S1E11: The Worship of Nature

4 May 196950 minTV-G

Kenneth Clark examines a new force in the history of civilization, the belief in the divinity of nature. This takes him to Tintern Abbey and the Lake District of the poet Wordsworth, to the Swiss Alps and the ideas of Rousseau, and to the landscapes of Turner and Constable. Did the beliefs of the Romantic movement usurp Christianity's position as the chief creative force in Western civilization?