Chapter 35: Sublimity and Human Nature
But in the case of Plato there is, as I was saying, another difference; you see, not only in the greatness of his excellences, but also in their number does he fall short; and he has, besides, more in the way of mistakes than he has deficiency in excellences. 2. Now what did those authors, equals of the gods, understand as they desired what is greatest in writing and felt themselves to be above precision in all details? It was, in addition to many other things, this: that nature did not decide that man would be a low or ignoble animal; but leading us into life and into the whole cosmos as if into a kind of world’s fair to be, in a way, its observers and to be lovers of the esteem which comes to those who compete, immediately she implants into our souls an erotic passion which cannot be fought for all that is great and more daemonic than we. 3. For just this reason not even the entire cosmos taken together can cope with the thrust of human theorizing and percep tiveness, but man’s intentness on perceiving often everywhere goes out beyond the limits of what holds him in, and if anyone gaze around at life in its cycle, he will swiftly understand for what purpose we were born, by seeing how much what is “too much” and great and fine holds more advantage in all things. 4. Therefore we are (heaven knows) somehow driven by nature to wonder not at small streams, even if they are clear and useful, but at the Nile and the Danube and the Rhine, and still more at the Ocean; nor, of course, are we more astounded by that little flame which we kindle, when it preserves a pure gleam, than by the gleam of the heavenly bodies, though they are often gloomed over, nor do we generally consider it more worthy of wonder than the craters of Aetna, whose eruptions carry up n,x:ks and whole mounds from its abyss and sometimes pour forth rivers of that single earthbred fire. 5. But in all such things we may say this, that though what is useful or even necessary has for humanity an easy passage, still, what is contrary to opinion is over and over again wonderful.
Commentary
Longinus now resumes arguing the respective merits of Plato and Lysias, which he had interrupted at the end of ch. 32 in order to compare Hyperides and Demosthenes. The purpose of the parenthetical comparison was twofold:
- to show that Caecilius did not even know how to conduct a comparison in the conventional rhetorical terms which he thought were his premises; and
- to clear the ground for establishing the true principles and premises of literary criticism, especially criticism of the sub lime.
In comparing Hyperides and Demos thenes, Longin us had used convention al rhetorical premises: the excellences and correctnesses; he had, however, made the fundamental distinction be tween a) enumerating these—as if aes thetic judgments could be quantified— and b) judging them by the standard of truth. Now, as he again takes up his comparison of Plato and Lysias, he introduces an important qualification of these two principles: in dealing with Hyperides and Demosthenes, he had confined himself to the number of excel lences and to correctness; in dealing with Plato and Lysias, however, he uses the new criterion which he has been suggesting throughout chs. 32-34: not the number of virtues but their inten sity; not the mere absence of vices but their presence as the necessary cost of intense greatness. Hyperides, Longin us admits, is superior to Demosthenes if one uses only the number of excellen ces; but Plato is easily equal in the number of excellences. Where Plato falls behind Lysias is in the number and excessiveness of his faults and mistakes. In fact, Longin us concedes, Plato’s vices constitute a greater basis for censure than any deficiency in excellences. It will be Longinus’ purpose, in ch. 35, to show that the vices of Plato are the necessary concomitant of his greatness, and that Plato’s greatness could not have been achieved without the vices. He almost takes it for granted that Pla to’s greatnesses are superior—when they do occur—to anything in Lysias. The mixture of virtue and vice in Plato is like that found in the universe itself.
Russell observes that “The themes of this passage are for the most part philosophical commonplaces, some Stoic in origin, some Platonic or even Pythagorean. L is a typical, though unoriginal, witness to a type of piety and moral reflection which formed the common spiritual fare of the educated in the first two centuries or so of the Empire.” Russell goes on to distinguish four themes, which he discusses with parallels drawn from other authors:
- “The nobility of man”
- “Man is in the cosmos as a spectator and contestant in a marvellous panegyric”
- “The human mind is capable of passing in thought everywhere, even beyond the bounds of the cosmos”
- “For what purpose were we born?”
