Chapter 7, Section 1a

CHAPTER VII Concerning “Wisdom,” “Mind,” “Reason,” “Truth,” “Faith.” 1. Now, if it like thee, let us consider the Good and Eternal Life as Wise and as Very Wisdom, or rather as the Fount of all wisdom and as Transcending all wisdom and understanding. Not only is God so overflowing with wisdom that there is no limit to His understanding, but He even transcends all Reason, Intelligence, and Wisdom. 399 399 All wisdom or knowledge implies the distinction between thinker and object of thought. The undifferentiated Godhead is beyond this distinction; but (in a sense) it exists in the Persons of the Trinity and between them and the world, and hence from Them comes Absolute Wisdom, though the Godhead transcends it. And this is supernaturally perceived by the truly divine man (who hath 147 been as a luminary both to us and to our teacher) when he says: “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.” 400 400 1 Cor. i. 25 . And these words are true not only because all human thought is a kind of error when compared with the immovable permanence of the perfect thoughts which belong to God, but also because it is customary for writers on Divinity to apply negative terms to God in a sense contrary to the usual one. For instance, the Scripture calls the Light that shines on all things “Terrible,” and Him that hath many Titles and many Names “Ineffable” and “Nameless,” and Him that is present to all things and to be discovered from them all “Incomprehensible” and “Unsearchable.” In the same manner, it is thought, the divine Apostle, on the present occasion, when he speaks of God’s “foolishness,” is using in a higher sense the apparent strangeness and absurdity implied in the word, so as to hint at the ineffable Truth which is before all Reason. But, as I have said elsewhere, we misinterpret things above us by our own conceits and cling to the familiar notions of our senses, and, measuring Divine things by our human standards, we are led astray by the superficial meaning of the Divine and Ineffable Truth. Rather should we then consider that while the human Intellect hath a faculty of Intelligence, whereby it perceives intellectual truths, yet the act whereby the Intellect communes with the things that are beyond it transcends its intellectual nature. 401 401 This is the Doctrine of Unknowing. Cf. “Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower, We feel that we are mightier than we know.” This transcendent sense, therefore, must be given to our language about God, and not our human sense. We must be transported wholly out of ourselves and given unto God. For ‘tis better to belong unto God and not unto ourselves, since thus will the 148 Divine Bounties be bestowed, if we are united to God. 402 402 The term “God” is rightly used here because the manifested Absolute is meant. Speaking, then, in a transcendent manner of this “Foolish Wisdom,” 403 403 1 Cor. i. 25 . which hath neither Reason nor Intelligence, let us say that It is the Cause of all Intelligence and Reason, and of all Wisdom and Understanding, and that all counsel belongs unto It, and from It comes all Knowledge and Understanding, and in It “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” 404 404 Col. ii. 3 . For it naturally follows from what hath already been said that the All-wise (and more than Wise) Cause is the Fount of Very Wisdom and of created wisdom both as a whole and in each individual instance. 405 405 (1) Very Wisdom = Wisdom in the abstract.