Waldo Beach - "Curiosity and Reverence" (October 15, 1961)

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	(piano music)	0:03
-	Among the many dynamic forces	0:34
	that propel us around this campus	0:36
	that drag us out of bed to class,	0:40
	to the library, to the lab,	0:44
	to chapel, is the simple drive of curiosity.	0:47
	This motive is obscured under more	0:53
	immediate organization man motives	0:57
	of the dread of flunking of the push	1:00
	for prestige standard seeking,	1:03
	the political and economic considerations	1:08
	that drive us towards the BA degree.	1:11
	But curiosity is there too underneath	1:16
	luring us into this or that research project,	1:22
	lab experiment, raising a hand in class,	1:26
	teasing us into the library,	1:31
	why, how come,	1:34
	what makes the machine run?	1:38
	The leaves turn, the universe tick.	1:40
	The same curiosity turned Moses aside	1:46
	in the ancient story, our lesson of the morning.	1:51
	Strange thing, the bush is burning	1:56
	but it is not burnt up.	2:02
	Why, while a university lives outwardly on endowments,	2:05
	it lives inwardly on curiosity.	2:13
	And in this week's university calendar,	2:17
	there is something to satisfy every curiosity	2:20
	from lectures on visual learning in pigeons	2:25
	to serial techniques in non tonal music,	2:30
	something for everybody.	2:35
	But it becomes an interesting to ponder	2:39
	the relation of this curiosity	2:41
	to a kind of polar opposite in the university culture,	2:44
	another dynamic which seems to pull	2:50
	in the opposite direction from curiosity	2:53
	and that's reverence.	2:57
	How do these two stand together	3:00
	in our common life if indeed they do.	3:02
	How are we to reconcile outwardly in policy,	3:06
	inwardly each of us in the secret place,	3:12
	the spirit of reverence with a spirit of curiosity.	3:17
	There's one direct answer to this question	3:24
	given often by the devout and the pious,	3:28
	which says the reverence and curiosity	3:33
	are sharply opposed to each other.	3:35
	The curiosity is dangerous to faith.	3:38
	That reverence is the mind set	3:41
	that we should only cultivate.	3:44
	As soon as we become curious,	3:48
	inquisitive, raise questions according to this view,	3:50
	we are starting down a perilous path,	3:57
	which leads to skepticism.	3:59
	Better than keeps safe in the truth,	4:02
	keep the head bowed and the heart faithful,	4:05
	lest the minds questions begin to insinuate	4:10
	themselves into the safe assurance	4:13
	who knows where insatiable curiosity will lead you.	4:17
	If you keep asking but why,	4:24
	and then ask, but why that, far into the night,	4:29
	you'll soon be far into the night of doubt,	4:35
	groping through infinite regresses of reasons	4:39
	to fall finally into the abyss.	4:44
	It's interesting to note that this fear of curiosity	4:49
	is strong in medieval culture.	4:53
	In the 12th century Bernard of Clairvaux	4:57
	describing the steps of humility in monasticism	5:01
	pointed out that the first way word step of pride	5:07
	away from humility is curiosity.	5:11
	"If you see a monk," he wrote,	5:16
	"whom you formerly trusted confidently	5:19
	beginning to roam with his eyes,	5:21
	hold his head erect and prick up his ears,	5:25
	whenever he's standing or walking or sitting,	5:29
	you may know," he says in effect,	5:33
	"that this monk has started down the skid roll	5:36
	to the perdition of unpaid."	5:41
	But this medieval slant which suspects	5:46
	curiosity as inimical to reverence	5:49
	is not just a medieval period piece.	5:52
	It's very contemporary in the mind	5:56
	of the earnest back town,	6:00
	Bible thumbing, Southern Protestant.	6:03
	It was very suspicious of all this	6:08
	fancy book learning at Duke,	6:10
	all this science stuff and critical study of religion,	6:13
	which will come to no good.	6:19
	He may write to the Dean's office	6:22
	protesting that he didn't send his child to college	6:25
	to have his faith tampered with.	6:27
	It's not right to ask questions of the Lord,	6:31
	just accept his ways and trust.	6:35
