DOI: 10.

5840/augstudies201142221 Augustinian Studies 42:2 (2011) 153–172

Saint Augustine Lecture 2011

The Anatomy of Wonder: An Augustinian Taxonomy

John C. Cavadini

University of Notre Dame

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I
If someone sees beauty excellently represented in a face, and is carried to that
higher world [of the Divine Mind], will anyone be so sluggish in mind and so
immovable that, when he sees all the beauties of the world of sense, all its good
proportion and the mighty excellence of its order, and the splendour of form
which the stars, for all their remoteness, make manifest, he will not be seized
with reverence and think, “What wonders, and from what a source?” If he does
not, he neither understands the world of sense nor sees that higher world.1
Thus does the philosopher Plotinus, arguing against the contemptuous attitude of
the Gnostic Christians towards the visible world, speak instead of its wonder. He
also mentions the “reverence” which “seizes” the one looking upon these wonders
if they are properly perceived. It is fair to say that for Plotinus the philosophical life
is the cultivation of the reverence that is commensurate with a sense of wonder, and
that philosophy itself ultimately offers, if it is not too fearsome a conceit to put it
this way, an anatomy of wonder, a guide to the proper way of looking at the world.
It seems that, for Plotinus, without the sense of the wonder of the visible world,
and the attitude of reverence that is the appropriate response, one does not really
understand this empirically visible world, let alone any “higher” intelligibility.
Such intelligibility arises from wonder at the visible world and does not displace
or dissipate the wonder.
However, according to Professors Hawking and Mlodinow, in their recent book
The Grand Design, “philosophy is dead,”2 and, with its demise, wonder seems
to have been a collateral casualty. Commenting at length on the “extremely . . .
impressive fine-tuning coincidence”3 as a “miracle of fine-tuning”4 evident in the
cosmos to make it conducive to human life, they observe that this miracle has been
taken to argue for some higher “grand design,”5 but that design is not the “answer
of modern science.” The answer is, rather, the theory of multiple universes, the
“multiverse idea.”6
Our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is only one of many,
just as our solar system is one of many. That means that in the same way that the

1. Enneads 2.9.16. For this translation, see Plotinus: A Volume of Selections in a New English Trans-
lation, trans. A. H. Armstrong (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 134.
2. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 5.
3. Ibid., 161; the same page refers to a “series of startling coincidences in the precise details of
physical law,” another way of referring to the wonder of these coincidences (my emphasis).
4. Ibid., 164; here the word “miracle” is used loosely to mean something impressively wonderful.
5. Ibid., from the title, and from p. 181.
6. Ibid., 164.

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environmental coincidences of our solar system were rendered unremarkable by

the realization that billions of such systems exist, the fine-tunings in the laws of
nature can be explained by the existence of multiple universes.7
I take “unremarkable” to be a word indicating the opposite of “wonderful.” This
“miracle” of fine-tuning is only an “apparent miracle,”8 only an apparent wonder.
Just as “it is a small step from the realization that the earth is just another planet to
the idea that our sun is nothing special either,”9 so we have learned that even our
whole universe, with all its apparently miraculous fine-tuning, is also nothing special.
Nor is there any need for reverence, for God is a hypothesis of first causation that
is no longer needed.10 As Hawking and Mlodinow somewhat irreverently point out,
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why
the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the
blue touch paper and set the universe going.11
A particular casualty of the draining of wonder from the visible universe is some-
thing from the “higher world” of Plotinus to which reverence for the wonder of
the sensible universe leads us: free will. Hawking and Mlodinow rule out, a priori
and without philosophical argumentation, the existence of free will, and then ask
a series of rhetorical questions:
Since people live in the universe and interact with the other objects in it, scien-
tific determinism must hold for people as well. . . . Do people have free will? If
we have free will, where in the evolutionary tree did it develop? Do blue-green
algae or bacteria have free will, or is their behavior automatic and within the
realm of scientific law? Is it only multi-celled organisms that have free will, or
only mammals? We might think that a chimpanzee is exercising free will when
it chooses to chomp on a banana, or a cat when it rips up your sofa, but what
about the roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans—a simple creature made
of only 959 cells? It probably never thinks, “That was a damn tasty bacteria I
got to dine on back there,” yet it too has a definite preference in food and will
either settle for an unattractive meal or go foraging for something better, de-

7. Ibid., 165. Note that the expression “garden-variety” (cf. p. 164) is used to deflate our own solar
system of any notable wonder. In other words, it has no prestige.
8. Ibid. Note that this phrase is taken from the title of chapter seven.
9. Ibid., 21.
10. Ibid., 71.
11. Ibid., 180. The word “universe” is used in a technical sense throughout the book, without much
reflection on how this use of the word would be related to traditional notions of the cosmos. The
authors speak of a “vast landscape of possible universes” (cf. p. 144). What is meant by the word
“landscape”?—obviously a metaphor for some kind of “whole” that includes many “universes”
in the technical sense of the term “universe.” This is something like what is meant by the idea of
“cosmos” in antiquity.

