Spiritualistic Sublime, The Dymythologistic Sublime, and The Non-Theistic Sublime. These
Spiritualistic Sublime, The Dymythologistic Sublime, and The Non-Theistic Sublime. These
Spiritualistic Sublime, The Dymythologistic Sublime, and The Non-Theistic Sublime. These
These
models depict four main ways in which sublime experience relates to the defining
features of religious life—i.e., to what Rudolf Otto calls experience of the “numinous”, to
the acceptance of religious doctrine, and to the behaviors and affections that often
as the main prospects and obstacles for theoretical attempts to bring the domains of the
the concept of the sublime, largely because (as the various chapters of this volume
indicate) there is more than one concept that goes by the name. In contemporary
“awesome” that can be ascribed without irony to almost any object, person, or quality
that produces pleasure (it doesn’t sound odd to speak of a politician’s “sublime speech,”
experience of art or nature. The authors who established the contours of the latter (Baillie,
Addison, Burke, Kant) also tend to construe genuine sublime experience as requiring two
distinct moments: first, a feeling of being dazzled and even terrified in the face of
3
See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford, 1958), chap. 2. The term
derives from the Latin ‘numen’ which literally means “nodding” but has been used since