Sentimentalism—the rule of individualistic emotion—ends by destroying not only the good and beautiful emotions of the individual, but also the individual himself and the society in which he lives.

In the late 1980s I was a minister in the Church of England, when the entire denomination was embroiled in a debate about women’s ordination. Much was at stake. Strong arguments were put forward from both sides and the debates became heated. However, very often the discussion was reduced to one sided speeches like this:

My friend Sandra is a deacon. She has received the same theological training as the priests. She is a good preacher and teacher. She is a compassionate person who loves God and loves her neighbor. I know Sandra as a prayerful, mature and humble person. She has three beautiful children and a loving husband. You would love to see her walking in the countryside with Derek and their pair of Labradors, Poppy and George. Is it fair to deny Sandra ordination to the priesthood when she has felt in the depth of her heart that she too is called by God to be a priest?

The appeal in this speech is not to theology or Scripture. It is not to reason, church tradition, the writings of the apostolic fathers, canon law or the beliefs of Anglicanism’s older sisters, the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

The appeal is pure sentimentality. It is an appeal to the emotions. We are to admire Sandra for her wonderful qualities. Our hearts are warmed by her status as wife, mother and her fondness for Poppy and George her two lovable Labradors.

Then the propagandists plunged in the emotional guilt dagger: “How can you be so cruel and heartless to deny Sandra what she knows God wants her to do?”

There is nothing wrong with emotion as such, but sentimentalism is the system of making a decision or taking an action based only on one’s emotions.

The various distortions of human reason, like the heads of hydra, are all interwoven and connected, sentimentalism is often combined with utilitarianism and pragmatism with deadly results: “I’m afraid your mother is nearing the end of her life” says the kindly doctor. “I know you do not wish her to be in pain any longer. She’s a lovely person, but there really is not much more we can do for her. I’m going to leave this medicine here on her bedside table. I’m not allowed to administer it, but if you want her to be relieved of pain, just add it to her cup of tea before bed, and she will be at peace, and everyone will feel much better.”

Thus sentimentalism holds hands with pragmatism and utilitarianism. Wherever you turn in our contemporary culture it seems that sentimentalism rules. Arguments are made, goods are sold, relationships are undertaken and broken, decisions are taken based only on emotion. We think toleration, a positive attitude and being nice are the ruling emotions, but tenderness is not the only powerful emotion. There are other emotions lurking in the shadows. Rage, resentment, fear and hatred are the dark side of sentimentalism.

All Heart No Head

One of the historical trends behind sentimentalism is romanticism. The poetry, novels, paintings and music of romanticism gush with powerful emotions. This is the period of some of the best loved and most emotionally powerful works of art: the stirring music of Beethoven and Brahms, the operas of Verdi and Puccini, the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists, the emotional and evocative poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. This is also the period of the frightening gothic stories of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the horror tales of Edgar Allen Poe, the sweeping romances of the Bronte sisters and much more.

In the “enlightenment” divine revelation was eventually replaced with a reliance on human reason. However, when pure rationalism proved to be abstract, sterile and uninspiring, mankind— starved for inspiration, truth and beauty—fell in love with subjective emotion. The rationalist Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” The romantics brushed that aside and said, “I feel therefore I am.”

The historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin observed that for over a century romanticism disrupted Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading “to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth”^[1]

Rousseau the First Romantic

The writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d.1778) was born in Geneva, Switzerland—the nexus of Calvinism. Rousseau’s mother died soon after he was born. His father was a passionate, weak and immature man who soon abandoned his family.

Rousseau bounced from foster homes and boarding schools before setting out on his own. As a teenager he converted to Catholicism and fell in with an older woman. His life was a tempestuous adventure of love affairs, philosophical and political debates, battles with the religious authorities over his heretical writings and stormy friendships with other enlightenment writers and philosophers like David Hume, Denis Diderot and Voltaire.

Rousseau’s claim as the father of Romanticism can be summed up by an incident in his life re-told by historian Joseph T. Stuart. Rousseau was walking along a road when he read an ad for an essay competition which read, “Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to corrupt or purify morals?” This question enflamed his mind and heart, and he thought, “Perhaps humans are naturally good. Perhaps evil proceeds not from the heart of man, but from the constraint and competition of an artificial civilization? Maybe we need to return to our natural simplicity in order to be whole?

From the moment he read these words in a magazine, Rousseau wrote, ‘I beheld another world and became another man.’ Dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights as crowds of lively ideas thronged his mind, he felt giddy and intoxicated. With difficulty breathing and palpitations of the heart, he threw himself down under a tree and ‘there passed a half hour in such agitation that on rising I found the whole front of my shirt wet with tears, without having been conscious that I had shed them.’”^[2]

Notice that Rousseau was a product of the Protestant Revolution that took place two hundred years earlier. John Calvin taught the total depravity of man, and in reaction, Rousseau has a vision of the total goodness of man.