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pending on recent experience. Is that the exercise of free will? . . . [F]ree will
is just an illusion.12
The irreverent informality of the language enhances the impression that the authors
are trying to make: there is nothing special about human beings, nothing essentially
more wondrous about a human being than there is about a 959 cell worm, or, to
reverse it, there is nothing wondrous about the worm, whose behavior is “automatic
and within the realm of scientific law”13 and so nothing wondrous about human
beings. Any other impression is only an “illusion.”
If wonder is the beginning of the philosophical life according to Plotinus, and
if the philosophical life is the cultivation of wonder, science, for the authors of The
Grand Design, seems to be the continual deflation of wonder from the world until
wonder, along with the philosophy that cultivated it, is also dead. This goes a fortiori
for those specific cases of special intervention or wonder, called miracles. These
are simply declared not to exist, without any further examination or philosophi-
cal regret.14 In Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s intellectual paradigm, and contrary to
Plotinus’s, intelligibility makes something less, rather than more, wondrous.
Ultimately, for the authors of The Grand Design, the universe becomes less
wondrous the less it is centered around us human beings, and the less it corresponds
to what they call our “desire to be special,” the object of the care of a “benevolent
Creator.”15 The idea of God is not useful and is unnecessary, an illusion of human
narcissism disguised as a scientific theory. Paradoxically, once the universe has
been disenchanted of narcissistic illusions, the only thing that is left to wonder at
is the theory that explains everything else: “perhaps the true miracle,” the authors
drily comment, “is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that
predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see.”16 It
is an irony that those “abstract considerations” are not disembodied, but belong to
the scientist, though not as human being, since most human beings are not capable
of such abstraction, but strictly speaking as a scientist. The true wonder is not the
amazing variety we see, but the impressive abstract considerations of the scientists
which deflate the world of its wonder, and deflect the wonder onto the theory instead.
One can feel, at the very end of The Grand Design, the claim to cultural prestige

12. Ibid., 30, 31, 32.

13. Ibid., 31.
14. See ibid., 34.
15. Ibid., 144.
16. Ibid., 181.

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well-earned, and surely well-deserved, after the “great triumph” of making such
sense out of so many hitherto unmitigated wonders.17
Plotinus would perhaps not dismiss these claims insofar as they are useful in
some way, but would not find them amusing or even interesting as claims about the
meaning and source of the universe. No claim which would deflate the wonder of
the perceptible world by abstracting it onto a theory could ever gain any traction
with Plotinus. Abstract conceptions are, for all their abstraction, theories which
deflate what is doing the thinking, what Plotinus calls “soul” and “mind,” to the
level of a sensible object subject to similar laws, and so, at the same time, deflate
the world of soul and mind. Deflation of the world of wonder, displacing wonder
onto an abstract theory, is actually, then, to remain attached to the sensible and the
perceptible and to have an investment in never rising beyond them, for the ascent
of the soul would imply that the thinker, as mind, was somehow not reducible
to the theory, and the world as described by theory would then be lost. Plotinus
teaches, rather, that the ultimate intelligibility of the universe is not discovered by
divesting it of its wonder, which he uses the words “soul” and “mind” to describe.
Nor is the ultimate intelligibility of the universe found by dissolving oneself as
“soul” and “mind” into the physically measurable—but rather by letting oneself
be seized by the “reverence” which is a true intuition of the wonder of one’s own
self, first as “soul” and then as “mind.” The perceptible universe is the sensible
expression, wondrously reaching even to lifeless matter, of soul and mind, so
much so that one becomes aware of oneself as soul and mind, as such and not as
physical in any way, participating in the whole of Soul or life, and the whole of
Mind or intelligibility.
Finally, as a moment of increased—rather than decreased—seizure by reverence,
one does not and cannot stop with mere intelligibility, because to see the intelligibil-
ity of all, and to experience oneself as a participation in the intelligibility or Mind
of the Universe, is to see the universe as overflowing from a Goodness that is not
reducible either to intelligibility or Mind, or to Soul or life, but is beyond both.
Each is the expression of this Goodness, which, precisely as Good, has overflowed
into intelligibility, life, and the visible world as its own expression. We learn about
the Good by study, by what Plato, Plotinus says, calls the “greatest study,” and it is
thus that we ascend first into the domain of Mind. We learn about the Good
by comparisons and negations and knowledge of the things which proceed from
It and intellectual progress by ascending degrees; but we advance towards It by

17. Ibid. Cf. the expression “marvels of technology” (p. 7). The real prestige in the universe is not in
the solar system or in the universe at all; rather it is in these “marvels,” i.e., these applications of
theories.

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purifications and virtues and adornings of the soul and by gaining a foothold in
the world of Mind and settling ourselves firmly There and feasting on its contents;
anyone who attains to this at once contemplates himself and everything else
and is the object of his contemplation; he becomes real being and Mind and the
Perfect living Creature and does not look at it any more from outside [i.e. from
abstraction]. When he becomes this he is near; the Good is next above him, close
to him, already shining over the whole intelligible world.18
But after a while there is an end of study as a light beyond study, beyond Mind,
begins to be seen, something so beautiful that it swamps ones whole soul and mind
with light:
Then, letting all study go, led by his instruction to Mind and firmly established
in beauty, he raises his thought to that in which he is, but is carried out of it by
the very surge of the wave of Mind and, lifted high by its swell, suddenly sees
without knowing how; the Sight fills his eyes with light but does not make him
see something else by it, but the Light is That Which he sees. There is not in It
one thing which is seen and another which is Its light, or Mind and that which
it thinks, but a Radiance which produces these at a later stage and lets them
exist beside it. The Good is a Radiance which simply produces Mind without
extinguishing Itself in the production. The Radiance remains, and Mind comes
to be by reason of the Good’s existence.19
Passing beyond this moment to a simple awareness of the Good itself is a moment
of ecstatic reverence, which Plotinus compares to entering the sanctuary of a temple.
When one leaves the sanctuary, one sees that the statues of the gods outside the
sanctuary are simply images of something much more beautiful. In other words,
one comes to see the whole sensible world, and one’s own soul and mind, as akin
to statues of the Divine, of the Good.20

II
So, where are we in our taxonomy of wonder? Should we pause a moment to
look back, after such a vision in the sanctuary? Can we call philosophy back from

18. En. 6.7.34–36 (cf. n.1 and Armstrong, Plotinus, 145–146). In other words, the “good” is not an
empirically measurable feature of the cosmos, it is not the object of what we would call a “scien-
tific” hypothesis or theory, and yet one can “ascend” to an awareness of the good which is not a
subjective illusion, but a deepened awareness of the wonder of the physical world. Its wonder is
original and intrinsic, an indication of its “life” or “soul,” not reducible to physical life, and a true
indication of its nature as “intelligible,” and thus as good. This is the so-called ascent of the soul.
It is a path of deepening wonder.
19. Ibid., 146.
20. See En. 6.9.11 (cf. n.1 and Armstrong, Plotinus, 147–148).

