Sapientia and Scientia

Augustine taught that scientia, knowledge of historical events, was necessary for Christian theology, but that all theology aspired to love of God, which is more closely bound with “sapientia” or wisdom. By the time Aquinas raised the question of whether sacred doctrine is a form of wisdom, however, the terms had been redefined.

Under the influence of Peter Abelard, Ellen Charry argues, Peter the Lombard attempted to deliver scientia from the Augustinian subordination to sapientia, and in so doing to construct a “scientific” theology. He chided Augustine “for cutting knowledge off from promoting piety and discouraging the active contribution

scientia has to make to intelligent Christian theology.” He introduced a third term, intelligentia, which united “the rational judgment of historical matters of scientia with the intellectual grasp of eternal matters of sapientia to provide a cognitively invasive tool for penetrating rather than aiming for delight in the spiritual realm.” Philosophy is capable of enhancing “contemplation and delight in the Creator and created invisible things.” The realm of the spirit is thus no longer a realm of pure contemplation, but another arena that rational science can examine and judge.

For Charry, the gap of affective and cognitive has only increased in modern theology. “Theology came to be thought of as the intellectual justification of the faith, apart from the practice of the Christian life,” with the result that sapiential knowledge in Augustine’s sense “is unintelligible to the modern secularized construal of truth. Modern epistemology not only fragmented truth itself, privileging correct information over beauty and goodness, it relocated truth in facts and ideas. The search for truth in the modern scientific sense is a cognitive enterprise that seeks correct information useful to the improvement of human comfort and efficiency rather than an intellectual activity employed for spiritual growth. Knowing the truth no longer implied loving it, wanting it, and being transformed by it, because the truth no longer brings the knower to God but to use information to subdue nature.”

Aquinas does not ignore the affective dimension of wisdom. According to Bruce Marshall, “The truth we believe and love is of course Jesus Christ himself . . . . But the incarnate prima veritas does not simply call upon us from afar to believe in him; he dwells within us and gives us the gift of his own Spirit, whose very being is to kindle love. This indwelling by grace of the one who is the truth itself, inseparable from the donation of the Spirit who is love itself, brings our intellect to the highest perfection it can enjoy in this life. The indwelling Christ gives us ‘a kind of instruction by which the intellect bursts out in love’s affection,’ a taste of himself which is ‘a certain experiential knowledge,’ so that we might hold fast to what he says, to a truth we do not see. The name for this sort of knowledge is ‘wisdom, a kind of knowledge by taste’ – a wisdom which comes not first from learning, but from ‘suffering divine things.’”