In the Old Testament stories, … the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the ever… - Erich Auerbach

"Epilegomena to Mimesis", trans. Jan Ziolkowski, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 50th anniversary edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003 (reprinted 2013), p. 570

[The Passion story] completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensory realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base. Or—if anyone prefers to have it the other way around—a new sermo humilis is born, a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal.

The digressions [in Homer] are not meant to keep the reader in suspense ... An episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely.