The Sublime and the Pantheon

(Sublimity can be defined as a feeling of being in the presence of something great, something greater than one's self)

As I stated in my previous post, I spent about eight days in Rome during the winter break. During that time, I saw pretty much all of the famous and great churches and monuments of Rome. My favorite of all the buildings was the Pantheon. This was due to me experiencing the greatest moment of supreme sublimity when I entered the Pantheon. (This was a consistent experience, I went inside of it at least 5 or 6 times.)  Nowhere else in Rome did I have an experience even close to this, even with St. Peter's Cathedral's dome being only slightly smaller than the Pantheon's. But sublimity was the intention of these baroque architects, constructing these gigantic and ornate churches, so why did I not really receive sublimity from these churches?

I think the answer might have something to do with analogy between how I sit in regards to the church as an institution, and the placement I am in the actual physical church. I should start with my relationship as a human being to the church. I grew up with very little to no knowledge of the Christian faiths and kind of developed my own views that 'God' is not an entity which lives above and beyond us but that nature in and of itself is 'God'. When I think of spirituality, I do not associate it with a relationship to heaven, but with a relationship to nature. Spirituality and faith is a much more immediate thing for me and is not so much longing for some kind of divine worship from above, but a more naturalistic worship from around us. (You can see my influence from people like Thoreau.) So let us analogize this to the Pantheon vs. St. Peter's. The Pantheon is much closer to the Earth. The dome is not something far above us, but is right there. While St. Peter's (and the other gigantic Christian cathedrals) are so far above me, I feel no connection, I don't feel overwhelmed (being overwhelmed is usual prerequisite for sublime beauty), more disinterested. St. Peter's is beautiful and all, but I don't seek for that which is beautiful, I seek for that which is sublime.

So now this comes to my relationship with dance. How in the world do I produce a sublime affect through dance? Most treatises on sublimity actually focus upon literature as a source of sublimity. The reason why I ask this question is because sublimity is really what, for me, makes art worthwhile. I do not really know the answer to this question, and it will probably be the focus for a lot of my next few years. (I think I have always really sought the sublime in dance, I just haven't noticed it until recently.) I am doing some extensive reading upon the sublime and am currently experimenting with my choreography to see if I can produce that result, or a different, more peculiar, form of the sublime within dance itself. But one of my professors told me that Ballet is actually aimed at the sublime, but I quickly pointed out that I do not feel sublimity from ballet. So maybe there is another analogy that we can make from the previous analogy. Maybe I have the same relation to ballet as I do to Christianity or to baroque architecture? I do not know. These are all questions which I will continue to seriously ponder as I go into my future as a choreographer and philosopher.