ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

Why wonder?

part I|69 pages

Philosophical perspectives

chapter 1|12 pages

The wonder of not wondering

From Plato to Lucretius

chapter 2|21 pages

Wonder and the philosopher’s perfection

Giordano Bruno *

chapter 4|13 pages

Wonder in ethics and aesthetics

Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

chapter 5|9 pages

A mysticism of a dead leaf

A brief apology for an ordinary phenomenon

part II|69 pages

Theological perspectives

chapter 6|13 pages

The extraordinary of the ordinary

G.K. Chesterton, imagination and the wonder of a natural theology

chapter 7|14 pages

Between rapture and rupture

An exploration of wonder

chapter 8|15 pages

Between the poet and the legislator

Wonder and ambivalence in Midrash and Hebrew poetry

chapter 9|14 pages

Scandalous wonder

Contemplating the cross with Isaac Watts

chapter 10|11 pages

This world of wonders

Theology, poetics and everyday life

part III|69 pages

Literary perspectives

chapter 11|21 pages

Wonder and the power of the word

chapter 13|13 pages

Rilke’s poetics of wonder

Looking at the picture books of beauty in the Duino Elegies

chapter 14|11 pages

Poetry, radicalism and wonder

Peter Levi, priesthood and David Jones

chapter 15|14 pages

‘The flowers remember/ the sugar bowl remembers’

Quotidian wonder and the painter/poet Joanna Margaret Paul 1

part IV|16 pages

Afterword

chapter 16|14 pages

‘Learn from wonder, nurture astonishment’

Notes on Bergoglio’s aesthetics