In Wonder, Love and Praise

Małgorzata Grzegorzewska and Jean Ward

Prolegomena: The Aporias of Wonder

Abstract: The text discusses various facets of wonder: from curiosity to bewilderment; from the child’s innocent amazement to the adult’s lust for knowledge and power; from the force that stimulates movement to the paralysing stupor of the mind. The authors invoke Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of the “saturated phenomenon”, which denotes the phenomena given to us “in excess”, in which intuition overflows intention, to provide a conceptual framework for the discussion developed in the volume as a whole. A reference to Charles Wesley’s hymn “Love divine, all loves excelling”, combined with scriptural description of Jesus, Love embodied, sets the discussion of wonder in the context of religious poetry and mystical discourse. The Christian mystery of the Incarnation is invoked as a way of connecting the abstract discussion of wonder with the phenomenon of the flesh. A mention of the Anglo-Saxon dream vision allegory, The Dream of the Rood, reminds the reader of the suffering involved in the experience of wonder. Viewed in this perspective, wonder is defined as a fissure, perhaps even a wound, which paradoxically makes everyday reality the locus of “love and praise”.

Keywords: wonder, miracle, epistemology, the saturated phenomenon, the Incarnation

The recent resurgence of philosophical considerations on the subject of the wondrous  –undoubtedly rooted in Martin Heidegger’s reassessment of the concepts of wonder  – reveals the ambivalence of this phenomenon. On the one hand, the term “wonder” entails the sense of curiosity that drives us to move relentlessly further and further with our questions about the nature of things, to challenge all certainties and interrogate every idea which presents itself as self-evident. In this sense, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein asserts, it is the Socratic “grounding principle” of philosophy (6). And surely philosophers should pay attention to doubt; they must be ready to put up with the sense of uncertain expectation and must heed the queries that pose themselves in the mind. On the other hand, one must not stop at the threshold of wonder if the pursuit of knowledge is to be continued. The grounding principle must then be “ungrounded” and the philosopher must take on the role of an “ancient mariner”, so to speak, becoming an eternal wanderer subject to the marine-god Thaumas, whose name literally means “the wondrous” (Rubenstein 6). Otherwise, “wondering” will shut down philosophical or scientific inquiry, instead of opening new horizons and leading to new discoveries. Commenting ←7 | 8→on Plato’s dialogue about the nature of knowledge entitled Theaetetus, Rubenstein claims that:

The authors of the texts gathered in this volume are well aware of the perils of genuine, ever fertile  – albeit risky  – wondering and of the temptation to retreat from wonder into the barren land of acquiescence, familiarity and likelihood, whether they are concerned with philosophy, poetry or theology, the three intertwined areas of interest in our book, or with the interplay among them. Theaetetus, not accidentally, is the starting point for Alex Villas Boas’ discussion of wonder and desire in the dialogue between theology and literature, which opens the volume. It is also with Theaetetus’ query about the nature of true knowledge that Anna Walczuk begins the last text in the book, in which she reflects on the expression in two modern poetic “magnificats” of a joyful and thankful response to the first of all wonders, namely the wonder of being. Poets are children in their always fresh perception of the ordinary, and of the extraordinary within it. We could say that in Theaetetus Socrates gives his interlocutor a lesson which is the philosopher’s version of Jesus’ spiritual teaching: “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3–4).¹ In other words, in order to obtain wisdom, one must first humbly accept the predicament of “being lost in wonder”; one must always be ready to stop for a while, to “turn aside” and take one’s time, looking for some way through the dense wood of philosophical matter (both “wood” and “matter” in Greek are denoted by one word: hyle). In the twentieth century, it was Heidegger who recalled the Socratic ←8 | 9→principle that wonder stands at the origins and determines the end of philosophy: “To say that philosophy begins in wonder means philosophy is wondrous in its essence and becomes more wondrous the more it becomes what it really is” (qtd. in Rubenstein 1). Whoever says das wundert mich (‘it wonders me that…’) enters the field of philosophy and becomes a “wanderer”, in Rubenstein’s terms as well as in those adopted by Przemysław Uściński in his analysis of William Wordsworth’s poetry in this volume.

In our times, Jean-Luc Marion crosses the threshold of miracle and opens investigation of phenomena given to us “in excess”, that is, those in which intuition ←9 | 10→overflows intention. Philosophy thus takes a theological turn, perhaps approaching the realm contemplated in Charles Wesley’s hymn “Love divine, all loves excelling”. This is not a poem about an abstraction; it makes us rediscover St John the Evangelist’s discovery that the infinite God who is Love yet exceeds all known loves, may “fix . . . his humble dwelling” (l. 3) in us as we “abide in Him” (1 John. 2:27, King James Version; cf. John. 15:5, KJV: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit”). Wesley’s hymn also develops the promise expressed in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord”.

