Both the dreadful and the astonishing shock those who encounter them. In that regard, the dreadful and the astonishing are the same. However, the shock involved is as radically different as possible in the two cases. Let us consider each in turn, beginning with the dreadful.
* * *
dread (v.): late 12c., "to fear very much, be in shrinking apprehension or expectation of," a shortening of Old English adrædan, contraction of ondrædan "counsel or advise against," also "to dread, fear, be afraid," from ond-, and- "against" (from PIE root *ant-) + rædan "to advise" (from PIE root *re- "to reason, count").
— Online Etymology Dictionary
We dread the dreadful: by its very nature, the dreadful repels us.
Countless dreadful events that have occurred in the modern age — the age that began with the end of the Medieval period, continues today, and will all too long continue to continue long beyond this day. In truth, in no other age have so many dreadful events taken place as in the modern age. Indeed, the very essence of modernity as such makes the modern age the most dreadful of all ages, as shocking as that may sound, since it is altogether in contrast to what is most commonly thought about the nature of modernity.
As that same contrast attests, one must be given the eyes to see the dreadfulness of modernity — or, for that matter, the dreadfulness of anything dreadful. One’s eyes can be blinded to dreadfulness by one’s own preoccupations and cognitive or emotional investments. So, for example, someone who has been filled with hatred and contempt for Islam and Islamism might look upon images of the currently ongoing Israeli massacre of thousands of Muslims in Gaza and be filled not with any sense of dread, but even with a sense of pleasure.
Similarly, those deeply steeped in anti-Semitism may fail to see the utter dreadfulness of the picture below, of a pile of corpses found at the Nazi deathcamp in Ohrdorf, Germany when the Allied forces liberated that camp in April of 1945, at the end of World War II.
* * *
astonish (v.): c. 1300, astonien, "to stun, strike senseless," from Old French estoner "to stun, daze, deafen, astound," from Vulgar Latin *extonare, from Latin ex "out" + tonare "to thunder"; so, literally "to leave someone thunderstruck."
— Online Etymology Dictionary
[. . .] what art does, maybe what it does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don’t. That’s what it’s for—to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head, by something you weren’t prepared for.
— Greil Marcus, “Why I Write”[1]
In radical contrast to the dreadful, which by its nature repels us, by its own nature the astonishing attracts us.
Take beauty, for example. Beauty, truly beheld, always astonishes: to astonish those who truly behold it belongs to the essence of the beautiful.
The experience of the beautiful as such always brings us up short. It stops us in our tracks and reduces us to awed silence before it. Just so did Salvador Dali’s painting The Sacrament of the Last Supper bring me up short and reduce me to silent awe when, at the age of 16, I encountered it in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in my senior year in high school, as I recount at one point in my first book, The Stream of Thought.[2]
As Walter Benjamin already noted in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”[3]the ubiquitous reproduction of works of art via photographs, movies, and the like — such as the ubiquitous electronic means that proliferate everywhere today — strongly weakens the shocking impact of such works upon us. It tends to rob such works of their definitive power to shock us into astonishment, ripping us out of our customary distraction, as Greil Marcus addresses in the essay from which I have taken the quotation at the start of this current section of today’s post.
However, as Marcus highlights in his essay as a whole, even in the most dreadful, deadening processes of reproduction, something of the originally shocking, awe-inspiring nature of works of art remains; and viewers of such reproductions may suddenly, often after many repeated viewings of the same reproduction, find themselves elsewhere, somewhere far distinct from the places to which they have become so habitually accustomed. They may still, even in viewing for the umpteenth time some reproduction of a work of art, suddenly find themselves given new eyes, such that they find themselves dwelling, at least for a moment, in astonishment before what they suddenly see.
Tannenwald[4], by Gustav Klimt