Udith Dematagoda put it, “a feral beast…capable of committing untold atrocities,” all in the name of Beauty. There is, then, he notes, potentially an “underlying violence to this aesthetic.” This often leads to despair and/or madness.

Some reasons to embrace the New Romanticism

For these reasons, Goethe averred that “Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.”

While I agree by and large, pure order—if this is what Goethe means by “Classicism”—is often boring. Dana Gioia—brother of Ted—observes that just as “intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjectivist,” so, too, “intellectuality without physicality becomes dull and barren.” In other words, if the Church wants to offer the world anything lifegiving—and not simply harmless—she could take a page from the New Romantics’ playbook; she needs to take some risks. 

A Romantic worldview strains toward something transcendent—however vaguely. This mere fact sets it against a materialism which denies man any transcendent end and instead hopes to make a heaven on earth with fallen human beings. In some ways, the transcendent urge Romantics feel in their guts can remind us that we are made for more than a purely natural end. Those artistic Romantics who desire a pure beauty of the spiritual realm suggest the sacramentality of creation: visible things are meant to reveal something of the invisible. Materialist technocrats cannot believe in God, but Romantics might.

Romantics know there is a limit to reason. While this can often devolve into anti-rationalism, Romantics at least, unlike many technocrats, see that reason can only tell us so much about ourselves and our destinies. There are supernatural things out there, in the enchanted, strange world Tolkien dubbed Faërie. This realm is beyond our control; we are subject to its whims; it can shape our lives and give them meaning.

Thomas Pynchon wrote back in 1984 that “to insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us.” This Romantic intuition regarding the miraculous takes us out of the workaday world and reminds us, in the midst of routine, of the extraordinary. Damir Marusic notes “miraculous” here for Pynchon “is not explicitly the divine. But humanism, like morality itself, is impossible to pin down without at least a gesture at infinite things”—in other words, things we can’t control. So, though it is not overtly identified as such, Romantics are open to what we might call the action of grace in their lives. 

Final thoughts

So, how might the Church respond to the New Romanticism? Ted Gioia noted recently that the “New Romanticism Just Found an Unexpected Spokesperson” in the heart of the Church: 

the very first thing the new Pope does is name himself after a nineteenth century critic of the Industrial Revolution. And he announces to the world, at the very outset of his papacy, that we need a similar pushback against tech overreach today—all in the name of human dignity.

It would seem, then, if we follow the lead of our new pontiff, we need tools to combat the ongoing industrialization of man (and creation at large)—and we shouldn’t ignore a certain Romanticism.

Many in the Church today—particularly the young—are recognizing a deeply felt need for Beauty. This is a wonderful thing and must be encouraged. The energy of the New Romanticism can help fuel this surge and be unafraid of getting funky with it. But it must be tempered by reason; the Beautiful must not be cut off from the Good and the True.

The Church must respond to the New Romanticism with its characteristic “both/and” stance. Catholic anthropology asserts an integral unity of head and heart, reason and the passions. When it comes to the ecstasies and the dangers of the New Romanticism, the Church may be simultaneously cautious and hopeful—“innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents.”