I’m reading this terribly great book right now, The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was a renaissance man of culture; this book, released posthumously, collects lectures he gave in Washington, DC, some 40 years ago.

Accordingly, this is a work of rhetoric, not research, but builds upon an unbelievable amount of research. What he’s trying to do is twofold:

1. Establish the Romanticist movement as the most decisive intellectual revolution in western history (and knocking the Enlightenment off its pedestal); and
2. Figure out where this revolution came from.

He succeeds marvelously at the first task, if Christianity’s impact on pagan Europe is excluded. He seems to hardly concern himself with the cross-cultural translation of an initially Jewish sect into Greek/Roman society in the first centuries of the Common Era—he takes the Christian West for granted. That’s a problem, but hey: these are lectures, and I can grant him that point, if it helps his case.

His first major problem is defining romanticism, which is as slippery as soap. After explaining, with characteristic dry wit, that (regarding the hopeless task of supplying a definition) “I do not propose to fall into that particular trap,” he ultimately settles on calling Romanticism a (particularly German) critique of the (particularly French) Enlightenment, the latter with its voracious appetite for imposing quantifiable human categories on everything, from miracles to natural laws to ethnography.

Again, he’s on thin ice, but:

"Unless we do use some generalizations it is impossible to trace the course of human history. Therefore, difficult as it may be, it is important to find out what it was that caused this enormous revolution in human consciousness."

Where it gets really interesting is when he, moving from definitions, actually starts this revolution. And what he finds starts with pietism, that German (Lutheran) spiritual movement roughly analogous to Anglo-Saxon evangelicalism. Pietists took faith from an external point of connection to church and community, and made it individual and experiential.

The personal experience of faith opens all kind of new capacities inside one’s brain, as one can now conceive, for instance, of one’s fellow believers on the other side of the world as closer kin than one’s next-door neighbor unbelievers. This kind of intellectual leap is taken for granted today, but was incredibly destabilizing to the societies it landed in.

Berlin himself found pietism fairly pathetic, an internalization of spiritual energies because of the political weakness of Germany at that time. Never mind that: he’s uncovering something important: Inasmuch as we who concern ourselves with world Christianity believe in experience outweighing life station, we are all romantics.