“With thee is wisdom”
The grey month of November is not only the month of remembering but also of wisdom. In the pattern of the readings for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we begin on this Sunday to read from the Apocrypha, from those books which stand between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and which have a special sort of status, wonderfully captured in the sixth article of our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion which articulate an Anglican understanding of the Catholic Faith.
The article does not provide actually give a generic term for these books, such as Apocrypha or Deutero-canonical. It simply and in a wonderfully economical way refers to them as “other books” before actually naming them individually; it doesn’t even clearly state that they are or are not canonical.
They are an interesting and intriguing collection. At issue is how they are read and understood. This is the point of the article: having listed the Old Testament books, it goes on to say, “And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” (BCP, p. 700). The appeal here is to the Patristic period which worked out both the essential doctrines of the Christian Faith ultimately creedally expressed and the canonical texts of the Bible. The reference to Hierome means Jerome, the outstanding translator of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin Vulgate which was the defining text for 1500 years and more for the cultures of the West.
The Psalms in the Prayer Book bear quiet but eloquent testimony to the influence of Jerome’s translation: Latin titles derived from the first words of each psalm remain part of the Prayer Book Psalter and have since Coverdale’s 1535 translation. They remind us of the greater legacy and lineage of scriptural doctrine and introduce an important qualifier about the rightly celebrated reformation claim, sola scriptura, ‘scripture alone’. Yes, but in and through a tradition of translation and reception. In this case, the reformed elements of classical Anglicanism defer knowingly to the received understanding of the Patristic period, referring, after all, to Jerome, the Prince of Translators, and specifically to his understanding about the nature of these “other books.”
It is all a kind of wisdom. Our first lesson is from The Book of Wisdom, probably written in Alexandria during the latter part of the first century BC. It presents itself as being from the pen of Solomon and our lesson as the actual prayer of King Solomon, a figure from a far, far earlier period. It is really a fiction that is part of the larger discourse on wisdom which belongs to a category of biblical literature known as Wisdom Literature. The point is that it is not exactly historical, at least in our modern sense, but robustly theological. It complements, I think, our second lesson from Luke which bids us watch and wait and to read the times carefully. It is a kind of wakeful call to being thoughtful or wise, looking always to God and his truth active in our lives and our world. It entails an awareness of judgment and a sense of always living in the end-times where wisdom is precisely the only and essential thing.
But what is wisdom? Our age is profoundly conflicted and confused about wisdom. The age of information, the digital age, is not an age of wisdom. There is, to be perfectly blunt about it, not an ounce of knowledge, let alone wisdom, in the world of digital technology. What limited knowledge and possible wisdom might be found therein lies entirely in the humans who are busily bustling about trying to create machines that know all the while forgetting their very selves, unwittingly unknowing.
Many, I know, are fascinated and enthralled by all of this, forgetting, it seems to me, two things: consciousness and creativity. It is a beguiling thought that we could create a machine that then has no need of its creator. Think about it for a moment and you will see the whole pageant of creation and the fall. It was all about thinking that we could exist without the God who created us, that we could determine the ultimate principles of our own existence. As if thought and being were simultaneous in us; a privilege and a truth that belongs and can only belong to God.
And mercifully so. In a way, the distresses and disorders of our world and day stem entirely from assuming the unity of theory and practice. To be sure, there is an important relation between thinking and doing. The lessons of the Scriptures especially of the Wisdom literature are always about the priority and the importance of thinking in the face of the vagaries, the miseries and the persecutions of everyday life. In a way, the lessons come down to the salutary advice to think before you act, to be more thoughtful; rather necessary advice for such a thoughtless age, one might think.
However much the prayer for wisdom has a practical application and rightly so, there remains a necessary and inescapable gap between our thinking and our doing that can only be resolved in God. Wisdom is with God, first and foremost.
Solomon’s prayer in Wisdom, along with Luke’s warnings, recall us to the realities of the human condition; to our sufferings and uncertainties, our stresses and our anxieties, but, and the but is crucial, in the awareness of the need for wisdom which is with God and concerns how we are with God. It means a remarkable and necessary outlook, an approach and attitude of soul. It is about looking to God and to what is in God and not trying to control the things of God in relation to our enterprises and concerns. Our stresses and anxieties are really about nothing more than our forgetting that wisdom is with God and not with us except as we look to him and are found in him.
I take that to be the great good news. It is not and cannot be about us; it is about God and what is with God and through him with us. Such is wisdom.
“With thee is wisdom”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 21, 2014, Morning Prayer, Year II