	All this mindset may be present in one	6:39
	or other of you in this congregation.	6:44
	A sophomore whose religious faith	6:49
	is a precious sacred object to be revealed,	6:53
	but excused ahead of time from inquiry	6:59
	from curiosity who is judged badly	7:03
	by class discussion of miracles in religion 51, 52,	7:08
	doesn't square with what he's been taught	7:14
	at church in home	7:18
	who may come to chapel to have	7:21
	his weakening faith showered up.	7:23
	But this answer, a reverence prohibiting curiosity	7:30
	is wrong hearted as it is wrong headed.	7:35
	It's not the appropriate frame of mind	7:40
	for any university culture or university student.	7:43
	Reverence without curiosity is blind, docile, stupid.	7:48
	It bows the head but in fear not understanding	7:56
	its faith is closed, all finished and settled	8:02
	no more questions to ask.	8:08
	And such a reverence is a violation	8:11
	of the fact that we are by nature inquisitive animals.	8:13
	The only animals that can ask why	8:19
	and proof of this is seen in the fact	8:23
	that as soon as one prohibits inquiry	8:26
	and puts a fence around a sacred object	8:30
	saying no trespassing,	8:33
	such a sign is very invitation to heightened curiosity	8:37
	and trespass.	8:43
	`So it was with Adam in the garden,	8:46
	so has it always been in history	8:49
	wherever church or sectors are tempted by up fences	8:52
	to keep out the curious in defense of the faith.	8:57
	Second answer to the question of how reverence	9:04
	is related to curiosity is much more typical of our day	9:07
	and this community than the first.	9:14
	This opposite answer calls for curiosity without reverence.	9:18
	If curiosity was the first vice of medieval man	9:25
	leading him away from truth,	9:31
	it was the first virtue of Renaissance man	9:34
	leading him toward it.	9:38
	The university is in a sense	9:42
	the length and shadow of Renaissance man,	9:44
	who was infinitely curious about why	9:50
	and builds his realms of knowledge	9:53
	on this insatiable search.	9:56
	No domains of truth are close to debate an investigation,	10:00
	whether it's the question of the theologian	10:06
	about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin	10:08
	or the nuclear physicist about how many atoms	10:14
	condense on the head of a pin.	10:17
	Angels and Adams, stars and souls all are equally subject	10:21
	to the master question why.	10:28
	And according to the faith of Renaissance man,	10:33
	curiosity avidly pursued prying into the matter	10:36
	supposedly sacred and holy	10:41
	shows them up often to be pious, spoofs,	10:44
	gigantic, dreary, opiates and delusions	10:49
	to keep the people quiet.	10:55
	Yeah this answer, curiosity without reverence	10:59
	has too its dangers.	11:03
	For a curiosity that has lost all mystery,	11:07
	all sense of humility in the presence of the inscrutable,	11:14
	all sense of hush in the presence of transcendent grandeur.	11:20
	He says, "Perilous as a blind reverence	11:27
	which asks no questions."	11:29
	Curiosity without reverence can become jaunty,	11:33
	brittle, reckless, morally insensitive,	11:39
	and at the last morally destructive.	11:45
	There's a curious kind of arrogance that can develop	11:50
	in a mind which is inquisitive with no respect	11:54
	for the holy and the awesome mysterium tremendum	12:01
	that surrounds our little life, the great power,	12:07
	the great wisdom that lie before	12:12
	and after our petty powers and wisdoms,	12:16
	the overwhelming beauty that lurks in the open fifths	12:23
	of a chest and a cough anthem.	12:30
	Such a jaunty curiosity is really a little pathetic.	12:36
	A student wrote a letter to the Chronicle last year,	12:41
	suggesting that since the main library	12:46
	was so badly overcrowded with books	12:48
	and since this chapel isn't used very much	12:52
	except by tourists,	12:56
	it should be converted into storage space for books.	12:59
	His proposal amounted to suggesting that the campus	13:05
	realm devoted to curiosity should take over	13:09
	the campus realm devoted to reverence.	13:13
