The Sublime in Thomas Aquinas: A Philosophical Exploration

[00:00:06]Thank you. Um, yeah. So, this is, uh, a lot of what I'm going to say is quite tentative and also somewhat unpolished, but uh, hopefully it'll be a good conversation starter and, uh, I really look forward to seeing what you think.

[00:00:21]So, uh, let's get started.

[00:00:26]The universe is inconceivably vast and powerful.

[00:00:32]Join me for a moment in contemplating some numbers that express this vastness and power.

[00:00:39]I'm about 6' 3 in tall. That is practically nothing in comparison with the immensity of the Earth.

[00:00:47]If you placed a Mr. ofstein end on end on top of each other. Uh it would take about 6.7 million of me to measure the diameter of the earth.

[00:01:00]The earth in turn is dwarfed by the sun.

[00:01:04]Almost a million earths would fit inside the sun's diameter. The plumes of superheated gases that rise above the sun's surface raised by the immense magnetic forces are often many times the diameter of Earth.

[00:01:18]The power of that cosmic inferno is truly awe inspiring.

[00:01:23]Every second, the sun emits energy the equivalent of six billion Hiroshima explosions.

[00:01:30]Uh, for context, in case you have no idea how big the Hiroshima explosion was, that's more energy by far than humanity has used in its entire history.

[00:01:40]A human near the surface of the sun would be instantly vaporized by the sheer splendor of its radiation.

[00:01:49]The average distance between the Earth and the Sun is called an astronomical unit. It's about 11,700 Earth diameters. So if you if you were to see the Earth and the Sun, the Earth would be a tiny tiny little dot barely visible at the at the extent to which the Earth is away from the Sun.

[00:02:09]Uh, Mars is less than twice Earth's distance from the sun. So, it's about 1.7 astronomical units from the sun.

[00:02:18]It's by far the most uh Earthlike of the other planets. If you look at pictures from the rovers, it looks basically like Arizona.

[00:02:26]Um, but if you learn more about it, you realize that it's really not as Earthlike as it seems.

[00:02:34]Uh, the atmosphere of Mars is so thin that an unprotected human would perish in seconds.

[00:02:40]If you were on the surface of Mars, your blood would start boiling immediately, and you would you would die in a matter of seconds.

[00:02:48]In all of the vast emptiness of those Martian deserts, there isn't a single living thing, not even a microbe, as far as we know.

[00:03:00]Neptune is in the outer reaches of the solar system. It's about 30 astronomical units from the sun. So, four light hours. Takes the light four hours to get from the sun to Neptune.

[00:03:13]Uh it does not seem like Earth the way Mars does. It's totally totally unlike Earth. Um and there are lots of interesting things about Neptune. The the apparently calm blue surface of Neptune um actually totally belies the the violent nature of its of its depths.

[00:03:31]The speed of Neptune's rotation apparently fuels winds that are faster than the speed of sound.

[00:03:37]And uh deep within its atmosphere, some people think there's there's a theory that um elemental carbon crystallizes, snowing into a vast lake of liquid carbon in its center. So on Neptune, it snows diamonds literally.

[00:03:56]So the solar system is vast and powerful. But the vastness and powerful the vastness and power of our sun and its satellites is in turn dwarfed by the vastness of the galaxy.

[00:04:08]Uh remember an astronomical unit is the distance average distance from the earth to the sun. It takes about 63,000 astronomical units to make up a lightyear.

[00:04:21]And Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star, is just a little over four light years away.

[00:04:30]Try to imagine for a moment the immensity of that interstellar void.

[00:04:39]The Milky Way is around 100,000 lighty years in diameter.

[00:04:46]Uh we think that there are around a 100 billion stars within its beautiful shining spirals.

[00:04:56]Most of these stars we know harbor planets. We've now observed lots and lots of planets around different stars in the Milky Way.

[00:05:03]One one recently observed exoplanet uh is all covered in ice except on the side that's tidily locked to its star. So like the moon, it always revolves around with one side facing the star. Uh, and on that side there's a a round ocean, a circular ocean, uh, gazing forever, be blue and iris-like amid the whiteness of a planetary eye.

[00:05:31]Who knows what what other wonders there are out there? What other things there are on all of those planets? Hundreds of billions of them.

[00:05:41]And the Milky Way is not alone.

[00:05:43]On the very lowest estimates, there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. So around 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, around 100 billion galaxies in the known universe or maybe a lot more. The higher estimates are around a trillion.

[00:06:03]I have no imaginative difference in my mind between those numbers. But uh the closest galaxy Andromeda is visible with the naked eye in very very clear non-light polluted skies.

[00:06:18]It's a little smudge.

[00:06:21]Uh and it's around 250 million light years away.

[00:06:29]That means that the light that we now see, if you look up in the sky and you see that little smudge, the light that you now see began its journey across the intergalactic voids before the very long long before the very first humans walked the earth before before Adam came to be.

[00:06:52]Okay? So, I don't know about you, but to me these numbers are fearsome.

[00:06:59]Considering all this vastness and power, I feel crushed. I feel just utterly insignificant.

[00:07:08]My life is a poultry instant compared to the cosmic processes. My world is a speck of dust amid the infinite voids.

[00:07:17]I think of God's words to Job.

[00:07:21]Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

[00:07:25]Tell me if you have understanding.

