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Ancient Secrets for a Sharper Mind

by Father Dominic Legge, OP 

The new school year has returned (and with it, a mass of noisy high school students outside my urban priory’s windows!). For students, the drooping blooms of August’s last languor are now replaced by the fresh shoots of friendship (those are squeals of delight I’m hearing on the first day of school). But soon enough, the students will be back to the slow and steady routine of the classroom, the library, and the study desk.

Or will they? Today, we are told, learning is no longer simply a matter of lectures, books, and science labs. The internet can bring almost any text before a student’s eyes – positively glowing! – in a matter of seconds. (Indeed, after two years of teaching undergraduates, I wonder whether the library was used more for its free laser printer than for its books.) But this can be as much a hindrance as a help; the access-addict may end up none the wiser for all the data he has mined.

I suspect this is something that afflicts most of us, students or not: How often have you, after a day of multi-tasking, felt scattered and dissipated? Man is supposed to be homo sapiens, but there is a difference between genuine knowledge and information, between the concentration of a true scholar and the bleary-eyed absorption of the chronic web surfer.

The ancients grasped this, even before the internet age, and recovering their secrets can sharpen your mind, and even help you better your grades.

The key, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is not just a matter of study habits – and it certainly isn’t a matter of having unlimited access to the internet. Rather, it is a matter of training your desire for knowledge, so that you develop the virtue of studiousness and not the vice of curiositas.

Aquinas takes his starting point from Aristotle: Everyone desires to know. Though knowledge can be put to a bad use (you can use it for evil purposes, like defrauding your neighbor, or even killing an unborn baby in the name of scientific research), all true knowledge, considered in itself, is good. The desire to know is a spiritual desire for a spiritual good, the truth, and it comes with its own pleasures (and true pleasures they are!).

Spiritual desires are peculiar, the opposite of bodily desires. When we lack food and drink, we hunger and thirst for them. Once we’ve eaten and drunk, we stop desiring them. But spiritual desires lie dormant when we have never tasted their delights; once we’ve discovered them, and the more we taste them, the more our desire is inflamed.

Still, as every high school freshman is acutely aware, even the delights of the spirit don’t suppress our bodily desires, which often pull us in a different direction. “Because of his bodily nature, man avoids the labor involved in seeking knowledge,” says Aquinas.  Studiousness is the virtue that strengthens our perseverance in pursuing the higher but harder-to-reach pleasuresof worthy knowledge. 

Many people get this much. But the second part of Aquinas’s prescription for a sharp mind is often overlooked. It is not enough to seek knowledge in general. To reach the highest intellectual pleasures, we must avoid the vice of curiositas.

Curiositas, hard to translate, is the vice of an immoderate desire for knowledge, often the wrong kind of knowledge. Examples abound. The gossip magazines at the grocery store checkout line are designed to titillate the wrong kind of desire to know – to know the foibles and faults of others, not so we can help them, but so we can crow about them. That may produce a kind of stunted pleasure, but it is empty in the end. (The same goes for any like peeping into others’ affairs.)

Undisciplined web browsing is like it – we spend our time on things that are not important for us to know, at the expense of the very work or study that is our primary charge. Curiositas may also feed our pride: We want to seem up-to-date, equipped with the latest news and opinions. Here also lies the danger of the wired classroom. How often do students succumb to the temptation to look at something more interesting than the text they’ve been assigned?

Even worse, says Aquinas (in his medieval Latin), is “watching shows” (inspectiospectaculorum) that lead us towards vice. When we watch acts of lust or cruelty, we tend to become more lustful and cruel. What you look on with your eyes, you invite into your soul. How much of the so-called “entertainment” fare of our age falls into this category?

A restless boredom is the ultimate fruit of curiositas, not the restful delight that crowns true knowledge. This is because the wrong kind of knowledge doesn’t satisfy our spiritual desires. Like every vice, curiositas is a recipe for dissatisfaction.

It isn’t easy to be studious, especially not at first. But your mind is more like a muscle than a hard drive: The more you use it, the bigger and better it gets. 

Our knowledge will only be perfect when we know the infinite riches of First Truth, who is God himself. This doesn’t mean that we should only study theology – far from it – but that, in whatever we study, we ultimately see it as somehow coming from God and leading us back to Him. Knowledge of Him is, in the end, what will make us perfectly happy.

And that’s the ancient formula for being a successful student.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)