As far as the Christian tradition is concerned, it is often referred to as a way of love; especially in modern times its sapiential dimension is, for the most part, forsaken as if it were simply an alien intrusion into a purely ethical religious message based on divine and human love and the central element of faith. To be sure, Christianity is more than anything else a way of love; but being a total and integral religion, it could not be completely divorced from the way of knowledge and sapience. That is why the Johannine “In the beginning was the Word” was interpreted for centuries as an affirmation of the primacy of the Logos as source of both revelation and knowledge before the surgical knife of so-called higher criticism, itself the product of a purely secularized reason, anathemized the particular sapiential Gospel of John into a gradual accretion of statements influenced by alien modes of thought somewhat removed from the message and meaning of the “original” historical Christ. Moreover, the Christian tradition, in accepting the Old Testament as part of its sacred scripture, not only inherited the Hebrew wisdom tradition but even emphasized certain books of the Bible as source of wisdom even beyond what is found in the Judaic tradition.
In the Proverbs, chapter 8, Wisdom personified speaks in a famous passage as follows:
I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty
inventions… I lead in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the
paths of judgment: that I may cause those that love me to inherit
substance: and I will fill their treasures. The Lord possessed me in the
beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from
everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; where there were
no fountains abounding with water… While as yet he had not made the
earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass
upon the face of the depth; when he established the clouds above: when
he strengthened the fountains of the deep:… Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;… Now therefore harken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways.
The Christians meditated upon this and similar passages as the revealed sources of a sapiential path leading to the knowledge of God and theosis. As late as the last century even a philosopher such as Schelling was to call this passage “a breeze from a sacred, morning dawn.” In early ante-Nicene Christianity charity itself was considered by a figure such as Saint Maximus the Confessor as “a good disposition of the soul which makes it prefer the knowledge of God above all things,” as well as the bliss inhering in this knowledge and the love of God as the source of the illumination of knowledge. Also the earlier forms of Christology emphasized the role of Christ in illuminating the human mind and bestowing divine knowledge upon the qualified.
The early Christians, moreover, viewed Sophia as an almost “divine
being” unto herself, a “complement” to the Trinity. The Orthodox revered
her especially and built perhaps the most beautiful sacred structure of
early Christianity, the Hagia Sophia, in her honor. Sophia appeared in
the vision of saints and illuminated them with knowledge. She often
manifested herself as a woman of celestial beauty and was identified by
many sages and saints with the Virgin Mary in the same way that among
some of the Muslim sages wisdom appeared as a beautiful celestial figure
identified with Fāṭimah, the daughter of the Prophet, and a “second
Mary” within the more specific context of the Islamic tradition. For
Christians wisdom was at once related to the Son, to the Christ figure
itself, and to the feminine principle which was inseparable from the
inviolable purity and beauty of the Virgin. One should not forget that
that supreme poet of Christian spirituality, Dante, who was so
profoundly devoted to the Virgin, was guided in Paradiso by a
woman, by Beatrice, who symbolizes the feminine figure of Sophia,
without this fact detracting in any way from the role of Christ as
dispenser and also embodiment of wisdom. In Christianity as in other
traditions there is complementarity of the active and passive, or
masculine and feminine elements, in wisdom as well as in love.
Returning to the origins of the Christian tradition, we must
remember that the emphasis upon the sapiential dimension of Christianity
is to be seen in Saint Paul himself who saw Christ as the new Torah
identified with Divine Wisdom. The letters of Saint Paul contain
references to the possessors of sacred knowledge, the pneumatikoi, who speak the wisdom (sophia) of God and who possess inner knowledge (gnosis), sophia and gnosis
being “pneumatic” gifts imparted to the pneumatics by God. Although
modern scholars have debated extensively about the meaning in 1
Corinthians (12:8) of “a word of wisdom… and a word of knowledge,” even profane methods based only on historical and philological
evidence, and ignoring the oral tradition, have not been able to prove a
Greek or some other kind of foreign origin for the Pauline doctrine of
divine knowledge. There is a gnosis in these texts of a definitely Christian origin not
to be confused with second-century gnosticism of a sectarian nature, for
as Saint Paul asserted, sacred knowledge is one of Christ's most
precious gifts, to be sought earnestly by those qualified to receive and
to transmit it. Had there not been such a Christian gnosis, the
Christian tradition would have been able to integrate Greek wisdom and
adopt Graeco-Alexandrian metaphysical formulations for the expression of
its own teachings.
