By Dr. Nicholas DiDonato
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom have you made them all.
Psalm 104:24
“I pity the fool!” While not as eloquent as Proverbs, Mr. T nevertheless makes the point: foolishness, folly, and those who embrace them, are to be pitied. Yet, even the great Mr. T only reaches the halfway point: it is not enough simply to avoid the life of the fool, but one must follow the path of wisdom. And what is at the end of that path? Where does that path lead? In the Christian tradition, and in the Western tradition more generally, wisdom is a virtue because it brings the wise to none other than Christ. What follows is but a brief sketch of the history of the Greek word for wisdom, sophia, tracing its meanings from the pre-Socratic period, to the Hellenic philosophical schools, through to its incorporation into Second Temple Judaism, and ultimately into the hands of Christians.
In the pre-Socratic period, sophia denoted “materially complete” knowledge. It was mastery of what we would call “know how;” practical skills such as building, statecraft, wrestling, etc., counted as wisdom. The key behind the wisdom (sophia) of these “know how” skills is that they are mastered by learning, not by pure physical power or brute force. The wise wrestler, for instance, wins not by superior strength but by superior technique, skill, and strategy. As sophia moves into the classical Greek period, the “know how” refers specifically to applying eternal Truth to one’s life. Consequently, sophia becomes abstract in content (since it refers now to eternal Truth rather than to concrete truths such as how to build a house), and the wise man is understood as a virtuous and good person, precisely because he knows how to order his life according to what naturally, eternally True.
The Hellenic philosophical schools take this highly abstract yet eminently practical notion of sophia and run with it! For Plato, sophia is knowledge of true Being, that is, what is unchangingly and ultimately real. In contrast to the world of change or becoming, true Being is made known and is nourished by the Good. Plato contrasts the one who knows merely beautiful things (which come and go—the world of becoming) with the Beautiful Itself (which is unchanging and the source of all beauty).
At first, it may sound like Plato ruined the practical dimensions of sophia, but the opposite is the case: the truly educated, wise man is himself transformed by the Good and Beautiful because he has trained his desires to desire what is truly, unchangingly, and ultimately Good and Beautiful. Consequently, his soul will be properly ordered to what is real, and he will be happy. And, of course, this transformation into the likeness of the Good and Beautiful (insofar as it’s possible) whose end result is true happiness can only be divine (hence the capitalization). Wisdom’s content, then, is nothing less than divine, and divine not in the sense of academic theology, but in the sense of, if the anachronism can be forgiven, sanctification. In fact, for Plato, none of the other virtues are possible without wisdom. Aristotle too saw the divine as the content as wisdom, but he understood this in the more narrow sense of the knowledge of the first causes, first principles, and final teloi (that is, purpose or goal of a thing that brings that thing to perfection or completion). In general, the pagan philosophers recognized sophia as being near to what is divine, and therefore as a bridge to the Divine.
The Jews of the Second Temple period were far from oblivious to these philosophical developments and applied what they thought true to their theology. For example, The Wisdom of Sirach treats Wisdom as divine in its own right, yet distinct from God Himself (hopefully this sounds Greek), and also as a Person: in some contexts, the student of Wisdom is her lover and bride, and in others is her mother (hopefully this sounds Hebrew). The Wisdom of Solomon goes a step further and sees union with Wisdom as union with God. Like Sirach, Wisdom is treated as a divine person, but this divine person is in some sense God Himself, which creates the oddity that the Wisdom of God both is God and reveals God; that is, Wisdom is a revelation of God to man that somehow is also God.
If you’re thinking, “This sounds like the relationship between the Father and the Son,” Augustine could not agree more. Drawing heavily upon The Wisdom of Solomon (which for him was part of the canon), Augustine equates the Son, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, with Wisdom itself, and reads the parts of the Book of Wisdom summarized above as a prophecy of Christ. Indeed, the Apostle Paul himself declared that Christ is both the power of God and the Wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). In Augustine’s thought, the Logos, who is the rational order behind all things, is the Wisdom of God, and thus is both a person and true Being that we ought to conform our desires to. Wisdom, being the Son, unites us to the Father by uniting us to Himself. He reveals God as the Good and Beautiful. He is the Alpha and Omega: the true cause, principle, and telos of all things. He is the bridegroom, and the Church is His bride.
The importance of sophia for classical Christian education is difficult to understate. Classically, as noted above, education is learning to desire what is truly desirable (the Good, the Beautiful, the Real, etc.) so that we can live a happy life. For a distinctly Christian classical education, Goodness Itself, Beauty Itself, and Being Itself are “transcendentals;” that is, they are God’s very presence or action in the world. Putting the pieces together, classical Christian education leads students to the Wisdom of God—Who is the Son—so that they may fulfill their calling to be not merely the image but the likeness of God, by being made into the likeness of Christ Himself, which is the same as Him transforming us into the likeness of the Good, the Beautiful, etc. (the likeness of God) where true happiness is found. Classical Christian education teaches us to love the Wisdom of God (Christ) so that we may be transformed by Christ.
Perhaps we don’t pity fools as Mr. T does—but we should. Fools are bereft of Wisdom and therefore bereft of God. Wisdom is practical skill: the skill of conforming oneself to the Logos, such that one can draw near to God, being transformed into His likeness, wherein is found true happiness. Wisdom is personal, or more precisely, being God, is the very measure of true Personhood against which we all fall short. In this sense, we can all be pitied, but always with the knowledge that God has taken pity on us.
