Return to Eden: A Search for the Sublime

“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” 

Painted with oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich in 1818 (link to source).

In the book Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, author Karen Armstrong writes that the decorative imagery and furnishings of King Solomon’s Temple allowed the people of Jerusalem  “to make an imaginary return to the Garden of Yahweh and to recover – if only momentarily – a sense of the paradise they had lost” (Armstrong 52). This garden – brought to life by imagination and the powerful ambiance of sacred space – healed within the worshipers a sense of longing that Armstrong states “lies at the root of the religious quest” (Armstrong 52). Such an entanglement of religious space with a sense of sublimity and nature is in no way unique. The origins of creation and presence of deities have, since the beginning of recorded history and myth, arisen and been solidified amid a backdrop of storms tempered, seas shaped, and soil sculpted in the creation of the world (Mark). It is from such a background that the creation story appearing in the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible arose, though efforts would later be made to distinguish and distance the ancient Israelites’ deity from those of their polytheistic neighbors.

These sublime origins are seen in both the book of Genesis and the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation story), in which humankind and the cosmos were created from a “watery chaos and primeval darkness” that filled the universe – a disordered vastness overcome by a deity who created light (Mark). While the Babylonian god Marduk triumphed over the sea god Tiamat, however, the story in Genesis involved a singular deity who moved “over the face of the waters” and created light in a world in which “darkness covered the face of the deep” (Enns and Genesis 1:2-3). Although it is interesting to note that the word “tehom,” or “the deep” in Hebrew, is similar to the name Tiamat, the story in Genesis distances itself from the presence of a god “of” something (of wind, water, earth, etc.), and instead illustrates the presence of an omnipotent deity that moves over and shapes the natural world (Enns).

Such distinctions between deities “of natural forces” and a god not confined to the presence of natural phenomena are increasingly stressed throughout the biblical text, as is reflected in the theophanies experienced by Moses and (subsequently) Elijah. While Moses experienced a deity that “descended upon [the mountain] in fire” and “answer[ed] him in thunder,” the deity in Elijah’s story was “not in the wind,” nor in the earthquake or fire that followed (Exodus 19:18-19 and 1 Kings 19:11-12). Instead, Elijah was informed of the deity’s presence by the “sound of sheer silence” that followed the natural phenomena (1 Kings 19:12). Thus, natural phenomena were no longer seen as “manifestations of the divine presence,” and a continual movement toward monotheism resulted in the experience of a deity who was not as “dramatically accessible” as the one of the past – one whose presence would need to be understood from occurrences not as easily observable as the phenomena of the natural world (Coogan and Chapman, 255).

This distance created between the divine and natural worlds was perhaps influential in increasing the “sense of separation” that Armstrong describes as being a driving force in the quest for Eden; distance from the garden was felt more strongly as the world’s phenomena lost their previously inherently sacred character (Armstrong 52). It was in response to this sense of something missing – of the lost garden, or connection to the sacred – that the Romantic period arose during the late 18^th and 19^th centuries (Habib). This cultural movement was characterized by a return to nature in search of spirituality and by a search for the sublime: the sense of emotion, or “experience of the infinite, which is terrifying and thrilling” evoked by intense natural phenomena, and resulting in awe in the presence of the forces of nature (Poetry Foundation Editors). This was not a movement away from God, but rather one in which nature was seen as the “language of God,” and as a “living force…held together by the breath of the divine spirit” (Habib).

As Armstrong states, “human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence,” and seek out this sense of the sacred because of the sensations of bereavement, injustice, and cruelty that are characteristic of the human experience and which lead to the belief that our existence is “fragmented and incomplete…an inchoate feeling that life was not meant to be thus” (Armstrong xvi-xvii). It seems no wonder, then, that throughout time the search for sublimity, spirituality, and Eden has remained a constant theme. Pilgrimages are made into nature and to religiously significant sites and cities – places in which “the sacred reality [has] erupted into the mundane world of men and women,” and in which there might be a “universal return to the Garden of Eden” (Armstrong 65).

Citations

Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Alfred A Knopf, 1996.

Coogan, Michael D., and Cynthia R. Chapman. A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Enns, Pete. “Yahweh, Creation, and the Cosmic Battle.” BioLogos, 2 Feb 2010, https://biologos.org/articles/yahweh-creation-and-the-cosmic-battle.

Habib, M.A.R. “Introduction to Romanticism.” Rutgers, 10 May 2013, https://habib.camden.rutgers.edu/introductions/romanticism/#:~:text=For%20the%20Romantics%2C%20Nature%20was,the%20%E2%80%9Clanguage%20of%20God.%E2%80%9D.

Mark, Joshua J. “Enuma Elish - The Babylonian Epic of Creation – Full Text.” World History Encyclopedia, 4 May 2018, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/.

New Revised Standard Version Bible. Bible Study Tools, 1989. https://www.biblestudytools.com/nrs/.

Poetry Foundation Editors. “Glossary of Poetic Terms.” Poetry Foundation, 2024, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/sublime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog.