So is it his emphasis on freedom that makes St. Josemaria a romantic? Is the exaltation of freedom the thing that can help us get in touch with the real, and thus realize a true romanticism?
Or is it rather that freedom is great because we need it to surrender ourselves to the truth?
In my reading, it's both. The Catholic response to Romanticism is et-et: embracing its subjective emphasis while grounding it in a dogmatic understanding of reality.
God holds our freedom in such high regard that He lowered Himself to redeem us — and yet He still runs the risk of us rejecting that gift. To take that seriously gives our freedom an objective weight. See: https://escriva.org/en/es-cristo-que-pasa/113/
Romanticism: Nature—>thought (freedom)—>action. We are not determined by nature. The dialectic of thought leads to freedom which leads to action. Freedom is from a material-deterministic nature and a commitment to incarnating the realm of the spirit. E. Michael Jones outlines this in Dangers of Beauty, and it applies to Escriva. Cheers!
So is it his emphasis on freedom that makes St. Josemaria a romantic? Is the exaltation of freedom the thing that can help us get in touch with the real, and thus realize a true romanticism?
Or is it rather that freedom is great because we need it to surrender ourselves to the truth?
In my reading, it's both. The Catholic response to Romanticism is et-et: embracing its subjective emphasis while grounding it in a dogmatic understanding of reality.
God holds our freedom in such high regard that He lowered Himself to redeem us — and yet He still runs the risk of us rejecting that gift. To take that seriously gives our freedom an objective weight. See: https://escriva.org/en/es-cristo-que-pasa/113/
Romanticism: Nature—>thought (freedom)—>action. We are not determined by nature. The dialectic of thought leads to freedom which leads to action. Freedom is from a material-deterministic nature and a commitment to incarnating the realm of the spirit. E. Michael Jones outlines this in Dangers of Beauty, and it applies to Escriva. Cheers!