“In his important book, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar, Paul Griffiths provides a telling account of curiosity. Curiosity has had an interesting history. We may not be able to imagine a world without avarice, but we still think avarice is a vice. According to Griffiths, however, though we think curiosity to be a commendable virtue that scholar and student should try to develop, that has not always been the case. According to Griffiths, prior to modernity curiosity was universally thought to be a vice. It was so because curiosity was an ordering of the affections, a form of love, by which the knower sought to make that which they knew unique to themselves. The curious desired to create new knowledge in an effort to give them control over that which they knew. By dominating that which they came to know they could make what they know a private possession. ‘Curiosity is, then, in brief, appetite for the ownership of new knowledge.’

“The curious seek to know what they do not yet know. As a result, that which they come to know ravishes them by enacting what Griffiths characterizes as a ‘sequestered intimacy.’ Griffiths uses the language of ‘sequestering’ to suggest that the curious think that what they have come to know is for their exclusive use. The curious assume they are masters of what they have come to know. Because they claim what they know is peculiar to them they seek as well as create envy in those who do not know what they know.

“In a way not unlike Augustine’s understanding of the place of the spectacle for the Romans, Griffiths suggests that the curious seek spectacles to distract them from the loneliness that is the necessary result of their desire to possess what they have come to know. The desire for novelty, the desire to have knowledge that I alone can possess, produces a restlessness that ‘is inflamed rather than assuaged by the spectacles it constructs.’ Curiosity so understood is the intellectual expression of the greed correlative to an economic system built on the need to have those that make up the system always want ‘more.’

“The alternative to curiosity, according to Griffiths, is studiousness. Studiousness, like curiosity, entails an ordering of the affections and is, therefore, a form of love. But the studious do not seek to ‘sequester, own, possess, or dominate what they hope to know; they want to participate lovingly in it, to respond to it knowingly as gift rather than as potential possession, to treat it as icon rather than as spectacle.’ For the studious what they know can be loved and contemplated, but not dominated by sequestration. The studious, therefore, accept as a gift what they have come to know, which means they assume that which they know is known in common, making possible a shared life.

“The contrast between the curious and the studious will be determined, according to Griffiths, by their willingness or unwillingness to share what they know with others. Whether we are or not possessed by our possessions can only be determined to the extent we are ready to give away that which we have. Griffiths associates such a willingness to share our knowledge of Christ just to the extent that the degree to which any of us know Christ and what the gospel is, and demands, is the ‘degree to which we must share that knowledge by giving it away.’ The studious Christian, therefore, seeks in Griffiths’ words, a ‘participatory intimacy driven by wonder and riven by lament,’ which makes it impossible for them to seek ownership of what they have been given. For Christians believe that all creatures have been brought into being by God out of nothing. Accordingly, the studious recognize that only God possesses or owns any creature. Only God, therefore, has the power to sequester any being into privacy or to grant it public display. Alms, and the sharing of what we know is a form of alms giving, is rightly understood not as our giving away what is ours, but rather is making available to others what was God’s before we had a use for it.”

— from Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Cascade, 2011)

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