Wisdom and Phronesis

Much that can be said of phronesis can be said of wisdom. It, too, has a kind of concrete, specific pattern of reasoning. Walter Bruggemann has noted that “[w]isdom is found in the experience of the world . . . a more qualified experience of the community." Wisdom both embraces what can be known and what cannot be known.

God is both the giver and withholder of knowledge. Wisdom, in all its variations, invites us to find a fit between our behavior and the divine order of the world we live in. Christians believe that God constructed the world with Wisdom at his side and, therefore, that there is a continuum between our personal lives and that of creation. They also believe that sophia is perfectly revealed in Christ; thus, while certain behavior leads to success, and other behavior leads to failure, christocentric obedience is at the heart of wise living. However, it is not quite so simple to say that we easily understand what success and failure add up to. Wisdom also teaches us what our limits are--what we do not understand, how blind we may be to God's true wisdom for our lives. Wisdom is kenotic and apophatic to a point.

There is, thus, more than one kind of wisdom. The kind of wisdom praised by Proverbs is practical. It amounts to a skill in living, an insight into varying circumstances, and a certain shrewdness in dealing with a variety of personalities. In this sense, it is very much like phornesis. This method of wisdom at its best is discipleship. More than the technical mastery of a few key insights, practical wisdom cultivates an internalized habit, a way of living in the world. Wisdom grows into a cultivated good-sense that sizes up situations, but as we have indicated above, the practice of wisdom only makes sense if the ethical pursuit that undergirds it is present.

Job and Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, teach us that wisdom has a limited potential. It cannot solve everything. God may leave us with questions, or we may discover that what we thought was wisdom breaks apart before the circumstances. These aspects of wisdom, then, are more interrogative in nature. The nature of God as both self-giving and concealing is exhibited in the systematic study of the universe. Kenotic learning, communal learning--these are not separate streams for phronetic learning.

Because of wisdom's practical side, some have suggested that the wisdom tradition of Ancient Israel is essentially neutral. There is some truth to this suggestion because many of the proverbs of Israel share the same kinds of concerns that other ancient wisdom traditions share. Proverbs' God-inspired editor was quite willing to adapt several Egyptian proverbs (cf. Prov 22:17ff.) Like its other Near eastern counterparts, the later chapters of Proverbs mainly teach ethical maxims and day-to-day management of circumstances.

Take, for example, the biblical portrait of the foolish and the wise. The fool is one who refuses apt words, who is lazy, and who is always undercuting others. The wise are those who speak fitting words, who care for others in the community, and who know how to avoid misunderstandings. These are observations that can be found in almost any culture. However, it would be a mistake to understand this wisdom as finally translatable from one context to another without phronetic reviewing. Israel's wisdom ultimately begins in the fear of God and has its confirmation in the Torah. Even supposedly "secular" insights are recontextualized within the worship and service of God. This suggests a manner for us in approaching the limited wisdom of human texts.

Practical wisdom is both inductive and deductive. It works by observing specific cases in life and applying general maxims to those circumstances, yet it also begins with a sense of divine revelation, for Yahweh has spoken to what is good and evil. Other texts, as a source of wisdom, can be evaluated from two complementary directions: 1) we can take an inductive approach that seeks to gather together principles for living from these sources, and 2) we can take a deductive approach that tests these examples by scripture and tradition.

This practice by itself can become rather reductive if we do not keep in mind, however, that wisdom also has an interrogative side. It asks questions to bring us to the end of our easy answers. We run the risk of a kind of "wisdom" that treats literature as ethical material to evaluate but then dispose of, as if literature were simply content to master. The impulse to wisdom, if it is shorn from its foundation in God, can prize itself for technique, for the ability to manipulate situations and manage persons. The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that such an approach is finally empty; it is but grasping wind. Our attempts at achieving success are vain, for the end of the matter is to fear God (12:13).

The New Testament also reminds us that human wisdom, conceived of in yet another way, with all its pretensions, may end up seeing God's wisdom as foolishness. Human wisdom has its noetic blindness, after all. Erasmus suggested as much when he observed that those of the world and those of God each believe the other to be insane:

For those who, despising all earthly things and even life itself, embrace the heavenly philosophy with all their heart, seem insane to those for whom nothing is pleasant but the earthly and perishable. He who pours out his inheritance for the poor is insane in the opinion of the man who places the defense of his life in riches. The man who, for the Gospel, willingly exposes himself to exile, poverty, imprisonment, torturing, and death, in hope of eternal blessedness, is a lunatic for the man who does not believe that, after this life, there is a more blessed one for the pious. He who spurns the honors of princes and of the people so as to obtain glory with God, is mad for those who really are mad.

To pour out your life on something other than the brightest, richest, and most powerful makes no sense to the person who does not believe in an eternal reward or the one who does not think bliss is possible with God. In some sense, then, human wisdom is also a matter of control beliefs, those essential assumptions that shape the rest of the way we see and understand existence. This is one reason that a Christian may evaluate a work of text in very different fashion from a person of another persuasion.

The practice of disputation, then, faces the question of commensurability, but as I suggested above, this occurs within a position, not from a supposedly, objective "positionless" space.