Poetry, Philosophy and Theology in Conversation

Thresholds of Wonder: The Power of the Word IV

Francesca Bugliani Knox, Jennifer Reek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351796019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

This volume is a collection of essays that explains how literature, philosophy and theology have explored the role of wonder in our lives, particularly through poetry. Wonder has been an object of fascination for these disciplines from the Greek antiquity onwards, yet the connections between their views on the subject are often ignored in subject specific studies.

The book is divided into three parts: Part I opens the conversation on wonder in philosophy, Part II is given to theology and Part III to literary perspectives. An international set of contributors, including poets as well as scholars, have produced a study that looks beyond traditional chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, both within the individual essays themselves and in respect to one another. The volume's wide historical framework is punctuated by four poems by contemporary poets on the theme of wonder.

An unconventional foray into one of the best-known themes of the European tradition, this book will be of great interest to scholars of literature, theology and philosophy.

Part I

Philosophical perspectives

In the Valley of the Lot

We came across the crayey Lot –

What seas have lain here through the centuries –

The cliffs are made of life

Up whose sheer walls we steer.

The fall beads fear, the song of far below

And time’s drop. We drove along the edge of space,

Blue, blue and white, your face light as a pearl

Around its seed of dust. You saw, where I did not,

Your road darkening to a dazzle

Stripped out and strung like a chord

Towards its perfect note.

So the path led: the jolting track,

The long-forgotten well,

The lichen knitting life and stone,

Our journey’s door as dream

Now opening green upon the arbour.

O little oak trees in the forest,

The garden of the earth was ours!

And you sat in it, content. I felt

The incandescence settle, start to thrum

Like a halo in the wood which rode

The shadows on its ring of fire.

You stared silent into that soul glare,

Time’s oil crushed from moss and lavender,

The myrrh of longing and memory and coming home.

What leaves rustled in your mind then,

What herald bugled in the balsam air?

As your frame merged with night

I heard them thronging through the undergrowth,

Lamb and ewe hustle, ghostly,

Brush with their warm breath the limestone wall.

They moved like a still wind of spirits

Whispering to their shepherd of eternity.

At the door you listened in the waiting forest

Till the moon fell and the sheep bells

Called from beyond the hinge of darkness,

Out of the wood of unknowing

Over the threshold between thicket and infinite

Where world and soul forge one.

Hilary Davies

1 The wonder of not wondering

From Plato to Lucretius

Guido Milanese

Memorable beginnings: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’), Dante’s Divine Comedy (‘In the midway of this our mortal life,/ I found me in a gloomy wood, astray/ Gone from the path direct’) and certainly Aristotle’s Metaphysics (‘All men by nature desire to know’).¹ They ‘desire’ (oρέγονται), says Aristotle: it is a motion from something towards something else, from ignorance to – presumably – knowledge, and any motion must be caused by something, excluding God, in an Aristotelian universe. This something that moves is wonder (Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b11–28):

That it [philosophy] is not a productive science is clear from a consideration of the first philosophers. It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities² and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe. Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus the philosopher is in a sense a myth lover³ since myths are composed of wonders); therefore if it was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy, it is obvious that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge, and not for any practical utility. The actual course of events bears witness to this; for speculation of this kind began with a view to recreation and pastime, at a time when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied. Clearly then it is for no extrinsic advantage that we seek this knowledge; for just as we call a man independent who exists for himself and not for another, so we call this the only independent science, since it alone exists for itself.⁴

The passage is a well-known adaptation of a passage in Plato’s Theaetetus:

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy, and he who said that Iris was the child of Thaumas made a good genealogy.

(155d)

Aristotle’s contribution is clear: he underlines that wonder is inescapably linked with the desire of knowledge (‘he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant’), with three consequences: (1) ‘it was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy’; (2) there is some relationship between philosophy and myth and (3) that philosophy had a well-defined place in the history of civilization (‘for speculation of this kind began with a view to recreation and pastime, at a time when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied’).

Is wonder then a pleasure for Aristotle? It is, normally, a pleasure, as well as a stimulus to learning:

And learning and admiring are normally pleasant; for admiring implies the desire to learn, so that what causes admiration is to be desired, and learning implies a return to stable natural condition.

(Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric 1371a)⁵

Aristotle says ‘normally’, a standard opening in rhetorical reasoning. More significant is what follows. The pleasure of admiring and of learning are not the same. The former is a pleasure with respect to something, while the latter is the pleasure of being in a natural state of mind. Being ignorant is not natural because it implies discomfort or uneasiness.

Aristotle

So wonder, for Aristotle, is not really a pleasure. It can be regarded as a pleasure only with respect to the end of the process that it ‘moves’, sets in motion, this end being knowledge. Wonder is a provisional, transient condition of the human soul. It opens a process, and the conclusion of the process, at least insofar as partial knowledge is concerned, removes wonder:

Yet the acquisition of it [knowledge] must in a sense end in something which is the opposite of our original inquiries. For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are, as they do about self-moving marionettes, or about the solstices or the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side; for it seems wonderful to all who have not yet seen the reason, that there is a thing which cannot be measured even by the smallest unit. But we must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case in these instances too when men learn the cause; for there is nothing which would surprise a geometer so much as if the diagonal turned out to be commensurable.

