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 2 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.

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 3 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 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 beautiful-good 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 4 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 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 5 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 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 6 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.

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. 7

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 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 8 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 awe- inspiring 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 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 9

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 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 10 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 on process rather than essentialism. Yet the 11 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.