Blog-ustine

Curiositas and Wonder in Augustine's The Confessions

“What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?...
He was getting hell ready for people who inquisitively peer into deep matters.”
—a damned funny joke retold by Augustine

Curiositas is one of the trilogy of sins to which Augustine continually falls prey before he is converted. At some point, I plan to trace the history of this vice, but suffice it to say that over 700 years later, Aquinas queries the nature of curiositas, citing Augustine’s discussion of it. (Summa Theologica, question 167 “Whether curiosity can be about intellective knowledge?” The answer is, it can’t. It’s about “sensitive” knowledge). Even though we hear quite a bit about Augustine’s sexual urges and exploits, The Confessions dwells even more on his sin of curiosity.

In each book of The Confessions, Augustine tries to work through a question about God’s nature, beginning with questions, leading to speculations, and ultimately arriving at graced knowledge. Another recurring pattern of each book that I wish to explore is that he’s led astray in the beginning of each book by some kind of curiositas, and then resolves this into wonder inspired by God’s magnitude, which leads him to another set of inquiries. This pattern aligns wonder with graced knowledge, suggesting that since God’s nature is unknowable to humankind, the appropriate response to God (for Augustine) is wonder, not curiosity. I wish to argue that The Confessions is not just a story of Augustine’s religious conversion but also of his conversion of ignorant, unbridled curiosity into enlightened, tempered wonder. Indeed, it is his learning of wonder—coupled with his acquisition of first literal and ultimately allegorical language—that propels his conversion, inspires his mystical encounter with God, and sustains his connection with God. Each book of The Confessions charts a mini-version of this process of transforming curiosity into wonder, and each book demonstrates a progressively enlarged capacity to wonder.

(NOTE: I had to abridge this “post”—I accidentally wrote a 20-page essay exploring each book of The Confessions, but I can’t reproduce it here. So, I’ll start with book 11).

In book eleven, we learn that wonder brings man closer to God, since God’s mind is itself wonderful: “such a mind is wonderful, so amazing as to fill us with awe.” Augustine goes so far as to suggest that God’s essence is wonder: “How deep is that mystery hidden in the secret recesses of your being.” Thus, it makes sense that the way to apprehend a wondrous being is through wonder. In his attempt to understand God, Augustine imitates him. Even more provocatively, Augustine suggests in a striking comparison between wondrous knowledge and music that the godly epistemology of wonder is inherent in human nature, much like Plato’s anamnesis: “Far, far more wonderful is your mode of knowing, and far more mysterious. When a person is singing words well known to him, or listening to a familiar song, his senses are strained between anticipating sounds still to come and remembering those sung already.” The last two books find Augustine doing his best to imitate God’s wondrous way of knowing. In book twelve, he wonders about the nature of chaos and creation:

“The abyss we know, the deep ocean of waters now visible, admits even in its most unfathomable depths some semblance of light which is perceptible to the fish and slithering creatures that live down on the ocean floor; but the primal abyss was almost nothingness, for it was still totally without form…For you, Lord, made the world from formless matter, and that formless matter that was almost nothing at all you made from nothing at all, intending to create from it all the great things which fill us humans with wonder.”

Unlike Augustine’s earlier attempts to analyze God’s ways (as when he asks why God didn’t baptize him sooner), this is not a rigorous, critical approach to understanding chaos; rather, it is an appreciation of the mystery of creation. It is not curiosity, driven by a desire to know the answers to the way the material world is formed, but is wonder. The passage acknowledge the limits of empiric knowledge; Augustine suggests that while we can know certain things about the material world, such as what sorts of animals live in the depths of the ocean, God’s mysteries are impenetrable through human senses. The first kind of knowledge satisfies curiosity, but it is not real truth. The second part of the passage demonstrates a different way of knowing the world, one that is based on faith and reverence for the wonders of God.

These two epistemologies parallel other divisions in the text, as between the flesh and the soul or between the letter and the spirit. Not only do these epistemologies gesture to ways of knowing the world, but they also align with the two ways of reading scripture that Augustine discusses shortly after this passage. Shuddering in awe at the mystery of God’s Word, Augustine comments directly on the two levels of meaning in the Bible, the superficial and the profound: “How amazing is the profundity of your words! We are confronted with a superficial meaning that offers easy access to the unlettered; yet how amazing their profundity, O my God, how amazingly deep they are! To look into that depth makes me shudder, but it is the shudder of awe, the trembling of love.” The superficial, or the literal, level is like the abyss of the ocean that can be penetrated with material, earthly light; the literal reading of the Bible is thus aligned with curiosity. The profound, allegorical, reading is wondrous. Reading the scripture—and the world—as allegory is a way to approximate, and therefore to apprehend, God’s wonder.

