Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.”
Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
[1 Corinthians 1:17-21, from the Catholic edition of the RSV as published by Thomas Nelson & Sons for Ignatius Press.]
St. Paul didn’t have much trouble speaking bluntly but, like me, he was exploring new realms of thought outside the existing words and concepts. He often spoke in a confusing manner, a rather obvious fact that remains invisible to many who would draw revealed truths from the words of a man who was a preacher and founder of communities and not a systematic theologian nor was he any sort of philosopher. Commentators, including some famous theologians, have taken to the Pauline letters with tools reminiscent of those used to cut, shape, and sometimes deform sheet-metal. I’ll try to do better, neither missing the claims to revelation, nor the human insights, nor the mistakes due to the limitations of any particular human being, nor the inadequacies and mistakes due to mistaken ideas about God’s Creation which are part and parcel as our condition as limited creatures of small regions of space-time.
I’ll be making some background comments on my view of the Bible and how it should be read with an eye towards a number of Biblical commentaries I’ll try to write, at a slow pace, if God grants me a good, long, active life. After those few comments, I’ll be mostly concerned with this attack of St. Paul upon wisdom, an attack which is properly qualified in a commentary by St. Thomas Aquinas. I’ll argue that we can gain a better understanding of what God is saying through His time-bound, finite, and error-prone servants by placing ourselves in the position of, for example, St. Paul and trying to hear what God was saying in words and concepts which we find more appropriate, often because we’ve learned much in these 20 centuries and have a better understanding of such matters as the nature and behavior of the entities of this world. And so:
What does St. Paul mean in condemning “worldly knowledge”?
It’s hard to recover the meaning of St. Paul in some of his writings, because of the cultural distance and also because he was working as evangelist and founder of local church communities, not as a systematic theologian. And though important and useful, the recovery of what St. Paul truly thought might be less important than would at first seem.
I’ll try to speak to an error which St. Paul seemed to make in his way of speaking about knowledge and I’ll do this first by turning to Aquinas who made a claim partway towards mine.
Over the course of his writings, St. Thomas Aquinas developed arguments that:
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Human moral nature is organic, not ‘spiritual’, and develops in active response to its environment. More generally, and adjusting for more recent discoveries about the human brain (and human being), I’ve made a strong claim that such is true for the intellectual aspects of a human being, our so-called intuitions or ‘sentiments’ (the word used by Adam Smith and others in his school of moral philosophy) being formed by the response of our human and pre-human ancestors over many millions of years.
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God does not generally speak to His prophets and apostles in the way that you and I would speak face-to-face. A man becomes a prophet by learning how to speak along with God, that is, by letting his mind and his tongue move with a human will aligned with that of God. The problem is that God speaking through the prophet is limited to what’s possible to that man, though Isaiah and others in the Bible seem to have been stretched awfully long to reach limits beyond what their contemporaries could understand.
Aquinas, thinking of human ‘stuff’ as being too inert for certain responses, posited a ‘soul’ which is not human but is attached to a human being and carries out abstract reasoning functions. With this time-bound and plausible thought eliminated in favor of the modern knowledge of the dynamic nature of all matter and of the very particular dynamic nature of the human brain, we arrive at a radically different view of mind and of knowledge and of the world from that held by St. Paul. In particular, we can see that ‘mind’ doesn’t pre-exist human nature. There are some aspects of our minds which developed over the millenia as our ancestors evolved by responding to specific environments and there are some aspects which develop during our lifetimes as we respond to our own environments, even to the world as a whole. In this context, it’s important to realize that we don’t have pre-existing minds that can be filled with knowledge but rather minds that are shaped as we deal with the world in a way that can be seen as a knowledge-generating process. There’s not a clean separation between mind and knowledge, though we’ve been taught to think in terms of systematic knowledge that can be pushed into a more or less empty mind.
We have to learn how to avoid approaching primary sources of knowledge with too much in the way of a system. That is, we have to learn how to shape our minds to the truth as found in the Word of God and in the Creation of God rather than approaching in the manner of Fundamentalists with a small list of principles or dogmas which tell us what is true before we listen to God’s revelations in the Bible and in Creation. In other words, we have to give up our habits of filtering God’s words and our knowledge of God’s creative acts through our all-too human ideas of what can be true. I’ve discussed some of the underlying issues in Four Kinds of Knowledge, a book freely available for download.
In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us:
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can [r]each an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… [p 17, where I have have corrected ‘teach’ to ‘reach’.]
Later, Aquinas tells us:
[T]he wisdom which attains to God through the things of this world is not the wisdom of this world but the wisdom of God… [page 51]
[I’m using the translations of Aquinas’ commentaries made by Fabian Larcher, O.P. and put up on the Internet for free use by Ave Maria University. I should note that these translations have not yet been reviewed by independent translators or edited but they seem very clean and very much in the spirit of Aquinas, arguably the most empirically minded of major philosophers.]
I suspect that St. Thomas didn’t appreciate how radically insightful his theory of the development of the human mind was. He probably attributed to St. Paul too great an understanding of the importance of empirical reality as part of Creation. Though I’m sure Aquinas thought himself to be recovering St. Paul’s meaning, he was commenting upon 1 Corinthians as if he were putting himself in the place of St. Paul, responding to God and trying to move along with God, but possessing much, even being much, that had been learned over 12 centuries of Christian thinking.
In all likelihood, St. Paul did distrust the best human knowledge of his day, not quite seeing it was imperfect knowledge of God’s Creation, that is, of God’s acts of creating contingent being and sustaining it in existence. Aquinas did see this, at times very clearly, and he read into St. Paul’s words his own better view of the nature of empirical reality and of human knowledge of that empirical reality. This is the correct way to read the Bible, but it should be more explicit than it was in the mind and writings of Aquinas. This is to say that the Bible remains the source of Christian revelation not because it’s a collection of writings which somehow transcend the limitations of their all-too human authors. The Bible fills that role because it’s the human recording of a particular conversation God was having with all of us by way of a particular group of poets, court historians, prophets, evangelists, and apostles. We can enter this conversation but not as a mere matter of the ‘spirit’, rather does it take some discipline in the way of ‘worldly’ thinking and a healthy bank account of ‘worldly’ knowledge. I can almost remember a high school history teacher telling us we have no ‘right’ to an opinion until we have some factual knowledge of the situation. I’m claiming that we should bring our knowledge, especially our modern empirical knowledge, to the process of encountering God by way of an intelligent and respectful reading of the Bible. Then we can form our opinions which might differ from those of St. Paul.
There are many valid reasons why we should be concerned about St. Paul’s life and his education, about the historical circumstances of Isaiah, about the development of the Semitic peoples and its state at the time of Moses. There are also good reasons to be concerned with the meaning that St. Paul and Isaiah put into their human utterances. But God’s meaning that He was conveying through His prophets and Apostles is far more important than what those prophets and Apostles thought the Lord to be saying and far more important than the limitations of their individual selves or their cultures.
If Aquinas was right, then our understanding of the Bible will be greatly improved by admitting “the wisdom which attains to God through the things of this world.” This doesn’t mean we push aside the Bible or even its human authors in order to impose a better and more modern version of God’s instructions to His children. It does mean that we need to struggle to put ourselves in the positions of those prophets and evangelists and Apostles to try and hear God’s words fresh in order that we can have those words in terms that allow us to speak along with God in our contexts as St. Paul spoke with God in his context.