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The Sublime, Nature’s Eloquent Gift: A Review Essay

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Thein K.

Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina

2017

vol. 53

issue 1-2

9-75

Discussing two recent books on the sublime (James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, and, in part, Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant), the review essay takes a closer look at the theoretical implications of, especially, Porter’s reading of Longinus. The main virtue of this reading is found to be twofold. First, avoiding the trap of a too narrow conceptualization of sublimity, it brings in an unusually broad range of texts that deal with sublime phaenomena from all the relevant points of view. Second, emphasizing the place of Longinus in the rhetorical tradition, it offers an archeology of the sublime’s fundamental relation to language. Demonstrating that no experience of sublimity is possible without speech that makes it articulate – and therefore shareable and teachable –, Porter enables us to rethink what Longinus has to say about nature, human nature, and art. The sublime emerges here as a unique yet variegated mental habitat where superhuman nature and the art of eloquence can connect and make us “see” what is incomparably greater than our shape and size that usually limit both our experience and the way we analyze it. The sublime reverses this experience and makes the universe bounce back on us by suddenly revealing its most distance vistas, but also its possible internal cracks and ruptures. Longinus himself does not theorize this situation as such: if he quotes and discusses a number of sources (Homer’s sublime mind looms large in his account), he is equally open to a form of Platonism and to those cosmic intervals or voids that originate with Lucretius whose theoretical stance is the most anti-Platonic imaginable. This is no contradiction: at the heart of the expressible sublime, there is a subtle and ongoing negotiation between what Porter labels the material and the immaterial sublime. If the former finds its expression in the poetics of the Presocratic authors and also in Lucretius, whereas the latter reaches its peak in various Platonic images of the soul’s ascent, neither kind of the sublime is a pure form and their difference is a matter of degree and scale. Regardless of theoretical orientation of different authors, the projection of their premises into the material universe leads the reader’s imagination towards the unachievable whole of reality as “sublime reality” (Porter). Compared to Porter’s enterprise, Doran’s book is less concerned with the rhetorical issues and focused on the sublime as a self-transcending psychological state that is more or less independent on the rhetoric of its expression. Instead, Doran’s sublime has a history that is intertwined with the culturally co-determined morality: especially the modern sublime thus shifts towards bourgeois rather than aristocratic values. The question is to know whether we find such a shift anticipated in the last chapter of Longinus’ treatise, which offers various views on the progressive disappearance of truly great and sublime natures. Longinus himself connects this process to the issue of political freedom and the world (imperial) peace, but leaves the matter of the true cause of the decline unresolved. Political progress or decline notwithstanding, to learn the appropriate rhetorical art of the sublime enables us to recover sublimity through the imitation or re-enactment that helps us to literally saturate our soul with the effluences of the great minds of the past.

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1 Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina

1 2017

1 Thein K.

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The Sublime, Nature’s Eloquent Gift: A Review Essay