	Well he was proposing a very profound educational issue	13:19
	but his answer was not very wise.	13:25
	He represented renaissance man called Beatnich.	13:29
	He had missed out on a deeper dimension of his education	13:36
	failed to catch what this university attempts to be about	13:42
	in its total philosophy of education.	13:47
	If medieval man catholic or protestant	13:52
	is in distrusting curiosity	13:56
	and Renaissance man of the 15th or 20th century	14:01
	in rejecting reverence,	14:08
	perhaps one could say that biblical man has a better grasp	14:11
	of the relation of these two great factors.	14:17
	Moses could stand here for biblical man	14:22
	and the strange folk story of the burning bush	14:27
	dramatizes the connection.	14:32
	Moses had something	14:36
	apparently what we call scientific spirit.	14:37
	He was curious to figure out why the bush was not consumed.	14:43
	He was led into an encounter with truth	14:50
	by an oddity that just piqued his curiosity.	14:53
	But the outcome of the encounter	14:59
	was not the dispelling of mystery	15:03
	but the reverence which accompanies mystery.	15:06
	Put off your shoes from your feet	15:12
	for the place on which you are standing	15:16
	is holy ground.	15:18
	Led by curiosity into an encounter with ultimate reality,	15:23
	he discovers that the desert place	15:28
	is the dwelling place of the Most High.	15:32
	That the immediate question of curiosity's why	15:36
	leads him to the ultimate question of existence	15:41
	which is who and to the answer,	15:46
	the God of his fathers.	15:52
	The original query of the mind leads	15:56
	to a final acknowledgement of awe and about it	16:00
	or when thinks of another biblical man	16:07
	in whom also has represented a more profound joining	16:13
	of reverence with curiosity	16:17
	than either a docile part by a tear	16:22
	or an arrogant secularism could possibly see.	16:24
	It's significant that one of the first glimpses we have	16:29
	of the boy Jesus, is when He is found	16:33
	by His distraught parents in the temple	16:37
	sitting among the teachers.	16:43
	It says, "Listening to them and asking them questions	16:45
	in a kind of pickup seminar on the Torah."	16:51
	The significance of this glimpse is that for Jesus,	16:57
	the temple is the place where curiosity is proper,	17:01
	where questions are not forbidden but raised.	17:05
	If Moses found the desert place to be after all	17:10
	the kind of temple, Jesus found the temple	17:15
	to be a kind of classroom where the searching spirit	17:19
	could give and take in the exciting directive with mind	17:24
	and recall too that in the rephrasing of the law,	17:31
	Jesus reminds his hearers that we are to love God	17:36
	with all our minds,	17:40
	which certainly includes the exercise of curiosity,	17:45
	the critical faculties.	17:50
	Curiosity and reverence	17:54
	should be our normative stands of faith	17:58
	in the whole life of this university,	18:02
	if we are to abide by the aims of its original trust	18:05
	and acquire wisdom.	18:11
	This means it seems to me that in curricular policy,	18:15
	the critical analysis of the religious tradition	18:21
	of Western culture is indispensable to humane education.	18:25
	It means that the kind of class brittle secularism,	18:32
	which in class delights to scorn all reverence	18:38
	and obliterate all holiness is inappropriate.	18:43
	It means that all the way across from medical school	18:50
	to the athletic fields,	18:52
	the ground on which we stand and walk	18:56
	and work is holy ground.	18:58
	The persons with whom we deal are infinitely	19:02
	precious and sacred because sacred to the infinite person.	19:05
	And the truth is about which we contend	19:13
	are facets of an eternal truth.	19:17
	What either way, a reverence curiosity	19:22
	or curious reverence, it is the whole mark	19:26
	of a liberally educated person.	19:32
	Note that the relation of curiosity	19:38
	and reverence does not mean	19:43
	a division of territory of two concentric circles.	19:47
	The inner circle of curiosity and investigation	19:54
	earning an empirical knowledge	19:58
