Sabbath and the Love of Wisdom
Christian life as philosophy
I think a lot about wisdom these days. The Biblical category of wisdom—which somehow involves speaking difficult truths in love and for the sake of peace—has helped me better make sense of the ugliness and violence of our era. It has also helped me integrate some of the deepest impulses within myself: my love of scripture, on the one hand, and my passion for ultimate questions and conceptual clarity, on the other.
I am currently writing a book on the sabbath that will be, in its way, a book about wisdom. For as a day of rest, the sabbath is, among other things, a day for devoting ourselves to the pursuit of wisdom. That’s the context for this fragment—probably cut, unfortunately, from the book—about how keeping the sabbath can help cultivate a love of wisdom.
Learning wisdom can be painful. Proverbs often uses violent images to describe words of wisdom: “wounds from a friend,”1 “iron sharpening iron.”2 Wisdom can also be costly. While the wise live in a way that often bears practical fruits even in this world, scripture also bears witness to how tenuous the connection between wise living and earthly prosperity can be. Fools succeed all too often, and long before they destroy themselves (if in this life they ever destroy themselves), their success means suffering and death for many innocents. Scripture gives frequent voice to those who suffer unjustly, from wise Job to the countless poor and oppressed on whose behalf the prophets cry out. The earthly life of Jesus Christ—the righteous one, Wisdom herself—ends in an ignoble death that gives the lie to any conception of Christian wisdom as a reliable path to earthly prosperity.
It is precisely because wisdom can be painful and costly that scripture so frequently emphasize its intrinsic goodness and delight.
Happy are those who find wisdom,
and those who get understanding
She is more precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can compare with her…
Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
those who hold her fast are called happy.3
Guided by texts like this, many early Christians called Christianity a “philosophy,” in the literal sense: a way of life devoted to the love of wisdom. This was no dry, merely intellectual activity. They had in mind a life driven towards wisdom by a burning kind of love, an all-encompassing desire.
This kind of passion for wisdom is very alien to us nowadays. Most people resent being called a fool, but few really seek wisdom.
The greatest of these Christian philosophers, Origen of Alexandria, points out that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament preferred by early Christians, sometimes invites us to “love” wisdom not only using the refined word agape but also the word eros, with its erotic connotations of sexual desire. Eros is the risker word, Origen argues, but it is the more accurate one:
Occasionally, however, though rarely, [scripture] calls the passion of love by its own name, and invites and urges souls to it, as when it says in Proverbs [4:6, 8] about Wisdom, “Love her greatly and she will preserve you; encompass her, and she will exalt you; honor her, that she may embrace you.” And in the book that is called the Wisdom of Solomon [8:2] it is written of Wisdom herself, “I became a lover of her beauty.”4
This quotation comes from the preface to his commentary on the Song of Songs, a book traditionally attributed to Solomon the wise. So Origen takes the love of wisdom as the hidden key to the whole Song. It becomes not merely a love poem, but a profound guide to philosophy as a love for wisdom that is “fierce as death” and “mighty as the grave.”5
For a Christian philosopher like Origen, the Song also becomes a love-song for Christ, whose love was quite literally as strong as death. Scripture calls Christ the Wisdom of God,6 the Word “who was in the beginning with God,”7 "a source of delight every day, rejoicing before Him at all times…finding delight with humankind.”8 He is the Wisdom who “appeared on earth and lived with humankind,”9 and in the most intimate possible way: he became flesh and was obedient unto death, even death on a cross, enacting “the foolishness of God that is wiser than human wisdom.”10
To love Christ as God’s wisdom requires an expansive way of understanding who Jesus Christ is. Although nothing manifests God’s wisdom more fully than the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, yet we can say more about the divine wisdom than this narrative alone or the New Testament’s tellings of it. Christ contains within himself “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”11 Christ's wisdom includes, for example, what true wisdom there is in philosophy and science. Certainly it includes the wisdom of Jesus' scriptures, the Old Testament. (Much of my book on the sabbath will focus on the way Jesus Christ is revealed in the treasures of the Law that he taught and the sabbath that he observed.)
As a day sanctified for God and for meditation on scripture, the sabbath is an especially appropriate day for awakening the passion for wisdom of which Origen speaks. Another Christian philosopher, Augustine, intuited this. The sabbath, he taught, is a symbol of the Christian’s rest in the Spirit of love and wisdom:
Because God sanctified the seventh day, on which He rested, the Holy Spirit— in whom is given to us that rest which we love everywhere, but find only in loving God, when “His love is shed abroad in us, by the Holy Ghost given unto us”12— is presented to our minds in the third commandment, which was written concerning the observance of the Sabbath...13
And for Augustine, there is a way of reading scripture that embodies the spirit of the sabbath and is especially able to fan the flames of love for wisdom. It is a slow and meditative kind of reading that immerses itself in the poetic and symbolic riches of the text:
For the feeding and fanning of that ardent love by which, under a law like that of gravitation, we are borne upwards or inwards to rest, the presentation of truth by emblems has a great power: for, thus presented, things move and kindle our affection much more than if they were set forth in bald statements, not clothed with sacramental symbols. Why this should be, it is hard to say; but it is the fact that anything which we are taught by allegory or emblem affects and pleases us more, and is more highly esteemed by us, than it would be if most clearly stated in plain terms… [The soul] gathers strength by the mere act of passing from the one to the other, and, like the flame of a lighted torch, is made by the motion to burn more brightly, and is carried away to rest by a more intensely glowing love.14
Augustine’s adds that it is precisely for this reason that the sabbath command, unlike the other ten commandments, does not bind Christians in its literal sense. Instead, by speaking allegorically, it invites us to reflect allegorically on the scriptures and thus fan flames of love for wisdom.
There is a certain elegance to this view, though I cannot share Augustine’s deprecation of sabbath observance. Even so, few Christians have understood more clearly how meditating on scripture can incite that love for the wisdom of God that brings us to rest in God—though all meditative reading, not just allegory, can have this effect, from careful InterVarsity manuscript study to lectio divina or traditional Jewish midrash.
Augustine’s description of the spiritual sabbath is useful as a description of the meditative spirit that resting on the sabbath can cultivate. The sabbath-observant Puritans, heirs of the Augustinian tradition, will make the connections that Augustine cannot: keeping the sabbath as a concrete practice helps create the conditions for love of wisdom and spiritual scripture reading. Thus the Puritan Thomas Watson could speak eloquently and almost erotically of the way our hearts could be overwhelmed by divine love on the sabbath:
On this day the thoughts rise to heaven, the tongue speaks of God, and is as the pen of a ready writer, the eyes drop tears, and the soul burns in love. The heart, which all the week was frozen, on the sabbath melts with the word.15
There is no contradiction between observing the sabbath as a practice and the restful spirit of wisdom and love that it symbolizes. Rather, the one leads to the other.
Prov. 27:6.
Prov. 27:17.
Prov. 3:13, 15, 17-18.
Origen, Commentary to the Song of Songs, Preface.
Song of Songs 8:6.
1 Cor. 1:24.
John 1:2.
Prov. 8:30-1.
Baruch 3:37.
1 Cor. 1:25.
Col. 2:3.
Rom. 5:5.
Augustine, Letter 55.11.21.
Augustine, Letter 55.11.22.
Thomas Watson, The Ten Commandments.