Awe and Wonder: Albert Camus and G. K. Chesterton
After reading this article, please be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page for an illustration by C&D artist Davis Dear.
Our world is much larger than we imagine. Even setting aside the inundating stream of internet content that provides background to our lives, the natural world itself is constantly changing and incredibly vast, so that we cannot know everything there is to know, even about a single place. No two people, standing in the same area, will see what occurs there in the same way; the perspective, the angle, will always be different. If nothing else, the stirring of a blade of grass, the shifting cloud cover, filtering dust in a window’s light, will alter the image.
Albert Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, discusses the overwhelming variety and beauty of the world, saying: “here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine” (7). Here, Camus speaks eloquently of something that is central to this life: the absolute and crushing grandness of the beauty of the world. He seems to have a deep sense of the importance of every moment and every created thing. “Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image… into a privileged moment” (9).
To the sorrow of the Christian reader, Camus rejects belief in a God. Overwhelmed by awe, he insists that we cannot really know anything outside of ourselves. We can predict patterns, we can build scientific laws, but we cannot know anything, or anyone, with the complete and all-encompassing knowledge that we yearn for. Camus sees this as the fundamental tragedy of life: our utter separateness. He looks straight into the face of the world, unveiled in its complexity—for without religion there is nowhere else for him to look—and he is overwhelmed.
Christians teach that the world is beautiful and varied, perfectly created directly from the mind of God. But often, Christian teaching emphasizes the “next life” in Heaven—a perfect future in some other, unclear location. The Christian hope is sometimes simplified to this future life, utterly untethered from the earth. If Christians spend their lives waiting to be taken from the “vale of tears” to a new and perfect place, they stand to miss a great deal. Atheists and skeptics like Camus, meanwhile, do not believe that there is anything beyond this world, and so they look closely at it. And sometimes, as with Camus, they unlock a sense of wonder that is overwhelming on its own, but when paired with the Christian belief in meaning and connection, can help us begin to understand what God saw when He said that His creation was “very good” (Genesis 1:31, ESV).
Christian wonder is nowhere better exemplified than by G. K. Chesterton. One of the main themes of Chesterton’s work as a Catholic theologian and author is that we ought to view ordinary things as very extraordinary indeed. In the comfortably cryptic style typical of his writing, he says, “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—” (The Man Who Was Thursday 110). Less cryptically, he says in another work, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder” (Tremendous Trifles 7). Trees, clouds, starlight, mountains—for both Camus and Chesterton, the fact that these things are in some way unknowable is central to their philosophies of life. Camus, however much he desires to know them and senses that they deserve to be understood in their full grandeur, despairs because he believes that he is ultimately cut off from them, and from man. Chesterton, on the other hand, can afford to be flippant as he recounts his adoration for natural things, because his faith suggests that there is a Mind which knows them completely, which connects us to them and to each other, and from whom we can learn wonders.
Never have I felt more alive than when a sunset springs tears in my eyes, or when I wake up early in the morning to watch the sun rise over a distant basin of pine trees, or when I climb into an oak tree and feel its bark pressing into my hands and back, and I sway with its limbs and feel that I know something about its life, a life worthy of a great respect. There are multitudes of things begging to be wondered at like this. Camus knew it. Because of his despair, he felt the immediate importance of knowing the grand unknown things in “this wondrous and multicolored universe” (7). And though as Christians we do not believe that the world in its current state is ultimate, is it not full of wonders? Are we not stewards of creation, called to follow Adam’s example of knowing plants and animals well enough to name them? Can we do this without feeling the intensity of the beauty and dignity of each created thing? In the words of Chesterton, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder” (A Short History of England 59).
Let us learn to be overwhelmed by joy in creation. Let us explore the worlds opened to us by hopeful wonder.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Translation originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Originally published in France as Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Librairie Gallimard, 1942.
Chesterton, G. K. A Short History of England. London: Chatto & Windus, 1917.
Chesterton, G. K. The Man Who Was Thursday. New York: Dover, 1986.
Chesterton, G. K. 2007. “Tremendous Trifles”, Tremendous Trifles. New York: Dover.