The Lover at the Wayside

A reflection on Wisdom

Does not wisdom call,
does not understanding raise her voice? 

On the heights beside the way,
    in the paths she takes her stand;

beside the gates in front of the town,
    at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:

“To you, O men, I call,
    and my cry is to the sons of men.”

– Proverbs 8:1-4

Wisdom is a lover. She stands at the wayside, calling the sons of men at the city gates. Those who love her, she will love in return (Proverbs 8:21), and her devotees will have riches greater than jewels, gold, silver or any treasures of this world (8:11, 19). Those who hear her call and unite with her can be truly accounted wise, and their wisdom is manifest in truth (8:7), just decrees (8:15), right governance (8:16), righteousness and justice(8-19-20): that is, in order and intelligibility. Hence kings and princes are favoured among her symbolic consorts (8:15-16).

This personification of Lady Wisdom, in Greek Sophia, speaks more to the sons of man than to women (8:4, 9:31): such was the form she had to take to win the heart of the lusty King Solomon to whom Proverbs is ascribed. Some maintain that this is due onl yto the grammatical gender of the noun sophia in Greek, and that there is nothing more feminine about it than there is about, say, a French table. Yet here she is explicitly characterised as a beauty whom men should aspire to court above all others. For the patriarch of kingly hall or hearth and home, she is the only spouse who can rightly order the passions of one’s heart and so the passions of one’s household, tribe or nation.

Lady Wisdom’s relationship to men, then, is clear. As for women: well, she is one, and is a teacher to men, placed in honour over them. It was therefore perhaps fortuitous - or even providential - that I wrote much of this essay on the feast of St Hilda, that great 7th century nun and esteemed advisor to bishops, lords and kings, who stands in the line of the likes of Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Hannah and not least the Blessed Theotokos, Mary, as one of the many wise women whose council has spared God’s people from the folly of men.

But so much for men and women. How does Wisdom relates to God? This is at first sight less clear.

In the beginning

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
    the first of his acts of old.

Ages ago I was set up,
    at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,
    when there were no springs abounding with water.

Proverbs 8:22-24

Beginning is a word heavy loaded with biblical resonance; created is another. It is on the balance of this twin load that the question of Wisdom’s identity seesaws in scholarly debate.

On the one end of the seesaw sits the first word of Scripture, the word which gives its Hebrew name, Bereshit, to the whole first book of the Torah, which Christians call Genesis. In English, we render bereshit “in the beginning,” as we do for its Greek translation, en archē. But this does not give the full sense of the words, whether in Hebrew or in Greek. For the English words, “in the beginning,” imply the first in a temporal succession of events: first this thing happened, then other things. The semantic range of the Hebrew and the Greek words is not so limited. They indicate rather an ordering principle or source. Hence the  Greek compounds of archē which have entered English: hierarchy, patriarchy, matriarchy, architect, archbishop.

Such words indicate a priority not of time but of order. So, the creation account of Genesis 1 describes not primarily, or even necessarily at all, a sequence of events in time. “Days” occurring before the making of the sun and earth are not “days” in any mundane or temporal sense. Hence Wisdom is with God in the beginning not merely as the first thing in time among a succession of later others, but timelessly: at the source might be a better translation. The references to Genesis 1 in Proverbs 8 reinforce this reading. Not only is Wisdom with God before the earth, indeed before any of the celestial spheres which by their movements govern time, but before even the heavens and their angelic denizens, and before the darkness of the deeps, the primordial stuff of creation over which God’s Holy Spirit hovers and into which he breathes life (Gen 1:2). “Before” and “the first” is clearly not being used in a linear, chronological sense here.

Rather, Wisdom always was and is and ever shall be with Him who was and is and ever shall be, which is perhaps the best we can render the Teragrammaton, that four-letter Holy Name which God spoke from the flames to Moses. It is by this Name that Wisdom addresses God explicitly throughout her soliloquy, masked though it is behind the pious euphemism: for where the Holy Name is written, it is never pronounced by Jewish readers, but replaced in speech by Adonai, “Lord,” a convention of respect for the Holy Name preserved also in most Christian bibles.

This “beginning” is where Christian tradition discerns more sharply not just what, but who Wisdom is. For those words, en archē, are famously echoed by St John in the Prologue to his Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

– John 1:1

For in the beginning, it was by speech, by His Word or in Greek Logos, that God created, breathing life into the depths and order into chaos. The Word God spoke “was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him.” And this is just how Wisdom continues her potted autobiography in Proverbs:

  …then I was beside him, like a master workman;
and I was daily his delight,
    rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world
    and delighting in the sons of men.

