Three Kinds of Wisdom

The holy apostle wants to teach us something great and hidden about knowledge and wisdom, and so in his first letter to the Corinthians he says: “We speak wisdom among those who are mature — yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, who are coming to nothing. We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom that God appointed before the world for our glory, which none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” [a]

In this passage he means to set out the different kinds of wisdom, and he points out that there is a wisdom of this world, and a wisdom of the rulers of this world, and another wisdom that is God’s own. But when he uses the phrase “the wisdom of the rulers of this world,” I do not think he means one wisdom shared by all the rulers of this world. I think he means a wisdom that belongs to certain individuals among them.

And again, when he says, “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom that God appointed before the world for our glory,” we have to ask what he means. Is this the same wisdom of God that was hidden from other times and generations and was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets? Is it also the wisdom of God that existed before the Savior came, the wisdom by which Solomon got his own wisdom — the wisdom the Savior himself had in view when he said that what he taught was greater than Solomon’s, in the words, “Look, something greater than Solomon is here”? Those words show that the people the Savior taught were being taught something higher than Solomon’s knowledge.

For if someone were to claim that the Savior did indeed possess greater knowledge himself but passed on no more of it to others than Solomon did, how does that square with the statement that follows? “The queen of the south will rise up at the judgment and condemn the men of this generation, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and look, something greater than Solomon is here.”

So there is a wisdom of this world, and probably a wisdom belonging to each individual ruler of this world as well. But about the wisdom of God, and it alone, we see this indicated: that it was at work to a lesser degree in ancient and earlier times, and was afterward more fully revealed and made plain through Christ. We will take up the wisdom of God, however, in its proper place.

Now, since we are dealing with the way the opposing powers stir up these struggles — the way false knowledge is planted in people’s minds and human souls are led astray while they imagine they have discovered wisdom — I think we have to name these kinds of wisdom and tell them apart: the wisdom of this world, and the wisdom of the rulers of this world. That way we can find out who the fathers of this wisdom are, or rather of these several kinds of wisdom. [f]

My view, then, as I said above, is that besides the various kinds of wisdom belonging to the rulers of this world there is another wisdom, the wisdom of this world, and that it is by this wisdom that the things belonging to this world seem to be understood and grasped. This wisdom, however, has nothing in it that fits a person to form a judgment about the divine, or about the plan by which the world is governed, or about any other matter of importance, or about the training that makes for a good and happy life. It deals entirely with such things as the art of poetry, or grammar, or rhetoric, or geometry, or music — and medicine should probably be counted along with them. All of these subjects, we are to take it, are included in the wisdom of this world.

The wisdom of the rulers of this world, on the other hand, we take to be things like the secret and hidden philosophy, as they call it, of the Egyptians, and the astrology of the Chaldeans and the Indians, who promise knowledge of the things on high, and also the enormous variety of opinion about the divine that prevails among the Greeks.

And in fact in the holy Scriptures we find that there are rulers set over individual nations. In Daniel we read of a ruler of the kingdom of Persia and another ruler of the kingdom of Greece, who are clearly shown by the nature of the passage to be not human beings but powers of some kind. In the prophecies of Ezekiel, too, the ruler of Tyre is unmistakably shown to be a spiritual power of some sort.

So when these, and others like them, each holding his own wisdom and building up his own opinions and convictions, saw our Lord and Savior declaring openly that he had come into the world for this very purpose, that all the teachings of what is falsely called knowledge might be destroyed — then, not knowing what was hidden inside him, they immediately laid a trap for him. For “the kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ.” But their traps were exposed, and the plans they had tried to carry out were made plain, when they crucified the Lord of glory. And so the apostle says: “We speak wisdom among those who are mature, but not the wisdom of this world, nor of the rulers of this world, who are coming to nothing — a wisdom none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

We do have to try to work out whether these kinds of wisdom belonging to the rulers of this world, which they try to soak into people’s minds, are put there by the opposing powers in order to trap and injure them, or only in order to mislead them — that is, with no intention of doing anyone harm, but because these rulers of this world consider such opinions to be true and want to pass on to others what they themselves believe is the truth. That is the view I am inclined to take. [i]

Take an illustration. Certain Greek authors, or the leaders of some sect, take in an error of teaching instead of the truth, settle it in their own minds that this is the truth, and then set about persuading others that their opinions are correct. We are to suppose that the rulers of this world go about it in the same way — the rulers being certain spiritual powers to whom rule over certain nations has been assigned, and who are called rulers of this world for that reason.

Besides these rulers there are also certain particular energies at work in this world — spiritual powers, that is, which bring about certain effects that they have chosen of their own free will to produce; and the rulers who practice the wisdom of this world belong among them. There is, for instance, one particular energy and power that inspires poetry, another that inspires geometry, and a separate power to prompt us in each of the arts and professions of this kind.

Finally, many Greek writers have held that the art of poetry cannot exist without madness, and their histories accordingly relate several times that the men they call seers were suddenly filled with a kind of spirit of madness. And what are we to say about the men they call diviners, who give their answers in carefully built verses through the working of the demons that have mastery over them? Or about the people they call magicians or sorcerers, who by calling demons down over young boys have often made the boys recite poems that astonished and amazed everyone?