[00:07:27]Who determined its measurements? Surely you know. Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone when all the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

[00:07:46]So I feel I feel crushed. I feel insignificant. And yet these numbers, fearsome and humbling as they are, they also fill me with with delight and a kind of exaltation. They kind lifted up.

[00:08:00]Uh I'm a part and a sharer in all of that power and vastness. I'm allowed to consider its glory.

[00:08:07]True, my physical being is nothing compared with the whole, but with the power of my mind, I can reach out toward it and bring it all within me. The greatness of the universe shows me also the greatness of the human spirit. the greatness of my own spirit.

[00:08:23]Okay. So this kind of experience, an experience in which we feel fear on the one hand, but on the other hand a kind of delight in contemplating the greatness and power of things. That's the topic of my talk today. The object of such experiences is the sublime.

[00:08:44]Now the sublime is interesting because as an explicit philosophical category it has a quite recent origin.

[00:08:52]Of course thinkers in every age have meditated on the vastness and power of the universe. Uh but it really is not until around the time of Kant that the sublime became kind of a thought of as a unique category of value as a as its own distinct phenomenon.

[00:09:10]uh in Kant and many later thinkers responding to his ideas, the sublime is closely related to the beautiful. The sublime and the beautiful are both uh you could call them contemplative values. They're both things that delight you when you look at them.

[00:09:26]Uh but while related for Kant and for these other thinkers, they're opposed.

[00:09:32]They're they are different sorts of value and they elicit fundamentally different kinds of responses.

[00:09:38]For Kant the sublime is not beautiful nor is the beautiful sublime. There's a fundamental distinction between looking through the classical tradition there's nothing obviously corresponding to this distinction u especially from astic perspective taking St. Thomas as a representative of the classical tradition. There's it's hard to see this distinction clearly marked in any way. Um, and it's not really clear what a follower of St. Thomas ought to say about it.

[00:10:14]On the one hand, Kant and later thinkers that he inspired do seem, at least to me, to be hitting upon an interesting and important phenomena. There's something about these kinds of experiences of vastness and power, these kind of overwhelming experiences.

[00:10:27]there's there's some kind of unified phenomenon there.

[00:10:31]But on the other hand, making the sublime an entirely different category from the beautiful seems a little problematic from a timistic perspective.

[00:10:39]According to St. Thomas, everything in so far as it has being is beautiful. So how could the sublime and the beautiful be kind of totally different from each other? Where would we fit the sublime in?

[00:10:51]So the question I will be addressing today is what should at say about all this? Is there something to the idea that the sublime is its own separate category or is this like many of Kant's ideas very interesting but also completely completely wrong? Uh is it possible to develop a timistic account of the sublime and what would that look like?

[00:11:12]And my answer will be tentatively. I'm kind of playing with different ideas here and I'm interested to see what you have to say that yes uh it is possible to develop a timistic account of the sublime. That sublime will unsurprisingly look very different than what Khan says about it. Uh but it will preserve I think the the basic phenomenon that he's talking about.

[00:11:35]The sublime I want to suggest is arduous beauty.

[00:11:40]Those beauties are sublime which because of their greatness are arduous and merit a spirited response.

[00:11:48]My argument will proceed in three sections. In section one, I will give a brief philosophical history of the sublime. My focus here will be on Kant's views, but I will also address some other thinkers. Um, importantly, some uh thinkers from kind of the the romantic generation who responded to his ideas.

[00:12:05]Shelling comes up in section two. I will develop three aspects of St. Thomas's thought that I think could give us kind of resources for thinking through the sublime on ontoistic principles. And then finally in section five, I'll conclude sorry in section three I'll conclude by suggesting how these resources could be kind of put together into an account of the spark.

[00:12:28]Like I said, I'm kind of uh trying out these ideas. I'm not really sure about them. I'm sort of throwing pasta at a wall and see what will stick. So, I'm very interested to see what what you think sticks and what you think doesn't.

[00:12:40]So, first a brief kind of oversimplified philosophical history of the sublime.

[00:12:46]The sublime first became a real topic of conversation in the late 18th century.

[00:12:51]It was popularized in philosophical circles by Edmund Burke. There was a treatise, an ancient treatise by a guy called Lgininus called Perhipsus on the sublime that was discovered around this time, but it's really more of a treatise of rhetoric. It's about lofty moving rhetoric. But that kind of got the idea going. Burke is really the first person who um writes a a philosophical treatise on it. For Burke, there's a fundamental opposition in our experience between the idea of the sublime and the idea of the beautiful. His his book is tit entitled I think something like a a philosophical inquiry concerning our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful or something something pretentious in English like that.

[00:13:33]>> Um our delight in the beautiful according to Burke arises from love from our desire for sociability and procreation.

[00:13:43]Beautiful things are tend to be small smooth bright and clear delightful in a word lovely. Our delight in the sublime, on the other hand, arises from fear, from our desire for self-preservation.

[00:14:00]Sublime things are immense, rough, dark, and obscure, painful, in a word, fearful.

[00:14:09]The sublime delights us, Burke thinks, because while it looks threatening, it does not in fact immediately threaten our lives. A craggy mountain abyss is sublime when contemplated from a safe perch. The terrors of the Sicilian campaign are sublime when read in the safety of a book by Thusidities.

[00:14:29]So Burke's book is honestly kind of lame. Uh it's sort of philosophy by sociology. He just sort of says, well, here are some things that seem to be associated with the beautiful and here are some things that tend to be associated with the sublime. And the whole account of the sublime is being like, well, I'm safe, but that looks scary. It's just a little kind of falls a little flat for me.

[00:14:49]Um but Burke is important because he was a big stimulus for Kant. So uh in his critique of judgment, Kant adopts many of Burke's ideas. Um but Kant Kant is a much deeper mind and and Kant's treatment of the sublime became kind of the classic. People disagreed with it in various ways, but it was very influential.

[00:15:10]So for Kant, the sublime is like the beautiful in that both of them are liked for their own sake with disinterested pleasure. That's what he thinks of as being characteristic of the aesthetic in general. You you like something uh when you like something beautiful, you don't delight in it because it fulfills your inclinations. The way I delight in a juicy burger, right? I delight in the burger because I am hungry. I want something to fulfill my inclination of hunger and the burger fulfills that. Rather, you delight in the very look of the thing. Similarly for the sublime, I don't delight in the starry sky above me because it fulfills my inclinations. I just delight to contemplate its fearsome loftiness.

[00:15:52]But the sublime is also opposed to the beautiful according to K. He says a lot about this. There are lots of different ways in which they're opposed. The most important thing for our purposes is that the beautiful is perposive for our imagination and understanding while the sublime is counterproposive.

[00:16:10]God.

[00:16:11]Okay. So, proposive proposive in Kantes means something like purpose-based form or design. So, the house the form of the house is proposive. It's designed in such a way as to serve a purpose of a certain kind.

[00:16:28]So, beautiful things have a form or design which harmonizes with our cognitive nature, allowing our cognitive powers to enter into a kind of pleasurable state of free play. And that's why we delight in looking at them.

[00:16:41]Sublime things on the other hand are formless and in some way contrary to our nature. They don't harmonize with us.

[00:16:46]They're they're disharmonious with us.

[00:16:48]Counterproposive.

[00:16:51]There are two basic ways that this happens context which correspond to the two basic kinds of sublimity. The mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime.

[00:17:03]The mathematical sublime or as I like to call it the mind-boggling is what is absolutely great. That's what that's how calls it the absolutely great. It's something that gives us the impression of infinity and defeats the ability of our imagination and understanding to comprehend it. Thinking about those numbers, it gives you this impression of infinity. Your imagination can't get around it. You can't comprehend it. It kind of defeats your your power to comprehend things.

[00:17:34]Why would we delight in that? Why would we delight in our cognitive powers being defeated? So Kant thinks that in the mathematical sublime, the reason why we delight is because we feel the superiority of our cognitive power to the whole of nature's vastness.

[00:17:50]Reason as opposed to understanding, reason is Kant's kind of highest faculty. Gives these regulative ideals.

[00:17:58]Uh so reason as opposed to understanding commands us to seek an absolute and total infinity.

[00:18:04]But this can never in fact be presented by the imagination and the understanding. We can't really imagine or really understand an actual infinite.

[00:18:13]But we have this rational ideal that makes us search for the infinite.

[00:18:18]So our ability to think the idea of the infinite shows us the superiority of our cognitive power to the whole mass of nature.

[00:18:26]The mathematically sublime is thus counterproposive for imagination and understanding. It boggles our mind um but purposive for our our reason. It pains us by boggling our imagination and understanding but it delights us by showing us the exalted greatness of our reason.

[00:18:46]So that's the one kind mathematical sublime. The other kind is the dynamical sublime or as I like to call it the fearsome.

[00:18:54]The dynamical sublime or the fearsome is what threatens us by its power.

[00:19:00]So mathematical sublime bigness, dynamical sublime power. Uh when we feel the fearfulness of nature's power, our utter insignificance in the face of its might, that's when we feel the dynamically sublime according to K again. Why is it pleasurable? Why is it pleasurable to feel that you know the sun can utterly destroy you or something like that?

[00:19:23]Kant says the reason for this is again that we feel the superiority of our power of desire this time to the whole of nature's might.

[00:19:35]The will as opposed to our appetites or our inclinations can never be defeated by the force of nature. God thinks nothing can compel us to depart from our duty to abandon our allegiance to the moral law.

[00:19:50]So though the dynamically sublime is counterproposulosive for our inclinations, it's proposive for the will.

[00:19:58]Though it pains us by threatening our our inclinations, our sense of self, it delights us by showing us the unconquerable greatness of our own will.

[00:20:10]So the feeling that the sublime evokes for Kant is a kind of vibration or alternation between displeasure and pleasure.

[00:20:18]We feel displeasure in our imagination or or inclinations from them being conquered by the greatness or power of the object. But then we delight in the exalted status of our own spirit that's symbolized for us in this.

[00:20:34]According to Kant, this is important.

[00:20:36]What I delight in is thus not really the sublime object. He says, I don't really delight in the vast sea upheaved with storms. That's not really what I'm delighting in. That's not a delightful object. Really, what I'm delighting in is the feeling that I get for the greatness of my own spirit. I see the I see a massive storm out at sea or I see the greatness of the stars, but what that does is it it kind of brings my spirit forth within me and I feel the force and the strength of my reason and my will.

[00:21:07]All right. So, like me, I hope you are a little uncomfortable with this.

[00:21:14]uh it's smacks of spiritual pride. I think that there's uh in fact I think that there's a kind of titanic idolatry of human it uh autonomy going on in in Kant. He's putting the human spirit in the place of God.

[00:21:33]Surely it's the stars themselves that are sublime. It's the ocean itself that's sublime. Not not just my own feeling.

[00:21:40]Um, and while there does seem to be an element of exaltation in that experience that we we do feel kind of lifted up seeing this the stormy ocean, um, that doesn't seem kind of the more important aspect of the experience. The more important aspect of the experience seems to be the the humbling feeling, the feeling of being put down in the face of the the greatness of nature.

[00:22:03]So Kant does seem to have hit on on a kind of important sort of experience, one different than that normally associated with the beautiful. Anyway, but his own account of that experience I think just can't can't quite be right.

[00:22:14]There's there's something deeply wrong there.

[00:22:18]Most later accounts of the sublime in some way respond to Kant's ideas.

[00:22:21]Particularly interesting for me are thinkers of the romantic generations.

[00:22:26]Uh I think some of these thinkers develop some of Kant's ideas in slightly more promising directions.

[00:22:33]Uh a good representative of this tradition is Shelling. Uh he was very influential both on German romanticism and on English romanticism for the reason that uh Ceridge just plagiarized most of his philosophical work straight out of Shelling. So English people read a bunch of shelling not realizing that it was shelling because colorage just would translate shelling without attribution. He call it his own.

[00:22:56]Um okay so Shelling uh Shelling's account of sublimity and beauty draws on his kind of crazy pantheistic and idealistic metaphysics.

[00:23:08]For Shelling like kind of like for Hegel uh the phenomenal world is the product of a kind of divine unfolding.

[00:23:16]uh the absolute or God is slowly realizing itself objectively as nature and subjectively as consciousness.

[00:23:24]Finite individuals in the phenomenal world uh represent and participate in divine ideas, the divine ideas from which they're unfolded. So that the world that we see around us is a kind of unfolding of God and the things that we see are they represent the kind of aspects of God or the ideas of God that they're unfolded from. It's kind of like it's kind of like pltonism but like a dynamic platonism that's unfolding over time as representing and making the ideas uh and making present the ideas in which they participate. Finite things are symbols of the infinite. So a symbol according to shelling and according to Craridge who stole the definition from shelling >> is uh is something that represents that which it truly participates in. It's when the finite really participates in the infinite and so represents the infinite.

[00:24:21]The harmonious presence of the infinite within the finite symbol for shelling is beauty. So beautiful things have a kind of perfection of representation uh that that kind of allows the divine to shine through.

[00:24:36]Think about uh classical Greek sculpture. That's Shelling's favorite example. Um there you see the divine the divine idea kind of fully realized in and manifesting itself in the human form. I see Apollo and Apollo is just the very idea of humanity sort of perfectly realized in this in this marble.

[00:24:56]Uh the sublime by contrast. So the beautiful harmonious kind of perfect expression of the infinite within the finite. The sublime by contrast is um he calls it the eruption of the infinite into the finite.

[00:25:12]So sublime things make the infinite present make the absolute present because they themselves have a kind of ursat or deficient infinity and that brings the human mind to intuit it the absolute infinity from which they derive. It's the sublime thing precisely because it has a kind of failure in its representing of the idea makes you think about the idea brings your brings your mind to um to the idea.

[00:25:40]So for example uh he says the the will of the tragic hero crushed under the budgeonings of chance that symbolizes the divine principle of harmony or sorry um skipped a line there signifies the absolute will precisely by its failure of control. I see Edipus crushed by these terrible events, unable to control his own life and precisely in that falling short of the kind of absoluteness of will. It kind of is a symbol for me of absolute will.

[00:26:13]Similarly, the chaotic vastness of nature he thinks symbolizes the divine principle of harmony precisely in failing to exhibit that harmony. I see the vast storminess of the sea, the kind of chaos of the sea. He thinks actually You're having a kind of feeling for the the harmonious source that that a strange paradoxical feeling for the harmonious source that that comes from.

[00:26:37]Interestingly, uh yeah, sorry. Um, so you can kind of summarize it by saying the beautiful is symbolic harmony, the infinite harmoniously being within the symbol, while the sublime is symbolic excess, the symbol as pointing beyond itself to an infinity that it doesn't achieve rather than resting in the infinity that it really does achieve.

[00:27:01]Interestingly, Shelling thinks that the beautiful and the sublime, while distinct, are both always present in aesthetic experience. So they're kind of two dimensions of aesthetic experience rather than rather than uh totally distinct categories like in Kant. Every true symbol according to shelling both realizes the infinite in some way and points beyond itself to the infinite that it doesn't realize in some other way.

[00:27:25]Beauty without a core of sublimity is merely pretty. Sublimity without an aspect of beauty is merely monstrous.

[00:27:34]To the extent that the element of excess is more prominent, we call something sublime. to the extent that the element of realization is more common, we call it beautiful. And I think uh I think this idea of his is is closely connected with um actually with the different goals of classical and romantic art and with the romantic theory of the fragment. Uh but ask me about that in the Q&A if you're interested.

