Longinus on the Sublime: Sublime and the Modern Perceiver

By Avik Gangopadhyay, Masters Student

The aesthetic evolution of the concept of Sublime an its standing in the present times.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

LONGINUS ON THE SUBLIMESublime and the Modern Perceiver





I

AUTHOR AND THE TEXT


On the Sublime is one of the most useful critical manuscripts to have survived from the Mediterranean world and yet scholars know very kittle about its sources. The manuscript was written in Greek. It was first assigned to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian of the first century B.C., then to Cassius Longinus of Palmyra, a Syrian rhetorician and philosopher of the third century A.D.. It seems from textural evidence that both guesses were wrong, mainly because the author mentions no literary work after the time of Augustus, that the mysterious and debatable ‘Longinus’ lived about the first century A.D. probably during the reign of Nero. The original document exists in eleven manuscripts. Unfortunately, over a third of which are missing. Some indicipherable parts have complicated matter further. The work is addressed to Postumius Terentianus but his indentity is obscure. Some scholars even argue that this is a work by a Jewish Sicilian grammarian, a teacher in Rome during the first years of the Empire.
In a recent study by Bernandino M. Bonansea of the Catholic University of America, we have something more specific. Cassius Longinus was born in Athens about 213 A.D.. He studied with Neoplatonist Ammonius Saccus in Alexandria, Egypta, and was a teacher of philosophy, philology and Rhetoric in Athens. Porphyry, the noted philosopher was his student. He was invited by Queen Zenobia to Palmyra to instruct her in Greek literature. Longinus became her valuable adviser and convinced her to assert her independence from the Romans. Queen Zenobia failed in her attempt and handed over Longinus to Emperor Aurelian, who executed him in 273 A.D. The fragments On the Sublime was once held to be his work but now it is attributed to an unknown author, Pseudo Longinus.
In 1554, Mare Antoine Muret, a French poet and literary critic offered the first extant evaluation of On the Sublime. The very term ‘Sublime’ started receiving series of interpretations since Nicholas Boileau’s translation in 1674. The coalescence of logistics and romanticism made the treatise a spirited and an uplifting work, which has challenged and inspired many English authors, including Gibbon, Dryden, Addison, Goldsmith, Fielding, Sterne and Pope. Edmund Burke reopened speculation in the field of sublimity with A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in 1757. German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, developed the ideas of Longinus twice in 1766 and in 1790, to link beauty with the finite and the sublime with the infinite. This has naturally made the term ‘sublime’ a favourite guest of the Romantics. Before coming to the modernist perception let us read what Longinus has to after.