Importantly, the literal reading is a valid one for Augustine: “Everyone draws for himself whatever truth he can from it about these questions, each a different point, and then hauls his discovery trough meandering channels of his own discourse.” He offers a very generous allowance for the interpretation of scripture, although he also claims there are various levels of Truth, explaining that God made scripture available on multiple levels so all could access it. As a result, curiosity is an acceptable way of reading God’s nature; it is just not the most complete. And it can lead to confusion; Augustine explains that scripture can either be a nest or a thicket; “chatterers”—or those who give into loquacitas and read only literally—view it as a thicket, unable to be disentangled. In my reading of Augustine, chatterers are guilty of curiositas, indulging indiscriminately in curiosity that leads to a limited understanding of God. Wonderers read allegorically and thus rest in the nest of scripture.

Indeed, it is Augustine’s allegorical understanding of scripture that allows him to bring his material understanding of the world into alignment with his spiritual one. In an extended allegorization of Genesis (what Marshall Grossman calls the “allegory of allegories”), the sea creatures become auguries rather than just creatures. Augustine recognizes the dangers of reading God’s Word through his world: “Am I to be charged with lying or with causing confusion, by failing to draw a distinction between the luminous comprehension of these mysteries in the vault of heaven, and the corporeal works achieved far below in the waves of the sea?” Despite the potential for misreading that allegory introduces, Augustine insists that God planted meaning in the world:

“It is true that the characteristics of certain things are fixed and finalized, and not subject to development over successive generations, and among these are the splendors of wisdom and knowledge; but these same realities work themselves out in the sphere of bodily things in a great variety of forms which constantly increase and multiply through your blessing, O God. You have made kindly provision for the learning processes of us mortals, so prone to weariness, by arranging that our minds should attain to understanding as one single truth is figuratively expressed and annunciated in many different ways through the variations to which corporeal things are subject. The waters it was that produced these things, but in response to your creative word.”

The need for allegory resulted from man’s fall; if not for the fall, “there would have been no need for the deeds performed and the words spoken by your stewards amid the pounding waves, words and deeds material and sensible, yet fraught with sacramental power.” In the post-lapsarian world, words are material sacraments, reminders of the severed connection between God and man, between Word and word. Allegory is one way to recover some of the wonder—and therefore Truth—of God’s nature. Through allegory, Augustine moves from in-fans (one who cannot speak) to con-fessor (one who tells together with God). In joining the literal and figurative, Augustine joins his word to the Word and speaks with God. Allegory serves as the tool by which Augustine converts his dangerously absorbing curiosity into wonder.

Footnote:
Some of the ways—other than allegory—that Augustine expresses wonder:

• questions/inquiry
o Where was I before my birth?

• paradox
o God is “most hidden yet intimately present…steadfast yet elusive”

• amplification (like Longinus in sublime)
o “You are most high, excellent, most powerful, omnipotent, supremely merciful and supremely just…”
o Praise and admiration forms of wonder

• language of magnitude
o “The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it”

• language of overflow, bounty
o “rather you gave me an infant’s nourishment”
o “and so they wanted to pass on to me the overflowing gift they received from you. It was a bounty for me from them”

• concatenation of images
o about human custom: “Who can keep his footing against you? Will you never run dry? How long will you toss the children of Eve into a vast, terrifying sea”

• exclamation (a bit histrionic):
o “Feverishly I thrashed about, sighed, wept and was troubles, and there was no repose for me”

• inspired poetry

• complex philosophizing
o “all our tomorrows and beyond, all our yesterdays and further back, you will make in your Today, you have made in your Today”

• inventiveness in language (like “scamel”)
o what is mutability? “a nothing-something” or “an-is-that-is-not”

What is wonder, anyway?

To begin to answer the question I posed at the end of the sublime post (yes, I mean "sublime post" in both ways), I turn to Peter Platt’s article, “‘Not before Either Known or Dreamt of’: Francesco Patrizi and the Power of Wonder in Renaissance Poetics.” This excellent article gives us a much-needed connection between Longinus and Renaissance thought. Longinus just wasn’t around much during the Renaissance, particularly not in England. Platt’s discussion of Patrizi shows us that Longinus did indeed lurk on the margins, especially in discussions of wonder.