Proverbs 30-31

In the life of the Holy Trinity, the Divine Word is both the workman or craftsman – it is no coincidence that His heavenly Father entrusted His upbringing to a craftsman, the carpenter Joseph – and also, the eternally begotten Son whose gaze holds the Father’s in the delight of mutual and eternal adoration. In that gaze, the Son mirrors teh Father, perfectly reflecting His image. As St Paul writes to the faithful in Corinth:

He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

1 Cor 1:15-17

The Apostle here draws on the older personification of Lady Wisdom, whom the deuterocanonical book of Wisdom, written in the century before Christ, depicts thus:

a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.

Wisdom 7:26

Hence the early Church equated Wisdom with the Word and Son of God who was Incarnate in Jesus. In the beginning — bereshit, en archē — which is to say, at the very source of creation, beyond time, is and ever has been the Word and Wisdom who bears the perfect image of the Father, and by whose reflection, or impression, all things in heaven and on earth, invisible and visible, are crafted into being. So, the first thing to say about Wisdom from a Christian perspective is that she is identical with Christ.

But we must not forget the weight on the other end of the seesaw: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work” (Prov 8:22). This is an unfortunate Greek mistranslation of the Hebrew ḳānāh, which those better versed in that language than I translate as “possessed” or “begot.” It should be self-evident that there was no time when God was without His Wisdom, which Origen framed in terms of “eternal generation,” but the Greek translation of this word here as ktisen, “created,” has caused historic problems in the Church. In the fourth century, the Arians (who wished to deny the divinity of Christ) made this word a proof text for their heretical position that the Son is a creature: that is, created by the Father as all humans are, rather than begotten by the Father and of one substance with Him. But as the great victor over the Arians, St Athanasius, argued in his second discourse against them (Discourse 2 14.44, 47), one must read the Scriptures in the light of the revelation of God in Christ: He is the rule, the Canon, against which all wisdom and prophecy is to be measured. Athanasius gives several scriptural examples of the verb “to create” which could not possibly be interpreted in such a literal wise, and thereby shows the danger of proof-texting on the basis of a single word in translation. That the Divine Logos and Son of God has condescended to adopt a created body is not in doubt, but the notion that the Logos itself is created stands against the wider witness of Scripture and the Spirit-led consensus of the Apostolic Church.

Sophia’s other lovers?

If we accept the Church’s balancing of this seesaw, those who seek Wisdom will find her in Christ. But has Sophia not also called to other lovers outside the Church and by other means? The obvious candidates are those who name themselves such: the philosophers, literally lovers of wisdom, and Socrates chief among all. St Athanasius acknowledges Plato as a “giant among the Greeks” (On the Incarnation 2) but judges the Greeks by their fruits. For all their fine words, he says, they persuaded few, an elite minority. It took the plain-talking Christ to guide the masses to immortality (Ibid. 47). Platonists be warned!

And truly, there is much that separates Plato and his pagan successors from the Church Fathers of both West and East. But this can be and often is overstated, even by Fathers whose debt to Greek wisdom is clear to all but those ideologically driven to divide them. Among those who flaunt that debt more openly is the sixth century saint who assimilated himself to the identity of St Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian philosopher who turned from paganism to follow St Paul (that, at least, is my reading of his pseudonymity). The Dionysian Corpus is littered with references to Plato, Plotinus and Proclus, though not to the extent of his references to Scripture. With his pagan precursors, he plays with etymology to identify the one who calls - in Greek, the verb is kaloun - with Beauty, to kalon (Divine Names 4.7). Well, bad etymology can yield good theology. Beauty calls all things to itself. It is the motivation for yearning, or Eros, which draws all things back to their origin in the Good, who is God, the thearchy or Divine Source of all things. Beauty exercises a gravitational pull on all things which keeps them in their proper order. Wisdom, then, is the manifestation of the Beautiful and the Good who holds all things in being, whilst remaining utterly beyond being.

So far, Dionysius is in line with Platonic precedent. Yet he differs from it, most obviously with Plato and Plotinus, and even with Proclus, who comes closest to his own position. Plato and Plotinus leave Eros as an intermediate between God and mortals, insisting that since God requires nothing he can desire nothing. Proclus acknowledges that gods can desire and so love, but does not concede this to the One beyond Being. St Dionysius, however, cleaves to the tradition of St John the Evangelist, who was so beloved of Christ that he would later proclaim, “God is love” (1 John 4:7). The first Christians knew through their life with Christ that the Word and Wisdom of God is not only to be loved as a passive recipient or Aristotelian unmoved mover, but also actively loves, is indeed a lover, that same lover whom King Solomon had centuries ago found cause to praise in song: Wisdom, who calls from the wayside. Hence Platonic beauty becomes Dante’s amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. God is the beauty and love who calls and lures - Dionysius uses the word enchants or bewitches (Divine Names 4.13) - all things to himself, like a siren redeemed.