	which gradually moves out over the outer circle	20:00
	of mystery and the unknown.	20:06
	So that eventually in time, reverence is the fear	20:10
	of the unknown will be dispelled by knowledge.	20:16
	This was sort of the 19th century way	20:22
	of reconciling science and religion or so it was thought.	20:25
	But a biblical outlook is different from this	20:32
	in Genesis and Job, in the Psalms	20:36
	and in the mind of Christ.	20:41
	It is not knowledge bounded by mystery	20:43
	but knowledge infused with mystery.	20:49
	The sense of wonder does not begin at that point	20:54
	beyond which curiosity cannot reach.	20:59
	It permeates all that we know.	21:04
	Philosophy begins in wonder, ends in wonder,	21:08
	is sustained throughout by wonder.	21:13
	The immediate whys of 'cause of connection	21:19
	in the economic text or in the lab	21:25
	always point beyond themselves to the ultimate questions	21:29
	of the source, the goal, the who,	21:33
	who gives the rhyme or reason to it all.	21:38
	In whom do all these little bits of data cohere.	21:42
	These religious questions haunt all technical question.	21:48
	The moral answer to the problem,	21:54
	how am I to use all the technical answers for good	21:57
	or for ill?	22:04
	This arises from the sense of reverence.	22:07
	The sense that the ground on which I am standing	22:12
	is Holy ground.	22:17
	The moral problems about the uses of knowledge	22:20
	are answered from the side of reverence	22:25
	not curiosity in a universe	22:28
	which gives us a dreadful freedom	22:31
	to choose between life and death.	22:35
	To be sure, curiosity and reverence never fit	22:41
	quite neatly together.	22:47
	There's always some pull and haul between them,	22:50
	which makes for the exciting collision of ideas	22:54
	and the outer forums of debate	22:57
	and the inner agony of making up your mind.	22:59
	And you can be sure that the faculty of this institution	23:05
	are not of a single persuasion	23:10
	as to whether a reverent mind,	23:11
	as well as a curious mind should here be fostered.	23:16
	But the norm of a reverent curiosity holds good.	23:23
	And if sought commonly,	23:28
	it would preserve our motto or UTDO at religio.	23:31
	From being a statement only of an uneasy truce	23:40
	between two warring champs of the reverence	23:43
	and the curious for a wind held somehow together,	23:48
	curiosity protects reverence from a crowd,	23:55
	an abject fear without removing the wonder.	24:00
	Reverends keeps curiosity from arrogance	24:05
	without removing the quest and the question mark.	24:11
	This spirit would constitute our integrity and health	24:19
	and sustain us as we go our rounds of seeking	24:25
	and finding and losing and seeking again,	24:31
	which is education.	24:37
	Amen, let us pray.	24:43
	All Mighty God, always hidden, always revealed.	24:55
	The unseen source and goal of our searching,	25:04
	the answer to our last question,	25:08
	the questioner of our last answer,	25:13
	grant us by thy grace,	25:19
	such open curious and reverent minds	25:22
	as they come to wisdom in obedience before Thee,	25:30
	in knowledge of whom standeth are eternal life.	25:36
	Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,	25:43
	the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit,	25:48
	be with you all.	25:53

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Title:

Waldo Beach - "Curiosity and Reverence" (October 15, 1961)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4fb51n2b

Date:

October 15, 1961

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

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Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0159
ref5524_e5j
uachapelsermaud
duke:628046
dcrau002175
ark:/87924/r4fb51n2b
5b4152b7-9d1b-46bb-a319-94ae160dc58d

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Durham (N.C.)

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CC BY-NC 4.0

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Waldo Beach - "Curiosity and Reverence" (October 15, 1961)

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