Canter Bridge

The biblical proverbs are framed in didactic summonses and calls to subjection. One is asked to endure the discipline of instruction, to prefer a rod on the back to the false freedom of the streets. It all sounds very hard and self-denying, and it is.

Like most appearances, however, this one is partial. In time, we are led to understand, wisdom turns back upon her student as the best of friends. In a metaphor capable of perversion, the school-teacher becomes one’s intimate. The alien virtue that one strives so hard to achieve becomes now one’s own flesh and blood, beloved sister.

Say to wisdom, ‘You are my sister,’
and call insight your intimate friend.

If we are to understand this, we must for a moment unmake ourselves of all that Western individualism has so assiduously taught us to believe about who we are and what freedom means. We have been quite effectively schooled to know that freedom comes by unshacklement. We seek ourselves, such is the pedagogical creed of our instructors, by disassociating our noble lives from all that surrounds and choosing who we shall become.

Even the speaking of it sounds noble. Indeed, there is a kernel of exalted self-understanding in it, for the Renaissance and the intellectual and spiritual freedom that were embodied in the various awakenings that have shaped our habits of mind were and are a gift, an achievement of humankind when it grasped more clearly than is customary the nobility of humanity stamped with its Creator’s glory. Yet like all truths here, east of Eden, it has claimed for itself an absoluteness that turns truth into something very near to a lie.

Freedom, in the end, is not found in the liberation of the human soul from all imposed tradition. It does not come to us by the casting off of the fathers’ instruction nor via fresh gnosis about the benighted compromises of our mothers. Paradoxically—for us who so badly need a teacher, it is a paradox, for others it is simply clear—we find our freedom in submitting to the wisdom of the ages or at least to the wisdom of our parents or, failing that, to wisdom as it comes to us in these pages.

Then one discovers that wisdom has a face and a name. She bears a voice, practices an enduring amity. She is one’s intimate, one’s sister, one’s lover.

The abstract, alien object of our study has come inside. Indeed, at points her voice sounds almost like one’s own.

She finishes one’s sentences.