[00:27:56]Um okay. So I think this theory is a little bit more promising from a timistic perspective. Um, I do think maybe at least some of our sublime experiences involve like some kind of dark vague sense of God's presence, of God's power. Um, some kind of the infinite is being kind of guested at that there seems something right about that. Uh, but even leaving aside kind of all the obvious metaphysical problems with Shelling's view, um, we may be unsure to what extent Shelling is right to make the sublime always about God. Is it really always about God? I mean, can't uh can an atheist astronomer have a sublime experience of the stars?

[00:28:39]Presumably, he's not thinking of it as symbolizing God to him in some way. So, that seems like a problem with Shelling Spoon.

[00:28:47]Okay, so that was section one. Section two.

[00:28:52]So far, I've introduced the idea of the sublime and I've given a basic overview of some of the ways that Kant and other philosophers have developed the idea. My next task is to develop some resources from St. Thomas's thought that I think we could draw on when trying to think through the sublime optimistic principles.

[00:29:08]Uh there's three main ideas that I've been kind of turning over here. Uh perhaps you have other and better ideas I'm interested to know.

[00:29:17]My first idea is to draw on St. Thomas's notions about the ways that things are both concealed and revealed to us in our experiences of beauty. And the goal here is to account for something like Shelling's idea that sublimity and beauty are kind of two sides or dimensions of aesthetic experience.

[00:29:40]So we can starting with uh St. Thomas's theory of beauty, we can see how this kind of uh polarity between revelation and concealment is a is a consistent feature of his of his theory.

[00:29:53]Uh St. Thomas usually says that beauty consists in splendor and proportion.

[00:29:57]Sometimes he adds a third characteristic. Wholeness or perfection.

[00:30:01]Uh you could see that on text one on your handout.

[00:30:06]I'll just read that real quick. Three things are required for beauty. First, wholeness or perfection, for those things that are diminished are by that very fact ugly. Second, due proportion or harmony. And finally, splendor, for which reason things with shining colors are said to be beautiful.

[00:30:22]So what does that mean?

[00:30:24]Beautiful things are those that please when apprehended. Why do they please?

[00:30:29]Because they have a brightness, a splendor, a kind of excellence and intensity of knowability that arrests and delights our cognitive powers. In order for that splendor to shine through, their appearance has to be ordered and unified. So that's the proportion element. And it has to be integral. It has to not lack any of the parts that it needs in order to make itself known.

[00:30:52]The central category here is splendor. I think uh that's and I think the the way to interpret that is that it's it's the manifestation of a thing's form.

[00:31:04]It's a thing's revelation of itself.

[00:31:08]Beautiful things delight us primarily because they reveal their forms to us in an excellent way.

[00:31:15]So beauty is very closely connected with revelation.

[00:31:20]On the other hand, for a mortal and finite human, the revealing dimension of beauty always brings with it a concealing dimension.

[00:31:31]Here's a a way in to see why that's so.

[00:31:34]We know the intelligible only through the sensible.

[00:31:39]The sensible manifests the intelligible to us, but it also conceals them.

[00:31:47]Think for example about one of your friends.

[00:31:50]Because his face, his words, his gestures, and his activities are perceptible to you, you're able to apprehend him as a living and spiritual being. You know something of his inner life and character. You can see it splendidly revealed in his face and in his actions.

[00:32:07]That's part of your experience of his beauty.

[00:32:12]But there's always more to him than what you see. You you do see his life. You do see his thought. You do see his character. But you always see them only partially. You always see only something of it, not the whole. You see it partly revealed and partly concealed.

[00:32:28]There's a there's always a kind of mysterious interiority that remains. An interiority that you can guess at but not fully discern.

[00:32:39]An example here that I find very helpful is to think about the veil over the uh over the sacred vessels at holy mass.

[00:32:49]Think about the veil. It draws your attention to the mysteries that it contains. Right? I see the veil on the altar and I know what's what's underneath it in a certain way. Right?

[00:32:59]But it draws your attention precisely by hiding those mysteries.

[00:33:04]It makes us understand what it contains.

[00:33:06]It makes us understand that what it contains exceeds what we can understand.

[00:33:12]It shows us that it contains something that can't fully be shown.

[00:33:18]Uh this image, the veil, as an image for our mode of knowing, it's actually a favorite uh image of one of St. Thomas's most important teachers, Pseudo Dynisius. And it's an image that St. Thomas recurs to over and over again.

[00:33:31]The idea of sensibles as a kind of veil for the intelligibles. Um, you could see that in text two on your handout from Pseudoius.

[00:33:40]PseudoDines says, "We now grasp these things in the best way that we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils of that love toward humanity with which scripture and hierarchical traditions cover the truths of the mind, with things derived from the realms of the senses. And so it is that the transcendent is clothed in the terms of being with shape and form on the things that have neither. And numerous symbols are employed to convey the varied attributes of what is an imageless and supernatural simplicity.

[00:34:15]Pseudony is kind of hard to understand.

[00:34:17]Um, >> but uh I think basically what's going on in this text is something that's just a constant theme of his writings, which is this interplay between revelation and mystery, between veiling and unveiling.

[00:34:32]All the world reveals God. Sensible reveals the intelligible. The intelligible reveals its ultimate cause.

[00:34:38]And yet God remains mysterious because his his revelation is always only partial.

[00:34:45]The manifest of God and the hiddenness of God are the opposing sides of the same phenomenon. God precisely in being manifest to me through the world is nonetheless in other ways not manifest.

