An Age of Augustinian Curiosity
Their days were consumed in vanity, and their years in haste
And their days were consumed in vanity, and their years in haste (Ps 77:33)1
Dear reader, my apologies - this is a long one. In your shoes, I would read the first paragraph and the last three. If I then thought, “hmm, is there a coherent argument here?” I would go back and read the whole thing. If I found no coherent argument, I would leave a long comment trying to politely dismantle the author’s spurious claims.
In much the same way that G.K. Chesterton called St. Francis the antidote for the 19th Century and St. Thomas Aquinas the antidote for the 20th century, St. Augustine is the antidote for the 21st. The revolutionary liveliness of Francis was the remedy to a Victorian excess of conventionality when the tumor of modernism first began to grow; Aquinas’s ordering of faith and reason attacked the nodes of scientism and irrationalism as modernism spread; today, Augustine’s analysis of curiosity offers to target modernism’s metastasis. Of course, the fact that modernism has spread despite the availability of treatment at each stage sadly indicates that Augustine’s offer will go largely unheeded.
I shouldn’t make such wild claims about the malady of our age and its prognosis, so I’ll retract somewhat. But if I were making a friendly bet about the identity of our disease, I really would put my money on curiosity understood in an Augustinian manner. Our age is an information age, and our economy is an information economy, so it’s plausible that the vice of the age is one that perverts our relationship to information.2 Let me try to properly introduce our slippery and adversarial specimen: curiositas (the Latin makes it scarier, which is appropriate).
When presenting Augustine’s view of curiosity, it is typical to begin by clearly separating Augustine’s usage from the contemporary usage, the latter being so often praised and encouraged as a virtue. This approach especially makes sense if you are reading Augustine’s treatment of curiosity in light of Aquinas’s later modification and development of the theme. However, I will not take this distinction for granted at the outset because Augustine gives quite a few examples of curiosity that appear to line up nicely with contemporary usage.
For Augustine, curiosity is identified with the concupiscence of the eyes put forward in St. John’s Epistle as one of the world’s three obstacles to the charity of the Father (1 Jn 2: 15-17).3 Perhaps confusingly, concupiscence of the eyes does not include the lusts of physical eyesight, which are already categorized under a different obstacle, namely, concupiscence of the flesh. Concupiscence of the eyes, rather, pertains more properly to knowledge. Of the two, concupiscence of the eyes (i.e. curiosity) is more dangerous than concupiscence of the flesh because it is more spiritual and more easily “cloaked over with the title of knowledge and science” (Conf, 10.35.54).
Curiosity is so serious a threat in Augustine’s view that he sees it at work in the very primordial fall of man. Pride is the root sin but curiosity is a kind of intermediary whereby Adam and Eve, having already been turned away from God, were moved to desire the knowledge promised by the serpent when he said, “your eyes will be opened” (De Gen. ad litteram XI. 31).4
Augustine also sees curiosity at work in seemingly innocent interests. Somewhat amusingly, he accuses himself before God of being waylaid by curiosity when his attention is drawn to a dog chasing a rabbit or to a lizard or spider catching flies (Conf, 10.35.57). These are the kinds of concerns that warrant a caution against too hastily separating the Augustinian notion of curiosity from a contemporary one. It may be the case that the two often overlap and that Augustine would blame what we praise. In view of such cases, it is tempting to dismiss Augustine as hyper-scrupulous or to take him seriously and become hyper-scrupulous oneself. Both paths have been taken by careful readers of Augustine.
It is my view, however (and the view of many fans of viae mediae), that such concerns of Augustine can be taken seriously without being excessively alarming and can be instructive without inducing scrupulosity. Augustine, after all, was among the first to articulate the goodness of all things and the status of evil as a mere privation (lack). He also set forth the principle that all things may be used lawfully as long as God alone is enjoyed for His own sake. There must then be a way to reconcile these seemingly opposed Augustinian tendencies which might be loosely called “pessimism” and “optimism.”
Context, as always, is crucial. The examples of the dog chasing a rabbit and the lizard catching flies, which at first seem so random and trivial, are all important. Each one is an example of violence: hunting, trapping, and consuming; they are small reminders to Augustine of the Roman circuses and gladiatorial combats that at one time so enslaved Augustine and his dear friend Alypius. When Augustine beats himself up over his enthrallment to canine and reptilian hunting practices it is after he has just thanked God for his liberation from his former enthrallment to theatrics and astrology. In other words, Augustine is confessing tendencies more like a former alcoholic who confesses loitering around a liquor store than those of a budding naturalist.
