On Seeking the Sublime
Keble College in Oxford stands as a powerful monument to John Keble, and the architecture of our own Church of the Advent, here, has some elements that echo it – not least in the use of alternating red brick and grey stone.
One observer in amazement said of Keble College’s chapel that, upon entering it, one was “assailed by the sheer riot of colors” even if others less kindly suggested that it amounted to a “holy zebra style,” and even compared the overall effect to that of an “Elephant wearing a sweater”.
But jests aside, what the typical Anglo-Catholic concern with aesthetics is really about is something quite deep. One Roman Catholic commentator, Rick Yoder, was candid enough to say that:
“Two facts have become steadily clearer to me over the course of my life as a Roman Catholic. First, that we don’t do beauty like we used to. …. Many of our houses of worship are stuck in the 1970’s, riddled with patently ugly, non-figurative depictions of Christ and the saints. Abstract windows cast unseemly splashes of light over softwood pews. And there are far too many carpets….In short, we have a problem with beauty.”
He then added that,
“The second thing I realized is that the Anglo-Catholics—do not. And it seems to me that much of the renewal in sacred art that we’re witnessing today is indebted to the Anglo-Catholics, as any browsing of the New Liturgical Movement (website) will show.”
What all this speaks to is the importance of addressing all aspects of our humanity in our worship and our buildings. This is what makes our approach to liturgy so powerful, embracing as it does careful attention to beauty in all its forms, from the architecture to the vestments and the flowers, on through to the music and choir, while even the domain of the olfactory is addressed through our use of incense.
It is this range that also entails the commitment of so many to make everything happen. I was therefore very pleased that we managed to convene a good number (though by no means all) of those who help with our many ministries for the group photograph in the Church last weekend before the Annual Potluck.
The architect of Keble College, William Butterfield, had consciously synthesized and built upon the prior work of Pugin’s Gothic Revival (so triumphantly deployed in the design of the Palace of Westminster) as well as the insights of John Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and other writings, whereby associational values were enabled to inform and ground a sophisticated level of aesthetic appreciation.
All of which brings us to that fascinating concept of the sublime.
Members of our clergy, vestry, staff, ministry and guild leaders, and volunteers from our Parish photoshoot on Sunday, June 7.
Longinus
The earliest significant intersection of what might be called a theory of the sublime, that also related to Christian scripture, occurs in the very early text known as the Peri Hypsous (commonly attributed to Pseudo-Longinus (c. first century AD).
That identifies five sources of sublimity led by “the power of forming great conceptions” issuing from a “great soul” (megalophrosunēs apēchēma).
The treatise cites Genesis 1:3 — “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light” — as a supreme exemplar of the sublime in literature. This accordingly marks the Hebrew scriptures as a foundational reference point for this entire aesthetic category.
Grotius, Heinsius and Vozar
Later and modern biblical scholars showed considerable enthusiasm – as instanced by Hugo Grotius for example who even claimed Longinus as a non-Christian authority for the veracity of Christian scripture in De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627). While, Daniel Heinsius even employed him in a critical assessment of a paraphrase of the Gospel of John, consolidating Longinus as a resource claimed even for Protestant biblical aesthetics.
The modern day scholar, Thomas Vozar has further argued that this tradition was well known in seventeenth-century England and that it shaped John Milton’s own theological and rhetorical imagination in important ways –– which may perhaps also serve to illuminate the slightly earlier figure of John Donne.
Edmund Burke
But perhaps one of the least expected yet major figures in academic reflection on the concept of the sublime was Edmund Burke, the great historian and critic of the French Revolution (among much else).
His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) offered what we would call a physiological and psychological account of the sublime which was ultimately rooted in nothing less than terror.
For Burke, the strongest human passion is fear, and the sublime arises wherever overwhelming power, vastness, darkness, and obscurity are encountered. He thus drew explicit connections between the sublime and the divine, arguing that the attributes of God — omnipotence, infinity, incomprehensibility — are paradigmatic sources of sublime experience.
The rhetorical and liturgical traditions of religion were, for Burke, practically structured around inducing the sublime response: darkness, mystery, and awe in the sacred space perform precisely the terror-at-a-distance that he identifies as the mechanism of sublimity.
The effect of this was that Burke was able to provide an empiricist framework in which the theological and the aesthetic come together even if a form of sensory psychology rather than metaphysics is in danger of being deployed as that which grounds our apprehension of the divine, which seems philosophically dangerous!
Kant
But it was in the thought of Kant upon the sublime in his Critique of Judgment (of 1790) that we come to what has been the most consequential philosophical analysis, which however also (and characteristically) rather displaced the theological.
For Kant, the sublime is located not in the natural object itself but in the subject’s discovery of its own supersensible vocation: when nature overwhelms the imagination, reason asserts its superiority, and the subject discovers its own moral dignity. The dynamical sublime — confronting the raw power of storm, mountain, or sea — does not crush the subject but rather reveals the depth of humanity’s moral nature that stands above physical causality. The theological implication is both subtle and far-reaching: whereas traditional Christian piety attributed the overwhelming character of nature to the majesty of its Creator, Kant relocates the encounter with the infinite in the self-legislation of practical reason. One theologian has pointedly observed that Kant’s account “fails to connect the sublime experience to the limit experience definitive of Christianity,” because in Kant, the overwhelming power of the cosmos is subdued by innate rational dignity rather than by “the specific death-dealing work of Christ” and the resurrection.
