Admiratio: What Fireworks Teach Us About the Human Capacity for Wonder

Every head tips back. Conversations stop. Phones go up, then come back down, because the screen is somehow less than what the eye wants. For a few seconds, people who spend their days managing disappointment and defending themselves against too much feeling simply open. This is not excitement. Something else is happening — and the neuroscience of it is a better starting point than it might seem.

The orienting reflex and its limits

A burst of light against a dark sky hits the visual system with the kind of novelty it is built to track. Peterson, drawing on Russian psychophysiologist E.N. Sokolov's work, describes how human beings attend involuntarily to things that occur contrary to their predictions — and that involuntary attention forms a large part of what we call consciousness.[^1] Fireworks are engineered novelty: each burst is designed to differ from the last, which means the orienting response never quite habituates. The brain keeps asking what was that? and the body follows with a small cascade of arousal.

Perry's research on early development adds another dimension. Human beings evolved reading faces and bodies in groups of roughly 40 to 60 members, where facial expression was the primary currency of social communication.[^2] A fireworks display functions like a collective face: everyone around you is oriented the same direction, wearing the same expression of open astonishment. The shared physiological state is itself pleasurable. You are not alone in your wonder. The crowd becomes, briefly, one organism.

Both accounts are accurate. But the neuroscience stops at the threshold of the more interesting question: why does the experience carry the quality it does? The orienting reflex explains attention. It does not explain longing.

What Hayes noticed about opposites

Hayes, working in the tradition of relational frame theory, observes that human symbolic thought binds opposites together in ways no other animal's cognition does.[^3] Happiness can remind a person of sadness because the mind holds both poles at once. This is the source of much human suffering — and also the mechanism by which a person can stand before a beautiful thing and feel, simultaneously, delight and an ache. Not because something is wrong. Because the beautiful thing is not enough. It exceeds ordinary life but falls short of the thing it seems to promise.

Augustine named this structure before cognitive science existed: the heart is restless until it rests in God. The CCMMP framework developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus grounds this theologically: the human person is not a self-enclosed system of drives seeking equilibrium but a being constitutively ordered toward a transcendent horizon. Wonder, on this account, is an anthropological signal — a feature of the imago Dei — pointing toward the One for whom the creature was made.

Fireworks catch the breath not only because they are loud and bright. They catch the breath because they briefly resemble something the person has always half-remembered and never quite seen: glory that arrives without effort, that is not earned and cannot be hoarded.

Admiratio: wonder as formation

Aquinas distinguishes the passions of the sensitive appetite from the acts of the intellect and will, but he does not dismiss the passions. Well-ordered, they are the fuel of virtue. Admiratio — wonder, admiration — is for Aquinas the beginning of the philosophical impulse: the moment when a person encounters something whose cause they do not know and are moved to seek it. Wonder is not merely pleasant. It is morally and intellectually formative. The person who can still be stopped by a sky full of light has not yet become fully closed.

Nordling, elaborating the CCMMP's account of beauty, draws on Aquinas to show that what is beautiful calls out to be recognized, appreciated, and loved by rational creatures — and that the experience of created beauty leads toward contemplation of its source.[^5] Luminosity, harmony, and integrity draw the person toward transcendental beauty rather than terminate the movement in sensation. On this reading, the fireworks are not the destination. They are a direction.

This means awe can be trained — or lost. The capacity is not static. A person who habitually rushes past beauty, who fills every interval of silence with noise, who consumes spectacle as a product rather than receives it as a gift, gradually narrows. The orienting response still fires, but nothing deeper follows. The intellect's desire to know its cause has been domesticated into appetite for stimulus.

The training runs the other direction too. Contemplative traditions within the Catholic Christian heritage — John of the Cross in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, Teresa of Avila in the Interior Castle — are in part practices of recovering and deepening the capacity for awe. They do this by detaching the will from consolation so that the soul can move through it toward the source. John of the Cross warns against fixing the will too strongly on sensory beauty — not because it is evil, but because its proper function is to carry the soul toward its origin rather than terminate the movement in itself.

The compulsive alternative

Mate's account of addiction identifies the same structure from the other side. What distinguishes human beings from our ancestors, Mate notes, is the capacity for symbolic expression — the ability to reach beyond immediate sensation toward something the sensation represents.[^4] The compulsive search for intensity — through substances, screens, or spectacle — is a search for what wonder briefly provides: the sense of being more alive than usual, of the ordinary cage of anxiety and self-consciousness dissolving. The appetite that was designed to open the soul, when treated as an end in itself, begins to close it. Each successive hit of novelty needs to be larger to produce the same lift, and the capacity for genuine astonishment quietly erodes.

The contrast is between two orientations toward the same experience. One person stands before the sky and lets the beauty carry them somewhere. Another stands before it and immediately wants the next one. The difference is not in the stimulus but in the habits of attention brought to it — which is to say, in character.

Communities of shared astonishment

Fireworks are one of the few contemporary rituals that reliably produce collective awe in secular settings. They are almost always tied to occasions of communal meaning: independence, new years, feast days, weddings. The cultures that invented them understood that communities need shared moments of astonishment — not to escape ordinary life, but to remember what ordinary life is oriented toward. The Hebrew tradition spoke of kavod, the weight of glory. The Christian tradition speaks of theophany, the self-disclosure of God through created signs. Each tradition was accounting for the same datum: that beauty encountered together does something to a community that information and argument cannot do.

The body's answer — orienting reflex, shared arousal, the pleasure of mutual attention — is true. It is just not the whole account. Underneath it is a creature who was made for more than the world reliably delivers, who knows this at the level of the nervous system before knowing it at the level of argument, and who finds in these brief moments of engineered glory a memory of something not yet fully seen.

You are standing on a lawn. The sky opens. Every head tips back.

That gesture is the oldest gesture of prayer: the creature looking up, the will momentarily freed from its own weight, the whole body briefly remembering what it was made for. The delight is not a distraction. It is a direction — and like every capacity worth having, it can be cultivated or squandered.

References

[^1]: Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning — 'We attend, involuntarily, to those things that occur contrary to our predictions.' [^2]: Bruce Perry, Born for Love — 'Individual survival depended on close cooperation and communication.' [^3]: Steven Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life — 'happiness can remind human beings of being sad. The two are related.' [^4]: Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts — 'What distinguishes us from our defunct Neanderthal cousins is Homo sapiens' capacity for symbolic expression.' [^5]: William Nordling, in Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020) — on beauty as luminosity, harmony, and integrity that draws the person toward transcendental beauty and its divine source.