5 Sol

Desire is lack, that’s how he felt to me; to love God is to feel his absence, an insistence without presence. It is plainly written: that no man has ever seen God, except for Christ, who came to declare Him. The death of Christ is an assent to affliction, assent to endure in his absence, without intervention. It is “God, please” until at last “It is finished.”

In Burke’s original analysis of the sublime, he links the experience of beauty to a sense of love the subject feels for an object, and the experience of sublime to a sense of fear one feels for the other. Depression in the psychoanalytic tradition stems from the loss of the object, and this depression masks a feeling of hatred toward the object for making itself so inaccessible.

Joining this framework to Burke’s aesthetic theory, just as depression is an inability to interface with the beloved object, I believe that an inability to interface with the feared other manifests as a sense of alienation which masks the opposite of that initial sense—in this case, it masks arrogance—as a way to cope with the irresolvable (see the master-slave dialectic).

And then, the experience of faith (the word to use here currently eludes me), which is attending to the absence. I allude to the older meaning of attend, in both French and English, which denotes patience and attention. The inability to interface with God’s quiet absence in this world engenders a sense of doom, which here masks rejection.

I have tried using this psychoanalytic framing of beauty and the sublime to elucidate an aesthetic experience of faith. Contrasting both the beautiful object whose presence substitutes absence, and the sublime scene which is so vast as to leave no voids of absence; it is spatially bounded yet its interiority is unknowable; exaggerative feelings like love or fear cannot extend or imbed it or even imagine an interiority conducive to extension or imbedding.

In a forest, there rises a hill with a great house upon it, and at the base of the hill behind the house is a modest dwelling for the servants of the estate. At night, from the window of these quarters, one can see the illuminated windows of the house, and silhouettes moving within.

By the sea, an insurmountable cliff rises over a field of dunes. Laying between hills of sand, the stranded gaze up at the unassailable rocks, and listen to the ceaseless waves.

In a valley, strewn with bones, there is a low cave where once a great wolf laired. It died a long time ago, but the place is still given a wide berth by all, now and forever at peace.

I imagine Heaven is a very small and sparse scene like these. And Hell then must be almost nothing. A single burning candle. All the evil in the world is contained in this still flame. It could be extinguished forever with no effort. And that is all which exists: a painting, a candle, the world.