WISDOM AND LIFE

by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam

Wisdom in Christianity as in every tradition, can mean more than one thing. There is the biblical wisdom that consists in nothing other than a 'listening heart', and there is that irreproachable wisdom which is the integrity of a life of faith. These wisdoms have no shadow. When we speak of a wisdom theology, or way of wisdom, however, the infinitesimal beginning of a swerve toward elitism and an exclusive territory can be detected. It will not be long, of we are not careful, before we are building at a comfortable distance from the gospel.

History abounds in these constructions; Gnosticism exhibits the most luxuriant specimens of them in the world of early Christianity. Paul rudely brushes them all aside to affirm the one valid Christian wisdom that is the 'word of the cross.' (1 Cor 1:17-31) The virus can be fatal or it can merely weaken the life of Christian faith. We must not become too rigoristic in our judgments, however. Do not some of the Greek Fathers seem to overvalue knowledge in comparison with love and life? Do they not suggest an elite category of Christian gnostics, much as the Gnostics themselves do? I am thinking of Clement, Evagrius - and to some extent others of the Platonist Fathers.

For us today, the recovery of a wisdom Christianity is vital. It is one long step back toward the fullness of Christianity, of the Christ-Mystery realized today. And so we need also a way of wisdom, a wisdom epistemology, a wisdom theology with its own language.

But we must never forget that wisdom always leads beyond itself. This is witnessed by the life of the Word Incarnate upon earth. Wisdom leads to union, to the unitive realization, to incarnation, to action and suffering, to martyrdom, to the seed falling into the ground. Wisdom too is the seed that must fall into the ground lest it remain alone and not bear fruit.

Jesus himself is the Wisdom of God become incarnate, become a human being. The first phase of his public life is Revelation, the lamp upon its lampstand, the manifestation of God in this incarnate divine Word. But in this phase of manifestation already, the divine Wisdom points firmly beyond this phase, to a time when the Bridegroom, the divine Word, the divine Wisdom and Manifestation, will be taken away. And this is necessary; otherwise 'the Spirit will not come to you.'

The Seed of divine Wisdom falling into the ground of death, of humanity - and thus into the Ground of the Father - is a further stage of incarnation of divine Wisdom. The pattern seems always to be this: Manifestation and Incarnation, the two phases. Only then can there come the third phase of Resurrection, of the sprouting forth of the new and abundant fruit, the Pentecostal first fruits.

So it is that Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians (ch. 1 and 2), seems to speak of wisdom only hesitantly, reluctantly. First he denies that he has any wisdom, that he brings any wisdom with him to the Corinthians. Then he affirms, O yes, we do have a wisdom. It is the wisdom of the cross. Only the wisdom that disappears, that recycles itself, that has the freedom to go into the ground and come forth again, can be the true wisdom. Only the wisdom that can become unwisdom, only the wisdom that can die to itself and to the world is the true wisdom. This is the wisdom of Christ, of the Gospel and of the cross, as Paul says.

In this way Christianity and Christian wisdom seem to distinguish themselves from the other wisdom traditions. But perhaps not so clearly as we might have thought. Do not all the authentic and highly developed wisdom traditions agree on this point: that the only true and ultimate wisdom is that which is a death and rebirth, an unbeing and rebeing? Buddhism proclaims this principle with special clarity. So much so that the teaching itself disappears into the unwisdoming, the emptiness, the nothing. The teaching of the Buddha is a self-deconstructing wisdom which parallels the wisdom of the cross.

It is very important to recognize this principle at the outset, so that the pursuit of Christian Wisdom will not become the pursuit or the confection of another idol, and will not lead to a kind of self-worship rather than union with God. Paul is saying that wisdom itself - whatever wisdom - is swallowed up by the event of Christ, by the gospel, by the cross. The pursuit of wisdom inevitably leads you beyond wisdom, beyond anything you can seek or cultivate or name or anything that you could possibly care about. Jesus implies this when he responds to Nicodemus. It's a matter of being born again, rather than the acquisition of some teaching, doctrine, wisdom. This being born again involves the death of wisdom as we know and prize it. .

