Restorative Wonder: Healing Moral Injury through Engagement with Beauty

By Ashley E. Schumacher, MS, LAPC

This article is adapted from an original academic paper authored by Ashley E. Schumacher in 2023.

Some experiences do more than leave painful memories. They can disturb a person’s understanding of what is good, trustworthy, meaningful, and worthy of love.

This is one way of understanding moral injury. Moral injury can emerge when a person experiences, participates in, or witnesses a profound violation of deeply held moral expectations. Early descriptions emphasized betrayal by legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation (Shay, 2014), while later models expanded the concept to include violations involving one’s own actions and failures to prevent harm (Litz et al., 2009). Although moral injury is not itself a psychiatric diagnosis, it can involve guilt, shame, loss of trust, self-condemnation, spiritual crisis, demoralization, and a disruption of one’s understanding of self, others, and the world (Jinkerson, 2016; Richardson et al., 2022).

For many people, the wound is also spiritual. Moral frameworks are often inseparable from a person’s understanding of God, vocation, responsibility, and human dignity. Consequently, a violation of what one believes to be morally true can affect not only psychological well-being but also one’s relationship with transcendence and one’s sense of meaning (Carey et al., 2016; Wortmann et al., 2017).

If moral injury can disrupt a person’s perception of what is good, might an encounter with beauty help restore that perception?

This question is not based on the claim that beauty is a proven treatment for moral injury. At present, there is no empirical evidence establishing that engagement with beauty directly or indirectly heals moral injury specifically. Rather, the possibility emerges from bringing together philosophical, theological, and psychological understandings of beauty, wonder, moral elevation, and restoration.

Moral Injury and the Disruption of the Moral World

Moral injury is particularly difficult because the person may continue to live in a world that no longer appears morally coherent.

The injury may involve betrayal by someone who was expected to protect, guide, or exercise authority responsibly. It may involve having violated one’s own moral commitments, or having been unable to prevent an event that violated those commitments. Whatever its particular form, moral injury can leave a person struggling to reconcile what happened with what they believed about themselves, other people, authority, morality, or God.

This helps distinguish moral injury from trauma understood primarily as a response to threat. Fear and danger may certainly be present, but moral injury concerns another dimension of human experience: the violation of a moral world.

That distinction matters because healing may require more than reducing distress. A person may need to recover the capacity to perceive goodness, trust, meaning, relationship, and possibility without denying the reality of what was wrong.

The question, then, becomes partly epistemological: How does a person come to know again that goodness exists when experience has made goodness difficult to perceive?

Wonder as a Response to Moral Beauty

Psychological research on moral elevation offers one important point of entry.

Jonathan Haidt described moral elevation as a positive emotional response to witnessing acts of moral beauty, particularly acts of compassion, kindness, generosity, or moral courage (Haidt, 2000, 2008). Rather than producing disgust or cynicism, the perception of moral goodness can evoke admiration, warmth, hope, and a desire to become better oneself. Research has further explored moral beauty and elevation as experiences capable of influencing prosocial motivation and perceptions of human nature (Diessner et al., 2008; Pohling & Diessner, 2016).

Moral beauty is not simply another word for moral goodness. Something may be objectively good without necessarily producing an experience of beauty. Beauty involves the way goodness, order, proportion, or harmony becomes perceptible and affectively meaningful. It can therefore engage the person differently than an abstract moral proposition.

Wonder deepens this encounter. Experiences of awe and wonder can arise when something is perceived as vast, profound, beautiful, or transcendent, disrupting ordinary patterns of perception and inviting a reconsideration of one’s place within a larger reality (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Haidt & Morris, 2009).

For someone whose moral world has been narrowed by betrayal, shame, or despair, this interruption may be significant. Beauty can make possible a moment in which reality appears larger than the injury without making the injury less real.

Beauty and the Order of Reality

The possibility of healing through beauty has roots much older than contemporary psychology.