Platt argues that Patrizi’s main influence in his aesthetic theory was Longinus, working against the grain of the hegemony of Aristotleian admiration. Platt cites Patrizi’s discussion of wonder in poetry: “there must be incredible things if the marvelous is to be known from them, because the credible cannot bring about the marvelous…all poetry must have as its object the incredible because this is the true foundation of of the marvelous, which must in such wise be the principal object of every poem.” So the basis of all poetry, according to Patrizi, must be wonder. This wonder is “neither reason, nor emotion, but separate from them both and in the business of communicating between them both; and that, placed on the boundary between the two, it is able to spread and flow, through its movement, swiftly up to the regions of reason and down to those of emotion…the power of wonder is almost an Euripos [violent current]…,the tide running back and forth from reason to emotion.”

This very exciting description of wonder builds upon the Longinian sublime, which is described as a lightning bolt scattering everything; here, wonder is an electric current running between opposite poles. This demonstrates the liminality, contingency, and force of wonder. While this description tells us little about wonder is, it usefully describes for us what it is not: reason OR emotion. So, although I don’t get the answer to my question (What is wonder?), I am beginning to get a sense of how the sublime made its way into the Renaissance as wonder. Platt argues that Patrizi valorizes what Aristotelians feared: wonder as a force that can, and perhaps ought, to destabilize and diminish reason. While Patrizi is certainly in the minority, Platt demonstrates that his work did indeed have some impact, particularly on humanist thinking.

On a related note, it seems to me, and I want to discuss this further when I get to Shakespeare and even early modern poetry that with the exception of Patrizi and those he influenced, early modern practice was ahead of its aesthetic theory; the aesthetics of wonder prefigure the shift to or at least the tension between Longinian and Aristotleian theories of art.

Sublime Wonder

I've been reading Longinus, Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer and thinking about the sublime. A very dangerous endeavor. Since wonder has much in common with the sublime, however, I think it's important to work through some of the similarities and differences between the two. This post is a bit long and uneven because I'm still mulling over some of the issues.

Theorists of the sublime differ in the exact effect of the sublime, yet for all of them, the sublime causes us to either look or move upward. Longinus explains, for example, sublime produces “not persuasion but transport” (ekstasis). Burke’s explanation of the effects of the sublime is the opposite; while looking upward to something of great magnitude, the subject is not lifted up but rather pressed down: “But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him.” Kant revises this, suggesting that while the subject does indeed fill overwhelmed, at the same time, the imagination rises to meet the challenge that reason could not meet. As a result, the sublime is both a displeasure and “also a pleasure, aroused by the fact that this very judgment, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us.” The sublime thus “elevates our imagination.” Indeed, for Kant, the subject is elevated even above nature: “we found in our mind a superiority over nature itself in its immensity…though the irresistibility of nature’s might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us. This keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded.”

Schopenhauer has a similar view, explaining that the sublime “is occasioned…by the sight of a power threatening the individual with annihilation, incomparably superior to him.” While it crushes the individual, the sublime concurrently uplifts the spirit: “But at the same time there rises against such a specter of our own nullity, against such a lying impossibility, the immediate consciousness that indeed all these worlds exist only in a presentation to us…The magnitude of the world that previously caused us unrest now rests within us; our dependence upon it is nullified by its dependence upon us.” He differs slightly from Kant’s view because he does not see aesthetic judgment giving the subject a feeling of superiority; rather, the subject sheds its will and confronts what he calls presentation in its pure form, explaining that the subject becomes ““one with the world and thus not crushed, but lifted up, by its immensity.” Related to the feeling of being suspended, another similarity between the effect of the sublime and of wonder is a sense of enchantment. Longinus calls it “enthrallment.” While both the sublime and wonder involve a moment of arrest or freezing, however, the sublime has to do with upward momentum or upward looking, whereas wonder has to do with looking ahead.

The enthrallment and arrest effected by both wonder and the sublime also cause them both to temporarily suspend critical faculties. Burke explains, “The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused.” Indeed, this feeling of arrest in the sublime is so powerful that it can paralyze: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is the state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect.” The difference is, wonder is intimately wrapped up with the desire to know and often prompts analysis or further inquiry.

