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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2015
And the LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presenceof the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered therocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the windthere was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After theearthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the firecame a gentle whisper.
When Elijah heard the whisper, he pulled his cloak over his face and went outand stood at the mouth of the cave.
1 Kings 19:11–13Saying this, Krishna the great lord of discipline revealed to Arjuna the true majesty of his form.
It was a multiform, wondrous vision, with countless mouths and eyes and celestial ornaments, brandishing many divine weapons.
Everywhere was boundless divinity containing all astonishing things, wearing divine garlands and garments, anointed with divine perfume.
If the light of a thousand suns were to rise in the sky at once it would be like the light of that great spirit.
Arjuna saw all the universe in its many ways and parts, standing as one in the body of the god of gods. Then filled with astonishment, his hair bristling on his flesh, Arjuna bowed his head to the god.
Bhagavad-Gita 11.12–14INTRODUCTION
The relationship between the religious and aesthetic domains in human life isdeep, complicated, and hard to describe in philosophical prose. Characterizingit is all the more challenging when the proposed point of intersection is thesublime, which by its very definition runs up to (“sub”) the limit(“limen”) of conceptual analysis and phenomenological description.As a result of the elusiveness of the topic – as well as the vastness ofthe historical territory here – scholarly work on the relationshipbetween religion and the sublime has tended to focus on a specific period or setof figures, with few attempts to provide a theoretical template for the whole.Our goal here, however, is to do precisely that. We begin with some conceptualground clearing before briefly highlighting some undernoticed connectionsbetween religion and the sublime in two central eighteenth-century authors,Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. We then devote the bulk of the chapter to afourfold taxonomy of what we call the theistic sublime, thespiritualistic sublime, thedymythologistic sublime, and thenontheistic sublime.
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