notes on the sublime

more questions than answers

to be godly is to be unknowable

At the beginning of the pandemic, I listened to a podcast episode that talked about godliness — specifically, that to be godly is to be unknowable. (I can’t seem to find it anywhere, so if you happen to know the one I’m referencing, please send it over!).

It echoed the sentiment that “faith is not the progressive unearthing of God's nature but a recognition that he/she is fundamentally unknowable. The signpost points not to growing certainty but towards increasing non-knowing.” While resonant of agnosticism, the quality of ‘godliness’ was considered distinct from any faith or non-faith. Instead, its assertion was that unknowability is essential to godliness.

At the time, I wrote a note to myself, filled with questions: if to be godly means to be unknowable, can unknowability be a means of measuring godliness? Does it follow that to be unknowable is to be godly? Can we measure individual godliness based on unknowability? What makes the unknowable godly? Is mystery necessarily divine?

Lately, Tom and I have been talking about the sublime, both philosophically and in practice. I realized that the concept of the sublime — “having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed” — is an approximation of godliness.

The earliest known discussion of the sublime was a work of literary criticism by the Greek, Longinus. Entitled Peri Hypsous (On The Sublime), it dates back to the 1st century CE and was translated in the 17th-century by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. From the Art Story (emphasis mine):

Concerned mostly with language, Longinus does write briefly about the visual sublime in both nature and human-made objects; great size and variety can induce the feeling of the sublime in his estimation. In his own treatise on aesthetics, Boileau wrote of the sublime, "The sublime is not strictly speaking something which is proven or demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel."

the sublime in art

The theory of sublime art was published by Edmund Burke in 1757, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. From the Tate: “Burke’s definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of pleasurable terror.” In Western culture, the sublime is captured by majestic religious renderings and sweeping landscapes, emblematic of the Renaissance and the Romantic periods of art, and by Homeric epics and post-modern literature.

One central tension of art is between making something intelligible while preserving enough distance to protect its divinity. A piece of art can neither be too familiar nor too esoteric. I believe this is, in part, why Impressionism, both in visual art and in literature, has been so successful. And, in part, why abstract and modern art have been less mainstream in its success — we moved a step or two too far from the recognizable and into the outlandish.

Monet’s water lilies are recognizable enough to draw us in, to encourage us to squint, and yet, it’ll never become reliably coherent. While there’s an analogy to Van Gogh’s night sky in our internal gallery, it will always be at the edge of knowability. The same can be said about literature such as The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño: “it plays with that boundary [of the sublime], always remaining just out of reach.”

the sublime in nature

I’ve often heard it said that for those without a church, the closest to believing in the existence of god is being in nature. For Burke, nature, and representations of nature, was the epitome of the sublime — not for its beauty, but for its terror. He moves from the “greatness” of nature to nature as threat — its absolute power, and notably, its unpredictability — or unknowability. In the face of the forces of nature, man enters “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” — along with marvel, there is fear. Burke concludes that, at its essence, “the sublime is an idea belonging to selfpreservation.” It is when we are at the border of life and death, at the mercy of something magnificent yet incomprehensible, that we feel sublime — awestruck, humbled, terrified.

German philosopher, Immanuel Kant comes onto the scene in 1790 with his Critique of Judgment and takes this further by suggesting another avenue to the sublime (emphasis mine) — through triumph over nature:

Kant proposed two types of sublimity: the mathematical and the dynamical. With the mathematical sublime, one is faced with the magnitude of nature, and one's imagination cannot adequately comprehend the vastness. Kant argues, though, that our faculty of reason kicks in and allows us to comprehend the sense of infinity before us; the feeling of the mathematical sublime, then, is the feeling of reason's superiority over nature and our imagination. The dynamical sublime is also a feeling of reason's superiority to nature, but via a different avenue…"[T]he irresistibility of [nature's] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…”

Our present reality is the furthest thing from banal, and it continues to change before our eyes, every day. Yet, the sublime has never felt more elusive. In a time past, we struggled for survival, often, against nature; in our youth, the world was both more novel and more dangerous. As adults, in the absence of religion and its built-in, out-of-the-box experiences of the sublime, we play increasingly complicated games with increasingly higher stakes — different forests, taller mountains, longer jumps — to find this feeling of pleasurable horror — a feeling only attainable, Kant asserts, if we come out on top.

There is the sublime of merely being small among the redwood trees; and there is the compulsion to backpack 11-miles or climb a big wall, to surf big waves or dive for abalone. Regardless, seeking nature, in every form, is ultimately a search for the sublime.

the sublime in love

Love, that defiant cliché, is a weary embodiment of the sublime. In the beginning, love is an “agitation” that “shakes the soul” (Kant, on the sublime). But, as with all experiences, over time, with repetition, the adrenaline rush fades into the background. Your body (heart?) builds immunity, adapts to the butterflies, and you find yourself needing more and more to feel the same exhilaration. As expected, Esther Perel writes about this in her book, Mating in Captivity:

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. […] An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness.

In love, we try to “know” the other. But, given that godliness is predicated upon unknowability, then it follows that to know someone is to bring him to his mortality, back down to the corporeal earth; — to know someone is to defeat them.

Paraphrasing Tom, in The Savage Detectives, Bolaño intentionally created a plot in which the readers are the savage detectives — and in trying to ‘know’ the book, we begin to destroy it. If the only way to love someone is to know them, it follows that the only way to love someone is to eradicate their godliness.

the sublime in the self

The thing about the humans — the thing about the universe — is that despite our effortless existence, the mechanisms required to make us work continue to defy knowability. The brain remains a mystery; the microbiome does too; as does the interactions between cancerous cells and healthy cells. Our bodies’ responses to treatments — not to mention, to viruses — continue to be unpredictable, to escape human comprehension — to the extent that pharmaceutical commercials are required to narrate a laundry list of possible side effects.

It’s fundamentally human to believe in our own godliness — we don’t know when we might die and we live as if we believe in our own immortality, until the day we are no longer mortal. We are unknowable to ourselves. The pursuit of knowing ourselves — through self-reflection, meditation, through passable explanations and the stories we create — toward some vague ambition of self-actualization — could that be understood as our attempt to eradicate our own godliness?

the sublime in the sublime

The quiet mysteries of the world are what compels us in our search for answers, understanding, meaning. If we knew where we came from and where we’re going, if we were handed the meaning of life, if we were able to experience what death feels like  — then what would be the point? There would be something inestimable lost should the secret worlds within us and around us be open to public viewing.

The central metaphor is magic. It’s a sense of possibility that you can’t quite put your finger on . It’s in knowing that something exists, but not how or why. The intrigue is the feeling that there is something more to uncover. And, sometimes ,  it’s better left that way. Roald Dahl never fails me —

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

— Roald Dahl in The Minpins