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The Early Medieval Sublime
This paper is dedicated to Terry Eagleton, whose 1996 essay “The Irish Sublime”
provides its basis.
Immanuel Kant began his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime by
stating: “The various feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure rest not so much upon the
nature of the eternal things that arouse them as upon each person’s own disposition to be
moved by these to pleasure or pain.” Yet there is another tradition of the sublime that
emphasizes not so much a transcendent internal disposition of the individual as the
psychosomatic balance of external and internal, exemplified by Edmund Burke. This
tradition of the sublime I will argue includes a sense of beauty that parallels literary traditions
that modern scholars have labeled the Celtic Otherworld and the English Green World,
which have their roots in early Christian ascetic cosmologies within the apophatic tradition
continued today most notably in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Burke himself famously had an Irish pedigree and cultural sympathies, being born in
Dublin of an Irish Catholic mother and Irish Protestant father, and marrying the daughter of
an Irish Catholic doctor the same year in which he published his A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in 1757. Some scholars consider him to have
been a crypto-Catholic in Enlightenment England, devoted to the cause of rights for Irish
Catholics, and famously defending what he called an organic notion of society against
transcendental rationalist ideology. In the 1760s the Scottish writer James Macpherson
would exemplify Burke’s notions of the sublime in his famous Ossian poems, based on early
Irish and Scottish stories of the Otherworld. They were a sensation, and an important
influence on Gothic and Romantic literature, favorite literature of such disparate figures as
Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte, though they became an historically obscured
influence due to controversy over Macpherson’s story of their origin.
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Burke’s theory of the sublime included three key points relevant to this discussion: It
was a physiological experience, which involved simultaneous experience of joy and terror,
and an awareness of one’s own place in larger contexts of life. In this it echoed the Classical
writer Longinus’ earlier treatise on the sublime, which can be organized into a parallel three
points: 1. Grandeur of thought accompanying a vigorous and spirited treatment of the
passions, both arising from natural endowments; 2. Artifice in the employment of figures of
thought and figures of speech, accompanied by dignified expression involving the proper
choice of words and use of metaphors and other ornaments of diction; and 3. Majesty and
elevation of structure, embracing the first two. Burke’s emphasis on the psychosomatic
nature of the sublime draws on Longinus’ on thought and emotion related to natural
endowments, which both writers related strongly to features of nature as well as internal
gifts. The later writer’s sense of joy and terror mixed in the sublime emerges from Longinus’
sense of art involving crafting metaphor that in a metonymic sense can meld the physical
and the spiritual, in textually iconographic ways related I’ll argue ultimately to apophatic
theology. And finally Burke’s sense of the sublime placing us in larger contexts draws on
Longinus’ sense of majesty of structure of the artistic expression melding with the physical
world. The identity of Longinus has long been debated; he was familiar with the biblical
Genesis, leading some medieval Christians to claim him as Christian, and some modern
scholars to speculate he was Jewish. Even the name is uncertain. Another name attributed to
his text on the sublime was suggestively Dionysius, the same as the reputed founder of
apophatic theology.
In any case, Longinus’ reference to the Creation story in Genesis is telling, especially
because of the way the Septuagint text refers to God seeing all Creation as good in
terminology that can also be called beautiful. And Longinus specifically references the
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biblical Creation story’s account of God saying “Let there be light,” as an example of the
sublime. The whole Creation account in Longinus’ terms, as amplified by Burke, can be
taken to be the ultimate sublime, a term sometimes used as a synonym for “majesty” in
English-language translations of Eastern Orthodox Christian texts today. Here the beautifulgood emerges in the natural world from the abyss over which the Holy Spirit hovers. This
beautiful-good partakes of what Dmitru Staniloae called the sparkling in Creation, in
apophatic Christian theology the uncreated divine energies in Creation through which we
and Creation participate in the divine, even as the divine essence remains to us always an
awesome mystery. So too the Son and the Holy Spirit are sometimes described as hands on
Earth of God the Father, who remains usually unportrayed in iconography based in this
theology.
Sts. Ephraim the Syrian and Gregory of Nyssa described the particular landscape of
the beautiful-good Paradise from Genesis in terms of a mountain encompassing the Earth.
This sense of cosmic landscape was picked up by early Irish Christian writers and melded
with native traditions of an ancestral spiritual realm encompassing the Earth, since labeled in
modern English the Otherworld. The Celticist John Carey has called this literary move the
“baptism of the gods,” and indeed it seems echoed directly by the modern Christian
fantasists C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who shaped other similar fantasy overlay landscapes
of the Earth, melding in part non-Christian mythology with the biblical Creation story.
Genesis itself arguably provides the ultimate Ur version of this kind of overlay landscape, as
for example in the four rivers of Paradise, associated by church fathers with the
geographically known rivers of the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile and Ganges or Danube, although
in a relation obscured by the Fall. In early Irish stories likewise we are sometimes told that
the Otherworld is everywhere present but cannot be seen due to the Fall. It can be accessed
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by portals in the countryside, in ancient mounds, in the sea, in springs. Present-day maps of
Ireland and Scotland trace routes and places of these fantasy Otherworld stories. This
landscape with its biblical resonances lent a sense of mystery and awe to the Earth, a sense
of sublime beauty arguably.
The Celticist John Carey has argued that over time in Ireland the Otherworld came
to carry more demonic associations. From the start it often carried a sense of being an
alternative unfallen dimension whose inhabitants were antediluevian or even unfallen in their
long-lived or eternal natures. It also in its greatest extant literary works, the Táin Bó Cúailnge,
or “Cattle Raid of Cooley,” and the Welsh Mabinogi and derivative Arthurian traditions, took
on an aspect of a magical Insular indigenous landscape, a cultural resistance to colonialism
and the emergence of medieval Western Europe.
Yet it also had analogues and roots in explicitly Christian writings in early Ireland,
such as the Psaltair na Rann, or psalter of the meters, and its poetic expansion of the Genesis
Creation story. In that early medieval, Creation is described as including a wheel of winds
identified with colors. This is the Irish version of what is also known from some Native
American cultures and less authentically from Disney as the “colors of the winds.”
The winds are described in a circle of directions, with darker colored winds in the
north and lighter colors in the south, mirroring Ireland’s geographic and meteorological
position. The east wind is purple, a royal color for the direction from which Christ will come
again, but also a color associatable with physical dawn. The west wind as dun brown comes
from a direction identified with death but also the setting of the sun on the ocean. The
winds are described as governed by harmonies. Interestingly, harmony is one of the
translations for the Greek term logos, which Maximus the Confessor identified with the
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uncreated energies of God or logoi both constituting and redeeming Creation. The logoi of
the Logos were for Maximus the harmonies of the harmony.
The colors of the winds in the Irish text are identified with the biblical story of
Creation and governed by harmonies. In the Greek Septuagint, spirit is identified
metonomyically with breath and wind. Some scholars feel some knowledge of Greek and
certainly of Greek patristics and ascetics was present in early medieval Ireland, as evidenced
most notably by the Irish scholar John Scottus Eriugena’s adaptation of works by St.
Maximus, Gregory of Nyssa, and those attributed to St. Dionysius, into Latin. Both the
symbolism of colors and of winds themselves implies a kind of continuity between
theophany and physicality as evidenced in Eriugena’s theophanic philosophy of nature.
This is reinforced by the way in which the southern tier of wind colors in the early
Irish wind tier overlap with the early Irish colors of martyrdom known from other texts.
These are often translated as green or blue, white, and red, heading from the southwest to
southeast. The southwestern color, in Irish glas, is translated variously grey, green or blue,
and has perhaps most accurately in English been described as the color of sky in water. This
color is associated with tears, water, mist, clouds, and otherworldly beings, foreigners and
exiles. It reflects in part the dynamic physical climate of an island in the Gulf Stream, on an
archipelago which can simultaneously be imagined as primarily seas or primarily islands,
afloat in an ever-changing atmosphere mixing ocean and sky.
