O Wisdom

From the English usage on December 16:
O Sapientia, quæ ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiæ.
O Wisdom, you came out of the mouth of the Most High, and reach from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: come and teach us the way of prudence. (trans. from OHC's A Monastic Breviary).

The O's begin with a meditation on wisdom, the wisdom proceeding from the mouth of God which orders creation. This is the theology of the Word, in Hebrew dabar, in Greek logos, the foundational insight of the Judeo-Christian tradition which directly links the world we experience to the mind of God. So our approach to the saving work of God starts with the assertion that what is to be saved was created and is already foundationally in tune with its creator/savior.

The coming into the world of this wisdom is a kind of homecoming. I sometimes wonder if the parables Jesus tells of a householder going off on a journey and coming back unexpectedly, not knowing what he will find when he returns, are not an indication of God's experience in finding the world he made not exactly perfectly in tune with him. Certainly John (1:10-11) makes that explicit.

I am reading a new, interesting, somewhat abstruse book on Roman paganism by Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire. Ando's starting point is the assertion that the Romans did not have myths, or at least when they needed them, they borrowed them. From the Greeks, of course. What they did have was praxis, the right performance of ritual. This praxis permeated everything in life. Their praxis can be shown to have changed as they noted what did and didn't work. Ando argues that Roman pagan religion was profoundly experiential, in that what they were interested in was discovering the links between the phenomenal world and the spiritual realities which lay beyond it. Each ritual act was observed in its intention, its performance and its effect. Just as the Hebrews and their Christian descendants did, the Romans were looking for the word behind the world. They were looking for the wisdom that would enable them to act prudently, to line themselves up with the relevant spiritual powers and find protection and success by doing so.

This doesn't seem so odd to me. I suppose that trying to line yourself up with the divine is the universal desire of humankind. So for me, this first antiphon is a bridge to the experience of all our ancestors, going back to the dawn of consciousness. They all wanted wisdom, they all felt and thought that the world we are in proceeds from and operates according to the will of the divine one(s), and that our job is to get in touch with that and speak and act accordingly, which is prudence.

It gives me great comfort to imagine that my desire for wisdom and prudence is shared by all serious thinking and feeling people of every age, even the painters of the caves of Altamira, even the worshipers of the Venus of Willendorf, even the obsessive-compulsive Romans trying so hard to get it right so that they could go out and conquer some more of their neighbors, near and far. It is profoundly human. Judaism and Christianity are not discontinuous at all with the great human longings for wisdom.

The Wisdom we ask to come to us is mighty in its actions. But it is also sweet, which is perhaps the surprise word here. For on the whole pagan religion is about fear, seeking to avoid trouble -- famine, disease, injury, natural and human disaster, childlessness, death -- which is the lot of every human, and knowing that even if you get too close to the virtue of the divine one(s), you may not be able to bear it. And if it is not about fear, it is about power -- getting it, keeping it, using it. The divine is powerful and dangerous, and so prudence is the right gift to ask for. But Jesus, now there's a different kind of power. The helpless child, poor and insignificant. The teacher whose words and deeds only get him into trouble with the higher-ups, and anyway, he spent his time with people who really don't count. The life given on the Cross. The surprise ending of the Resurrection and the astonishing (eventual) victory of a community at least nominally centered on the Love, not the Danger, of God. Blessed are the meek. How very different from the Romans, indeed, from practically everyone else, who have the sense to ask for the sensible gifts, not mourning, poverty, persecution. In Jesus the world of desire and power is turned on its head.

So sweetness is part of real prudence too. Not only the avoidance of danger, but learning the wisdom of delight, of beauty, of kindness, of compassion, of agape, disinterested love for the sake of the other. Learning the sweetness of not just loving the poor but being one of them. Come and teach us the way (now there's a loaded word for Christians!) of prudence.