The Renaissance Neoplatonists deeply admired Longinus and swept him up in their belief that art had the power to convey divine truth. With a single decisive stroke, Burke detached Longinus’s sublime from the standard classical ideal of beauty. The real source of our experience of the sublime, the youthful Burke argued, was our most intense feelings; and of these the most important were fear of pain and danger, especially from a nature beyond human scale and beyond man’s control.
