The high and the broad is knowledge for those whose souls desire it. Knowledge begins in desiring.
Depth is wisdom for those whose hearts can bear and endure it. Wisdom begins in unchosen suffering. Aeschylus= “we must suffer into truth.” Wisdom searches out the deep things of God ‘beneath’ existence.
Job, 26, 7=
“Have the gates of death been revealed to you
..or have you seen the gates of deep darkness,
where is the way to the place of deep darkness?”
Isaiah, 7, 10=
“Again Yahweh spoke..
Ask a sign of Yahweh your God;
Let it be deep as hell or high as heaven.”
Ecclesiasticus, 1, 1-2=
“All wisdom is from God, and is given to them that fear and love God.
All wisdom is from Yahweh our God, and has always been with him, and is before all time.
Who has numbered the sands of the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of the world?
Who has measured the height of heaven, and the breadth of the earth, and the depth of the abyss?”
Psalms, 94, 3=
“For Yahweh is a great God, and a great king.
In his hand are the deep places of the earth.”
In his left hand.
Paul, Ephesians, 4, 8-9=
“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,
And he gave gifts to humanity.
But in saying ‘he ascended’,
What does it mean but that
He had also descended into the lower parts of the earth.”
Ascending and gifts= Salvation.
Descending into the lower realms in the deeps, even into hell= Redemption.
There is no wisdom-ology. There is no and cannot be any logos of wisdom.
There is a spirit of wisdom.
Theo-Logos will not ever be able to express the deeps searched by the Spirit of God.
Spirit-wisdom is different. You cannot put it into words, unless you break their order, coherence, beauty.
What the heart learns from its terrible struggle ‘in the hands’ of the Daemonic is beyond any speaking. It is unspeakable. It is cried, sighed, inarticulately voiced in the silence that is a different prayer when all praying is done.
It is in the silence of the fatherless, it is in the silence of the widow, it is in the silence of the broken. It cannot be comforted, it is inconsolable.
It is in the extinction of any remaining hope in this life, when we still are secretly thinking we can side step the blow, and avoid the revealing of the chasm.
Let the rationalists and moralists continue to prattle their ungrounded confidence in things unseen.
Those who are of the heart are broken-hearted, and realise it; they have come to life’s heartbreak, and in the empty abyss, the consuming hell, the dead pit, they are neither reached nor changed by the Light of God’s Face, because they ‘know in their bones’ their only ignition after having burned down to ashes is the Fire of God’s Heart.
This is what the Messiah brings that is new, the Second Covenant. It begins on the Cross, then Descends into hell, and effects the change there, in the groundless ground of existence, and finally emerges victorious in the Resurrection.
Ecclesiasticus, 51, 4, 7= “And you have freed me from ..the depths of the bowels of hell.”
Redemption is deep. The Fire goes deep, because there is no other remedy for the tragedy lodged so far down, in all of us.
“Who has searched out the wisdom of God that goes before all things?” [Ecclesiasticus, 1, 3].