Wisdom as the road

A title nobody explained

In 1926 a private edition of a very long book appeared, printed for subscribers in a run of about two hundred copies that cost more to make than it brought in. The book was Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935), the British officer later known as Lawrence of Arabia. It is not a novel. It is Lawrence’s first-person account of the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916–18 and of his part in it. An earlier, longer version, the “Oxford text,” had been printed in 1922 in just eight copies, and a public edition came out in 1935, after his death in a motorcycle accident that May. In 1962 David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia won seven Academy Awards, Best Picture among them.

Readers have long noticed that nothing in the book explains the title. It comes from the Bible. “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars,” says Proverbs 9:1 in the King James Version. Lawrence had used the same title years earlier, before the war, for a planned book about seven cities of the Middle East: Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, and Medina. That manuscript was destroyed, and the title was reused for the war memoir. So a verse about a house has been carried, for a hundred years, on the spine of a book about a desert war. This lesson asks what the verse means, and what it says about how religions turn to wisdom for salvation.

A house, a feast, a call

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither … Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled. Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.

Proverbs 9:1–6, King James Version (1611)

Here Wisdom is a woman, a host who has built a large house and laid a table, and sends her servants into the streets to call the unwary in. In the Hebrew Bible Wisdom (ḥokmah) is often personified this way. In chapter 8 she says she was there before the world was made. In chapter 9 a rival speaks too, Lady Folly, who also sits at her door and calls to the passer-by. The reader is being asked to choose which house to enter. In the Chinese Union Version of 1919 the opening reads 智慧建造房屋，凿成七根柱子, “Wisdom has built a house and hewn out seven pillars.”

Salvation by wisdom

The first lesson gave two marks of religious thought: a transcendent, and a remedy. This lesson adds a claim about how the remedy works. In this reading, the great traditions all prescribe the same kind of medicine, which is wisdom: seeing rightly, so that a person is lifted out of their predicament into a lasting peace. It is easy to see how that works in two of them.

In the Bible, the story of the first man and woman is already about knowledge. As the last lesson noted, the tree was one “to be desired to make one wise,” and the Fall is in part a story about wisdom sought the wrong way. The book of Proverbs answers it: wisdom is real, and it begins somewhere else. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:7). In Buddhism a root of suffering, along with craving, is a kind of unseeing, avidyā, in Chinese 无明 (wúmíng), “no brightness,” and the cure is prajñā, wisdom. Wisdom is one of the “three trainings” of the Buddhist path, along with ethical conduct and concentration, and, in the Mahāyāna list of six “perfections,” the last. In both, the prescription is to see.

This course adds a contrast of its own, and offers it with a caution. It says: Christianity’s emphasis falls on the moral life and on trust, Buddhism’s on insight. The contrast has some truth and a great deal of oversimplification. The Apostle Paul calls Christ “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and Christian tradition has a long literature of wisdom. Buddhism, for its part, makes ethics the first of the three trainings. Each tradition has both. What differs is where each puts its weight.

Wisdom also marks the line between religion and philosophy, in this reading. Philosophy means “love of wisdom,” and the Greek tradition, in Plato’s Symposium, makes the point with a myth: the one who loves wisdom is by definition someone who does not yet have it, a seeker standing between ignorance and knowledge, while those who are already wise do not need to seek. Socrates in the Apology says that he neither knows nor thinks he knows what others claim to know. The course puts the contrast this way: philosophy is the road toward wisdom, and religion, in its own claims, offers wisdom whole. A religion says that it has found the end of the road. That is a claim about the traditions’ own self-understanding, and the next box says where it is too neat.

Two wisdoms

Does Christianity prize wisdom or distrust it? Both voices are old. Paul writes to the Corinthians that “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness,” that “the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom,” and that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:18–25, King James Version). Around the year 200 the North African writer Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”, meaning that philosophy and the Church had little to say to each other. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who had read the Greek philosophers closely, took the other path and drew a distinction. In On the Trinity, written between about 400 and 420, he separates two kinds of knowing. In the nineteenth-century English translation: “the intellectual cognizance of eternal things belongs to wisdom, but the rational cognizance of temporal things to knowledge.” His Latin terms are sapientia and scientia: wisdom contemplates what does not change, and knowledge works with what does.

A popular summary of this distinction speaks of “material wisdom” and “spiritual wisdom.” Augustine does not use those words; the idea that there are two levels, one human and bounded and one lasting, is his. The idea matters because it set the terms in which Christian scholars later welcomed learning. Course 2, on this site, follows how the study of the world moved into the medieval university.

