agape as sublime

When any . . . act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary, when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

Jefferson went on to say that the physical feelings and motivational effects caused by great literature are as powerful as those caused by real events. He considered the example of a contemporary French play, asking whether the fidelity and generosity of its hero does not:

…dilate [the reader's] breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does [the reader] not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?

This extraordinary statement is more than just a poetic description of the joys of reading. It is also a precise scientific definition of an emotion. In emotion research, we generally study emotions by specifying their components, and Jefferson gives us most of the major components: an eliciting or triggering condition (displays of charity, gratitude, or other virtues); physical changes in the body ("dilation" in the chest); a motivation (a desire of "doing charitable and grateful acts also"); and a characteristic feeling beyond bodily sensations (elevated sentiments). As an act of crypto-religious glorification, I considered calling this emotion "Jefferson's emotion," but thought better of it, and chose the word "elevation," which Jefferson himself had used to capture the sense of rising on a vertical dimension, away from disgust.

The relationship of elevation to love and trust was beautifully expressed in a letter I once received from a man in Massachusetts, David Whitford who had read about my work on elevation. Whitford's Unitarian church had asked each of its members to write a spiritual autobiography account of how each had become the spiritual person he or she is now. In one section of his autobiography, Whitford puzzled over why he was so often moved to tears during church services. He noticed that he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first he called "tears of compassion," such as the time he cried during a sermon on Mothers' Day on the subject of children who were abandoned or neglected. These cases felt to him like "being pricked in the soul," after which "love pours out" for those who are suffering. But he called the second kind "tears of celebration"; he could just as well have called them tears of elevation:

There's another kind of tear. This one's less about giving love and more about the joy of receiving love, or maybe just detecting love (whether it's directed at me or at someone else). It's the kind of tear that flows in response to expressions of courage, or compassion, or kindness by others. A few weeks after Mother's Day, we met here in the sanctuary after the service and considered whether to become a Welcoming Congregation [a congregation that welcomes gay people]. When John stood in support of the resolution, and spoke of how, as far as he knew, he was the first gay man to come out at First Parish, in the early 1970s, I cried for his courage. Later, when all hands went up and the resolution passed unanimously, I cried for the love expressed by our congregation in that act. That was a tear of celebration, a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says it's okay, relax, let down your guard, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it's in our nature. That kind of tear is also like being pricked, only now the love pours in.”

For many people, one of the pleasures of going to church is the experience of collective elevation. People step out of their everyday profane existence, which offers only occasional opportunities for movement on the third dimension, and come together with a community of like-hearted people who are also hoping to feel a "lift" from stories about Christ, virtuous people in the Bible, saints, or exemplary members of their own community. When this happens, people find themselves overflowing with love, but it is not exactly the love that grows out of attachment relationships. That love has a specific object, and it turns to pain when the object is gone. This love has no specific object; it is agape. It feels like a love of all humankind, and because humans find it hard to believe that something comes from nothing, it seems natural to attribute the love to Christ, or to the Holy Spirit moving within one's own heart. Such experiences give direct and subjectively compelling evidence that God resides within each person. And once a person knows this "truth," the ethic of divinity becomes self-evident.

- Johnathan Haidt

psychedelic

The vastness and beauty of nature often stirs the soul. Immanuel Kant explicitly linked morality and nature when he declared that the two causes of genuine awe are "the starry sky above and the moral law within.” Darwin felt spiritually uplifted while exploring South America:

In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, "it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind." I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the breath of his body.

The New England transcendentalist movement was based directly on the idea that God is to be found in each person and in nature, so spending time alone in the woods is a way of knowing and worshiping God Waldo Emerson, a founder of the movement, wrote:

Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty

Something about the vastness and beauty of nature makes the self feel small and insignificant and anything that shrinks the self creates an opportunity for spiritual experience.

