Abstract
Even in a secular age, mountains continue to be sites of religious and spiritual significance, whether on account of their sublime grandeur or with regard to the sense of a different time-order, eternal or sempiternal, that they inspire. This chapter examines two modern thinkers in whom the spiritual significance of mountains is expressed in especially striking terms: John Ruskin and Martin Heidegger. Although these may seem to be thinkers of a very different stamp, they can both be seen as arguing for the importance of art (respectively painting and poetry) in the human response to modernity and industrialization and, through their privileged artists (respectively J. M. W. Turner and Friedrich Hölderlin), giving a special place to representations of mountains that are attentive to their potential spiritual significance.
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- 1.
Discussed further below.
- 2.
On the mythology of sacred mountains see Eliade 1986.
- 3.
Dozeman has a further third point, but it is less relevant to our present purpose.
- 4.
Elsewhere, Heidegger makes this point by playing on the German word for ‘to belong’, gehören, which derives from the same root as hören, to hear. Thus, language ‘belongs’ to being by listening to it. See Heidegger 1969. Can we perhaps connect this to the imagery of Moses and Elijah listening for and to the Word of God on their respective mountains?
- 5.
Of course, there will be many cases where there is room for dispute as to how a work actually functions. There may be examples of high-tech bridges that also, in their way, ‘gather’ their environment (the Golden Gate, the eponymous ‘Bridge’ between Denmark and Sweden). And does the installation of an Antony Gormley sculpture on a mountain-side or a shore-line gather or negate its landscape. Judgements will, presumably vary.
- 6.
My translation.
- 7.
Inevitably, there is the further and unavoidable question that the content of these lectures can be related only too easily to Heidegger’s Nazism and to the founding of a would-be 1000-year Reich through national ritual. See Pattison 2015, 319–326 for further discussion.
Bibliography
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Pattison, G. (2018). ‘I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills …’. In: Kakalis, C., Goetsch, E. (eds) Mountains, Mobilities and Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_12
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