Modernism in English literature is often described as a radical aesthetic rupture—a rebellion against Victorian confidence, linear narratives, stable meanings, and inherited forms. While this description is not incorrect, it remains incomplete. At a deeper level, modernism can be understood as a profound spiritual and epistemological inquiry: an attempt to investigate whether the religious traditions’ claim of a reality beyond the personal self was still viable in a world increasingly dominated by reason, science, and secular thought.
This article argues that modernism was not simply an artistic revolution but a last serious cultural effort—within literature and the arts—to respond to the loss of God, the erosion of divine grace, and the collapse of metaphysical certainty initiated much earlier in Western intellectual history. Modernist writers inherited a world in which the transcendent center had already weakened, yet the existential need for meaning, permanence, and wholeness had not disappeared. Their works reflect this tension.
Enlightenment Rationality and the Shift in the Source of Knowledge
The roots of modernism lie deep in the Enlightenment. Contrary to a simplistic view, the Enlightenment did not explicitly deny the existence of God. Many Enlightenment thinkers were deists rather than atheists. However, the attitude of Enlightenment thought carried implications that were far more disruptive than an outright denial of divinity.
Reason and intellect were elevated as the primary—eventually the only—legitimate sources of knowledge. Human beings were increasingly seen as the measure of all things, echoing Protagoras more than Augustine. Knowledge was no longer grounded in revelation, divine grace, or spiritual realization, but in observation, logic, and empirical verification. The exploration of natural laws replaced the pursuit of metaphysical truth as the central goal of human culture.
This shift had far-reaching consequences. Once divine realization was sidelined, God gradually became unnecessary—not denied, but rendered irrelevant. The sacred cosmos of medieval Christianity, where meaning flowed from a transcendent center, gave way to a mechanistic universe governed by impersonal laws.
The Second Displacement: Darwin, Marx, and Freud
If the Enlightenment displaced God from the center, the nineteenth century completed a second and more devastating displacement: the loss of man himself.
Charles Darwin challenged the theological belief that human beings were created in the image of God, presenting instead a vision in which humanity was a product of blind evolutionary processes. Karl Marx reduced human consciousness to economic structures and class relations, while Sigmund Freud interpreted the self as a battlefield of unconscious drives rather than a unified rational or spiritual subject.
Together, these thinkers dismantled the Enlightenment image of man as a sovereign, rational agent. Reason was no longer autonomous; consciousness was no longer transparent to itself. The individual appeared increasingly as a by-product—of biology, economics, or psychology. God had been lost earlier; now man’s central position was also lost.
This double loss created a cultural vacuum. The cohesive force that religion once provided—binding ethics, metaphysics, art, and everyday life—was no longer available. Yet the human longing for meaning did not disappear. It merely lost its traditional language.
Why Literature Became the Site of Inquiry
In this intellectual and spiritual crisis, literature and the arts assumed a unique role. Unlike science and technology, which were committed to external explanation and instrumental reason, literature remained close to inner experience, ambiguity, silence, and contradiction. It retained an affinity with spiritual sensibility, even when explicit religious belief was no longer possible.
Modernist writers were not theologians, yet they were deeply engaged with metaphysical questions:
Is there something permanent beneath the flux of experience?
Can meaning survive without transcendence?
Is impersonality a path to truth, or a symptom of loss?
Modernism thus emerges as an aesthetic investigation of spiritual absence—a probing of what remains when God and metaphysical certainties have dissolved.
T. S. Eliot and the Impersonal Theory of Poetry
No writer exemplifies this tension more clearly than T. S. Eliot. In his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot proposes what he famously calls the impersonal theory of poetry. At first glance, this theory seems purely aesthetic, even anti-romantic. Yet beneath it lies a profound spiritual concern.
Eliot argues that the mature poet does not express personal emotions directly. Instead, poetry is formed through a process of self-effacement, where the poet becomes a medium through which tradition speaks. The more developed the poet, the less personal the poetry. This notion subtly echoes older religious ideas of surrender, humility, and self-transcendence—though Eliot articulates them in secular terms.
