The Delight That Demands a Giver: Sarah Hendrickx on Autistic Joy, and What the Catholic Tradition Adds

The Man at the Window

There is a man Sarah Hendrickx describes in her Aeon essay "The Joy of Autism" who stops outside houses at night and wishes he could see into every window on every street in the world. Not from malice. From need. He wants to know everything about the people inside, because living surrounded by unknowns is, for him, frightening and incomplete. Hendrickx offers this image as a portrait of autistic curiosity — urgent, boundless, and at its best, joyful. The man is not dangerous. He is hungry.

That image refuses to stay in its clinical container. The hunger he describes — for total knowledge of the world and the people in it — is not merely a neurological profile. In a different register, it is the oldest hunger in the tradition: our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. Augustine did not think he was describing a cognitive style. He thought he was describing the human condition.

Hendrickx's essay is generous and intelligent. It refuses the reductive equation of autism with deficit, and it insists that the same cognitive wiring that causes real suffering can also generate real delight. On both counts she is right. What the Catholic tradition presses is whether "delight" is a sufficient category for what she is actually describing.

Curiosity as structure, not accident

The DMU faculty's Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the person treats curiosity not as a personality quirk but as a constitutive feature of human beings as body-soul unities. In their account of the sensory-perceptual-cognitive dimension of the person, intrinsic curiosity appears alongside the primary senses as one of the bio-physiological bases for knowledge — a capacity that "serves the natural inclinations for goodness and relationship that aim at flourishing."[^4] Curiosity, on this view, is not a bug in the human operating system. It is a feature oriented toward something beyond itself.

Jordan Peterson, drawing on neuropsychology in Maps of Meaning, makes a compatible observation: the dopaminergic systems activated by exploration and novel discovery produce an "innate capacity to take true pleasure in such activity" that accompanies genuine investigation of the unknown.[^5] He notes that human beings alone enjoy investigation and classification in a way qualitatively different from that characterizing any other animal, and he reaches the word spiritually when describing this capacity — and then stops, unsure what to do with it. The Catholic tradition knows exactly what to do with it.

What Hendrickx describes in her autistic clients and in herself — the firing neurons, the eureka moment, the sense of being most alive when a pattern finally connects — corresponds with what Aquinas calls the delectatio that accompanies the act of understanding. The pleasure is not incidental to knowing; it is the sign that knowing has reached its object. The autistic person who spends a weekend absorbed in the geometry of butternut squash distribution across Spain, or who feels like neurons are "connecting the Universe," is fulfilling a capacity that belongs to every human person — only, apparently, with unusual intensity and focus.

The crisis the essay cannot resolve

Hendrickx is too honest not to note the shadow. The curiosity that brings joy also brings anxiety. The need to know is also a fear of not-knowing. The man at the window is frightened as well as fascinated, and the question is whether her framework — neurodivergent identity, sensory delight, the flow state — can hold both poles without collapsing one into the other.

Her strongest case runs like this: autistic joy is proportionate to its object. The intensity is real, not manufactured. The delight in a lightbulb collection or a Taylor Swift discography or the grammar of an obscure language is genuine delight, and dismissing it as neurological compensation would be condescending. She is right about this. The Catholic tradition would not dismiss it either. It would, however, ask: proportionate to which object? And what happens when no finite object is large enough?

Vitz's work in Catholic psychology touches this edge when he examines the relationship between high-functioning autism and religious belief — noting, cautiously, the empirical literature suggesting that some autistic individuals show reduced engagement with conventional religious frameworks, while others arrive at intense metaphysical fascination through precisely the pattern-seeking Hendrickx celebrates.[^1] The question is not whether autistic joy is real. It is whether joy can sustain itself on finite objects indefinitely, or whether the pattern-seeking eventually asks for a Pattern behind all patterns.

The DMU faculty consistently argue that sensory-perceptual-cognitive activity, however rich and genuine, "is not sufficient to explain fully how and why persons perceive and evaluate the world around them."[^3] The neurological account of delight does not close the question of what the delight is for.

What the older tradition sees

Hendrickx's essay treats joy as though its value were self-evident: find the things that light you up, and the lighting-up is its own justification. This is not quite wrong. But the Catholic tradition has long held that joy is not a state to be secured. It is a signal to be read. Genuine joy points beyond itself toward the Good that makes it possible.

The autistic person's capacity for what Hendrickx's contributor Steph Jones calls "a totally immersive flow state" — feeling "connected to something bigger" — is the kind of natural energy that the spiritual tradition has always known needs not suppression but direction.

Frankl, writing from outside the tradition but toward it, made the related point that meaning cannot be manufactured from pleasure alone. The man at the window is not simply seeking stimulation. He is seeking comprehensive knowledge — knowledge of persons, of how they live, of what holds their lives together. That is not a clinical symptom. In its structure, it is a theological yearning dressed in sensory clothing.

The window, revisited

Hendrickx has done something worth celebrating: she has recovered the dignity of a cognitive style that medicine too quickly encodes as deficit. The joy is real. The curiosity is not a malfunction. The intensity is, in its own way, a gift.

But the man at the window cannot see into every house. No finite survey of human lives will close the gap between what he hungers for and what the world can offer him. The Catholic tradition does not regard that as his neurological limitation. It regards it as his theological condition — the same condition that makes every human being, neurotypical or not, capable of a restlessness that no created thing can finally resolve.

The question his image leaves open is not whether autistic joy is legitimate. It is whether anyone has told him that the longing underneath his joy has a name, and that the name is not a diagnosis.

Disclaimer: The views and content of this post are the author's own. AI was used to help edit grammar and improve clarity.

References

[^1]: Vitz, P. C. (2018). The psychology of atheism: From defective fathers to autism to professional socialization to personal concerns. In J. Koperski & C. Taliaferro (Eds.), The naturalness of belief: New essays on theism's rationality (pp. 175–195). Lexington.

[^3]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). Chapter 13: Sensory-perceptual-cognitive dimensions of the person. In A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press.

[^4]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & the DMU Group. (2020). Theological, philosophical, and psychological premises for a Catholic Christian meta-model of the person. In A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 20–44). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^5]: Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge.