Christian Romanticism

Where is the divine radiance?

In October I am offering an online course on the Rosicrucian documents of the 17th century (Fama Fraternitatis, Confessio Fraternitatis, and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz). You can also support my work on Patreon.

In his profoundly important essay “What Are Poets For?,” Martin Heidegger asks some uncomfortable questions not about poets or poetry so much, but about religion, and, in particular, about Christianity. Following a trace left in the poem “Bread and Wine” by the great and troubled German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Heidegger asks, “What are poets for in a destitute time?” The destitution in question is not necessarily that of poetry (the destitution of which is merely a symptom), but the destitution of God. As Heidegger writes,

“The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the ‘default of God.’ But the default of God which Hölderlin experienced does not deny that the Christian relationship with God lives on in individuals and in churches; still less does it assess this relationship negatively. The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things to himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even greater, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.”

Not only was Heidegger describing Hölderlin’s historical moment, he was describing his own (the essay was published in 1950). More importantly, he was also describing ours. The rise of the technocratic and totalitarian state and the tacit assent of the churches in this rise require one not afraid to engage in honest introspection to ask if we are not indeed living in a destitute time of God’s default. As Hölderlin writes in “Patmos,” “Near is / And difficult to grasp, the god.” Where is the divine radiance?

For Heidegger, the traces of this radiance can be found in poets like Hölderlin, Novalis, and, above all, Rilke, “poets whose song turns our unprotected being into the Open.” Meditating on the angel of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Heidegger finds a holiness in the midst of the spreading darkness:

“In the invisible of the world’s inner space, as whose worldly oneness the Angel appears, the haleness of worldly beings becomes visible. Holiness can appear only within the widest orbit of the wholesome. Poets who are the most venturesome kind are under way on the track of the holy because they experience the unholy as such. Their song over the land hallows. Their singing hails the integrity of the globe of Being.”

The Romanticism of the late-18th and 19^th centuries stood in defiance of the encroaching technicization and atomization of the world introduced by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. In England, William Blake decried the Dark Satanic Mills appearing both in his country and in the spiritual worlds, while in Germany Goethe railed against the “gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic torture chamber” of the accepted scientific method in favor of his own “delicate empiricism.” It is more than significant that the crowning achievements of both men reach their apotheosis in the exaltation of the sophianic Divine Feminine, Blake in Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion and Goethe in the conclusion of Faust.

As in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, the Romantic vision is unimaginable outside of a Christian cultural context, but, because the Romantics did not feel themselves obligated to the dogmatism of this or that Christian confession, their intuition led them in an inescapable sophianic direction. As Christopher Bamford writes in An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West, “Romanticism...is always concerned—metaphysically, cosmologically, psychologically—with the recovery of the true Christianity of the creative Word.” And rediscovering the sophianic is part of that recovery.

To be sure, the religious intuitions of the Romantics were not always “orthodox”—Goethe (whom Owen Barfield called “the uncrowned king of the Romantics”) tellingly said he kept a Christianity “for my own private use”—but not being held by dogma allowed them to disclose the essence of Christianity organically and phenomenologically. This was also the case with Jacob Boehme before them and Rudolf Steiner after: what they professed might not be your vicar’s Christianity, but it’s Christianity all the same. Some, I am sure, will take issue with such a pronouncement: but if we look at the glaring differences (and often deep animosities) between just the mainstream Christian confessions, making a fuss over the religious and sophiological intuitions of the Romantics becomes comical if not completely absurd. Romanticism offers a genuine ecumenism—nothing like the ridiculous overtures between popes and patriarchs offered on a semi-annual basis. I mean, my God, they’ve been in negotiations to “reunite Christianity” for almost a thousand years! Who could possibly take their pious promises to “heal the schism” seriously? I certainly can’t.

Without the Romantic-Sophianic intuition, what happens is that Christian confessions become the superego of the faithful and...the light begins to dim. Still, tradition and history are important. Novalis was completely aware of this when he wrote “Christendom or Europe?” which starts with the sentence “Once there were fine, resplendent times when Europe was a Christian land, when one Christendom occupied this humanly constituted continent.” Novalis’s essay, written in 1799, may at first strike one as nostalgic for a medieval Christianity; and in part it is. But rather than a nostalgia for a place and time where we’ve never been, more importantly, he is voicing a nostalgia for a place we knew before birth. And that, at least in part, is what Christianity should be involved in actualizing. We all know what we’ve been given—a Christianity splintered into a thousand pieces—is inherently wrong. The institutions will not remedy this. Not ever. As Novalis cogently observed two and a quarter centuries ago, “The old Papacy lies in its grave and Rome for the second time has become a ruin.”

This is why, I think, I find myself a little saddened by the recent embrace of Orthodoxy by Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw; though, to be clear, I would be equally saddened had they been received into the Catholic (or any other institutional) Church. I don’t want to see them lose their wildness, the inherent Romantic-Sophianic intuition that is their birthright, for a plate of comfortable beans and a box of envelopes. I don’t want to see them imaginatively domesticated and claimed for a tribe (which is apparently de rigueur in high profile conversion stories).

Indeed, the clannishness of religious confessionalism has outworn its usefulness long since. We need a new vision—not a reiteration of the old. As Novalis writes,

“Christendom must come alive again and be effective, and, without regard to national boundaries, again form a visible Church which will take into its bosom all souls athirst for the supernatural, and willingly become the mediatrix between the old world and the new.”

Christianity has been bogged down with confessionalism, rationality, and political capture for far too long; and to leave its redemption to the bureaucratic mandarins who have shepherded its demise for at least a millennium is beyond absurd. We live in destitute times and only by exposing ourselves to the Open can we rediscover the traces of the Holy. This may, to some, sound as a dangerous path. But, as Rilke writes in The Sonnets to Orpheus, “the lyre’s strings do not restrict his hands. / And it is in over-stepping that he obeys.”

Here is a poem I wrote invoking this Romantic Christianity:

GLAD DAY

Vision...the trees in Spring, when first the leaves unfurl,
their fresh and delicate green, so easy to bruise,
and pollen-heavy catkins hang like green christs in the breeze.

Is it even possible to have a favorite kind of tree,
to choose between the maple’s exuberance and abundance
the oak’s austere and fatherly authority
the black cherry’s feminine love for the margins
the child-like grace and light of the orchard
or the quiet and secretive mystery of a pine grove?

But what is it to know one tree in its individuality, in its personhood?

Often in the middle of a wheat field you will see a solitary tree,
invariably an ancient oak, a shepherd or guardian of the corn, 
a palimpsest of the vanished wild, a talisman. 
Joan at the Faerie Oak in Domrémy, 
the beautiful lady perched upon a tree at the Cova de Iria,
the white mist enveloping the Rose of Sharon in Ferndale.

The one tree I climbed as a boy...I forget what kind it was
….its leaves fluttered in the wind, branches swaying,
the morning sun’s voice filtered through dappled light;
and to the east I could see the hay fields ripe for the cutting.
It was then I noticed them: all around me were angels.
Upon every bough they sat, alone or in pairs or in threes,
and I felt the joy of their undeniable breathing
and the warmth of their overwhelming splendor
as they opened the threshold between the worlds
at a gate that could never be closed.