Avoid Mistakes: Rootedness Leads to Wisdom
Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has made three important theological insights from this quote from Augustine's Confessions for the quest for wisdom:
Left to ourselves, we can fantasize about gaining wisdom by effort, but in fact we shall only be locking ourselves up still further in our illusions, admiring not the eternal wisdom but our own spiritual skills.
Alistair McGrath sums up Williams' three insights:
The first insight is this: wisdom is not something we achieve but something that gradually arises within us as a result of our transformative encounter with the greater reality of God. It is a work of grace, not a human achievement.
The second insight: natural human notions of "wisdom" are often self-serving and self-referential. We need to be challenged by a new vision of both what it means to be wise and how we can become wise.
And third: engaging with past writers can illuminate and enrich our present by allowing us to tap into past wisdom that has proved its value over time.
On this last point, French philosopher Simone Weil adds an additional insight:
Being rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the most difficult to define. A human being has roots by virtue of a real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in a living form certain treasures of the past and certain expectations for the future.
I have worked in the same church for almost twenty-three years and have come to appreciate deeply participation in the life of a community over time. Healthy community, rooted securely in the past, helps us retrieve the wisdom of the past to be used for excellent purposes in the present. The one who eschews the wisdom of the past is a fool in the present. How do I know? Because I have made that mistake before.
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