Sublime

"It's easy to remember (and so hard to forget)"

“I thought you did well with your teaching presentation. But I have to say, I disagreed with your definition of the sublime.”
“Really?” I thought about it for a moment. What had I said? Something like, ‘Had you ever had a moment when you saw something so horrible you couldn’t look away.’ How would you have defined it?” I asked.
“I think of it in terms of an awe and wonder of God’s creation, something like the feeling evoked in one of the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church or Thomas Cole.”
“I guess I think of it as more of an emotional reaction, not one necessarily tied to God or the divine.”
“I’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia when I get back to my office” he joked.

“I don’t like lightening, Papa. It’s loud.” Her voiced rising to punctuate the effect. I pulled S. in close to me, to let her know that she was safe.

Kant said of the sublime "We call that sublime which is absolutely great." I imagine it to be the beautiful, naturally, but also the tragic, the ugly and the terrible. After all, the overwhelming sense of awe that we feel, what we call the sublime, is one that causes spectacle to dwarf our understanding of our own existence, to threaten our understanding of what is reasonable with destruction. I suppose in these moments one might get a glimpse of the awesome power of the divine, or from terror to turn to the divine as a means of salvation.

“Papa!” S. shouted excitedly. “It’s raining outside!” It would seem that S. has not yet connected Blitzen and Donder with rain.

I remember the first time I noticed the long fingers of sunlight beaming down through the clouds after a storm. I felt the sudden revelation and knew exactly why people believed Heaven was in the sky. I had the exact same feeling the day a looked at a crescent moon and recognized it as a pair of cow’s horns. I knew, knew, why people had fashioned a golden calf. The sublime is an absolute, god is an absolute. If A=B and C=B, does that mean that A=C? Where do those ideas of absolute come from?

The natural state of man, argues Rousseau, is neither good nor bad. Men knew neither vice nor virtue. Mankind’s bad habits are the products of civilization. I wonder, does our sense of awe and wonder come from a realization of the vastness of nature compared to our construction of civil society, its fragility, or both?

A final thought, pulling at threads, is there a sense of moral or spiritual transcendence in the sublime? Does it, perhaps, make more sense to ask how do we approach the divine?

Watching to a video in Sunday school, Marcus Borg described 3 central stories Of the Old Testament: Exodus (bondage and liberation, journey and destination); Exile (alienation and loss of connection and the return home); and the Priestly story (sin, guilt, forgiveness). Each of these stories, he says serves as a model for avenues of moral or spiritual transcendence. While Christianity, he says, has focused chiefly on the third, each of these stories serves as a model for how an individual can restore their contact with the divine.

I think I get from this that every experience with the divine is different, and that we need a variety of tools to understand our relationship with God.

Thinking back on it one more time, I am pretty sure I can’t even say that A=A. That is to say, that no one experience of the absolute, i.e. absolutely great or absolutely terrible, is quantifiable and that to make comparisons between absolutes is meaningless. Rather we are meant to be overwhelmed, and in so being are terrified and bedazzled by the experience, and that, to me, is the sublime. Everything else is just the stuff we bring to the experience, to help sort it out and make sense of it.