ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the thesis that aesthetic, fantasist, dillettantish, antiquarian and political mediaevalism often had a truly religious dimension hidden under the secular mask; a dimension which deepened as Romanticism became more profound and universal, and developed the “theology” of imagination. Monasticism is explored as a rallying point of either psychotic evil or disciplined faith. Devendra P. Varma summarizes the dialectic reflected in Gothicism, itself reflecting the dialectic of religious medievalism: the novelists were seeking a frisson nouveau, a frisson of the supernatural. The brutality of change brings social brutalization where there was once religion. The Middle Age was an age of faith which succumbed to the “airy hopes, Dancing around; hopes grounded, one assumes, in the new rationalism and materialism. William Wordsworth dislike of rationalism emerges in “The Egyptian Maid”, where Merlin is a type of rationalism unaided by imagination, which leads to destruction.
