Studiositas: The Virtue of Study and Attention

And the opposite of curiositas

Photo by Marjhon Obsioma on Unsplash

Under the heading of temperance fall the vice of curiositas and the sub-virtue of studiositas. A few months ago I wrote about the the vice of curiositas in relation to the David Platt documentary and the Steve Lawson scandal. At the time, I wrote that curiositas is “a perverse, restless desire for knowledge that goes beyond what is respectable, reasonable, and appropriate, that goes beyond all limits. And the right response to curiositas is the virtue of temperance or self-control.” We are used to thinking about curiosity in positive terms, of encouraging curiosity in children, but traditionally, the term was associated with an inordinate, obsessive desire for knowledge. When I wrote about curiositas, I did not talk about its opposite virtue, studiositas, the intentional, enduring, attention to a subject that is worthy. Just as it is important for us to avoid the vice of curiositas by endlessly doomscrolling and looking for scandalous information about other people, it is important for us to practice studiositas by intentionally attending to a virtuous subject of study across time despite the difficulties and challenges the study may present. My fear is that we have been encouraged to practice curiositas and discouraged from practicing studiositas.

I think a reasonable inventory each of us can do is to ask ourselves if there is anything in our lives that we are deeply studying. At the very least, we should be studying the Word, and doing so in a way that is attentive to the context and language and implications for our lives, challenging ourselves and focusing our attention. But beyond that, there are a multitude of other subjects we could be and should be studying: literature, history, theology, philosophy, the arts, the natural world, and so on. I know it feels cliché to talk about being a “lifelong learner,” but there’s some truth to the phrase. We ought to be people who are always learning more about God’s Creation. A key aspect of this virtue is perseverance, which is part of the reason why Aquinas associates the virtue of fortitude with studiositas.

It takes courage to meaningfully study a subject. There were many times in graduate school that I remember thinking that some of theorists we were reading were fools because they were too dense for me to understand. I was speaking out of my own insecurity rather than having the courage to be ignorant and press into further study. Striving to learn a subject makes you vulnerable to failure and embarrassment, it faces you up to your own limits, and no one likes to know the limit of their intelligence. Everyone likes to imagine they are a little more intelligent than they really are. And so, courage is a necessary aspect of studiositas.

Our society’s tendency is to give us tools that make everything easier and more accessible. If there is a barrier, it should be removed—that is the mantra of the market. But part of learning is cultivating the perseverance to overcome challenges, to advocate for yourself, to choose to attend to a subject, to focus your attention, to endure failure and continue learning anyway. One of the pivotal moments in my education was when I was in a remedial English composition class at a community college and I received a failing grade on my first paper. I walked to my car feeling like the instructor had given me, as a person, a failing grade. Obviously, this was the wrong way to think about it, and had I been wiser I would have taken it in stride, but I learned from my errors, worked hard, and passed the class. Years later I taught that class at that same institution. I’m not holding myself up as the model of perseverance; after all, there were a lot of curse words and maybe even a few tears in between the failing grade and becoming an instructor. But I survived. And I matured.

While I think there are some positives to the easy way which we can learn languages via apps and listen to audiobooks and access information on the Internet, I do worry about our ability to face a challenge in studying and overcome that challenge over time in order to reap the rewards of deep knowledge. “Tools” like ChatGPT and online summaries might make it “easier” to access a kind of knowledge by removing the challenge of doing the reading yourself, but they eliminate the opportunity to cultivate the virtue of studiositas. Most of our contemporary tools for accessing knowledge make us consumers of knowledge, and therefore more likely to fall into curiositas than develop studiositas.

This has and will continue to have profound consequences on society, because societies cannot build and develop and create without virtuous citizens. We need people who have the endurance, attention, and courage to learn hard things and fail and keep learning hard things so they can make beautiful, true, and good works. We can’t appreciate the great works of the past unless we are willing to do hard work today. Consider the complaints of those who say Shakespeare is too hard for students to understand. Or consider the current engineer shortage in America. How much of that shortage can be explained by young people who struggle to overcome math anxiety and the challenge of studying a difficult subject?

This isn’t an argument for making things hard for the sake of being hard. I appreciate the ability, for example, of being able to search the Summa digitally, especially since I don’t own a copy myself and my school’s library copy is 45 minutes and a snow storm away. Rather, my concern is that with easy access to knowledge we may not be practicing the virtue of studiositas at all, there may be no subject which we are deeply studying, including the Bible. Second, I worry that our technology and practices are bending us toward curiositas, consuming knowledge and not holding it and certainly not facing hardship and difficulty to gain knowledge. Third, I worry that because our access to knowledge is being streamlined so much, we are not cultivating the virtues necessary to gain deep knowledge and create and build complex works and systems.

I do think these digital tools can be used responsibly, and I think we can develop the virtue of studiositas, but it will require intentionality on our part in the way we design schools, in the way we choose to study, in the way we read the Bible, and in the way we fail and continue pursuing knowledge. This means demanding much of ourselves, failing, persevering, and knowing.

---

On another note…

On Wednesday I sent in a full draft of my next book to the editor at InterVarsity Press. I’m quite excited. As you may have picked up, it’s about the virtues, and studiositas makes an appearance. To read more about the book, see here. When I have information about pre-ordering, I’ll let you know.

If your church or organization does a book study of one of my books and would like me to be a guest visitor via Zoom, please let me know. If my schedule works with your schedule, I’d be happy to speak to your group! Just email me at professor.noble@gmail.com.