II

THE SUBLIME


The fountain-head of stylistic criticism is known by this Greek treatise, a work which has sometimes seemed to rival in importance even the Poetics of Aristole. It is usually called Longinus on the Sublime. The work is wholly critical and makes no appeal to any philosophical theory of art. Though it is a work of a Greek of the first/third century, it seems to have been unknown to ancient or medieval culture. Its importance in the history of criticism is entirely modern, dating from seventeenth century. The title is a double misnomer: it is perhaps not by Longinus, and it is not wholly concerned, in our sense of the sublime.
Before Longinus (for the anonymous author) the function of literature, if it was poetry, was to instruct or to delight or to do both, and, if it was prose, to persuade. Scott-James aptly puts it, “to instruct, to delight, to persuade – all the efforts of all the inspired bards, of all the brilliant historians, eloquent orators, and profound philosophers of the world had been summed up in that formula of three words”. Longinus found this ‘three word formula wanting’. For he discovered that the masterpieces of Greek classical literature – the epics of Homer, the lyrics of Sappho and Pindar, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophoeles, the orations of Demosthenes – while they no doubt did all this, were great for a different reason-their Sublimity. Longinus says, “Sublimity consists in a certain distinction and consummate excellence in expression. …The effect of a lofty passage is not to convince the reason of a reader but to transport him out of himself. Invariably an admirable speech cats a spell over us and eclipses that which merely aims at persuasion and pleasure. “Therefore, it is not instruction, or delight, or persuasion, but transport (ekstasis) is the test of great literature. If he is spell bound by what the writer says, so that he can neither think nor feel except what the writer thinks or feels, the work has the quality of the sublime.
The chief theoretical challenge of the Essay lies in the five fold division of the “sources” of “elevation”. These five sources are announced and briefly defined in Chapter VIII. They are: (a) Grandeur of thought or the power of forming great conceptions (noescis); (b) capacity for strong emotion or vehement passion (pathos); (c) appropriate use of figures (schemata); (d) nobility of diction (phrasis); and (e) dignified and elevated composition (sunthesis). Longinus says that both nature and art contribute to sublimity in literature … “art is perfect when it seems to be nature and nature hits the mark when she contains art hidden within her”. With this as his premise, Longinus finds these five principal sources of the sublime, the first two of which are largely the gifts of nature and the remaining three, the gifts of art.
For the first source Longinus says, “… sublimity is the echo of greatness of soul. …It is impossible for those whose whole lives are full of mean and servile ideas and habits, to produce anything that is admirable and worthy of an immortal life. It is only natural that great accents should fall from the lips of those whose thoughts have always been deep and full of majesty”. Stately thoughts belong to the loftiest minds. Mostly they are innate, a natural condition of the writer’s mind and heart. Longinus further adds, “…it is good for us too, when we are working at some subject which demands sublimity of thought and expression, to have some idea in our minds as to how Homer might have expressed the same thought, how Plato or Demosthenes would have raised it to the sublime. Emulation will bring those great examples before our eyes, illumining our path and lifting up our souls to the high standard of perfection, imaged on our minds”. Thus, linking sublimity of expression with sublimity of thought, Longinus assigns a higher purpose to the resulting ‘transport’. It signified a transport caused by the noblest thoughts finding their natural expression in the noblest language. This reflects the classicism of Longinus.
The second source of the sublime is vehement and inspired passion. What Longinus says of this natural source is unfortunately lost. There are scattered remarks in the work which throw light on what he thought of emotions as an important factor in sublimity. He asserts, “I would confidently affirm that nothing makes so much for grandeur as true emotion in the right place, for it inspires the words, with a wild gust of mad enthusiasm and fills them with divine frenzy”. It is for this reason that he prefers the Iliad to the Odyssey and Demosthenes to Cicero. Like stately thought, stately emotions also belong to the loftiest souls. They equally lead to loftiness of utterance. With these two expressions, ‘true emotion’ and ‘in the right place’, Longinus rather challenges Plato’s General distrust of emotions as men’s guides. Again, Aristotle had justified emotion by its cathartic effect, which is more moral than an aesthetic consideration. But Longinus values them primarily for the aesthetic transport they cause, though this transport may ultimately be found to be morally uplifting.
Of the artistic aids to sublimity the figures of speech occupy nearly one third of the treatise. In general, Longinus’ concern with oratory considers the use of figures from a different angle, where grandeur, ornamentation, imposition, strangeness and surprise are the chief functions of the figures of speech. The chief figures that make for sublimity are the rhetorical question, asyndeton, Hyperbaton, and Periphrasis. The rhetorical question is either a statement in question form that suggests its own answer, or a rapid succession of questions and answers. It makes a direct appeal to the passions. Asyndeton leaves words or clauses unconnected by conjunctions, where the rapid flow of the unconnected verbs suggests the excited mood in which they are uttered and which induces the same mood to the hearer or reader. Hyperbaton is an Inversion of the normal wonder of words, suggestive of a disordered utterance made under an emotional strain. The apparent disorder in succession expresses the meaning of the speaker more powerfully. Peripharsis is also a roundabout way of speaking. In modern terms, these have long ceased to have any charm of novelty, but certain combinations do impart loftiness to speech. One thing which Longinus mentions is that the figures aid the effect of sublimity only when they seem to arise naturally from the context. He adds, “A figure, therefore, is effective only when it appears in disguise”, that is, when it is shaded by the brilliance of the style.
Next, like all rhetoricians Longinus turns his attention to diction – “which comprises the proper choice of words and the use of metaphors and ornamented language”. A large portion of this part is lost. He says that words, when suitable and striking, have “a moving seductive effect” upon the reader and are the first things in a style to lend it “grandeur, beauty and mellowness, dignity, force, power and a sort of glittering charm”. He continues, … “it should be noted that imposing language is not suitable for every occasion. When the object is trivial, to invest it with grand style would have the same effect as patting a full sized tragic mask on the head of a little child”. This necessitates the use of common words.
Among the ornaments of speech Longinus considers Metaphor and Hyperbole. Apart from the views of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Quintilian, in one particular comment on metaphor, he strikes a new note. Longinus finds no justification in limiting the number of metaphors at a time. Metaphors being the language of passions, has no arbitrary rule. No writer could count the number of metaphors he is using nor the reader, when he is impassioned and carried away respectively. This is the romanticism of Longinus. Here, he goes against his Greek and Roman Predecessors and sanctity of rules. On hyperbole he has stated that like all great art it must conceal its art of appearance.
Lastly, Longinus considers the arrangement of words. It should be one that blends thought, emotion, figures and words themselves – the preceding four elements of sublimity into a harmonious whole. Such an arrangement, according to him, has not only “a natural power of persuasion and of giving pleasure but also the marvellous power of exalting the soul and swaying the heart of men”. It makes the reader share the emotions of the speaker. A harmonious composition alone sometimes makes up for the deficiency of the other elements and a proper Rhythm is one of the elements in this harmony.
All five sources of sublime could be seen in a single perspective: “the basis of division, a logician might say, is not single. The first two sources, thoughts and emotions, are coextensive not co-ordinate, with the other three sources. The quintuple division does not in reality constitute a single logical classification coextensive with the sources of the sublime”. The Longinian preoccupation with the genius of the poet suggests a question; whether the two ancient distinctions between poiesis, content and poiema, form are important in literary composition. The sources of sublimity even places this debate and distinction in a proper perspective, which Longinus takes up later in the essay for discourse.


