Oh Wisdom, who gushed forth from the lips of the Most High, encompassing from one to the other confines and ordering everything firmly and gently, come and show us the way of salvation!
It is known as what could be considered the first conversion of Saint Augustine: It happened in Carthage, when he was about eighteen years old and read the Cicero’s Hortensius. Saint Augustine fell deeply in love with Wisdom, and he promised to seek her every day of his life (Confessions 3, 7). Certainly in that Saint Augustine did not know that Wisdom has a name, and the name of Sapientia in person is Christ. For this reason, the first Pauline quote that appears in the Augustinian work is that of 1 Corinthians 1:24, where Saint Paul reminds us that Christ is the Strength and Wisdom of God. This quote is so important that it appears in the first work that we preserve by Saint Augustine written in Casiciaco in the year 386, the Contra Academics.
The incarnation of Christ, Wisdom of the Father, is the first step in the redemption of the men, through which Christ has freed us from our sins and has given us made adopted children of God and joint heirs of his kingdom. This is how Saint Augustine expresses it:
“Since the Wisdom and Virtue of God (1 Corinthians 1, 24), who is called the Son only begotten, by assuming humanity, he has indicated the liberation of the whole man.” (Eighty-three various questions, 11).
Christ, in addition to saving us from death as Wisdom that is from the Father, teaches us how we should behave and exhorts us not to live bound by fears or fears, particularly the fear of death, since he with the incarnation of him and his redemption has freed us from eternal death, and made us partakers of his life without end. This is how Saint Augustine comments:
“The Wisdom of God assumed humanity to teach us by his example that let’s live well. Now, it is good for a righteous life not to fear what should not be feared. Indeed, death is not to be feared. Then it was convenient that this same thing was demonstrated by the death of humanity that Wisdom assumed of God” (Eighty-three diverse questions, 25).
Wisdom for Saint Augustine does not consist of accumulating knowledge, or knowing many things, but it is about recognizing and accepting Christ in our lives as the Wisdom that must guide our steps.
The Latin word sapientia (wisdom) is etymologically related to the Latin verb sapio that means not only ‘to know’, but also ‘to taste’, ‘to savor’. In this same line, to be wise for Saint Augustine is to accept Christ Wisdom of the Father in our own lives, and develop within us a “spiritual palate”, a “spiritual taste” for the things of God, which leads us to reject what has no “taste to God”, and to seek – as Saint Paul reminds us – the things above, those of heaven, and not those of the earth (Col 3, 1).
May we allow ourselves to be guided by the Wisdom of God, which is what accompanies us through the ways of this life, so that we can achieve eternal goods.
