The Wisdom Tradition

April 25, 2008

The perennial philosophy tends to get brought up in relation to mystical philosophies.. pushing people to understand that underneath the externals religious thinkers share a similar view of God and humanity. Our antipathy to this leveling of religious traditions goes way back here at Old Roads (see here). But today as I was getting ready for a lecture on wisdom literature it occurred to me that we seriously underestimate the ancient consensus about wisdom.

The wisdom tradition can in part be followed by looking for collections that are addressed from a father to son. The biblical book of Proverbs conforms to this pattern: "My child, if you accept my words..." (2.1). Likewise the under-read Wisdom of Ben Sirach urges: "My child, when you come to serve the Lord..." (2.1). When we turn to other ancient traditions we find this same pattern. The best later example of this may be the Mesopotamian Story of Ahiqar:

And he returned, and implored the Most High God, and believed, beseeching Him with a burning in his heart, saying, 'O Most High God, O Creator of the Heavens and of the earth, O Creator of all created things!

I beseech Thee to give me a boy, that I may be consoled by him, that he may be present at my death, that
he may close my eyes, and that he may bury me.'

Then there came to him a voice saying, 'Inasmuch as thou hast relied first of all on graven images, and hast
offered sacrifices to them, for this reason thou Shalt remain childless thy life long.

But take Nadan thy sister's son, and make him thy child and teach him thy learning and thy good breeding, and at thy death he shall bury thee.'

There follows a number of proverbs prefixed with "O my son." Here we see the same pattern, this time with an elaborately framed setup. The father finds a young child to instruct and teach.

These central wisdom texts can be thought of as elaborations on themes worked out a millennium previous in Egypt. The Maxims of Ptahhotep being the stately and complete model for these works, although we know this literary type goes back into the Old Kingdom. This pin-points the importance of ancient Egyptian literature. It is not a tradition with a Gilgamesh or an Odysseus, but one that gives us the earliest examples of wisdom texts. And these wisdom texts will be the basis for an international wisdom culture that dominated learned discourse for centuries.

The goal of these wisdom texts was not to adjudicate theology or national conflicts, but to propose rules for life in the most artful manner possible. It would not be hard to locate a small constellation of values and problems that these texts share.. among them a sense of deference to the social order and a confidence in the possibility of success. In essence, these wisdom texts can be understood as an early kind of perennial philosophy.. not a mysticism or even a religious position, really, but a widespread and interlocked faith in rational order.

This steady horse is now riderless.. as Yeats would say. It is a literary tradition that was displaced in the West by the high-profile genres of epic and drama and lyric. The current examples of wisdom literature, from etiquette books to the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, are sub-literary. One place this tradition survived for a long time is in the Arabic and Persian traditions. The Arabic notion of adab or correct behavior is a successor to these wisdom texts.. as are the multiple works that contain advice for princes.

It is difficult to stir up excitement for these jewels in the Arabic and Persian literary traditions.. and the reason for that is clear enough: these texts look back to an older system of genres, and therefore fall outside our modern taste for excitement and sublimity. To enjoy wisdom texts one must have an eye for detail and an ear for subtle modulation. Repetitions cannot be a source of boredom, but a cause for curiosity. Didacticism is not a banned word, but a natural result of life's inherent seriousness.