Editing Modernism (section)

== Overview and definition ==
[[File:NYC - Guggenheim Museum.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|left|[[Solomon Guggenheim Museum]] completed in 1959,<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.trendir.com/modernist-architecture/ |title=Modernist architecture: 30 stunning examples |date=2 September 2016 |website=Trendir}}</ref> designed by the American architect [[Frank Lloyd Wright]]]]

Modernism was a cultural movement that impacted the arts as well as the broader ''[[Zeitgeist]]''. It is commonly described as a system of thought and behavior marked by [[self-consciousness]] or [[self-reference]], prevalent within the [[avant-garde]] of various arts and disciplines.<ref name="Everdell">Everdell, William, ''[[The First Moderns|The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought]]'', [[University of Chicago Press]], 1997, {{ISBN|0-226-22480-5}}.</ref> It is also often perceived, especially in the West, as a [[Progressive movement|socially progressive movement]] that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.{{efn|In the twentieth century, the social processes that brought this maelstrom into being, and kept it in a state of perpetual becoming, came to be called 'modernization'. These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and values have been loosely grouped under 'modernism'.<ref>Berman 1988, p 16</ref>}} From this perspective, modernism encourages the re-examination of every aspect of existence. Modernists analyze topics to find the ones they believe to be holding back [[progress]], replacing them with new ways of reaching the same end.

According to historian [[Roger Griffin]], modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative sustained by the [[ethos]] of "the temporality of the new". Griffin believed that modernism aspired to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching '[[Nomos (sociology)|nomos]]', or 'sacred canopy', under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity". Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as "[[Expressionism]], [[Futurism]], [[Vitalism]], [[Theosophy]], [[Psychoanalysis]], [[Nudism]], [[Eugenics]], Utopian town planning and architecture, [[modern dance]], [[Bolsheviks|Bolshevism]], [[Romantic Nationalism|Organic Nationalism]] — and even the cult of [[self-sacrifice]] that sustained the [[Hecatomb]] of the First World War — disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) [[decadence]]." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality" in which individuals believed they could transcend their mortality and eventually that they would cease to be victims of history to instead become its creators.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OcaHOPaa0iMC |title=Where have all the fascists gone? |last=Bar-On |first=Tamir |date=2007-01-01 |publisher=[[Ashgate Publishing]], Ltd. |isbn=9780754671541 |language=en |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref>

Religion was similarly influenced by new scientific, philosophical and political developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this led to the development of [[Modernism in the Catholic Church|Catholic modernism]].<ref>[https://www.jstor.org/stable/3160168?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Bella, Julius I. "Father Tyrrell's Dogmas." ''Church History'', vol. 8, no. 4, 1939, pp. 316–341. JSTOR]</ref> T. S. Eliot was influenced by Catholic Modernism.<ref>Anna BUDZIAK, « Modernism and Muddle: Religious Implications of T. S. Eliot’s Use of the Term  », e-Rea [En ligne], 15.2 | 2018, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2018, consulté le 12 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/6200 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.6200
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Writing in the ''[[Catholic Encyclopedia]]'' in 1911, the [[Jesuits|Jesuit]] Arthur Vermeersch gave a definition of modernism in the perspective of the Catholic [[heresiology]] of his time:<blockquote>"In general we may say that modernism aims at that radical transformation of human thought in relation to God, man, the world, and life, here and hereafter, which was prepared by [[Humanism]] and eighteenth-century philosophy, and solemnly promulgated at the [[French Revolution]]."<ref>{{Cite encyclopedia |title= Modernism |encyclopedia= The Catholic Encyclopedia |publisher= Robert Appleton Company |location= New York |url= http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm |access-date=8 June 2016 |last= Vermeersch |first= Arthur |date= 1911 |volume= 10}}</ref></blockquote>