III

Romantic CRITIC


Scott-James in The Making of Literature calls Longinus “the first romantic critic”, mainly for his insistence on passion, ecstasy, transport, imagination, intensity and exaltation. These are the chief romantice traits breathed by Longinus in the aesthetic criticism of the Classical Age.
With Longinus the classical criteria of literary perfection undergo a change. It had been supposed hitherto by the Greek and Roman critics alike that if a writer followed the rules of art, as deduced from the practice of the ancient masters, he could, with due help from nature, attain to perfection. In the words of Prof. G. Saintsbury – “The whole tendency of classical criticism is in this direction. The provision of large numbers of positive rules inevitably suggests – to the feebler minds, at any rate – that if you do not break these rules it will be all right with you. The nervous terror of excess has an even stronger influence in the same direction.” Much of Longinus’s own criticism follows this very line. He attempts to reduce sublimity ‘to the dry bones of rule and precepts’ and lays down injunction for the use of artistic aids to sublimity which read like those laid down by Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian and the rest. But in three ways Longinus breaks with this tradition.
First, it is instruction, delight and persuasion, all of which kept the reader within the bounds of reason. These are the classical ideal of literary perfection. Into this Longinus adds, “the storm and fury of romantic movement”, by admitting the full play of the passions in the production of a masterpiece. This freedom is the base of romantic temper. But it is true that he does not leave it entirely free. “For him”, Scott James says, “classicism was touched with Romance, but not darkened. His romanticism was sane and bright by dint of contact with the classical order. Though he was the first to expound the doctrines upon which romanticism rests, he turned, and tempered them with what is sanest classicism”. Without any guiding rules, Longinus cautions “Merely grandeur is exposed to danger when left without the control of reason and the ballast of scientific method. For the great passions need the curd as often as the spur”.
Secondly, his protest against the traditional limitation of the number of metaphors to not more than two at a time is in a romantic strain. Metaphorical usage gives a great strength of expression. Longinus is a romanticist in his theory of sublimity as he recommends to judge a work on the basis of its power to carry away, transport and move to ecstasy by its grandeur and passion through the nobility of diction.
Finally, while the classicists judge a work by its ‘faultlessness’ or close conformity to rules, Longinus sees no merit in it, if it does not lead to sublimity at the same time. He says, “Suppose we assume the existence of a writer who is really immaculate and unimpeachable, is it not worth while in this connection to raise the general question, whether in poetry and prose we should prefer grandeur with some attendant faults, or a style of mediocre quality, which never stumbles and is always free from error?” The illuminating answer is obvious: “Perhaps it is inevitable, that the low and average natures remain as a rule free from faults and secure of blame because they never aim at heights. In great natures, their very greatness brings them insecurity. “So Longinus prefers the ‘faulty’ Homer to the ‘faultless’ Apollonius, the ‘faulty’ Demosthenes to the almost ‘faultless’ Hyperides. His final observance to this matter has something to do with romanticism later on – “correctness escapes censure, but sublimity commands positive reverence. Each of these supreme authors often redeems all his mistakes by one sublime and happy touch.” This very attitude, Rhys Roberts says, “is subjective rather than objective rather than objective”. He is an enthusiast rather than an analyst. He is better fitted to fire the young than to convince the maturely sceptical. Longinus speaks rather of ‘transport or inspiration’ than ‘purgation or universal’.
According to Prof. Atkins, Longinus is an exponent of the genuine classical spirit, but he is, indeed, “the most modern of the ancient critics”. He is the first critic to assert that ‘style is the man’. Saintsbury rightly points out that Longinus has marked out grounds of criticism very far from those of the ancient Period, further still from any critic except Dante of the Middle Ages, and close to, if not all cases overlapping the territory of the modern romantic criticism itself.


