Pints With Aquinas - Curiosity Killed the Christian? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

Father Pine, looks at the thought of great minds on curiosity. He asks if it is a vice and how we ought to treat it as christians. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar in the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about curiosity. Specifically, is curiosity a good thing or is it a bad thing? Because yeah, you got people out there saying all kinds of things about it. So some, largely positive.

On the one hand we have Eleanor Roosevelt saying, I think at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity. Or you've got Albert Einstein saying, the important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. Whereas you've got largely negative things to say by others in the tradition, like Thomas Hobbes saying, curiosity is the lust of the mind, and all people in all times and places saying that curiosity killed the cat.

So we know that cat killing is no bueno, and we have to account for the fact that some people are saying positive things and some people are saying negative things. So there's confusion on the issue. So what exactly is curiosity and where does it fit in our human life and how does it contribute to our human flourishing? Let's take a look. Okay, so I think that we can start with what most people mean by curiosity and work our way towards what some people mean by curiosity. And along the way identify those various strengths and weaknesses which we as human beings are subject to so as to chart a course towards further perfection.

So I think that when most people say curiosity, what they mean is a kind of intellectual openness and intellectual interest. So what do we mean by this? Well, intellectual openness, and that the person has a capacity for further experience and for further discovery. So I think that what's kind of opposed to this would be a certain closed-mindedness or a certain prejudice which keeps one from further experience and further discovery. And I think we can say that, yeah, this is bad. And as a result of which, curiosity, as we have described it, is good. But it's not like an absolute good. It's a kind of relative good. I've heard it said before that

you open your mind for the same reason that you open your mouth, to kind of bite down on something. So open-mindedness isn't itself like the highest thing to be enshrined at the heart of culture or faith, because we eventually want to know things and make judgments and build on the basis of those judgments. So like for instance, if you're interested in knowing and loving God, then your interest in other things is probably going to decrease. And that's fine. Like you don't have to constantly curate new experiences or perpetuate further discoveries. Because the most important adventures are the adventures of the heart. And when you are in relationship to God, those adventures can be pretty wild. So if it becomes a kind of intellectual thrill seeking,

or if it becomes a kind of hyper fascination with the novel, then I think we've got ourselves a problem. So let's say this, just kind of at the outset. To be intellectually open and to be intellectually interested is good, because a lot of people can get weighed down by their human flesh, and they find that they lack

the strength or they lack the energy to pursue these types of things. And so they content themselves with like reclining in their barka lounger and with just watching reruns of the same Netflix show until Jesus comes back. And that's just sad. It's kind of tragic because we, as human beings, are made to the image and likeness of God, which I will often describe on pints as having a mind with which to know and a heart with which to love. And as we know further, we can exercise these two kind of powers of the soul, and we can know God, and we can know Him with His own knowledge of Himself, and we can love God, and we can love Him with His own love of Himself.

But the stakes are such that we actually have to exercise those powers of the soul. We actually have to activate them. And I think the low bar is openness and interest. So I think in this sense, you know, curiosity is a good in that it opens us to reality and to God who crowns reality, by whom we hope to be saved, and by whom we hope to be kind of pulled out of our maybe laziness or lack of openness, lack of interest. Okay. So that'd be like the kind of most general way in which people use it. But then in certain conversations, especially among Christians, you'll hear curiosity described

in negative terms. And I think there's also good reason for that. Because you know, I quoted that line from Thomas Hobbes at the beginning, curiosity is the lust of the mind, or I described it as a kind of intellectual thrill-seeking. There, I'm thinking of the description of St. Augustine in the Confessions and the commentary of Zena Hitz in her book apropos of the subject. But I think that when we talk about, you know, curiosity in the Christian tradition, and certainly as St. Augustine or St. Thomas understands it,

there can be, yeah, like a kind of pursuit of things knowable, or a kind of pursuit of knowledge, for bad reasons. Either because you use it for your own self-aggrandizement, or you use it as a way by which to escape your boredom, or to escape your boorishness or to escape yourself or you might use it to bad ends okay so like on the one hand maybe you use it for the upbuilding of pride so that you can have trivial facts to tell people at a cocktail party and impress them with

your wide-ranging knowledge or maybe like you're a thief and you have mastered the knowledge of safe breaking so that you can steal lots of money. You can see clearly in these instances that knowledge here is not saving, that it's not actually investing us with a further kind of appreciation for our dignity as human beings and the nobility of our high calling. So in this sense, it can kind of do violence, as it were, to our human minds and hearts because we have failed to moderate our desire for knowledge, or we've failed to discipline it or order it in the way that it's

meant to be ordered. And St. Thomas identifies kind of four ways in which our desire for knowledge can go off the rails, and he calls this curiositas. He calls this, you know, the vice basically of curiosity. So he'll say, if you devote yourself to less important things and you neglect essential things or necessary things. So like by virtue of the fact that you occupy this state of life, there are certain things that you probably ought to know about because they're essential to your state in life. They're essential to living your Christian vocation. But maybe you just prefer to like, I don't know, watch cooking shows or learn a lot about the 1983 Philadelphia 76ers or whatever else it is.

You know, like kind of on their own terms, those aren't bad to like watch cooking shows or to learn a lot about the 1983 76ers, but if they become an obstacle to your learning things which are necessary, things which contribute to your state in life, things which help you to flourish, right? That's a problem. Okay, so like a lack of proportion there or a lack of balance. The next things he used, or the next thing that he describes is when you use illicit means to the attainment of knowledge, okay? So like the example that he gives is if you consult demons for finding things out, and you think you're like a Ouija board or a

seance, and he has in mind other things, kind of forms of superstition which are described in the Old Testament like swordeledge and necromancy and horuspexy, it's like, ooh, exciting. But like, if we go about the pursuit of our intellectual vocation, and that's not to say like all of us are called to be intellectuals or intellectuals as Flannery O'Connor would say, but in the sense that like we as Christians are called to know God and to love God and to know and to love in accord with our state in life, so we all are called to a kind of habit of study or studiousness.

