Sublime, Idea of the

SUBLIME, IDEA OF THE

SUBLIME, IDEA OF THE. The sublime (from the Greek hypsous ) entered the language of aesthetic theory from its use in the treatise Peri hypsous (On the sublime). The unknown author of this work has been called by tradition "Longinus," and its probable period of composition is the first half-century c.e. Longinus associates the sublime with the feeling of surpassing glory that powerful words may impart. This glory becomes for a reader the evidence of a great soul—the writer's soul, of course, but also the reader's own. The peculiarity of the sublime is that it overwhelms the ordinary distinctions of sense. Its effects come only at moments, even in the greatest writing. It "scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt."

Much of Longinus's book is devoted to analysis of some characteristic verbal traits of sublimity. The exuberance of a great soul may show itself in irregular syntax, and Dionysius of Phocaea is praised for the inversion of logical order in the phrase "Our fortunes are on the razor's edge, men of Ionia," which arrests attention by giving the metaphor before the circumstance it evokes. The sentence from Genesis, "Let there be light, and there was light," is cited as an instance of a tremendous effect that suggests a tremendous cause, the power of words here becoming indistinguishable from the power of a deed.

The modern revival of Longinus dates from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The writings of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) reflect much of the new emphasis, and Pope adapted a Longinian sentiment when he wrote in his "Essay on Criticism" (1711) that genius may "snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." The sublime now came to stand at the center of a larger riddle about art: it gives pain as well as pleasure; and yet, knowing this, we are eager for the sensations of art. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) explicitly links the sublime with pain. The passion that corresponds to the sublime is astonishment, or "that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror."

The sublime for Burke is an idea and not a property of objects themselves. Yet certain attributes are consistently associated with the sublime, among them obscurity, power, vastness, and infinitude. Like Longinus, Burke draws his literary illustrations eclectically, from Homer, the book of Job, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Unlike Longinus, he places the natural on a par with the man-made sublime: a soulless thing may yield as vast an idea as an oration; prominent examples are the sight of the ruins of a great city after an earthquake and the spectacle of the hanging of a state criminal. Burke's Enquiry initiated the discussion of the moral and nonmoral foundations of taste that occupied many of the subtlest minds of the later eighteenth century. In response to Burke's sensational and nonmoral theory, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique of judgment) undertook to relate the sense of the sublime to all that finally exceeds understanding in the experience of human autonomy.

See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography ; Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas ; Burke, Edmund ; Kant, Immanuel ; Pope, Alexander .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by James T. Boulton. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1987.

Longinus. Longinus on the Sublime. Edited by W. Rhys Roberts. New York, 1987.

Secondary Sources

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York, 1953.

Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories on Eighteenth-Century England. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960.

David Bromwich