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the dead after such a thrilling spiritual vision? Or is this kind of mysticism simply
a reversion to an unscientific mystification after science has already and so persua-
sively and prestigiously demystified it? Can philosophy fight back?
Plotinus would not be too interested in fighting, perhaps, but his eye might light
upon the following passage, in which the authors of The Grand Design discuss
free will as an “effective theory.” “In physics, an effective theory is a framework
created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of
the underlying processes.” In the case of human beings, this is necessary, because,
“while conceding that human behavior is indeed determined by the laws of nature,”
the complexity of the case would mean it would require “a few billion years” to do
the equations that would accurately predict any given behavioral outcome, and that
would be, “a bit late to duck when the person opposite aimed a blow.”21 However,
it turns out that “that effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting
behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on
a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. That is why the world is in
such a mess.”22
Plotinus might wonder how self-aware the writer of these lines might be. What
is meant by “rational,” for instance? Subject to scientific determinism, presumably
no human decision is “rational” in any strict sense. Does “rational” imply, then, the
equivalent of a purely subjective value judgment? Perhaps the same value judgment
implied in the seemingly gratuitous judgment that the world is in a “mess?” What
is “mess” relative to, if all we see are the outcomes of scientific determinism being
played out before our eyes? Does it imply an idea of the Good that has seized the
writer temporarily with reverence, even though expressed in an offhand, irreverent
comment? Plotinus, having come back from the dead, would press this point! From
such a small but auspicious intuition of reverence and goodness, let the ascent of
the soul begin! Since it does not begin, but is refused, Plotinus would diagnose an
instance of “soul” so immersed in sense and sensibilia that it has identified itself
with them.23 Plotinus might sense the resulting “passion” in the sentence, implied
in the judgmental contempt the authors express as though what they meant was,
perhaps the world would not be in quite such a “mess” if all human beings were as
“rational” as the writers and their scientist colleagues. The comment then would
serve simply as a kind of reminder of the cultural prestige of the writers and of
science in general—as if the simple layman or woman who is reading this book,

21. Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 32 (n.2).

22. Ibid., 33.
23. See esp. En. 3.1.8 (cf. n.1 and Armstrong, Plotinus, 120–121) for why the soul would not perceive
its own freedom.

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and who is cast as such by the popular idiom the book takes up, would need any
reminding that the real wonder in the world is this “rationality” and the theories it
generates. Perhaps we could locate at this point, from Plotinus’s point of view, a
pathology of wonder, displaced from the physical universe onto the theories of the
cultural elite who have by these very theories explained these wonders away and
with them, the possibility of the “ascent” of the soul to any “higher” awareness.

III
Well, here we are half-way through the St. Augustine Lecture and we haven’t
yet mentioned St. Augustine! Though it must be admitted, it is actually sometimes
hard to know precisely where to draw the boundary line between Plotinus and one
of his most enthusiastic admirers, St. Augustine! Perhaps we have already segued
from Plotinus to Augustine without noticing. Perhaps our suspicion about how
Plotinus might feel about the refusal of ascent is actually an assertion that would
be more comfortably at home in Augustine. To talk about the cultural per se, and to
think of the way in which cultural elites define themselves by seeking to displace
wonder from creation onto themselves, is already to be working more strictly within
a sphere of what we could call the cultural. This is a sphere in which Plotinus is not
ever really at home. But this set of sign making and signifying behavior that results
in language, education, and all other representational activity, is, on the other hand,
the “cultural” of which Augustine proved to be such an acute observer. Augustine is
suspicious of self-styled elites, both secular and ecclesiastical,24 because an elite, as
an elite, is a group that allows itself to be defined by the prestige it attracts to itself,
that is, by the wonder it excites in others. Of course there are groups of people who
do excel in certain cultural venues, and surely it is not wrong to excel at something
or to seek to excel. Yet Augustine notices how hard it is for elites not to strive for
excellence simply because it defines them as an elite, that is, as prestigious, and,
correspondingly, how hard it is for everyone else not to feel intimidated by this
prestige and participate in creating it by giving the grudging or fearful wonder that
intimidation always represents.
In the Confessions, especially in Book I, Augustine shows how his education
taught him not only to be a good orator, but also to seek praise, that is, prestige,
through his rhetoric. He learned that the purpose of excelling in rhetoric was not

24. On ecclesiastical elites, see, e.g., ciu. Dei XIX,19 and Augustine’s comments on bishops who
seek office because they seek the honor of office, that is, to belong to an elite, rather than the
service intrinsic to the office. The translation followed here and throughout is Saint Augustine.
Concerning The City of God against the Pagans, trans. H. Bettenson (London: Penguin Books,
1972), 880.

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necessarily to speak the truth persuasively, but to acquire prestigious appointments.

