Tu Es Vita

In his work “Leisure: the Basis of Culture”, the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper talks about the importance of wonder as the foundational act of true philosophy: the philosopher is first of all one who marvels at Being. He looks at the vast vaults of the sky, he notices the little ants scuttling upon the ground, he stops to look at a baby babbling his first words, and all of this captures and entrances him.

This definition was not invented by Pieper. It was the Greeks, most notably Aristotle, who posited wonder as the beginning of philosophy. In this sense, philosophy, far from being a dry theoretical pursuit for stuffy rationalists, is embedded in the very substance of being human. When, as children, we looked upon the world’s mysteries and asked our parents, “Why?”, we were expressing a profoundly human instinct, the desire to know and understand the things we saw. If properly nourished and supported, this very instinct is what leads to truly fruitful philosophy, which is nothing other than the desire to know and understand Being.

The Christian tradition inherited and affirmed this truth. Being is a gift that is offered to us by a loving Creator. It is there to guide and elevate us to the eternal truths that nurture our souls. It is there as a guidepost to God Himself, who wishes to be known and loved by His creatures just as He knows and loves us. We begin with wonder, we end with wisdom.

But wonder is a delicate state of the mind and heart. It presupposes an openness, a trusting acceptance of what our senses offer us. We must allow ourselves to be won over by the magic of Being, by its beauty and its greatness. In this, the philosopher is again akin to a child. With wide, trusting eyes, the child drinks up what he sees – and is changed profoundly. For this change to occur, he must be receptive. So too, the philosopher must trust in Being as he perceives it. He must trust that his senses do not deceive him, and that his intellect can truly grasp what he perceives. He must enter into an open and trusting relationship with reality as it comes to him.

This attitude seems obvious to healthy intellects. Most children do not hesitate in thinking that the things they see are truly there, as real as their own existence. In fact, they are such realists that they sometimes exceed in this instinct and attribute the same reality to the imagined monsters lurking under their beds. Children live in a world made of things that they know to exist and act independently from them, as marvellous or as scary as that can be.

But the human intellect, alas, is here below in a fallen state, and it can fall prey to all sorts of terrible diseases which can harm and even destroy its relationship with Being. One of the most destructive of these diseases is doubt. Not all doubt is unhealthy, of course. We may doubt many things licitly and validly. Was it a voice we heard just now outside our door, or was it simply the whooshing of the wind? Was that our friend Sally we saw turning that corner at the end of the street, or was it somebody else? Is this the meaning of what you said, or am I misunderstanding you? Certainly, doubt can be akin to a prudent suspension of judgement, useful and natural in many cases.

But doubt can become a disease when it extends to the very foundations of our knowledge, when it strikes at the heart of our possibility to know and understand human and divine things.

Was it not the beginning of the illness of doubt when an uneasy Descartes first asked himself whether he could trust his own senses? What if, he posited in his feverishly excited mind, everything were but an illusion, a dream, created by an evil spirit to trick and deceive us?

He allowed this doubt to gnaw at his soul, to possess him so completely, that he thought it necessary to refound the entirety of Western philosophy, which had thus far been established firmly on the ground of child-like faith in Being, on the doubt of all things but the thinking “I”, which seemed to him the only certain truth. This is the origin of his famous Cogito, ergo sum.  And so modern philosophy was born, set on the shaky ground of the subjective self disconnected from reality. This self grew increasingly isolated and estranged from Being as the centuries passed and all of its certainties were progressively eroded by the tyranny of doubt.  

We have come to a time now, in the year 2025, when it is considered legitimate and reasonable to question things which seemed so obvious and commonplace to ancient man, that nobody would have dreamt of philosophizing about them in the first place, like the fact that a woman cannot become a man and a man cannot become a dog. Our post-modern uneasiness is so great that we cannot trust these basic truths anymore. Whatever we learn in the child-like faith of our first years is soon gone, swept away by the caustic fumes of modern philosophy, which we begin to breathe in very early on, if we are not sheltered from them by sound parents.

It seems to me that we cannot continue like this. If we are to rescue our crippled civilization from oblivion, we have to make a change. If we are to find our peace again, as individuals and as nations, we have to go back to the basics and start anew.

The solution is as simple as it is monumental and groundbreaking: we must repair our relationship with Being, liberating our souls from the illness of doubt. We must recover the child-like wonder of the first philosophers, who engaged Being with all the powers of their intellect and heart and did not shrink away from reality into the mire of a sterile subjectivism. We must rediscover their enthusiasm and zest for understanding, their conviction that Being is a mystery to be embraced, a pathway to greater things, a door that leads to an eternal destiny.

Reality demands our attention, our acceptance, our participation. The old and worn-out skeptic in us must die and yield to the eternal child, if we are to reclaim the state of harmony with Being that is at the heart of all true human endeavours.

Does it seem to be a fantasy or a dream? I say that it is rather the modern world that is a fantasy or a dream. I too was asleep in this dream, wrapped up for many years in a desolation where my own subjectivity was the center of reality. I grew up thinking that everybody had their own truth and that personal perception was all that mattered. Contradictions were a normal fact of life. The world was a carnival of illusions where nothing was permanent. There was no objective moral order, no objective standard by which to judge things. What was the purpose of reason, if there was nothing solid it could cling to? My mind moved in circles endlessly like a rabid animal in a cage, unable to do what it was designed for.

 I lived like that for years. It is a terribly lonely condition for a man to think that his intellect cannot in any way grasp reality. For so long, I was unable to reach out and form a true relationship with something outside of myself. Everything was hidden and distorted by a cascade of interpretations, questions, perspectives; I was always on slippery ground, twisting and turning things in my mind in a state of permanent confusion.  

The spell for me was broken when I converted to the Catholic Faith and embraced Thomistic philosophy. Suddenly, I realized that there was something real outside of myself; something that had its own nature, its own laws, its own purpose, distinct from my own subjective interpretations. The world was full of these somethings. Most of all, these mysterious somethings could be known and understood; they could be grasped through a solid rational framework. My reason was no longer trapped playing kaleidoscopic games in its own subjectivity, but could finally do what it was meant to do: think and understand the world.  

For me, it was a revelation. It not only produced a total change in my thinking process; it also healed something profound in my soul. When I discovered reality, I began feeling a joy and an interest in life that I had never had before. It is not too much to say that Thomism healed my depression. It gave me a sense of purpose. It lifted me from the burden of being a lonely consciousness in a vacuum. In short, it helped me repair my relationship with Being. I began experiencing that child-like wonder that started philosophy in the West so many centuries ago, and it has never left me since.

I cannot but say to modern man: embrace the realness of Being with a spirit of wonder. Reality is still there waiting for us with its mystery and its secrets. It has not and will not abandon us because it is the very call of God to the souls of every new generation. It beckons us to wake from our long slumber, to cast off the chains of rationalism that we’ve been shackled with during centuries of rebellion against the natural order.

This wonder will set us free. Wonder, the first act of true human civilization and flourishing. Wonder, the first act of the child and the philosopher.