Studiousness

IT’S traditional in schools inspired by the Christian spirit that a Holy Mass of the Holy Spirit is celebrated at the beginning of the school year. That’s what I’ve been doing these past days.

Obviously, the main idea is to remind students or to explain to the first-timers the relationship between the Holy Spirit and our studies. There is a passage in St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy that mentions a predicament that we should try to avoid.

“Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth,” (3,7) he said. Sad to say, this anomaly is getting common. We can have an information overdrive, wallow in an ocean of data, and yet we can miss the point of it all.

For Christian believers, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of God, the spirit of truth and wisdom, of love and holiness that is meant to inhere in our own soul, since God wants to share what he us with us, his creatures, his children. God and us are meant to live in a communion of life and love in the truth.

No matter how mundane or worldly or secular our studies may be, no matter with what autonomy our studies enjoy, we have to realize that they can only come from and go to God. We have to learn to pursue our studies in this kind of orbit.

What this all means is that we can never really arrive at the truth of things if it is not in the Holy Spirit. At best, we can have some aspects of truth, but they can miss a number of things, like charity, integrity, holiness.

They can be truths that feed our weakness and malice, our pride and vanity. Instead of building us up, they can destroy us. We have seen this phenomenon repeated millions of times in our history.

We need to know how to study, what are involved in our study, what attitudes and habits should be cultivated. This is where the virtue of studiousness comes in. We need to be more aware of our need for it.

It’s something to be developed, since it does not come automatically, or as a result of external factors. It has to be deliberately cultivated from inside us, with our will and effort.

Studiousness stands right in the middle of indifference and apathy on the one hand, and inordinate, obsessive curiosity on the other.

To spur students to study, St. Josemaria Escriva offered a formula: “As a student, you should dedicate yourself to your books with an apostolic spirit, and be convinced that one hour added to another make up—even now—a spiritual sacrifice offered to God and profitable for all mankind, your country and your soul.” (Furrow 522)

Our studies should be properly contextualized by the fact that we are all children of God, meant for holiness and apostolate, that is, helping one another all the way to bringing everyone back to God.

We need to develop a strong, abiding culture of studiousness not only in schools, but also at home and in other places. Obviously, this has to be done in different ways and forms, but it has to be with us all the time. It’s dangerous for us to leave this virtue behind, since we are meant to know things always, and to know them properly.

St. Thomas Aquinas also warned us about the forms of unhealthy curiosity. Some signs of this anomaly are when (a) we seek knowledge to take pride in it; (b) we seek knowledge to sin; (c) we seek useless knowledge and waste effort that otherwise could have been used to study what we need to know.

He also said that we are over-curious when (d) we seek knowledge from unlawful sources, as from demons; (e) we seek creatural knowledge without referring them to God; (f) we may foolishly risk error by trying to master what is beyond our capacity.

Over-curiosity is also fostered when we have an excessive love of sight-seeing, neglecting to study to gaze idly on meaningless spectacles, observing others for the purpose of criticizing or condemning them.

I feel that these indications are never passé. Rather, with the temper of our times, they assume greater relevance and urgency for all of us, since we are often pushed if not harassed by a swarm of pressuring data and information.

We have to learn to tame the bullish urges of our modern information technology by this virtue of studiousness!