Augustine’s skill as an orator contributed to the prestige of the Roman emperor
who appointed him to a chair of rhetoric, and the appointment, of course, conferred
prestige on him. This prestige, however, as Augustine analyzes it, is a kind of
pathologized wonder, wonder which is displaced from the Truth since, as Augustine
points out, no one hearing any of his speeches thought they were true and served
to cast wonder onto something much less deserving of wonder so that it would be
wondered at instead of Truth.25 After all, it is easier to become an excellent speaker,
or to bask in the cultural prestige of one, than actually to speak the truth no mat-
ter what. In fact, someone who spoke the truth no matter what would be so truly
wondrous that it might bring some well needed perspective to bear on the imperial
power of the Emperor and his bureaucracy.
Augustine sees in such socially enacted projects of wonder-control one of the
best indications of a more fundamental or “original” flaw, which Augustine always
called “superbia,” or, in the somewhat lackluster English equivalent, “pride.” Pride as
“superbia” is not simply joy in one’s legitimate accomplishments, but rather a desire
to live as though one were self-interpreting, the principle of one’s own meaning,
and in that sense, self-sufficient. Since the only truly self-sufficient reality is God,
pride is in effect the desire to displace God and to live as though one had no need to
reference anything outside of oneself in order to be happy. This requires that there
be nothing outside of oneself or one’s projects to attract one’s own or anyone else’s
wonder, for if one is reduced to a wondering awe at something outside of oneself,
one has momentarily at least left pride behind for humility. Wonder is the opposite
of Pride—unless there is a mechanism in place to safely displace it from wherever
it might naturally lie onto oneself or one’s own social group. For Augustine the
most notable example of this was the Roman Empire, which taught its citizens to
be zealous for the glory of Rome above any other value and at any cost.
In Book Five of the City of God we see a parade of impressive and wonderful
examples of human virtus or excellence, including figures that even after so many
centuries we still can regard as truly glorious: e.g., Cincinnatus, who became dictator
at a time of political crisis, steered his country through the crisis, and then retired
back to his farm, penniless.26 Who would not regard such excellence as wondrous
and wish for such a statesman to appear, even now? And yet Augustine points out

25. See conf. IV, xiv,21–23, where Augustine gives the reasons why he dedicated his first books to the
famous orator Hierius. This is an excellent example of his analysis of the pathologies of the quest
for excellence as a quest for prestige independent of truth. For Augustine’s brief analysis of his
work speaking the praises of the Emperor, see conf. VI,vi,9.
26. Ciu Dei V,18.

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that, over time, the pursuit of virtue or excellence for the purpose of acquiring
glory for one’s country and in turn receiving glory back, only makes the virtues
“the slaves of human glory,”27 which is a certain kind of opinion. “Excellence”
becomes simply a function of opinion, that is, a function of prestige, instead of the
other way around. But if excellence or virtue becomes relative to prestige, which
is a function of opinion, then it begins to be a virtue not to rise above opinion. In
ciu Dei, Book V, Augustine depicts a society in the terminal stages of complacency
and, in the process, has offered his reader an analysis of social stagnation. It is the
chauvinism of the Roman Empire which is causing its decline, not, as Augustine’s
critics had suggested, the rise of Christianity. It is its inability to wonder at anything
other than itself that has made it so it has no place to gain perspective on itself and
its settled opinions on what is, and what is not, prestigious.28
Social stagnation as a pathology in wonder is, perhaps, especially amplified
and therefore exemplary in the case of the pagan Roman Empire because of the
myth of “Roma Aeterna,” Rome the Eternal City, a virtual apotheosis of a social
and political body. Augustine comes as close as he ever does to a joke in his scorn-
ful parody of the pantheon of Roman gods to be found in the erudite compilation
of the (even then) “classical” (read: “prestigious”), Roman author Varro, ciu. Dei
Book IV.29 Augustine knows very well that most of these gods did not even have a
cult and that, by his time, no one, neither Christian nor non-Christian, believed in
any of them, and yet the passage is a parody not so much of the gods themselves
as of the imperial bureaucracy which it seems to elevate into the skies. The gods
and goddesses that no one believes in are still part of the Roman cultural heritage,
prestigious as such, and the failure to disown them reveals the vested interest in the
imperial project as an apotheosized replacement for the divine. The countryside,
the mountains and hills, are left bereft of the wonder that should pertain to them
as creatures of the one Creator, politicized as part of the imperial delivery system
of benefits, glorious only insofar as precisely controlled to extend the glory of the
empire. The countryside, the visible and sensible world, has meaning only insofar
as it provides prestige and glory to the Empire. Truly this is the apotheosis of pride
for there is no wonder outside of the state to challenge its hegemony of meaning.
If you try, with Plotinus, to ascend from the wonder of the sensible world to the
wonders of Soul, Mind and the Good, you end up ascending only to the ultimate
referent of the world’s wonder, displaced onto the state. If you manage to ascend

27. Ibid., V,20 (cf. n.24 and Bettenson, Saint Augustine, 215).
28. For more on this, see John C. Cavadini, “Ideology and Solidarity in Augustine’s City of God,” in
The Cambridge Guide to Augustine’s City of God, ed., James Wetzel, forthcoming.
29. Ciu. Dei IV,8.

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to awareness of yourself as Soul or Mind, you find that the very virtues or “excel-
lences” of soul and mind refer you not to the ultimate Goodness that is the source
of wonder, but to the glory of the Empire which is redefining wonder politically.
Philosophy itself is co-opted, corrupted by the desire to provide prestigious sages
for the state to boast about, or at very least, so that the state can brag that it is “just”
from the point of view of philosophically enlightened judges.30

IV
Where are we now in our anatomy of wonder? Surely Augustine is on the side
of Plotinus and on the side of the wonder of the universe as providing a true clue
as to its ultimate intelligibility as “good.” And yet, just as surely, we are treading
into even deeper waters when it comes to a diagnosis of the pathologized warpings
and denials of wonder. The simultaneous inflation and displacement of the wonder
of the natural universe, including human persons, onto an abstract theory that is
the product of a cultural elite, serves the prestige of that elite. As a consequence, it
serves up the natural world, and the human person, bereft of wonder and devoid of
prestige simply as human, to some hierarchy of utility. Augustine would suspect that,
if this hierarchy is not the late Roman Empire, then it is the global market forces
of late phase capitalism. Augustine is always suspicious when wonder is arbitrarily
trucked about as so much spiritual cargo, fungible with prestige, and denied the
human person independent of wherever he or she may be in education or brilliance.
From this perspective, the idea of the authors of The Grand Design, namely, that
God has been invented to support a view of the universe with the human being at
the center, is simply a distraction and could not be farther from the truth of true
religion, in which God, not human beings, is at the center precisely as a challenge to
any premature foreclosures of meaning focused on utility. In rejecting a caricature
of true religion, Hawking and Mlodinow, have, from an Augustinian point of view,
distracted us from their replacement of it with their own actual claim to hegemony
of meaning. In the sleight of hand, the wonder that used to belong to the cosmos
and to the human person is displaced onto the prestige of the scientific vanguard.
From this perspective, I cannot imagine that Augustine would believe Plotinus
ultimately to be very helpful because philosophical achievement, as a form of cultural
excellence, is itself too easily co-opted into the imperial project of the displacement
of wonder away from human persons and excellence and onto the Empire. In his
sermons and treatises, Augustine repeatedly comments that in the desire to claim
wisdom as a prestigious accomplishment, the philosophers themselves have not

30. See ibid., V,19.

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proved able ultimately to resist the pursuit of excellence as a pursuit of prestige.

Just as virtue can become a credential for personal and imperial glory, so truth itself
can become a similar credential; and the more one has mastered the truth, so to
speak, the more, rather than the less, one is tempted to vitiate it in the very process
of teaching it. This is because the urge to displace wonder onto oneself that comes
from imperial culture is only in the culture because it is first and foremost in every
human heart: it is the “original” sin in which we are all complicit and from which
we need to be saved.
To illustrate this, let us go on with our anatomy of wonder by considering
Augustine’s view of miracles. In the ciu. Dei, Augustine observes that God works
miracles in order to awaken our sense of wonder, or rather, to inspire us to release
ourselves from the strategies of control and management of wonder that generate
prestige, and to put it back where it belongs, namely, onto the world itself as the
handiwork of God the Creator.
We must not listen to those who say that God does not work visible miracles,
since, according to their own admission, it is God who made the world, and they
cannot deny that the world is a visible work. And whatever miracle happens in
this world, it is certainly a lesser marvel than the whole world, that is to say,
the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, which God undoubtedly made.
But the manner of its making is as hidden from man and as incomprehensible
to man as is he who made it. And so although the miracles of the visible world
of nature have lost their value for us because we see them continually, still, if
we observe them wisely they will be found to be greater miracles than the most
extraordinary and unusual events. For man is a greater miracle than any miracle
effected by man’s agency. And therefore God who made the visible marvels of
heaven and earth does not disdain to work visible miracles in heaven and earth,
by which he arouses the soul, hitherto preoccupied with visible things, to the
worship of himself, the invisible God.31
Miracles may or may not be interruptions of natural law (though surely the most
dramatic of them are), yet Augustine does not draw attention to that feature of
them, as though such interruptions proved that there was a God who is creator
in the sense of first physical cause, and who has overseen the creation of a cozy
universe that is meaningful to us because it is centered on us as human beings. In
fact that is exactly the problem miracles are meant to address. Our prideful effort to
render ourselves fully self-referential has ended up deadening the visible universe
and our own being as an element in its wonder by displacing that wonder onto the
prestige of cultural achievement. Miracles are meant to jump start our sense of
wonder at the visible universe by providing us with something that is so wondrous

31. Ibid., X,12. For this translation, cf. n.24 and Bettenson, Saint Augustine, 390.

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that it obviously relativizes and potentially demystifies the prestige associated with
cultural elites. It would be difficult to routinize, as a cultural accomplishment, the
raising of the dead (though some lesser marvels can be routinized through magic).
It seems to demand a larger sense of wonder. It seems to want us to recover a sense
of wonder for our own being that is different from any prestige which may attach
to our achieved excellence.
In fact, any particular miracle, if authentic, will always carry with it some guid-
ance so that we can begin to see the true dimensions of wonder that it is meant
to inspire. In a sermon preached about 417 on a text from the Gospel of John,
Augustine says:
Could anything, after all, be more difficult to comprehend than that a human
being, who was not, should come to be; . . . that one who was not should, by
being born, appear in the light of day? Could anything be as wonderful as that,
as difficult to comprehend, but for God as easy to do? Marvel at such things, sit
up and take notice.32
Augustine continues by commenting on the wonder that, by contrast, is elicited
by a miracle: “People were amazed at the Lord our God Jesus Christ giving so
many thousands their fill on five loaves, and they are not amazed at the lands be-
ing filled with crops from a few grains.” We have seen why—the lands filled with
crops have lost their reference to the Creator because they are seen merely as an
extension of the wonder of the imperial economy, and are valued for their utility.
“People see extraordinary things and are amazed. Where do the people themselves
come from, to be amazed? . . . You marvel at other things, while you the marveler
are yourself an amazing miracle!”33 Wonder excites questions, it does not suppress
them, it disturbs the deadening complacency that accepts cultural prestige as an
unquestioned value.
But, as I was saying, all these things had grown cheap in your eyes, lost their
glamor, and so he came himself to do extraordinary things, in order to help you
recognize the hand of your maker in these ordinary things as well. The one came
. . . who was asked, Make wonderful your mercies (Ps. 17.7). He was being gen-
erous with them, you see. He was being generous [in creation], and nobody was
astonished, or saw the wonder of it. So he came as a little one to little ones, he
came as a doctor to the sick . . . .34

32. Sermo 126,4. For this trans., see The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century,
III/4 (Sermons 94A–147A), ed. J. E. Rotelle, trans. E. Hill (Brooklyn, New York: New City Press,
1992), 271. Hereafter this series is abbreviated as WSA.
33. Ibid., 272.
34. Ibid.

