In exploring Romanticism, I expected to find some key seeds of thought at the root of the movement, things that contrasted with Rationalism. I was not disappointed.

I have taught for years on Descartes’ famous statement, later summarized as “I think, therefore I am.” In case you are unfamiliar, Descartes was a French philosopher/mathematician who was trying to bring about an end to the religious strife in his day by trying to discover truth that would unite, truth that could not be doubted. Not a bad wish. But his method was all wrong: first of all, because he tried to discover this truth by reason alone, shutting out the world of sense experience and inherited traditions. Second, because he opted to search through doubt. His conclusion was that he could find a way to doubt everything except the act of doubting itself. This, he reasoned, was a form of thinking, which must be done by a thinking thing, which must be me! Thus, he “proved” to himself the truth of his existence beyond all possibility of doubt. One perhaps unintended side-effect was the way it cast man as essentially a thinking thing. What am I? A reasoner.

It turned out proving anything else was harder than Descartes thought, which drew attention to the problem of how you know your perceptions are related to reality. This is the turn to the subject, where we focus on the subjective (mind dependent) in hopes of finding a way back to the real world “out there.”

Of course, rationalism as a movement didn’t get stuck in this subjectivity problem. It was too busy making sense of the universe through deduction and induction, through math and experimentation. But it would create other problems that I won’t get into in any depth today. Suffice it to say that, according to Isaiah Berlin, rationalism applied as a worldview was too much for some to bear, and so reactions percolated and coalesced until Romanticism was born.

I’m not able to tell that story yet. What I want to focus on is this: Romanticism as a counter-movement had its own moment like Descartes, with similar ripple effects. The German philosopher Fichte asserted, according to Berlin, “You become aware of the self only when there is some kind of resistance. . . . In the resistance emerged the self and the not-self” (Berlin 108, 109). In other words, “I resist, therefore I am.” I noticed it right away, and Berlin himself circled back to make this very point a few pages later, “I will, therefore I am.”

I have long been fascinated by the relationship between faith and reason, and in some ways this is a part of this larger conversation, the relationship between will and reason. Some scholars think European civilization shifted into modernity because of new teachings about God that placed His will above His reason and even His goodness (see Theological Origins of Modernity by Gillespie). God could never bind Himself by a promise because He is radically free. This is the “voluntarist” (from the Latin for will) picture of God, and the theory is that such a God could not act as the basis for knowledge about reality, so mankind turned to nature looking for something more stable. (I am truncating the argument considerably, but I hope not distorting it too badly.)

If so, it should be of no surprise that this voluntarist conception of God would, through one change and influence after another, result in something of a voluntarist conception of self. If my identity is in my will, especially as an expression of resistance toward the world and its order, then I am going to be encouraged to look inside to find myself, to insist on self expression as a necessary aspect of life, and ultimately to reject any categories that are foisted upon me. This is more or less the picture painted in Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, although he highlights other, later contributors.

Supposing all this is true, then is it possible the same corrective I was taught about Descartes and rationalist skepticism could address Fichte and voluntarist individualism?

Anselm said, quoting Augustine, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand.” He saw his reasoning abilities and overall relationship to truth as dependent on believing rightly, although whether or not he saw himself as a “believing thing,” I cannot say for sure, but that seems unlikely.

Augustine also, with Luther after him, famously emphasized his inability to will correctly apart from God’s work. But this cannot be recast so simply as “Unless I believe, I shall not will [what is good].” Believing itself is usually seen as an act of the will, or at least closely bound up with it. But to some degree this is what we must say; faith is the first act of the will (or among them; I don’t want to be pedantic here) that makes possible the healing of the will. How this first act of faith comes about is a mystery debated over for centuries, but Western Christians are usually united in saying man is incapable apart from some help from God (see Second Council of Orange).

For my part, whichever thread we pull, whether reason or faith or will or any other human faculty, (e.g., conscience, intuition, sense experience, etc.), it will always lead us back to God. He existed first. He created us. He is intimately involved in all of reality. Before man’s reason was God’s wisdom, before man’s will was God’s “let there be.”

The fundamental principle of identity is I AM. And, crucially, that “I” is not me.