Jewish Sublime

“Longinus” describes the sublime as “the echo of a great soul” (de Sublimitate, 9.2)). The sublime can be expressed in silence or in speech, and it can be found the terrible, awe-inspiring acts of the gods.

But Longinus worries that Homeric accounts of the gods “if they be not taken allegorically, they are altogether impious, and violate our sense of what is fitting. Homer seems to me, in his legends of wounds suffered by the gods, and of their feuds, reprisals, tears, bonds, and all their manifold passions, to have made, as far as lay within his power, gods of the men concerned in the Siege of Troy, and men of the gods. But whereas we mortals have death as the destined haven of our ills if our lot is miserable, he portrays the gods as immortal not only in nature but also in misfortune” (9.7)

It’s far superior to “represent the divine nature as it really is – pure and great and undefiled.” He gives a Homeric example, then draw a fitting depiction of the majesty of the gods from another source: “the legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed and expressed a worthy conception of the might of the Godhead, writes at the very beginning of his Laws, ‘God said’ – what? ‘Let there be light, and there was light; let there be land, and there was land’” (9.9).