[00:34:59]So they're uh they're like the like the two poles of the of a magnet. They form a polarity.

[00:35:06]Uh as St. Thomas explains when expounding that text from from pseudony is it's not just that the intelligible things must be veiled for us in sensible things but that the supraintelligible mysteries of God must in turn be veiled for us in intelligible things in this life I can't know God's essence I can only understand him through the created perfections I see around me which always fall short of God's eminence God in himself is supremely knowable supremely manifest and thus supremely beautiful. But we are not able to see the divine splendor in itself. For us, the the inaccessible light in which God dwells is a kind of darkness. Not because it lacks intelligibility, but because its intelligibility goes so far beyond what we can grasp.

[00:35:54]For us, God primarily is sublime.

[00:35:58]I think this idea can be expanded by uh thinking about St. Thomas's theory of participation.

[00:36:06]So St. Thomas talks about different modes of participation and one of the modes that he talks about is that an an effect can be said to participate in its efficient cause especially when the cause exceeds the effect in per in perfection.

[00:36:23]So the effect takes part in the perfection of its cause. It really does take part. So it's representing the perfection of its cause. Right? When I when I do something, when I talk to you, my words are taking part in the perfection of my soul. So, they're representing something of the perfection of which I'm capable.

[00:36:48]But it does this only partially. The eminence of the cause goes beyond what's re what's revealed in its effect.

[00:36:55]There's much more to me than just what you can what you will hear in this talk today. um there's much more to me than even I can understand.

[00:37:08]So uh every effect that that derives from a a cause with greater per perfection exhibits this kind of veiling unveiling dynamic with respect to its cause. Um and every creature is such an effect. Every creature both to some degree reveals God and then in an even greater degree conceals God.

[00:37:28]So perhaps we can agree with Shelling's idea that there are two dimensions or poles in aesthetic experience.

[00:37:35]The splendor of the beautiful is always revelatory both of the depths of the creature's being and of its source. But it is always also velatory indicating while not fully revealing the beauty from which it derives. Perhaps we can call those beauties sublime in which the latter element predominates.

[00:37:56]beauties that primarily indicate the depths in a veiled way rather than revealing them clearly.

[00:38:03]So that's one idea, this kind of um pointing beyond toward the infinite and full revelation. There's something in that idea that uh seems to correspond to this uh idea in St. Thomas that beauty involves revelation but also mystery.

[00:38:21]My second idea concerns the manner in which the sublime enters our experience.

[00:38:26]How exactly do we experience the depths of creaturely being and the dazzling darkness of God in for example the vastness of the starry sky? So I said you know an effect manifests its cause but like how do we how is that actually present in our experience and again can't can't the atheist astronomer also contemplate the sublimity of space? Does it really involve some kind of experience of God there?

[00:38:54]My proposal is that we experience these realities primarily effectively through a kind of a effective connaturality. Uh if you've ever read things by Jacqu Meritan, you would see that I'm uh drawing on some of his ideas here. What does that mean?

[00:39:11]St. Thomas will speak sometimes about a kind of judgment by affective co-naturality.

[00:39:17]um usually in the context of discussing virtue, the uh judgment of the prudent man and uh the gift of wisdom. So you could see this in text three on your handout.

[00:39:30]Um I'm not going to read the whole thing, but there St. Thomas is explaining uh how it is that wisdom is a gift connected with charity, that charity is what gives you wisdom.

[00:39:43]Um so and Roughly the idea is something like this.

[00:39:48]Uh so think about a chased man. A chasteed man does not need to think through conceptually all the time what is chased and what isn't. They don't need to always be thinking about the rules, right? Um they don't need that in order to come to a prudent judgment in a in a given situation. Because the chase man's appetites are properly ordered. He has a sort of effective feel for what's chased. Right?

[00:40:12]Unchastity of any kind is just dissonant with him. He has a kind of nose for it.

[00:40:16]It stinks to him. He he instinctively flinches away from it because his his um affections are ordered rightly.

[00:40:25]In a similar way, the gift of wisdom allows you to know God by means of charity. Through the effective union that charity brings with God, you're able to judge rightly about the things of God.

[00:40:38]Now, of course, to experience uh the sublime, one need not necessarily be chased or supernaturally wise. Uh I think I'm have at many times been neither of those things, but still able to uh experience the sublimity of the stars.

[00:40:57]What I'm suggesting though is that a similar notion of effective conality could be applied to the kind of mystery dimension of the beautiful that we're talking about. kind of pointing beyond the the veiling indication dimension.

[00:41:12]And here's something like how I I think it could go.

[00:41:17]The perfection of our natural knowing is to see God as fully as possible as revealed in the order of the universe.

[00:41:23]Right? By nature, what we can do is we can come to see God as well as possible through understanding his effect, which is the whole order of the universe. That's the kind of image of God that we're given by nature, right? That's our that's kind of the destination of our mind.

[00:41:41]None of us in fact achieve that perfection fully in this fallen life. Uh but we all have moments of wonder, moments where our natural hunger for this perfection wells up within us.

[00:41:53]This longing to see the cause, I suggest gives us a kind of unfulfilled experience of the cause by the same kind of affective co-naturality.

