Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| What is the Difference Between Wisdom and Knowledge. The Worship of God is the Love of Him. How the Intellectual Cognizance of Eternal Things Comes to Pass Through Wisdom.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 14.—What is the
Difference Between Wisdom and Knowledge. The Worship of God is the
Love of Him. How the Intellectual Cognizance of Eternal Things
Comes to Pass Through Wisdom.
For knowledge also has its own good
measure, if that in it which puffs up, or is wont to puff up, is
conquered by love of eternal things, which does not puff up, but,
as we know, edifieth.785
Certainly without knowledge the
virtues themselves, by which one lives rightly, cannot be
possessed, by which this miserable life may be so governed, that we
may attain to that eternal life which is truly blessed.
22. Yet action, by which we use
temporal things well, differs from contemplation of eternal things;
and the latter is reckoned to wisdom, the former to knowledge. For
although that which is wisdom can also be called knowledge, as the
apostle too speaks, where he says, “Now I know in part, but then
shall I know even as also I am known;”786
when doubtless he meant his words
to be understood of the knowledge of the contemplation of God,
which will be the highest reward of the saints; yet where he says,
“For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another
the word of knowledge by the same Spirit,”787
certainly he distinguishes without
doubt these two things, although he does not there explain the
difference, nor in what way one may be discerned from the other.
But having examined a great number of passages from the Holy
Scriptures, I find it written in the Book of Job, that holy man
being the speaker, “Behold, piety, that is wisdom; but to depart
from evil is knowledge.”788
In thus distinguishing, it must be
understood that wisdom belongs to contemplation, knowledge to
action. For in this place he meant by piety the worship of God,
which in Greek is called
θεοσέβεια. For the sentence
in the Greek mss. has that word. And what
is there in eternal things more excellent than God, of whom alone
the nature is unchangeable? And what is the worship of Him except
the love of Him, by which we now desire to see Him, and we believe
and hope that we shall see Him; and in proportion as we make
progress, see now through a glass in an enigma, but then in
clearness? For this is what the Apostle Paul means by “face to
face.”789
This is also
what John says, “Beloved, now we are the sons of God, and it doth
not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when He shall
appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.”790
Discourse
about these and the like subjects seems to me to be the discourse
itself of wisdom. But to depart from evil, which Job says is
knowledge, is without doubt of temporal things. Since it is in
reference to time [and this world] that we are in evil, from which
we ought to abstain that we may come to those good eternal things.
And therefore, whatsoever we do prudently, boldly, temperately, and
justly, belongs to that knowledge or discipline wherewith our
action is conversant in avoiding evil and desiring good; and so
also, whatsoever we gather by the knowledge that comes from
inquiry, in the way of examples either to be guarded against or to
be imitated, and in the way of necessary proofs respecting any
subject, accommodated to our use.
23. When a discourse then relates
to these things, I hold it to be a discourse belonging to
knowledge, and to be distinguished from a discourse belonging to
wisdom, to which those things belong, which neither have
been, nor shall be, but are; and on account of that eternity
in which they are, are said to have been, and to be, and to be
about to be, without any changeableness of times. For neither have
they been in such way as that they should cease to be, nor are they
about to be in such way as if they were not now; but they have
always had and always will have that very absolute being. And they
abide, but not as if fixed in some place as are bodies; but as
intelligible things in incorporeal nature, they are so at hand to
the glance of the mind, as things visible or tangible in place are
to the sense of the body. And not only in the case of sensible
things posited in place, there abide also intelligible and
incorporeal reasons of them apart from local space; but also of
motions that pass by in successive times, apart from any transit in
time, there stand also like reasons, themselves certainly
intelligible, and not sensible. And to attain to these with the eye
of the mind is the lot of few; and when they are attained as much
as they can be, he himself who attains to them does not abide in
them, but is as it were repelled by the rebounding of the eye
itself of the mind, and so there comes to be a transitory thought
of a thing not transitory. And yet this transient thought is
committed to the memory through the instructions by which the mind
is taught; that the mind which is compelled to pass from thence,
may be able to return thither again; although, if the thought
should not return to the memory and find there what it had
committed to it, it would be led thereto like an uninstructed
person, as it had been led before, and would find it where it had
first found it, that is to say, in that incorporeal truth, whence
yet once more it may be as it were written down and fixed in the
mind. For the thought of man, for example, does not so abide in
that incorporeal and unchangeable reason of a square body, as that
reason itself abides: if, to be sure, it could attain to it at all
without the phantasy of local space. Or if one were to apprehend
the rhythm of any artificial or musical sound, passing through
certain intervals of time, as it rested without time in some secret
and deep silence, it could at least be thought as long as that song
could be heard; yet what the glance of the mind, transient though
it was, caught from thence, and, absorbing as it were into a belly,
so laid up in the memory, over this it will be able to rumiuate in
some measure by recollection, and to transfer what it has thus
learned into systematic knowledge. But if this has been blotted out
by absolute forgetfulness, yet once again, under the guidance of
teaching, one will come to that which had altogether dropped away,
and it will be found such as it was. E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
