spiritualistic sublime, the dymythologistic sublime, and the non-theistic sublime.

These

models depict four main ways in which sublime experience relates to the defining

features of religious life—i.e., to what Rudolf Otto calls experience of the “numinous”, to

the acceptance of religious doctrine, and to the behaviors and affections that often

characterize religious practice.3 We conclude (section 4) with a survey of what we regard

as the main prospects and obstacles for theoretical attempts to bring the domains of the

religious and the sublime together in this way.

2. The sublime: discursive preliminaries

It is worth noting right away that we do not take ourselves to be characterizing

the concept of the sublime, largely because (as the various chapters of this volume

indicate) there is more than one concept that goes by the name. In contemporary

parlance, “sublime” functions as a term of general approbation: a high-brow version of

“awesome” that can be ascribed without irony to almost any object, person, or quality

that produces pleasure (it doesn’t sound odd to speak of a politician’s “sublime speech,”

or a chef’s “sublime cake” or even a philosopher’s “sublime beard”). This everyday

concept is thus distinct from—or at most an extremely watered-down descendent of—the

more technical eighteenth-century concept, which makes essential reference to sensory

experience of art or nature. The authors who established the contours of the latter (Baillie,

Addison, Burke, Kant) also tend to construe genuine sublime experience as requiring two

distinct moments: first, a feeling of being dazzled and even terrified in the face of
3
See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford, 1958), chap. 2. The term

derives from the Latin ‘numen’ which literally means “nodding” but has been used since

Roman times to refer to divine presence and will.