The Dangling Conversation
Charles Taylor on Romanticism and Art
Welcome back to our series on A Secular Age by Charles Taylor1. We are quickly approaching the end of this series! We hope it’s been helpful and interesting to you. As a reminder, or for those of you who are just arriving, A Secular Age is a massive historical and philosophical tome. Our colleague Jim Aldrich has been breaking down the book’s content for us, pulling out some essential themes and helping draw out key ideas that will be instructive and interesting to church leaders.
Why? Well, at Cultivating Communities, we are always thinking about important conversations for churches to have. How we engage culture as faithful communities—not to mention how culture has changed and influenced us in our pursuit of becoming those very communities—is one essential piece.
In the last post, Jim recapped how society moved from one understanding of the world toward an every-increasing range of options for making sense of things—a reality Charles Taylor described as a “nova effect.”
Read more about that here:
Deism + Nova (More on A Secular Age)
Welcome back to our series on the book A Secular Age by philosopher Charles Taylor.
This week, we’ll consider how that nova effect contributed to the development of Romanticism.
Lost in Space
Western elite society went Nova. The more we came to experience our human ability to know, to understand, and to order the world we live in, the farther we got from former times, the times when all was revealed from outside us. On the one hand, then, we became powerful—knowledge is power, it’s said. We could organize the world and society as we thought best, and we could argue about what’s best. But on the other hand, we were no longer at home in a small, local cosmos with a finite amount of everything. There were limits and boundaries in this cosmos, and earth was the center around which all creation revolved.
As a result of becoming enlightened (able to look rationally at our situation), we found ourselves in a limitless, expanding universe, clinging to this rock but no longer the center of all that was or is. This understanding didn’t happen all at once. Rather, over generations the social imaginary—and cosmic imaginary—developed explanations for our situation, among which were many which left no place for God, gods, spirits, transcendence. And this was quite a shift, from a cosmos replete with meaning to a silent universe in which humans are mere specks in the vastness of time and space, devoid of meaning—and painfully aware of it.
It’s a conundrum. In this reality, humans are elevated to a place of incredible powers, while simultaneously being set adrift in a vast impersonal universe, where those powers have no apparent meaning. No absolute explanation is presented by this universe, nothing to reveal what we are, or why. Attaining great powers of knowledge and control comes at that cost of being lost in space. And the Nova effect is such that any observation or application of our newfound rationality can give rise to more than one response. Any number of responses become possible as we try to figure out how to live as occupants of this planet. What can we find within ourselves, or within nature, that can provide substance and weight to our existence? What matters? What are we to value, and pursue?
Harmony and Disharmony
Well, one direction some inheritors of this disenchanted and flattened universe went was the “Romantic” direction. A movement among a loose group of writers and thinkers, the Romantic ideal imagined human life needing a harmonious unity, a “fusion of ordinary desire and the sense of a higher goal, rather than an opposition in which harmony is achieved by the relegation or subordination of desire.” “This “ideal,” Taylor says, “comes to be identified with beauty.” Romanticism, then, was not only a protest against a variety of divisions but also a move toward something that was lost in the move toward order, discipline, and reason. It was important to the Romantics to overcome not only our personal disharmony—reason and discipline against ordinary human desire—but other disharmonies as well. These included various perspectives toward the “great unity of nature outside us.” Overcoming the perceived alienation created by the rational, disciplined order became a pursuit for many of the elite.
Taylor recounts a story of Tocqueville’s visit to America. Upon a visit to the Michigan territory, Tocqueville wanted to see the wilderness for himself, having been influenced by the Romantic writings of his time. “But when he tried to explain his project to the local frontiersmen to enlist their help, he met a wall of incomprehension. Somebody wanting to enter the primeval forest just to behold it; this made no sense. He must have had some other undeclared agenda…”
What particularly interests me in Taylor’s narration of Romanticism is “the shift in the place and understanding of art that came” about in this period. I’ve always found the category “art” enigmatic, confusing, inscrutable. What is art? What makes one thing art, and another not? What are the boundaries of art? Is it about something? In our world, art has become a self-contained, autonomous domain. It wasn’t always so. In former times, music and poetry, sculpture and painting, were not art in the modern sense. These things all existed, were practiced and valued, but were not what we think of as art (though we now look back on artifacts of those times and call them art). While artisans generated fabulous items, those items existed in specific social settings and served particular functions within settings in which they were at home. In the Romantic period a shift took place: “from an understanding of art as mimesis to one that stresses creation.”
We’re all familiar with images of the Madonna and Child or with stray verses from Shakespeare, as well as other pre-Romantic artistic expression. These all drew on publicly available reference points, or on public doctrines. They referred to and reinforced social understandings of the world and of our place in it. Taylor writes more, perhaps, of poetry than of any of the other artistic fields, but his observations hold for all the others. In contrast with earlier poets, Taylor says, speaking of Wordsworth and Holderlin:
“The Romantic poets and their successors have to articulate an original vision of the cosmos…they no longer play on an established gamut of references…They make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no established words. The poems are finding words for us. In this ‘subtler language’... something is defined and created as well as manifested. A watershed has been passed in the history of literature.”
What happened in poetry, or something similar, happened also in painting and music. The search was on for “subtler languages,” ways to “say something for which no adequate terms exist,” a “symbolism in nature that is not based on accepted conventions.”
Poetry, painting, and music have their origins in well-understood social life. They refer to common life and experience: stories and songs of great heroes, of the might and works of God, of exemplary or notorious characters in our societies history. They are connected to the common activities of society, of religion, of praising heroes, of telling the story of us. In the Romantic period, those connections came loose, and the “arts”—poetry, music, painting—became their own activity, valuable for their own sake. They also took on a new role: that of disclosing deep truths, truths that weren’t readily obvious or available to everyone.
A line from the Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Dangling Conversation,” comes to mind: “You read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost…” Like so many lines in their songs, it expresses a deep longing for something inexpressible and the dread that the thing longed for is beyond finding.
So, we come to our day, in which the search goes on more intensely than ever for those subtler languages, for words, images, chords that resonate with us, assuring us there is more to existence than the flattened outlook of the coldly rational, impersonal, instrumental world of enlightenment.
In Case You Missed It:
Earlier this week, C. Christopher Smith shared some reflections on the role of faith communities in preserving and promoting literacy. Read that post here:
At The Englewood Review of Books, we shared our list of Fall 2026’s Most Anticipated Books! It’s a great list that includes titles from Kristin Du Mez, Nijay K. Gupta, Carmen Joy Imes, Liz Daye, Amanda Held Opelt, Sophie Killingley, J.S. Park, Kaitlin Curtice, and many, many more! Check it out here.
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