‘The Last of the Romantics’

A Catholic Vision of the ‘New Romanticism’

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the start of Caput Mundi. For more on our project, see here.

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Amid talk of the impending “AI revolution,” a recent trend has caught my eye: the budding sense of a “new Romanticism.”¹

The premise is simple: just as the 19th century saw the Industrial Revolution, so too do we find ourselves in a society struggling to cope with rapid technological change. The Age of Reason has given way to the Age of the Algorithm. This upheaval pervades every aspect of life: family, work, leisure — even prayer.

Source: “Words and the Heart: The Two Mirrors of Prayer”

And just as Romanticism pushed back on the materialization of Enlightenment excesses — which ossified man’s reason and choked his freedom, so too is coming a new emphasis on less scrolling and more living. Ted Gioia has been beating this drum since 2023:

I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise … Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out.

Resemblances with the current moment are not hard to see.

The question thus becomes not whether Romanticism will arrive, but what kind.

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The best description I’ve heard of Jordan Peterson is that he is the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of our time — an intellectual with intriguing ideas about Christianity that attract widespread attention but, left to their own devices, ultimately prove vapid.

When he was simply a professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson was a superhero to me. Having discovered him during my college years, I will forever be grateful to the man who told me to make my bed, accept personal responsibility and do something meaningful with my life.

But beyond the commercialization of JBP, his talks have increasingly veered thematically into the spiritual. I know that this point has been beaten to death in Christian circles, so I won’t linger on it. I just want to point out that this shift is both dangerous and misleading.

I miss the old Jordan Peterson.

In the buildup to the French Revolution, Rousseau’s popularity and emphasis on the sentimental value of religion led some in the Church to adopt his frame-of-reference in an effort to keep France Catholic. “Man is always guided by his senses,” explained one 18th-century apologist, “… You need spectacles to retain the attention of the people” — Catholicism being the religion most adept at carrying out such a task.² After the Revolution, Rousseau kept his appeal in the Napoleonic counter-reaction: the general-turned-emperor’s minister of cults, Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, had been inspired by Rousseau, while Chateaubriand also considered himself a disciple of the French philosopher.

But the abstract nature of Rousseau’s thought — and his refusal to be pinned down to any one set of beliefs — meant that his ideas became all things to all men: “Rousseauean language was used to legitimize everything from the abbé Claude Fauchet’s national religion of democratized Catholicism, to Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, to Louis-Marie Reveillière-Lépeaux’s religion of Theophilanthropy, and even a return to the Roman Catholicism of the Old Regime.”³

Emily Finley

’s recent four-part overview of the Romantic imagination lays bare the danger of an approach steeped in Rousseau as deracinated — a reality reflected in the man’s personal character. As Paul Johnson states in Intellectuals:

He is best summed up by the woman who, he said, was his only love, Sophie d’Houdetot … “He was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive. But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness. He was an interesting madman.”

Uncoupled from limits or the need for intellectual or moral consistency, at their worst the Romantics fall into madness, moral degeneracy, and/or esotericism. Left to their own devices, Romantics old and new dabble in various forms of “spirituality” which quickly veer towards the occult.⁴

And yet, all is not lost:

Instead, we ought to take what is good from Romanticism: its recognition of the power and beauty-creating potential of the imagination, the role of symbol in conveying reality, its emphasis on the innocence of childhood as a place of truth. Rather than permit a “wild vagabondage” of imagination, we can encourage a highly imaginative child who is nonetheless ordered by moral reality. Rather than fantasize about a mythical past and invent symbols to try to transport us there, we can turn to the living symbols of Christ that have been revealed and given to us. Rather than exalt the abstract idea of childhood, we can “become as little children.” Rather than despair that life is not otherwise, we can experience the manifold complexity of reality and wonder at it.

One example to follow in this regard is St. Josemaría Escrivá.

“Don’t let me be ‘the last of the Romantics.’ This is Christian Romanticism:
to love the freedom of others, with love and affection.”

St. Josemaría Escrivá
(preaching notes, May 18, 1974).

The “the saint of the ordinary,” as Pope St. John Paul II called him in his canonization homily on October 6, 2002, Escrivá brought to light a central facet of the universal call to holiness — itself a key tenet of the Second Vatican Council.

It’s not that Escrivá was the first to emphasize that all people are called to be holy — one can see this idea in the writings of many saints (e.g. Francis de Sales). Rather, what made Escrivá’s appeal unique was a special emphasis on understanding that, via Christ’s kenosis, every Christian is called to share in that Divine Sonship which is incarnated in the hidden life of Christ-made-man: if God grew, worked, bled, sweated, cried, laughed, loved (cfr. Luke 2:52) — spending the majority of His life-on-Earth in quiet, obedient obscurity — so too should man imitate and discover that quid divinum in the mundanity of daily life. The Romantic, subjective reality (“all are called to be saints”) becomes underpinned by an concrete, objective mission (all honest paths on this Earth are waiting to be sanctified): the secular substratum on which is built the Kingdom of God.