Tradition, for Eliot, is not a static inheritance. It cannot be received passively. Rather, it is a living order that must be continually renewed. When a genuinely new work of art appears, it alters the entire tradition that precedes it. Tradition remains the same, yet it is transformed by each authentic addition.
This idea mirrors a spiritual paradox: continuity without stagnation, permanence without rigidity. In a world where divine authority had weakened, Eliot sought a surrogate sacred order—a cultural tradition capable of sustaining meaning through disciplined impersonality.
Stream of Consciousness and the Search for Essence
Modernist fiction pursued a similar inquiry through radically new narrative techniques. The stream of consciousness method, employed by writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, was not merely an experiment in style. It was a philosophical exploration.
Classical metaphysics distinguished between essence and accident, permanence and change. Modernist fiction internalized this distinction, transforming it into a psychological investigation. By tracing the fleeting flow of thoughts, memories, sensations, and perceptions, modernist writers asked a fundamental question: Is there something enduring beneath this flux, or is the self nothing more than a stream?
In novels like Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, time is fragmented, identity is unstable, and meaning is elusive. Yet the very intensity with which these writers examine transience suggests a longing for permanence. The failure to find a stable essence does not negate the search—it defines it.
This inward turn represents modernism’s attempt to rediscover transcendence within experience, after losing confidence in external religious frameworks.
D. H. Lawrence and the Mythic Imagination
While Eliot turned toward tradition and impersonality, D. H. Lawrence sought transcendence through the body, instinct, and myth. Lawrence’s engagement with sexuality is often misunderstood as mere rebellion against social norms. In reality, it reflects a deeper metaphysical ambition.
Influenced—directly or indirectly—by Eastern philosophies and mythologies, including Hindu concepts such as Shiva and Shakti, Lawrence attempted to move beyond socially constructed gender roles. Male and female, for him, were not merely biological or social categories but cosmic principles whose union pointed toward a deeper wholeness.
Lawrence rejected both mechanistic science and moralistic religion. He sought a living sacredness, one grounded in vital energy rather than abstract belief. His work represents another modernist strategy: recovering the sacred not through doctrine, but through mythic imagination and embodied experience.
Modernism as the Last Attempt
Seen from this perspective, modernism appears as a last serious attempt within Western literature to re-establish absolute value after the collapse of religious certainty. God, grace, and transcendence were no longer given; they had to be rediscovered—or reconstructed—through art.
However, art and literature do not exist in isolation. They function within a larger social, philosophical, and religious context. When the metaphysical foundations of a culture erode, literature alone cannot sustain them indefinitely.
Modernism reached a point of exhaustion. Its intensity, difficulty, and inwardness reflected both its ambition and its limits. The spiritual questions remained unresolved.
The Emergence of Postmodernism
This exhaustion paved the way for postmodernism. Where modernism still searched for coherence, postmodernism embraced fragmentation. Where modernism mourned the loss of absolutes, postmodernism questioned whether absolutes ever existed at all.
Postmodern literature does not attempt to recover transcendence; it exposes the constructed nature of meaning itself. Irony replaces seriousness, play replaces belief, and plurality replaces unity. This shift does not occur accidentally—it reflects a cultural recognition that the metaphysical project of modernism had reached its end.
Conclusion
Modernism in English literature can thus be understood not merely as an aesthetic movement but as a spiritual and philosophical inquiry conducted under conditions of loss. It emerged from a world where God had faded, reason had proven insufficient, and the individual had lost its centrality.
Through poetry, narrative experimentation, myth, and impersonality, modernist writers attempted to test whether the religious intuition of something beyond the personal self still held truth. Their failure was not merely artistic; it was cultural.
Postmodernism follows not as a solution, but as an acknowledgment of that failure. In this sense, modernism stands as a poignant historical moment—a final, intense effort by literature to carry a burden once borne by religion.