IV

MODERNISM AND SUBLIMITY


To the modern reader, A.C. Bradley’s essay “The Sublime”, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, would help to appreciate the widening gap between the perception present in the romantic age and the perception of a modern mind, which is torn assunder, divided against himself. Bradley, himself a romantic critic, concluded with the idea of sublime in the expansiveness of the romantic consciousness merging into a spiritual greatness, beyond the boundless limits of finite forms. This directly refers to the appeal, the blissful imaginative vision, that aesthetic experience offers. But do we have any more of such experiences in modern art forms, specially in literature? Longinus has punctuated his remarks with frequent quotations from numerous Greek writers, including Plato, Homer, Sophocles, Demonsthenes, Xenophon, Thueydides, Sappho and Herodotus to illustrate the sense of astonishment, awe, rapture, grand, grace, beauty and above all, sublimity. Literature abounds in excesses of such experiences which we don’t even contemplate today. Even the word of Coleridge – ‘majestic’ is devoured in our age by stony confinements of realism. Why does modern literature fail to breathe sublimity as an aesthetic experience?
To answer such questions both the concepts of modernisation and modern consciousness need to be probed. These two, along with demodernisation, played a vital role in shaping the modern mind in the 20th century. Some of the features of modernism will portray the base of the literary topography of the modern writer.
(i) The central feature of the modern world is technological production. This brings with it anonymous social relations. The logic of the production process dictates control over “free flowing emotionality”. People need psychological engineering i.e. emotional management. People have reached a point where psychic tensions have started endangering the work process of modern man itself. The ‘scientific world view’ is different from the consciousness coloured by technological production.
(ii) The bureaucratic consciousness of ‘competence’ and ‘expertise’ has made life concentrated in focus.
(iii) Modern life is typically segmented to a very high degree and it is important to comprehend that this segmentation, (in other word, pluralisation) is manifest on social conduct and on the level of consciousness. The individual in a modern society is aware of a sharp and penetrating dichotomization between the world of his private life and the world of public institutions to which he relates in a variety of roles.
(iv) Modernity involves urbanization. Urbanization is a process of development of cities, institutions, communities, style of life, thinking, feeling, experiencing, reality and fantasy through media, mass communication, technological entertainment and consciousness. Today ‘urbanized’ refers to ‘the standard’ for the society at large.
(v) The new images of changes in the modern world inevitably collide with the symbols, values and beliefs of any traditional society. Any individual having a personal commitment to the tradition collides with a potent threat of changes.
(vi) The modern process of democratisation involves a belief in average man, none above average, all equal in degree and kind. The democratic set up does not permit to go beyond equality. The rigidity in the concept of average thwarts greatness, grand, majestic, both in and out of consciousness.
(vii) The greats wars, racial clashes, terrorism, political resettlements, withering away of values and morality, the satanic boast of power that corrupts inevitably, economic depression, the limitations of the fundamental rights of constitutions, the rush of inventions – the very world of flux looms large before the growing modern mind. The modern man is lost in this world of mass culture and starts a self reckoning amidst socially decaying and morally chaotic world order. In his search for identity the modern artist is ‘alienated’, encounters degrees of reality, finds the world ‘absurd’ and ends his quest either in ‘nothingness’ or in deceiving himself in a world of make-belief.
Thus, challenges in the field of the abnormal psychology mount up. We encounter maladaptive behaviour resulting from stress and coping, anxiety disorders, personality and mood disorders of childhood and adolescence, substance related and developmental disorders in our present society. Psychosomatic changes increase day by day causing alarm in both the clinical as well as in the academic spheres.
The creative artist hovers around uncertain poles of illusion. If the nature of the challenge to them is unique, the response is sure to be unexpected. The new genres like the short story, the one act play, the experimental novel, the war-poetry, the disjoint Lyric – are thus so typical of modern times. Amidst “violence upon the roads”, ‘dry pond’, the modern angler (the poet) could only try in vain to mix “memory and desire”, sitting where, “there is only rock and no water” and “Dry sterile thunder without rain”.
At the end of the 20th Century I could hardly see literary ventures that could be labelled as ‘sublime’ in the purest sense of the term. The demand and scope of creative consciousness fail to witness and envision anything that would enable us to appreciate the needed aesthetic experience of the ‘sublime’. Only two exceptions, I suppose, still remain: the sublime struggle of Paphnutius in Anatole France’s novel Thais and in the sublime quest of Santiago in Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man And the Sea. The nature and variation of the sublime in these two novels will be discussed later when I shall treat them separately in a new modern perspective.