A curious thing has happened to Curious George, the fictional monkey who, in the original books written in the mid-twentieth century by Margret and H.A. Rey, was commonly described as a “good little monkey, and always very curious.” [1] In these books, Curious George’s curiosity always lands him in mischief or peril from which he needs to be rescued by his friend, The Man with the Yellow Hat. The message of these books is clear: curiosity leads to mischief and (possibly) danger and is not something to be cultivated.
In the 2006 PBS TV show television show based on the same character, which ran until 2015 and its recent revival, however, something strange has happened. Curious George’s curiosity is no longer a liability; rather, it is what compels Curious George to explore the world, have new experiences, and learn. Curious George’s curiosity has transformed from vice to virtue.
While the transformation of George’s curiosity may seem swift, it is rooted in a deeper cultural shift in which curiosity has become “a natural, desirable intellectual trait.”[2] In our popular imagination and in academic circles, to be curious is a good thing. Pedagogically, many contemporary educational theorists define it as the bedrock of learning, virtue epistemologists consider curiosity the epistemological virtue that directs and orients other intellectual virtues,[3] psychologists and sociologists see it as a positive psychological trait that is crucial for cultivating healthy relationships (social curiosity). In popular culture, advice for cultivating curiosity shows up in Ted Talks, YouTube channels like CuriositySteam, and the aforementioned Curious George TV show. Similarly, in discussions with colleagues and other academics, we often use and perceive curiosity in a similar way. Curiosity is what we want to instill in students and being curious is often seen leading us down paths of academic inquiry. To all but a few medievalists or specialists in the history of virtues and vices, this feels normal. However, prior to the Enlightenment, curiosity (or more properly curiositas) was a vice commonly linked with pride and the lust of the eyes and contrasted with the virtue of studiositas.[4] The intellectual roots of curiosity’s makeover from ancient vice to modern virtue can be traced back to the Enlightenment in figures like Hume and Bacon, who sought to recover curiosity as a positive intellectual good, especially for scientific inquiry.
While tracing this history is fascinating, it is beyond the scope of what we can cover in this address. Rather the curious case of curiosity’s modern renaissance, exemplified in Curious George, points to something deeper. Namely, that virtues, values, and ways of inhabiting our world are embedded within complex worlds of meaning passed on through tradition, cultural stories, and embodied practices. We perceive curiosity positively not because we have all read Bacon and Hume, but because we have been shaped by positive portrayals of curiosity and pass it on, inculcating it in diverse ways through practice and stories in our communities within the midst of life, which form our understanding and posture towards the world.
For many here identifying the reality that our understanding, basic beliefs, and intuitions about the world arise from within life itself and is conditioned or traditioned by our context is a familiar path.
In many ways this is what neo-Calvinists have described as a world-and-life view. For neo-Calvinists a world-and-life view is not a set of intellectual propositions (as commonly treated in certain strains of American evangelicalism) As Wolters writes in Creation Regained, “a worldview is a matter of the shared everyday experience of humankind, an inescapable component of all human knowing, and as such it is nonscientific, or rather (since scientific knowing is always dependent on the intuitive knowing of our everyday experience) prescientific, in nature”[5] A worldview orients our lives, is deeply religious, and “functions as a guide to our life…like a compass or a road map.”[6]Worldviews are embodied, lived, and passed on. To develop a worldview is to act as a kind of cartographer, mapping the terrain and making meaning of the world. Philosophy and theology give scientific elaboration of worldviews, providing clarity and, at times, correction and redirection.[7]
This raises the question, building on the recuperation of curiosity, rather than reject curiosity simply because it’s a modern virtue and ancient vice,[8] how might a Reformed world-and-life view form and inform curiosity and a vision of scholarship in a particular way? For scholarship too functions within a world-and-life view, and thus it is a kind of habitus, or mode of operation that is lived within the boundaries mapped out and shaped by a Christian world-and-life view, forming and informing the way the Christian scholar inhabits her discipline and approaches her work.
I want to sketch a brief vision of what the curious Calvinist scholar looks like, suggesting that neo-Calvinism forms scholars to have a capacious, conditioned curiosity. This kind of curiosity is distinct from the modern conception that often lives in popular imagination.[9]
Just note of clarification while this vision builds on the work of Bavinck, Kuyper, Dooeyweerd, Vollenhoven, Wolters, and other great significant neo-Calvinist figures, my primary focus will be on the way the neo-Calvinist tradition creates scholars who show up in the world to their work in a particular way. Thus, to speak of conditions, in this case, is not to unpack the conditions that make knowledge possible. With that clarification, we can turn to sketch a broad vision of Christian scholarship starting by exploring how the reformational worldview (in good Creation Regained fashion of creation, fall, redemption, consummation) produces a capacious, conditioned curiosity followed by the vision of Christian scholarship this creates.
For the sake of simplicity, if we define curiosity as the desire to know and that this desire is particularly inquisitive, asking questions about the world, then, curiosity formed by a reformational worldview is necessarily capacious, as wide and broad and deep as creation itself.
Creation: Following the broader Christian tradition, neo-Calvinism understands creation itself as a gift, given by the Triune God in love, freely and gratuitously. Taking creation seriously as a gift of love, the gift and its Giver are not only worth knowing but knowable. Herman Bavinck’s theology illuminates this reality, even going so far as to describe creation as God’s gift of self-communication by which he gives himself to another (in this case, humans) to be known.[10] This does not diminish the status of creation, rathe it grounds and situates it.[11] Affirming creation as gift means it has an inherent worth—thus, creation, in all its marvelous unity-in-diversity, glorious pluriformity, forms a complex whole, a world of truth, goodness, and beauty, open to and given as a gift to humans to be known. And yet, knowledge of creation comes to light in the presence of the divine Giver. In relationship with Him, knowledge comes to completion in worship. Thus, curiosity formed by the reformational emphasis is carried out before the face of God—coram deo–in His good creation, and is thereby natural and capacious—as wide, broad, and deep as creation itself.
Cultural Mandate: Second, before the fall, creation is a ‘world of wholeness and meaning’[12] in which Adam and Eve were not only invited to know but discover meaning within it and develop it (Genesis 1:28-30). Here curiosity and its questions are not just informational, “what is that?” but relational and compound, “what happens when we put that together with that or when we do x with this”? In the garden, curiosity functions along with imagination, asking how and what and imagining the possibilities, in order to unpack and develop creation’s treasures.[13] This kind of curious imagining, of course, goes very wrong in the Fall (Genesis 3), when Adam and Eve use these gifts to devastatingly wrong ends; nonetheless, even broken and factored, curiosity and imagination remain after the fall and continue to serve the human task of carrying out the cultural mandate of Genesis 1. Thus, curiosity formed by the Reformational emphasis on the cultural mandate continues to wonder about the ways creation can be developed, and it is curious about the ways others have responded to the cultural mandate, which after the fall this involves attentiveness to the direction [toward God or away from him] that these responses have taken. Capacious & broad, curiosity extends past just the natural world to exploring it in light of God’s call to his human creatures to discover its treasures and develop them.
Fall, Redemption, & Consummation: Finally, this still occurs not just because of God’s common grace and upholding of creation after the fall, but because creation is (in a sense) a gift re-given in redemption. Redemption within neo-Calvinism is re-creation, a restoration ‘as far as the curse is found.’ As sin’s polluting effects are pervasive, impacting every arena of creaturely life, so grace restores creation affirming it as a gift once again. Christ’s redemption is cosmic in scope. Again, Bavinck’s work is insightful here in his articulation of the scope of redemption in “The Catholicity of Christianity.” Bavinck writes:
Sin has corrupted much; in fact, everything…Nonetheless sin does not dominate and corrupt without God’s abundant grace in Christ triumphing even more (Rom. 5:15-20) … The Gospel is a joyful tiding, not only for the individual person but also for humanity, for the family, for society, for the state, for art and science, for the entire cosmos, for the whole groaning creation.[14]
In redemption, the vistas and valleys of creation and human cultural development are affirmed once again, re-directing Christian curiosity to these as good gifts meant to be enjoyed and explored in every arena of life. However, caution is required here, for we still await the full consummation of Christ’s kingdom. And curiosity cannot bring it about–curiosity in this present age, then also inquirers into the realities of pain, sorrow, and suffering as we’ll explore more below.
While capacious and broad, already, implicit in the description above are the ways the reformational worldview conditions curiosity, thereby conditioning its capaciousness.
Furthermore as creatures, curiosity exists within community necessarily relies on the insights and knowledge of others. Adam and Eve needed one another. In contrast to modern, individualist conceptions of curiosity, in which curiosity is what makes genius stand out apart from the community, curiosity rightly conditioned produces hospitality and community, learning from and welcoming the insights and questions of others.
However, in developing an account of how a reformational worldview forms and shapes curiosity, it’s important to attend not just to creation, fall, redemption, consummation but also faith, hope, and love, which as Bavinck describes are “incorporated into religion itself as [its] primary acts.”[16] Thus, an account of the formation of Christian curiosity must include how these acts condition and direct curiosity. And here, again, it will be necessary to present a sketch of what this looks like.
Faith: Faith is an irreducible aspect of life that directs and orients the whole of one’s life. As Cornelius Plantinga once summarized: “a person’s faith, even in idols, shapes most of what a person thinks and writes, and the Christian faith is in competition with other faiths for human hearts and minds.”[17] Saving faith—a gift from God and the fruit of the Spirit’s work of regeneration, not only justifies the believer but also redirects the whole of his life. Furthermore, as faith is not only a ‘sure knowledge’ but also a ‘wholehearted trust,’[18] faith seeks understanding of the knowledge of God as revealed in Christ, but it does not seek mastery. Faith orients our seeing of creation, but it also reiterates creatureliness, situating what we expect to find. Sometimes the responses to curious questions are beyond human comprehension or rightful investigation, inviting the asker into exploration of her creaturely dependence. As the Israelites in the desert taste and see the goodness of God through the daily provision of manna—literally, ‘what is it’ (Exodus 16). Sometimes the answer to the question ‘what is it?’ is simply God’s good provision. As the fool in Proverbs seeks the wrong things in the wrong ways—he’s like someone who follows the rabbit trail of clickbait and gossip—we are called to use our curiosity to find wisdom in light of our ‘fear of the Lord’ (Proverbs 1:7). Curiosity conditioned by faith accepts that some answers are beyond the limits of human reason, knows some things are unwise to pursue, and it also directs our other inquiry in a God-ward direction. Faith-filled curiosity commences and culminates in worship; curiosity in service to the wrong ends becomes twisted and warped.
Hope: Christian hope rests in the promises of Christ that at his coming again all things will be made new; his Kingdom will be consummated. As such, hope is filled with expectation and longing, and it rests within a world that still experiences the ramifications of what Makoto Fujimura once described as our “common curse.”[19] Because of this hope is paired with grief, longing, and lament. Hopeful curiosity engages the world on this side eternity, knowing that one is bound to find brokenness. However, the Christian doesn’t enter these spaces to gawk or gloat but join in the Spirit’s groaning (Romans 8)– asking questions and listening to stories, naming pain and brokenness, finding ways to creatively articulate the Christian hope of the Kingdom’s comsumation.
Love: Briefly, for the sake of time, love of God, neighbour, and creation direct Christian living and engagement with the world. Love, among other things, guards against pride. Thus, loving curiosity seeks the good of others and does not use the pursuit of knowledge nor knowledge gained for selfish ends. Rather, love seeks the ends that bring about human flourishing and worship of God.
In sum, if Curious George was a neo-Calvinist, he would not need saving by the Man with the Yellow Hat nor would his curiosity be limitless. Why? Because neo-Calvinist Curiosity is capacious (broad) yet tethered to creation and creaturely, conditioned or directed by that which we love, that for which we hope, and the Triune One in whom we have faith.
What does this mean for the scholar, who builds on natural human curiosity but directs it towards a particular area of study? There are several implications which give us a neo-Calvinist vision of Christian Scholarship. [20]
Formed to stand within a world open to exploration, the Christian scholar sees her work as exploring a gift in light of the giver. She receives the world in wonder as faith opens up the arena of creation, in all its complexity and multiformity. Or, as my colleague Justin Bailey has put it, “non-reductive curiosity is the fruit of faith.”[21]
Affirming created reality as a gift, the various disciplines are exploratory communities, utilizing their developed tools and methods to engage the world, seeking to know the riches of God’s creation and developing it. Even amid human limitations, the Christian scholar refuses anything that reduces creation to one particular aspect of it, knowing that would diminish the beauty of the gift itself—reducing the kaleidoscope of God’s creation to a single, still black and white picture. But the curious Calvinist attends to creation and what humans have done with it—in all their varied ways.
This is part of the profound contribution that the neo-Calvinist worldview makes make to Christian scholarship. For it maps out a world in which the mode of operation is a wide wondering. Curiosity without capaciousness limits the avenues open to Christian scholars, but a neo-Calvinist worldview opens up the world to exploration. Biology, mathematics, psychology, etc. within are legitimate arenas of inquiry.
And, within these arenas, the scholar’s curiosity is not limited to theological inquiry alone. Certainly, Christian scholars stand within a world mapped out by their faith and their discoveries do lead them to worship the Giver, but they don’t require a theology of one’s discipline or subject to do so. Why? Because the gift is intrinsically worth exploring and being curious about. The gift of creation is given to be known and developed using the kind curious imagining that each discipline offers. Yet scholars also sit within the life of faith, knowing that as they delight in seeking and finding, they do so before the face of the Triune God who is the origin and essence of all things. He is the only one who can satisfy the deepest needs of the heart and the mind. This is good news because curiosity without condition leads to endless searching and directing our search towards the wrong ends.
Furthermore, the Christian scholar is also aware that we are all grappling with the same gift but as we do, we face disciplinary limits. Thus, Christian scholars delight in being hospitable to others and curious about what humans have done as they’ve cultivated this gift of creation. No one person nor one discipline has the universal claim to knowledge. Thus, a curious Christian scholar respects disciplinary boundaries but also delights in murky boarders and the messiness of disciplinary dialogue. Similarly, Christian scholars are excited to sit down with others who see the world differently, realizing that it is possible to learn a great deal from those who have also grappled with created reality in rich, traditioned ways. They are also curious about the ways humans have responded to the cultural mandate, emphasizing the importance of knowing the history of humanity’s response to God (particularly within their disciplines)
Finally, Neo-Calvinist Christian scholarship is directed towards human flourishing and doxological in nature. The Christian scholar does not see her work as end in itself. Rather, it is conditioned by faith, hope, and love directing it towards its proper end.
There is more that could be said. We’ve only begun to unpack curiosity as the way of being in the world shared by Christian scholars within the neo-Calvinist tradition but I’ll close with this. The Albert M. Wolter’s Centre for Christian Scholarship, among other things, is so exciting because it forms and shapes scholars in its work, it forms curious Calvinists. Its practices and academic endeavors encourage and form capacious, conditioned curiosity rooted by continuing to pass on a living tradition-and by forming practices that cultivate it—like fellows, lecture series etc. For these illustrate scholarship, but they also continue to form scholars within a tradition in which curiosity is capacious and conditioned.
[1] See for example Margret and Hans Augusto Rey, Curious George Goes to the Hospital (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1966), 3.
[2] Kent Dennington, “Premodern Christian Perspectives on Curiosity,” in The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, eds. Ilhan Inan et al (London: Roman & Littlefield Publishing, 2018), 79. See also Lani Watson, “Introduction: The Moral Psychology of Curiosity,” in The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, eds. Ilhan Inan et al (London: Roman & Littlefield Publishing, 2018), 1-8.
[3] Lani Watson, “Educating for Curiosity,” in The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, eds. Ilhan Inan et al (London: Roman & Littlefield Publishing, 2018), 293-307.
[4] For a prime example of this see Augustine, Confessions, ed. Michael P. Foley, trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd Ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 10.35.54-46.
[5] Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basis for a Reformational Worldview, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 9.
[6] Wolters, Creation Regained, 5.
[7] Notwithstanding some important differences, the neo-Calvinist understanding of a world-and-life view bears more similarities to the contemporary concept of social imaginary than it does to modern evangelical notions of worldview that, quite frankly, intellectualize worldviews and articulate them as the key to winning a battle of ideas. From Kuyper through Vollenhoven, a firm commitment to finding the connection between everyday knowing and scientific knowing. First one lives, then one philosophizes. The scholar remains with his feet in the clay as he engages in theoretical reflection.
[8] Language from Kent Dennington, “Premodern Christian Perspectives on Curiosity,”
[9] In many ways bears similarities to the ancient intellectual virtues of studiositas (proper curiosity).
[10] See Bavinck RD, I, Chapters 7-9; Herman Bavinck, Christian Worldview, trans. Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, Cory Brock, and James Eglinton (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), Chapter 1. See also Gayle Doornbos, “Herman Bavinck’s Trinitarian Theology: The Ontological, Cosmological, and Soteriological Dimensions of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Ph.D Dissertation (University of St. Michael’s College, 2019), Chapters 2-3.
[11] See Herman Bavinck, RD, I, Chapter 16.
[12] Language from Justin Ariel Bailey, Interpreting your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022),223
[13] This insight arises from a conversation with my colleague at Dordt University, Justin Bailey.
[14] Herman Bavinck, “Catholicity of Christianity,” trans. John, Bolt, Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992): 225.
[15] See Abraham Kuyper, “Scholastica II,” in Scholarship: Two Convocation Addresses on University Life, trans. Harry Van Dyke (Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2014), 23-25.Interestingly, Kuyper uses a hunting analogy in this address, which is also found in Hume’s treatment of Curiosity in David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, New Ed edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.3.10.
[16] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols.trans. John Vriend, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003-2008), I:260.
[17] Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), x.
[18] Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 21.
[19] Makoto Fujimura,“Japanese Aesthetics and Reformed Theology: Reflections on Rikyū, Kintsugi, and Endō,” in Reformed Public Theology: A Global Vision for Life in the World, ed. Matthew Kaemingk (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic), 171.
[20] That which is built on everyday curiosity and life in the world but examines and explores created reality via the means and methods of various disciplines,
[21] Bailey, Interpreting your World, 225.
Thank you, Dr. Doornbos, for your excellent presentation! It is a delight to see you back at Redeemer University after your years as an undergraduate here, and to witness how you have become a scholar in your own right within the Neocalvinist tradition. It is a great pleasure for me to respond briefly to your reflections on this special occasion.
In the brief time at my disposal I want to do two things. First I will interact briefly with what Dr. Doornbos (I’ll drop formality and refer to her as Gayle)—what Gayle has said about curiosity in her lecture. Second, I will take this opportunity to say a few personal words about this special occasion as the official launch of the Albert M. Wolters Centre for Christian Scholarship.
First then: it is fascinating to see the changing fortunes of the idea of curiosity. This is true not only of Curious George, as Gayle pointed out, but also of culture at large, as we witness a change from a more negative view of curiosity, which sees it as a prelude to things going wrong (as in “curiosity killed the cat”), to a more positive view, which sees curiosity as an intellectual virtue.
We find this same development in theology, and more specifically in the Calvinist tradition. When I first heard the title of Gayle’s presentation I thought: “Isn’t there something in the Reformed confessions about the dangers of curiosity?” And sure enough, after some digging I found two places (there may be more) which speak negatively of investigating things “curiously.”
The first one is from the Belgic Confession, Article 13, which deals with the providence of God, where we read, “We do not wish to inquire with undue curiosity into what God does that surpasses human understanding and is beyond our ability to comprehend.” In the official version of the Belgic Confession which was adopted by the Synod of Dordt the original French of the phrase “with undue curiosity” is simply curieusement, “curiously.”[1] It is not just “undue curiosity” that we should avoid, but curiosity itself.
The second place is found in the Canons of Dordt, Article I,12, dealing with the assurance of election, where we read: “Such assurance comes not by inquisitive searching into the hidden and deep things of God.” Here the original language is Latin, and the phrase “inquisitive searching” translates curiose scrutando, literally “searching curiously.”[2] Here it seems there is another warning against curiosity.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century and we find the positive evaluation of curiosity in many writings, including avowedly Neocalvinist ones, like the excellent presentation we just heard. Just last week I saw it used in this positive way in a book on Christian mindfulness published by a Calvin University professor in 2020, and the examples could be easily multiplied.
Are we to conclude from these examples that there is a tension between this contemporary way of speaking positively about curiosity and that of the Reformed confessions? Not at all. Not only are we dealing here with the perfectly ordinary shift in lexical meaning of the word “curiosity” (from the pejorative “nosiness” to the neutral “desire to know”), but if we look more closely at the “curiosity” against which the Reformed confessions warn us, we learn that it is specifically curiosity about the hidden things of God, either in explaining the inscrutable ways of providence or the election of believers. As finite human beings we should not try to pry into things that God has chosen not to reveal to us. This is precisely the point that Gayle makes when she says that “curiosity is creaturely and therefore limited by what it means to be human and remains tethered to creation,” and ”curiosity is conditioned by creaturely limits” (p. 4).
Thus the contemporary dictionary meaning of “curiosity” as simply the “desire to know” is perfectly legitimate and is an excellent way of referring to the human quest for knowledge in general which is part of the cultural mandate, a quest which occurs not only in our everyday experience, but also in the academic disciplines of the university. And that curiosity is indeed capacious in the sense that it is creation-wide. You might say that for the curiosity of the Christian academic (and of the ordinary Christian believer) “the sky is the limit,” in the sense that “heaven” is the limit, the heaven where God dwells. The entire earthly creation lies before us to be marveled at and explored.
So yes, our curiosity is capacious, as Gayle has explained. But it is also conditioned. It is conditioned by our faith commitment and the tradition in which we are embedded. That faith and that tradition provide us with a world and life view, or what Lesslie Newbigin called a “plausibility structure,” in terms of which we make sense of the world. Gayle has laid out clearly what some of the key themes are of such a Neocalvinist plausibility structure. I would single out especially her emphasis on irreducible complexity as a corollary of the biblical notion of creation.
I turn now to the second focus of my remarks. It is a great honour for me to have been chosen, as representative of the founding generation of Redeemer University, to have my name attached to this Centre. Although I was not part of the original faculty of Redeemer, I was one of the founding members of the Ontario Christian College Association in 1976, and I was also a member of the board when Redeemer opened its doors in 1982, and a member of the curriculum subcommittee which prepared for that opening. It is fitting, at this time of celebrating Redeemer’s fortieth anniversary, to remember the work and legacy of that founding generation, and its vision for a full-fledged Christian university in Ontario. We were a flawed group of men and women, but God used us in spite of our flaws to do an amazing thing. As we will be reminded repeatedly during these days of celebration and remembrance, God time and again miraculously opened up unexpected opportunities for Redeemer over those forty years.
From the outset we were very clear and explicit about the fact that we stood in an identifiable Christian tradition, the tradition of Dutch Neocalvinism, associated with such names as Kuyper and Bavinck, Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd, which in turn is a manifestation of a broader Christian tradition that goes back to the church fathers and Scripture itself. This Neocalvinism is a tradition that stresses the universal claims of Christ’s kingship, the pivotal role of a world and life view in human affairs, not least in academic affairs, and the necessity of making scholarship serviceable for the modern world in which we live.
It is very encouraging to me that Redeemer continues to explicitly situate itself in that tradition, and that the Centre which now bears my name actively promotes this emphasis, and seeks cooperative connections with likeminded centres across the globe. I pay tribute to the first two Directors of the Centre, first Rob and now Jessica Joustra, for actively promoting an awareness of the Centre’s historical roots, and of the necessity to make this historical rootedness fruitful for a rapidly changing world. May God continue to bless the Centre as a visible signpost of Christ’s kingdom in the academic world!
[1] J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink, ed., De Nederlandse Belijdenisgeschriften in authentieke teksten met inleiding en tekstvergelijkingen. Tweede druk (Amsterdam: Ton Bolland, 1976), p. 90.
[2] Op. cit., p. 234.