People often refer to viewing great art, hearing a symphony, or listening to an inspiring speaker as (crypto) religious experiences. And some things give more than a taste: They give a full-blown, though temporary, escape. When the hallucinogenic drugs LSD and psilocybin became widely known in the West, medical researchers called these drugs "psychoto-mimetic" because they mimicked some of the symptoms of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. But those who tried the drugs generally rejected that label and made up terms such as "psychedelic" (manifesting the mind) and "entheogen" (generating God from within). The Aztec word for the psilocybin mushroom was teonanacati, which means literally "god's flesh"; when it was eaten in religious ceremonies, it gave many the experience of a direct encounter with God.

Drugs that create an altered mental state have an obvious usefulness in marking off sacred experiences from profane, and therefore many drugs, including alcohol and marijuana, play a role in religious rites in some cultures. But there is something special about the phenethylamines—the drug class that includes LSD and psilocybin. Drugs in this class, whether naturally occurring (as in psilocybin, mescaline, or yage) or synthesized by a chemist (LSD, ecstasy, DMT) are unmatched in their ability to induce massive alterations of perception and emotion that sometimes feel, even to secular users, like contact with divinity, and that cause people to feel afterwards that they've been transformed. The effects of these drugs depend greatly on what Timothy Leary and the other early psychedelic explorers called “set and setting,” referring to the user's mental set, and to the setting in which the drugs are taken. When people bring a reverential mindset and take the drugs in a safe and supportive setting, as is done in the initiation rites of some traditional cultures, these drugs can be catalysts for spiritual and personal growth--the strongest effects often included: feelings of unity with the universe, transcendence of time and space, joy, a difficulty putting the experience into words, and a feeling of having been changed for the better. Many report seeing beautiful colors and patterns and having profound feelings of ecstasy, fear, and awe.

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence. The emotion of awe happens when two conditions are usually met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory; or socially vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures. Something enormous can't be processed, and when people are stumped, stopped in their cognitive tracks while in the presence of something vast, they feel small, powerless, passive, and receptive. They often (though not always) feel fear, admiration, elevation, or a sense of beauty as well. By stopping people and making them receptive, awe creates an opening for change, and this is why awe plays a role in most stories of religious conversion.

- Johnathan Haidt

islamic art

Hegel considered the sublime to be a marker of cultural difference and a characteristic feature of oriental art. His teleological view of history meant that he considered 'oriental' cultures as less 'developed', more autocratic in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage god only through 'sublated' means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe.

definition of sublime

In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation.

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).

Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).

Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).

Sublime – Turbulent Nature (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).

Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).

Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).

On the Sublime

Long partial to deserts, drawn to photographs of the American West (bits of tumbleweed blowing across a wasteland) and the names of the great deserts (Mojave, Kalahari, Taklamakan, Gobi), I booked a charter flight to the Israeli resort of Eilat and went to wander in the Sinai. On the plane journey over, I talked to a young Australian woman beside me, who was taking up a job as a lifeguard at the Eilat Hilton, and I read Pascal:

When I consider...the small space I occupy which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me [l’infinie immensité des espaces que j’ignore et qui m’ignorent], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?

- Pascal, Pensées, 68

Wordsworth urged us to travel through landscapes in order to feel emotions that may benefit our souls. I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small. It is usually unpleasant to be made to feel small, whether by doormen in hotels or by comparison with heroes of great achievement. But there may be another and more satisfying way for a person to feel diminished. Intimations of this may be felt by any viewer who stands in front of Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak (1863) by Albert Bierstadt, An Avalanche in the Alps (1803) by Philip James de Loutherbourg or Chalk Cliffs on Rugen by Caspar David Friedrich. What do such barren, overwhelming spaces do for us?

Two days into my Sinai trip, the group of twelve that I have joined reaches a valley empty of life, without trees, grass, water or animals. Only boulders lie strewn across its sandstone floor, as though the stamping of a petulant giant had caused them to roll off the sides of the surrounding mountains. These mountains look like naked Alps, their nudity revealing geological origins normally concealed beneath coats of earth and pine forest. There are gashes and fissures that speak of the pressures of millennia, offering up cross sections through disproportionate expanses of time. The Earth’s tectonic plates have rippled granite as though it were linen. The mountains spread out in seeming infinity over the horizon until eventually the high plateau of the southern Sinai gives way to a featureless, baking gravel pan to which the Bedouins have given the name El Tih, or ‘the Desert of the Wandering’.

