Traditional Christianity includes a number of ideas with affinities to decadence, notably the eschatological belief that the end of the world is imminent (a belief that has its secular counterpart in the idea of historical and social decline) and the dogma of original sin. This chapter sketches out ‘a theology of decadence’ by showing how particular theological ideas ? principally those concerned with transgression, punishment, and apocalypse ? grew anew in the strange and modern hothouse of decadent literary form. Baudelaire and his use of original sin as formulated by the Catholic theologian Joseph de Maistre ramifies into the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans before moving on to the apocalyptically-charged flowering of decadence in England at the Victorian fin de siècle. These theological influences are particularly evident in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Wilde reflects the dual inheritance of an aesthetic relativism derived from Walter Pater and theological ideas of sin and punishment as a form of apocalyptic crisis.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.