For Plato, Beauty belongs to the transcendent order of reality, while beautiful things in the world participate imperfectly in Beauty itself (Plato, 1967). Aristotle located beauty in qualities such as order, proportion, and definiteness. Plotinus developed the relationship between beauty and the Good further, describing beauty as something that awakens the soul to the reality from which it has become estranged. Beauty can evoke wonder, longing, delight, and a desire for the Good (Plotinus, 2017).

These philosophical traditions offer a particularly relevant lens for moral injury. Moral injury involves a kind of disorder. Something that should have been ordered toward protection, responsibility, fidelity, or justice has instead become distorted through betrayal, domination, violence, neglect, or complicity.

The person may therefore experience not merely that something bad happened, but that something fundamental about reality has become difficult to understand.

Aquinas described beauty as that which pleases when seen, connecting beauty with truth, goodness, proportion, and the intelligibility of being (Aquinas, 1981). Beauty is not therefore merely decorative or subjective. It can disclose something about reality. It can draw the intellect and affective life toward what is true and good.

This gives beauty an epistemological dimension. Beauty does not simply make life more pleasant. It may help a person perceive aspects of reality that have become obscured by suffering.

From Beauty to Wonder, From Wonder to Meaning

This is where wonder becomes especially important.

An experience of beauty can interrupt the assumption that the world is exhausted by what has already been experienced. A piece of music, a work of art, the natural world, an act of unexpected kindness, or an encounter with genuine human goodness can become more than an enjoyable experience. It can raise questions about order, meaning, goodness, and possibility.

For the person experiencing moral injury, those questions may be restorative.

If betrayal has taught the person that authority cannot be trusted, an encounter with trustworthy goodness may complicate that conclusion.

If shame has reduced the person’s understanding of self to moral failure, beauty may create space to perceive dignity that has not been erased by what happened.

If suffering has made God seem absent or incomprehensible, beauty may become a place where transcendence can once again be encountered without requiring the person to prematurely resolve the problem of suffering.

The movement is not simplistic. Beauty does not erase moral disorder. Wonder does not explain away betrayal. Rather, beauty may create enough perceptual and affective space for the person to encounter reality as larger and more ordered than the wound alone has allowed.

In this sense, wonder may participate in the restoration of meaning.

Beauty and the Restoration of the Person

Moral injury can also involve a fragmentation of the self.

A person may know intellectually that they possess dignity while emotionally experiencing themselves as contaminated, complicit, powerless, or unworthy. The different dimensions of human experience no longer seem to belong together.

Aquinas’s understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul provides an important theological-philosophical framework here. Human beings do not encounter reality through intellect alone. Sensory perception, emotion, reason, imagination, memory, and will participate together in human knowing and responding (Aquinas, 1981).

Beauty can engage several of these dimensions simultaneously.

The sensory experience of color, music, form, movement, nature, or human expression can become emotionally meaningful. That emotional response can awaken reflection. Reflection can reopen questions of truth and goodness. The intellect can begin to reconsider assumptions formed under conditions of injury. The will can encounter renewed possibilities for relationship, responsibility, and hope.

The result is not simply feeling better. It is potentially a re-integration of ways of perceiving and responding that have become disordered or disconnected.

This is particularly important for moral injury because the wound often concerns the relationship between what a person perceives, what they believe, what they value, and how they understand themselves as a moral agent.

Beauty may therefore have a restorative function precisely because it can address the person as a whole.

Christ and the Transformation of Beauty

Within Christianity, the question of beauty ultimately leads beyond beautiful things to Beauty itself.

The Christian understanding of the Incarnation radically alters conventional associations between beauty, power, and authority. Christ does not reveal divine beauty through domination or worldly status. He reveals it through self-giving love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics places Christ at the center of this vision. In Christ, the infinite becomes visible within the finite, and divine glory is revealed through the concrete form of a human life (von Balthasar, 1964, 1982).

This becomes especially significant in the Passion.

The Cross is not conventionally beautiful. It bears the visible marks of violence, humiliation, suffering, and apparent defeat. Yet within Christian theology, the Cross reveals the beauty of self-giving love precisely within the place where human beings have inflicted ugliness and violence.

