Curositas killed the cat.

Pagan and Christian writers

“When men understand what each other mean, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.”

• John Henry Newman, 1839

Thinking is untidy and demanding, intrusive and heavy. Thoughts seem to arrive unannounced like guests whose coats must immediately be taken and stored. Those committed to its companionship must yield when it knocks.

But thinking, it must be said, is increasingly rare. This is strange, because writing is quite common. Thinking and writing, however, are not the same- though writing is one of the best ways to practice thinking.

What is it, then, to think? Plato is one of our classic models for thinking, and his strategy mostly seemed to involve goading people. Goading in the service of truth, perhaps- he poked and prodded so that those in his company examined their initial claims. This behavior is annoying, and there are not many people who will exercise it. How often has a friend or reader pushed you to consider whether what you have stated is actually true? Do we even know how to engage a friend in this way?

Public writing is easier than ever. Twitter (now X) and Substack offer anyone the opportunity to make their writing public. Such an act, in turn, makes them writers.

It would seem that such opportunity is a good. If writing is good, then let us have more of it!- let a hundred flowers bloom, etc. The best will rise to the top, and the rest will at least have a new hobby. But because we lack Plato’s incredulity- never asking “is that actually true?”- writing has become merely an occasion to demonstrate our taste.

The glut of public writing has appeared just as our taste for what makes good writing has diminished, and just as our instinct for what is true has been swallowed by a desire for what goes down easy. When there is a profit motive for writers, they will write what we want to read. And so our tastes determine what is written and what is written is determined by our tastes, with nothing interrupting this process to get us outside of our basest instincts. And so it goes. We eat because the food tastes good, trapped at a Golden Corral of the mind.

There was a moment in 2023 where we all read thousands of words on an ill-conceived chapter from Josh Butler on sex and God and it seemed, well, urgent, as if new knowledge had been found.

Butler’s chapter was gross, elementary, unpolished and juvenile. The chapter was also common. Theologians have been describing God’s love for the church like a husband’s carnal love for his bride, well, forever. Butler was a poor writer whose use of theological concepts was elementary and crude. But the outrage occurred because readers love something new to be angry at. Such anger makes us superior and allows us to demonstrate that we know something, indeed that we can point a finger at another’s grotesque ignorance. Much of the writing on Butler simply revealed our desire for dominance. Writing in this form becomes a means of power, power as a form of popularity. We were supping at the buffet, going back for seconds on frozen yogurt because it was plentiful and tasty but not because it was good. None of us were better for it— some in fact were harmed.

We are not better for having written these responses or having read such writing. We are simply more assured that we are right and so more tightly locked in our own minds. We have crafted an intellectual culture that is composed of people sitting on their pedestals pointing fingers at one another. No one is smarter for any of it.

In his book Intellectual Appetites, Paul Griffiths writes of a distinction in early Christian thought between two forms of knowledge- curiositas and studiositas. By Griffiths’ account, curiositas was rendered a vice from Tertullian (2nd century) to at least the seventeenth, when it was transferred unainmously to a virtue. This transfer was not an even trade, however. Curiositas in becoming a virtue became the modern word curiosity with its meaning of “a disinterested desire to know the truth”. What once meant “an undisciplined profligate desire to know and so consume” came to mean something like “being awake to the world.”

It is unclear why curiosity, of this latter modern meaning, is such a bad thing. But indeed the undisciplined desire for knowledge might be as destructive as the undisciplined desire for power or love or money. Even with the earliest Christian literature, the book of Genesis, the “appetite for knowledge is not an undifferentiated good”.¹ It was a desire for knowledge, after all, that led Eve to eat the fruit.

Especially when much writing is created and distributed online, the motives for producing writing lie often in how many eyes see a piece or pass it on. But if what we want to see and share are largely things that make us feel powerful or superior, we filter out things that make us feel unlearned, ignorant, or stupid. But sometimes we must feel stupid because we are stupid- or at least ignorant or unlearned. What a gift it can be, to be accosted by your own ignorance! In an online-only reading and writing space, we are now seldom accosted by our own stupidity. We must seek out the knowledge of our own vapidity. Much online writing perfectly fits Griffith’s account of curiositas.

For early Christians, the right kind of knowledge was of increasing concern as the tradition developed and the wrong kinds of knowledge tried to jump the gate. Pagan philosophies and curriculum placed pressure on those who wanted to be Christian and educated. So Christians in turn sought to parse out what was pagan from what was of God. This ordering of the world into the heavenly and the carnal makes up much of early Christian writing- a form of sorting and sifting sand from sediment. For what is of God is not new- indeed it is from “the beginning”- and yet some of the oldest knowledge was only known as God’s through this sorting process. As Christians sought to promote a “catechized and disciplined appetite for knowledge”, they did not seek to create a new discipline from whole cloth but to mend a tapestry that reflected how truth cohered with God himself. New and old together cohered in a quilt of sorts, one sewn from scraps and new cloth, together better than the sum of its parts.