This incarnational principle resonates with a frequency also intuited by the Romantics. As

Megha Lillywhite

explained earlier this year, in a passage worth quoting in full:

Digital technology pervades every dimension of existence today. Although technology is as human as having opposable thumbs--we have invented and used technology as long as humanity has existed--digital technology is a new phenomenon that distinguishes the modern age with its lack of physicality. Digital technology abandons all physical knowledge for cerebral knowledge. We can send ideas at the speed of light but the material things still take just as much time. We can create simulations of relationships, experiences, people, and money, but in doing so, the real things lay gathering dust, untended outside “away from keyboard”.

But there is a shift happening. There is increasingly a feeling of un-ease with this digital world. We crave real tickets we can hold in our hands instead of QR codes. We want menus we can touch, not touch-screens. We want buttons and cranks. We want to make physical things. We are realising that we don’t look at our family photos when they remain digital. Books that we physically keep can’t be effaced or changed by malignant government censorship. Live music. Art made of real paint and ink. We look for the wabi-sabi mistakes of the human handprint in everything. We don’t want to live in the matrix. We don’t want to die and become so many pixels in the metaverse.

The New Romantic Movement therefore takes its nostalgia from the 19th century movement and expands upon it to articulate what it was that our precursors, Tennyson, Keats, Arnold, Wordsworth were all presciently warning us about: we want to preserve the human in an increasingly inhuman world. To feel alive we need a physicality not only a mentality.

This explains why there is currently also an explosion of new-found faith in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity as both sects emphasise the importance of the physical elements of ritual and religion. The material, so important to the secularists, has hitherto been desecrated by the religious; if the religious understand the importance of the material and give it its proper importance, perhaps the secular will have less of a hold on it.

A simple example is a picture of your deceased grandmother. Or a scarf she made for you by hand. Would you be comfortable destroying it? Of course that picture is not your grandmother and neither is the scarf, and you understand that perfectly well, but still these things hold sentimental value for you. You would not feel comfortable with their destruction or vandalism. This is what it means to sanctify the material and it is not the same thing as worship. They are the secular who worship the material and sell their very souls to acquire it; who value the picture and the scarf more than the people whom they may represent.

Reading this, I was struck by its similarity to a point the late-Pope Francis made in his most recent encyclical, Dilexit Nos — which underpins Romantic appeals to the value of the heart with a plea for a renewed devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus:

“In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories ‘kept’ deep in our heart.”

Dilexit Nos, n. 20

But the vision of Dilexit Nos is not merely a superficial appeal for a “return to the heart”; rather, it presents a concrete desire to increase devotion the Sacred Heart of Christ. To incarnate such a devotion requires practices of piety — such as receiving Communion on the first Friday of each month or making a Holy Hour in Eucharistic adoration on Thursdays — and serves a real purpose, just as it did in 17th-century France:

“It could be argued that today, in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God. In our societies, we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality. I must warn that within the Church too, a baneful Jansenist dualism has re-emerged in new forms. This has gained renewed strength in recent decades, but it is a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of ‘the salvation of the flesh.’ For this reason, I turn my gaze to the heart of Christ and I invite all of us to renew our devotion to it. I hope this will also appeal to today’s sensitivities and thus help us to confront the dualisms, old and new, to which this devotion offers an effective response.”

Dilexit Nos, n. 87

One can see the same dynamic with Escrivá, who actively leaned into labeling himself a Romantic — principally in his love for personal freedom.⁵ But rather than limit himself to a purely subjective understanding of freedom — with vague claims and ambiguous starting points — he urged that treasuring mankind’s greatest gift precisely calls one to recognize the need for communion with the Gift-Giver.

“I think that I am the last of the romantics, because I love everybody’s personal freedom — that of non-Catholics, too. I love the freedom of others, and yours, and the freedom of the one who’s walking down the street at this very moment, because if I did not love his freedom, I could not defend my own. But this is not the main reason. The main reason is something else: that Christ died on the Cross to give us freedom, so that we should end up ‘in libertatem gloriae filiorum Dei’ (Rm 8, 21).”

Salvador Bernal, A Profile of Msgr. Escrivá the Founder of Opus Dei
(London: Scepter (U.K.) Ltd., 1977), p. 260.

Escrivá’s appeal to freedom strikes at the heart of a central Romantic tenet: the idealistic search. As a January piece published in Point Magazine on the re-election of Donald Trump and his appeal among Gen-Z men explained, “[t]his is what the younger NatCons are: New Romantics. Young men looking for meaning, guidance, purpose and use, for a world where they could belong.”

In an age suffering from a crisis of meaning, the Romantic urge to seek what is real can serve as the jolt needed to look up from the screen and rediscover the Christian roots of our tired paeans to a withered-away humanism.

1. For a helpful overview:

Hopeful Romantics

2. Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, Apologie de la religion chrétienne contre l’auteur du Christianisme dévoilé et contre quelques autres critiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Humbolt, 1770), 410.

3. Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion”, 10.

4. See Ross Barkan:

The Rise of the New Romanticism

5. For more, see Mariano Fazio, Last of the Romantics: St. Josemaría in the Twenty-first Century (Strongsville: Scepter, 2018).