Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar

1. Introduction

1 1 Introduction This book is about intellectual appetite. This appetite, Aristotle claimed at the beginning of the Metaphysics, is natural to us, a proper constituent of human nature like (he did not say this) the capacity to torture or to laugh. It is, he seems to have thought, an appetite other creatures lack. They seek food or sex or safety or sensual pleasure, and finding these involves seeking and getting knowledge of a sort—the whereabouts of the food or the mate, for instance. But dogs and cats, and even (probably) dolphins and nonhuman primates, are never primarily interested in knowing where the food or the mate is. No, what they want is to eat the food or copulate with the mate, and they seek knowledge as a means to that end. We often seek knowledge in this way, too, as a necessary means for getting something else—power, security, self-congratulation, adulation, money. But sometimes we do something different: we cosset and indulge an appetite for knowledge quite independent of any other end. Sometimes, it seems, we just want to know: how to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, whether there is life on planets in other solar systems, if that thing over there is an elm tree, what Dickens’s plans were for bringing Edwin Drood to a conclusion, how best to explain the slaughter of 2 S introduction the innocents and the inevitability of betrayal. And it is this appetite, an appetite for knowledge simpliciter, for nothing other, that Aristotle seems to have thought of as properly and uniquely human. I am not especially interested in whether Aristotle is right about the restriction of this appetite to human beings. Most of us—we human beings, that is—think that some living beings other than ourselves (angels, demons, pretas, djinns, sprites) have intellectual appetite , as well, and therefore judge the Aristotelean restriction wrong. Christians, certainly, think, unless they have misconstrued Christianity , that there are angels and that they have intellectual appetites. But these topics, interesting though they are, are not the topic of this book. I am interested only in the question of human intellectual appetite : what it is and how it should be catechized, disciplined, and configured. What I offer in this book is a depiction or display of the grammar of a Christian understanding of what a catechized and disciplined appetite for knowledge ought to look like. Any such display involves depicting not only the lexicon and grammar of a particular account of what it is to want to know, but also, inevitably, some among the assumptions about the way the world is, the way human knowers are, and the point of seeking and finding knowledge, which inform any such account. It is not possible to think about intellectual appetite without also thinking about these difficult and controversial topics, and certainly, Christians make no attempt to avoid them. My display of the grammar of their account of intellectual appetite will therefore include the relevant ontological and teleological lexicon. And not only this. Thinking about intellectual appetite rapidly shows that this appetite always demands and receives formation by culture, and that this formation can be and is very varied, sometimes in the direction of deepening damage and sometimes in that of remedying it. Even if you think, as Aristotle did and as most Christians do, that intellectual appetite is natural to us, this does not mean that a human being in introduction S 3 a state of nature—without the company of other human beings, for example—would be any more likely to develop a distinctively human form of appetite for knowledge than to become a language-user. And that means not likely at all. An account of intellectual appetite therefore requires attention to catechesis, curriculum, and pedagogy. The Christian account of intellectual appetite—by calling it “the” Christian account I do not mean to suggest that all Christians would assent to it; I mean only to say, descriptively, that the vast majority of self-described Christians who have thought and written about the topic have given an account in essentials like this one; and, normatively , that this is in fact the account of the matter orthodox Christians should give (though I will not argue for that last claim)—has of course its competitors, and every chapter of the book will have contrasts and occasional debates with one or another among these competitors woven through...