If “borrowing” or “plagiarism” is a form of imitation, what shall we say of dealing with those ideas which have been treated by one’s whole culture? The “history of ideas” is an essential branch of history, but we do not find it useful ourselves to classify a major statement in a late stage of such history as a “commonplace.” For Longinus, as for Johnson, such dismissal would have been a compliment: “great ideas are always general,” Johnson said, borrow ing from Longinus even as he stamped the commonplace with the cast of his own genius. Perhaps the most minimal definition of wit is that of Pope: “What oft was thought but ne’er so well ex pressed” (Essay on Criticism II.298); as Johnson says, in the life of Cowley, it reduces wit “from strength of thought to happiness of language.” But even if Longinus could claim no higher wit than this, he would command our attention, for the sources and analogues cited by Russell in his notes are far too often lost to us, and we are in no posi tion to make any kind of distinction, invidious or otherwise, about either the “strength of thought” or the “happi ness of language.” Russell’s admission that these are “philosophical” commonplaces is of the utmost importance, for Longinus is not simply talking about philosophy but-in what is, as far as we can tell, an original way-about the relevance of such observations to liter ary criticism. As this chapter is the heart of his theory of sublimity, and of his difference with Caecilius, we must be prepared to see in the ideas, common places though they may be philosophi cally, a power of expression and convic tion that merit the exaltation of feeling which all readers experience on reading them.
low: Russell suggests that Longinus may have in mind the ancient teleology of man’s upright stature: he cites Cicero (On the Nature of the Gods2.140): god “who first stood them aloft and upright so that, gazing on the sky, they might grasp an understanding of the gods.” To this we may add Ovid’s famous pic ture at the beginning of the Metamor phoses (l.85 ff), where the phrase os sublime is used. Segal (p. 145, n. 33) cites contemporary sources which collect passages expressing the idea.
life: the Greek word, bias, from which we derive “biology” and “biography,” originally had the sense of organic existence; after Plato the word almost always suggests quality or way of life. This sense of development seems to be in Longinus’ mind as he first says that man was not intended to be a low or ignoble living creature (i.e., his poten tial existence) and then says that nature led him into “life (bias)” in order to lead a certain kind of life, one with quality. He describes this quality in his word for “world’s fair” (see below).
world’s fair: panegyric, the Greek word, came to mean “celebrating a public fes tival” and then the public festival itself; later it referred to a speech delivered in such an assembly, especially a speech of praise. The most famous of the ancient panegyrics is that of Isocrates. In the rhetorical handbooks, a panegyric was a kind of epideictic or “display” speech, which could be of either praise or cen sure (Nicholas the Sophist, Progym nasmata (Spengel III.450]); Hermo genes, in his book On Ideas (Spengel 11.403), associates it especially with Plato. Such speeches dealt with the state and its culture as a whole. Isocrates, for example, praises Athens because, unlike other Greek states, it did not hold “world’s fairs” from time to time but was instead a perpetual and year-long “world’s fair” (Panegyricus 46).
There isa good account of what such a “world’s fair” was like in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (8.18): it has sacred groves and shrines and race-courses and a theatre and races of men from neighboring countries and from foreign lands and from overseas; many arts go to make it up, and many kills and much true wisdom of poets and advisers and philosophers and athletic contests and musical con tests… it collects and domiciles the most important of what is important and the most praised of what is praised.
Just as the small city-state ( the polis) became, in the Hellenistic period, the “cosmopolis,” or “city of the world,” so Longinus expands the metaphor to make the cosmos itself a “world’s fair,” to which all men are sent by nature as “spectators” and “observers.”
observers: Men in general are sent by nature, says Longin us, into the world as spectators in a theatre or at the Olympic games. Thus far he seems to agree with the Pythagorean, Platonic, and Aris totelian theory, that the contemplative (i.e., theoretical) life was superior to the active (i.e., practical) life. So Pythago ras, in a famous analogy to which Lon gin us is alluding, says that men come to life as they do to the Olympic games, for three purposes: to sell merchandise to others and make a profit; to compete for glory in physical contests; to see fine sights (Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 58). This third group, Pythagoras said, was “of course the freest.” Such de tachment, such a sense of superiority to the sweat and struggle of life, marks the Pythagorean pan of Plato and of Aris totle, when they praise the spectators over the other groups. In the perversion of the notion which occurred during the Hellenistic period, we find the philo sophy of Epicureanism, just as we find a parallel perversion of the Socratic Pla to’s concern for civic life in Hellenistic Stoicism. Cynicism tried, paradoxically, to combine the two.
Longinus here takes his place with the Socratic Plato and against the Pytha gorean Plato: he sees the need for the contemplative life, but only as a means to participation in the life of this world like the philosopher in the Socratic allegory of the cave (Republic 7.514 ff). For Longinus, as for Cicero, gazing on the heavens and the cosmos was a way of enabling the politician and statesman to understand the hierarchy of things and his dual obligation to it-to study the divine order above as a means of enabling him to govern the human order below both idealistically and com passionately (Cicero, On Old Age 77).
Even Isocrates, who did not himself deliver speeches and share in the hurly burly of political life, recognized that one must descend into the arena and compete (Helen 9 ff), and if Isocrates did not himself participate vocally, he trained his students to do so.
lovers of the esteem: the love of ambi tion may, of course, work for either good or ill.
Longin us intended his book as an aid to men entering active political life; he is, then, a latter-day Isocrates, with more taste and wit but not different in aim. Nature implants a dual desire in us: to see the greatness in and of the world and then to imitate and rival it. The greater the thing we observe, the greater our desire to master it, up to and beyond the cosmos itself.
erotic passion: in 15.3, Longinus uses the word quite literally to signify one of Euripides’ thematic specialities. His only other uses of the noun are metaphorical: in 4. I, Caecilius is said to have an “erotic passion”—a positive mania, as it were—for exciting, strange conceptions. Such an “erotic passion” grows from the same source as man’s natural “erotic passion” for greatness mentioned here in ch. 35. Galen (On the Natural Faculties 3.10) shows that the metaphor was still alive in the second century A.D.: the young student, he says, should have a kind of “erotic passion” for the truth, “just as if he were inspired.”
thrust: one may think of Matthew Arnold’s notion of religion as language “thrown at” what he called “the power not ourselves” (God and the Bible, passim).
Russell aptly cites Lucretius (1.72 ff.):
Therefore the living force of the soul had conquered and gone out beyond the far-flaming walls of the universe and has travelled, in mind and soul, its whole immen sity.
Another parallel, found in Aristotle’s (or pseudo-Aristotle’s) book On the Cosmos (I) is especially apposite, for here the author contrasts the philoso phic attempt to transcend the cosmos with the physical attempt of the Aloa dae, whom Longinus discussed in 8.2; similarly, in 9.5, Longinus quotes the Homeric passage on the magnificent· leaping of Poseidon’s horses, which would, in two leaps, have measured out the cosmos.
cycle: the emphasis on circularity is not uncommon. We may compare Shake speare’s sonnet 21: “that heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.” Shakespeare here seeks to transcend all the elements of the universe, and to reach truth itself. Longin us is probably exploiting many of the applications of the Greek word (kyklos): a dance, the sky, the sun, other heavenly bodies, the eyes, the cyclic epic poems, the cyclic theory of the universe, and the rhetorical meaning of a perio dic sentence, of which his own sentence is a splendid example.
too much: probably a deliberate echo of the verb “he has more” (literally, “he has too much”) used just above (35.1); Plato, Longinus conceded, often had “too much” in the way of faults-and yet only because he sought to be exces sive did he succeed in being sublime. Not all excess is bad, as Longinus shows by adding the words “great and fine” to its use here.