Hegel later contested this essentially negative reading of the sublime, arguing in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827) that sublimity is not the voiding of reason but a moment of “fusion with the Absolute in which the beautiful is fulfilled,” and that the divine manifests itself precisely through the natural world’s capacity for sublimity.
Schleiermacher
It fell to Friedrich Schleiermacher in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (1830) to set out the most deliberate theological response to the post-Kantian “problematic” of religion and feeling.
And he set the stage for much subsequent hollowing out of Christianity by proposing that the essence of religion is not doctrine, metaphysics, or even ethics, but Gefühl — a pre-reflective feeling of “absolute dependence,” which he identified as “the consciousness of being in relationship with God”.
This feeling would seem to be analogous to the Kantian and Burkean sublime: it being the felt awareness of one’s own finitude and fragility before an infinite ground that exceeds all conceptual comprehension. Schleiermacher saw Christianity as the supreme fulfilment of this universal religious yearning, with Jesus Christ embodying the perfect God-consciousness — the fullest possible expression of this absolute dependence — and in so doing representing the completion of the human spiritual trajectory rather than an interruption of it.
Where Kant had effectively secularized the sublime by lodging it in moral reason, Schleiermacher re-theologized the analogous experience of overwhelming dependence by making it the heart of Christian piety.
Rudolf Otto
Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917) next attempted to distinguish the properly religious experience from the aesthetic category of the sublime while acknowledging their profound connection. And it was Otto who famously coined the term “numinous” for the mysterium tremendum et fascinans — which is the experience of a ‘wholly other’ (das ganz Andere) reality that simultaneously overwhelms (tremendum), and majestically imposes itself (majestas), and fascinates and attracts (fascinans) all at once. Though for him the sublime is “but a pale reflection” of the numinous. And there is here an important distinction that holds categorically: experientially, axiologically, and ontologically. This reflects the fact that the Kantian sublime ultimately refers back to the subject’s own rational nature, whereas the numinous refers to an objective mind-independent reality wholly outside the human self.
For Otto, the Christian liturgy, along with the cathedrals, polyphonic choral music, and the Psalms all served to evoke and mediate the numinous.
This perspective has the effect in consequence of both making the Christian tradition and liturgy uniquely important as vehicles for the encounter with the holy — (even though the numinous in his account is not confined to Christianity). While Carl Jung subsequently appropriated the numinous for depth psychology, arguing that encounters with the numinosum are therapeutically indispensable and that religion, in its structural function, is precisely the systematic “careful observation” of these numinous eruptions. But with this seeming openness comes a danger insofar as Christianity on this approach looks very much at risk of being instrumentalised as that which is helpful to us without any particular claim to be ultimately reality-depicting of God rather than human need.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
All of this set the stage for the vast project of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit (The Glory of the Lord, which runs to no less than 7 vols., (1961–69).
His work represents the most sustained theological aesthetics of the twentieth century and engages the concept of the sublime at a structural level, even while working primarily through the category of beauty (Schönheit) and its analogue in theological discourse, divine Doxa (glory).
The central thesis is that beauty is a transcendental property of Being itself — alongside truth and goodness — and that the divine glory disclosed in the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ represents the supreme form (Gestalt) through which infinite beauty breaks into this world of finite appearance.
This perspective rejects the Burkian strict separation of the beautiful from the sublime — which Balthasar regarded as having fatally diminished the beautiful into the merely pleasurable — he insists that the Christian understanding of beauty already incorporates what Burke and Kant had to assign to a separate, overwhelming category.
This then renders the cross, for Balthasar, as simultaneously both the nadir of apparent ugliness in this fallen world and yet also, the culminating disclosure of divine glory: here too there is a deep paradox, as beauty is revealed through suffering. Thus, at the level of Christology is the dialectic of terror and attraction brought into unity with the aesthetic tradition –– ultimately going back all the way to Longinus.
The concept of the sublime as a corrective to the danger of reducing Anglo -Catholic liturgy to the merely aesthetic
All of the foregoing comes together in really important ways to address the danger of secularizing of the sublime: which would reduce beauty to mere subjective aestheticism.
Modernity and even more post-modernity have tended to evacuate the sublime of its capacity to bear transcendent weight. And if the concept is to have the value originally seen for it this characteristically reductionist hollowing out would ultimately disable the very faculties of prayer and love.
Arguably, C.S. Lewis gives the experience of Sehnsucht, one of its most powerful literary articulations in The Weight of Glory (1941) and Surprised by Joy (1955).
The following passage from The Weight of Glory is his most direct theoretical statement:
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
This surely exhibits the poverty and error of the sublime when understood in the secular sense—to do this is to the mistake the medium — architecture, music, vestments and all the rest — as the terminal objects of the experience, when in fact they can only ever be be vehicles leading us to the truly transcendent.
This takes us back to the force of the perspective set out by Balthasar. For him the word “sublime” applied directly to the agony of Christ in Gethsemane — his agonia, the sweat as drops of blood — is a theologically very deep.
Balthasar does not at all aestheticise the Passion; rather, he highlights its overwhelming power in paradox, for at that point the categories of majesty, sublimity, and consuming fire were in fact most fully disclosed precisely at the point of the greatest apparent dereliction. This reverses the logic of the sublime as understood in secular terms entirely: (where Burke and Kant located it in a sense of overwhelming natural power). Balthasar instead locates it in the kenotic and voluntary self-emptying and suffering of God.
This enables him to conclude with great force and say that:
“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
— The Glory of the Lord, Vol. I