we used to believe.

”29 Indeed, some theorists explicitly claim that the lack of genuine

religious commitment is a pre-condition for experience of the sublime: “talking about the

sublime,” says James Elkins, “is a way of addressing something that can no longer be

called by any of its traditional names.” Thus “the sublime has come to be the place

where thoughts about religious truth, revelation, and other more or less unusable concepts

have congregated.”30

This last claim overreaches, however, or is at least not entailed by any of the

claims about analogy. Otto, for instance, finds in the sublime a demythologized analogue

of religious experience, but also explicitly refuses to regard it as a replacement for the

latter. In his Kantian terminology, the sublime object is a “schema” of the numinous

—“something more than a merely accidental analogy” —and thus experience of the one

may well serve as stage along the way to experience of the other.31 In the same spirit,

Thomas Weiskel begins his influential book on The Romantic Sublime with the claim that

“without some notion of the beyond, some credible discourse of the superhuman, the

sublime founders.”32

29
James Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1997), 195. Thanks to Gordon Graham for this reference.

30
James Elkins, “Against the Sublime,” forthcoming in Beyond the Finite: The Sublime

in Art and Science, ed. Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd White (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2011).

31
Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 47.

32
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of

Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3.

32