Literature during the first half of the Twentieth Century reflected the disorder that had engulfed the entire world. There was a feeling among the common people that humanity had achieved the material progress at the cost of spiritual values and this loss was the root cause of the entire chaos. Instead of moral and spiritual themes, the works of art were full of themes like anxiety, chaos, boredom and emptiness in human life. Commenting on the change that was distinctly visible in Europe and for that matter in the entire world, Aurobindo says:
The whole difficulty of the present situation turns upon the peculiar and critical character of the age in which we are living. It is a period of immense and rapid changes so swift that few of us who …show more content…
And it was not that the values declined overnight and that man started feeling hopeless suddenly. The decomposition started even before the advent of the Twentieth Century. Complaining about the “flimsiness” of his own religious faith, Ruskin exclaimed: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses”(qtd. in Abrams 2: 882). The damage mourned by Ruskin was of two kinds: First the scientific approach was applied towards the study of the Bible itself. Bible was treated not as a sacred text but as a mere book with unauthentic documentation of historical happenings. The second kind of damage was done by the discoveries of geology and astronomy. Geology by extending the history of earth backwards million of years, reduced the stature of man in time. Man fell from the position of dignity and pride. He was reduced from the position of the son of God to the descendent of an ape. This made man feel isolated in the entire universe. As a result of such feelings against the holy texts on which the whole religious beliefs were based, the human race started getting detached from its roots. Realising the gravity of the situation, Berdyaev stated: “Man stands amid a frightening emptiness. He no longer knows where the keystone of his life may be found; beneath his feet he feels no depth of solidity.” (Berdyaev 189) John Tyndall, an eminent physicist, in an address at Belfast in 1874 said that in the Eighteenth Century men had an “unwavering trust” in the “chronology of the Old Testament”, but in Victorian times men have had to become accustomed to “the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons embracing untold
The whole difficulty of the present situation turns upon the peculiar and critical character of the age in which we are living. It is a period of immense and rapid changes so swift that few of us who …show more content…
And it was not that the values declined overnight and that man started feeling hopeless suddenly. The decomposition started even before the advent of the Twentieth Century. Complaining about the “flimsiness” of his own religious faith, Ruskin exclaimed: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses”(qtd. in Abrams 2: 882). The damage mourned by Ruskin was of two kinds: First the scientific approach was applied towards the study of the Bible itself. Bible was treated not as a sacred text but as a mere book with unauthentic documentation of historical happenings. The second kind of damage was done by the discoveries of geology and astronomy. Geology by extending the history of earth backwards million of years, reduced the stature of man in time. Man fell from the position of dignity and pride. He was reduced from the position of the son of God to the descendent of an ape. This made man feel isolated in the entire universe. As a result of such feelings against the holy texts on which the whole religious beliefs were based, the human race started getting detached from its roots. Realising the gravity of the situation, Berdyaev stated: “Man stands amid a frightening emptiness. He no longer knows where the keystone of his life may be found; beneath his feet he feels no depth of solidity.” (Berdyaev 189) John Tyndall, an eminent physicist, in an address at Belfast in 1874 said that in the Eighteenth Century men had an “unwavering trust” in the “chronology of the Old Testament”, but in Victorian times men have had to become accustomed to “the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons embracing untold