Another link between the sublime and wonder is that they both border on the ridiculous or bathetic. At the opposite pole, another connection between wonder and the sublime is that both are dangerous and require tempering. These very different characteristics point to another link between wonder and the sublime: that they both deal in paradoxes, in contradictions somehow united.

Now, here is an area that tangles my thoughts up more quickly than my cat does to a ball of yarn. Pleasure. Nobody seems to agree about the role of pleasure in the sublime. Longinus says that passion and pleasure can cause the sublime, but it can also be “independent of passion” as long as there is dignity and elevation. Burke argues that the sublime causes delight, not pleasure, and he characterizes delight as the “removal of pain or danger.” Such delight arises out of the passion for self-preservation: “they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances.” As much as Kant tries to deny his similarity to Burke in this case, his pleasure in the sublime sounds awfully familiar. He argues, “the liking for the sublime contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure.” Kant’s liking here does not derive out of self-preservation, but rather admiration; in fact, Kant’s version of aesthetic pleasure is disinterested and lacks purpose; yet it is like Burke’s delight in that it is not a “positive pleasure.”

While I cannot iron out these discrepancies, I’m interested in how pleasure fits in with wonder. Kent Cartwright has me nearly convinced that wonder is always associated with pleasure because it is a feeling of being connected in some way with greatness. In a way, this idea makes sense because, as with sublimity, wonder is an encounter with greatness, with something of magnitude. Whereas the sublime is a terrifying experience that in some way makes the subject painfully aware of her smallness and limited nature, wonder causes her to feel aware of her relationship with that greatness. Further, wonder is generally connected with the desire to learn more and often prompts further inquiry, thus emphasizing the power of the subject’s intellect. Such acknowledgement of the capacity of the individual offers another kind of pleasure, though this might be more of an after-effect of wonder rather than an experience with wonder itself.

An important difference between wonder and the sublime is that wonder is always a response to newness, surprise, or the unexpected; the sublime, while it may be provoked by novelty, does not require it. Indeed, Longinus even derides novelty as something that interferes with the sublime: “All these ugly and parasitical growths arise in literature from a single cause, that pursuit of novelty in the expression of ideas which may be regarded as the fashionable craze of the day.” As a result, the same wondrous encounter cannot be repeated. A sublime passage in Milton, for example (hey, everyone who talks about the sublime uses him, why not me?), is always sublime; a passage in Shakespeare might capture or aesthetically reproduce a moment of wonder, but it is not wondrous itself. Or attending a second performance of a play that has a moment of wondrous spectacle might result in curiosity (a feeling of how did they do that?, for example), but once it is expected, familiar, or understood, it is not wonder anymore. An important exception to this is an encounter with something incomprehensible, incredible, or unresolvable, as in repeated experiences with the sacrament of the Eucharist for a devout believer. I think that moments like this—often involving contact with some divine force—demonstrate where the sublime and the wondrous overlap. Burke gives us the example of David’s abjection before God: “we cannot but shudder at a power which can confer benefits of such might importance. When the prophet David contemplated the wonders of wisdom and power, which are displayed in the economy of man, he seems to be struck with a sort of divine horror, and cries out, fearfully and wonderfully am I made!”

Another distinction between wonder and the sublime is that the sublime is universal, whereas wonder can be very particular. My example of the Eucharist might serve here as well.

Theorists of the sublime have conflicted attitudes about wonder. Generally, they denigrate it, linking it to superstition and stupidity or lack of reflection. It is thus not as great as the sublime. Other times, however, they link wonder to genius, as when Schopenhauer argues, “Because genius mirrors clear essence of the world, it seeks constant wonder.” Schopenhauer goes on to relate wonder to restlessness, something I’d like to consider in later readings: “This is the explanation of the liveliness to the point of restlessness in individuals of genius, the present rarely being able to satisfy them because it does not fill their consciousness. This gives them that character of unresting endeavor, that ceaseless search for objects that are new and worthy of regard.” Schopenhauer actually suggests that wonder, in art at least, is a quality of the sublime (or perhaps one of its effects): “It is also that blessed state of will-less perception, finally, that spreads so wondrous a magic over the past and distant places and depicts them in so very flattering a light, by way of a kind of self-deception.” This idea brings me to a final reflection for this already too long post, that sublime is an aesthetic response or experience, and wonder is not. What, then, is it?