what holds him in...holds more: it is impossible to duplicate in English the sequence of puns and word-plays which Longin us makes here. Man gazes at the rondure of the cosmos, imitates and emulates its cosmic greatness, and seeks to transcend it by holding in that which holds him in, by containing more than his container.
the Nile...the Rhine: a famous pas sage, much admired in the eighteenth century. The illustration may be a glancing censure of Callimachus and his doctrine of the small, elaborated poem: in the Hymn of Apollo (108 ff.), Callimachus said that big poems were like big rivers—turgid.
Hume conflates both passages in his essay “Of the Middle Station in Life,” where he imagines a dialogue between two rivulets, one of which has suddenly grown much larger and speaks of rival ing the “Danube or the Rhine.” To this “the humble rivulet” replies:
You are indeed swain to a great size; but methinks you are become withal somewhat turbulent and muddy. I am contented with my low condition and purity.
Russell quotes some lines from Aken side’s Pleasures of the Imagination (i), a poem which in tum derives from Addi son and Longinus; Addison discusses the topic in several of the Spectator pap ers, especially #412:
Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its capac ity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views and feel a delightful still ness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them. The mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a res traint upon it. …
Akenside is even closer:
Who but rather turns
To heaven’s broad fire his un constrained view,
Than to the glittering of a waxen flame?
Who from the Alpine heights his laboring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains,
through empires black with shade
And continents of sand, will tum his gaze
to mark the windings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet?
The allusion to the Alps probably owes something to Pope (Essay on Criticism Il.223-32), although in Pope the Alps become partly a symbol of discourage ment at the immensity of the cosmos. Hamlet’s soliloquy is similar in senti ment (IV.iv):
Sure, He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave 1,1s not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.
In Marlowe’s Faustus, the transcendent aim becomes demonic rather than dae monic, as it does in many writings of the Romantic poets. Emerson echoes the sentiment powerfully in his essay Circles:
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imper ceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger cir cles, and that without end…if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innu merable expansions.
The notion degenerates, in the twen tieth century, into such bombast as the close of Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (quoted in ch. 3); the shift from a circular to a linear conception of the cosmos is influential in the degeneration, as is the movement from the idea of a “cosmos” or “universe” to what J. Robert Oppenheimer called a “pluralistic multiverse.” In such a world, Pas cal’s cry seems more relevant: “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
the Ocean: the word in Greek would have something of the same effect as “Nile” and “Rhine,” for ocean was a god and a proper name; hence the capitalization.
Aetna: Longinus, we may legitimately presume, has in mind Pindar’s famous description of Mt. Aetna (Pythian 1.21 ff), for Aetna was not violently active in the first century ce Pliny the Elder (Natural History 2.1l0.236) says only that it “always glows at night.” Had Longin us written after the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., we might perhaps have expected him to mention it here, as he uses more than one river to make his point. For the possible effect of this argument on dat ing Longinus, see Dating.
Longinus is using the allusion to return to his defence of Plato: the great and sublime artist is like a volcanic eruption: a mass of rocks and debris and pure unapproachable fonts of fire.
wonderful: Longinus is aware of his own exaltation: his closing sentence is conversational in tone, a gentle apology for his flight of fancy into what Sir Thomas Browne calls O altitudo. The observation is founded in human nature, e.g., Tacitus’ omne ignotum pro mag nifico (everything unknown is taken for something great) or Demetrius’ more pallid expression (60): “Everything that is familiar is petty, and for this reason is lacking in wonder.” Longinus makes two additional points by his different wording: the sense of wonder will keep on occurring provided that it is “con trary to opinion.” Phenomena like the ocean never can become familiar, for they are like the cosmos-too big to be grasped except in sublime moments.
We may contrast Whitman’s attempt to invest the familiar with a sense of wonder (Song of Myself 31):
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars…
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with de press’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