The nearly two thousand years of Christian history were to be
witness, despite all obstacles, to the survival of this sapiential
dimension of the Christian tradition as well as its gradual eclipse,
this latter process leading to the secularization of the concept of
knowledge itself. To trace the history of this long tradition from the
early Church Fathers to recent times would require a separate study of
monumental proportions. Here is suffices to refer briefly to some of the
representatives of the sapiential perspectives within the Christian
tradition, figures who considered it possible for man to attain the
knowledge of the sacred and who saw the root of knowledge itself as
being sunk in the soil of the sacred and the holy. To reassert and
rediscover the sacramental quality of knowledge in the contemporary
West, it is certainly helpful to recall this long-neglected dimension of
the Christian tradition, a dimension which is either cast aside and
deliberately ignored in the more easily accessible works on Western
intellectual life or, when mentioned in such sources, treated in such a
way as to reduce it to a harmless borrowing, of interest only for the
history of thought. Of course, there is little wonder in the observation
of such a spectacle for only the like can know the like. How can a mind
totally depleted of the sense of the sacred grasp the significance of
the sacred as sacred?
The sapiential current in Christian spirituality, distinct from
what came to be known as gnosticism, is found among many of the major
figures of early Christianity such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory
of Nazianzus as well as the early desert fathers and the community
which produced the Nag Hammadi texts. But it is especially strong among
the Alexandrian fathers whose writings are a fountainhead of Christian
gnosis and who stress the central role of sacred knowledge and knowledge
of the sacred in the attainment of sanctity. Among them none is more
important than Clement of Alexandria (140–c.220) who saw Christianity as
a way to wisdom. In his teachings Christ is identified with the Universal Intellect
which God has also placed at the center of the cosmos and in the heart
of man. Clement, who spent much of his life in Alexandria, was well acquainted
with Greek wisdom which he did not oppose to Christianity but which he
considered to have issued from the same Intellect to which the
Christians had full access through Christ. For him true philosophy was
not a “profane knowledge” to be opposed to Christian faith but a
knowledge of an ultimately sacred character derived from the Intellect
which God had revealed in Christ and through sacred Scripture. The true
sage, the person who has attained sacred knowledge, is he who has first become pure and achieved moral perfection,41 and subsequently become a “true gnostic.” Concerning such a person, “one can no longer say that he has science or possesses gnosis, but he is science and gnosis.”
As far as the possibility of an actual initiatic path within
Christianity based on knowledge is concerned, the case of Clement
presents evidence of unusual interest, for Clement did not only possess
sacred knowledge, but writes that he received it from a human dispenser
of such knowledge. While in Alexandria, he met a master named Pantaenus
who, according to Clement, “deposited pure gnosis” in the spirits of men
and who had in turn received it from those who had transmitted the
esoteric knowledge handed down to them orally and secretly by the
apostles and ultimately by Christ himself. Through this regular chain of
transmission of a “divine wisdom,” Clement had received that gnosis
which implied knowledge of God and the angelic world, science of the
spiritual significance of sacred Scripture, and the attainment of total
certitude. Clement was in turn to become a spiritual master as revealed
by such works as the Protrepticus and Stromateis, which are treatises of spiritual guidance, as well as the resumé of his Hypotypsis
as summarized by Photius. But it is significant, as far as the later
history of the Christian tradition and the place of gnosis in it is
concerned, that he was not canonized as a saint and that the regularity
of transmission of sacred knowledge did not continue for long, although
Clement did train Origen, another of the important figures of early
Christianity who was concerned with sapience and the role of knowledge
in gaining access to the sacred.
Like Clement, Origen (185–253 or 254) was well acquainted with Greek philosophy which he studied in Alexandria. In fact, his teacher was the mysterious Ammonias Saccas, the teacher of
Plotinus, and the philosophical education of Origen paralleled closely
that of Plotinus who represents the most universal and central
expression of the esoteric and metaphysical aspects of Greek wisdom. As
for Clement so for Origen, Christianity itself was “philosophy” in the
sense of wisdom, and Greek philosophy a depository of that sacred
knowledge which was to be found in its fullness in the Christian
message. Origen, in a sense, continued the teachings of Clement as far
as the relation between Christianity and philosophy was concerned,
although emphasizing more the importance of asceticism.
The central depository of sacred knowledge for Origen is sacred
Scripture which nourishes the soul of man and provides for his need to
know. But Scripture is not only the literal text. Like man, sacred
Scripture is composed of body, soul, and spirit or the literal, moral,
and sapiential or spiritual dimensions. Not all readers can understand the inner meaning present in the text,
but even those who cannot grasp this wisdom are aware that there issome kind of message hidden in the Book of God. Origen relates sacred knowledge directly to sacred Scripture and
believes that it is the function of spiritual beings to discover this
inner meaning of revealed truth and to use their intelligence in the
contemplation of spiritual realities. The spiritual life of man is none
other than the gradual development of the power of the soul to grasp the
spiritual intelligence of Scripture which, like Christ himself, feeds
the soul.
It is the presence of the Logos in the heart of man and at the root
of his intelligence that makes it possible for man to grasp the inner
meaning of sacred Scripture and to become illuminated by this knowledge.
The Logos is the illuminator of souls, the light which makes intellectual vision possible. In fact, the Logos which exists in divinis is the root of intelligence in man and is the intermediary through which man receives sacred knowledge. In as much as the Logos is the origin of human intelligence and the
source of the human instrument of knowledge, knowledge of the sacred is
the ultimate ground of knowledge as such, as well as its goal.
As one of the outstanding representatives of those who composed
sapiential commentaries upon the Bible, Origen wrote extensive spiritual
and esoteric commentaries upon various parts of both the Old and the
New Testaments, wherein he sought to reveal the sacred knowledge which a
person whose intellect is already sanctified and illuminated by the
Logos can grasp. In Origen there is that harmonious wedding between a
sacramental conception of knowledge and study of sacred Scripture, which
became rather rare in later phases of Christian history with the result
that hermeneutics, as the science of penetration into the inner meaning of sacred Scripture on the basis of a veritable scientia sacra
and with the aid of an intelligence which is already illuminated by the
Word or Logos, became reduced to the desacralization of the Holy Book
itself by a mentality which had lost the sense of the sacred. Origen's
perspective is, therefore, an especially precious one if the meaning of
the sapiential perspective in the Christian tradition is to be
understood in conjunction with the central reality of a revealed book.
Origen's commentaries include many direct allusions to the esoteric
nature of scriptural passages and the sacred knowledge which they convey
to those capable of grasping their message. For example, concerning the
already cited verse from the Song of Songs, “Let him kiss me with the
kiss of his mouth” (which is also of paramount importance in Jewish
esoterism), Origen writes,
But when she has begun to discern for herself what was obscure, to
unravel what was untangled, to unfold what was involved, to interpret
parables and riddles and the sayings of the wise along the lines of her
own expert thinking, then let her believe that she has now received the
kisses of the Spouse Himself, that is, the Word of God.
Here again, the “kiss of his mouth” is seen as none other than the
transmission of inner knowledge through that organ which is endowed with
the power to invoke His Name and to utter His Word.