As an additional note about the circuses and gladiatorial shows, which are always prime examples of curiosity according to Augustine, it’s worth remembering that these entertainments would have had special significance to the Roman mind of Augustine and his readers. For centuries in the Republic and the early Empire the great games that had consisted of such spectacles had been a rarity occurring only once in the living memory of a generation and always marking the start of a new age (saeculum), the renewal of the saecular Roman Order.5 As Rome waned, the games became a common staple, the mere bread and circuses by which demagogues maintained power. Constantine had tried to suppress the games, declaring that Rome had entered a new and final age under Christ. Like so many blue laws, however, Constantine’s efforts basically failed and by Augustine’s time such spectacles were again common. All this is to say that since the very conception of such a thing as the “secular order,” an order literally etymologically tied to a pagan Roman triumphalism marked by the games, this order has promoted curiosity in opposition to the Christian order. Modernism is the special form of a diabolically all-devouring secularism which attempts to transform all things into food for curiosity.
This transformation is pervasive, fundamental, and hard to pin down precisely because it is not a transformation in things themselves but rather in our relationship to things as knowers. Whereas our knowledge is supposed to transform our intellects into the objects known, to be in-formed by them (De Trinitate XI), and thus through community with creation attain a fuller likeness to He of Whom creation is an imitation, curiosity instead pretends that the knowable object is food for appetite, a self-referential object made like the knower through ingestion.
The proper movement of mind from exterior to interior and interior to superior is perverted into a movement of appetite from interior to exterior and exterior to inferior: from within, our desire seeks out the external forms of things and consumes them. As Augustine tells us: by sin we are made dust, as dust we are food for the devil (“on your belly you shall crawl and dust you shall eat”), as food for the devil we become like him and in turn seek to transform all into dust to be the feed and increase of our appetite (de Agone Christiano, 2).6 When we glut upon dust our desire is not quenched but there is also no more room for true food.
According to Augustine, whenever we voluntarily consume information, by seeing, reading, hearing, or otherwise, without an ordered purpose, we do wrong. When our attempts to satisfy the desire to know are merely the scratching of an itch, then no matter how wholesome the object in itself, we have made it dust for ourselves, and by it, ourselves into dust.
Augustine’s view therefore might be reasonably summarized in terms of the claim by the contemporary psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist that attention itself is a moral act and a foundational one at that.7 As a gloss on Augustine along these lines, we might say that curiosity is a distortion in the quality and range of our attention. When curiosity is put in terms of attention as a moral act we can readily see that it is a malady that many others have identified with growing clarity and alarm, though under differing names.8
In terms of remedies, I will be brief, since, in fact, the remedy is the whole of the Christian life. I will merely mention two considerations that Augustine emphasizes often: the ordering of goods and the discipline of the flesh. The two are related since discipline of the flesh involves rejecting lower goods for the sake of higher ones. The act of ordering in general requires more than the profession that God comes first. Often, to even see the order of things requires hands-on cultivation of an order that is first accepted on trust from another. Think of a child learning to read: the process begins with the repetition of minute details and drags on for years, often against the child’s protestations but, gradually, blurs and smudges on a page are eventually seen to be whole worlds of discourse. That’s as practical as I’ll get because in this case I suspect that the reader already knows well the many obstacles co-opting their attention. Since this is an Augustinian reflection I will stay as far away from Pelagianism as possible. Suffice it to say, it is my belief that St. Augustine’s particular sensitivity to the issue, his ability to provide a properly Catholic metaphysical and spiritual framework, and his personal holiness make him an ideal companion and intercessor in our efforts to keep our attention focused on Christ.
Douay-Rheims (So it’s Psalm 78 if you’re checking a different version)
This thought was indirectly inspired by a talk given by Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P. entitled “The Common Good & the Catholic Intellectual Vocation.” The talk is available through the Thomistic Institute.
See also Augustine’s commentary in Homily 2 on I John: “by the lust of the eyes, he means all curiosity. Now how wide is the scope of curiosity! This it is that works in spectacles, in theaters, in sacraments of the devil, in magical arts, in dealings with darkness: none other than curiosity.” (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/170202.htm)
https://www.augustinus.it/latino/genesi_lettera/index2.htm
This summary is drawn from a talk given by Fr. Ezra Sullivan, O.P. entitled “Christ vs. Secularism: The Ethics of the Day.” The talk is available through the Thomistic Institute.
https://www.augustinus.it/latino/agone_cristiano/index.htm
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 133: “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.”
To give some shoutouts to those in the clarity department:
at the Comic Muse and at the Honest Broker often have insightful and informative things to say about attention and related topics. My teacher Dr. John Cuddeback has long been addressing the issue from an Arsitotelian perspective in the classroom and at LifeCraft (while none of these have been direct sources for this reflection they have all informed my thinking in general).
Fantastic article, Matthew!
Good article. After reading it I thought of the psalm that goes: "I have not gone after things too great nor marvels beyond me. Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace."