Curiosity as Intemperance
A bonus section cut from To Live Well
The following is a section that didn’t make it into the published manuscript of To Live Well for pacing and length reasons, but I quite like it, so I edited it and expanded it a bit for our purposes here. It was meant to be one of the “application” sections under the virtue of temperance. I hope you find it beneficial and order the book!
Normally we think of “curiosity” in positive terms. We desire our children to be curious in their education, for example. But for Aquinas, and of course Josef Pieper, curiositas is a form of intemperance, and one very relevant to our own time. Pieper notes that “Aquinas assigns curiositas to the ‘roaming unrest of spirit,’ . . . which he says is the first-born daughter of acedia” (The Four Cardinal Virtues 200). This deserves some unpacking because it is a significant claim. First, curiositas is a “roaming unrest of spirit,” a restlessness, an anxious consumption of knowledge, an unsatisfiable gaze, a constant scrolling, shall we say. It’s a feeling of dis-ease deep in your spirit that won’t let you stop consuming more and more information, gathering more data, experiencing more things, seeing more sights. And interestingly, Aquinas says this is the “first-born daughter” of another condition, acedia. Understanding acedia will help us understand why it is that we are driven to the intemperance of curiositas.
Pieper defines acedia as “the dreary sadness of a heart unwilling to accept the greatness to which man is called by God; this inertia raises its paralyzing face wherever man is trying to shake off the obligatory nobility of being that belongs to his essential dignity as a person, and particularly the nobility the sonship of God, thus denying his true self” (200). In other words, we are each created with an innate nobility due to our being made in the Image of God, and on top of that, those of us who have been adopted by God through Christ now experience sonship, a place of honor, which is one reason Paul calls us to conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel in Philippians 1:17. We are to live up to our “essential dignity.” But some of us grow frightened by the enormity of that task, and despairing that we will fail, we fold in on ourselves and turn to acedia. A restlessness, a weariness, a particular kind of depression that rejects the greatness God has bestowed upon us and which is true about us. Acedia is not a form of intemperance, but a temptation of despair which I discuss in chapter six of To Live Well, on the virtue of hope. Pieper’s point here is that when we are in this mood of despair we are inclined to distract ourselves through curiosity, a fruitless quest for endless knowledge.
Whether your curiositas is born from acedia or not, if you are living in the contemporary world, it is likely that you struggle with this form of intemperance. Our Information Age has overwhelmed us with data, and sites are engineered to invite us to see more and more information, to watch one more video, click on one more Wikipedia article, ask AI one more prompt, and so on. There’s no end to it. On social media, sensational headlines about horrific crimes or stories of abuse lure us into narratives which we have no part in, but the temptation to read about scandal is too great for us to resist. And so we find ourselves reading stories or watching videos which include lurid and intimate details of other people’s lives. While it is natural and good to want to pursue some knowledge, an intemperate pursuit of knowledge leads to perverse results and reveals something unsettling about ourselves.
The anxious scrolling, feverish watching, obsessive consumption of content may reveal in us a person “in flight from himself” (201). We are sick of ourselves, bored with our own interior life which has been destroyed by despair. And so we distract ourselves endlessly. That distraction can take the form of reading novels or watching great films or watching TikTok, but when it is done out of that anxious curiosity which has no aim except the selfish goal of distraction from reality, then it is curiositas.
The opposite of curiositas is studiositas, a careful, intentional, reality-centered, loving, devoted, courageous search for knowledge. In order to enter a state of studiositas, which is important for all of us but especially for students, a person must “hermetically close the inner room of his being against the intrusively boisterous pseudo-reality of empty shows and sounds” (202). Practically speaking, we must take the step to separate ourselves from external distractions so we can devote our attention to the reality we are trying to study. This task gets harder and harder as technology only intrudes more and more into our daily lives, but it is necessary for attaining knowledge that we learn to shut off the sights and sounds of the distracting world around us.
In silence and contemplation we focus on what truly matters and study it, seeking a temperate knowledge. Part of how we know that the knowledge we are seeking is temperate is what is motivating us. If anxiety, emptiness, or an urge to distract ourselves is driving our desire for knowledge, we are probably crossing over into curiositas. If we can calmly, intentionally study something out of love, then we are probably practicing studiositas. But ultimately what matters is rightly ordering our desire for knowledge according to what is honoring to God, and therefore loving to our neighbor.
Ironically, the rush of curiositas to gain and control knowledge does not lead to more wisdom and understanding but less. Because it is only in slowing down, silence, and contemplation that we see reality rightly and are able to process God’s Word and creation.
We are going to be tempted to intemperate pursuits of knowledge. This is a besetting sin of the Information Age. Our duty is to practice the virtue of temperance, to practice studiositas, to allow the Holy Spirit to discipline us so that we can sit and be silent before God and His creation and therefore really know God and His creation.
I’m very excited to be joining Jake Meador at this Mere Orthodoxy event on April 29th! It’s FREE, but there are limited spots available, so please sign up while you can!