1 Introduction

This study seeks to unpack the place of wonder in religious education today. It will begin by accounting for the notoriously fluid definition of wonder, less a concept than a ‘happening’ that seems to characterize our human experiences of the mysterious and the unknown. Further, it will chart what appears to be an alarming decline of wonder today (O’Rourke, 2019). The sense of mystery that accompanies wonder, it will be argued, unsettles a world increasingly preoccupied with ‘solving’ rather than contemplating what remains outside our immediate grasp. Meanwhile, the interiority that wonder encourages lies at odds with a distracted world that exists increasingly at the surface-level. In its second half, this study will turn its attention to the pedagogical realm and advance the case that religious education is uniquely placed to promote the kind of contemplative wonder that has been eroded and replaced by a more expedient ‘curiosity’. Existing at the intersection between philosophy, theology, spirituality, education and the arts, wonder can be reclaimed as the antidote to what Pope Francis has called the ‘tedious monotony’ of a modern world leeched of its sense of mystery, of transcendence, of meaning. Religious education is well-placed to restore to society its ability to reckon with the “stubborn there-ness” (Arendt, 2005, p. 310) of these realities. Its ability to do so rests on the ability of the religious educator—at all levels from primary to tertiary—to model for their students a more contemplative spirit of wonder that challenges a dialectic of mastery over mystery with the contention that “[human]kind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living” (Heschel, 1951, p. 37).

2 Defining wonder

The work of William Desmond and Catherine Pickstock provides a framework for the definition and study of wonder that is robust yet flexible enough to account for the fluidity at hand (Desmond & Pickstock, 2018). This fluidity is in the first instance terminological. The interdisciplinarity of wonder leads all too easily to a situation where words like amazement, curiosity, perplexity, astonishment, admiration are used seemingly interchangeably.Footnote 1 The work of Desmond and Pickstock distinguishes between three modalities of wonder, namely curiosity, perplexity, and astonishment. Curiosity is the most inquisitive and pragmatic of the three, it is driven by the desire to move, by inquiry, from an initial incomprehension towards the acquisition of some new knowledge. Desmond characterizes this modality of wonder as the voice that asks “What is…?”. Ultimately, this type of wonder does not penetrate too deeply into the human spirit: it “gives way to a determinate answer” (Desmond, 2020, 238) and subsides.

A second modality of wonder identified by Desmond is perplexity. With perplexity, we are puzzled and overcome by the “too-much-ness” (Desmond, 2020, p. 107) of the world. Try as we may to snatch it to ourselves and grasp its meaning, the surplus of meaning inherent in the world around us reminds us of our limitations and our ignorance. Plato’s cave emerges as a paradigm for the elusive interplay of light and dark that characterizes this state of wonder. The fearfulness of perplexity for those unwilling to accept its terms is captured by the spirit that cries “What the hell is …?” (p. 107).

Astonishment is the final modality of wonder described by Desmond, capturing the most contemplative element of wonder that appreciates the ontological unlikelihood of our very own existence. This is a wonder that appreciates the inherent gratuitousness and contingency of life itself, and which revels “that it is at all…”. (p. 107) This modality of wonder is less about answers to be sought and more a mystery to be celebrated and lived. Astonishment is the modality of wonder most in touch with the transcendent. It resists the modern trivialization of wonder into what Desmond and Pickstock call the “gosh/wow experience of the strange” (Desmond & Pickstock, 2018). Astonishment, rather, retains an “ontological bite” that embraces the “boundaries of being” and the “possibilities of not being” (Desmond & Pickstock, 2018).

The work of Desmond and Pickstock underlines the essentially elusive nature of wonder. In the first case, it is neither fully active nor passive. Curiosity seems to take it upon itself to satiate a desire for answers, yet astonishment revels in the very impossibility of a conclusive resolution. Perplexity seems poised in a kind of uneasy hypertension between the active and passive,Footnote 2 aware of the claims of the mysterious unknown but unwilling to entirely give over to its implications. In all three modalities, wonder acts as a kind of catalyst that quickens the pulse of humankind’s interactions with the world. This interaction can be characterized by feelings of determination, frustration, or delight, and can lead to inquiry, puzzlement or contemplation, depending on the conditions at hand and crucially, on the predispositions of those involved. The very same sunset could bring about curiosity, perplexity or astonishment in three different onlookers, or even in the same person depending on their state of mind at the time in question. Their interaction with that sunset could as easily lead to a scientific inquiry into the laws of the universe as it could inspire a meditation on the gratuitous gift of creation.

