The renowned Aquinas scholar James A. Weisheipl OP writes: “…Thomas had an extraordinary knowledge of the whole Bible. It has been said, not without likelihood, that Thomas memorised the entire Bible during the year he was confined to his family castle at Roccasecca, 1244–45. This is not at all difficult to believe. His memory was far superior to any man-made concordance of the Bible.”
Reading this inevitably prompts thoughts of the many months we were all confined to our respective little castles during Covid. How did we use that time? One wonders whether, had Aquinas had a TikTok account in 1244–45, his name would be known to us today. I meet people who made exemplary use of their enforced solitude: one young man bought a banjo online during the pandemic, applied himself assiduously to learning it, and now plays brilliantly. Others wrote books or studied new languages.
Thankfully, TikTok was unknown to Aquinas. Yet even so he faced distractions. Famously, his family, who had imprisoned him in a futile attempt to prevent him joining the new, prestige-less Dominican order, introduced a local, apparently very beautiful, prostitute into his cell to break his resolve. The young Aquinas, however, repelled her advances with a burning brand from the fire, convincing simultaneously the prostitute of his scant zeal for her, and his family of his great zeal for the Dominican order.
Clearly, the young St Thomas was committed to his calling to the Dominicans, but also, and fittingly, to his call to study and to the habit of studiositas. We would be mistaken to imagine that this meant he was driven by an insatiable desire to devour every book in the castle. He defines the virtue of studiositas in terms of restraint: “Studiousness is the virtue that moderates the appetite for knowledge.” It is what we would today call focus. One might reasonably suppose that Aquinas deliberately limited the scope of his study to Sacred Scripture during that year, reasoning that of all the books available to him, the Scriptures were of singular importance. Here his virtue is evident: restraining the desire to know everything, the vice of curiosity, which, according to him, “implies a disordered desire for knowing.”
As a child, I remember a dream where I tunnelled through our sitting-room wall and emerged at the back of the display case for Matchbox cars in the local shop, a tunnel that in reality would have had to stretch some 700 metres, but in Dreamland needed only be ten centimetres. It was probably the happiest dream of my childhood. In many ways, the web functions as a similar kind of tunnel: it allows us to explore the garden of earthly delights of knowledge. Here we have access to a virtually limitless sea of “knowledge”, from the sublime, such as wonderful documentaries, to the ridiculous, the silliest of shorts; from innocent social interaction to the darkest corners of human depravity. In Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the eponymous hero is enticed by the Coachman into the Land of Toys, where he and other boys, freed from school lessons, play all day. Gradually, however, their indulgence transforms them into donkeys: “And when the poor little donkeys were good and fat, he sold them at a good price.”
We often hear that if something online is free, we are the product. Indeed, the web is a marketplace where the primary product is our attention. In one way or another, our attention is web gold, to be converted into subscribers, customers, voters or devotees. The world’s greatest minds have devised the perfect bait to capture it, firing our curiositas. The deeper the bait is swallowed, the more loyal the subscriber, customer, voter or devotee becomes.
Augustine, in the Confessions, tells a story of fourth-century addiction that resonates perfectly with the twenty-first century. His friend Alipius was studying law in Rome when he encountered a group of friends on their way to the amphitheatre to watch gladiatorial games. They pressed him to join them. Alipius, who detested such shows, relented only after assuring them, and himself, that while they might drag him along, which they did, they could not force him to open his eyes. They did manage to drag him along, but they did not need to open his eyes for him; his curiosity took care of that. When a huge roar erupted at some particularly grisly moment, he was, according to Augustine, “struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body.” He fell into a deeper addiction than his friends, and it took Augustine considerable effort to extricate him from this state. His transformation into a donkey had been instantaneous.
Studiositas teaches us that our attention, literally what we “stretch out” towards, is a treasure. In practice, the great enemies of studiositas are TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. It is not that they are inherently “bad”; it is that they are extraordinarily compelling. Their algorithms serve up a cocktail of content tailored perfectly to each user, to the point of being almost irresistibly attractive. They are dragging us away to the Land of Toys and, ultimately, to the gladiatorial games. The answer is simple: just do not go there.
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