Endowed with Wonder: Heschel on Science and Religion

According to Hebrew Bible scholar Abraham Heschel, there is embedded within each of us a natural proclivity to wonder, a sense of “unmitigated innate surprise.”^[1] A sense of wonder is constitutive of who we are as humans. Wonder, for Heschel, is not merely an emotion, but an existential experience, a fundamental orientation to the world. All religious awareness and insight are rooted in wonder. 

One of the principal responsibilities of religion, therefore, is to fight against the anesthetizing effects of becoming “too familiar” with life and reality, and to instill in us a sense of perpetual surprise, a willingness to encounter the world again and again as if for the first time.^[2] In this way, religion has nothing to fear from science. The latter, Heschel writes, “extends rather than limits the scope of the ineffable, and our radical amazement is enhanced rather than reduced by the advancement of knowledge.”^[3] Mindful of this, he warns that the feeling of being seized by wonder and transcendence must not become “a cushion for the lazy intellect.” He expounds: “It must not be a substitute for analysis where analysis is possible; it must not stifle doubt where doubt is legitimate. It must, however, remain a constant awareness if [humanity] is to remain true to the dignity of God’s creation, because such awareness is the spring of all creative thinking.”^[4] Without question, Heschel’s intention is to eradicate the assumption that wonder is synonymous with ignorance of science, a belief quite often held both by critics of religions as well as its most spirited defenders. He is adamant that science is in no way dangerous to religion, and that the security, safety, and success of religion in no way hinges upon the fear and eschewal of science. 

Here, we discover a constitutive feature of Heschel’s theology. He is not interested in a search for “the God of the gaps,” a God who dwells in the empty spaces of contemporary scientific understanding. It is not so much specific facts that fill one with wonder, but rather “the fact that there are facts at all.” Understood from a philosophical vantage point, the presence of divine life is to be discerned not primarily in so-called interruptions of the natural order, but in the astounding realization that natural order exists in the first place. “To the Biblical mind,” Heschel explains, “nature, order are not an answer but a problem: why is there order, being, at all?”^[5] At the root of Heschel’s sense of wonder, then, is a preoccupation with a broader, more fundamental question: Why is there something rather than nothing? He writes: “We are amazed at seeing anything at all; amazed not only at particular values and things but at the unexpectedness of being as such, at the fact that there has always been being [and becoming].”^[6] Implicit in Heschel’s insight is the notion that matter is eternal and emergent. From the earliest moments of consciousness, the universe has been in the process of gestation; it is slowly being born and taking shape as the perception of the divine, the realm of the spiritual. We might say, in other words, that wonder or sheer amazement is the realization that all of reality—its actuality and its depth dimension—alludes to some transcendent meaning, even though that meaning is always shrouded in mystery. 

Although a person can have a sense of wonder without an explicit awareness of God, the former is already the first step toward this apprehension, this closer recognition: “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder . . . [It is] a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is” beneath the surface of things.^[7] Wonder is “our relationship with God.” For both the scientist and theologian, it takes the form of “understanding . . . an act of insight into a meaning and purpose greater than ourselves.”^[8] Whether we unconditionally acknowledge it or not, wonder is our response to the sense that reality alludes to something more: every single element, entity, or moment is more than it appears to be and, in all its beauty, richness, and future becoming, reveals the presence and capacity of this transcendent dimension of life. 

One of the central tenets of biblical literature is the consciousness that what is, is “deep, exceedingly deep.” On the horizon of the world of the known is a world unknown, hidden, inherently mysterious, full of infinite life and endless potential. Heschel explains that what stirred the souls of the biblical authors in particular and the Jewish imaginary in general was “neither the hidden nor the apparent, but the hidden in the apparent; not the order but the mystery of the order that prevails in the complexity of the universe.”^[9] Mystery, the divine, the ultimate, God, is an indispensable aspect of the world; not an exception to reality but a spiritual setting of reality; not something separate from existence but a dimension of all existence. As such, the “mystery of nature” cannot be overcome, for it is part of God and a fulfillment of God’s own ultimate self.  

Thus, the challenge forever before us is Isaiah’s challenge: to see through nature to the God who is essentially transcendent in immanence (Isa. 40:26). We must embrace wonder in its fullest sense, and live it with awe, determination, wisdom, and love. After all, when we approach the world with wonder, as Teilhard de Chardin reminds us, we activate our “zest for life,” we radiate compassion, we become love itself. Indeed, Heschel and Teilhard share a point of considerable convergence: religion is the result of what we do with the energy of our ultimate wonder. 

Notes:

^[1] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 58.

^[2] Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 12.

^[3] Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 30.

^[4] Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 51.

^[5] Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 107.

^[6] Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 58. Italics his. 

^[7] Heschel, God in Search of Man, 46.

^[8] Heschel, God in Search of Man, 74.

^[9] Heschel, God in Search of Man, 57.