Is Curiosity a Vice?

The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Ascension

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.9 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2019

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Knowledge is always good, but St. Thomas Aquinas said curiosity—or the fickle pursuit of unnecessary knowledge—can be a vice. What he meant, and what Fr. Mike means here, is that the methods by which we feed our curiosity, and our motivation for feeding it, can lead to vice if we just want to know something instead of pursuing what we need to know.

Those things we say we have to know about because everyone else is talking about them—like that popular show we say we simply cannot miss, or that things someone did that’s none of our business but we just need to know about it—these things can lead us away from a wholehearted pursuit of truth.

The counterpart virtue of unhealthy curiosity is studiousness, where the motivation and method of pursuing knowledge are correct. Curiosity is a good place to start, but it should always lead to studiousness, the virtue of great minds.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is Ascension Presents.
0:10.2	So this is really interesting, this is kind of fascinating.
0:12.6	I don't know if you knew this in Christianity and in the church.
0:16.2	Curiosity is often considered to be a vice.
0:19.2	It's the opposite of a virtue, right?
0:21.4	And no, I think here's one of the things you might be sitting there going like, no,
0:25.0	it doesn't surprise me at all.
0:27.4	Yeah, the church just wants to suppress the truth and just want people thinking for themselves.
0:31.4	Well, if that's what you think, I don't know how to say this, but you're wrong.
0:35.9	Here's the deal.
0:37.0	Curiosity.
0:38.0	It's the most natural thing in the world, right?
0:39.8	We could define curiosity as just the desire to know.
0:42.6	When I'm feeling curious, what is it I'm feeling?
0:46.0	I'm feeling a desire to know.
0:48.2	And whether that's, I want to know the details.
0:49.9	I want to know the truth.
0:50.7	I want to know the story.
0:51.8	I want to know what's going on.
0:53.2	Even just like I look at the universe and I want to know.
0:56.6	So that's in and of itself is not wrong, right?
0:59.3	Obviously, that desire to know is a can be a decent thing.
	...

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