The Papal Sublime

How I will remember Pope Francis.

I have nothing against Pope Francis, but I do have something against all world leaders. That something is: skepticism. You may call it cynicism. Maybe I am a cynic. But history abounds with evidence supporting such cynicism. As does the recent history of the Catholic Church. I respect the office of the pope, but I temper my admiration for the office holders.

Still, I am Catholic, and the pope is the Vicar of Christ, and this particular pope, the late Jorge Bergoglio, had tremendous charisma. His hopefulness was relentless; in dark moments, like the pandemic or the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he always had something convincingly hopeful to say. I will miss that. As a souvenir, I’d like to record the moment when something he did marked my life indelibly, for the better.

The one-lunged, 86 year-old pope, ambling up St. Peter’s square, in the rain and with the awkward gait of an old man. His face not sullen but grave, he preaches in the twilight before an empty square, below the dark blue sky, standing small beneath the massive rising columns of St. Peter’s Basilica. As night descends, he stands before a fifteenth century wooden crucifix, credited for ending an epidemic during that time. He makes the sign of the Cross with the monstrance at the threshold of St. Peter’s, before the same empty square, a blessing for a city under lockdown and a world watching on television.

I watched it on a YouTube live feed, from the confines of my sunless, gloomy basement studio apartment, where I lived alone. The end of the lockdown was nowhere in sight. No one knew if or when treatments, much less a vaccine, would be available. Covid patients were still being intubated.

It was the second month of lockdown, five years ago.

On that dreary day, the pope brought something new to a moment otherwise ruled by fear and suffering and death. I was transfixed by the scene. I looked at photographs of it after it was over. I spent more time looking at these images than I did thinking about anything the pope said on that day. The images spoke without words. A friend wrote: “Watching: Pope Francis speaking in Rome. Thinking: it seems that there is a certain tension between the Roman architecture of the place where he speaks, and the content of his speech.”

There is a name for the emotion caused by this event, and for my friend’s feeling of tension before a liturgy that even Pope Francis’ traditionalist critics remember with reverence. The pope’s gestures, and the historic images they produced, are sublime. Sublime is what we call something that makes us feel like our capacity to grasp reality has been overwhelmed. The sublime produces “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” writes Edmund Burke. In the experience of the sublime, our eyes suddenly become aware of the limits of our capacity to see. Our minds perceive a contradiction between the goodness of life and the seeming indifference of the world.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant cites St. Peter’s Basilica as an example of the sublime. There are two ways in which our mind can be overwhelmed, and the first of these Kant calls “mathematical.” It is born out of the tension between what our mind grasps and what our senses can show us. We look at something (the starry sky) and we come to know its great magnitude (the countless numbers of stars) — but we can’t see what we understand to be there. We can’t see all the stars; we can barely count the ones that we do see. To use Kant’s terminology, we can’t “imagine” (form an image of) the thing that we know we have before us:

The same thing may sufficiently explain the bewilderment or, as it were, perplexity which, it is said, seizes the spectator on his first entrance into St. Peter’s at Rome. For there is here a feeling of the inadequacy of his Imagination for presenting the Ideas of a whole, wherein the Imagination reaches its maximum and, in striving to surpass it, sinks back into itself …

The image of a solitary man standing before St. Peter’s Basilica only heightens this sense of bewilderment and perplexity.

When you consider that the solitary man is the pope, and that he’s praying for an end to a pandemic, you might undergo another type of sublime experience. Kant calls it “the dynamical sublime.” This is when you perceive humanity as threatened by the blind, destructive forces of nature. In this experience, nature becomes something fearful: “Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation …” Kant might have added “pandemics” to this list. Yet he argues that “in our mind we find a superiority to nature even in its immensity.” That’s because the destructive forces of nature cannot erase the fact that we are all aware, to a greater or lesser extent, of freedom and goodness and justice. We are moral beings, not only animals or bits of matter. In the tension between blind nature and our vulnerability, these higher aspects of human nature come into high relief.

In this second type of sublimity, it is not the pope standing before St. Peter’s that produces the sublime experience, but rather the pope speaking to an empty space within the colonnade. The fearfulness of the moment was evident in the absence of the throngs of people that are usually there. Absence also reminds us of our loved ones who were far away, of people who may never return. Their absence recalled the absence at the heart of our grief for those who died alone and without a proper burial.

We don’t see nature in St. Peter’s Square; the pope isn’t standing in the midst of a hurricane or a yawning abyss. Nature is fearful in an indirect way, through peoples’ absence — the people who would be there — and this only makes the pope’s entreaty to God all the more sublime. The pope represents — not only for Catholics but for anyone moved by the sublimity of the scene — those passions that stand against nature: our longing for freedom and justice and peace and, especially during the pandemic, life itself.

With gestures like his lockdown prayer at St. Peter’s (or his spontaneous embrace of a disfigured man, or his daily phone calls with the Catholic community in Gaza), Pope Francis suggested that neither nature nor history — neither disease nor war — has the last word on the human race. We can hope in a greater destiny. Whenever I am tempted to think otherwise, I remember Pope Francis.

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