Awe is the phenomena experienced when one looks up and lights upon the height, majesty, and mystery of the California Redwoods. It appears the trees pierce heaven itself. Among these giant organisms are the Sequoia–while they are shorter in form, they reserve a width that spans an automobile. These trees are the largest beings on the planet. Some of them are nearly 4000 years old, and it is hard to not feel miniscule when you walk under their canopy. Experiences like this make one feel connected to something greater and simultaneously small at the same time. Modern psychologists call awe-inducing experiences “self-transcendent”1. For Christians, we might say our sense of God—coined by Calvin as the sensus divinatus—is stirred during these experiences.
Giant trees are not the only things capable of triggering awe. Awe can arise when listening to an acoustic tune with harmonics perfectly in place, with strings sounding off at the exact moment they should. The sound of notes, chords, and strings come together in perfect unison. Every note falls in the right place. But “right” according to what? The music provides a glimpse into some transcendent standard of beauty. After all, if one truly believes a musical tune is beautiful there must be beauty that is ultimate. No one listens to beautiful music and claims it’s only auditory information. Heavenly music pierces the mind and testifies that something transcendent must exist.
By and large the Protestant tradition would agree on beauty as a transcendental. However, there is some contention if beauty has transcendental qualities equal to that of truth or goodness:
Bavinck was hesitant to elevate beauty “equal” to that of truth and goodness:
“beauty is such a rich, divine gift, it also must be loved by us. It does not, however, have the same compelling force for us as the true and the good.”2
But he does ascribe beauty as follows:
“a valuable gift the Creator of all things has granted to his children.”3
While Bavinck’s point contains his typical wisdom, we can agree awe involves a sense of foreignness–of something other moving in. Usually, from our everyday perspective, we are the nucleus of significance. Most objects and processes revolve around us. But when one witnesses a great waterfall or burning sunset their actual significance becomes realized. We gain a sense of what incredible mysteries lie beyond our immediate experience, which communicates that we are not the orbiters of reality. It is witnessing the power of God’s creation—like raging volcanoes or colossal glaciers—that enlightens the mind in this way. Many will report they become timid around such things of nature. The feeling of awe wraps up in one phenomena the wonderful, fearful, and the communication of something greater.
All humanity is familiar with awe. Not all can relish it, unfortunately. Naturalists deny the transcendence that beckons them during awe-inducing experience, and attempt to strip what’s been perceived (objects, music, etc.) of anything transcendental. They must deal with the feelings produced from perceiving that phenomena, however, and end up conceding it is only the feeling generated which is anything substantial. Not the perceived itself.
C.S. Lewis highlights the absurdity of this in The Abolition of Man. When “Gaius” and “Titius” assert we make value statements about our affections generated from perceived experience and not the perceived thing itself, Lewis responds with: “The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”4
Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how the naturalist can even shelter the importance of the experience in the feelings towards it. The beauty, meaning, and purpose felt in the experience means nothing in the final analysis. The feeling of purpose is only dopamine. The “meaning” is only a temporary emotional state that has arisen from chemical activity. But how pitiless and depressing of a conclusion that is to hold—and we know it. With confidence, the Christian theist can affirm their affections felt during awe-inducing experience.
A depression mounts if the naturalist is truly consistent. They must stand firm in their position that awe is nothing, both the perceived thing and the feelings generated from it. In the final analysis, if they are consistent, they may be logically sound but must also swallow the pill of nihilism. Which never goes down smoothly.
They must cling to their naturalism lest they step outside their philosophy. Running to the shelter of subjectivity, the sorry is alleviated with an existentialist embrace of “subjective meaning” or by insisting they are “enjoying the experience for what it is.” However, this doesn’t solve the problem that caused the existential dread in the first place: that they cannot bring themselves to believe what is being communicated to them through their experience of awe, even if it is a more meaningful reality than they profess to believe.
In Book 1 of the Institutes, John Calvin expounds on God’s divinity revealed in nature:
“Indeed, his essence is incomprehensible; hence, his divineness far escapes all human perception. But upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance. ”5
He continues, after noting the power of God that shines through the firmament:
The reason why the author of The Letter to the Hebrews elegantly calls the universe the appearance of things invisible [Heb. 11:3] is that this skillful ordering of the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible. The reason why the prophet attributes to the heavenly creatures a language known to every nation [Ps. 19:2 ff.] is that therein lies an attestation of divinity so apparent that it ought not to escape the gaze of even the most stupid tribe.6
This mirror Calvin describes is awe’s mechanism.
I recently noted the following remark in the comments section of a Reddit thread titled, “Why do humans like music?”:
“Nothing really matters but music”
This remark was found in an area of the internet with many professing atheists, and it’s currently one of the highest “rated” comments in the thread. The comment is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It is not made to claim that music is the only thing with ontological purpose. Note how, sadly, the commenter recognizes the “otherness” of music I have explained but confesses meaninglessness. In fact, the comment is actually a reply to another comment that reads:
“…listening to music tickles neurons in people’s brain that make them experience pleasure.”
Indeed, it is only neurons chiming without God in the picture.
Music is a mirror that speaks into their soul of God’s beauty and perfection. The meaning that’s communicated through the music can only be possible with this God, which the atheist knows if they understand the logic of their worldview. According to Calvin the “skillful ordering of the universe” is a physical reality that reflects the divine, and so is the elegant structure of music. The “language known to every nation”
The feeling of awe seems part of the sensus divinitatis and is a vein which the man becomes more conscious of the divine. Calvin explains that the knowledge of God is renewed at times and brought forth on occasion by God himself.
He writes:
“To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. Ever renewing its memory, he repeatedly sheds fresh drops. Since, therefore, men one and all perceive that there is a God and that he is their Maker,”7
Since all men have implanted the knowledge of God, it follows that “everyday” things can be awe-inducing too. It depends on the individual. One may feel awe during a musical symphony but be perplexed by an art piece. To others a simple arrangement of color could be awe-inducing. Consider colorblind individuals who see color for the first time using modern optical technology. Often, the new perspective brings tears. In this way God is “ever renewing” and “repeatedly sheds fresh drops” of awe.
While awe can be relative to the individual, that does not diminish awe’s significance or communicative nature. Indeed, it is this universality that establishes awe as a divine mechanism. Using the “relativity” of religions, Calvin argues similarly that the diversity of religion does not provide evidence for a type of religious conditioning.
He writes in Chapter 3.2,
“Therefore it is utterly vain for some men to say that religion was invented by the subtlety and craft of a few to hold the simple folk in thrall by this device and that those very persons who originated the worship of God for others did not in the least believe that any God existed. I confess, indeed, that in order to hold men’s minds in greater subjection, clever men have devised very many things in religion by which to inspire the common folk with reverence and to strike them with terror. But they would never have achieved this if men’s minds had not already been imbued with a firm conviction about God, from which the inclination toward religion springs as from a seed. ”8
God knows all people and their inclinations exhaustively. He can providentially place people and awe-inducing phenomena according to those affections.
Calvin also states that when God does renews His presence in the mind, it agonizes the unbeliever; He continues in 2.2,
“Indeed, they seek out every subterfuge to hide themselves from the Lord’s presence, and to efface it again from their minds. But in spite of themselves they are always entrapped. Although it may sometimes seem to vanish for a moment, it returns at once and rushes in with new force. If for these there is any respite from anxiety of conscience, it is not much different from the sleep of drunken or frenzied persons, who do not rest peacefully even while sleeping because they are continually troubled with dire and dreadful dreams. The impious themselves therefore exemplify the fact that some conception of God is ever alive in all men’s minds.”9
We could see described here the consequences of the naturalist’s denial of the transcendent. It is unbelief itself that sears the naturalist’s mind every time they experience awe. An enmity exists between their unbelief and the beauty they peer into. They see beauty and glory, but they believe they are only having beautiful or glorious feelings, or worse, that these feelings seem beautiful but are only brain activity in the end. This is a position they must struggle with—a “anxiety of conscience”. It’s dreadful.
But how wonderful it would be if the beautiful is truly beautiful. It is only the believer who can truly delight in God’s creation and feelings that arise from witnessing it. One notable philosopher once warned, that“if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”10 Perhaps the fright of the abyss need not always be the dark, dreary, and harrowed. For the unbeliever an abyss can be the beautiful, glorious, and divine that beams into the soul.
- Pizzaro et al. 2021. Self-Transcendent Emotions and Their Social Effects: Awe, Elevation, and Kama Muta Promote a Human Identification and Motivation to Help Others. Frontiers in Psychology. ↩︎
- Bavinck, Herman. Essays on Religion, Science, and Society. Baker Academic. pp. 259. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Lewis, C.S. Abolition of Man. ↩︎
- Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Book 1. Chapter 5. Section 1. Westminster John Knox Press. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles, Edited by John T. McNeil. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Institutes. Book 1. Chapter 3. Section 1. ↩︎
- ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. ↩︎