In Search of the Sublime-Third Installment

According to James Boswell, Dr. Johnson confided to Sir Joshua Reynolds that "the great business of his life was to escape from himself." (The Life of Samuel Johnson, Modern Library edition, p. 81).

In Search of the Sublime-Second Installment

The sublime is something that catches us off guard and "transports" us "beyond" ourselves, removing us--our senses or perceptions, even momentarily, from what Blake termed "the same dull round" [There Is NO Natural Religion (b) "Conclusion. If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again

Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is"].

That we may "step outside" ourselves [Gk.: ekstasin]; make contact--direct contact--with that which is not ourselves. That we may escape the narrow confines of the self and, thereby, experience freedom.

Talking of constitutional melancholy, [Dr. Samuel Johnson] observed, "A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them." Boswell: "May not he think them down, Sir?" Johnson: "No, Sir. To attempt to think them down is madness. He should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest. To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise..." Boswell: "Should not he provide amusements for himself? Would it not, for instance, be right for him to take a course of chymistry?" Johnson: "Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself."
Boswell's Life of Johnson.

In Search of the Sublime-First Installment

An essay by Mae-Wan Ho.

Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity

As Guy Stroumsa has argued perceptively, Late Antiquity (roughly 250-750 C.E.) represents a second "Axial Age," when what we call "religion" asserts itself in ways that revolutionize human societies. In his superb series of lectures published as The End of Sacrifice, Stroumsa also argues that "along with these [religious] transformations came forms of religious and cultural heritage--not from 'Europe' (an over-used term that too often still means Western Europe of Catholic and Protestant tradition), but from the three civilizations of which we are all the heirs: alongside Latin Europe, that of Byzantium, from Constantinople to Moscow ('the third Jerusalem'), and that of Islam, from Baghdad to Cordoba. Byzantium and Islam ended up transmitting to neo-Latin Europe, with a long delay, a portion of their ancient heritages. These are commonplaces, of course, but are nevertheless often forgotten" (p. 129)--or, in the U.S., suppressed or denied.

Plutarch

"In contrast to the Christian thinker, the Greco-Roman sage, either Stoic or Platonic, wants to learn to accept death. For him, it is neither a matter of accepting the laws of nature nor or revolting against them. For Plutarch--who is, let us not forget, both a priest of Apollo and a Greek-speaking Roman intellectual--the sage is someone who knows how to recognize his limits and consequently to live without hubris (excess), so as to succeed in integrating with nature...The unhappiness of men comes from their being distant from nature...Happiness, in effect, resides in the tranquility that we may find beyond our own strength. Not forcing one's nature is what allows one to reach the refuge of peace and indifference to the world, and in particular to others."

--Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, tr. Susan Emanuel, University of Chicago Press (2009), 17.

Dubliners

"We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes."

--James Joyce, "Araby."

Walter Kaufmann On Rembrandt's Eyes

Walter Kaufmann wrote that this painting ("Large Self-Portrait") "cast a spell" on him when he first saw it in the Vienna art museum, but it affected him even more in 1962 when he saw it again after visiting Poland and an afternoon spent at Auschwitz. He explained that Rembrandt had been 12 when the Thirty Years War began, and the painting was completed four years after the carnage of that war had ended. Kaufmann remarked that Rembrandt painted many self-portraits during his life, despite the fact that there was no market for them. But he painted them to provide a record of his evolution as an artist and as a human being. "Here was integrity incarnate," he said.

These thoughts and reminiscences are contained in Kaufmann's 1978 Preface to the Princeton paperback edition of his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy, a work that "certainly did not fail to impede my career," as he put it. He wrote the book (and its sequel, The Faith of a Heretic) because he felt that he had things to say--and was willing to say--that others did not and would not say.

His conclusion was that "humanists should be concerned less with the opinions of their peers and elders than with the challenge of Rembrandt's eyes."

The Faith of a Heretic

I purchased Walter Kaufmann's The Faith of a Heretic sometime around 1980 and for the next couple of decades dipped into it regularly, as one does with wisdom literature. Then I put the book away and did not look at it again until about a year or so ago when I consulted it to find a passage I had imperfectly recalled. In the last few weeks, I've picked it up again, determined to read it through carefully. Each page, each paragraph continues to speak to me with an honesty and vigor that must have molded my thinking on human religiosity far more than I ever credited in my twenties--for the arguments, the examples, the sources are all the arguments, examples, and sources that I appeal to even now in my writing and, especially, my classroom teaching.

Kaufmann's combination of intellectual honesty and moral commitment were exceptional during his lifetime and remain so to this day. If I have been unconsciously emulating him these many years, I doubt I could have picked a better model.

Longinus: On the Sublime

Further, writing for a man of such education as yourself, dear friend, I almost feel freed from the need of a lengthy preface showing how the sublime consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of language, and that this alone gave to the greatest poets and prose writers their preeminence and clothed them with immortal fame. For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves.

Baseball

When will the national pastime find its bard? Someone who can write about it with the same attention to detail, aesthetic eye, and ardor as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bull fighting?

Don't get me wrong, there has been some fine American writing about sports in general and baseball in particular--the musings of Hemingway's Santiago about Joe DiMaggio surely belongs to the genre. The Library of America's Baseball: A Literary Anthology contains a wide and generous selection and George Will's Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball deserves mention. In the spring of 2012, The Daily Beast published a list of 13 notable reads. But where, oh where, is baseball's Balzac?

One Of The Great Ones

Edmund Wilson.

The Unknown Prophet

Second Isaiah.

The Neglected Walter Kaufmann

And an essay Kaufmann published in Harper's in 1959 and later expanded into a book (that I read and re-read during my last two years as an undergraduate).

William Blake: Preface to 'Milton' (Jerusalem)