Given the topic of my sermon this morning, I came across this discussion by Stanley Fish of curiosity. Taking off from a recent speech by James Leach, the Director of the National Humanities Administration, Fish asks whether curiosity has positive religious connotations, whether it is a virtue or a vice.

Oddly, he begins with Adam instead of Eve. Genesis 3 states quite clearly that Adam wasn’t involved: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6, NRSV).

“The tree was desired to be desired to make one wise.” There is of course in the biblical (and the Christian) tradition that denigrates the quest for wisdom, but there is also, as I said in my sermon, a strand that views wisdom as a way of approaching God