[00:42:04]Maybe we all sometimes have a kind of natural experience of suffering divine things as St. Thomas talks about in that quote. So in feeling wonder there's a way in which what you're really experiencing you're you're reaching out with your desire not with your concepts not with your mind not with something that you understand but with your desire you're reaching out toward God.

[00:42:28]This experience need not be in any way explicit. It may manifest merely as a kind of vague longing or sense of deeper meaning or or thankfulness.

[00:42:40]Um because the atheist astronomer is in fact ordered towards seeing God through the order of the universe. He may experience this. He may experience um not only the inner being of the magnificent infernos, the stars that he's considering, right? but even have a kind of dark effective experience of their of their creative source. He won't be contemplating God as such, but he will be um he will be having a kind of feeling for some deeper meaning and that is in fact God. So he's in fact in a way having an experience of God even though he doesn't know it. That's what I'm suggesting.

[00:43:20]Okay. So the second idea maybe part of how this mystery dimension of the beautiful actually comes into our experience is through something like effective connaturality.

[00:43:33]My third idea attempts to capture the aspect of negativity on which Kant Burke and the other romantics all seem to agree.

[00:43:41]The sublime differs from the beautiful according to them because it's not simply speaking delightful to behold.

[00:43:46]It's both delightful and also painful.

[00:43:49]Uh, and they tend to emphasize fear.

[00:43:51]Fear is it's it's the fearful. It's I'm afraid of losing myself in the abyss of the of the greatness of the universe.

[00:43:58]Um, so my proposal, and this one especially, I'm kind of not really sure whether this works, but we'll see.

[00:44:07]uh is that we think of the sublime as a mode of beauty that engages our spirited part, our thumos, our irassable appetite. Uh instead of just our concubisible appetite, our desiring part uh quick review of what that is. Uh for St. Thomas, the concupisible passions move us toward the good or away from the evil considered simply.

[00:44:31]The irassable passions on the other hand, the spirited part, thumos, uh that moves us toward the good or away from the evil considered as arduous, considered as difficult in some way.

[00:44:44]So when I perceive a good, I an inclination or naturality toward it arises within me. That's love. If I'm not united with that good, that leads to desire. If I already possess that good, that leads to delight. Similarly for hatred, avoidance and sorrow. So those are the concubis. They're just regard the good simply speaking.

[00:45:05]But when a good is arduous that is when uh there's certain there's some kind of difficulty there's some kind of evil that needs to be overcome in order to acquire the good or in order to avoid the evil then I experience a different set of passions.

[00:45:19]Hope or confidence makes me feel that I can and will acquire the good despite the difficulty.

[00:45:26]Despair makes me feel that because of the difficulty, I cannot and will not attain the good. Similarly, daring drives me to kind of dare on a difficult evil. I'm going to I'm going to go for it even though there's this difficult evil that will be hard to avoid. And fear makes me feel that some difficult evil can't be avoided.

[00:45:46]St. Thomas normally connects the beautiful only with love and contemplative delight.

[00:45:53]But I'm wondering, might there not be kind of modes of the beautiful that elicit a kind of contemplative fear?

[00:46:03]When considering the vastness and power of the universe, I experience a kind of arduousness, a kind of difficulty, the difficulty of being unable to comprehend, of my imagination being defeated, of the meaningfulness of my existence being threatened.

[00:46:19]Perhaps this makes the contemplation of such realities have this kind of note of arduousness.

[00:46:25]On the negative side, that leads to seeing the thing as fearsome um and to a a kind of despair of ever being able to understand it.

[00:46:36]On the positive side, it raises my spirit to a kind of confidence and daring. That feeling of being lifted up.

[00:46:42]That seems like a spirited uh irrassible kind of feeling.

[00:46:47]the exaltation that we feel on a mountaintop or uh in the consideration of a magnificent cathedral that seems to be a kind of daring or maybe a kind of confidence.

[00:46:59]Something like this notion seems to be indicated in a really interesting text from Albert the Great's commentary on pseudonyasis. This is text four on your handout. Um and I'm going to read this because it's I I really like this text.

[00:47:11]I think it's and I think it's very um seems clear that Albert is talking here about exactly the the phenomenon of the sublime specifically when it comes to God.

[00:47:23]The eminence of the divine names is shown when the psalm verse he's commenting on a psalm verse says wondrous for as the philosopher says in the beginning of the metaphysics it is from wonder that men both now and before have begun to philosophize seeing that is the effect whose cause was unknown and high they began to inquire concerning the cause in wonder and thus philosophized and damsine says the same thing that wonder is fear or astonishment in a Great imagining admiratio estimup in mana fantasia.

[00:47:59]That is someone considering his own smallness and the loftiness of the thing flees in a certain manner from the thing and is turned over to astonishment.

[00:48:10]And therefore because of the loftiness of the divine names with respect to what they signify, they are called wondrous.

[00:48:17]And so it is said in Genesis 32 and in Judges 13, why do you seek my name which is wonderful?

[00:48:26]So what is Albert saying? I think he's saying our our natural we have this natural desire for the cause. We have this natural hunger for the cause.

[00:48:36]Um but it can be it can be driven back by the kind of lack of proportion between the greatness of the cause and our own smallalness. it can be converted into uh stupor uh um astonishment which is a kind of fear I think.

[00:48:56]Um so as we begin to as we begin to seek for the cause and we realize how great it is um we can have a kind of contemplative wonder and fear. It seems to me that that's what he's talking about.

