Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar by Paul Griffiths (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 497 Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar. By PAUL GRIFFITHS. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Pp. 600. $24.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1686-7. In the Thomist lexicon, “intellectual appetite” denotes the inclination toward good as apprehended by intellect; it is another name for voluntas or appetitus rationalis. Departing from Thomistic usage, Paul Griffiths takes “intellectual appetite” as a name for the desire to know. How should this desire be understood and formed? Griffiths aspires to set forth a “theological grammar” for asking and answering this question. The grammar begins with a basic contrast between two conceptions of the desire to know. One is studiositas, the well-formed appetite that aims to intensify our participation in the divine source of knowledge, taking “gift” as the mark of all that can be known. The other is its “deformed kissing cousin,” traditionally named curiositas (20). Curiositas too seeks knowledge, but interprets the field of knowledge as a series of ever-new objects to be conquered, possessed, and sequestered by the knower. Intellectual Appetite is divided into three main parts. The first specifies “the grammar of the world,” a task that requires a preliminary clarification of the meaning of “world” (chap. 3) along with a construal of the world in terms of damage (chap. 4), gift (chap. 5), and participation (chap. 6). The second part coincides with the book’s central and longest chapter on appetite (chap. 7). The third part unfolds a “series of contrasts between curiosity and studiousness” (28), beginning in wonder (chap. 8), moving through owning, kidnapping, spectacle, novelty and loquacity (chaps. 9-13), and ending in gratitude (chap. 14). The first part begins on a Wittgensteinian note. The world is everything that is the case, all that is sensed and unsensed, thought and unthought. Though the world is “given to us without our request or consent” (25), it does not become a world that we can live in until we sort and catalog what is given. We construe the world; we do not construct it. Many, perhaps “infinitely many” worldconstruals are possible, but “only a few are of deep and lasting importance for the history of human thought”—the ones that “we would now (not very usefully) call ‘religious’: Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Confucian, and so on“ (28). Griffiths acknowledges the possibility of secular world-construals. He proceeds to dismiss them as “the more-or-less malformed and corrupted bastard offspring of their religious parents” (ibid.). He seems to take as a fait accompli John Milbank’s deconstruction of a purely “secular reason” unmarked by theological origins. Any world-construal is either explicit theology, disguised theology, or bastard theology. What does it mean to construe the world in terms of damage, gift, and participation? Griffiths answers this question by drawing upon the tradition’s metaphysics of light: “the world, the array of particulars with which we are faced whether we like it or not, is bathed in light” (30). Not everything in a fallen world is radiant; the world is “light shot through with darkness” (42). Since light comes in varying intensities, and admits of a distinction between one source and multiple streams, gradation belongs to the Christian construal of the world. The BOOK REVIEWS 498 most fundamental distinction within the hierarchy of being is between intelligibilia and sensibilia. That sensibilia can change, being vulnerable to corruption and decay, places them lower in the hierarchy of being than intelligibilia. One can accept this claim, and yet wonder why Griffiths categorizes some things as sensibilia. “When you read a sonnet, hear a harmony, stroke silk, smell sassafras, or taste truffles you are engaging with sensibilia, all of which are extended in space and through time and are therefore themselves physical and changing” (34). It is not controversial to hold that the words of a sonnet, taken as combinations of letters printed on a page, are sensibilia. But is the sonnet itself a sensible thing? It is, if we identify the sonnet with the words on the page, or the noises we make when we read the words aloud. This identification, however, collapses the intelligible thing, the sonnet proper, into its visible and audible...