The next instalment of the Anglican Centre in Rome’s ongoing seminar programme will take place on Monday 24 November as ACR scholar-in-residence Father Johnathan Denson offers a seminar entitled ‘Atheist Artists and Anglican Aesthetics: The Late Romantics in the History of Theology’.

To register for in-person participation at the Anglican Centre in Rome, please write to info@anglicancentre.it. Those who wish to participate online can register for access here.

The Romantic period (late-18th to mid-19th century) arose in the wake of a major shift away from a theocentric worldview and toward a stress on rationalism, criticism and individualism. Consequentially, it also constitutes a distinctive moment in the history of theology, particularly in England, as catechetical formation and religious practice became preoccupied with creedalism and maintaining the Church’s threatened status and influence in society. 

English Christianity saw notable decline in both the arts and engagement in the current thinking of the time. In this era that would come to be described by modern scholars of theological aesthetics as “one of the least creative in the history of theology” (Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics, 155), decreased patronage from the Church led to increased autonomy of the artist.

Operating entirely outside of the institutional Church of their age — and often in explicit opposition to it — the later poets of English Romanticism appealed to emotion, beauty and nature in order to express what is typical of religious belief in other periods of history: the human person’s longing for the infinite and eternal and the capacity to find some true trace of it here and now. 

In this seminar, Father Denson suggests that serious consideration of famously unorthodox poets like Lord Byron and John Keats, and even the notorious atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley, is indispensable for understanding Anglicanism’s own history.