Augustine and the Hummingbird
Do we love anything except that which is beautiful? What then is a beautiful object? And what is beauty? What is it which charms and attracts us to the things we love?
—Augustine, Confessions, Book 4, Section 20
In the middle of winter, a hummingbird builds her nest outside my daughter’s bedroom window. We are playing on our apartment building’s communal patio when we first notice it. A leafless tree sprouts from a concrete planter. In the sun, its branches become long arms that reach inside, pawing at my daughter’s crib. As we play beneath the tree, an emerald blur of wings flits between the branches, their own shadow quickening against the wall. “Look!” I say, pointing. If she inherits one thing from our life together, I hope she grows to see the world—for all its struggle, all its wounds—as a fundamentally beautiful thing.
There is a long theological tradition of paying attention to beauty in the natural world. In Confessions, Augustine bears witness to the world’s beauty as a sign of grace. Full of longing, he writes:
And I said to all these things in my external environment: “Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.” And with a great voice they cried out: ‘He made us’ (Ps 99:3). My question was the attention I gave to them, and their response was their beauty.”
Augustine’s whole world—its language, saplings, and rivers—was indicative. The skies proclaimed, the rocks cried out, and, in attending them, he was directed to something deeper that hummed in all creation. His earth was rich with “signs” which helped him “attain” his human telos: communion with the hidden divine. As a result, Augustine spent a lifetime scanning his surroundings for signs of a holy other. He ached to encounter a transcendent Beauty in his midst.
As we watch the bird, I think about Augustine: how he was filled with every desire, how he struggled to locate the true end of his longing in this world—a world that was not divine but that revealed and even contained God. He was needy in a way I recognize. His thirst, familiar.
The quest for beauty predates Augustine’s own thinking, his longing decidedly ancient. His theology of beauty was deeply shaped by Plato, whose ideas saturated Augustine’s Roman education in North Africa. In the Symposium, Plato argues that an attention to beauty is the disposition from which any person should live. In this, we will grow in love for beauty, which will strengthen our awareness of it in the first place, and help us contemplate “higher” things. He describes the process as such:
This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.
I want to share this with my daughter, but Plato is advanced reading for a 16-month-old. So instead, I point at the hummingbird and wonder what she thinks. She is busy stacking rows of cracked green plant pots, but pauses to see what I see. “Biw!” she cries, unable to pronounce her rs and ds. I watch her watch the bird, who flies up in search of nectar.
In Plato’s world, earthly beauty was a conduit towards that which seemingly exceeded him: Beauty in the intelligible realm. Material beauty reminded Plato “of true Beauty”—the latter of which existed elsewhere. Writing in the tradition of Plato, Plotinus later argued that earthly beauty should inspire Odysseus’ famous phrase, “Let us fly to our dear country!” This is a country that resides above.
I am suspicious of Plato’s hierarchy—that there is no “true Beauty” in this world—but not of his pursuit. Like Augustine, he longed to encounter something transcendental. This, always the quest: for Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. Mothering, I wonder if my daughter will care about these things, will yearn for them like her parents do. Of course she will, I tell myself. If Augustine was right about anything, all longing is a hunt for that which is Good, Beautiful, and True. It simply manifests in many forms.
For days, we watch the hummingbird build her nest above our noisy street. She seems unaware of the howl of ambulances below and works slowly, with persistence. It is difficult to notice the home she is making, which cleverly adopts its surroundings. Camouflaged, it is small enough for my daughter’s two-inch palm to cradle. If it weren’t for the bird hovering over her work, we would miss it entirely. Enchanted, we study her movement. She glimmers like a jewel, strung invisibly in the flickering air.
This is what ornithologists call an “Anna’s Hummingbird.” Named after a duchess, this species once lived only in California. But sugary feeders and tropical transplants have drawn Anna’s family up the map, planting her in a Pacific Northwest city like ours. For weeks, we inquire after her small, warm body. We learn the facts: her mating rituals, what to expect of her hatchlings, how her heart rate rises to 1,200 beats per minute in flight. I try to imagine the speed of this thrum, recalling my daughter’s own rapid heartbeat in utero—for months, my favourite sound—which, at eight times slower, is an inadequate comparison. The more we pay attention to this bird, the more her life becomes woven into ours. Her life is a pageant. Rapt, we stitch our monotonous, housebound days into hers.
Each afternoon, when my daughter wakes from her nap, I open the window and chart the bird’s whereabouts. One day, I see that two other hummingbirds have joined her on the patio—one small and fluffy, the other fully grown. They dart back and forth across the street while I look up the collective noun for hummingbirds, and learn that we are aptly gazing at a charm, a hover, or a shimmer of birds. I am indeed charmed, and inexplicably tethered to this small creature. In the dead of January, she signifies life, and I realize that Augustine’s search for transcendence wasn’t born out of piety. He was, simply put, as desperate as a new mom in winter: yearning for beauty, longing for a shred of presence in this world, which can be difficult to see.
In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry suggests we form a kind of covenant with the beautiful things we perceive. Our attention to beauty facilitates an encounter, she says, which acts like a small tear in “the surface of the world,” pulling us “through to some vaster space.” According to Scarry, these encounters transform us. They “lift us (as though by the air currents of someone else’s sweeping), letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world.” Perhaps, then, I am tethered to the bird. I am casting myself out to her, hoping she will haul me up and into something wide and boundless: my desire’s truest end. And yet, as Scarry observes, the aim of this encounter is not to escape the world, as Plato sought, but ultimately, to stand differently in it. An encounter with beauty doesn’t draw us out of this world, then, but makes us more rooted here.
To Plato and his followers, the hummingbird is a shadowy thing, a low rung on a ladder that leads to higher Beauty—helpful but penultimate. True Beauty is found in fleeing the senses and rising above material creation, where nature’s mutability is suspect to the Platonist. The world—earthy and decaying, then blooming—is a mere training ground for ascent. Its ability to be wounded is tantamount to its corruption.
Like Plato, Augustine knew that natural beauty directs us to its source: the beauty of the supernatural. But unlike Plato, Augustine did not think of material beauty as only a finger pointing far away, leading to some transcendent beyond. If material’s only function is to point us elsewhere, it would be a symbol, purely representative in its role. Instead, Augustine viewed the world as a sign. There is a subtle but significant difference here.
Where a symbol represents a far-off thing, a sign suggests a relationship of proximity. A fresh paw print, a blade of grass, a word: these all hold some of what they signify. Each contain, respectively, a trace of animal, the physical presence of spring, or a shred of meaning. Under this logic, earthly beauty is a sign that both contains and reveals divine life.
For Augustine, all nature is entangled in the holy. Everything has existence—has being—because it is in God. In Confessions, he explains:
“I would have no being, would not have any existence, unless you were in me. Or rather, I would have no being if I were not in you ‘of whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things’ (Rom 11:36).”
God, whom Aquinas calls “subsistent being itself” (ipsum esse subsistens), is the very foundation of all nature, all existence. We are because God is. “In filling all things,” Augustine says, addressing God, “you fill them all with the whole of yourself.”
In this, Augustine’s world is a sacrament.
*
To make her nest, the hummingbird hauls moss and lichen onto the branch: a shaggy bedrock on which to brood. She stuffs it with willow velvet and cattail down, then wraps it in spider’s silk to make it stick. If her nest is too drab, she will chip paint off neighbouring houses to give her lodgings some colour.
As the days lengthen, we track the bird’s movements, wondering when she will lay her eggs. One Sunday, I fling open the blinds in my daughter’s room. The skies are bright, so we invite the light to spill into our home. I gaze up at the tree while a small voice chatters below: “Biw, biw, biw.” She knows why I scan the windowscape.
Today, there is no sign of the hummingbird—just an empty nest. But when I look lower, I find her at my daughter’s eyeline. She hovers near a spider’s web, busy with survival. We watch, spellbound, as this mother spools strands of sticky satin onto her long and purposeful beak. Delighted, I bring my second cup of coffee to the patio and watch this scene unfold.
By now, January has misted into February. After a year of postpartum depression, mixed with the dull ache of raising a child in lockdown, I am desperate for these small indications of spring. Like Augustine, I am feverishly attending beautiful things, hoping they will haul me up to something vast, something that will help me transcend a protracted loneliness that endures.
My daughter plays at my feet while, above, the bird bobs to and from her nest. She is a sea-green flash in the tree’s weathered boughs. She plucks a bug out of the air, which is charged with itself. The day is alive.
*
To see the world as sacrament is to understand the way transcendence permeates creation, becoming a key attribute of reality. It means the very nature of being—and the very nature of nature—is entangled in a supernatural grace. While Augustine never described the world as “sacrament” verbatim, his quest for beauty led him to realize that God is “most intimately” here. He knew, as Pope Francis says in Laudato Sì, that, “nature as a whole not only manifests God but is also a locus of his presence.” This is a decidedly sacramental logic.
In For the Life of the World, Father Alexander Schmemann describes the world’s “true nature” as sacrament. A sacramental world doesn’t just symbolize grace but sees grace amidst phenomena: “God’s real presence” upholding all things. It affirms “the holy thisness…of our flesh and blood existence.” Viewed through this lens, all material phenomena are saturated by the sustaining presence of some holy other. The world’s beauty, but also its trash, contains the very presence of that which transcends it.
While Plato could not see the hummingbird through Augustine’s eyes—figuratively, of course, for hummingbirds did not frequent ancient Greece—the philosopher and his followers didn’t get everything wrong. They were, after all, pilgrims for beauty—just like Augustine.
Plotinus understood the hope and struggle of this pilgrimage, asking how a material body can see “inconceivable beauty”—that holy mystery which transcends the senses, beckoning. “How shall we find the way?” he asks. In response, Plotinus suggests that we can recognize and follow “the beauty in bodies” so that we might learn the mystery of “inner sight.”
These days, I am trying to cultivate an inner sight that sees a holy presence in things as plain as feathers green and ruby. I am trying to foster sacramental attention. In this, I aim to embody Scarry’s rooted engagement over Plato’s escapism, which means choosing a theory of being that sees a world—its suffering, decay, matter, beauty—that participates in divine life. This is the challenge, both for Augustine’s restless heart and for our modern disenchanted eyes: to see that all things are wrapped in this Beauty, that transcendence, as Annie Dillard says, “sockets into everything that is.”
I confess: I fret over this vision. Is it reckless to see all nature as entangled in the holy, when that nature is burning? I know the arguments well, have rehearsed them incessantly. This way of thinking is romantic, perhaps unethical, especially if it leads to an escapist apathy towards ecological wrongs. What if it perpetuates Platonic detachment from a world that needs our attachment? And yet, I suspect that splitting nature from the supernatural facilitated our current crisis in the first place. You can extract as many resources as you’d like from something that’s just raw, unholy material for analysis.
To restitch the natural world to its source—to think sacramentally—we need to recover the wisdom of the incarnation, which affirms that the “self-revealing…Word is in every dimension.” Under this logic, says Athanasius, the very presence of God, of Beauty, is “above, in creation; below, in the Incarnation; in the depth, in Hades; in the breadth, throughout the world.” This is a world viewed through the body of Christ—anathema to Plato, because it is the divine condescended to wounded flesh.
Augustine wrestled with this, asking why he “approved of the beauty of bodies” and “what justification [he] had for…mutable things.” He did not find the answer until he “embraced” the mystery of the incarnation: divine life “mingled with flesh,” transcendent Beauty that inhabits our “house of our clay.” “None of this is in the Platonist books,” he writes. “Those pages…disdain to learn from [Christ], for he is meek and humble.” In this, they miss the hidden depths of unseen glory laid down low, buried at the foundations.
Viewed incarnationally, the whole world is “quickened and sustained” by this mystery.
*
By late March, I notice the bird less frequently. When we see the bare nest, I tell my daughter that the bird must be hunting for food. When it rains for five days, I worry her nest will be washed away. When I check, the nest is fine, but the bird isn’t there.
After several weeks, I accept that the bird has abandoned her nest. Something has happened to her, or perhaps her eggs were unfertilized all along. (When the latter occurs, a hummingbird will sense something is wrong and move on—a better instinct than brooding over something that will never hatch.) Maybe she didn’t even lay eggs, I hypothesize, and was simply rehearsing her maternal instinct on an empty cradle. The nest is too high up to check for babies, and I do not want to meddle, so I leave it alone. Barely perceptible, it rests: my own private sign of a balm during a difficult winter.
The week after Easter, I give in and investigate. The bird is not coming back. Any eggs would have been motherless for nearly a month. (This is less meddling and more housekeeping, I justify.) I climb onto the concrete planter that houses the tree, and paw through its tangle of branches. It is April, each branch now covered in soft green leaves that move like small, gentle hands. As I search for the nest, they paw at my face.
I cannot find it. Where a nest once perched, there is only a shred of filmy, gossamered moss. I rummage through the clover that covers the soil below, wondering if it fell in a storm, but the nest has altogether vanished. I am flummoxed, but my daughter is about to wake up, so I cannot dwell on this mystery for too long. Life beckons. I go inside, a piece of sticky moss tucked into my pocket, soil on my hands and nails.
*
Something in the world directed Augustine to the true end of his fervent longing: the beauty of the one who made it. Aching for transcendent Beauty, Augustine was drawn to Plato’s ascent. But in following the path of beauty, he finds a beauty that descends, through Christ, enfolding low things in divine care. This brings Augustine down to earth, in a way, reoriented with new awareness of the presence that grants all things their existence: ecosystems and people, small birds and their smaller nests. Making sense of this, he writes: “When you are poured out upon us, you are not wasted on the ground. You raise us upright. You are not scattered but reassemble us.”
As I think about the missing nest, I realize its disappearance—which indicates nature’s capacity for entropy—would fuel Plato’s suspicion of the physical world. I can sympathize with this. Nature’s chaos is a reminder that our desire’s truest end is not met in full by anything material. And yet, viewed sacramentally, our desire’s end is also very much here—even, and especially, in the world’s most wounded places. Through the incarnation, God’s presence is revealed in its seeming absence.
The incarnation revealed and affirmed what was always there: a divine presence holding all things. It proclaims a world where this presence is profoundly revealed in wounded flesh: through “the lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8). This is the sacramental reality in which all creation is enmeshed. As the mystery of the cross reveals, even death is held, and is holding all things: the body of Christ, woven into the very fabric of being. As Simone Weil says, all longing for beauty is essentially a longing for this incarnate reality.
Do we love anything except that which bears witness to this? Do we grieve anything except the ways in which our systems betray this reality? I tuck the piece of moss into a drawer in my daughter’s change table, and think of Annie Dillard’s speaker in Holy the Firm. All day long, she felt created. When I change my daughter’s diapers in the spring, when I fling open her blinds to a birdless tree, I will try and remember the “holy thisness” of our world. And because of this, I will cling to a real presence, seeing Augustine’s God—O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new—suffused in all things.
