* T. J. De Boer, The History of Philosophy in Islam, 6.
PROVERBS I. 7 199
2. The Greek idea of " Wisdom " was a grander thing ; it meant a clear insight into the eternal order of the world. In more modern terms, it meant the knowledge of God. But it had its defects. The God that was sought after was too much of an intellectual Infinite, and too exclusively apprehended by the intellect. Hence the dictum that the highest wisdom was a kind of intellectual contemplation in which the mind transcended appearances and looked right into the heart and the reality of things. Even by the Greek this wisdom was held with a strong element of ethical apprehension and feeling. The ethical factors were presupposed even when not expressly stated, for the Greeks declared that knowledge was virtue, and it is clear that the knowledge which is virtue is ethical at the heart of it. But the intellectual and metaphysical predominated too much in the Greek system ; the transcendence and sovereignty of the ethical element was not made clear and emphatic, and Greek wisdom at last degenerated into a jingle of syllogisms. Yet the Greek had seen much of the truth of the world, and many of the sons of Greece lived strong and heroic lives through the wisdom that God had revealed to them. When their old truths were ready to vanish away, God was already preparing to send them the higher wisdom, the wisdom revealed in Christ.
^ Wisdom, the third of Plato's cardinal virtues, consists in the supremacy of reason over spirit and appetite ; just as temperance and courage consisted in the subordination of appetite and spirit to reason. Wisdom, then, is much the same thing as temperance and courage, only in more positive and comprehensive form. Wisdom is the vision of the good, the true end of man, for the sake of which the lower elements must be subordinated.^
% On the broad distinction between the morally good life, manifesting itself in such " virtues " as self-mastery and liberality, and the life of intellectual insight as typified in the wise adminis- tration of one's own and other people's affairs, Aristotle shows no tendency to suppose that a man can be good in the full sense without being intelligent and thoughtful. The life of prudence he consistently conceives of (as we should expect from his general view of the relation of higher forms of reality to lower) as the end to which the life of conformity to moral and social traditions points, and in which it finds its reality. According to this view, * W, D. Hyde, The Five Great Philosophies of Life, 129.
200 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
to be good is to be on the road to wisdom ; to be wise is to know where goodness points and what it means. Aristotle endeavoured to hold the balance between the citizen and the philosopher, first, by representing the life of good citizenship as a means to the life of leisure or philosophy, and, second, by identifying the latter with that highest form of intellectual activity which is the end and the soul of civilization. Wisdom, as conceived by Aristotle, presents two features which are the marks of truth. In the first place, it is activity, and activity of the highest element in man. To possess this wisdom is thus to heighten, instead of to depress, the sense of living. Secondly, it is a deepening of the present, and not merely the preparation for a future life. It is true that Aristotle speaks of it as a putting off of our mortality, but the immortality which he has in view consists not in an other-world life foreign to the present, but in the power of seeing the eternal principles or laws of which our own world is the expression.^
3. The Hebrew, though we cannot compare him in intellectual might with the great Greek athletes, found a nobler and truer and more abiding conception of "Wisdom." While the Greek conception contained much that was noble and true, and was to that extent a preparation for the coming of Christ, especially pre- paring the intellectual elements and methods for the apprehen- sion of the teaching of the Son, yet it was of the Hebrew concep- tion that the Wisdom revealed in Christ was a direct develop- ment. The standpoint is the same in the Old and in the New Testament, and the Hebrew presentation of the relation of " Wisdom " both to God and to man contains some striking sug- gestions which become almost startling in the light of the New Testament revelation of Jesus Christ. The primary and funda- mental idea in Hebrew " Wisdom " is ethical. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The Hebrew does not argue the matter ; he does not prove it by a series of syllogisms. He knows it to be so. He is self-consciously ethical. God's voice within him speaks to his spirit, his God-filled life presents him with a clear message, and that message he proclaims to the world. The question he propounds to himself is not, Whence came the world ? but, What is the true path for me to pursue ? What is the utterance within me which I recognize to be noblest and divinest ? What is the course of life, the manner of exist- * J. H. Muirhead, Chapters from Aristotle's Ethics, 162.