The move St Dionysius had to make, then, was to place love, the Eros of the Greeks, above the line between created and creature. Whether this differentiates the Areopagite from the Platonic tradition or rather makes him an adventurous interpreter thereof is a matter of debate, mostly polemical, and depending on the contenders’ prior predilections towards Platonism. Fr John Romanides is an exemplar of those who argue that Dionysius uses Greek philosophical terms in an exclusively Christian way. Offering a more positive assessment of the Platonic background, Eric Perl, in the third chapter of his Theophany, argues that the difference between Dionysius and the earlier Platonists is terminological rater than substantive, maintaining that it is the unmoved mover of Aristotle rather than the pagan Platonic One which really differs from Dionysius’ God as Eros. Both Plotinus and Proclus, he says, speak of the One as “productive overflow” which remains transcendently self-contained and, simultaneously, moves outside itself to be immanently present in all this. What Dionysius calls the “love” of the God who “ecstatically” stands outside Himself, his pagan forebears describe as the One’s constitutive presence to and in all things: the gift, in other words, of their existence as differentiated manifestations of God. This, Dionysius calls “Theophany.”

Whether or not there is more to the difference between St Dionysius and Proclus than just terminology, for now, suffice it to say that the Areopagite wants to be seen as working within the same scholarly lineage as his Platonic precursors, interpreting and referring directly to the same Platonic texts even as he takes his place in the history of biblical interpretation. And indeed, however much some of the more nominalistic scholars of the twentieth century reject “philosophy” outright, it is Dionysius’ Eastern Platonic framing of the transcendent-immanent paradox of God that helped the later Church Fathers to distinguish between the divine essence and the divine energies, so key to the doctrine and spiritual practice of the Eastern Church. Dionysius uses a Platonic framework to show how God can be unknowable and inaccessible in His essence whilst manifesting Himself in His energies, visible and knowable to the “wise” who love Him.

The erotic sacrifice

This is where Sophiology meets Christology and we see, insofar as reason allows, the wisdom of God unfolded in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Wisdom’s soliloquy in Proverbs 8 is followed with a second invitation, introduced as follows:

Wisdom built her house,
And she supported it with seven pillars.
She offered her sacrifices;
She mixed her wine in a bowl
And prepared her table.

Proverbs 9:1-2, St Athanasius Academy Septuagint

To the Christian, the Eucharistic resonances of this passage are unmistakeable. In his ninth Epistle (9:3), Dionysius interprets it like this. The sacrifices are meat, “solid food” and “fixed,” whereas the wine is “liquid and flowing.” The roundness of the bowl makes it a “symbol of Providence,” encompassing all things in circular eternity. The solidity and liquidity of the offerings reflect respectively simultaneous the unmoved stability and outward movement of divine Providence: “even while going forth to all, it remains in Itself.”

This motif of remaining (monē), procession (proodos) and return (epistrophē) was essential to the more eastern kind of Platonic metaphysics of Dionysius’ time, represented by Iamblichus and Proclus, and he makes frequent use of it. Yet he does so always, as here, in the context of Scripture and the liturgical life of the Church. Proclus would not dissent from these words of Dionysius:

The Author of the being, and of the well being, of all things, is both an all-perfect providence, and advances to all, and comes into being in everything, and embraces them all; and on the other hand, He, the same, in the same, par excellence, is nothing in anything at all, but overtops the whole, Himself being in Himself, identically and always; and standing, and remaining, and resting, and ever being in the same condition and in the same way, and never becoming outside Himself, nor falling from His own session, and unmoved abiding (Epistle 9:3).

Indeed, this is not far from Proclus’s own more pithy summation:

“Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it.”
– Proclus, Elements of Theology 35

What would otherwise remain a drily philosophical statement, Dionysius expresses in terms of the cultic practice established by Christ as Sophia Incarnate. The bread and wine of the Eucharist, offered in the Church supported by the seven pillars of the Holy Spirit, are the vehicle whereby “Good Wisdom” calls and bestows the joyous gifts which nourish the guests for their great Odyssey to union, or Communion, with God. It is as yet unclear to me when Dionysius speaks of the “mixing” of the cup, whether he takes it as the mixing of wine with water, or refers to the Eastern Eucharistic practice of mixing the bread in with the wine. In any event, the circular motion of mixing remains for him a motif of simultaneous movement and stillness, and it originates in the holy sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood. At one point, he refers to angelic movement as a “spiral,” combining both circularity and linear forward movement (Divine Names 4.8). Wisdom is the movement of God’s erotic self-sacrifice which at once creates all things and calls them back to Him, holding them in being by the dance of the heavenly hosts.