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The miracles accomplished by the Incarnate Word, the Incarnate Rationale for the
whole universe, are all wonderful signs of Himself as the greatest wonder. He is the
most prestigious person in the universe, after all, God himself, and yet he came as
a “little one to little ones.” The miracle of creation is a miracle of generosity and
compassion or mercy, and yet we were looking past such generosity for something
more prestigious. The miracles catch our attention—we are always looking for some
impressive accomplishment—but they direct our attention to a wonder that places
into perspective all of the excellence that we customarily endow with prestige:
After all, which is the more incredible? . . . It’s easier to believe that human be-
ings receive life from God; that God receives death from human beings, I think
is much more incredible.35
It is incredible that Christ multiplied the loaves and the fishes, but the wonder—
impressive as it is to us who are looking for prestigious accomplishments—serves
only to deflate the pride that was looking for them by inspiring us to wonder at
something that can never be co-opted by the quest for prestige, the shedding of
the blood of the Incarnate Word. The wonder that this elicits is healing of pride. It
causes us to see our own being as wonderful not in the first instance for anything
it has accomplished or can accomplish, but because it is the object of such prodi-
gal love. Our wonder at the self-emptying love of the Lord is wonder at the same
time at the Word, the Logos, the Rationale for the whole universe, the Mind of the
Maker and the very Maker himself. The universe is invested in wonder because its
intelligibility comes from this Love. And this Love exceeds our ability to explain it
precisely because, as divine love, it is completely and absolutely free. The universe
is released from its slavery to our quest for prestige, and in its freedom its true
wonder is also released, recovered from the “unremarkability” to which political,
cultural or scientific complacency had assigned it. We are free to be formed in the
love which alone makes us truly objective observers of the world.

V
This is a far cry from the anthropocentric and narcissistic view of creation which
Hawking and Mlodinow, to their credit it must be admitted, reject. To see the world
objectively means to begin to see it from the perspective of the love in which it was
created, otherwise we see it only as a reflection, in some way, of our own ambitions
to be fully self-interpreting knowers.
The knowledge (scientiam) of earthly and celestial things is highly prized by the
human race. The better among them, to be sure, rate knowing themselves above

35. Sermo 130,4. For this translation, see ibid., 313.

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this sort of knowledge; and the mind that knows its own weakness deserves more
respect than the one that, with no thought at all for a little thing like that, sets out
to explore, or even knows already, the course of the stars, while ignorant of the
course it should follow itself to its own health and strength. . . . A man who has . . .
taken a look at himself in God’s light, and discovered himself, and realized that
his own sickness cannot be compounded with God’s purity . . . is not “puffed up
by knowledge” because he is “built up by love” (1 Cor 8:1), since he has valued
knowledge above knowledge (scientiam scientiae); he has put knowledge of his
own weakness above knowledge of “the walls of the world” (Lucretius, De Rerum
Naturae 2.73), the foundations of the earth and the pinnacles of the sky; and
by “bringing in” this “knowledge” he has “brought in sorrow” (cf. Eccl 1:18).36
This is not a simple statement about the preference of “self-knowledge” over
“knowledge of the walls of the world,” to use the phrase from Lucretius cited
by Augustine, but rather a statement about the conditions for the objectivity of
knowing, for “purity.” The person who “knows already” the “course of the stars,”
knows something true. Yet that does not mean that he knows objectively. Indeed,
if he is not aware of the very status of his knowledge, of its ultimate significance
or reference, and if he is not aware of the status of the knower and of our liability
to narrow down the significance of what we know, then he cannot do so. We prefer
the complacency of someone who has “arrived,” rather than feeling the sorrow as
“of someone in exile,” as Augustine puts it.
In another passage, this time from Book V of the Confessions, Augustine tells
God,
You will not let yourself be found by the proud, nor even by those who in their
inquisitive skill count stars or grains of sand, or measure the expanses of heaven,
or trace the paths of planets. With their intellect and the intelligence you have
given them they investigate these things, and so they have discovered much . . .
and their calculations have been accurate. It has therefore been possible for them
to make forecasts and draw up rules from their research. On the basis of these
rules, which are still studied today, it can be predicted in which year, in which
month, on which day of the month and at what hour an eclipse will occur, and
what proportion of its light the sun or moon will lose. And, as forecast, it hap-
pens. People think this wonderful: those who are ignorant of such matters are
dumbfounded, while the experts strut and make merry. In their impious pride they
draw away from you and lose your light, because these scholars who foresee a
future eclipse of the sun long beforehand fail to see their own in the present, for
want of inquiring in a religious spirit from whom they have received the very
intelligence which enables them to inquire into these phenomena . . . Many true

36. De Trinitate 4. Prologue.1. See WSA I/5 (The Trinity), ed. J. E. Rotelle, trans. E. Hill (Hyde Park,
New York: New City Press, 1991), 152. The translation has been slightly adjusted.

