Cleverness Is Not True Test Of Wisdom

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 10, 20 October 1950, Page 6

Cleverness Is Not True Test Of Wisdom

By Stapleton Hall

Wisdom must be distinguished from knowledge, and especially from cleverness or shrewdness. A knowledgeable man is not always wise; a shrewd, man may be a fool. Something more than intellectual strength is involved in wisdom; moral qualities must be added. These include self-examination, love of truth, courage to face facts, scorn of deceptive and illuslory prejudices, fairmindedness and candour, thoroughness, simplicity, child-likeness, humility, and other graces of character. In a notable passage, St. Thomas Aquinas gives eight such moral qualities, briefly summed up in three words, docility, impartiality, conscientiousness.

Wisdom may be described as the organ which discerns right ideals. The task of wisdom is to see things as they are, in their due place and proportion, and under the light of the eternal years. In John Bunyan’s “Holy War,” there is a character called “Mr Get ‘i the Hundred and lose i’ the Shire.” What Bunyan meant by this long name was that a man may grasp at an “advantage under his own eyes, and by gaining it be disabled from a larger ambition and a wider success. Wisdom calculates beyond the hour. Permanent Value Wisdom considers all things in the light of timelessness. In a brilliant study called “The Fools of the Bible,” Professor Paterson, a Scottish theologian, brings out the permanent value of the cardinal virtue of true wisdom. The modern emphasis on prudence may be a reaction against the teaching of the Middle Ages that true wisdom lay in contemplating the vision of a future life. Let us hear less, men say, about the Father’s House of many rooms, tell us more about the dwellings of the poor and the problem of the oneroomed house. This agnosticism about the future is the popular mood of the day. But is it wisdom? Does it really tend to serve the practical, present-day needs which it is intended to serve? It is a fact of experience that those who have done most to help the poor have been those who looked to another country beyond the limits of time, the reflected glory from which has made the poor worth helping.