Mid-Summer                                                                                           Waning Garlic Moon

“Inquiry is fatal to certainty.” – Will Durant

Will Durant, a philosopher cum historian, author of a history of the world, has a key insight.  When a seminary student enters biblical studies classes, ones informed by the higher criticism, criticism that treats scripture as literature and literature with a history, inquiry can erode the foundations of faith.  It did not for me, that erosion came later, and under a different form of inquiry; but, the discipline of question asking, of seeking evidence, of pursuing a hypothesis forces the world out of a lock step predictability and into a quantum universe, a place where inquiry itself can confound knowledge.

A while back I bought a book on curiosity.  As latter day children of the enlightenment, we bow the knee to inquiry if nothing else, so curiosity has its own high rank in our pantheon of virtues; but, many cultures, ones also wise to the Durant syndrome, have suppressed curiosity as dangerous.  The culture of the Roman Catholic stood solidly in the anti-curiosity camp during the middle ages and often tips that way even today.  Many authoritarian find inquiry and curiosity the bedfellows of political rebellion.  Curiosity and inquiry are dangerous to dogma, inflammatory to regimes that define the truth in their own way, think the Bush-Cheney Whitehouse.

Inquiry and curiosity, let’s lift a cup to these twins, dangerous and inflammatory though they may be.