Romanticism vs Modernism vs Postmodernism

(So who were the relativists in religion, really, hmm? Answer below) 

This is not a good summary so much as just fun things to talk about and think about.

TS Eliot was considered one of the first and best exemplars of Modernism. "The Waste Land" is usually the first work cited as the anti-Romantic shot across the bow.  April is the cruelest month, breeding... (because it brings the lie of renewal, and beauty) indeed. Modernism celebrated the new works of mankind: science, cities, technology, and the philosophies of destruction of the traditional. Many of them singled out Chesterton in specific for condemnation. Eliot was a rather ironic choice for this, because while the initial line of the poem expresses the opposite idea of Whan that Aprille with its shoures soot (When April with its showers sweet), it is meant as a direct echo of Chaucer's initial line. Eliot was a classicist, not much in favor of the destruction of previous culture, rather forced into the pigeonhole of Modernism. His views also changed over the years, most notably after his conversion to Christianity (before CS Lewis) after viewing the Pieta in the Vatican, because he saw his own suffering mirrored in Christ and identified with Him with immediate tears. Conversion came in about a year.

Am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, pointing out the the Modernists were not really all that, um, modernist as individuals, and the words can mean many things?  Yes, yes, I am, and doing it on purpose. The same is true of the Romantics and the Postmodernists. We make categories in order to break them, as I have said before. You should learn in school that the Enlightenment saw itself as challenging the ideas of the monarchy and the church, especially the Catholic Church; that the Romantics saw themselves as challenging the ideas of the Enlightenment; their focus was the "horrors" of the Industrial Revolution, but that was only the practical arm of the philosophical Enlightenment: that the Modernists saw themselves as challenging the ideas of the Romantics; and the Postmodernists as challenging the ideas of the Modernists. You should nail that down, and get that all clear in your head so that you could get an A on a quiz about the subject. Then you should start chipping away at it to get your real education. Eliot is not the only example of all this, but he is an excellent one, for he himself said that when people quoted him, they should include the year in which he said it, because twenty years later he might not have agreed with it.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. (from "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" TS Eliot c 1910)

The Romanticism Eliot and the other Modernists were rejecting celebrated medieval culture, and longstanding traditions of the people. It loved nature, the emotions and spontaneity, and felt the artist should be unrestrained to be original. It had a Christianity, but it was sentimental, stressing feelings and impressions.
 

CS Lewis hated Eliot's entire approach to poetry. Lewis (and Tolkien, and Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers) was an unabashed Romantic and composed a poem in direct answer.

I am so coarse the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening, any evening, would suggest
A patient etherised upon a table.
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looks far more
Like the departure from a crowded, yet a silent shore.
Of a ship whose freight is everything. Leaving behind
gracefully, finally, without farewell, marooned mankind.
(CS Lewis "Spartanactus"* c. 1925)

Eliot is interesting in a dozen ways. Charles Williams brought him and Lewis together for lunch in the 1930s and they did not like each other at all. The met again in the 1950s, when both were part of rewriting the Psalter for the Anglican prayer book, and were immediate friends. They argued about the poetic choices, and were both on the opposite side that one might expect if one had not read about them. Lewis favored modernising choices for understanding rather than retaining the older forms. Eliot wanted to preserve as much of the previous wording as possible. But both could fight without hatred at that point. Listen to how he ends Prufrock

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. 

These are not the words of a man who is rejecting romanticism so much as one who is disillusioned because he cannot experience it.  He does not declare that mermaids do not exist, but feels regret that they will not sing to him. 

And check out his serious Christian work later, like The Journey of the Magi or The Four Quartets.

The Modernists rejected folk culture because they rejected folks. If a writer or an artist was popular they felt they could not be any good. The believed in capital-C Culture, which only the elites could understand. They loved 

The remaining Romantics of their time, at least the Christians, did not fear the popular and less-fashionable genres. They wrote fantasy and fairy-story, science fiction, detective fiction,       When you have a (Christian culture that goes back 500 years, 1000 years, 2000 or 4000 years, or even to the beginning of time you feel less need to show your literary bona fides by being up-to-the-minute on the latest obscurantist and impenetrable works in the fashionable journals. When you read criticism of these writers it comes from two directions: the fundamentalists of the church who want to hear their favorite doctrines presented in exactly their approved terms and framings, or the fundamentalists of Culture who disdain anything popular or accessible. 

Modernists say they are beholden to science and rationality, providing the only real education. The postmodernists insist they are not objective either, and their solid foundations are just shifting sands, dependent on elusive meanings. They regard all knowledge and value as socially conditioned, and are quite open about their moral relativism. They will tell you your moral absolutism only serves to perpetuate views you were trained to and maintain your power. For this reason, they draw the ire of conservatives, including Christians. Postmodernist is practically a standalone insult on the discussion sites some of us frequent.

Yet there are Christians who hail the arrival of postmodernism as the best thing to happen to Christianity in in decades or even centuries. This is because the Modernists and the continuing effect of the Enlightenment have held the day since before 1700, and those have systematically excluded Christian faith, relegating it to at best a private hobby. The Postmodernists are seen as an ally, arriving on the scene and saying "Look, there's no need to get all conceited about it, because you're no better." Christianity is back in the discussion, baby! We aren't laughed at at conferences anymore. We can smack around secular power structures with the best of them. We are all on the same footing now.

I think there are excellent points to be made about power structures, and attention to epistemology and elusive meanings are always welcome.  But the embrace of postmodernism as an ally strikes me as naive and narrow.  They were great allies for taking down the powerful who laughed at faith. But that is all. 

Among the secular schools of thought, all of them were relativist when it came to faith, and the supposed closest ally Romanticism might have been the most dangerous, as it weakened the faith from within with its sentimentality. Our idea of heaven as the place where we meet with relatives after death - Will The Circle Be Unbroken and all that - was not common anywhere in the church until after the Civil War in America. 

You can think of postmodernism as the problem if you like.  Just know that many of the few Christians left in the academy look at them as the last ally.  Not sure I agree, but by the process of elimination I noted above, they have a point.
 

*I cannot find this online, and so am taking this text on trust from a person reciting it on a podcast.

Update: A reader reports (see comments) that the poem is entitled "A Confession" but is sometimes called "Spartan Nactus." He includes the rest of the poem, including the last few lines, which are marvelous.