Now we are to suppose that these effects come about in the following way. Holy and undefiled souls devote themselves to God with all their love and purity, keep themselves clear of any contact with demons, are purified by long abstinence, and are steeped in holy and religious training; and by this means they take into themselves a share of what is divine and earn the grace of prophecy and other divine gifts. In the same way, we are to suppose, those who put themselves in the way of the opposing powers — who deliberately admire and adopt their way of life and their habits — receive their inspiration and come to share their wisdom and their teaching. And the result is that they are filled with the working of the spirits whose service they have submitted to.

As for those who teach about Christ differently from what the rule of Scripture allows, it is no idle question whether these opposing powers, in their struggle to prevent belief in Christ, devised certain made-up and irreverent teachings out of deliberate treachery; or whether, on hearing the word of Christ and being able neither to throw it out of the hiding place of their own conscience nor to keep it pure and holy, they used vessels convenient to their purpose — their own prophets, so to speak — to bring in various errors contrary to the rule of Christian truth. [m]

We should rather suppose that it was powers that had rebelled and deserted — powers that left God out of the sheer wickedness of their mind and will, or out of envy of those for whom, once they came to know the truth, a climb was being prepared up to the very rank the deserters had fallen from — and that it was to block any advance of that kind that they invented these errors and delusions of false teaching.

It is clearly established, then, and by many proofs, that while the soul of a person is in this body it can admit different energies — that is, different operations — from a variety of spirits, good and evil. Now wicked spirits work in two ways. Either they take complete and entire possession of the mind, so that those they have seized are left with no power of understanding or feeling — as is the case with the people commonly called possessed, whom we see stripped of reason and out of their senses, like those the Gospel says the Savior cured. Or else by their evil suggestions they corrupt a soul that is still perceiving and understanding, filling it with thoughts of every kind and persuading it to evil. Judas is an example of that: at the devil’s suggestion he was brought to commit the crime of treason, as Scripture declares — “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray him.”

A person receives the energy — the working, that is — of a good spirit when he is stirred and urged on toward good, and inspired toward heavenly and divine things. That is how the holy angels, and God himself, worked in the prophets, rousing them and urging them by their holy promptings toward a better course of life; and yet in such a way that it remained within each man’s own will and judgment whether he was willing to follow the call to divine and heavenly things or not.

From this plain distinction you can see how the soul is moved by the presence of a better spirit: namely, if it meets with no disturbance or displacement of mind at all from the inspiration coming upon it, and does not lose the free control of its own will. That is how it was with all of them, prophets and apostles alike, who served the divine answers with no disturbance of mind. And that the memory of a person is roused by the promptings of a good spirit to recall better things, we have already shown by earlier instances, when we mentioned Mordecai and Artaxerxes.

This too, I think, should be looked into next: what the reasons are why a human soul is acted on at one time by good spirits and at another by bad. I suspect that the grounds of it are older than the person’s bodily birth. John showed as much by leaping and exulting in his mother’s womb when the sound of Mary’s greeting reached the ears of his mother Elizabeth; and so did Jeremiah the prophet, who was known to God before he was formed in his mother’s womb, was set apart by him before he was born, and while still a boy received the grace of prophecy. [r]

And on the other hand it is shown beyond any doubt that some people have been held by hostile spirits from the very beginning of their lives: some were born with an evil spirit in them, and others, according to trustworthy histories, have practiced divination from childhood. Others have been under the influence of the demon called Python — the ventriloquial spirit — from the start of their existence.

To all these instances, those who hold that everything in the world is under the administration of divine providence — which is our own belief as well — can give, as it seems to me, no other answer that would clear the divine government of the least shadow of injustice, except this: that there were certain causes going back before birth, and that on account of them the souls, before their birth in a body, took on a certain amount of guilt in their power of perception or in the movements they made, and were on that account judged by divine providence to deserve being placed in this condition.

For a soul is always in possession of free will, both when it is in the body and when it is outside one, and freedom of the will is always directed either to good or to evil. Nor can any rational and perceiving being — that is, any mind or soul — exist without some movement, good or bad. And it is probable that these movements supply the grounds of desert even before the souls do anything in this world, so that on account of these deserts, or grounds, they are sorted by divine providence, immediately at their birth and even before it, so to speak, for the enduring of either good or evil.

Let that stand, then, as our view of the things that appear to befall people either right after birth or even before they come into the light. But as for the suggestions made to the soul — that is, to the faculty of human thought — by different spirits, rousing people to good actions or to the opposite, even here we must suppose that in some cases certain causes existed before bodily birth. For sometimes the mind, keeping watch and throwing off what is evil, calls the help of the good to itself; and sometimes, being careless and lazy instead, it makes room through insufficient caution for those spirits which lie in wait in secret like robbers and contrive to rush into people’s minds when they see that sloth has made them a lodging. As the apostle Peter says: “Our adversary the devil goes about like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.”

For that reason our heart must be guarded with every care, by day and by night, and no place given to the devil. Every effort must go into this: that the ministers of God — the spirits, that is, who are sent out to serve those who are called to inherit salvation — may find a place within us and be glad to enter the guest room of our soul, and, living within us, may guide us by their counsels; provided, of course, that they find the dwelling of our heart furnished by the practice of virtue and holiness. But let what we have said, as best we could, about the powers hostile to the human race be enough.