Abstract
Ronald F. Thiemann, The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief, I. B. Tauris: London, 2014; 256 pp.: 9781780767444, £56.00 (hbk)
The Humble Sublime gives an important new focus to the reconsideration of secularity. We can hardly deny that ours is a secular age, if we think of the sacred in moral or metaphysical terms. We no longer share a common world-view that links us to a transcendent reality. Nevertheless, there are experiences of beauty and order in which the reality available to our senses seems far from ‘mundane’. We experience the world in a way that raises an awareness of our own dignity and at the same time gives us a sense of obligation that goes with that awareness. We see who we are and begin to understand what we must do. That kind of beauty, which some have called ‘the sublime’, transcends the categories of sacred and secular, or mystical and empirical. It seems to be both generally and immediately available and at the same time to disclose something beyond what our senses tell us.
Thiemann’s work is particularly concerned with the sublime as it is available to us in art and literature, especially in a kind of artistic realism that arranges everyday things to make us aware of a larger reality. Rembrandt’s Holy Family or Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus seem so commonplace that they draw us effortlessly into the reality they depict, only to show us something awesome going on within the ordinary.
Not just any kind of beauty performs this function. Nature is inspiring, but it is also ambiguous. Abstract art may be beautiful, but it often fails to connect with reality. Thiemann is concerned with mimesis, a realistic representation that interprets without distorting, in such a way that the larger reality that the artist sees in the scene or the story becomes present to us, too. In this aesthetic theology, the contrast between belief and unbelief is narrowed. It is not so easy as it seems for the moralist or the theologian to say who is faithful and who is not.
The Humble Sublime begins with a lucid presentation of this ‘sacramental realism’, then traces it in the work of four writers who represent the modern ambiguity of faith and unfaith: Anna Akhmatova, Langston Hughes, George Orwell and Albert Camus. The ambiguity comes full circle as the study of Camus moves seamlessly to a reflection on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The four studies are not always fully connected back to the initial chapter on sacramental realism. This last and most creative theological work from Ronald Thiemann is in some ways incomplete, but it nonetheless rewards careful reading and reflection. It is also enhanced by remembrances and explications provided by his family, colleagues and former students. If the project is incomplete as we have it from his hands, it is realized in the work of those who learned from him and in the institutions that bear his imprint.