Modernism is best understood through comparison with its two predecessors, Romanticism and Neoclassicism. The Neoclassical era began in the 18th century and emphasized the importance of the Greco-Roman ideals of logic and order, combined with the proper decorum of Europe and the Renaissance’s idea of effortlessness, i.e., sprezzatura. But by the 19th century, the Neoclassical stringency around the human intellect was held in disrepute as Western culture shifted towards spirituality. To be clear, the Romantics were not opposed to reason or logic. Rather, they opposed the hegemony of reason in the Neoclassical worldview. To them, logic was unsatisfactory in explaining much of human behavior, even things one would broadly consider good. Take kinship, for example. One often feels closer to people raised in similar areas and to people with similar backgrounds. But that level of kinship within a neighborhood, city, state, or nation is not totally explainable by logic. Sure, similar backgrounds between two people may cause common interest which results in some bond. But common interest is not the only reason kinship exists. Consider colleges or sports teams, for example. Even if two people share nothing in common, but they support the same sports team or attended the same college, there will often be some level of kinship, even if it is elementary. To the Romantics, Neoclassicism could not explain that phenomenon. Therefore, the Romantics struck down the Neoclassical hegemony of logic and allowed a second standard to exist: spirituality or feeling.
By the early 20th century, the Romantic worldview was also seen as unsatisfactory, and Neoclassicism was under attack again, this time more directly. Whereas the Romantics emphasized spirituality while also permitting the possibility of objective truths to exist and be discovered through logic, the Moderns recoiled at this notion. The very idea of broad, abstract, metaphysical—and especially biblical—truth became heresy as shown in the writings of Nietzsche (1844-1900). One particularly heinous Nietzschean idea was his will to power doctrine:
What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.
What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness.1
-Friedrich Nietzsche
To be sure, the Modern philosophers were not exempt from stumbling on truths via common grace. For example, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) empathized with St. Augustine’s view on the total depravity of man when he rejected the Enlightenment’s idea that human nature is inherently good but tainted by external forces. But without the Scriptures as his guide—the only infallible standard of truth—Freud “went off the deep end,” so to speak, and concluded that unintentional mistakes are outward manifestations of one’s subconscious. For example, forgetting a person’s name, though a seeming mistake, is the result of intentional subconscious hatred. This thesis is known as the Freudian Slip. Another example of common grace not going far enough in Freud’s life was when he concluded that monotheism comes from an immature longing for a father figure in his book The Future of Illusion (1927). This, along with many other Modernist ideas, the humanism of the Modern era and its retreat from the God-fearing piety of the Middle Ages and the Puritanism of the Reformation.
The arts, music, and architecture were not exempt from this radical break with the West’s Christian heritage. The apostasy prevalent in Freud and Nietzsche’s books was not unique; it represented the growing rot within the culture, and the other arts were soon to follow suit. In literature, James Joyce (1882-1941) deliberately ignored sentence structure in his novels. In art, expressionism took hold and artists became more interested in expressing their personal moods rather than displaying the beauty and order in God’s creation. And in music, Arnold Schoenberg broke the rules of music theory to deliberately create dissonant and atonal music.
While not all artists may not have had motives as evil as Nietzsche, their art mirrored the degeneracy of the times. Throughout the Modern era, art was no longer about mirroring the beauty of creation, from the awe of a mountain to musical harmony. Rather, art became a form of self-expression as creation was distorted through the eyes of apostate men.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Viking, 1954 [1895]), p. 2 ↩︎
Asher Sisneros 