Wonder, then, is clearly not objective, but neither is it entirely subjective. We do not have the ability to self-activate our wonder, or even to self-direct it. It is only in hindsight that moments of wonder can be recognised and accounted for. It is this context Pickstock and Desmond call wonder “transsubjective and transobjective” (Desmond & Pickstock, 2018). These terms capture the sense in which wonder takes us outside of ourselves and creates, however fleetingly, a kind of openness or porosity to the mystery of the world around us. This may excite, stupefy or nauseate us, but crucially, there is a sense in which wonder remains outside our control and our attempts to channel, understand or regulate it.

It should become clear at this point why wonder has captivated thinkers in so many spheres of human thought, none more so than religious education. Wonder is a powerful catalyst for our own understanding of the world and our place in it, quickening and transforming the nature of our interactions with our surroundings. Properly embraced, it is a state of mind most conducive to an encounter with the mysterious surplus of meaning in our world; it informs our response to the most consequential questions of our existence. It opens our spirit to the possibility of the transcendent, and in religious terms, it characterizes the relationship with the divine transcendence named God.

For these reasons, wonder can act tantalizingly as a kind of human instinct for truth. However, this instinct cannot be activated, directed, or apprehended in any systematic way. As will be outlined in the course of this study, both religion and education take it upon themselves to attend to the tantalizing challenges and possibilities of wonder. They undertake to nurture and direct wonder in the most appropriate and nourishing channels. As this article will suggest, it is the religious educator, most of all, who can dare to hope for the most transformative effects of wonder in their work. For it is the religious educator who realises that what they teach must penetrate deeper than the surface level, must address itself somehow to the very texture of the lives of their students as the seek more than the acquisition of information, but the ability to reflect on what gives their lives most meaning.

3 The decline of wonder

Before we consider such possibilities, it is apt to outline the challenges that arise for the individual, the religion or the educator that would seek to cultivate or nurture the place of wonder. Writing in the 1980’s, John Haught identified an “epistemology of control” (Haught, 1986, p. 116) that resists surrender to wonderment or perplexity. Such a view prioritizes the acquisition of knowledge for the measure of control and power it gives humankind over its surroundings. The manner in which wonder reduces us to a state of being ‘struck’ by our own ignorance, unimportance or contingency poses a threat to this kind of “epistemology of control”, which would prefer to recast and downgrade wonder as merely a momentary lapse to be subsumed into humankind’s onwards march of inquiry and mastery. Insofar as wonder is relevant or desirable at all to this kind of epistemology of control, it is as a narrow form of curiosity that initiates a new bout of problem-solving progress in a rapidly modernising society.

Written three decades after Haught identified the “epistemology of control”, Fran O’Rourke’s 2019 collection of essays on the philosophy of religion seemed to diagnose much the same conditions in twenty-first century society, with increasingly dire consequences for wonder:

Modernity has robbed mankind of its gods and leeched the world of mystery. Our sense of wonder has largely evaporated - there is little that astonishes or startles us. The world has become all too familiar. We assume science has solved the great questions, with little residue for reflection. It could be argued that the lack of a sense of transcendence springs from the loss of wonder. (O’Rourke, 2019, p. 27)

This is largely the state of play today. Led in part by the rise of information technology, wonder has been trivialised and commodified, reduced to a fleeting transaction of glamour, a banalized version of curiosity that tranquilizes rather than stimulates. Deprived of its sense of wonder, the search for Truth in the modern ‘post-Truth’ landscape has become a consensus of non-commitment. In such an apathetic context, Pilate’s fateful question in John’s gospel—‘truth- what is that?’—has become a rhetorical shoulder-shrug, an intellectual dead end rather than the beginning of a meaningful search for Truth. In a distracted world less familiar with mystery and less inclined towards engaged reflection on the transcendent, wonder has become almost content-less as a concept. It has been flat-packed and marketed as yet another lifestyle product, where the “wonderful everyday” is more recognisable as the catchphrase of a Scandinavian furniture multinational than for its “ontological bite”.

Several cohorts of society—such as artists—have long been more attentive to the endangered status of wonder and its implications for a modernising, secularising society. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney commented in an interview shortly before his death that “the biggest shift in my lifetime has been the evaporation of the transcendent from all our discourse and sense of destiny.” (Randolph, 2010, p. 205) Heaney may have been notoriously ‘God-shy’ (Agnew, 2018, p. 22), but here gave an insight into a society increasingly unable or unwilling to come to terms with what, in a 2008 interview, he called “in-betweenness” (Kim, 2008)—the metaphysical half-spaces of life where the stuff of myth and mystery and poetry and the transcendent lie close at hand.Footnote 3 The figure of the artist has long been at home in this world of wonder. Long before Heaney detected the ‘evaporation of the transcendent’, GK Chesterton bemoaned the harm done by the gradual diminution of humankind’s instinct for the mystical and the mysterious. The inability to rest with and revel in the mysterious contradictions and puzzlements of life was typical, for Chesterton, of a society whose grasp of the truth was being lost by their increasing trust in the “the morbid logician [who] seeks to make everything lucid” (Chesterton, 1908, p. 49). What Chesterton was diagnosing was the decline of wonder, for wonder is the very state of mind that allows for and embraces the inexplicable truth that underpins our encounter with the mysterious.

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always let himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus, he has always believed that there is such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus, he believes that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else become lucid. (Chesterton, 1908, pp. 48-49)

Chesterton goes on to explain that it is not the progress of modern technology that is the problem, but our very inability to wonder at that progress:

I am not depreciating telephones; I am complaining that they are not appreciated. I am not attacking inventions; I am attacking indifference to inventions. I only remark that it is the same people who brag about them who are really indifferent to them. I am not objecting to the statement that the science of the modern world is wonderful; I am only objecting to the modern world because it does not wonder at it. (Chesterton, 1966, p. 185).

The scientific and technological advancements that have only multiplied since Chesterton’s comments seem to have had the gradual consequence of creating an intellectual pride that resists the embrace of wonder. Wonder, particularly the more contemplative ontological astonishment, contains an element of humility that recognises the contingency of events and affairs: that even though things are as they are (often for logical reasons we can explain and account for), they need not be at all.Footnote 4 As Wittgenstein summarises: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." (Wittgenstein, 1961, p. 44).

The philosophical tradition to which Wittgenstein belongs has long appreciated the demands and possibilities of wonder. In Plato’s Theatetus, Socrates calls wonder the “pathos of the philosopher” (Theaetetus, 155c–d). Socrates’ dialogical inquiries into the opinions of other humans end most often in aporia, a mere restatement of the initial sense of incomprehension. For Socrates, to understand clearly the terms of his own ignorance was the summit of philosophical knowledge. With his predilection for the unknown and the unknowable, Socrates injected an element of humility into humankind’s search for wisdom. The gentle probing of his Socratic method (repeatedly questioning the assumptions of his interlocutor until they collapse into an admission of ignorance) offers a unique blend of curiosity, puzzlement and astonishment. Socrates seems to evince genuine curiosity at the opinions of his conversation partners, and undertakes inquiries to test the wisdom of their knowledge. He grapples head-on with the fearful too-much-ness of the world, concluding with regularity that he is unable to unlock its secret. But perhaps decisively, he shows a level of comfort with this uncertainty. The mystery of the world does not overcome him, nor reduce him to a state of denial, pride, or stupor. His inquiries go on, driven by the conviction that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” (Apology, 38a). But crucially, they are guided by the humble acknowledgement that “I neither know, nor think that I know.” (Apology, 21d).

In their work, Pickstock and Desmond consider the possibility of an ideal blend of wonder, a “redeemed integration” (Desmond & Pickstock, 2018) of the three modalities of curiosity, perplexity and astonishment. They seem to conclude that the three are never fully distinct and are constantly “hithering and dithering, running in and through each other” (Desmond & Pickstock, 2018). Socrates is an evocative and programmatic example of this redeemed integration at play in the tradition of Greek philosophy.

4 Towards a ‘Christian’ wonder

In his study of the history of wonder, Dennis Quinn distinguishes between a Greek, Roman and Christian wonder, each shaped by their own highest good (Quinn, 2002). Greek wonder, as established by Plato and Socrates, was directed inwards, following the philosophical imperative to ‘know thyself’. Guided by the ultimate virtue of pietas, Roman wonder inclined outwards towards the ordering of the collective society. Christian wonder, meanwhile, focused on God. As Quinn puts it, with the dawn of Christianity “the very purpose of wonder was now seen to be changed from the obtaining of knowledge for self-satisfaction or ‘happiness’ or rendering the world order secure and just, to the quest for eternal life for each person and for the whole of mankind.” (Quinn, 2002, p. 118).

Wonder has a potted history in the Christian theological tradition. From its beginnings, the preoccupation of Augustine and the Church Fathers with the dangers of a misguided wonder that leads away from God created a negativistic assessment of wonder throughout much of the history of Christian theology. What is most striking from Augustine’s influential treatment is the concept of curiositas, a counterfeit wonder that catalyses the most sinful desires and intuitions of the Christian. Augustine, whose Confessions are an extraordinary theological “act of therapy” (Brown, 2002, p. 165), was all too personally acquainted with humankind’s ability, even proclivity, to do what it knows is contrary to its own wellbeing. Curiositas characterizes this unsettling attraction to violence, power and self-satisfaction. Curiositas does not easily map on to Pickstock and Desmond’s ‘curiosity’. However, it does provide a reminder (if a morbid one) of the need for wonder to be channelled and encouraged correctly if it is to lead to a nourishing experience.

Thomas Aquinas’ more fulsome treatment of wonder in his Summa Theologiae addressed Augustine’s preoccupation with curiositas and set the terms for a more fruiltful experience of wonder that led back to God. Most significant in Aquinas’ work is the balance he strikes between the different modalities of wonder. His definition of wonder as “certain desire for knowledge” (Summa Theologiae II-I, q. 32, a. 8, co.) seems at home with the ‘curiosity’ of Pickstock and Desmond. Aquinas considers reason a gift from God that allows humans to attain some knowledge of the divine and thus advance their faith. Wonder arises out of our sense of the endlessness of God and thus the endlessness of what there is to know of God by reason and by faith. Wonder characterizes our desire to explore this endlessness and thus to come to know God. However, Aquinas balances this kind of theological curiosity with a stark surrender of the mysterious ineffability of God. Aquinas’ work resounds with the apophatic principle that God is unknowable in his true essence and that the summit of our knowledge of God is prayerful contemplation of this mystery: “this is the summit of humankind’s knowledge about God: that it knows nothing about God.” (Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia, q.7, a. 5, ad. 14).

This apophatic impulse in Aquinas’ work directs his sense of wonder and brings it closer to the ontological astonishment that Pickstock and Desmond describe. In the end, Aquinas sets a hopeful seal on humankind’s search for God. As he explains, it is through the virtue of studiositas that the believer can come to terms with the pitfalls and boundaries of humankind’s search for the divine, and yet hope to come to know God. The gift of studiositas alerts the believer to instances of curiositas and directs their wonder towards knowledge that is appropriate to their intellect and nourishing for their spirit. With the help of studiositas, Aquinas’ treatment comes to characterize—in theological terms—a kind of “redeemed integration” of the three modalities of wonder described in Pickstock and Desmond.

Pope Francis has reinforced the stakes and injected new urgency into the Christian relationship with wonder today. During his papacy, Pope Francis has seemed keenly aware that Christianity is not immune from the crisis of wonder in modern society. As such, he has infused a pressing, pastoral practicality into the tradition of Christian wonder, placing it at the very heart of his eco-theological agenda in his 2015 Laudato si’. In this defining work of his papacy, he calls for:

a bold cultural revolution [against] the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness. (Francis, 2015, p. 115).

Speaking in St. Peter’s Basilica several years later, Pope Francis reiterated the importance of wonder to the essence of the Christian life:

Ask for the grace to be amazed. A Christian life without amazement becomes drab and dreary. How can we talk about the joy of meeting Jesus, unless we are daily astonished and amazed by his love, which brings us forgiveness and the possibility of a new beginning? When faith no longer experiences amazement, it grows dull: It becomes blind to the wonders of grace; it can no longer taste the Bread of life and hear the Word; it can no longer perceive the beauty of our brothers and sisters and the gift of creation. (Francis, 2021).

5 Wonder in education

Education has long grappled with the challenges and possibilities of wonder. Wonder, with its sense of inquiry, invigoration, and delight may seem an obvious panacea for the educator who, true to their vocation, seeks to light a spark rather than to fill a jug in their classroom. Indeed, wonder is the focus of increasing attention in the most recent educational literature. Schinkel (2019) and Schinkel et al. (2020) has been a leading proponent on wonder in education and his 2020 ‘Wonder, Education and Human Flourishing’ gathered together in one volume many of the papers delivered at a conference of the same name earlier that year. In his introduction to the collection, Schinkel gave the following definition of the experience of wonder: “to experience wonder is to experience a combination of puzzlement and a sense of importance. In wonder one’s attention is arrested by something that puzzles or mystifies (and sometimes surprises) one, yet at the same time appears worthy of one’s attention for its own sake.” (Schinkel et al., 2020, p. 11).

The place of wonder in education can be traced historically to influential treatments by Dewey (1965, 1997) and Arendt (1958, 1978, 2006). While Arendt’s image of the educator as a ‘representative of the world as it is’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 42) favoured a more contemplative wonder, Dewey’s conception of the educator as ‘filterer’ (Dewey, 1965, p. 23) suggests the importance of a more inquisitive wonder in the classroom. This inquisitive wonder, explored in detail by Schinkel’s recent research (Schinkel, 2019), is defined by Schinkel as the “drive to investigate the what, how, and why of what aroused one’s wonder” (Schinkel, 2019, p. 481).

Another influential study of wonder by Whitehead drew on Dewey and emphasized the crucial role wonder can play at the beginning of the learning process, in what Whitehead calls the ‘romance’ stage. Without a romantic, excited infatuation with a new topic, students cannot proceed to further stages of precision and generalisation, according to Whitehead. The greatest problem identified by Whitehead is the skipping of the romance stage in the learning process. As Whitehead observes, the crucial initial ‘romantic’ stage of the learning process is “dominated by wonder, and cursed be the dullard who destroys wonder” (Whitehead, 1962, pp. 50–51). Whitehead’s work on the educational potential is particularly significant in highlighting the importance of practical action taken by the teacher in the cultivation of wonder in the classroom: he believes that teachers have the ability and the responsibility to model the wonder they wish to see in their students. If wonder cannot be easily self-activated, its pedagogical potential rests largely in the lap of the educator to ‘draw out’ wonder from their students (apt if we consider that the Latin derivation of education means literally ‘to lead out’). As Schinkel (commenting on Whitehead) observes:

The educator’s wonder can here be the spark that lights the child’s wonder, or it can fan the flame that is already there. Wonder can be contagious. If the teacher’s wonder is directed at some object, this suggests to the child that there is something wonderful about it—and that means it is worth getting to know. (Schinkel, 2019, p. 486).

It should be admitted that terminological diversity abounds in literature on wonder in education, making a neat assessment impossible. Two broad observations will serve the purposes of the current study. Generally, more surface-level versions of wonder, however they are termed, are treated with disdain in the literature. Wonder that does not result in some measurable response or action on the behalf of the student is assumed not to have penetrated beneath the surface-level and is thus discounted. The critique of ‘surface-level wonder’ sounds reasonable, but raises the question of how one would measure wonder and its effects at all—or whether such a measuring is desirable in the first place? This is most urgent in the case of what Pickstock and Desmond would call astonishment, the more ontological wonder that is more likely to result in contemplative appreciation of mystery than the solving of a problem by inquiry. The solution to this problem in the literature on wonder in education has largely been to focus on what Desmond and Pickstock call curiosity, which can be fairly closely equated with what Schinkel calls ‘inquisitive wonder’: the “drive to investigate the what, how, and why of what aroused one’s wonder” (Schinkel, 2019, p. 481).

Whatever the terminological diversity at hand, what has been defined as ‘curiosity’ by this study is generally the modality most credited and most valued in the sphere of education. Curiosity is the kind of wonder connected with motivation and behaviour that is beneficial for learning, such as perseverance in the face of obstacles and the establishment of goals (Kashdan & Steger, 2007). Curiosity is also credited with a role in creating a more deep-seated interests in students, which can help with the development of self-regulation and information-seeking. (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Renninger, 2000). Menning’s, 2019 study showed that teachers see curiosity as a pedagogical tool in their teaching that brings about better student-to-student interaction in group activities and fosters critical thinking (Menning, 2019). Overall, the educational benefits of curiosity seem clear: this inquisitive wonder motivates students to deal with uncertainty and develop deep-seated habits of learning.

Why, then, do the authors of a large-scale recent study observe that “children’s curiosity seems to diminish as they progress through formal education, at least curiosity expressed in school” (Jirout et al., 2022, p. 2)? The answer suggested by the same study highlights some of the challenges that accompany the development of wonder in education. At play here are some of the most deep-seated assumptions and methodologies of the teaching and learning process: “traditional instructional assignments often focus on getting correct answers or doing things the “right” way, leaving little room for students to question, wonder, or try out new or different ways of doing things.” (Jirout et al., 2022, p. 2). Students consulted as part of a study on curiosity in the classroom demonstrated how conclusively traditional pedagogical methods can snuff out a student’s innate sense of wonder, leading to a situation where schoolwork is considered completely unworthy or incompatible with the expression of curiosity: “No one is curious about what we learn in class. We just need to do whatever the teachers tell us to do,” “It does not matter whether I am curious, because we just need to learn whatever we are assigned to do,” and “Are you joking? There is nothing to be curious about when [we’re] doing boring math or reading” (Post & Walma van der Molen, 2018, p. 65).

The authors suggest methodologies to counter such a situation: firstly in stimulating curiosity and secondly in maintaining and encouraging the behaviours that accompany it. This will engender a situation, they hypothesise, where students “develop a more stable comfort with uncertainty, thus positively influencing their more stable curiosity over time.” (Jirout et al., 2022, p. 3). The teacher hoping to promote and foster curiosity in the classroom should strive to make students “feel safe taking risks, making mistakes, failing, and not knowing or not being sure” (Dess & Picken, 2012; Jirout et al., 2018). These methodologies include providing opportunities to think, modelling positive reactions to uncertainty, prompting question generation, connecting known and unknown information, and encouraging alternative ideas (Jirout et al., 2022).

6 Mystery over mastery

It is the contention of this study that education, particularly religious education, suffers if it restricts itself to the pursuit of curiosity. The inquisitive drive to acquire new knowledge has undoubted value in any educational setting. However, the “epistemology of control” that Haught identified in the 1980’s still casts a shadow over any dialectic of wonder that ignores wider, more contemplative modalities. An educational setting that values information-acquisition and the ‘right answer’ at the expense of a more challenging puzzlement or a more contemplative astonishment is perpetuating the same epistemology of control that Haught bemoans. Thomas Green outlines the shortfalls of an education process that presents ‘what is’ as if it could never have been any other way. Without the sense of contingency and mystery inherent in wonder, education becomes ‘just one damned thing after another’.

One way to destroy the motivation to learn is to effectively abort the childlike capacity for awe and wonder. We do this quite efficiently when in teaching we take the description of a phenomenon to be its sufficient explanation; thus losing sight of how contingent is our knowledge, we lead students to entertain contingent truths as though they could not be otherwise. We build an image of the world in which the conditions of wonder are banished because the presence of mystery is seen always as a temporary inadequacy shortly to be corrected. We cultivate curiosity, if at all, by divorcing it from the capacity for awe. Thus, in our teaching and curricula it is only rarely that a child discovers how thoroughly in every quarter our knowledge is an act of imagination and interpretation. (Green, 1971, pp. 201-202)

The use and abuse of wonder in education as described by Green suggests that despite the increasing attention paid to inquisitive curiosity, wonder has not been embraced as the panacea suggested earlier in this study. In fact, the evidence suggests that education is uniquely adept at creating the conditions for the stifling of wonder in all its forms. Methodologies to promote an inquisitive curiosity in the classroom, while laudable, are doomed to failure if they neglect to approach the kind of “redeemed integration” outlined in the work of Pickstock and Desmond. Promoting only the kind of wonder that seeks and finds answers will inevitably lead to less innate curiosity, not more. This is because wonder qua curiosity is defined more than any other kind of wonder by its outcome: inquiry leading to new information or the ‘right answer’.

If the ‘point’ of curiosity is getting the right answer, students will find quicker and more efficient ways at finding the answer than the often time-consuming pursuit of a latent and ill-defined curiosity. The teacher, the book, the internet will all provide a shortcut that cuts out the need for curiosity and inquiry. Methodologies developed to cultivate curiosity and its associated behaviours are worthy and no-doubt effective. However, they require considerable time and effort on behalf of the teacher to create artificial conditions to rouse the students into an otherwise unlikely and foreign state of wonder. In conditions where the ‘right answer’ is the goal of education, what passes for the cultivation of curiosity or wonder could become merely the creation of a contrived obstacle course that leaves students remarking: ‘that was fun, but why didn’t you just tell us the answer at the beginning?’ Try as the teacher might to explain the importance of curiosity for its own sake, the student would be correct in intuiting that the end justifies the means: if the ‘end’ of education is information-acquisition and getting the ‘right answer’, shutting down all superfluous curiosity in search of the shortest route to that right answer is, cynically speaking, a means worth pursuing.

One methodology not mentioned in Jirout’s large-scale study is the promotion of other modalities of wonder such as perplexity or astonishment. This would require moving the goalposts and making the ‘end’ of education something more like personal development than information acquisition. If there is no right answer, or the ‘right’ answer is itself puzzling and unsettling, the ability to navigate those uncertain waters becomes more valuable. This is where the capacity for wonder qua perplexity or astonishment would become valuable to the student. This is most obviously the case in religious education, where students can expect to come closest in their lives to the questions that transcend inquiry and require more than mere curiosity. This is where they can hope for an approach that is more woven into the texture of their lives. This is where wonder can hope to make a real difference in the lives of its students today more than ever. In meeting this urgent need in a modern society ‘leeched of its sense of wonder’ is where religious education can be more valuable than ever before. Religious education is perhaps unique in its ability to pivot from mastery to mystery in its pedagogical focus.

An education that focuses on mastery alone—that makes acquisition of information, knowledge and ‘results’ its main destination—will not eradicate the unknown from the world, it will merely train its students to treat mystery as a nuisance, a threat or a source of unease. Ironically, the ‘epistemology of control’ that still pervades our society and education today was initially designed to account for the all-too-conspicuous contingency of life on earth. It is as if humankind said to itself: ‘life is difficult, random, challenging, uncertain, let us seek to come to know it and control this variability.’ As Heschel observes, humans are faced constantly with the choice between expediency or wonder in the face of life’s inherently unpredictability: “We go out to meet the world not only by way of expediency but also by way of wonder. In the first we accumulate information in order to dominate; in the second we deepen our appreciation in order to respond.” (Heschel, 1951, p. 37) By the terms of Haught’s “epistemology of control”, humankind has increasingly chosen the way of expediency over wonder. The difference today is that we have become so insulated and estranged from life’s variability that when it rears its head, as it inevitably does, we are less resilient in dealing with it. Access to the comforting sense of power that information provides has become so ubiquitous that mystery is ever more alien and threatening as a result. Thomas Green could see the beginning of this trend when he observed:

The presence of mystery can be a cause for despair and anxiety or what Sartre calls "nausea". This is the expression of curiosity divorced from its proper source. Curiosity by itself knows only the necessity to understand—to get from this point to that. It cannot respect the inscrutable; it can only seek to penetrate it, and having failed, to cry out against it. (Green, 1971, p. 201)

The promotion of curiosity in education, particularly as it is divorced from a more contemplative wonder, risks perpetuating a dialectic of ‘mastery over mystery’. This dialectic began with at least some awareness of the stakes at hand. In a modernising capitalist society, the pursuit of mastery chose to ignore mystery with a blithe confidence. Today, mystery has been so long ignored that it is almost forgotten. But whether it is ignored or forgotten, mystery still exists as stubbornly as ever. All that has changed is our ability to reckon with it. The confident expediency that accompanied the initial stages of the “epistemology of control” has now given way to an increasing estrangement with the very idea of mystery. This estrangement can manifest as apathy, anxiety, arrogance, ignorance, yearning. The educator will encounter these symptoms and many more of the dialectic of mastery over mystery that has taken a firm hold over twenty-first century society and which has continued the dramatic decline of wonder today. This study has suggested that curiosity alone is not sufficient to address the status quo and indeed risks upholding it by the reduction of wonder to an inquisitive search for ‘the right answer’. Religious education is well placed to offer a perspective, so rare today, that challenges student to focus and reflect on what they do not or cannot know. Religious education has the potential to approach—like the aporia of the Socratic method or the apophasis of Thomas Aquinas’—a redeemed integration of the three modalities of wonder described by Pickstock and Desmond.

In his work on ‘Godly Play’, Jerome Berryman has advanced the case for wonder as “soft break” (Berryman, 1991, p. 94) in the boundaries of meaning we impose on the world. Wonder expands rather that annuls these boundaries; it creates rooms for mystery rather than ignoring, fearing or conquering it. Berryman’s work on the importance of wonder in religious education underscores the argument of Whitehead—the teacher’s ability to model wonder is the sine qua non for a more redeemed sense of wonder in our classrooms: “When the teacher truly is wondering, the children sense wonder in the air.” (Berryman, 1991, p. 62). The ability of religious education teachers at every level—from primary to tertiary—to go about their work with this same sense of wonder holds the key to making good on the unique potential so vouched for in this study.

If modern society has fallen increasingly out of touch with why wonder was ever necessary in the first place, the greatest minds and the most enduring religious traditions have always grasped the necessity with hopeful joy: “But that attitude of ignorance which we know as wonder does not involve despair or anxiety. Out of wonder comes joy, the joy of the beginner, of the mind always open to what is fresh and new and as yet unknown.” (Green, 1971, p. 201).

7 Conclusion

In large part, this study has problematized contemporary dialectics of wonder in order to clear the ground for a robust and realistic rehabilitation. It is not enough to bemoan the decline of wonder and blithely support its promotion. We must ask, as this study has begun to do, ‘what decline?’ and ‘what wonder?’. We must analyse the reasons for the decline and consider honestly what the necessity and conditions of rehabilitation might be. This study has outlined the challenges posed by such a multifarious ‘happening’ that is without a common set of terminology, relies perilously on unempirical ‘experience’ that cannot be quantified, self-activated, or controlled, but which has been counterfeited, degraded, ignored, misapprehended, and misappropriated with alarming consistency to suit the basest whims of humankind. What then here is worth rehabilitating, and how to achieve it? This study has merely opened the conversation prompted by these questions. It has begun to answer them by underscoring the essential role of the teacher in modelling the sort of ‘redeemed’ wonder most in need in our classrooms and society today. Further, it has suggested that religious education has at its disposal the opportunity, the means and the motive to advance a more contemplative wonder to rebalance what has become a self-defeating over-reliance on a more expedient, inquisitive ‘curiosity’. It boasts these unique set of advantages because despite ever more sophisticated means humankind conjures to solve life’s mysteries and to sideline the wondrous surplus of meaning at the heart of our human existence, religious education both exceeds and chastens the story that the modern world so relentlessly tells.