Gratitude and Awe

Seneca's Three Graces, Pascal's Starry Abyss, and the Small Self

In his seven-book treatise On Benefits, Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca asked why ancient artists always painted the Three Graces dancing hand in hand in an unbroken circle. The choreography, he explained, captures the rhythm of human kindness: one sister bestows a gift, the second receives it gladly, and the third returns the favor in time.

Speaking in the Roman courts in 54 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero declared that gratitude is not only the greatest of all virtues, but the mother of every other virtue. Without the living memory of what we owe to parents, teachers, friends, and predecessors, loyalty, citizenship, and human decency have no roots.

In his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith observed that gratitude did the work of law long before human beings invented courts, police, or written contracts. By making us naturally eager to reward a neighbor who helped us in a pinch, gratitude allowed early communities to trade favors across years of trust.

French anthropologist Marcel Mauss demonstrated in his 1925 classic The Gift that in traditional Polynesian and Pacific Northwest societies, no gift is ever a dead, inert object. Every gift carries a piece of the giver's spirit, weaving giver and receiver into a three-part obligation to give, to receive graciously, and to give back.

Why do people hesitate to send thank-you notes even when they feel deeply grateful? In 2018 at the University of Chicago, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley asked volunteers to write a short letter of thanks to someone in their life. Writers worried their phrasing would sound clumsy, whereas recipients treasured the note for weeks.

Unlike a bank debt that can only be paid back to the original lender, genuine gratitude overflows toward strangers—a pattern psychologists Monica Bartlett and David DeSteno call upstream reciprocity. Volunteers rescued from a frustrating computer crash by a kind assistant spent 40 percent longer helping a completely unrelated stranger on a tedious task afterward.

While gratitude ties us to one another, awe ties us to what lies beyond human scale. Gazing up at the newly discovered Copernican universe in the seventeenth century, French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées that the eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrified him. Awe begins where ordinary human measurement breaks.

In his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry, a young Edmund Burke separated the sublime from simple beauty. A trim rose garden or a smooth melody gives the mind a gentle, relaxing pleasure. By contrast, standing safely on a cliff above a raging sea storm or gazing up at jagged mountain peaks fills us with reverent astonishment.

Immanuel Kant closed his 1788 Critique of Practical Reason with the most famous pairing of the European Enlightenment. Two things, Kant wrote, fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more steadily we reflect upon them. Those two wonders are the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Hurtling home from the Moon aboard Apollo 14 in 1971, astronaut Edgar Mitchell stared through the cabin window at Earth floating like a fragile blue-and-white marble in the black void. Author Frank White later interviewed dozens of astronauts and named this shift the Overview Effect—the instant national borders vanish beneath a paper-thin sky.

In 2015 at the University of California, Berkeley, psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner asked volunteers to stand for sixty seconds looking up at a grove of 200-foot Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus trees. When a passerby accidentally dropped a handful of pens moments later, the tree-gazers picked up significantly more pens than building-gazers.

Why does standing on the rim of a desert canyon, watching a thunderstorm roll across the plains, or hearing a great choir make a stressful week suddenly feel manageable? By shrinking the noisy, self-important ego down to its true proportions, awe quiets daily anxieties and reconnects the individual to a larger whole.