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statements do they make about creation, but they do not find the Truth who is
artificer of creation because they do not seek him with reverence . . . their rea-
soning grows unsound as they claim to be wise and arrogate to themselves what
is Yours. This in turn leads them into an extreme of blind perversity, where they
will even ascribe to you what is theirs, blaming you, who are Truth, for their
own lies. . . . They distort truth into a lie, and they worship and serve the creature
instead of the Creator.37
Just as in the passage from the De Trinitate, this passage does not dispute the truth
of scientific claims; in fact Augustine will shortly rely on their truth in refuting the
mythology of the Manichees. Rather, the passage draws attention to the dynamic
of pride, in which the truth is used to displace the wonder proper to creation onto
an elite who seek and accept the prestige of being the “wise,” those to whom all
the rest of us must turn for wisdom, as though the solutions they provide to the big
questions of life have reference to themselves and their theories alone. The theories
are made to seem above the fray, above the normal cultural exchange where status
and prestige is sought through sign-making and signification. It is a false “ascent”;
and it is the more pernicious the more value-neutral and a-cultural it is made to
seem. The elite appears to have succeeded in being self-interpreting, to have pulled
it off, to have provided intelligibility solely on one’s own terms. The scientific facts
are verified by the results they predict, even as the meaning of the whole is lost, and
one becomes addicted to that meaninglessness as the price one pays for prestige,
for being known as “wise.” This is the extreme form of anthropocentrism. The
point of real religion, as Augustine describes it, is, with Plotinus, to “ascend” to an
awareness of oneself where such arrogance can be critiqued.
But such an ascent is terrifying, more terrifying, Augustine wants to claim, than
Plotinus ever suspected. For one thing, such an ascent means recognizing the invest-
ment we have in claims to prestige, and “grieving” as we become more and more
aware of the emptiness it has engendered for ourselves and for others. It requires a
conversion, not by wrenching our intellect to the belief in six literal days of creation
and a Paradise in which there was a literal talking serpent, but by adverting to our
own investment in prestige as an addiction to emptiness, to meaninglessness, to
the “blind perversity” of filling that meaninglessness with the prideful myth of be-
ing self-interpreting. It means confessing that “what has satisfied [us] is [our] own
imaginings, not your truth” and finding that, in that knowledge, it is “a relief to
cry”38 when we realize that we have been so deeply commitment to a way of look-

37. Conf. V,iii,3–5. This trans. is a slightly adjusted version of WSA I/1 (The Confessions), ed. J. E.
Rotelle, trans. M. Boulding (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 1997), 115–117.
38. Trin. IV, prologue.,1. For this translation, see WSA I/9, 152 (n.36).

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ing at the world which is actually a perverse addiction to meaninglessness: “amavi

perire,” Augustine says of himself: “I was in love with my own destruction.”39 It is
hard to be freed of an addiction!

VI
The true ascent thus requires a “sacrifice,” an “immolation” of the “high-flown
pride” of this way of looking at the world (to use expressions from Conf. 5). The
“ascent” to awareness of God needed is actually, then, a descent into true self-
awareness and thus contrition. But what is the way? How can we bear it? How can
we afford to look at the depth of our own foolishness? The way is to “climb down
from [our] lofty selves to Him,” to the very “Rationale” through which creation
was made, to the Creator who has and seeks no prestige, who “was reckoned as one
of us” and Who, in the Incarnation, revealed His utter heedlessness of the narrow
truncation of wonder we call prestige. “Thus by Him we ascend to Him.” (conf.
V,iii,5). If, to return to the language of the sermons quoted above, He came as “a
little one to little ones,” then in renouncing our attempts to be self-interpreting, we
are being configured to the very Rationale, the “Word,” through which creation was
made, to the Meaning of the world in self-giving love. We ascend by descending
from our attempts to provide the meaning of life on our own, and instead to be
humble enough to feel hungry and to receive that meaning as food, as Bread, and
to eat it and so grow in true life, in the freedom to, in turn, give ourselves as food.

VII
Therefore, the proper attitude that corresponds to the Christian doctrine of
creation is not, for example, in the first instance to try to prove or to disprove that
we have free will, as though we could do either one persuasively. It is rather to al-
low ourselves to grow in configuration to the “Word,” the Meaning through which
the world was created, this “Mind” or “Intelligibility,” if we want to use Plotinus’s
words, of a reality unsuspected by Plotinus himself. We “descend” to “Intelligibility”
when we sacrifice the miracle of our monopoly on meaning in order to accompany
the Creator in His littleness and to find Him among the little ones.
Let us turn back to the one who performed these miracles. He is himself the
bread which came down from heaven; but bread which nourishes and never
diminishes; bread which can be eaten, but cannot be eaten up. . . . Who can the
bread of heaven be, but Christ? But for man to eat the bread of angels, the Lord

39. Conf. II,iv,9.

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of angels became man. Because if he hadn’t become this, we would not have
his flesh; if we didn’t have his flesh, we would not eat the bread of the altar.40
Augustine loves to talk about the wonder of this love as the wonder of a heavenly
deal that God strikes with us in Christ, a heavenly economy (if we can put it that
way), in which God seemingly irrationally receives nothing from us except our
liabilities, and pays for those liabilities with the most expensive commodity in the
universe, His own blood:
Sift through all human affairs, convict me of lying if you can, consider all human
beings, and ask yourself whether they are in this world for any other end but to
be born, to toil, and to die. These are the trade goods of this region of ours, these
are found here in abundance; it was to such trade that that Trader came down.
And because every trader both gives and receives; gives what he has, receives
what he hasn’t got; when he buys something, gives money and receives what
he buys; so Christ too in this piece of trading both gave and received. But what
did he receive? What there’s plenty of here, being born, toiling and dying. . . .
“Please, good Trader, buy us. What am I saying, ‘Buy us,’ when we ought to be
giving thanks because you have already bought us? You distribute our price to
us, we drink your blood; so you indeed distribute our price to us.”41
Looking for prestige, for something wondrous, and wanting to receive that prestige,
we find ourselves mysteriously trapped, beguiled, perhaps attracted by the miracles
as a break in natural law, but passing on to the greater marvel that this represents.
And in wondering at that, we suddenly find ourselves, in awe, gawking foolishly
and most unprestigiously at the essence of the whole universe, and wanting, in spite
of ourselves almost, and most un-prestigiously and foolishly, to run after it, to buy
the pearl of great price, or rather to receive its price as our own, the blood of the
Creator of the universe spilled to buy death back from us and give us a life that is
beyond the useless and obsessive quest for glory, honor, and prestige. Receiving
the Eucharist, we are incorporated, literally, into the heavenly economy and find
our freedom, not as a theory proven, but as a configuration to that free economy
of love, as ourselves food or bread for the world. We experience the wonder of the
world primarily in configuration to its price.
So how do we cultivate this attitude of wonder? Augustine’s answer is consistent
throughout the corpus of his sermons: by the Eucharistic, by what we could call
Eucharistic giving. Just as the stranger was recognized on the road to Emmaus42 in
the breaking of the bread, so a Eucharistic giving would involve the recognition of