Yet glas also bodily is a color of paleness and brightness both, also associated with
asceticism and penance. And in its melding of colors of sky and sea and tears it relates to
ascetic notions of baptism, watery penitential prayers by Irish monks in the sea, and
scriptural notions of meeting Christ in the clouds on his return.
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Of the martyrdom colors in the southern tier of wind colors nearest the sun, red
martyrdom was identified with death for one’s faith, white martyrdom with exile from all
that one loves, as in monasticism, and glas martyrdom with ascetic penance that could be
practiced by laity and monastics alike, in communities that often extended across both ranks
of the faithful. But glas as a color of brightness in water essentially was a color of mystery as
well, a sense of light as both immanent and transcendent as in Byzantine iconography. As a
kind of textual iconography itself, glas martyrdom seems to have reflected a sense of patristic
and ascetic emphasis on energy rather than a Scholastic one on analogy. And identified with
the southwest wind, glas was associated with the direction in which early Irish maps
portrayed their island as projecting most into the sea, was identified explicitly with the sea in
the Saltair’s text, and also with a direction associated most with the Otherworld as a spiritual
realm entwined with actual geography. It is also the direction of the famous monastic island
of Skellig Michael, now a UNESCO world heritage site, from the main island of Ireland.
The use of the color glas to describe the wind from the southwest associated with the
Otherworld and governed by the harmonies, and also the martyrdom of asceticism and
penance, itself presents a kind of continuum of energy from theophany to ascesis and
physical creation. In this color itself, spanning as it does the physical and the iconographic
and the textual, can symbolize the notion of hierarchies that are also direct networks of
divine energies as found in the writings of Dionysius, and adapted as the theophanies of
Eriugena, as well as with an early Irish apophatic sense of the sublime.
Colors here seem to function in a symbolic way that crosses boundaries between
what in modernity would be considered discrete units of individual beings or categories, and
relating the spiritual harmonies and the physical elements with human life practice and
ultimately through ascesis with theosis. The medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has suggested
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that parallel meldings such as medieval humors and astrological views could be termed
bodies without organs, following the rhizomic postmodern ecosophy of Deleuze and
Guarrari. The contemporary philosopher Peter Hallward in fact has described the rhizomic
worldview of Deleuze and Guattari, focused on process and not essence, as Eriugenan, akin
to the early Irish worldview we have been discussing. The difference of course is in
Eriugena’s apophatic theology, in which the essence of the energies is transcendent and
divine mystery, nonetheless Incarnate in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit’s workings. So
we have a combined rhizomic and arboreal symbol of faith, to borrow Deleuze and
Guattari’s terms, in the Tree of Life and in the gospel image of Christ as vine.
The result arguably is a mystery of sublime beauty, both a good and terrible aweinspiring mystery. The Otherworld of early Christian Irish and Welsh narratives types this, in
ways that one early Irish text described as the “strange beauty” of such magical landscape.
The Welsh Mabinogi in particular affords a complex relation between its four branches or
stories and the symbolism of the four Evangelists as developed by St. Gregory the Dialogist
and virtues of personal life and phases of the earthly life of Christ related to it, all of which
become ingressed and inscribed in the map of Wales as if on an icon. The stories cycle from
South to North Wales in following Gregory’s language of left and right, which also mean
south and north in early Welsh as today.
Iconography fulfills this sense of sacred beauty, a beautiful-sublime glimpsed not in
objectified superficial prettiness or allegory but in the depth of intercommunion between the
divine and the human and ultimately all creatures. In visual aesthetics an analogue to the
Irish Otherworld can be seen in the Book of Kells, which draws on native and Byzantine
themes for its illustrations of a gospel book, which melds the written text, such as most
famously the Greek Chi-Rho, into patterns of contemplative and interconnective visual
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imagery including angels, humans, saints, and vegetative and animal imagery. Some scholars
have spoken of the Book of Kells and also Byzantine iconography as stereoscopic or
stereographic, with inverse perspective that shapes what has been called a pop-out book
effect. Instead of the art being the object of a gaze it is relational and in effect looking out on
us. I would argue that the overlay landscape of the Otherworld has a similar effect, and that
this effect is also a key aspect of describing the sublimely beautiful as iconographic in
apophatic terms.
Landscape in Ireland or Wales in effect becomes unobjectifiable when experienced
through Otherworld narratives in which it sparkles with unpossessable energy. This was
reflected also in literary effects in Middle English and Elizabethan English, and modern
Romantic and fantasy literatures influenced by what the literary critic Northrop Frye called
the green world trope in English literature. In examples ranging from Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and on to Spenser’s
Faerie Queene and some of Shakespeare’s plays, an overlay landscape melding the spiritual and
imaginative with the natural world, juxtaposes with the conventional world of human life.
The result, Frye suggested in examining Elizabethan works, leads us to question whether the
everyday human world really is the reality it claims to be. This arguably is the case with the
work of the Christian fantasists Lewis and Tolkien. Before them, though, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge shaped a modern Western model for this process in his famous theory of the
imagination, based as it was in his artistic and spiritual move toward a traditional
Anglicanism and away from his earlier interest in revolutionary Unitarianism. It is no
coincidence that he cited Eriugena as a source and ally in this. Coleridge famously described
the primary imagination as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and
as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.” And he
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described the secondary imagination as “an echo of the former, co-existing with the
conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing
only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to
recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to
idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed
and dead.” In certain ways Coleridge’s poetics of imagination lines up with the patristic
Christian notion of the nous in relation to the process of theosis. In his work the mix of joy
and terror in this apophatic sublime beauty can be seen in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
In his nineteenth-century Anglophone poetic view of life as immaterial
communication through imagination, based in God, Coleridge anticipated the work of
semiotician Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American Pragmatism. Peirce’s development of
a model for what he called agapasm, evolution based on agape, empathetic love, equated
ultimately information-energy and its communication with life. His triad, translated into
modern environmental philosophy as environment, text and landscapes, paralleled in
semiotic terms the function of Coleridge’s divine, primary imagination and secondary
imagination that had grown in part from Eriugena’s influence. Peirce’s triadic model of
meaning-making also reflects the physiological, metonymic and contextual-landscape aspects
of Burke’s sublime derived from Longinus. And it joined the biologist Jakob Von Uexküll’s
early 20th-century work in the Baltic States to form the foundation for today’s new field of
ecosemiotics, which defines life in informational terms, distantly reflecting current
developments in physics. Ecosemiotics today arguably suggests a kind of sublime beauty
based in a process of meaning-making, similar in some ways to what deconstruction suggests
about texts in literary studies, both being relatable to apophatic worldviews in their emphasis
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on process rather than essentialism. Yet the sublime’s terror can be mixed fully with joy in a
Christian sense only in their realization together in the beauty of the Cross.
In the related work of the twentieth-century Czech Christian phenomenologist
Erazim Kohák, the intersection of time and eternity forms personhood of absolute value.
That intersection types the Cross, “joyful sorrow” and asceticism, the mystery of the
essential beyond the energy, and thus of the energy of the essential itself. It conveys a sense
of the immaterial nature of life now newly emphasized by ecosmiotics, amid the physical.
This aspect of the Cross in the beautiful is a final element of what I have suggested as
aspects of the holy sublimely beautiful or the holy majestic beautiful in apophatic Christian
theology. The first was apophatic intercommunion and its essential mystery, the second was
the pop-out effect of reciprocal relation rather than objectification, and then its analogue to
the Cross in its personalism. In all this I’ve hopefully suggested the relation of the sublimely
beautiful not to superficial objectification, as in effect decried by both Burke and Coleridge,
but to a holistic experience of the apophatically divine, familiar still today from living
traditions of Eastern Orthodox Christian theology, iconography and ascetic hesychasm.