INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the religious and aesthetic domains in human life is deep, complicated, and hard to describe in philosophical prose. Characterizing it is all the more challenging when the proposed point of intersection is the sublime, which by its very definition runs up to (“sub”) the limit (“limen”) of conceptual analysis and phenomenological description. As a result of the elusiveness of the topic – as well as the vastness of the historical territory here – scholarly work on the relationship between religion and the sublime has tended to focus on a specific period or set of figures, with few attempts to provide a theoretical template for the whole. Our goal here, however, is to do precisely that. We begin with some conceptual ground clearing before briefly highlighting some undernoticed connections between religion and the sublime in two central eighteenth-century authors, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. We then devote the bulk of the chapter to a fourfold taxonomy of what we call the theistic sublime, the spiritualistic sublime, the dymythologistic sublime, and the nontheistic sublime.