A Reading of Longinus’ On the Sublime

A Reading of Longinus’s On the
Sublime

The dissolution of the self through the
transcendent experience of hypsos provides a
mode to transcend the materialist tyranny of
contemporary socio-political reality.

• Rhetorical Subtexts
• Philosophical Influences
• Political Viewpoints

• Neil Hertz, “A Reading of Longinus”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 3
(Mar., 1983), 579-596.
• Suzanne Guerlac, “Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime”, New Literary
History, Vol. 16, No. 2, The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations
(Winter, 1985), 275-289.
• Frances Ferguson, “A Commentary on Suzanne Guerlac's ‘Longinus and the
Subject of the Sublime’”, New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2, The Sublime
and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations (Winter, 1985), 291-297.
• Jonathan Culler, “The Hertzian Sublime”, MLN, Vol. 120, No.
5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 2005), 969-985.

In this manner also the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, since he
recognized and expressed divine power according to its worth, expressed that
power clearly when he wrote at the beginning of his Laws: “And God said.”
What? “Let there be light, and there was light; let there be land, and there
was land.”

Ward off this gloomy darkness, father Zeus,
Restore the light, grant that our eyes may see,
And in the light destroy us, if you must.
Iliad 17. 645-647.

Longinus 9.

Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee,
Silvery speaking,

Laughing Love’s low laughter. Oh this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble,
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;

Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
‘Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
Waves in my ears sounds;

Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love trance.

He rushed upon them, as a wave storm-driven
Boisterous beneath black clouds, on a swift ship
Will burst, and all is hidden in the foam;
Meanwhile the wind tears thundering at the mast,
And all hands tremble, pale and sore afraid,
As they are carried close from under death.

Iliad 15. 624-628.
Longinus 10.

• Charles P. Segal, “Υψοσ and the Problem of Cultural Decline in the De
Sublimitate”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 64 (1959), 121-
146.

• Henny Fiska Hagg, “The Concept of God in Middle Platonism”, Clement of
Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 71-133.

• Jeffrey Walker, “Argumentation Indoors: Alcaeus and Sappho”, Rhetoric
and Poetics in Antiquity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 208-249.

No treatise by me concerning it exists or will ever exist. It is not something
that can be put into words other branches of learning; only after long
partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon
the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it
nourishes itself thereafter.
Plato, Seventh Letter, 338-42.

But greatness appears suddenly; like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and
reveals the writer’s full power in a flash.
Longinus 1.

One must know, therefore, how far one can go in each case, for to go too far
spoils the hyperbole’s effect which, when overstrained, is weakened and
may, on occasion, turn into its opposite.
Longinus 38.

If it is thus, then, that every art does its work well- by looking to the
intermediate and judgling its works by this standard (so that we often say of
good works of art that it is not possible either to take away or to add
anything, implying that excess and defect destroy the goodness of works of
art, while the mean preserves it; and good artists, as we say, look to this in
their work), and if, further, virtue is more exact and better than any art, as
nature also is, then virtue must have the quality of aiming at the
intermediate.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.6.

Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one being
and one soul; how all is absorbed into the one consciousness of this living
creature; how it compasses all things with a single purpose, and how all
things work together to cause all that comes to pass, and their wonderful web
and texture.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. IV, Art. 40, 21.

Do you not marvel how she seeks to make her
mind, body, ears, tongue, eyes, and complexion, as if they were scattered
elements strange to her, join together in the same moment of experience? …
[it is] her working them into one whole which produce[s] the outstanding
quality of the poem.
Longinus 10.

This, among other things: that nature judged man to be no lowly or ignoble
creature when she brought us into this life and into the whole universe as into
a great celebration, to be spectators of her whole performance and most
ambitious actors. She implanted at once into our souls an invincible love for
all that is great and more divine than ourselves. That is why the whole
universe gives insufficient scope to man’s power of contemplation and
reflection, but his thoughts often pass beyond the boundaries of the
surrounding world. Anyone who looks at life in all its aspects will see how far
the remarkable, the great, and the beautiful predominate in all things, and he
will soon understand to what end we have been born. That is
why, somehow, we are by nature led to marvel, not indeed, at little
streams, clear and useful though may be, but at the Nile, the Danube, or the
Rhine, and still more at the Ocean. (…) man can easily understand what is
useful or necessary, but he admires what passes his understanding.
Longinus 35

A Reading of Longinus’ On the Sublime

What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is
always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and
reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with
the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and
perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of
necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created.
The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the
form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be
made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created
pattern, it is not fair or perfect. Was the heaven then or the world, whether called
by this or by any other more appropriate name-assuming the name, I am asking a
question which has to be asked at the beginning of an enquiry about anything-
was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning? or created, and
had it a beginning? Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a
body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion
and sense and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created
must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker
of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to
all men would be impossible.
Plato, Timaeus.

A world wide sterility of utterance has comeupon our life. Must we indeed
accept, … the well-worn cliché that democracy is a good foster mother of
greatness, that great speakers flourished when she flourished and died with
her? Freedom, they say, is able to nurture the thoughts of great minds and to
give them hope; with it comes eagerness to compete and ambition to grasp
the highest rewards.
Longinus 44

A Reading of Longinus’ On the Sublime

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked (20)

Similar to A Reading of Longinus’ On the Sublime (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

A Reading of Longinus’ On the Sublime

Editor's Notes