The Sources of Sublimity

Experienced readers quickly learn that not all uses of language affect the ear and eye at the same level or in the same way. Prior to all concerns about a text’s social, educational, or practical utility to whatever end, there exists a plain division between good writing and bad writing. Contemporary criticism fosters many conversations about “popular” versus “literary” styles, identities of narrator and author, and the role and nature of empathy. Yet most such conversations prescind from the question of good or bad writing — or pretend it does not matter — in ways that do not help students who want to, and must, simply learn how to write. Second, these conversations set readers talking past each other about what constitutes a compelling use of language, why it affects us the way it does, and how or whether language’s effects have any greater significance beyond themselves.

So what makes for good writing? To address the question from a clearer vantage point, we can step back all the way to a little book called On the Sublime by an anonymous first-century author known only as Longinus.

Longinus takes sublimity as his baseline criterion for good writing. He says that any writer with a desire to communicate should want to achieve sublimity, since “sublime passages exert an irresistible force and mastery, and get the upper hand with every hearer.” Anyone can pursue sublimity, but no one can pursue it without preparation. Writers need familiarity with existing works of good quality: “The very fact that certain effects of literature derive from nature alone cannot be learnt from any other source than art.”

For a passage to be sublime, though, it is not enough that it should stand out on its own, patched into a work of lower value. The work taken as a whole must rise toward sublimity the way the plain walls of a cathedral support the vaulted ceiling and the spire. Fine effects in writing are never reducible to mere decoration, but “reveal themselves by slow degrees as they run through the whole texture of the composition.”

And to whom do they reveal themselves? According to Longinus, the test of a writer’s greatness lies in his or her ability to persuade and appeal to a wide range of minds in a broad variety of circumstances, and across time: “[A] piece is truly great only if it can stand up to repeated examination, and if it is difficult, or rather impossible to resist its appeal, and it remains firmly and ineffaceably in the memory. … Sublimity in all its truth and beauty exists in such works as please all men at all times,” earning acclamation in “the unanimous judgment… of discordant voices.”

This view of Longinus’s presents a refreshing alternative to an academic clericalism in which the only persons capable of divining the true meaning of what is written are thought to be those with extensive training in theory and criticism. A sublime text invites a democratic diversity of readers as it marries depths to surfaces. Its fullness of meaning unfurls under close reading, yet a sublime text rewards even the most cursory engagement.

In their strivings to weave praiseworthy texts, Longinus tells us, writers can — and frequently do — fall into certain faults or flaws, sins against sublimity. He names four such main faults of prose for us. I take the liberty of translating them here into what are, arguably, their modern-day equivalents:

Turbidity is overwriting. Unforgettably, Longinus says of turbidity that “in discourse as in the human body, swellings are bad things.” Turbid prose inflames a topic until it is sore and tender to the touch. The best thing to do is ice it down and wait a while. As with a twisted ankle, elevation and compression might also help.

Puerility is mean-spiritedness, small-mindedness, pusillanimity. Puerile prose is shallow, lazy, sloppy. It spells out the obvious at agonizing length, or it fails to address objections that cry out for attention. It neglects key questions or lavishes attention on irrelevancies. In short, puerility is a failure of authorial self-control.

Frigidity is failure to engage adequately with one’s material. As Longinus describes it, frigidity frequently overlaps with, or can be ascribed to the root cause of, puerility: an immature preoccupation with the author’s own private concerns, where these do not touch relevantly on the serious matter supposedly being held up for common consideration. But where puerility presents more as an intellectual problem, frigidity appears in the guise of an emotional one. We might want to transliterate it as “tone-deafness.”

“Pseudo-bacchanalianism” is frigidity’s opposite. “Wallowing” might come closest to being its contemporary analogue. Longinus says little about pseudo-bacchanalianism except that it consists of excessively deep engagement in a matter having little or no relevance to the stated topic at hand. He describes it in terms of outbursts of emotion that come either as digressions from, or imagery that does not suit, a piece’s ostensible purpose.

The common thread that runs through these “defects against sublimity” is that they are manipulative, either of reality or of the reader’s perception or both. They seek to elicit a response in a dishonest way, by means of some distorted or fractional representation that diverts attention from a more salient point.

For example, whenever we can identify part of a story as mere decoration, not integral to the significance of the whole, Longinus tells us this is turbidity in pursuit of pseudo-sublimity: giving “an impression of grandeur by means of much adornment indiscriminately applied.” False grandeur — grandiosity — is manipulative because it seeks to divert our attention away to the author’s dazzling facility with words rather than to character, theme, setting, or plot. Now when splendid language brings out the realities hiding within reality, it is not manipulative but revelatory. But like a good architect, a good writer should decorate constructions, not construct decorations. To do otherwise risks “being shown up as mere bombast when these are stripped away.”

Sublime writing presupposes a high level of literary craft. Longinus implies that this craft can be learned by anyone, given time and opportunity, when he names the five sources of sublimity: (1) “the ability to form grand conceptions;” (2) “powerful and inspired emotion;” (3) a facility with figures of thought and of speech; (4) a working knowledge of diction, or the ability to select the most effective words from a range of possible choices; and, finally, (5) “dignified and elevated word-arrangement,” or the ability to structure a text both at the line level and in terms of the overall form.

Of these five, Longinus believes the first two must be given as a gift. They cannot be transmitted through teaching, though they can be encouraged by doing “all we can to train our minds toward greatness.” But the last three — figurative capacity, diction, and structure — can be acquired. These three skill sets largely define craft. Any aspiring writer must expect to work hard to attain them.

To that end, Longinus spends his later chapters in walking the novice writer through a variety of rhetorical devices and offering examples of how these work in classical texts. These chapters are interesting to the contemporary writer less as a practical manual — though they could certainly serve as one — than for their measured, even-handed, dispassionate tone. Both by instruction and by example, Longinus offers us a model of how to read, how to identify the parts of a work and their operation, and how to evaluate effects in prose, poetry, or speech. Whether or not we are already familiar with the classical texts he investigates, Longinus makes it easy for us to follow his critical lead, multiplying and evaluating passages from texts we do know.

There are two final ways Longinus may appeal to the contemporary reader and writer: First, we can honor his implicit insistence that sublimity, while rare, is not the province of some narrowly defined elite. Anyone can meet Longinus’ requirement to cultivate “a mind that is not mean or ignoble” as long as their circumstances allow them to retain some measure of control over their “thoughts and habits.”

Then, after all his insistence on the importance of careful construction and curation of linguistic craft, Longinus pays homage to the glory that can arise from “flawed sublimity” over against “flawless mediocrity.” What we should value most in the use of language, he says — what lends itself best to expression and to art — is not finally the exercise of perfect control over a text but, rather, an access to the depths and heights of human experience, even if that access encompasses “careless oversights let in casually and at random by the heedlessness of genius.” Given the chance to write either an “impeccable … faultless and elegant” text or else one full of “surges of divine inspiration … [that] seem at times to burn up everything before them as they go,” Longinus tells us there should be no contest: “Virtues which are greater in themselves” mean more than “the greater number of virtues.” The glow of the divine fire is to be preferred to any shine from human polishing.

Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and the author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood Books, 2021), Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord (Catholic Truth Society, 2021), and Fragile Objects, stories (Wiseblood, 2023, forthcoming). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society located at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.