Self-gift and sacred order

These geometrical allusions emphasise that the fundamental force that moves all things is Divine Eros, which is essentially unmoved and unchanging, and yet also eternally stands outside itself in ecstasy, mixing the cosmos into itself:

Whether we are talking about the Eros of God or of angels, of the mind or of the soul or of matter, let us consider Eros a kind of unifying Energy that mixes things together (synkratikē: cognate with kratēr, “bowl”), moving the higher things to providence for the lower, things that are equal to communal coherence with one another, and at the end, the lesser things to return (epistrophē) to the greater things immediately above them.

Divine Names 4:15, 713B

This, then, is the ordering of reality in what Dionysius was famously first to call “hierarchy.” By this he means not, as moderns are wont to misread him, an ordering of power in any worldly sense, but an ordering of sanctity: hieros means “holy.” It is an order in which the higher exist for the sake of the lower and reach out to raise them up. To a considerable extent, this reflects the cosmic ordering perceived by the Platonists of Dionysius’ time, who realised that without the basic distinction of similarity and difference, nothing would exist, and that as long as there is difference, there is a necessary inequality to the cosmos. Without such inequality, there would be no order and no possibility for meaning. So much is typically Neoplatonic. But Dionysius finds this order perfected in the Church, as body of Christ. So, finally, we can sum up Dionysius’ understanding of Christ Himself as the Wisdom of God and macrocosm of the cosmic hierarchy.

The doctrine of the Incarnation is born from the experience of Christ’s earliest followers that He was and remains the eternally begotten Word of God who had appeared and spoken of old to the prophets and patriarchs. By Dionysius’ time, though it is debated whether he strictly adhered to this formulation, the (Chalcedonian) Church had recognised Christ not as an admixture of the divine and human (qua the Apollinarian heretics), but as both entirely human and entirely divine. He therefore comprises both absolute similarity to and absolute difference from God, becoming a bridge between the created and the divine. But we must stress that the Incarnation was not a reactionary afterthought to the Fall as a remedy for sin, as it is often portrayed. Rather, it is expressive of God’s eternal and unchanging providence, and of His eternal movement in love towards His creation.

The cardinal point of the Incarnation is the Crucifixion, wherein Christ, having condescended to human flesh, yields up even this and descends to Hades. It seems an act of foolhardiness, even folly, but it the folly of God which outstrips the wisdom of humanity in its sheer power of love. God leaves no aspect of creation, not even Hell, untouched. Yet Dionysius is famously quiet about the Cross, a charge levelled at him with particular vehemence by Martin Luther. I do not, however, think that the Cross is absent from Dionysian theology, in which the concealing of the most important things is a leitmotif. Rather, it is incorporated in the liturgical life of His living Body, the Church. In Divine Names 3.2, channelling the age of the Apostles in his guise as the disciple of St Paul, Dionysius speaks of a time when he and his master, Hierotheus, gathered with bishops including St James and St Peter, to celebrate “as each was capable, the Omnipotent Goodness of the supremely Divine Weakness” in the Eucharist. During this concelebration, Hierotheus “experienced the pain of communion” with the holy elements of bread and wine.

Dionysius saw the historical salvific event of Christ’s suffering and weakness as one in which the wise can participate for their salvation here and now, as guests at Wisdom’s table and drinkers from her mixed cup. It is by joining in the ecstatic “standing outside of oneself,” the self-offering and self-emptying of the God-man on the Cross, that Dionysius’ adopted spiritual master St Paul could say, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” The paradox of identity and difference is not abolished by Christ, but rather, His divine self-abnegation opens to us the path of human self-abnegation by which we are unified with the One who is “no thing in anything” and “all in all” (Divine Names 7.3).

Wisdom calling

Wisdom, then, in a Dionysian Christian understanding is the manifestation and recognition of divine, self-giving, enchanting and beguiling love as the source and end of all reality, the gravitational tension of which gives the possibility for existence. Wisdom Incarnate in Christ is the macrocosm of this erotic hierarchy, and He invites us to take our microcosmic place in His loving self-sacrifice through the altar or table of the Holy Eucharist. Acting through the liturgy of the Church, Divine Wisdom at once reveals, calls and realises the angelic and hierarchical ordering of the cosmos towards God, the Beautiful, the Good and the True.