Despite its connections to the Divine, the sublime is undeniably also a demonic aesthetic. In a tradition dating back to John Dennis, Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) – and specifically its depiction of Satan – was used as a paradigmatic example of the sublime. The English Gothic, similarly, regularly accords demonic figures a substantial degree of both physical and moral sublimity, as well as using ‘associative sublimity’ in the portrayal of the demonic, most notably in the consistent connection between sublime landscapes and demonic appearances, found in the mountaintop harangues of the Devils of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806). The theological implications of this seemingly inextricable connection between the sublime and both the Divine and the demonic has been left largely unaddressed in literary criticism.

One response, found in Samuel Monk (1960), is to elude the problem by noting demonic sublimity but ignoring its theological implications. Another popular approach is found in Robert Geary (1992) who stresses the sublime/demonic association, but elides its problematic nature by erasing the relationship between the Divine and the sublime. Relying on a largely secularized version of Rudolf Otto's concept of the ‘numinous’ (the experience of the beyond human), the ‘awefullness’ and majesty of ‘daemonic dread’ of Otto's theory are centred and their counterpart, the ‘fascinans’ is ignored. The ‘fascinans’ is the ‘attractive’ aspect, which, once rationalised or schematised, becomes attached to concepts of mercy, pity and love (Otto 1936, 16). This conflation of the numinous with the sublime, understood monologically as the ‘terror sublime’, allows the demonic to be unproblematically aligned with the sublime by ignoring sublime multiplicity and separating sublimity from the concept of the Divine. This separation leads to negatively coded discussions of the sublime as a source of terror, producing a conception of the Divine as an ‘immortal tyrant whose evil is not good’ (Byron 1841a, 321) and, on a human level, aligning the sublime's properties with patriarchal and colonial expressions of dominance, in the shape of the aristocratic tyrant.