Desiring the right kind of knowledge in the right way

School is starting, and we need to keep students from curiosity. Curiosity? It sounds bad to modern ears, but ancient and medieval thinkers considered it a vice—a dangerous intellectual habit. You can hear that judgment in the old saying, “Curiosity killed the cat.” You can also see it in horror movies where people decide they must investigate the sounds coming from upstairs—even though they know of a rampaging murderer in the area! Yet apart from those examples, we usually treat curiosity as simply good.

What do we mean by “curiosity” as good and healthy? What did those older thinkers mean by it as bad and dangerous morally and spiritually?

In our time, we usually define it in a neutral way. The current Merriam-Webster definition is simply “desire to know.” True, a negative sub-definition is a synonym for “nosiness,” but the other sub-definition is “interest leading to inquiry.” This is surely more common. When I ask students about old sayings, very few know that curiosity killed the cat.

Used in this neutral sense, without distinctions, it’s easy to see why. Indeed, those of us who teach often wish our students would display more of that neutral quality of curiosity when it comes to the assigned readings, experiments, visual art, and music. We want them to be interested enough to ask questions: Why did Frodo not destroy the ring himself? Why do acids behave that way when in contact with bases? Why is the father’s left hand so big in Rembrandt’s painting “Return of the Prodigal Son”? Why do minor keys make us feel sad?

Students are, alas, often less interested in inquiring about these topics and more interested in the latest episode of “Love Island” or the latest dances on Tik Tok.

Yet this very fact about their interest leading to inquiry into useless or even morally dangerous things and lack of interest into subjects they are supposedly studying points to curiosity’s older meaning as vice.

It is human to want to know things. The old gossip rag known as the National Inquirer had as a motto, “Inquiring Minds Want to Know.” That’s not wrong. As rational creatures, part of our fulfillment comes from knowledge. But we are fallen and finite creatures. As such, we must desire the right kind of knowledge and desire it and pursue it rightly. Curiosity as vice is desire for knowledge that isn’t right for us or knowledge desired and pursued in the wrong way.

As creatures who are frail and fallen, there is a knowledge of evil that is bad for us to pursue without a very good reason because it creates temptations for us to do evil things. At baptisms, we promise to “reject the glamor of evil.” That glamorous nature of evil is dangerous because, even if we don’t give in and commit sins, pursuing knowledge with that glamor on it can cause us to focus our minds on the attraction of evil and desire it. At the very least, it can distract us from good things in front of us, the right path of action, and God himself. In short, pursuit of knowledge of evil can tempt us to sins of thought, word, and deed. It can tempt us to sins of commission and omission.

As noted, curiosity is the pursuit of such knowledge without a good reason. Some people are required to study certain evils. Police officers, lawyers, and journalists must study heinous crimes. Psychologists, counselors, and spiritual directors must study sinful and disordered patterns of thought. Philosophers and theologians must study heretical and false ideas. Parents must sometimes study cultural trends to know whether they are good or bad. The question of whether we must study something dangerous has a lot to do with what our duties are.

That leads to a second aspect of curiosity as a vice. Even for knowledge that is not evil, we must desire it in the right way. One aspect of this is the intention we have for some knowledge. We can desire knowledge of good things with an evil intent for action. We can desire to know good things out of a desire to do evil with them. I might note when my neighbor goes to work and returns because I want to watch his house for him. I might learn this because I want to know when to rob him.

Similarly, I might do extra study of my company to do better…or to show up a co-worker I dislike in the Tuesday meeting. I might even want to know about spiritual or theological truths for the purpose of manipulating others or showing my own intellectual superiority.

But even if we are not learning to dominate or harm others, we can desire knowledge in the wrong way as an end in itself. We must pursue all knowledge with the goal of wisdom: the capacity to see what the knowledge is good for and where it leads. The most important answer is that it leads to God.

As St. Thomas Aquinas says, “man’s sovereign good consists, not in the knowledge of any truth, but in the perfect knowledge of the sovereign truth.” That is why any pursuit of knowledge that distracts us from duties to family, community, or God is ultimately a problem.

We can pursue knowledge of myriad subjects. But, when that desire to know is not integrated into service of Christ, then our pursuit of knowledge is not rightly ordered. It is no longer that virtue the ancients called “studiousness.” The vice of curiosity is disordered desire and promotes negligence about pursuing knowledge we need to live in God’s presence.

Let’s nourish our students’—and our own—desire to know. But let’s nourish it properly, learning to pursue the right kind of knowledge in the right way for the right ultimate goal: the sovereign truth about God and how to love Him back.