Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview for free subscribers, so please click on the button below to enjoy this along with an “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
I am back down out of the mountains and my digital connections to the world have been restored. Logging back on to my social media accounts sometimes makes me wish I could stay in the mountains forever. Alas.
I was hoping to find something important or noteworthy on which to write some commentary, but I admit that I am coming up empty. I’m not in the mood for politics—neither Senator Menendez’s latest bribery indictment and Senator Fetterman’s slovenliness energizes me.
So why don’t I just tell you about some things I have been enjoying?
Years ago I received in the mail a book out of the blue. It was from my friend and colleague, Andrew Sandlin. He just pulled it off his shelf, thought I would enjoy it, so he put it into an envelope and mailed it to me. He’s that sort of guy; rather than recommend that I get the book, he just sent me his copy.
[And that reminds me. Andrew’s father passed away earlier this week, and I highly recommend you read his tribute. One of the finest and most moving such things I’ve ever read.]
Back to the book. It is The Roots of Romanticism by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, the eminent Oxford intellectual historian. It sat on my shelf for several years and I finally got around to it. Andrew was right: I did enjoy it. And I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read it because it would have been helpful over the past couple of years as I’ve been engaged in some debate over “post-liberalism” and “Christian nationalism.” It is not that I didn’t know or didn’t notice that current iterations of nationalism have their roots in 18th century Romanticism—I wrote as much. But I just didn’t quite grasp how clear and how deep those roots are. Reading Berlin’s masterful (and impressively concise) treatment of the leading ideas and figures of Romanticism is extremely eye-opening if you read with present-day intellectual currents in the back of your mind.
Put simply: as Berlin painstakingly explores the thought-world of Hamann, Herder, Schilling, et. al. he might as well be writing about Stephen Wolfe and his present band of utopians. The intuitions, the sentiments, the ethos, the arguments—all of it—is taken straight from German Romanticism. Wolfe himself made no secret that his interest in “groups” and group identity owes much to J.G. Herder, but he engaged in a little sleight of hand when he called him a “Christian philosopher,” trying to make him sound as benign as possible to his evangelical audience. Herder was the father of Romanticism—by no means a Christian philosophy—and while he is not directly responsible for the intellectual places his later followers went, he is nevertheless the font of what became a lot of human misery.
No matter how much they want to insist that their political program is grounded in theology or straightforward “natural reason,” it is nothing of the sort. It is a program rooted in nostalgia for a very particular 18th century worldview, and it pretends that the fruits of that worldview, ripened in full during the bloody 20th century, just never happened.
But I do not hate the 18th century. It gave us a few great things. The United States of America, for one thing. Jane Austen, for another. And boy have I enjoyed watching this particular three-part screen adaptation of her first novel, Sense & Sensibility.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Square Inch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.