How To Be An Agnostic
The connection between wonderment and the sublime is to do
with the overpowering sense that is inspired in such landscape,
suggesting that there are values intrinsic in nature that human
beings should respect as well as study. This can be forgotten.
Scholars suggest that, in its American guise, sublime landscape
connects directly with the religious origins of the country. The
West, for example, was called God’s country. Paintings can suggest
that the New World is an emanation of the divine. Holiness and
spirituality are then readily coupled to national pride and destiny.
Thus, as professor of art history Roger Hull writes:
American nature was emblematic of America’s size, strength,
cultural and economic potential, and materialistic potential.
American nature was unlike any other in the world, and cer-
tainly different (and by implication ‘better’) than the old,
used, domesticated nature of England and Europe. William
Cullen Bryant urged his friend Thomas Cole, the American
landscape painter who had been born in England, to soak up
in his imagination ‘that wilder image’ of American scenery
before he took a trip to England and the continent. Bryant’s
advice was a warning to Cole to remember the virility of
American nature and not be seduced by the gentler forms of
nature he would encounter on his trip.This sensibility is therefore very different from that of the
agnostic. For people like Bryant, at least, landscape is expressive
of what human beings are capable of, not of their limits.
The opposing view is found in the writings of nineteenth-
century agnostic and mountaineer, Leslie Stephen. His book
The Playground of Europe, in which he describes the peaks of
the Alps, is still in print. He argued that, before the industrial
era, most peoples had just feared mountains. Now, though, in
what was called the golden age of mountaineering, they loved
them because, though climbable, they challenge. For climbing
a mountain is not the same as conquering it (as in the thought
that men and women can conquer nature). Rather, mountains