The Catholic Church does not teach either the total depravity of man, nor does it teach the total goodness of man. Instead she teaches God created man in his divine image and said, “That’s good!” We are good, but we have fallen. God’s image in us is wounded. We need redemption, healing and restoration.

Rousseau was, in many ways, a great soul, but he was also deeply wounded and flawed. He went on to study and write on botany, philosophy and political science. His dependence on personal emotion was linked with a sentimental understanding of nature. As he threw himself down under a tree in his life changing moment of enlightenment, so Rousseau would glorify the solitary, romantic attachment to nature—taking long, lonely walks to commune within himself with the beauties of the natural world.

Rousseau’s individualistic, sentimental understanding of the self and the world is very much part of the assumed modern mindset. It is present first of all, in our denial of original sin and belief that circumstances and external societal influences are the cause of human wrongdoing. It is present in our sentimental attitudes to animals and nature, and expressed through misguided or extreme environmentalism and campaigns for animal rights. It is present in our modern assumption that romantic love excuses everything and above all, it is present in the ideas that our own emotions are the only test for truth.

Original Goodness

Rousseau died in 1778, but the ideas he planted were hugely influential in the century to follow. Suddenly God’s revelation was not the source for truth, neither was man’s philosophy the answer. Instead, the surge of inner emotions was the criteria for truth, and it was the artist, not the theologian or the philosopher who became the high priest and guardian of truth, and this reliance on “the inner light” spread through every aspect of society.

Isaiah Berlin observes about Romanticism, “in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and groups—states, nations, movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature… but create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue; these goals represent the self-expression of the artist’s own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of some “external” voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste.” ^[3]

Rousseau also brought his sentimental subjectivism to bear on political theory. Inspired by his experience on the road to Vincennes, his dominant conviction was the essential goodness of man. “We are not bad”, Rousseau would say, “It is a corrupt society that makes us bad. And who controls that society? It is the establishment: the wealthy, the aristocrats, the Church.”

The common man, however, must be good because mankind is good. Therefore, the intentions of the crowd of common men must also be good, and when each individual joins with others his own goodness is validated and strengthened. When this is extended to society, the conclusion must be that the will of the majority is also automatically and essentially good.

This sentimentality is evident in the assumptions of our contemporary society. No matter what horrors have been perpetrated, planned and carried out by the majority, we still assume that, because man is good, the plans he makes for society must also be good. We therefore also assume— majority equals morality. The mob may riot and rampage, pillage and rape, but we still assume their revolution is noble, that they are good at heart and their motives are pure, and it is this wrong assumption which fuels the rise of tyranny.

Sentimentalism and Romanticism not only interact with each other., they also connect to the other insidious ism’s that poison the modern mindset. Sentimentalism is the natural expression of individualism: the individual’s emotions rule all. Sentimentalism is linked with utilitarianism because the feeling that the individual is innately good brings about the conclusion that the feelings of the crowd must also be good, and utilitarianism is the belief that happiness for the crowd is good. Sentimentalism therefore also feeds progressivism and utopianism—if mankind is essentially good then he is advancing to ever higher levels of goodness and the dream of an ideal society produces another wave of wonderful, positive feelings.

Tenderness and Tyranny

When these “ism’s” come together we can see why Nationalism, Fascism, Nazism and Communism were the result. Because of the flawed assumption of individual and societal goodness, the crowd swallows the utopian lie. With a dream of total group happiness, the masses fall under the sway of a leader who promises a heaven on earth and they are swept up in a tsunami of emotional political fervor—a fervor that as it swells and surges and sweeps them up in an ever spiraling whirlwind of emotion.

Finally, because personal emotions are always good and the ultimate guide to goodness, when the not so nice emotions emerge, they too are regarded as good. Resentment is also an emotion. Rage is an emotion. Fear is an emotion. When the fear and resentment surge forth in an irrational wave, the people who are filled with rage actually believe their rage—and the accompanying violence—is justified.

They have already come to believe that all their emotions are good. They have come to believe their cause is righteous, and if religion is thrown into the mix, in their hearts they think that God too is on their side. Therefore they revel in the negative emotions of resentment and rage and this reinforces another emotion which is invincible: self righteousness.

Once these negative emotions are unleashed there is no stopping the volcano of violence. This is why Rousseau’s sweet ideas about the goodness of human nature eventually end in destruction. As Flannery O’Connor observed, “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” Sentimentalism—the rule of individualistic emotion—ends by destroying not only the good and beautiful emotions of the individual, but also the individual himself and the society in which he lives.

This essay is a revised version of chapter seven of Fr Longenecker’s book Beheading Hydra- A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age. Read his blog, browse his books and be in touch at dwightlongenecker.com

^[1]Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Princeton University Press, 2013, p.60.

^[2] Joseph T. Stuart, Re-Thinking the Enlightenment, Sophia Institute Press, 2020, pp. 21-22.

^[3] Berlin, ibid.

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