It was an elevation that Longinus ascribed to the power of writing-that is, to the description of the world and the people in it-but that the moderns ascribed to the power of the world itself, as well as to that of writing. That elevation of soul is what obsessed the modern theorists and poets.
One definition Longinus gives, therefore, is that “Sublimity is the echo of a great soul” (9.2), and it finds an echo in its perceiver, as can be seen by how even the father of the gods, Zeus, responds to Ajax’s prayer for light, “So he prayed / and the Father filled with pity, seeing Ajax weep, / He dispelled the mist at once.” ( Iliad 17.728–730, Fagles translation) For this reason, the central hallmark of the experience of the literary sublime, and the insight most quoted from Longinus, is that it is “as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard” (7.2). The sublime is not a question of language, though it may be, but of greatness of soul, and so Longinus writes that “the silence of Ajax in the Underworld is great and more sublime than words” when Ajax turns away from Odysseus in the Odyssey (11.543). It is not for life but light that Ajax prays Longinus compares this passage to the opening of the Book of Genesis and the creation of light as the first of things. For Longinus, such passages characterized Homer especially, as in Ajax’s great prayer for light in the Iliad after the gods have suddenly blinded them with mist and darkness: “O father Zeus-draw our armies clear of the cloud, / give us a bright sky, give us back our sight! / Kill us all in the light of day at least” (17.645, translated by Fagles, treated by Longinus at 9.9). He collected and considered passages that filled the soul with exaltation (the “elevation” of his title), passages which might interrupt the reader’s unfolding experience of the work in which they appeared to stand alone in their power. Longinus’s treatise was about style in writing. We have to distinguish between two aspects of the sublime in order to see what was novel about the modern account of it. Boileau coined the famous phrase “je ne sais quoi” (literally, “I do not know”) to describe what made something sublime-something powerful, perhaps overwhelmingly so, but not conformable to some preexistent category, like that by which we think of beauty as harmonious (for example). But the sublime is something different, and what that difference is was interesting, first of all, to Longinus, then to Boileau, and then to the 18th-century theorists and philosophers (Edmund Burke, Hugh Blair, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel especially) and the 19th-century poets who followed them.
The beautiful had been a perennial object of aesthetic and philosophical interest, from Plato onward. The word sublime is Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s height, or elevation, and it stuck. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas Boileau (1636– 1711) of Longinus’s third-century treatise Peri Hypsos (Of elevation) into French in 1674. The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism.