A Brief History of Curiosity

Curiosity hasn’t always been celebrated.
In fact, for most of Western history, it was treated as a vice — a dangerous impulse that threatened order, authority, and the comfort of not asking too many questions.

As your friendly neighbourhood curiosity-fighter (and curiosity-defender), let me walk you through this strange and uneven history.

1. Curiosity made the powerful uncomfortable

For centuries, curiosity was seen as meddling — the behaviour of someone who peers where they shouldn’t, asks what they shouldn’t, and wonders about what they were told to accept.
And to those in power, nothing is more annoying than a mind that refuses to stay put.

Michel Foucault reminds us that Christian tradition openly distrusted curiosity.
It linked curiosity to Eve tasting the forbidden fruit — the fruit of knowledge.
Eve’s “sin” was, essentially, wanting to know.

Even more telling: the Church formally absolved Galileo only in 1992.
A four-century delay says a lot about how threatening curiosity was allowed to become.

In the 3rd century, theologians argued that humanity was created after God had already made the universe precisely so humans wouldn’t know “how” He did it.
To ask, to investigate, to pry, was to overstep.

Saint Bernard even claimed that Lucifer fell from Heaven because of curiosity.

So yes — a rough start.

2. Before Christianity, curiosity didn’t fare much better

The ancient world wasn’t exactly a playground for the curious.

King Solomon warned: “In much wisdom there is much sorrow; whoever increases knowledge increases pain.”

Aristotle described curiosity as the behaviour of someone “noisy,” someone who sticks their head where it doesn’t belong.
Plutarch called the curious person a meddler, a snoop.

And the Romans?
They believed the Greeks had already discovered everything worth knowing.
So curiosity had no purpose — everything important was supposedly already known.

And Pandora?
She didn’t open a “box,” but an amphora — out of pure curiosity.
And look how that turned out in the story.

Curiosity was blamed for trouble, not praised for insight.

3. A turning point: curiosity becomes a virtue

It’s not until the late 17th century that the word curiosity explodes in usage.

Suddenly, it becomes acceptable — even admirable — to ask questions about anything, no matter how small or obscure.

But before that, the Renaissance had already planted the seed.
Figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus embodied the idea of the “complete human”: someone curious about everything — from anatomy to rivers, from art to engineering.

Nature was seen as a tapestry full of hidden secrets waiting to be asked into the light.

At the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, cabinets of curiosities flourished — the wunderkammern, or “rooms of wonders.”
These were proto-museums, spaces where strangeness, rarity, difference, and marvel were collected and displayed.
It was the age of curiosity as virtue and pansophia, the dream of knowing everything.
The early steps toward what would later become the Encyclopaedia.

This was also the era of the “idea hunter”: someone who believes Nature hides truths and that these truths must be pursued, tracked, sniffed out.
(And yes — this is the ancestral spirit behind The Golden Nose.)

4. Curiosity today: valued… but only if narrow

Jump to the present.

Curiosity is appreciated — but selectively.
Society praises the expert who is endlessly curious within a single field.
Vertical curiosity is seen as discipline.

But curiosity about everything?
That’s seen as scattered. Unfocused.
Wanting to know many things is often criticised as ending up “knowing nothing.”

This is a loss.
Human creativity requires a wide stockpile of ideas, influences, references, and unrelated fragments.
The broader the curiosity, the richer the creative well.

Curiosity is the fuel of creativity.
Its vastness determines the diversity of the ideas a person can generate.

5. For a creative mind, there is no better state

For someone creative, nothing is more powerful than the feeling of knowing nothing —
and wanting to know everything.

To question.
To poke.
To investigate.
To refuse the comfort of the already-known.

Curiosity is not a luxury; it’s the oxygen of creative thinking.

And when you cultivate it widely, courageously, without apology —
the world opens.