"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10
“Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
1 Cor. 1:22-25
If you’ve been around Capstone very long, you’ve heard us rattle off words like wisdom and virtue so much that they just might have lost their meaning. I hope not, but if so, the next few articles are intended to help remedy that. In this mighty duo, virtue typically means moral virtue. Some parents exploring Capstone might rightly ask, “Why spend time on virtue? I understand why you teach wisdom, but we can teach virtue at home and church. What we need from you is knowledge and skills!”
These moral virtues are the ones we most often think of in common vernacular. They make for people of high, noble character and are acquired through practice and imitation of role models in moral virtue. These are virtues like our Gryphon’s weapons, with which Capstone parents are very familiar. We will tackle those virtues in a future article, but this week we are tackling intellectual virtues, of which wisdom is supreme. This week’s First Things just might help you to understand in part why Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas grace the front of our building.
Our definition of classical Christian education starts with a pursuit of wisdom through a cultivation of intellectual virtue. So what, exactly, are these intellectual virtues, and why would they lead to wisdom?
Aristotle was the first to organize a list of intellectual virtues. Moral virtues, he believed, are made within a person by habit. However, he believed that intellectual virtues needed to be taught. We practice heart-shaping habits at Capstone in pursuit of moral virtue, but we teach content and skills in the classroom, on the court, and on the field to develop intellectual virtues. Aristotle identified five intellectual virtues: artistry (craftsmanship), prudence (applied wisdom), intuition (understanding), scientific knowledge, and philosophic wisdom. Thomas Aquinas argues for three intellectual virtues: understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. We won’t go into detail on each of those this week, but both exemplars in all things classical education identified wisdom as the highest intellectual virtue.
Aristotle defines wisdom (sophia in Greek) as mastery of intuition and scientific knowledge applied to the highest or metaphysical matters. He uses the same word for wisdom that the apostle Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 1 when he calls Christ the “wisdom of God.” For both Aristotle and Aquinas, wisdom relates to the first principles or ultimate causes that govern and undergird all other knowledge and understanding. Wisdom can be acquired by growing in the other intellectual virtues, and the other intellectual virtues are explained best by the light of wisdom.
For Aristotle, wisdom is the intellectual virtue that considers highest causes. For Aquinas, wisdom begins and ends in Christ, and good theology guides reason to truth. Theology is the highest form of wisdom. Theology provides a unifying framework for developing artistry, prudence, intuition, and scientific knowledge. Much of his work considered his predecessor Aristotle, but Aquinas considered that Christ, the power and wisdom of God, is the incarnation of wisdom, and therefore wisdom must be theologically informed.
Without doing a deep dive into each of these great thinkers’ work, we can say that at Capstone we stand with these giants in declaring wisdom the highest intellectual virtue. It informs our selection of content and experiences that develop the other intellectual virtues so that it may expand and unite them. We apply wisdom to the development of curriculum and instruction so that they are Christ-centered and coherent. In a sense, wisdom is both the end and the means of classical education, and in classical Christian education, Christ is the embodiment of wisdom.
The other intellectual virtues are similarly both ends and means, but not ultimately the way that wisdom is both.
Each of the intellectual virtues complements and enhances the others. We aim to build our students’ intuition or intellectual instincts by immersing them in a rich array of vibrant encounters with reality through history, music, biblical studies, art, and literature so that they begin to have a tremendous mental stock of good, true, and beautiful knowledge that will develop the intellectual virtue of intuition. The intuition must also be fueled by knowledge and craftsmanship (or skill) so that it can make better judgments and predictions.
We train students in the intellectual virtue of artistry in writing and rhetoric (among other skills like reading, drawing, etc.), and such artistry sharpens the development of wisdom and understanding as students examine their thinking more critically when applying those crafts.
We teach students about the intricate order of creation and the laws governing it and connect them to the study of logic so that their empirical skills (the intellectual virtue of scientific knowledge) are cultivated. These studies help to form our students’ theology as they can deduce the nature of God through their developing mental mosaic of reality, but we also teach them theology so that they can see how it sheds light upon their empiricism. When they study science in light of Paul’s declaration in Romans that creation groans in eager expectation for redemption, they can better interpret signs of futility in nature in light of their ultimate meaning.
And ultimate meaning is what a school aimed at wisdom and virtue is all about. We went to send graduates into the world who possess all knowledge, understanding, and wisdom as a coherent whole that provides the most fundamental answers to the meaning of life. Aristotle called it eudaimonia (happiness). We avoid that word today and call it flourishing. At Capstone, we like to call it what Jesus called it: abundant life. That’s why the lintel over our front doors is engraved with John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life.” Jesus, the wisdom of God, is the starting and ending point of all intellectual virtue and the only way to happiness, not just for Capstone, but for all mankind.