Sublime From the Greeks to Term Paper

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Keats attempted to purify the sublimity in nature -- but it was disconnected from the old world view of sublimity in nature with regard to God. Keats' Romanticism often employed the use of the gods and heroes of antiquity -- what it moved away from (and rightly so) was the Protestant ethos that had corrupted the Western religious sensibility. For Keats, recapturing the sublimity of the ancients was part of the essence of the poet's craft. For Shelley and Byron, sublimity was passion -- which was certainly an aspect of sublimity, according to Longinus. But while the old world reconciled faith and reason, Shelley attempted to "reconcile reason and passion by abolishing belief in God" in the "quintessential Enlightenment poem" Queen Mab (Jones 78).

Thus, sublimity in nature was divorced from religion. Nature was absolved of the presence of the supernatural -- and human passion was conceived as the greatest height. Of course, Rousseau attempted to persuade the Western world as to how human passion should be reconciled with reason -- but it was based on a false notion of liberty that Socrates would have rejected out of hand. If Aquinas would use Aristotle to prove the existence of God, Shelley would use Rousseau to attempt to disprove it. In a sense, the Romantics latched onto an aspect of the sublime -- which was essentially all they were permitted since the new world had dissolved the definitions of the old. Longinus would not have denied that passion played a part in the sublime -- but it was not all; nor would he have suggested that reason be reconciled with passion, but that reason be its ruler.

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In conclusion, the notion of the sublime held constant with the notion of the good, whether with Plato or Augustine -- the highest good could be drawn from first principles. The modern world, however, as Weaver notes "has been running away from, rather than toward, first principles, so that…the world of 'modern' knowledge is like the universe of Eddington, expanding by diffusion until it approaches the point of nullity" (13). Without a return to the ideas of the old world, any hope of understanding the sublime cannot be achieved: a subjective world refuses to consent to definition -- rather it patronizingly agrees to disagree -- which is a reassertion of the treaty signed at Westphalia between opposing ideologies. That treaty proved inefficacious; so too will this one.

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