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Edmund Burke
De Botton sees the sublime as pointing to the existence of a higher power. He calls this God, referring to the traditional Abrahamic God who supposedly performed many of his greatest acts in the Sinai desert and appears in the Biblical book of Job, but also to the very idea of a supernatural creator with absolute power over the Earth.
God Quotes in The Art of Travel
The The Art of Travel quotes below are all either spoken by God or refer to God. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 6 Quotes
The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.
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God Character Timeline in The Art of Travel
The timeline below shows where the character God appears in The Art of Travel. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 6: On the Sublime
...landscape suggests that something greater than humans built the Earth. According to the Abrahamic religions, God supposedly spent significant time there—and de Botton thinks that any traveler in the desert there...
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Indeed, many early theorists of the sublime saw it as proof of God’s existence, and de Botton sees a connection between the rise of the sublime as a...
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One Biblical book particularly connects God to the sublime; in it, “a righteous but desperate man” asks God why he suffers,...
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...tell him that his sin caused his misfortune, but Job denies that he has sinned. God replies, showing Job his ignorance and impotence through questions like “where was thou when I...
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De Botton thinks that God’s answer to Job also holds value for secular people, for the sublime can still lead...
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Chapter 8: On Possessing Beauty
...summarized his mission as an attempt to “direct people’s attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe.” He imagined two people, one a sketcher and one not,...
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