The wounds of Christ therefore do not simply represent suffering. They transform the meaning of suffering.

The one who possesses ultimate authority enters human vulnerability rather than protecting Himself through domination. He identifies Himself with the poor, the rejected, the suffering, and the marginalized. He accepts the vulnerability of human existence and ultimately allows the violence of human power to be turned toward an act of self-giving love.

“By his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

For a person wounded through the misuse of authority, this theological vision can carry particular significance. Christ does not merely stand outside the experience of violated power. He enters into human vulnerability and transforms authority from within.

Beauty is therefore no longer identified with perfection as the absence of suffering. Christian beauty can be found in the restoration of what suffering has disfigured through love.

Beauty in the Midst of Suffering

Viktor Frankl offers a striking psychological illustration of this possibility.

Writing about his experiences in the concentration camps, Frankl described moments in which beauty remained perceptible even amid extreme suffering. A sunset, a moment of kindness, or another seemingly ordinary experience could briefly interrupt the totalizing reality of the camp and reveal that the world contained more than suffering (Frankl, 1963).

The significance of such moments was not that they made suffering disappear. Their significance was that suffering did not possess the whole of reality.

This distinction is essential.

Healing moral injury cannot mean persuading someone that what happened was somehow beautiful or necessary. Nor does engagement with beauty require forgiveness before a person is ready, reconciliation where accountability has not occurred, or the spiritualization of suffering.

Rather, beauty may provide evidence, however momentary, that the person’s experience of reality is not exhausted by the violation.

The world can still contain goodness.

Other people can still act with courage and compassion.

The self can still possess dignity.

Relationship can still be possible.

God can still be sought.

The capacity for wonder can survive.

A Possibility for Restoration

Research has increasingly explored the relationship between positive emotions, meaning, reconciliation, acceptance, and post-traumatic growth. These findings do not establish beauty as a treatment for moral injury, but they provide a broader empirical context for considering how experiences of beauty, transcendence, and moral elevation might contribute to human restoration (Diessner et al., 2006, 2008; Paris, 2017; Pohling & Diessner, 2016; Wortmann et al., 2017).

The proposal here is therefore conceptual rather than empirical: engagement with beauty through wonder may help restore aspects of moral life that moral injury has disrupted.

It may begin with perception.

What has become difficult to perceive as good may become perceptible again.

Perception may awaken wonder.

Wonder may reopen questions of meaning.

Meaning may make renewed relationship possible.

Relationship may create space for acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation, or a renewed relationship with God, depending upon the person’s circumstances and readiness.

None of these movements is guaranteed, linear, or interchangeable. Forgiveness, in particular, cannot be reduced to an emotional response to beauty or confused with excusing wrongdoing. Accountability and justice remain important dimensions of moral repair.

The deeper possibility is restoration of the person’s capacity to perceive and participate in reality without allowing the injury to become the final interpreter of what is true, good, or beautiful.

Returning to Wonder

Moral injury can leave a person with an understandable suspicion of goodness. When people entrusted with authority betray that trust, when one’s own actions violate one’s deepest values, or when suffering seems fundamentally incompatible with a good and meaningful world, the moral imagination can become constricted.

Beauty offers another possibility.

It does not argue against the reality of suffering. It reveals that suffering is not the only reality.

It does not demand premature meaning. It can create the conditions in which meaning becomes possible again.

It does not remove the wound. It may help the person perceive what remains beyond the wound.

For Christians, this possibility ultimately rests in the Incarnation. Beauty is not merely an abstract ideal but something encountered in a Person who enters the disorder of human existence and transforms it through self-giving love.

For the healing professions, the implication is modest but meaningful. Human beings possess an inherent orientation toward truth, goodness, and beauty. Therapeutic work need not reduce that orientation to symptoms or techniques. There may be therapeutic significance in helping a wounded person recover the capacity to perceive what is true, receive what is good, and remain open to beauty without denying what has been suffered.

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of wonder.

It allows us to look again.

And sometimes, when we look again, we discover that reality contains more than the wound taught us to expect.

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