The Book of Wisdom calls wickedness a disposition of fear—a “cowardly thing.” This fear is easily explained: The wicked reject God, and so reject the belief that He will assist them. Their scowling strength masks a weakness, namely, the vulnerability of a child who would do without his parents. Their teeth chatter at even the smallest threat to their self-preservation, which they take as their own responsibility, rather than the Almighty’s. Thus the wicked are most fundamentally described, not by this or that dark deed, but as scattering about the world like so many wide-eyed rabbits: “For even if nothing disturbed them, yet, scared by the passing of beasts and the hissing of serpents, they perished in trembling fear, refusing to look even at the air, though it nowhere could be avoided” (Wisdom 17:9). “The wicked flee though no one pursues” (Proverbs 28:1).
Within the Scriptures, righteousness is belief in God, a habitual mode of being by which the goods of the earth appear abundant, one’s person, cared for, thus: “the righteous are bold as a lion” (28:1). Wickedness is disbelief in God, the habitual mode of being by which the goods of the world appear scarce, one’s person, abandoned, thus: “overwhelmed with dread, where there was nothing to fear” (Psalm 53:5), the wicked are those creatures of whom it may be said: “even the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight” (Leviticus 26:36). This is why the Book of Wisdom, characterizing the wicked as fundamentally jittery and fearful over nothing, chalks this fear up to their belief that they are not constitutively helped: “For fear is nothing but surrender of the helps that come from reason,” it argues, and, lest we give such a powerful definition some vague, stoic sense, we’d do well do remember precisely what “reason” whispers in our author’s ear: that “you have not neglected to help [your people] at all times and in all places” (19:22).
The human person is a strange kind of animal whose attitude toward God alters the appearance of God’s creation, and whose subsequent actions shape creation according to that attitude—altering the world. It doesn’t particularly matter whether one believes God is non-existent or merely inadequate: the wicked, forsaking the help of God, fear death and loss, and so see the world as a pile of scarce resources to be gathered up against the impinging darkness. The action consequent to this attitude is stockpiling, in which the wicked gather up the wealth of this world to preserve the life that they have chosen to believe is unpreserved by the Father: thus the Bible can think of no better image for wickedness than the consumptive purchase of real estate (Isaiah 5:8).
Stockpiling creates precisely the conditions that the wicked fear in the first place: by culling the good gifts of creation to themselves, the wicked create the conditions of scarcity that would otherwise remain their own, silly postulate. The man who looks at the field and imagines it as a scarce resource becomes the man who takes the field for himself and thus renders it actually scarce. Looking at the poverty of those he has deprived of the common goods of the Earth, the wicked man has all the more reason to fear, lest he should become poor like them. Thus stockpiling breeds stockpiling, until the day of wrath, and God’s great smashing and redistribution of whatever amassment wicked men manage to build up in their disbelief.
Whereas, the man who looks at the field and imagines it as abundant becomes the man who distributes the fruit of the field to others—he is not worried about losing it, for his Father takes care of him. Rejoicing in the wealth of those with whom he has shared the common goods of the Earth, the righteous man has all the more reason to rest, for he has made, by his actions, the very conditions by which any relative scarcity he faces will be alleviated by others: as he gives so he shall receive, having built up the divine treasure of friendship rather than the precariousness of worldly riches.
The wicked exist in a downward spiral, by which their accumulations make the world into a place in which one rather easily believes one should accumulate, while the righteous spiral upward, their gifts making the world into a place in which one rather easily believes one should give.
Throughout the Scriptures, miracles of superabundance—in which the Earth gives its wealth beyond its ordinary generosity—are given by God for the sake of establishing man within this upward spiral. Speaking of the manna from Heaven, the book of Wisdom does not argue that it made up for a lack inherent in God’s creation. Rather, the miracle “served your all-nourishing bounty” (16:25)—a gift within and of God’s abundant creation; making up, not for a lack in God’s provident care, but for the wickedness of the Israelite people, who imagined that God as a limited idol of Egypt, a god who had failed to consider the difficulties of the desert.
God does not provide them with bread from heaven in order to fill them by unnatural means, but to make them righteous: The bread from heaven is a test to see whether the Israelite people will believe in the abundant providence of God, or disbelieve in it. He says: “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not” (Exodus 16:4). The Book of Wisdom argues that this was “so that your sons, whom you loved, O Lord, might learn that it is not the production of crops that feeds man, but that your word preserves those who trust in you” (Wisdom 16:26).
At first, the Israelites did not learn this lesson. They attempted to stockpile. They “did not listen to Moses; some left part of it till the morning” (Exodus 16:20). They saw heaven’s abundance with a gaze that continued to presume God’s absence—that he might, after all, withhold or forget.
In this sense, wicked people are unable to see miracles: they treat bread falling from Heaven as one more finite resource, to be stored up with the same fear for tomorrow with which they would store up bread rising from the earth. They may have been surprised to see it fall from the clouds like a hailstorm of “coriander seed” (16:31) rather than rise from the dust as a grain of wheat—so, I imagine, a passing pigeon or dog would have been surprised. But their fundamental attitude remained unmoved: The bread was a scarce resource, they feared its loss, and so they sought to amass. They could not see the miracle, because a miracle is not simply an event that occurs contrary to one’s regular expectations, but one which could only come from God, as a revelation of his goodness and of the fact that “his power, being absolutely infinite, is not confined to any special effect, nor to the producing of its effect in any particular way or order” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 3, Chapter 102). They reduced God’s wondrous action to a part of a human process of production designed to stave off death, and so they lost the miracle even as they lost the bread, which was consumed with mold and worm overnight. They missed the revelation of the bread which Jesus Christ, the bread of life, was born to give again: that God is Our Father, a giver of good gifts, and that we need not fear, for He gives them indeed.
Righteous people, for their part, are able to see miracles. For them, the bread from heaven is a sign that the bread of earth was always the gift of a God who loves us, does not forget us, and will never abandon His people. The miraculous destruction of a particular expectation (that bread usually comes from the earth) shines its light over all our expectations (that the sun will rise, that the rain will fall) revealing all of creation as the abundant gift of a loving Father. This, for a mind like St. Thomas Aquinas, is precisely the reason for surprise and variation within creation: “if all things happened according to the common course of nature, the whole would be attributed to nature, and not to divine providence” (Commentary on Matthew, 1566). To put it another way, every miracle destroys the idea that there are “laws of nature” rather than gifts of God. Miracles reveal that the consistency of nature is not a quality of “nature” as such but a result of the consistency of the Father. They are reminders that our ability to establish an expectation regarding the order of creation is less akin to the ability to expect the identical application of a law of physics and more akin to the ability of a child to expect constancy within a loving home. The Book of Wisdom can argue, concerning the Crossing of the Red Sea, that “the whole of creation in its nature was fashioned anew, complying with your commands, that your children might be kept unharmed” (19:6), not because it sees God as an arbitrary lawgiver and law-revoker, but because all of nature is a gift poured out from a hand we can trust.
This is why the action which follows upon a miracle perceived as a miracle is to cease fearing: the righteous Israelite does not save up the manna from heaven because by it, he has come to believe that his days are not ordered by nature, caprice, fate, chance, or law, but by a God who keeps His promises. The bread from heaven showers down on the righteous and the wicked alike, but only the righteous perceives the wonder as his “daily bread,” for only the righteous perceive ‘that it is not the production of crops that feeds man, but that your word preserves those who trust in you” (Wisdom 16:26). Only the righteous trust the gift to be given again. The wicked tremble and seek better assurances than the promises of God.