Nature’s Art and the Whitewashing of Awe

Secular humanist reverence and the vindication of cosmic horror

AI-generated image by DeepAI

• “Let God forever keep it from my head
  And make me as the poorest vassal is
  That doth with awe and terror kneel to it.”
  ― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
• “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
  ― Albert Einstein

Awe has taken quite a journey over the course of European history.

The semantic whitewashing of awe

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word’s original and subsequent meanings, saying by way of definition, “Originally: a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine. Subsequently: a feeling of reverential respect, mixed with wonder or fear, typically as inspired by a person of great authority, accomplishments, etc., or (from the 18th century) by the power or beauty of the natural world.”

More specifically, ‘“fear, terror, dread” was probably the original sense, but over the course of later Middle English and the 16th century ideas of reverence…