The speaker looks ahead to the future form of things, after the ongoing process of change reaches the point beyond change. Here and now, however, even the greatest wonder of Christian wonders, miracle of miracles, that is the ←10 | 11→Incarnation, remains “spangled with spilling blood”, to use the image of the ancient poem known as The Dream of the Rood (l. 23).² Although Mary-Jane Rubenstein, whose seminal analysis of philosophical wondering is a leading motif in our short reflection on the aporias of wonder, is not explicitly concerned with the mystery of the Incarnation, one element of her analysis brings us directly to this mystery. Rubenstein makes the remarkable suggestion that the etymology of the word “wonder” may be connected with “wound” (9). She goes on to interpret this wound as a perilous and painful opening, a fissure in the experience of wonder. In this way she helps us flesh out the concept of a wonder that is specifically Christian, wonder which cannot be separated from the memory of the Passion. Our book records wonders which, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “The Windhover”, “gash gold-vermilion” (l. 14). The “wonder of this pity”, to paraphrase Christopher Hodgkins’ title, is presented in his lucid analysis of George Herbert’s religious verse.

The founding text of what J. A. W. Bennett calls “poetry of the Passion” in the English tradition is the one referred to above, the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, whose anonymous author explores the ambivalence of this wondrous “glory-tree” (l. 14). A song of victory mingles with a dirge for the dying Prince and the light of the mysterious “beacon” (l. 6) shines in the “deep midnight” (l. 2). The wood of the cross is decked in gems and in gold that is blood and blood that is gold; in this vision, the speaker sees “that unstill brightness / change raiment and colour” (l. 30–31). Now it is “clad in gold” (l. 32), now it is “slicked with sweat, / spangled with spilling blood” (ll. 33–34). The Dream of the Rood describes the sudden arrival of light that bedazzles the eyes, shining in the darkness. In the mystic’s nights of faith, God is not so much absent as intensely, indeed insufferably present. The first section of our book includes two texts which refer to one of the most important figures of sixteenth-century Spanish mysticism: St Ignatius of Loyola, whose experience of being wounded  – literally  – was fundamental to the wonder of his encounter with God. This is clear in both Rossano Zas Friz de Col’s account of the saint’s first spiritual experience and in Cristina Bustamante’s discussion of Ignatius in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.

It was John Henry Newman who reminded us of the need to “wonder at the Divine Mercy of the Incarnation, till we grow startled at it” (172). When we think of “the wondrous tree”, whose sight not only evokes a tender pity for the dying Man, but also causes the beholder to tremble at the thought of the price the Son of God of his own will paid for human iniquity, we may at the same time recall ←11 | 12→the startling epiphanies of the Old Testament, which are so often torn between admiration and awe. Embedded in the etymology of the Latin word mirus, wonderful, is the word “smile”; but there are times when the benign warmth of smiling wonderment gives way to unspeakable dread.³ When God speaks, the earth trembles; at His voice “the mountains quake …, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at His presence” (Nahum 1:5, KJV). In these eloquent biblical images the wondrous meets with the awesome and the terrifying. The ultimate promise, however, which informs the title and the content of this volume, is that in the end, we shall see Him “with unveiled face” (2 Corinthians 3:18, NKJV), and beyond all shadow of fear, be “lost in wonder, love and praise”.

Here and now, however, just as for some being “lost in wonder” will mean the beginning of philosophical inquiry and for others an easy escape route from intellectual effort, the same predicament can either mark the birth of faith (and, if we cross the threshold of wonder, wonder yields the first-fruit of faith: love and praise), or the crisis, perhaps even loss of faith. Martin Potter calls the poet-artist David Jones “an explorer of the enchanted world”, always conscious that “the transcendent lies behind, and supports the existence of, perceptible things in the world” (x). But for many, if not most others, we live in what Mark Burrows, following Hölderlin, calls “a destitute age”. It is in this context that Burrows considers the religious strand in the “wondering” of modern American poets, which follows in the tradition of Emerson’s well-known assertion that “the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common” (53). Marco Damonte, in turn, draws our attention to Sir Anthony Kenny’s agnosticism as drifting apart from the certitudes of theism and atheism. Similarly, Monika Szuba, recalling the formulation of Max Weber, sets her reflections on the poetry of David Constantine within the horizons of a “disenchanted world”.

In such a world, few can go beyond the small epiphanies of an Edward Thomas, as discussed by Maria Fengler. Few can cross the threshold of wonder to move unequivocally towards “love and praise” of the “Love divine”. And perhaps, given that to be “lost in wonder, love and praise” is in Wesley’s hymn, as we have said, a vision of a future beatific state, one which has not yet come, it might be too much to expect from our poets and philosophers any more than an intimation of it. Nevertheless, we have seen fit to conclude this volume with Anna Walczuk’s account of the resoundingly joyful “poetic magnificat” of the English ←12 | 13→poet Elizabeth Jennings and the Polish priest-poet Jan Twardowski, because in spite of all their particularity, or even because of it, these poets touch on most of the themes that are important to the book as a whole. Above all, their understanding of the way that the ordinary can suddenly reveal itself as extraordinary chimes with the insights of so many of the poets and philosophers discussed in this volume, perhaps none more so than R. S. Thomas. Let us conclude, then, with some lines from the poem “The Bright Field”, which is central to Katarzyna Dudek’s analysis, in which Thomas writes thus of the human capacity for wonder: