Where is Wisdom to be Found?

The penultimate Chapel services for the Junior School and the Grade 10s and the last Chapel services for the Grade 11s and Grade 12s centered on wisdom, as befits, I hope, the life of a school. The School prayer notes that wisdom is of God: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding.” All wisdom belongs to God.

The reading from The Wisdom of Solomon read on Monday and Tuesday is a wonderful paean of praise to wisdom as created by God and as mirroring the life of God. Wisdom, Sophia in Greek, “is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of God,” “a reflection of eternal light,” “an image of divine goodness.” Wisdom, we are told, “renews all things;” and “in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God.” On Thursday and Friday, the reading from The Book of Job highlights the divine nature and source of wisdom. “Where shall wisdom be found?” Job asks, and tells us that we “do not know the way to it;” that “it is not in the deep of the sea;” that it can’t be bought and sold; that it is above the price of pearls and gold. For it is from God and belongs to God: “God understands the way to it, and he knows its place” in the whole order of creation. God rules by wisdom and tells us that “the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” These are powerful and arresting statements that speak to the radical nature of education.

Education, ultimately, is about the pursuit of wisdom and understanding. There can be no education without a respect for learning and that can only happen through the quest or desire for wisdom. This ancient truth - as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh and embodied in many of the world’s traditions of religion and philosophy - speaks to the meaning of our humanity. As Aristotle says, it belongs to our very nature to desire to know. We crave meaning and purpose in our lives. It belongs to the pilgrimage of our souls. And yet it is a challenge and a struggle for every age, and certainly for ours. For wisdom is not information and not knowledge. It is something more.

“Where is the life we have lost in living?”, T.S. Eliot asks in his verse pageant play “Choruses From the Rock,” written and performed in 1934. He was not referring to Newfoundland. The image of the Rock belongs to God in the Hebrew Scriptures and is taken up as a term for Christ in the New Testament. He goes on to ask “where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” and notes that “The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.” The whole pageant is a critical comment on the confusions and contradictions of contemporary culture, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, an awakening call to reclaim the light of wisdom and understanding that alone can provide meaning and purpose to an otherwise empty and despairing world. Information is not knowledge; and knowledge is not wisdom.

We often forget this. You are more than data-generating entities. School is not about cramming bits and bytes of information into your head making you more like automatons and less like human beings. There is a lot of know-how knowledge but very little in the way of know-what knowledge. Yet that is utterly crucial for the way of wisdom and understanding. It belongs to our lives as spiritual and intellectual beings. The pursuit of wisdom and understanding acknowledges an intelligible world grounded in an intellectual principle; such is the wisdom of God. The quest for wisdom belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.

In northern Italy during the sixth century, a time of confusion and disarray following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Boethius wrote a remarkable work entitled The Consolation of Philosophy. It had an enormous influence on the shaping of the intellectual life of European culture and beyond. It was translated from Latin into the various forms of English, for instance, by Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Elizabeth I. But Boethius was writing in the face of the ruin of his scholarly and political career in which he had been slandered and falsely accused. Ultimately, he would be executed. In his despair, Lady Philosophy appears to him and recalls him to his true self and to the providential reason or intellect of God that is the ruling force of all things. O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas: “O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason.” For, as Wisdom itself teaches, “against wisdom evil does not prevail” and “God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.” And indeed, among the few scriptural references in the Consolatio, there is an explicit reference to The Book of Wisdom. “Wisdom reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things well.” Fortiter et suaviter. Strongly and sweetly, we might say.

The pursuit of wisdom is not about our manipulation and control of nature or of one another, which results in what C.S. Lewis called the abolition of our humanity. This, too, is shown in the Consolatio by the dress of Lady Philosophy embroidered with the two Greek letters PI and Theta, signifying practical and theoretical wisdom. A ladder connects them. Yet that is where her dress is torn, signifying the separation of the practical and the theoretical occasioned by ignorance and violence.

Education is about the desire to learn and to know the true, the good and the beautiful, to use Plato’s terms, and carries over into living and acting out of what is learned. It is a life-long project which speaks to the dignity of our humanity and to its highest potentialities. It shapes character and gives us the strength to face the ups and downs, the uncertainties and confusions of our own hearts and world, and all evil. It recognises that wisdom is of God and not simply a human construct.  Our year in Chapel has been in the pursuit of wisdom and understanding, wrestling with the various images of Scripture and thought in the quiet of the early morning. I can only thank you for your patience and attention and hope that something of the consolation of philosophy has been glimpsed by you and will remain with you. The fear of the Lord, meaning the wonder and awe of God, is the beginning of wisdom.