Know God, know yourself

In 1536, at the age of twenty-six, John Calvin published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Basel, and revised it until the final Latin edition of 1559. The 1559 edition opens with a statement about wisdom, here in Henry Beveridge’s English translation of 1845: “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” The two are tied together, Calvin writes, so that it is hard to say which comes first, though in the next section he says that no one comes to true knowledge of himself without first looking at God.

For Calvin the knowledge of ourselves is humbling: we see our ignorance, vanity, want, and weakness, and, in his harsher words, depravity and corruption, and that tells us where wisdom is to be found, in God alone. In this reading, humility is wisdom’s entrance: the more of the whole one sees, the smaller one’s own part in it looks, as the last lesson’s astronauts found. Proverbs says it with the phrase “the fear of the LORD,” which in this context means awe more than terror.

Calvin belongs to a story of division that the course notes in passing. Christianity separated in 1054 into the Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox (“orthodox,” from the Greek for right belief) and the Latin-speaking Catholic churches (from the Greek katholikos, “according to the whole”), when the two sides excommunicated each other, although the break had been growing for a long time. After Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 the Western church split again. The word “Protestant” comes from the formal protest that evangelical princes and cities lodged at the Diet of Speyer in 1529. One thing the Reformers did early was to put the Bible in the language of ordinary people: Luther’s German New Testament appeared in September 1522. In 2010, by Pew Research Center’s count, there were about 2.18 billion Christians, of whom about half were Catholic, 37 percent Protestant, and 12 percent Orthodox. By its 2025 report, Christians were about 28.8 percent of the world’s people in 2020, about 2.3 billion.

The same insight has an older cousin in China. In the Analects, Confucius says to his disciple Zilu: 知之为知之，不知为不知，是知也, which means: to know what you know and to admit what you do not know, that is knowing (2.17). Socrates’s confession of ignorance, the Proverbs line about the fear of the LORD, and Confucius’s advice to Zilu are three separate traditions, and each begins wisdom, in its own way, from an honest sense of one’s limits.

Seven pillars: one reading, and many

What are the seven pillars? The answer people often give today comes from a few verses in the book of Proverbs, chapter 8, in which Wisdom speaks:

I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions. The fear of the LORD is to hate evil … Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have strength.

Proverbs 8:12–14, King James Version

Read as a list, these give: prudence; knowledge and discretion; the fear of the LORD; counsel; sound wisdom; understanding; and power (“strength”). This course reads them as seven qualities that mark a wise person, and it draws a path from them: someone with prudence weighs a decision, with knowledge and discretion avoids the danger, with awe stays humble, with counsel takes advice, with sound wisdom judges well, with understanding takes things in, and with power can carry the answer out. As the course puts it, that is how a person comes to live as a wise person lives.

Here the course has to say what it knows. That list of seven is a modern assembly: it appears in sermons and devotional writing on Proverbs 8, and it does not come from the Church Fathers or from the ancient commentaries. The verses themselves give eight terms if each is counted (prudence, knowledge, discretion, fear of the LORD, counsel, sound wisdom, understanding, strength), so any list of seven has to join two, and other lists of seven exist in the same sermons. The older readings of the “seven pillars” of Proverbs 9:1, meanwhile, are many:

• Augustine (City of God, book 17, chapter 4) takes seven as the number of perfection, and the house as the universal Church, pointing to the seven churches of the book of Revelation (Revelation 1:4).
• Rashi, the eleventh-century Jewish commentator, reads the pillars as the seven days of creation.
• Abraham ibn Ezra, a Jewish scholar of the twelfth century, reads them as seven branches of learning, the seven liberal arts.
• Some Christian commentators read them as the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit, a list drawn from Isaiah 11:2 (“the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD”), which in its Latin form has seven gifts.
• The Dutch theologian Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669) read them as seven periods in the history of the Church, matching the seven churches of Revelation.
• The eighteenth-century English commentator John Gill preferred the ministers of the Gospel, as the pillars that hold a church up.

There is no single reading, then, and the history of the verse is one of readers finding in it what they most wanted in a house of wisdom. That is a good thing to know before one says what the pillars “are.”

The simple, the fool, the wise

Proverbs, finally, sorts people. Wisdom’s call in chapter 9 goes to “whoso is simple,” and chapter 1 asks, “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?” (Proverbs 1:22). The Hebrew has several words here. The simple (petî) are the naive and untaught, who can still learn; the fool (kesîl) hates correction; the scoffer (lēṣ) mocks it. Against all of them stands the wise (ḥākām). This course compresses them into three kinds of people: the obstinate fool, the simple who can be taught, and the wise. The compression is fair as far as it goes. It leaves out the scoffer, and it does not say that the simple are mocked: the simple are the people Wisdom is inviting in. The advice that follows from it is the oldest in the book: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished” (Proverbs 22:3).