Romanticism

Largely in reaction to the order and rationalism espoused by the Enlightenment prior to it, romanticism was the intellectual movement in the West—and expressed most clearly in the works of art, writings, music and historiography of the era—that rejected the ideas of order, rationality and physicality and embracing, instead, individuality, subjectivity, imagination, spontaneity, and the transcendental. Began about the last decade of the 18th Cent, the movement flourished for about half a century afterwards. Christian theology did not, of course, escape the enticement of Romanticism, and Christianity came under its sway to be seen not as something to 'believe' but something to be felt. Rational thoughts, esp., in such important things like theology and doctrines became secondary. This would issue in such movements like Pietism, which would eventually lead to the rise of modern liberal theology under the lead of Friedrich Schleiermacher.