[00:49:10]Okay. So I'm going to now conclude. I've introduced the notion of the sublime.

[00:49:20]I've talked about K and Chilling's theories. Uh and I've indicated some resources that I think we could use in coming up with a toistic theory. I'm going to conclude by first speaking to what seems to be wrong in the modern accounts and then suggesting that using the resources that I talked about, we can give a more precise account of the various modes of beauty called support.

[00:49:40]So, first, what's wrong with the modern accounts? Seems to me that Burke and Kant are just kind of dead wrong in seeing the sublime and the beautiful as totally opposed categories at seeing if something's sublime, it's not beautiful.

[00:49:52]If it's beautiful, it's not sublime. Uh, I think this is just not true. Um, the sublime is contemplatively delightful and so it just follows straightforwardly that it's that it's a kinder mode of beauty. And I think we speak in this way. You talk about we it would make total sense to call a Mozart string quartet uh sublimely beautiful but on Burks and K's way of speaking about it that should be a kind of contradiction in in adcto right um we call a sun a we see a sunset makes sense to say wow that's beautiful wow that's sublime both of those adjectives seem to fit the sunset so perhaps there there we could say that there's a another subcategory of beauty besides the sublime. Maybe that's what we often refer to when we when we talk about beauty. Uh a sort of beauty that has splendor, harmony, and wholeness in a more straightforward way and in a way that's well proportioned to our own cognitive powers. Um we could call that, I don't know, simple beauty, something like that. Um maybe maybe we could say, well, there's beauty, which is the overarching category, and then one kind is sublimity, another kind is this more simple beauty, this beauty that's more proportion to us.

[00:51:04]Maybe. So uh even there I think though I would I would tend to add with shelling that there does they seem to interpenetrate. There does always seem to be an element of the sublime and simple beauty and an element of simple beauty in uh in the sublime.

[00:51:22]Again I think Kant is completely wrong to think that the sublime is in us rather than in things. It's the stars themselves that are sublime.

[00:51:31]the greatness of their own beauty and uh and maybe also the the kind of dark the the super luminous splendor of the cause that I'm kind of guessing at effectively. Um that's what's sublime.

[00:51:44]Uh and those things are really present to me however indistinctly when I contemplate them. What seems right in consecount is that part of the joy of contemplating the stars is feeling kind of the increase of my of of of the daring power of my spirit.

[00:52:01]Maybe we should say we want to avoid Kant's spiritual pride. But there's there's both an element of humility and an element of exaltation in the experience of the sublime. We should the sublime makes us humbly recognize our smallalness in the sight of God in the grand scheme of things. But also it makes us magnanimously re recognize the the nobility of our rational nature.

[00:52:23]Okay. So what finally is the supply?

[00:52:27]I'm inclined to say it's arduous beauty.

[00:52:31]Those beauties are sublime which because of their greatness are arduous and thus merit a spirited irrassible response.

[00:52:38]Uh I think there's lots of different ways in which a beauty could be arduous.

[00:52:42]Uh so for example some beauties are arduous because they're very difficult to apprehend. Uh they challenge our cognitive powers. They're fearful because our imagination shrinks from losing itself and being defeated. That's Kant's mathematical sublime.

[00:52:56]mindboggling.

[00:52:58]Some beauties are arduous because they have some kind of ad mixture of evil or ugliness in them. They're fearful because we perceive something in them that's harsh to contemplate.

[00:53:07]But this harshness somehow serves the beauty. Perhaps it um perhaps it points towards some final order and completeness which this beauty indicates u but in which it doesn't yet fully participate.

[00:53:19]That's where I would put maybe tragedy, maybe epic. Those both seem to have an element of sublimity to them. Um, and also that's where I would put K's dynamical sublime, the fearsome.

[00:53:30]I think there are also other other ways that a beauty can be arduous though. Um, I think sometimes beauties are arduous just because they depict something arduous.

[00:53:40]Uh, so for example, something like Beethoven's music which is imitating these very irassable spirited emotions, it kind of calls forth a similar response in you.

[00:53:53]And so your experience of it, your contemplation of it has this kind of spirited character.

[00:54:00]Um, and then I think sometimes you have beauties that are arduous, not because they kind of really hurt you or destroy you in any way, not really because they're fearful, but just just because they're so high, because they're so lofty.

[00:54:17]um the piercing beauty of of certain pieces by Mozart or uh or or a really glorious sunset. Those are things that come to mind for me. Um I don't I don't feel fear when I listen to a really incredible Mozart piece or when I see a really incredible sunset. I don't have a sense of my powers being destroyed or my life being threatened or something like that. Um but I do feel a kind of astonishment. I do feel this kind of exaltation. I feel this kind of maybe it's a kind of intellectual hope and daring. Um why is that? Well, maybe it's because they they indicate even more than they reveal. They do reveal, but they also veil. They also indicate something that they don't fully make present. And um and so they they pull our affections beyond what our mind can discern toward a a foretaste of the mysteries that we hope for.

[00:55:09]You could call that the the lofty.

[00:55:12]And maybe there are other ways. I don't know. Maybe there are maybe there are other modes in which um a beauty can be arduous. Maybe you can think of them.

[00:55:20]Anyway, that's what I have for today.

[00:55:21]Thank you.