modernism

Modernism.
1. See Modern Movement.

2. Style of the 1920s and 1930s described as Modernist.

Bibliography

Weston (1996)

modernism is an aesthetic movement related to the process of modernization. It is a complex and troubled response to the reality of rapid change. The emergence of modernism is often located at the end of the 19th century and encompasses art, literature, and architecture in particular. Modernism is internationalist in intent and challenges not only the past and tradition but the validity of the local and national. In Ireland, particularly after independence, modernism was seen as a corrosive influence on the attempt to create a national culture and was kept at bay by censorship and rhetoric. The establishment of the Film Censorship Board (1923), the passing of the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), and the anti‐jazz campaign of the 1920s were all examples of attempts to keep modern culture at bay. The main Irish contribution to modernist culture was in the field of literature. However, both James Joyce, whose work Ulysses is a key text, and Samuel Beckett, who wrote in French, spent their adult life on the Continent. The effect of modernism on the visual arts was derivative and diluted, and it was not until the building of Michael Scott's Busarus in Dublin (1952) that the country received its first clearly modernist building. A general agreement with Yeats's exhortation to ‘stem the filthy tide’ characterized the cultural reality of both parts of Ireland until the latter decades of the 20th century.

J. P. Smyth

modernism in religion, a general movement in the late 19th and 20th cent. that tried to reconcile historical Christianity with the findings of modern science and philosophy. Modernism arose mainly from the application of modern critical methods to the study of the Bible and the history of dogma and resulted in less emphasis on historic dogma and creeds and in greater stress on the humanistic aspects of religion. Importance was placed upon the immanent rather than the transcendent nature of God. The movement as a whole was profoundly influenced by the pragmatism of William James, the intuitionism of Henri Bergson, and the philosophy of action of Maurice Blondel. Modernist ideas were accepted in all or in part by many of the Protestant denominations, but there was also a reaction against them in the movement called fundamentalism . In reformed Judaism, especially among Americans, there developed a modernist movement resembling Protestant modernism. Within the Roman Catholic Church there was a movement specifically referred to as Modernism; it was condemned as the "synthesis of all heresies" by Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi (1907). Among the leaders of Catholic Modernism were A. F. Loisy in France and George Tyrrell in England. Vital to the Catholic movement were the adoption of the critical approach to the Bible, which was by that time accepted by most Protestant churches, and the rejection of the intellectualism of scholastic theology, with the corresponding subordination of doctrine to practice. Many modernists applied the pragmatic method to the sacraments, to dogma, and to prayer. They considered the sacraments to have no reality as a divinely ordained means of grace, but valuable only for their psychological effect. These tendencies led them naturally to deny the authority of the church and the traditional Christian conception of God; a decree declared the beliefs heretical, ending Roman Catholic Modernism.

Bibliography: See M. Rancheti, The Catholic Modernists (tr. 1969); B. M. Reardon, comp., Roman Catholic Modernism (1970); A. R. Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (1970); W. R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976); G. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (1980).