The Sublime

I am told the sublime refers to some kind of romantic terror in the face of awe inspiring greatness. A James Martin painting of mountainous apocalypses. But that’s not originally what I thought it meant, when Caleb Warner explained it to me in ninth (?) grade. Instead, it seemed to be a kind of secret glory. Something with rules that you couldn’t fully understand. Something more like a mysterious Vilhelm Hammershoi painting, of someone impossibly beautiful and lonely whose face is turned away from you.

Or finding yourself in the midst of an enchanted ruin. If that isn’t sublime, then what should we call it? Perhaps in my confused teenage brain I had combined the sublime, the subtle, the surreal, and the melancholy all into One Sensation, and have never fully untangled them since. All four aspects of this sublimity, this secret heaviness, are lacking from our light, flat, hollow, obvious culture.

Reviewing Longinus on wikipedia, however, we discover that -

    "the first and most important source of sublimity [is] the power of forming great conceptions." The concept of the sublime is generally accepted to refer to a style of writing that elevates itself "above the ordinary". Finally, Longinus sets out five sources of sublimity: "great thoughts, strong emotions, certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction, and dignified word arrangement".

    In the treatise, the author asserts that "the Sublime leads the listeners not to persuasion, but to ecstasy: for what is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay, and prevails over what is only convincing or delightful, since persuasion, as a rule, is within everyone's grasp: whereas, the Sublime, giving to speech an invincible power and [an invincible] strength, rises above every listener".

    According to this statement, one could think that the sublime, for Longinus, was only a moment of evasion from reality. But on the contrary, he thought that literature could model a soul, and that a soul could pour itself out into a work of art. In this way the treatise becomes not only a text of literary inquiry, but also one of ethical dissertation, since the Sublime becomes the product of a great soul"

That moment when you step into a work and you realize you have hit something heavy and soulful. Or when writing begins to suddenly lift up and you realize you are traveling beyond what others have trod. You are flying. So perhaps our fantasy fiction is an attempt to grind up little bits of sublimity and market them as products to tantalize, reducing great souled thoughts to trinketized novelties.

But in literature and art part of our quest is to discover true greatness of soul, and the delightful thing is that the more we grow in our capacity to discover it in others, the more we can begin to recognize greatness in our own souls. For all the dysfunction and sin in our lives, it is possible to find godlike shards within yourself.