(Aristotle, Metaphysics 983a)⁶

The basic, if unstated, Grundfrage is whether the same resolution of wonder which happens with knowledge of particulars also occurs in a process leading to absolute knowledge. Endless processes are not possible (ἀνάγκη στήναι, ‘it is necessary to come to a stop’) because they continue, impossibly for Aristotle, εἰς ἄπειρον (ad infinitum). Is this condition, this absolute knowledge, possible for us or only for God?⁷

Lucretius

Lucretius was obsessed with wonder: ‘no wonder that …’ (ni mirum) is used in 32 lines, warning the reader, as it were, to refrain from wonder: ‘And forbear herein to wonder that the current from this stone is not able to set in motion other things as well as iron’ (VI, 1056–7). The adjective mirabile is used seven times by Lucretius and always with a word of warning to the reader (II, 308, 465; IV, 256, 898; V, 666, 1056). The passage where Lucretius elaborates his aversion for wonder is in the second book:

Apply now, we entreat, your mind to true reason. For a new question struggles earnestly to gain your ears, a new aspect of things to display itself. But there is nothing so easy as not to be at first more difficult to believe than afterwards; and nothing too so great, so marvellous, that all do not gradually abate their admiration of it. Look up at the bright and unsullied hue of heaven and the stars which it holds within it, wandering all about, and the moon and the sun’s light of dazzling brilliancy: if all these things were now for the first time, if I say they were now suddenly presented to mortals beyond all expectation, what could have been named that would be more marvellous than these things, or that nations beforehand would less venture to believe could be? Nothing methinks; so wondrous strange had been this sight. Yet how little, you know, wearied as all are to satiety with seeing, any one now cares to look up into heaven’s glittering quarters! Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reason from your mind with loathing: weigh the questions rather with keen judgment and if they seem to you to be true, surrender, or if the thing is false, gird yourself to the encounter.

(II, 1023–43)⁸

The structure of the passage is the same as we saw in Aristotle’s text: a first stage (not knowledge) and a second stage (knowledge), where the latter stage is preferable to the former – the point is explicit in Aristotle and implied in Lucretius. Once you have reached knowledge, the greatest peril is, for Lucretius, to be seized again by wonder:

For they who have been rightly taught that the gods lead a life without care, if nevertheless they wonder on what plan all things can be carried on, above all in regard to those things which are seen overhead in the ethereal borders, are borne back again into their old religious scruples and take unto themselves hard taskmasters, whom they poor wretches believe to be almighty, not knowing what can, what cannot be, in short on what principle each thing has its powers defined, its deep set boundary mark; for which reason they are led all the farther astray by blind reason.

(VI, 50ff)

There is, then, no pleasure in wondering, only danger. What pleasure there is comes with the freedom from wonder and is not part of the process itself. And wonder, far from being, as Aristotle says, pleasant in some (indirect) way, becomes terror for Epicurus. In an Epicurean world, science in an Aristotelian sense is nonsense. Knowledge is necessary only because we need to remove fear and terror from our souls:

If we had never been molested by alarms at celestial and atmospheric phenomena, nor by the misgiving that death somehow affects us, nor by neglect of the proper limits of pains and desires, we should have had no need to study natural science.

It would be impossible to banish fear on matters of the highest importance, if a man did not know the nature of the whole universe, but lived in dread of what the legends tell us. Hence without the study of nature there was no enjoyment of unmixed pleasures.

(Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 11–12)⁹

The Aristotelian claim about knowledge not being ‘productive’ is here reversed. Science (‘philosophy’ or even ‘knowledge’) is, indeed, productive, and its ‘product’ is human freedom from fears and terrors. This stable, natural condition (katástema) is not a process – a basic idea of Epicurean ethics. In this respect, at least, Epicureanism agrees with Aristotle’s idea mentioned earlier (see p. 18 above) that, after the stage of wonder, the stage of learning is directed towards a katástema in accord to nature.

Horace, Seneca, Panaetius, Posidonius

For the Epicurean tradition, where ‘pure’ philosophy is a meaningless idea once the learner assimilates the basic tenets of the school, there is no room for residual or resurgent wondering. Philosophy is a productive activity, and its product is freedom. The philosopher remains in this stable state until, perchance, he is waylaid by wonder again.

Lucretius was not alone in holding this view. The Greek geographer and philosopher Strabo (60 BC–AD 24) noticed that ‘not wondering’ was a feature of ‘all the philosophers’, citing Democritus as the philosopher who first made this point.¹⁰ Horace (Epistles 1, 16) took the same stance:

‘Marvel at nothing’ – that is perhaps the one and only thing, Numicius, that can make a man happy and keep him so. Yon sun, the stars and seasons that pass in fixed courses – some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear: what think you of the gifts of earth, or what of the sea’s, which makes rich far distant Arabs and Indians – what of the shows, the plaudits and the favours of the friendly Roman – in what wise, with what feelings and eyes think you they should be viewed?

(Horace 287)

We should not trouble ourselves too much about Horace’s philosophical source or sources here; after all, in Epistles 1, 14 he says that he does not feel bound to any school of philosophy (‘nullius addi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: why wonder?
• Part I Philosophical perspectives
• Part II Theological perspectives
• Part III Literary perspectives
• Part IV Afterword
• Index