There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and deserts. In their presence one was likely to experience, and count on being understood if one reported that one had felt, a sense of the sublime.

The word itself had originated around 200 AD., in a treatise ‘On the Sublime’ ascribed to the Greek author Longinus, but it had languished until a retranslation of the essay into English in 1712 sparked a renewed, intense interest among critics. While these writers often differed in their specific analyses of the word, their shared assumptions were striking. They grouped into a single category, by virtue of their size, emptiness or danger, a variety of hitherto unconnected landscapes, and argued that such places provoked an identifiable feeling that was both pleasurable and morally good. The value of landscapes would henceforth be decided not solely on the basis of formal aesthetic criteria (the harmony of colours, for example, or the arrangement of lines) or even economic or practical concerns, but rather according to the power of places to arouse the mind to sublimity.

Joseph Addison, in his ‘Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination’, wrote of the ‘delightful stillness and amazement’ he felt before ‘the prospects of an open champian country, a vast uncultivated desert, huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices and a wide expanse of waters’. Hildebrand Jacob, in an essay entitled ‘How the Mind Is Raised by the Sublime’, offered a list of the places and things that were most likely to invoke this prized feeling: oceans, either in calm or storm, the setting sun, precipices, caverns and Swiss mountains.

Travellers set off to investigate. In 1739, the poet Thomas Gray undertook a walking tour of the Alps, the first of many such self-conscious pursuits of the sublime, and afterwards reported, ‘In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry.’

The southern Sinai at dawn. What, then, is this feeling? It is generated by a valley created four hundred million years ago, by a granite mountain 2,300 meters high and by the erosion of millennia marked on the walls of a succession of steep canyons. Beside all these, man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter—pleasurable; intoxicating, even—with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe.

In my backpack, I am carrying a torch, a sun hat and Edmund Burke. At the age of twenty-four, after giving up his legal studies in London, Burke composed A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was categorical: sublimity had to do with a feeling of weakness. Many landscapes were beautiful—meadows in spring, soft valleys, oak trees, banks of flowers (daisies especially)—but they were not sublime. ‘The ideas of the sublime and beautiful are frequently confounded,’ he complained. ‘Both are indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing and sometimes of natures directly opposite’—a trace of irritation on the part of the young philosopher with those who might have gasped at the Thames from Kew and called that sublime. A landscape could arouse the sublime only when it suggested power—a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to man’s will. Burke illustrated his argument with an analogy about oxen and bulls: ‘An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive....The idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons.’

There were oxlike landscapes, innocent and ‘not all dangerous’, pliable to human will; Burke had spent his youth in one such, at a quaker boarding school in the village of Ballitore in County Kildare, thirty miles southwest of Dublin: a landscape of farms, orchards, hedges, rivers and gardens. Then there were bull-like landscapes. The essayist enumerated their qualities: they were vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite because of the uniformity and succession of their elements. The Sinai was among them.

But why the pleasure? Why seek out this feeling of smallness—delight in it, even? Why leave the comforts of Eilat, join a group of desert devotees and walk for miles with a heavy pack along the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, all to reach a place of rocks and silence where one must shelter from the sun like a fugitive in the scant shadow of giant boulders? Why contemplate with exhilaration rather than despair beds of granite and baking gravel pans and a frozen lava of mountains extending into the distance until the peaks dissolve at the edge of a hard blue sky?
One answer is that not everything that is more powerful than us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect. It depends on whether the obstacle appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. We begrudge the defiance of the cocky doorman even as we honour that of the mist-shrouded mountain. We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean but awed by what is powerful and noble. To return to and extend Burke’s animal analogy, a bull may arouse a feeling of the sublime, whereas a piranha cannot. It seems a matter of motives: we interpret the piranha’s power as being vicious and predatory, and the bull’s as guileless and impersonal.

Even when we are not in deserts, the behaviour of others and our own flaws are prone to leave us feeling small. Humiliation is a perpetual risk in the world of men. It is not unusual for our will to be defied and our wishes frustrated. Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.

Because what is mightier than man has traditionally been called God, it does not seem unusual to start thinking of a deity in the Sinai. The mountains and valleys spontaneously suggest that the planet was built by something other than our own hands, by a force greater than we could gather, long before we were born, and set to continue long after our extinction (something we may forget when there are flowers and fast-food restaurants by the roadside).

God is said to have spent much time in the Sinai, most notably two years in the central region, looking after a group of irascible Israelites who complained about the lack of food and had a weakness for foreign gods. ‘The Lord came from Sinai,’ said Moses shortly before his death (Deuteronomy 33:2). ‘And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly,’ we are told by Exodus (19:18). ‘And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed and stood afar off. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you...’ (Exodus 20:18—19).

But biblical history serves only to reinforce an impression that would have occurred anyway to a traveller encamped in the Sinai: an impression that some intentional being must have had a hand in this, something greater than man and with an intelligence that mere ‘nature’ does not possess—a ‘something’ for which the word God still seems, even to the secular mind, a far from unlikely appellation. The knowledge that natural rather than supernatural forces can also create beauty and an impression of power seems peculiarly ineffective when one stands before a sandstone valley rising towards what appears to be a giant altar, above which hangs a slender crescent moon.

Early writers on the sublime repeatedly connected sublime landscapes with religion:

• Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712): ‘A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.’

• Thomas Gray, Letters (1739): ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument.’

• Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery’ (1835): ‘Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.’

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’ (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.’

It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside. The landscapes offered them an emotional connection to a greater power even as they freed them of the need to subscribe to the more specific and now less plausible claims of biblical texts and organized religions.

The link between God and sublime landscapes is made most explicit in one book of the Bible. The circumstances are peculiar: God is asked by a righteous but desperate man to explain why his life has become full of suffering. And God answers him by bidding him to contemplate the deserts and the mountains, rivers and ice caps, oceans and skies. Seldom have sublime places been asked to bear the burden of such a weighty, urgent question.

At the beginning of the Book of Job, described by Edmund Burke as the most sublime book of the Old Testament, we learn that Job was a wealthy, devout man from the land of Uz. He had seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys. His wishes were obeyed, and his virtue was rewarded. Then one day disaster struck. The Sabaeans stole Job’s oxen and asses, lightning killed his sheep and the Chaldeans raided his camels. A hurricane blew in from the desert and wrecked the house of his eldest son, killing him and his siblings. Painful sores developed from the soles of Job’s feet to the top of his head, and, as he sat in the ashes of his house, he scratched them with a piece of broken pottery and wept.

Why had Job been so afflicted? His friends had the answer: he had sinned. Bildad the Shuhite told Job that his children could not have been killed by God unless they and Job himself had done wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,’ said Bildad. Zophar the Naamathite ventured that God must have been generous in his treatment of Job: ‘Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.’

But Job could not accept these words. He called them ‘proverbs of ashes’ and ‘defenses of clay’. He had not been a bad man—so why had bad things happened to him?
It is one of the most acute questions asked of God in all the books of the Old Testament. And from a whirlwind in the desert, a furious God answers Job as follows:

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?...

By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?

Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?...

Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?

Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?...

Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?

Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towards the south?

Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?

Asked to explain why Job has been made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way, he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way, for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.

There is a strictly religious message here. God assures Job that he has a place in his heart, even if all events do not centre around him and may at times appear to run contrary to his interest. When divine wisdom eludes human understanding, the righteous, made aware of their limitations by the spectacle of sublime nature, must continue to trust in God’s plans for the universe.

But the religious answer to Job’s question does not invalidate the story for secular spirits. Sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles that we cannot overcome and the events that we cannot make sense of. As the Old Testament God knew, it can be helpful to back up deflationary points about mankind with reference to the very elements in nature which physically surpass it—the mountains, the girdle of the earth, the deserts.

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

- Alain de Botton