#1672

Fall-from-Grace from Planescape Torment

"Fall-from-Grace is a creature of contradictions. She is a cleric but worships no god. She is formed from pure chaos and evil, but is lawful neutral with a good bent. She runs a Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts. Perhaps the oddest of all, she is a beautiful succubus, but is by all appearances chaste. While many in-game characters are quick to indicate her heritage and proclaim that she must have some sort of demonic and evil scheme, no such plot on her part is ever indicated. She is a member of the Society of Sensation, who believe that truth and understanding can only come from personal experience and seeking out the unknown and unusual."

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The Idea of the Sublime in the Enlightenment

During the European Enlightenment, a concept was developed in philosophy and aesthetics called the sublime. In the arts, literature, and the works of intellectuals, the sublime referred to the awe-inspiring capacity of nature and beauty, characteristics that artists and thinkers sought to replicate in their own work and even to apply to ethics.

The concept of the sublime involves the inherent conflict which comes from an appreciation of beauty with a feeling of awe, astonishment, and incomprehension of the eternal. Philosophers discussed this conflict and suggested that our aim should be the harmonious blending of reason with emotion, and so the sublime became an element of the great shift during the Enlightenment which saw reason come to replace religion as the dominant driving intellectual force.

Origins of the Sublime

The idea of the sublime was revitalised during the Enlightenment thanks to the translation of an ancient text by Boileau in 1672. This text, only rediscovered in 1554, was On the Sublime, then thought to have been written by Longinus, a Greek author of the 1st century CE. J. W. Yolton summarises Longinus' thoughts on the sublime as:

…that quality which gives a distinctive power to works of art and literature; it rest primarily on grandeur of ideas and the capacity for strong emotion, supplemented by certain features of rhetoric; sublimity is the echo of a noble mind and a passionate heart.

(508)

Although he is primarily concerned with poetry and oratory, Longinus also writes about the sublime in nature and how impressive natural features and phenomena like wide plains, rugged mountains, and powerful rivers can bring out in all (or most) of us a pleasure at beholding them and a clearer sense of and proximity to the divine.

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy gives the following definition of the sublime: "The sublime is great, fearful, noble, calculated to arouse sentiments of pride and majesty, as well as awe and sometimes terror" (462-3). The sublime then creates a strange mixture of feelings like pleasure, awe, anxiety, personal insignificance, and even fear and terror; think of one's mixed emotions, for example, when standing above a precipice gazing down on a majestic Norwegian fjord.

The idea of the sublime in nature and the arts would capture the imagination of many writers, artists, and philosophers during the Enlightenment. The sublime, with its focus on immense grandeur and unfathomable meanings, seemed at odds with the progress being made by science where discovering nature's laws and order were the objectives of knowledge. Philosophers attempted to reconcile this conflict between emotion and reason and to show that the mind can indeed triumph over nature. A wide range of Enlightenment thinkers considered the sublime as part of their philosophy but here, in the interests of space and clarity, we will consider only three.