The negative side of laughter and curiosity

Part I: Laughter

A good friend of mine and an occasional commentator on this blog recently sent me an email referencing an interesting entry on "Laughter" in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, a three-volume reference work. According to the entry (2:1189), while the ancient pagans like Plutarch and Homer considered laughter a virtue, early Christians apparently "rejected laughter" as a vice. St. Jerome considered laughter "a sign of ungodliness," arguing that it "would be punished on the Day of Judgment." St. Basil the Great asserted that Christ never laughed (PG 31:961C). According to the dictionary, moreover, ancient monks had a particular antipathy for laughter.

This negativism toward laughter, however, must be qualified, since the dictionary also concedes that the Church Fathers thought that laughter could be used as a medium to exress spiritual joy, on the one hand, or "derision of the pagan world and of mundane objects," on the other. Early Christian antipathy towards laughter, then, was evidently antipathy towards laughter of a particular kind. St. John Chrysostom, for example, distinguished between permissible and inordinate laughter.

My friend writes:

Despite the warnings concerning laughter, the Byzantines apparently enjoyed a good laugh every now and again. Evidence for this practice is found in the vernacular literature of the Byzantines. Further information on this topic also can be found in N. Adkin, "The Fathers on Laughter," Orpheus 6 (1985): 149-152.

I remember hearing an interview on the radio some years ago (I think it was on National Public Radio), in which an author was being queried about a book he had written about laughter. His claim, if I remember correctly, was that all laughter (or humor -- it may have been a thesis about humor, I'm not sure) has a sadistic edge to it. Surely this thesis is a trifle excessive, to say the least, yet who cannot doubt that there is some truth in it? Who has not been the brunt of some hurtful joke, the object of some pejorative laughter, some barbed humor? Laughter may be vicious for other reasons as well. Who cannot remember the ethos of maniacal laughter in Petronius' Satyricon? A careful analysis of these and other vicious forms of laughter would be edifying, in order to distinguish them from that wholesome, good laughter Belloc celebrates famously in his rhyme:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There's always laughter and good red wine.
At least I've always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

Part II: Curiosity

Another friend and commentator on this blog recently sent me a great article by Paul J. Griffiths, whom I once had the pleasure of meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. The article, entitled "The Vice of Curiosity," is from Pro Ecclesia, Vol. XV, No. 1 (Winter, 2006). The article is of singular interest, so permit me to offer some extended excerpts for your reading pleasure. Griffiths begins thus:

Consider the claim that curiosity is a vice, an intellectual habit always and everywhere to be discouraged, abjured, and shunned. Tosay this of curiosity would be to make it something like envy, arrogance, or despair, all habits that most of us from time to time indulge in or fall victim to but that we would prefer to avoid and certainly do not seek. To speak of curiosity in this way sounds odd. Indeed, it sounds a little crazy. For us, curiosity is for the most part a positive word, a word we use to indicate an attitude or a practice we are happy to encourage and praise. But this was not so for almost all premodern Christian thinkers. They, almost without exception, did classify curiosity as a vice and did say that it should be shunned. In this brief essay I'll say something about why they held this view and offer a sketch of an argument that supports it.

To do this I will set before you two things. The first is a brief restatement of what I take to be Augustine's understanding and critique of curiositas, which is the Latin word that entered English as curiosity. For Augustine, as we shall see, curiosity was a vice rather than a virtue. The second is a sketch of an argument whose principal purpose is to support the distinction between virtuous and vicious intellectual appetites and to locate curiosity firmly within the camp of the vicious.

This article and the larger study, still mostly unwritten, of which it forms a part, have two motives. The first is a sense that the intellectual appetites that must be cultivated by academics and students if the knowledge industry of the contemporary academy is to be served as it demands to be served have become largely corrupt. This corruption, it seems to me, is evident in the ways in which scholars talk about their intellectual appetites -- and we do, obsessively, talk about them -- as well as in the practices of contemporary scholarship in the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften as the Germans prefer to call them. Implied by this talk and these practices is an understanding, or perhaps better a family of understandings, of what human beings are like, what the intellect is for, and how knowledge should be understood and sought. This family of understandings is, or so I have come to think, incompatible with specifically Christian understandings of these same matters, as well as being finally incoherent. And this is or should be a matter of concern for the church and for Christian scholars, for the secular academy has enormous and effectively unrivaled power to define the intellectual life and the practices of scholarship.

There is also a second motivation. One of the more remarkable transformations in the history of European intellectual life was the removal of curiosity from the table of the vices and its inscription into the table of virtues. From the beginnings of Latin Christianity in the second century (Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine), curiositas was defined as a vice; but by the fifteenth century it had begun to be considered a virtue, and by the eighteenth century it was simply assumed by most European thinkers to be virtuous, and the earlier understanding of the term was largely lost....

Why Augustine? Griffiths' answer: "It is no exaggeration to say that European thought about curiosity is Augustinian from the fifth century to the fifteenth." Why is curiosity a vice for Augustine? "Curiosity for Augustine is appetite for nothing other than the ownership of new knowledge." It is a kind of concupiscentia, a disordered desire that guarantees its own disappointment. Curious concupiscence engages in close study and investigation of its chosen objects. "But the curious man is always a fornicator: he pervets study and investigation in much the same way that having sex with those to whom you are not married perverts the gift of the sexual appetite." Thus the curious man is distinguished from the studious man.

Curiosity's desire is closed off to its objects relation to God, considered only in isolation, whereas the studious man's interest is open to a knowledge of things including their relatedness to God. The second of Jesus' three temptations in the wilderness (where Jesus is placed on the temple's pinnacle and asked to throw himself down because of the scripture that says God's angels will permit no harm to come to him) is the paridigmatic temptation of curiosity, says Griffiths, because it offers satisfaction of the experimental appetite. Appetite for novelty is another key element in curiosity, an appetite that prevents contemplative rest and also "prevents curiosity's gaze from seeing the vestigium aeternitatis, eternity's trace, in the things at which it looks." Yet again, curiosity is characterized by loquacitas, a garrulity or chattiness involved in becoming known as one who knows -- a characteristic for which Augustine sees the Manichees as paridigmatic, as well as the entire rhetorical trade in which he himself had been involved professionally. But the most important element in Augustine's critique of curiosity, according to Griffiths, has to do with the attempt to own knowledge, "to assert proprietas over it, to make it subject to oneself (sibi tribuere)." Griffiths helps explicate this connection by relating a number of cognates: "To own something, for him," he writes, "is to expropriate it, to make it 'proper' (proprium) to oneself, and thus private." Thus curiosity privatizes its knowledge. Griffiths goes on to offer an extended and fascinating technical analysis, referencing even Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion postmodern hermeneutic of human finitude. But the upshot of his analysis is that objects of human knowing cannot be exhaustively apprehended without remainder privately and individually. No phenomena, no object, and certainly no human other can be captured and privatized, owned or taken possession of without remainder, dominated or sequestered. Any attempt to do so must fail.

Curiositas, then, is an appetite that operates within the constraints of the libido dominandi, the lust for dominance that ownership brings. Its Augustinian contradictory is studiousness, and this is an intellectual appetite that operates within the constraints of a proper appreciation of givenness, or of what Augustine would prefer to call the gift, the donum Dei.

One hears an echo of Jean-Luc Marion's language here, but, of course, also much more: there is here the objective givenness of the entire order of creation, of natural law, as well as the objective gift of redemption.

[Hat tip to Brian Amend for information on date of issue.]