sense of the sublime which exercised the imaginations of eighteenth-century artists and thinkers taking their lead from Edmund Burke--but also in its quiet and intimate moments. It is not only the raging storm, the frenzied surf, the blizzard, or the precipice that awes man with infinity, but also the contemplation of undisturbed nature. In his essay "Nature," Emerson writes: nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God . . . I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and con- nate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. learns from nature the lesson of worship." address the Harvard Divinity School on Sunday, July 15, 1838. He complained that organized religion had failed to communicate man's own infinite nature through an engaged appreciation of the outdoors: many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own ori- gin in heaven? the sacred from the profane--and hoard it instead around their own buildings, vestments, and rituals--they had in fact lost touch with the sacred and diminished human nature at the same time. His words caused a scandal--especially as he advocated that the real miracle was nature and repudiated the need to believe in the supernatural miracles of Jesus. an effect of organized religion's attempt to hold it apart. Certainly, Western man now tends to occupy a stubbornly profane cosmos diminishing him against its brute immensity, rather than exalting him through common cause. [tragic] grandeur by refusing any appeal to transcendence, seeking instead to raise himself up by himself. As Eliade explains, non-religious man: himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime ob- stacle to his freedom. He will be- come himself only when he is com- pletely demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god. non-religious man is a direct descendant of religious man. To the extent that non- religious man has sought to purify himself from the beliefs and observances of his ancestors, those very behaviors continue to structure his existence. nials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own he has desacral- ized the world in which his ances- tors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier form of behavior, and that be- havior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being. modalities of nature that continue to move us on a symbolic and/or unconscious level. Sweeney's photographs in Paradise Road. Even if we don't view them through the eyes of faith, his keenly discriminated images of sky, clouds, horizons, mountains, water, and trees will nevertheless strike us with an atavistic sense of the sacred power of nature. tial vault already provokes a reli- gious experience . . . Transcendence is revealed by simple awareness of infinite height. `Most high' sponta- neously becomes an attribute of di- vinity. down, Sweeney's heavens are invariably shot through with clouds. Clouds have a transitional quality, linking the sky with the earth, the high with the low, the sacred with the profane. (In this respect, they offer a perfect path for Sweeney's imagination, as he seeks to invest the everyday and sometimes overlooked world with higher value.) that the Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa--literally, "the land of the long white cloud." Named by the legendary navigator Kupe, traveling across the vast |