So time and eternity came to have meaning as they were spoken of God, and so too did love and good and evil- but also this one particular man, Christ, came to interpret what we could say about God. The controversy between “Greek thought-forms” and “biblical revelation” is in my mind best handled as if the two came together to form this sort of quilt. It need not be two schools that were vying for influence- it might instead be an older truth that is interpreted in light of a newer one, and that together retain their distinctiveness but also create something new.

Studiositas is a form of knowledge that might lead to an awareness of the world anf its gifts, but also an awareness of ourselves as creatures. It forms in the knower a conformity to the thing known, and so might occur as skill or training- the pianist learning to play Mozart, the attentive participation of a lover to the one loved all demonstrate a form of studiositas.² Studiositas, or right knowledge, is “intimacy with unchanging things”. It is nothing less than life with God. To see knowledge in this way resists novelty and allows us to know all created forms as gift, not as things to be owned or used or bent for effect. Knowledge is known not as a tool but as lens or a clarifying agent, whereby we are known as creatures. We may then come to know all things as gifts of God.

We are prone to misuse knowledge and often mistake a chaste desire for knowledge for a restless appetite for changing things. This restlessness is one of curiosity’s more common forms. It leads us to make tools of gifts and to discard the costliest ones, the ones that awaken us to our need and our frailty.

Novelty grants many examples- eating to be satisfied only to find oneself never satisfied and always over-eating, sleeping so as to not be tired but find themselves never not-tired, those who study to know but find themselves consumed by the seeking after knowledge and never satisfied by it.³ We could think of more- to buy a new sweater in order to complete one’s wardrobe only to find oneself never enjoying it and only longing to buy more, or to exercise in order to enjoy health but to only over-exert and injure oneself in the process. Being consumed by the pursuit of enjoyment and never actually enjoying anything is at the heart of what Griffiths names as curiositas.

Additionally, novelty is never actually achieved because the moment it appears it is already past, outdated the minute it is published. One can never achieve the truly new. We instead remain caught on the treadmill of the seeking, the flutter of anticipation of a thing not yet seen driving us forward, swiping to refresh the deadened screen in our hands. We are adolescents in thrall to a crush and not indebted to a long love that knows our flaws. In Griffith’s words,

The novelty is the unattainable absence, the lure that occupies no time and no space. This makes it all the more alluring: nothing is sought more eagerly than what in principle cannot be had because it does not exist (208).

Griffiths closing indictment on novelty is worth its weight:

Those distracted by novelties work with great tenacity to make a transient path toward nothing. Those who were attracted by and moved toward the spectacle do the same: they too must put effort into building what the Buddhists call a sky-flower (something that would be beautiful if only it could exist, but which not only does not but cannot exist), so that they can possess it. What the depiction of the novelty adds to that of the spectacle is that it reveals curiosity- that form of the intellectual appetite that seeks both novelties and spectacles- as a self-replicating desire that cannot be satisfied and that must lead to an agonizing restlessness (211).

Distraction and restlessness are both human, and so natural, and also signs of a poorly disciplined mind. To set the mind on something in order to see it for what it is and not to use it to salve our restlessness would allow us to honor a thing for what it is and not make it a tool of our lust. We might then love things and not merely use them. We might love people, or at least see them as objects of pity or compassion, and not use their missteps as occasions for our own triumph. (Whatever Josh Butler is in the writing of such a book, he is certainly a creature under God’s mercy).

Writing might allow us to do approach the form of studiositas Griffiths’ describes. We might write as a peculiarly Christian discipline. We might see the world as held by such a mercy. Instead we writers seem intent on making creatures and creaturely life into things- mere figments of our desires- and making other’s missteps occasions for our own consumption. We feed on the weakness of others, cannibalizing what was once a professional discipline of statement and critique- harsh critique, yes!- but critique that allowed thoughts and writing to be better.

But now we remain trapped within ourselves, our world like a snow globe that delivers to us not wonder but the same few anemic deposits, shook loose by the prevailing wind. It might be otherwise.

Notes on Reading:

1. In my best of 2023 I neglected to mention Fierce Ambition by Jennet Conant (2023). Conant tells the story of Marguerite Higgins, the first female war correspondent and a fantastically outsized character. She was brash and promiscuous and was with the American troops when they liberated Dachau- in short, she was so very alive. Read it.

2. I’m currently reading John McPhee’s The Crofter and the Laird (1970), Edwin Black’s War against the Weak (2003) and How to be Multiple be Helena deBres (2023). Not sure if you will hear more of any of them, but the first is excellent writing and the second is a master class in historical storytelling on a very important question.

3. If you, after reading this, want to “be better” in your writing or thinking, leave me a comment and I’ll try to recommend something for you to read that might help you begin that process.

1. Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetites, 10.

2. Griffiths 134-5.

3. These come from Augustine- see Griffiths 203-5.