Western aesthetics has made a whole lot of a supposed distinction between “the attractive” and “the chic”: “chic” referring to issues like excessive mountains and the starry evening that make us really feel awe, make us really feel small in a great way. Indian rasa theory would seemingly confer with this sense as adbhūta rasa, the style of surprise. I like awe-inspiring pure phenomena – Bryce Canyon, Todra Gorge – and I discover the time period “chic” useful to explain them. However I’ve lengthy discovered myself mildly puzzled by the distinction. It appears apparent to me that mountains and gorges are lovely – their sublimity is one selection, one form, one species, of magnificence. But writers on “the chic” are likely to deal with it as one thing completely different from magnificence. Why?
I’ve discovered reply to this query in a fabulous previous e-book by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, entitled Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. I turned to this e-book out of curiosity a few associated however barely completely different phenomenon: the various generations of people that thought mountains have been not lovely. In premodern England a minimum of, it seems that it was commonplace to view mountains as ugly, as “warts” or “tumours”, deformities of nature. In a world the place the goodness of God’s creation was assumed, writers usually didn’t view mountains’ majesty as proof of God’s personal majesty, however slightly felt the necessity to justify why and loving God would deign to create such excrescences. Why was that?
Nicolson’s e-book walks us by way of a variety of English writers on mountains. The one she rightly spends probably the most time on is Thomas Burnet’s 1684 The Sacred Principle of the Earth, largely forgotten now however extremely influential in its personal time. Burnet’s personal major curiosity was not in aesthetics however in harmonizing theology and geology; for us in the present day, although, The Sacred Principle is most attention-grabbing due to the sunshine it sheds on the historical past of aesthetics. It’s on this work, Nicolson says, that “for the primary time in England we discover a sharp distinction between the emotional results of the chic and the lovely in exterior Nature…” (222, her emphasis) The excellence is especially fascinating to look at as a result of it displays a battle inside Burnet himself.
Burnet visited the Alps and Apennines and reacted to them as we moderns seemingly would: he discovered himself “rapt” and “ravished”, and famous of the ocean and the mountains that “in anyway hath however the Shadow and Look of INFINITE, as all Issues have which might be too massive for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the Thoughts with their Extra, and forged it into a lovely sort of Stupor and Admiration.” (quoted in Nicolson 214; all additional web page references are to her e-book) This a lot appears pure to us.
But it’s within the similar chapter of his e-book, the primary chapter, that Burnet views mountains with the older sort of horror and alarm:
These Mountains are plac’d in no Order one with one other, that may both respect Use or Magnificence; and in the event you take into account them singly, they don’t encompass any Proportion of Components that’s referable to any Design, or that hath the least Footsteps of Artwork and Counsel. There’s nothing in Nature extra shapeless and ill-figur’d than an previous Rock or Mountain… in the event you look upon an Heap of them collectively, or a mountainous Nation, they’re the best Examples of Confusion that we all know in Nature; no Tempest or Earthquake places Issues into extra Dysfunction. (210)
The ocean is even worse. If we may view its backside, “how horribly and barbarously would it not look? And with what Amazement ought to we see it lie below us like an open Hell, or a large bottomless Pit? So deep and hole and huge, so damaged and confus’d, so each the place deform’d and monstrous…. it seems to me probably the most ghastly factor in Nature.” (173-5)
So what’s happening right here? How can the identical creator, in the identical chapter, discover himself “rapt” and “ravished” with a “pleasing sort of Stupor and Admiration” by one thing that can’t “both respect Use or Magnificence”, or may even be “probably the most ghastly factor in Nature”?
The reply, I believe, lies within the particular view of magnificence that Burnet inherited. Burnet was a disciple of Henry More, a number one determine among the many Seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists. Extra didn’t really feel Burnet’s rapture at mountains. To Extra it was pure to confer with “these rudely-scattered Mountains, that appear however so many Wens and unnatural Protuberances upon the Face of the Earth…” (116) Why would an all-powerful omnibenevolent God create such impolite protuberances? As a result of they’re helpful: they condense salt water into recent. What they don’t seem to be, in accordance with Extra, is lovely.
It issues so much right here that the Cambridge Platonists have been Platonists – and Christian Platonists at that, bringing medieval Platonic Christianity right into a post-Renaissance and post-Reformation age. In his work on the topic, Umberto Eco reminds us that medieval Europeans took from Plato a way of rational order. Magnificence was a matter of symmetry and proportion, all the pieces in the appropriate place. And mountains are – not that. They’re craggy, irregular. Nicolson thinks that Burnet spent his English youth fortunately taking a look at the fantastic thing about church buildings and bushes, and studying books to theorize them – however within the Alps discovered one thing very different. Issues on heaven and earth that aren’t dreamed of in Horatio’s philosophy. So no matter Burnet may need seen within the mountains with pleasing admiration, it wasn’t magnificence. That phrase was reserved for issues that made rational sense of their symmetry and proportion, which mountains weren’t.
Right here, I believe, was born the fashionable thought of the chic. Westerners wanted a solution to speak about adbhūta rasa, the pleasurable expertise of surprise and awe, even when it was directed to not one thing as rationally ordered as a saksit cathedral, however to one thing as unruly and irregular as a mountain. However that approach couldn’t be by way of magnificence, because the Platonist and Christian Center Ages had reserved that time period for what appeared in rational order. Mountains and oceans needed to be one thing else, and that one thing was chic.
I get the enchantment of an aesthetic of rational order. There’s nice magnificence in symmetry and proportion – or for that matter in Euler’s equation. However, it appears to me, there’s additionally nice magnificence within the majesty of a craggy and irregular mountain. When one’s metaphysics allowed one to consider that the entire universe was a piece of rational order, it made sense to order “magnificence” for these phenomena that expressed that order of their outward look (and never simply of their perform). However I don’t see why there’s any want to try this any longer. Maybe a few of us nonetheless maintain a Platonist Christianity, however most don’t. For the remainder of us, is there something now that ought to maintain us again from saying merely: the chic is one sort of magnificence?
