The Wisdom of Wisdom

1500 Words, 7 minute read

The Old Testament Book of Wisdom is traditionally attributed to King Solomon (10^th century BCE) but it was actually written in the 2^nd century, in Greek (vs. Hebrew or Aramaic), and most likely in Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia…and not in Palestine).

200 years before Jesus, the author of Wisdom was already attempting to reconcile Judaism with the best of Greek philosophy – a noble project, elaborated by the Apostles John and Paul and culminating in the work of Thomas Aquinas a millennium later.

That said, the brilliance of Wisdom could not be fully appreciated until the 20^th century CE, when Solomon, the wisest man of his generation, met Bertrand Russell (the wisest man of his?) in the mud wrestling pit at the Oxford Union.

Why the grudge? It’s just a tiff about gods, nature, math, logic, and God. I mean, Jeez, it’s not the World Cup or anything! But still…

“Some men (sic) see things as they are and ask Why. I dream of things that never were and ask Why not.” (Bobby Kennedy) Our Solomon (KS) is firmly in the first camp; he is a pragmatist. He recognizes an abundance (not necessarily a preponderance) of Beauty (Nature), Truth (Order), and Justice (Harmony) in the World. When he asks, “Why?” the answer (to him) is obvious: God!

KS might have said, “God created the World, God sustains the World, and the World is made in God’s image and likeness. Any Beauty, Truth or Justice (i.e. any Good) that happens in this World is a reflection/refraction of God’s nature and/or the fruit of God’s generative (and generous) activity.” He might have said that!

Our Russell (BR) did not deny the existence of ‘good  things’ and he did not even dispute the idea that ‘all good things’ could constitute ‘a set’ (math & logic), i.e. the Set of all Good things. Russell argued on logical grounds that the ‘Set of all Good things’ (SG) could not itself be a good thing, i.e. that no set can be a member of itself.

This seems counterintuitive. Of course SG is a good thing; therefore it must be a member of the Set of all Good Things. And this doesn’t seem to be a one off anomaly. The set of all mathematical objects is itself a mathematical object; no? How about the set of all technologies? The set of all information? I could go on.

Of course, there are sets that are not members of themselves. The set of all horses is not a horse. Clearly, there is room here for pluralism, but no, BR is insistent - so much so that he makes it an Axiom of Logic that no set may be a member of itself (even if it obviously is).

(Note: Russell gets around this apparent absurdity by saying that when a set is a member of itself, it is not a set after all but a class.)

The set of Logical Axioms is a secular version of Moses’ Ten Commandments so when BR spoke ex cathedra, the world dutifully went silent…and stayed that way for more than half a century…until one brave soul (or fool) dared to shout, “Look, BR has no clothes!”

Wisdom defeats Russell, a British Empiricist at heart, with an argument that begins with their shared recognition of Good (i.e. Beauty, Truth, Justice) in the World. Humans instinctively and correctly recognize the ‘divine’ in concrete manifestations of such Virtues. 

Sincerely if mistakenly, we elevate ‘good things’ to the level of ‘god things’, aka gods. The Sun is good; we recognize it, we deify it (Ra), and ultimately, we worship it; we are animists.

Only later do we personify it (Helios); now we are pagans. Polytheism has its plusses: e.g. its penchant to recognize traces of divinity throughout the natural world; but on the other hand, the tendency for gods to proliferate makes the system quite unwieldy.

What can be deified and what can’t? The wind, a waterfall, an eddy, my uncle’s pipe? The pagan equivalent of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) would have to be in nearly continuous session, sorting out the conflicting claims of the pseudo-divine.

Here, theology reached an inflection point: Do we collapse the various gods into a single divinity (monotheism) permeating all things or do we go all in on idolatry? Do we solve the problem of divine proliferation by designating ever more gods? And when we have exhausted Nature’s storehouse, do we start manufacturing our own gods, i.e. idols?

This is the turn that has Solomon in a snit. It’s one thing to associate unique gods with specific natural phenomena. The impulse is benign. It’s quite another thing for us to make our own gods. Instead of a God who ‘made all things’ and/or is ‘incarnate’ in the World, we make gods of the works of our own hands. We become creator, gods are our creatures. We reduce divinity to the status of a bobble, a trinket, or a toy. That is a level of blasphemy that Solomon, for all his patience and wisdom, simply could not countenance.

This time, we don’t need to put words in Solomon’s mouth; we have his own words (by attribution), compliments of the Book of Wisdom (chapters 13, 14):

“For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; for they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists unseen, nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works… They should have realized that these things have a master and that he is much greater than all of them, for he is the creator of beauty…

(Solomon is clear: Beauty is a thing-in-itself, an objective reality, and not a subjective accident but the product of intentional agency.)

“Yet these men are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For as they live among his works, they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful.“

But the most miserable people of all are those who rest their hopes on lifeless things, who worship things that have been made by human hands—images of animals artistically made from gold and silver, or some useless stone carved by someone years ago…

“The idol made with hands is accursed, and so is he who made it; because he did the work and a perishable thing was called god. The ungodly man and his ungodliness are equally hateful to God; what was done will be punished together along with him who did it… For the worship of idols not to be named is the beginning and cause and end of every evil.”

According to Solomon, all ‘beautiful things’ share a common quality (beauty), thereby disclosing the real existence of Beauty. Beauty per se is ontologically prior to its expression in various concrete objects and events. The set of ‘all things bright and beautiful’, by virtue of their shared Beauty is itself a beautiful thing; therefore Beauty, the common element of every beautiful thing, the element that makes the ‘beautiful’ beautiful, is itself beautiful and therefore is itself a member of the ‘set of beautiful things’. 

God is good, and God is the Good per se, and the Good is experienced in our World as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Consequently, Keats can write, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.” Both are manifestations of the Good and therefore manifestations of God.

God is both beautiful and Beauty per se. Likewise, God is both truthful and Truth; God is just and Justice. Therefore God is a member of the set of all things beautiful, the set of all things true, and the set of all things just.

Recognizing that beautiful, true, and just things exist in the world, understanding that Beauty, Truth, and Justice are objective absolutes, neither subjective nor relative, and concluding that Beauty, Truth, and Justice imply intentional agency (i.e. the existence of God) preclude any rational preference for Evil over Good.

Conversely, all evil is at its root a rejection of what is beautiful, true or just in deference to some other pseudo-value (e.g. unjust gain, lust, power, sloth), i.e. in deference to the works of our own hands, i.e. in deference to idols. 

Who would have guessed that the struggle of Good vs. Evil would boil down to a debate pitting King Solomon, ‘the baby splitter’, against ‘better red than dead’ Bertrand Russell? But that is the whacky world of Intellectual History…and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else!