But if we use illicit means to the attainment of knowledge, then it's actually undermining us as agents. We're not like taking the steps that we as human beings are meant to take, because that's part of what it means to be're not like taking the steps that we as human beings are meant to take because that's part of what it means to be human is to take the steps. So if you use technology, not merely as time saving, but as like step skipping and humanity undermining that can be a cause for concern. So I think a lot of people are going through this type of questioning right now as it concerns

AI, like do I use AI to formulate a outline or do I use AI to go from an outline to a first draft? Or do I use AI to correct my first draft and make a better second draft? It's like, I mean, those are all interesting questions. But we as human beings, right, we have a certain responsibility to grow, right? And part of growing is gonna be our investment in whatever task lies at hand.

Now, should we spend our time doing small administrative tasks, which could be automated? Probably not, but like when it comes to higher order tasks, like thinking through things, right? And synthesizing things. And yeah, presenting a compelling case and formulating a thesis. Those are kind of higher order, those seem to demand of us a kind of intellectual engagement.

And if we skip those steps, when are we as human beings going to become better? When are we as human beings going to become whole? The third thing that he says is, when you learn about creaturely things without referring them to their creator, okay? So like losing a sense of the God-relatedness of reality. So ultimately, all things should lead unto a knowledge of God, and when they don't,'t, we've got ourselves a little bit of a problem. Well, a big problem. And then the last is, says, one seeks to learn beyond what he is capable of, because then you fall easily into error. Yeah, we find this in different aspects of life, but on account of the fact that

we are this way and not that way, that we're probably best suited for this type of life and not that type of life, perhaps there are certain intellectual pursuits that we ought to undertake and certain intellectual pursuits that we ought not undertake. And I think that when we kind of get out of our lane, we find ourselves in trouble. So when scientists start making pronouncements proper to philosophy and theology, it's like, I don't know, you know? That might be beyond your station. Not to say that I'm smarter than them, but I have studied theology in a way that alerts me

as to its proper methodology and helps me to be a good practitioner thereof. I pertain to the guild, you know, I'm a member of the guild. So when we get kind of out of our lane or we go beyond our reach, we stumble into errors without even recognizing that we are stumbling into errors. So I think there's a sense that like, you need to know what your gifts are

and act in accord with your gifts rather than yeah Going beyond I suppose So in this sense, I think that curiosity can be a problem when we have an inordinate desire for knowledge and as a result of which we lose a sense of proportion or balance or like work ethic I suppose or Godward directedness or Like a keen appreciation for who we are and what we're for. It's good to be magnanimous. It's good to want to do great things worthy of great honors because they're great.

But we also have to be humble. We have to recognize the gifts that we've actually been given, that they're from God and for God, and that we should respond to them in turn. So I think when we talk about curiosity in this sense, we're seeking to cultivate the virtue of studiousness, right? Because you get the word studiositas there in St. Thomas's language from the word studium, which basically means the application of the mind, right? A kind of care, a kind of attention, a kind of solicitude whereby we pour ourselves into something or we engage with something or we commit to something. And I think that the point

here is we ought to commit to knowledge in a way that builds us up as human beings and builds up the human community and leads to the knowledge and love of God. Because seeking to know is part of our perfection and training this desire to know is an essential feature. So I think that on the one hand we don't want to be lazy. You know, the body does weigh us down, and we're not going to want to inquire into things which we find difficult, but it's for our growth, you know, it's for our healing. But on the other hand, we don't just want to inquire into whatsoever, because we as human beings are limited, okay? We have these gifts and not those gifts. We are called to this state

and not that state. We are, you know, we have an animal nature, we're rational animals, and as a result of which there's only so many things that we can do and we can only dedicate ourselves to them so much. So we need to work within the bounds of our state, work within the bounds of our gifts in order to pursue a knowledge which will lead to God's glory and to our salvation. So yeah, I think about this a lot when it comes to…well, I think about this a lot in all kinds of ways, but yeah, I think that we want to channel and safeguard our pursuit of knowledge and our delight in knowledge. We don't want to weaken or deaden that delight, but we do want to moderate it so that we can

attain wisdom in the way that God wills and in God's timing. So we can't be impatient about it, we can't be violent about it, right? But yeah, we want to live well, we want to study well, we want to look into these things well. And yeah, so I think that in this kind of way, curiosity can be described as a kind of intellectual promiscuity, as unchastity is opposed to chastity, so curiosity in this way can be opposed to studiousness. And insofar as we're capable, we want to discipline our minds and engage in our genuine human setting and human communities so that way we can seek knowledge in a way that's organic, in a way that flows from the call of God and the glory to which he calls us.

So I hope that that is somewhat helpful to you. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We'll find out in due course, maybe in the comment boxes, but God be praised. All right, that's what I hope to share. This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and push the bell and get sweet email updates when other things come out also. I contribute to a podcast called God's Blending where we talk about just these types of things

with some frequency. So we have one about your intellectual vocation from a couple months back which you might profit from. And then I wrote a book called Prudence, Choose Confidently, Live Boldly, in which such-like considerations feature prominently. So you might also profit from that. All right, squad, know what my prayer is for you. Please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with

Aquinas.