Knowing, and epistemology - the understanding of knowing itself - is vitally important for us. It is essential that we discover the unitive reality, the unitive experience, the unitive central Self: advaita, sunyata, atman... But that is not the end. The unitive experience or realization is not the end but a taste of the 'Beginning', from which we move out into life, into the world. This unitive awakening corresponds to Christian baptism or illumination. But it is not yet the end, not yet eucharist. For eucharist, the seed must fall into the ground.

Well then, why bother with 'wisdom' at all in Christianity? Because it is a vital stretch of the road, a vital phase, because it is a territory near the center, it is just outside Jerusalem, it is the outer court of the Temple. Here is the scent and taste of the Center, the awakening and courtship of the heart, here is the music that charms us into life and draws us to the holy city. But the holy city is only entered by self-surrender, and this requires the inversion and deconstruction even of wisdom itself.

Much more remains to be said about the rediscovery of the original Christ-event, the Christ-mystery, the pleroma, through walking the way of wisdom back to the beginning, back to the Big Bang of Easter and Pentecost, back through the country of the New Testament, teeming with life, to the original welling forth, the original Gift in its fullness.

Aside from something happening to us - one of life's rough initiations - or a life of self-giving in love, it is probably the way of wisdom that leads most directly into this original country. The way of wisdom leads us close enough so that we can remain within the gravitational field of the Center, the pulsing Christ-heart in which the fullness dwells. And the way of wisdom also weaves a fabric of understanding, of intuitive communication, through this penultimate country. It builds an infrastructure, a 'culture', whether individual or communal and social, that makes the country habitable. The way of wisdom ploughs the waiting fields of this country in our psyche and plants them, so that the fruits are continually coming forth. The country becomes more than habitable; it brings forth its bread and its wine, both of them tasting of Paradise.

But we must always remember: the lights will go out, the night will come, the seed will descend into the ground, this bright consciousness with its music will become a setting sun. This is the law of Incarnation from which wisdom itself is not exempt, the law of the cross that remains the heart of wisdom - until the sun of resurrection rise.

Life is greater than wisdom, but without wisdom life is miserable. Wisdom must always be serving life. Must life always be seeking wisdom?

But life has more than one meaning; it has many. Two of them are competing in my mind at present:

1) life as humanity, as human existence, as ordinary and common human existence which in its concrete humility and confusion is better than any bright specialization. Call this the water of natural human life.

2) life as the fullness of Life which we are continually seeking; as drinking continually of the Holy Spirit; as wine rather than water.

Can we say that wisdom is the way between these two, the road from 1) to 2)? This is true ideally. It is also good to insist, however, upon the latent, invisible fullness of simple human life. Let us resist not only the idolizing of wisdom but the idolizing of experience by placing all the value in 2).

Wisdom should open ordinary human life so that the fullness which is within it can be known and can itself illuminate the road of life. It is this fullness, hidden beneath the surface of the everyday life of each of us, that matters. Both are important: the fullness and its hiddenness. The hiddenness is incarnation, is the cross in epistemological key. The hiddenness is the necessary veil, the enclosure, the vessel, the womb, without which the Mystery could not come to term and the Child be born.

We speak of faith in Christianity much more often than we speak of wisdom. This is right; it corresponds to the primary law of Incarnation and to the marvelous embrace of all the creation in God, to the universal recapitulation in Christ.

We have forgotten, however, that faith is the container of wisdom, and therefore it should be bulging with the interior fullness and emitting radioactivity. The fullness of wisdom is concentrated within faith like all that energy within the solid nucleus of the atom. But without some insight it may remain totally unconscious of itself - and consequently the seed which it is may never burst open into its glory - or live more than a sneaking life.

Real faith is not sterile, that is, but pregnant. Wisdom is the awareness of this roundness, the inner plenitude that is ours.