Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger (review)

There seems to be something a little provocative in talking about the medieval sublime, bearing in mind that the European popularity of this term dates back only to the publication of Longinus’s treatise Peri Hupsos (On Sublimity), forgotten for many centuries, in a French translation, as Le traité du sublime, in 1674 (Philip Shaw, The Sublime [2005], p. 5). And yet, as we learn from the very useful Introduction to the book Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics, by C. Stephen Jaeger, the Latin notion of sublimitas was by no means unknown in earlier centuries and figured quite prominently in the writings of such medieval luminaries as St. Augustine, or Richard of St. Victor.

Certainly the most interesting aspect of the book in question is the introduction of the notion of “diminutive Middle Ages” (DMA), with the help of which Jaeger is able to put forward the following, strongly ironical, definition of the Middle Ages: “the Middle Ages is a period of small, quaint things and people, of miniatures, humble, little, overshadowed by its big neighbors—antiquity in the past and the Renaissance in its future—a conduit between the two; full of ingenious people and little intricate objects; a curiosity cabinet full to overflowing” (p. 5). It is clear enough that the book is meant to combat and to rectify this disparaging and patronizing conception of the Middle Ages, the conception that replaced, to some extent, the hostility toward the Middle Ages so characteristic of the enthusiastic advocates of rationalism and progress, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and yet DMA may no doubt do even more harm, if it were to become, or to persist, as the only, or the orthodox, way the Middle Ages are popularly perceived.

It seems to me that one of the aspects of this “diminutiveness” is the tendency to associate medieval culture with closure, and this may easily bring to mind the idea of hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), which, while having its attractive features, symbolizes also a certain impossibility of progress, arrested development, and the tendency to compartmentalize and classify everything in a rather rigid and dogmatic manner. It should be remembered, however, that the recurrent images and references to horti conclusi are usually connected with the motif of crisis offering radically new possibilities, as we observe in the scenes of Annunciation, featuring the Virgin Mary and archangel Gabriel, taking place in a hortus conclusus. Such is the context, for example, of Fra Angelico’s well-known painting representing the Annunciation (ca. 1426), in which we can see scenes from the Old Testament and allusions to the salvific sacrifice of Christ, Mary’s child, so that the enclosed garden is, at the same time, a garden that tries to contain the world.

As regards religious pictures, it might be interesting to notice that in Immanuel Kant’s conception of the sublime, as explained by Jaroslaw Płuciennik, the cult of the holy pictures was treated as an antithesis of the sublime. The Kantian sublime was then clearly a Protestant sublime, based on an iconoclastic, and partly Platonic, suspicion about mimetic representation that, apparently, trivializes the mystery of existence, curtails man’s imagination with its subversive and revolutionary power, and leads to an individual’s enslavement by a centralized and dogmatic power (see J. Płuciennik, Figury niewyobrażalnego [The Figures of the Unimaginable] (2002), p. 31). If this point of view is accepted, then there is little room for the genuine sublime in the Middle Ages, or rather in the mainstream of medieval culture, as there certainly were iconoclastic, and proto-Protestant, tendencies in it. It is enough to mention nominalist philosophy and the so-called apophatic theology with their strong prejudice against abstractions and metaphors.

It might appear that Curtius’s idea that the bold and innovative conceptions of Longinus were “strangled . . . by the tradition of mediocrity...