Canter Bridge

The conventional biblical wisdom found in the book of Proverbs entwines the thread of proximity with that of exertion. That is to say, one of the collection’s principal burdens is to persuade the young man or woman that wisdom is available. Indeed, personified as Lady Wisdom, she stands in the street and calls out to passersby. One need not sail over the horizon to find wisdom. It is right here, right now.

On the other hand, wisdom becomes the province of those who exert heroically constant efforts to acquire it. If it is near, it is not easy. If it is on offer, it is not cheap. To acquire wisdom—this indeed is the noblest of ambitions in the book’s purview—is to commit oneself to the a lifelong pursuit that takes its shape against formidable odds.

It is easy to be foolish. The law of moral entropy, though the Proverbs nowhere use this language, assures us that those who do not battle for wisdom will necessarily end up fools. Wisdom is sweet, but it is not humankind’s destiny. To get wisdom is to swim against the current every day, for a lifetime. There is no end to the effort. Indeed, one of the book’s energizing convictions is that the wise are set up not so much to remain in that status but to get still further wisdom. The book does not worry itself overmuch about the destination. It is far more concerned with wisdom’s path, with the listening, submitting, humbly aggressive practice that brings the prize within reach.

The eye that takes things in in just this way disciplines itself against the seductive practices that everywhere and at all times lie in wait for the innocent who forgets that he is in a moral war zone. Wisdom’s counsel is to look straight ahead and to walk straight ahead.

Let your eyes look directly forward,
and your gaze be straight before you.
Keep straight the path of your feet,
and all your ways will be sure.
not swerve to the right or to the left;
turn your foot away from evil.

For obvious reasons, a libertine, individualistic culture will find such constraint on freedom to be suffocating. The best thing it will have to say about such instruction is that it is quaint.

Even a soul like this writer’s, steeped in reflection upon this literature, often finds it so.

That is, perhaps, because modernism and post-modernism have taught us that life is a game. One toys with one’s options, tries one thing and then another, remakes oneself when the old persona grows stale.

Biblical wisdom—regardless of whether it is right in its judgment—will have none of this.

Life is not a game. It is a deadly serious adventure, lived out with peril on every side. It leads down to Sheol—the gray, dry land of the dead—or forward towards YHWH’s blessing.

Its vision is bracing, , demanding, even stern. Wisdom does not suppose that one needs to walk in its way. The thing it knows for sure is that those who choose not to do so walk towards death. Nothing good lies there, only unending remorse and the loss of life’s very pleasure.

What if wisdom knows of what it speaks? The mind, in a season of clarity, reels at the thought.