On Wonder

or, Why the Princess Needs Saving

“The reason a princess in a fairy tale needs to be saved is because the princess in a fairy tale is an allegory for the soul, and the soul cannot save itself.”

That quote is from a plenary talk given by Heidi White at the CiRCE regional conference last October in Powder Springs, Georgia. Both it and a number of other things she said have been turning over in my mind ever since, principally, because though the substance of her talk was about interviewing her children to gather their perspective on their education, in this comment she illuminated the union between a material object common to all Classical classrooms, the fairy tale, and its unseen spiritual purpose: to teach us a logos about the soul. That union is what I want to write about today.

In all the conversations about Classical Ed there are to be had, the one word that tends to appear most often is “wonder.” I confess plain annoyance about this, because no other word is more overused or more varied in its definitions and applications. It is a paradoxical term, one which is frequently perfectly appropriate for whatever it’s being used for, and also stretched too thin, used in too many different contexts, its versatility constantly threatening to deflate its meaning (this is a topic for another time, but its slow encroachment into advertising hasn’t helped).

Here’s a heuristic I’ve used to recognize this principle: next time you’re at a Classical Ed conference, count how many times you see the word “wonder” in the title of a talk or seminar, then attend as many of those talks as you can and ask yourself if the various speakers’ understanding of wonder felt consistent from one to the next. In my experience, the answer is frequently no, and yet, I can never really say that any of the speakers were wrong in their understandings and assumptions about what “wonder” is. The frustration redoubles, of course, when I return from the conference and realize I now have to synthesize all of my notes into a set of best practices that will allegedly allow me to “cultivate” wonder, “instill” wonder, “provoke” wonder, “abide in” wonder, “Julienne fried potatoes” wonder, and on and on it goes.

This is because wonder is basically everything. It is a noun and a verb. It is a passive state and an active process. It is a quality of education and the driving mechanic underneath it. It is a divine surprise and a rational inquiry. It is a mystery and the means of conclusion. It provokes us to action and leads us to rest. It is a question for the unknown and marveling at the known, and marveling at the unknown to ask more questions of the known. It encompasses pretty much everything we do in Classical Ed. It is indispensable and it is… literally indispensable: it comes along with us whether we remember to engage with it or not.

My head hurts.

Mine does too. It’s difficult to practically break down what wonder is because it has an entire life of its own removed from the context of categorization and application. But I will try my best.

Wonder is where all lessons in the classroom start. We encounter an object or a skill unfamiliar to us, and we wonder how we might know it or use it. The teacher answers that question for us with a logos. That logos joins the small cosmos of our knowledge, which consists of all the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness we encounter in life. For example: what is the logos of an addition problem? The logos of an addition problem is that we combine two addends of given value to create a sum, which is always the exact numerical value of those two addends counted together. Seventeen plus nine is twenty-six and always twenty-six.

A student who receives this logos then goes on to apply it in their everyday life. Soon they are thinking about problems with more than two addends, or encountering circumstances in which a sum might have to be transformed into a quotient. “How can I do that?” Often, the student might not even know what a quotient is but still have the curiosity about it. This too is wonder, which persists beyond the bounds of the classroom because it is an innate, God-given instinct.

To tie this together then, Wonder is the means by which we come to know the True, Beautiful, and Good, because we want to know those things. And as discussed in the previous post, the nature of all logoi is characterized by their Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, which is the spiritual reality they possess on top of their material reality.

So, if wonder is innate and happens naturally why do we talk about it so much?

A good teacher knows how to use wonder as a tool in the classroom, to arouse a student’s curiosity, to encourage contemplation during rest, and ultimately, to lead the student to Truth. This process is incorporated into the Classical classroom by first remembering what the student already knows, and then leading them to ask the next natural question for the appropriate subject. “If I can use addition to count up with speed, can I use it or something else to count down just as quickly?” The more often and more effectively this is done, the more developed a student’s sense of wonder becomes, until they are not just floating in the current of life and all its logoi, but having matured, can swim along with it and discover new logoi for themselves.

For me, what this comes down to is the union of material and spiritual reality. Wonder is the lifelong road on which I encounter things and come to know them for what they are made of (the material) and what they are (the spiritual). The princess in the fairy tale has persisted for as long as she has not out of some outmoded sexual politic, but because she is a logos for our edification, as indeed are all aspects of fairy tales. The soul cannot save itself. The Prince is Christ. The form of the frog is humility. The wicked stepmother is pride (a soul that believes it can save itself). The dwarves, fidelity. The wolf, avarice. The dragons, passions. And, to introduce an observation from Andrew Kern, the pea in the mattress does not represent some vain discomfort, but the princess’s ability to sense disorder, a skill she must possess in order to be a true princess. What things are and what they are made of is a union of two realities, and wonder makes its residence between them.

Wonder works its magic on everyone differently, which is why it will never be a settled or safe thing in the Classical Renewal. As much as it vexes me sometimes, that is a good thing, and as we know, Good things proliferate Beauty, and Beauty leads us further to Truth. The fact that we cannot always harness or tidily capture every single aspect of our lives and education is a testament to God’s glory, and ironically, in those moments where He is merciful enough to let a teacher or an experience into our lives that bridges the understanding between the material and spiritual, we receive a gift that can only be described as one thing: wonderful.

May our Lord illuminate the righteous path He has laid before each of us and compel us to walk it dutifully and with joy.