The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4) / Hegel's Aesthetik

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

(a) The most direct way of bringing home to ourselves the significance of the above contrasted relations may be expressed in the statement that here for the first time we have Nature and the human form set before us cut off from the Divine, prosaic fact in short. It is a Greek tale that when the heroes of the Argonautic Expedition passed in their ships through the straits of the Hellespont, the rocks which hitherto had crashed open and shut like shears suddenly came to a standstill rooted firmly for evermore in the ground. In a manner somewhat similar the process of the finite toward stability in intelligible definition, as contrasted with the infinite essence, moves onward in the sacred poetry of the Sublime, while in the conceptions of symbolism, where we have the finite overturned in the Divine and the latter quite as frequently thrust forth from its own substance into temporal existence, nothing is permitted to keep its due position. If we turn, for example, from ancient Hindoo poetry to the Old Testament we find ourselves at once in a totally different atmosphere, one in which we feel ourselves thoroughly at home, however much we may discover in the circumstances, events, actions, and characters an environment either alien or different to that in which we live. From a world of tumble and confusion we are transported to another, and have human figures presented to us, which appear as natural as those we see with our eyes, characters with the stable outlines of patriarchal life, which in the truth of their delineation stand so near that they receive an immediate assent from our intelligence.

(b) In a general view of existence such as the above which is able to grasp the natural process of life and to accept as valid the claim of natural laws, wonder for the first time is a really active force. In Hindooism everything is a wonder and consequently is no longer wonderful. No wonder can enter a world where the intelligible connection of facts is invariably broken, where everything is wrested from its place and turned topsy-turvy. For the wonderful presupposes the rational sequence of events no less than the clear perceptions of ordinary consciousness which, when it meets with some example of causal effect produced by a higher law breaking the customary chain of events now for the first time notifies the exception as a wonder. Wonders of this kind, however, are no real or specific expression of the Sublime, for the reason that the ordinary course of natural phenomena is conceived as quite as much the product of the Will of God and evidence of Nature's submission as such interruption of the same.

(c) We must rather look for the real Sublime in the fact that under this view the entire created world is limited in time and space, with no independent stability or consistency, and as such an adventitious product which exists solely to celebrate the praise of Almighty God.

3. This recognition of the nullity of objective fact and the exaltation and extolment of God are at this stage the source of man's own self-respect, and in these he looks for his own consolation and satisfaction.

(a) In this connection the Psalms supply us with classical examples of the genuine Sublime, and are set forth as a precedent for all times of what our humanity at the highest point of its spiritual exultation has superbly expressed as the reflection of its religious consciousness. Nothing in the world can here make good its claim to independent subsistence, inasmuch as everything exists and subsists simply through the Power of God, and only exists as in duty bound to extol His mightiness no less than to acknowledge its own essential nothingness. In the imagination of pantheism, which mainly unfolded in the direction of material substance an infinite extension of range was most remarkable: what we most are amazed at here is the power of spiritual exaltation which suffers everything else to fall away that it may declare the unique Almightiness of God. An extraordinarily forceful illustration of this temper is the 104th Psalm, "The Light is Thy mantle which Thou wearest; Thou spreadest out the heavens like a carpet, etc." Light, heavens, clouds, the pinions of the winds, each and all are here nothing by themselves, merely an external vesture, the chariot or messenger in the service of God. A further expansion of the same idea is the extolment of the Wisdom of God, which has ordained all things. The springs, which leap from their sources, the waters, which flow between the hills, by the banks of which the birds of the air sit and carol among the branches; the grassy vine, which gladdens the heart of men and the cedars of Lebanon which the Lord hath planted; the sea, and its swarms without number; the whales which sport therein, all these hath the Lord made. And all that God has created He also preserves. "Thou hidest Thy Face, and they are affrighted; Thou takest their breath away and they are gone and become again as dust." The 90th Psalm, that prayer of Moses, the man of God, insists expressly on the nothingness of man, where we read: "Thou sufferest them to pass away like a brook; they are like as a sleep, even as the grass, which is soon withered, and in the evening is cut down and dried up. Thy scorn maketh us to pass away; Thou showest Thine anger and we are gone."

(b) Two ideas are therefore associated together with the Sublime, if viewed in its relation to the human soul, first, that of man's finiteness, and secondly, that of the insurmountable aloofness of God.

(α) For this reason the idea of immortality is not to be found where this mode of conception obtains in its original purity; for this idea involves the assumption that the individual self, the soul, the spirit of man is essentially a self-subsistent entity. In the religion of the Sublime it is only the One that is apprehended as imperishable; opposed to that all else merely subsists and passes away, is neither essentially free nor infinite.

(β) And, further, on a similar ground man is conceived in his absolute unworthiness before God; his exaltation consists in the fear of the Lord, in a trembling before His scorn. Over and over again, with a directness which tears aside every veil and opens the very depths, we have the cry of the soul to God depicted, the sorrow over the sense of its nothingness, increasing lament and groanings unutterable.

(γ) On the other hand if the individual persist in his finiteness of opposition to God, this deliberately willed persistence is wickedness, which as evil and sin belongs only to the natural and human condition, and is conceived as remote from the One undifferentiated substance as pain and everything else that is essentially negative.