“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,” he wrote,
“when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and
astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are
suspended, with some degree of horror.” He loved a torrential
waterfall, a violent storm, a dark grove. He would have made a good
raft guide.
According to Burke, for something to be truly awe-inspiring, it
must possess “vastness of extent” as well as a degree of difficulty in
our ability to make sense of it. That awe also inspires feelings of
humility and a more outward perspective has been well described by
philosophers, priests and poets. Until Burke, awe was considered the
purview and foundational emotion of religious experience. The word
“awe” derives from Old English and Norse words for the fear and
dread one felt before a divine being. It isn’t for nothing that many
churches play up the music, the visions, the robes and architectural
heights and spans. These elements fill us with wonder, humility and a
bit of trepidation.
In liberating the feeling of awe from the fabric of religion, Burke
heavily influenced Kant, Diderot and Wordsworth, who all wrote of
the power of the sublime to shore up the imaginations and mental
perceptions of humans. In America, Emerson picked up Burke’s
themes of vastness and humility, writing in his famous essay
“Nature” in 1836, “Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by
the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing.” That secular
transcendence still informs the modern environmental movement.
Later, Einstein would say, “The most beautiful emotion we can
experience is the mysterious.” You may be rolling your eyes about
now, but Emerson and Einstein were onto something. Among certain
circles in psychology (those circles, admittedly, residing largely in
California), awe is considered not just a powerful emotion but
perhaps the sliest Power Emotion of them all. Until recently, though,