When Curiosity Kills
The Name of the Rose is a 20th Century novel by the Italian author Umberto Eco, set in a fourteenth century Benedictine monastery, which follows the exploits of William of Baskerville, a Sherlock Holmes-like investigator who is commissioned to inquire into a series of murders occurring within the monastery walls. As William of Baskerville puts it, the story follows “what has happened among men who live among books, with books, [and] from books.” As such, the characters grapple with many of the theological controversies of the era, ranging from Franciscan debates over poverty to the struggle for power between the Empire and the Papacy.
This series will not serve as a literary analysis, but instead will investigate particular issues that arise over the course of the novel. While these articles will hopefully lend new insight to the reader familiar with The Name of the Rose, they also aim to be accessible to the unfamiliar reader, and to do so without ruining the delights of the novel, should he decide to pick it up in the future.
Growing up, many of my generation were trained in the virtue of curiosity by one of its greatest exemplars, the monkey Curious George, who appeared every morning on PBS. Curiosity, it seemed, was a praiseworth trait: most parents would’ve been quite pleased to hear from a teacher that their child was naturally curious or inquisitive. Yet to the medieval mind, the word curiosity (curiositas) did not reflect a praiseworthy trait. Quite to the contrary, theologians listed it amongst the moral vices, the excesses and deficiencies which lead people to act sinfully.
Curiositas plays a prominent role in The Name of the Rose. The library of the Abbey is renowned as one of the finest libraries in the Christian world, with a collection of works overflowing the banks of Christendom into the Classical, Arabic, and African worlds. This hoard of knowledge is guarded fiercely, and few monks are permitted unlimited access to the collection. In these circumstances, accusations of intellectual pride and curiositas are often levied against the monks who work on and amongst the manuscripts of the library. At one point, William remarks of a certain monk, “like many scholars, he had a lust for knowledge. Knowledge for its own sake… [His] is merely insatiable curiosity, intellectual pride, another way for a monk to transform and allay the desires of his loins… There is not only lust of the flesh” (Eco 402). Is this taboo of curiosity just another excess of overly cautious medieval zeal, an example to be laughed at and forgotten? Or do the theologians of old yet possess some wisdom which is of practical concern to us living in the modern world?
It is important to note that what medieval thinkers meant when they said curiositas is different from what most modern people mean when they say curiosity. The modern meaning of curiosity is something akin to “a strong desire to know.” This in itself is not a bad thing; in the Bible, the desire to know God and His laws is praised and the Proverbs command the hearer to actively pursue wisdom and insight (2 Pet. 3:18; Ps. 1:2; Prov. 4:4-9). But the modern meaning of the word curiosity evolved over time (Walsh 73-74, 78-85). Curiositas, its origin, was taken to mean a perverted or unhealthy interest in knowledge—a desire to know for the wrong reasons.
This brings us to a vital distinction: it is not with knowledge itself that curiositas is concerned, but with the “desire and study in the pursuit of knowledge” (Aquinas ST II-II, q. 67, a. 1). Analogies can be drawn with other desires. Humans desire food, which is inherently good, but for which human desire can be over- or under-indulgent. Likewise, sex is a good thing designed by God for human flourishing, but when it is desired in a perverted manner, it becomes a source of grave sin. As with food and sex, knowledge is a good thing, but if man’s desire for knowledge is perverted or misdirected, he falls into sin.
It was a wrongful desire for knowledge, in fact, which constituted part of the sin of Eve in the garden. When the Serpent offers Eve the fruit of the forbidden tree, he tempts her by saying “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Later, the scripture remarks that Eve saw “that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6). Part of the temptation of Eve is the desire for forbidden knowledge. The story of the garden demonstrates the way that pride, envy, and curiositas are a package deal; to desire knowledge wrongly is usually to be prideful or envious, and oftentimes to be both.
There are a host of ways in which knowledge can be wrongly desired. The first, intellectual pride, is a malady commonly found in a university setting. To be prideful of one’s search for knowledge is to be pursuing knowledge for the sake of one’s own hubris, rather than for the right purpose of knowledge itself (Aquinas ST II-II, q. 67, a. 1). In the novel, William remarks on this point saying, “true love wants the good of the beloved” (Eco 402). To desire knowledge for the sake of one’s self-image is the equivalent of desiring a significant other for the sake of one’s self-image. If a man desires a woman in order to make himself look good, then he is not loving the woman. A man who rightly desires a woman will desire what is good for her. Similarly, a student who rightly desires knowledge will desire the good of knowledge, which is to be known and employed to a right and good purpose. For the Christian, this right and good purpose is ultimately the knowledge and love of God and love of neighbor.
There are countless other examples of desiring knowledge wrongly. A person can pursue knowledge at the expense of their obligations, like a student more interested in TikTok videos about celebrity drama or naval trivia than in his math homework. A person can desire gossip about neighbors, which is a desire for knowledge that is entertaining and validating at the expense of others. One could pursue knowledge of spiritual things through sinful means, like witchcraft or hallucinogenic drugs. Above all, a person can desire knowledge while failing to recognize its source and end point, which is God (Aquinas ST II-II, q. 67, a. 1).
In the face of so many wrong ways to pursue knowledge, what is one to do? In the medieval moral framework, which was inherited from Aristotle, every vice corresponds to a particular virtue. The virtue which curiositas corresponds to is called studiositas. Like with curiositas and curiosity, while studiousness is the linguistic descendant of studiositas, it does not reflect the exact same meaning. When modern folks say studiousness, they mean something akin to a student who labors over his homework for many hours a night. For the medievals, it meant a tempered approach to learning, by which we choose the right knowledge to pursue (Aquinas ST II-II, q. 166, a. 2). In the same way that one must approach one’s diet with temperance and care, choosing the right foods for one’s body, a person also ought to choose the knowledge one pursues wisely, pursuing the appropriate knowledge, for the appropriate reasons, at the appropriate time.
Walsh, P. G. “The Rights and Wrongs of Curiosity (Plutarch to Augustine).” Greece & Rome Vol. 35, No. 1 (Apr., 1988), pp. 73-85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/643280.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by Richard Dixon. New York: First Mariner Books, 2014.