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The Sublime Codes of Manu: Law and Eighteenth Century Orientalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
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The first disquisition given to the concept of the sublime, written by the anonymous Greek Pseudo-Longinus, famously mourns the passing of the pagan relationship between gods and men. In his essay on the work of Pseudo-Longinus, the French poet Michel Deguy states that “the question of the sublime was doubtless first of all an attempt to measure the decline of the Orient, to measure the author's distance from the time of gods and heroes.” For Deguy, the Longinian tradition of emphasising the sublime as a key feature of rhetoric must be regarded as an attempt to establish some hope of a truly exalted discourse at a time in which man moves further and further away from his sacred relationship to the highest of origins. Such nostalgia obviously colours every cycle of secularisation; from paganism to Christianity to modernity and beyond. If each period of secularisation generates a more worldly state of affairs, or flatter discourses, it also produces a Longinian longing for a more vertical axis to explain our mortality.
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References
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