40. Sermo 130,2. See WSA III/4, 311 (n.32).

41. Ibid.
42. Sermo 236,3. See WSA III/7 (230–272B), 45–46.

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the stranger by the works of compassion and hospitality to the point of sacrifice. The
works of hospitality, not (in the first instance) a theory, recover the stranger from
the status of a predetermined, unfree outcropping of the impersonal physical forces
of the universe, to something precious, loved, valued and wondrous. Eucharistic
giving involves remembering that in the heavenly economy, there was no counting
of the cost, no strict justice, but an extravagance beyond justice, such that the very
meaning of the word justice is widened beyond calculations of equity. Instead of
assuming, for example, that the world is unjust and that God’s action or inaction in
any particular case indict Him of injustice, Augustine advises,
Before we go into that, consider whether there is any unpaid debt of justice in
your own account: “Break your bread for the hungry, and take the person with no
shelter into your home. If you see anyone naked, clothe him” (Is 58:11). This is
what justice means for you, for this is the commandment the Lord has entrusted to
you: “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, get rid of the wickedness of your
hearts and take it out of my sight; learn to do good, deal justly with the orphan
and the widow. Then come, and let us argue it out, says the Lord” (Is 1:16–18).43
One who has been foolish enough to go beyond what might be considered safe and,
therefore, even prestigious in giving to the poor, one who has given without regard
to merit but only to need, and who has given so much so as to feel foolish, such a
one is experiencing his or her freedom not by trying to construe it or observe it as
a neutral phenomenon in the universe, but by paying the price for it in love. That
price is the freedom itself. The orphan and the widow are “worth” just as much as
the prestigious chaired professor of cosmology—or theology or philosophy—and
are just as “wondrous.”

VIII
It turns out, after all, that wonder really does have an “anatomy,” and the anatomy
of a true body. It is the anatomy of the Body of Christ, formed by an economy of love
that is a new way of doing business in the world, a new way of assessing worth, and
so a new way of assessing wonder. We can look out on the world, in all the complex-
ity and variety that science has shown us, and see in it a reflection of the price God
has paid for it, for that is what “creation” is, something so precious to God that He
considered His own whole self, His own infinite and eternal self, a small—even neg-
ligible—price to pay. Creation bears the “traces” of this love everywhere and always,
and we will “see” these traces, delineations of glory and wonder, to the extent that
we too are configured to this price and so bring into the world an “image” by which

43. En. Ps. 61,22. See WSA III,17 (Expositions of the Psalms, 51–72), ed. J. E. Rotelle, trans. M.
Boulding (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2001), 224.

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people may see what the Creator is like. Isn’t this the point of Pope Benedict’s idea
that the saints are “lights,” that their lives cause light to enter into the world?44 It is
in the lives of the saints, he suggests, following Augustine, I think, that we are able
to see faint echoes of the true “big bang” that is creation, such that the “big bang”
of scientific theory is only an analogy, a trace. It is real, though only as a pointer to
the ultimate genesis of the cosmos in the wonder of God’s love.45

44. Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (2006), 40.

45. The question and answer period after the lecture provided for a fruitful exchange. One question
that came up at that time, and was then reiterated afterwards, was whether or not Augustine
thinks there is a legitimate form of praise, praise that one can give another, and praise that could
be sought or at least enjoyed from another, that was not part of the quest for glory and prestige.
Without providing a detailed response, an affirmative answer is clearly appropriate. E.g., in a
famous passage at Trin. IX,11, Augustine argues that were he to hear about some man who has
endured severe tortures on behalf of the faith, he would want to seek out that man, and get to know
him, and, as he says, “bind him to myself in friendship, . . . engage him in conversation, express
my regard for him, . . . and in turn hope he will develop and express a regard for me.” He has the
intention, in short, of “enjoying him.” Praise that is uttered in humble admiration, in the context
of a mutually supportive friendship striving for virtue, is not only appropriate but legitimately
enjoyable. In another passage, preaching on the feast of St. Vincent, Augustine points out that the
martyrs can be praised and can accept praise, but, placing Ps 34:2 on the lips of St. Vincent, “It is
in the Lord that my soul shall be praised” (s. 274). So, praise can be legitimately exchanged “in
the Lord,” meaning, if the glory is ascribed to God’s grace. Paul himself can not only be praised,
but can praise himself, as it were, boasting that he has “fought the good fight,” etc., because he
can ascribe his merits, genuine enough, to God’s gifts (see, e.g., s. 299B,5). Finally, returning to
s. 274, Augustine closes by praising the patience of the congregation, in standing through the long
reading of the acts of the martyr, and then the sermon. So, it would seem that praise can also be
offered as pastoral encouragement. Perhaps these three examples could be the basis for a more
detailed examination of the subject.
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous assistance of Nancy Cavadini, as well as
suggestions made by those who read the paper: Cyril O’Regan, Jesse Couenhoven, James K. Lee,
and Troy A. Stefano. Of course, any mistakes that remain are my own.

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