Where is the wise man?
By Alan Fimister | 18 June 2025
“I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes” (Mt 11:25)
Wisdom is the knowledge of things in their highest causes. The highest wisdom is the knowledge of the Cause of all causes in His essence. This is the Beatific Vision, the absolutely final end for which God in His perfect and completely gratuitous generosity created us. As Pope Benedict XII infallibly defined, in this vision which God need never have bestowed upon us, the Blessed “see the divine essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence.”
All creatures are finite, but the Cause of all causes is infinite. We cannot comprehend Him. He dwells through all eternity in unapproachable light. Were it not that God has revealed His intention to us by the light of faith, it would never occur to us that it is possible for the Creator to elevate the minds of His intelligent creatures to attain to an unmediated knowledge of Him as He is in Himself.
He Who is the Cause of all things is perfectly simple. He has no parts, no attributes, no operations with which He is not identical, which are not simply His very essence; nor is the very fact of His existence different from His nature. His existence is His essence: He is “He Who Is”. Although, the possibility of our attaining to the knowledge of His essence — of He Who Is as He Is — cannot formally be excluded by reason, it is unthinkable without His revelation. For, “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”, which “God has revealed to us through the Spirit” under the veil of faith.
Because “the divine substance surpasses every form the intellect reaches”, no one can invoke the very Name of God without doing so in vain. Or, almost no one. “The divine name may not be spoken by human lips, but by assuming our humanity the Word of God hands it over to us and we can invoke it: Jesus — ‘YHWH saves’.” (CCC 2666)
Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, as “the direct consequence of his ontology as Son of God made man” possesses the Beatific Vision, and, in seeing Him, we see the Father (Jn 14:9). “No man hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.” (Jn 3:13)
Although faith, hope and charity all in some sense remain when the blessed know God even as they are known, only charity remains in its own species. As Benedict XII explains, the “vision and enjoyment of the divine essence do away with the acts of faith and hope in these souls, inasmuch as faith and hope are properly theological virtues”. In contrast, in the charity of the faithful here below, heaven breaks through into this passing world. Only through charity is God’s will truly and fully done on earth as it is in heaven.
God need not have made us for this destiny. Not just as sinners, but simply as creatures, we have no claim upon it. Nothing which any creature does before the gift of faith and charity can merit that gift. “For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man may glory.” (Eph 2:8–9)
The presence of charity in the soul brings about the gift of wisdom: the knowledge of God acquired through the transformation of the soul to resemble the object of its love. “O Jesus, meek and humble of Heart, make our hearts like unto Thine!” This knowledge is utterly inaccessible to anyone without living faith. It is the seal of the divine friendship (Wis 7:14) of the believer’s victory over death (Song 8:6).
There is a wisdom (a knowledge of the highest causes) which is accessible to unaided nature, the wisdom “of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away” (1 Cor 2:6), but it is of no avail for salvation, and it cannot bring us into communion with God. Indeed, the belief that it can empties the Cross of its power (1:17). God has “made foolish the wisdom of the world” (1:20). Any purported “wisdom” claiming to establish a connaturality between God and creatures apart from the Christian revelation is a deceit of the evil one. There is “a secret and hidden wisdom of God” but it is that “which God decreed before the ages for our glorification” (2:7), the connatural wisdom which is imparted only by grace and of which nature and “the rulers of this age” are wholly ignorant.
When St Jude asked Our Lord at the Last Supper, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus replied, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (Jn 14:22-23) The truths of the faith are transmitted publicly by the apostolic hierarchy “what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” (2 Tim 2:2) The Lord manifests Himself to us in a way unavailable to the world through charity not secret knowledge.
The Acts of the Apostles tell us of “a man named Simon who had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the nation of Samaria” (Acts 8:9). Indeed, the Samaritans gave him a blasphemous divine reverence “because for a long time he had amazed them with his magic” (Acts 8:11). But, like the magicians of Pharaoh (Ex 7:12), Simon’s arts paled before the power of God’s messengers, in this case, Philip the Deacon. When Philip sent for the Apostles Peter and John to bring down the Holy Spirit upon their Samaritan converts, Simon Magus tried to offer them money saying, “Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 8:19)
This is the familiar sin of simony: the offering of temporal in exchange for spiritual goods (or vice versa). It is a recurring abuse in the history of the Church, but it is often forgotten that, before it is an abuse, it is a heresy. Indeed, Simon Magus is remembered by the Fathers of the Church as the very first heretic and the founder of the Gnostic heresy. Pope Paschal I (817–825) decreed that “manifest simoniacs should be rejected by the faithful as the first and pre-eminent heretics; and if after admonition they refuse to desist, they should be suppressed by the secular power. For all other sins in comparison with the heresy of simony are as if of no account” and St Peter Damian calls it “the heresy of simony, the first of all heresies to spring from the bowels of the devil”.
Why is this abuse a heresy and how does it relate to the practice of magic which Simon had pretended to set aside? When the evil one rebelled against God, St Thomas explains, “he desired resemblance with God in this respect — by desiring, as his last end of beatitude, something which he could attain by the virtue of his own nature, turning his appetite away from supernatural beatitude, which is attained by God’s grace.” (Summa Ia, 63, 3) To try to buy or sell participation in the divine nature, even before being sacrilege, is a heresy because it implies a proportion between the created and the uncreated, between nature and grace, a proportion that can be established only by grace. Were such a proportion to exist in nature then a connaturality between nature and grace could be established by human effort, by some sort of technique apart from the grace of God — by magic.
In this way Simony, the first heresy, and Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies, are revealed as one and the same. For if man could desire the supernatural as a result of his unaided natural reflection, he would be unable to desire anything less and God in his justice would owe it to man as the end He had given us by nature. As St Pius X explained in Pascendi (1907), the Modernist, assuming the persona of the apologist, claims that “there is in human nature a true and rigorous necessity with regard to the supernatural order — and not merely a capacity and a suitability for the supernatural, such as has at all times been emphasized by Catholic apologists.” Were there such a true and rigorous necessity, man would have a right to the Beatific Vision and would not be truly a creature at all. The world would simply unfold from within God out of the principles of His own nature. The rites of the pagans would in principle be imperfect but salvageable ways to God. In this way grace as such would be abolished. As Pius XII observed during the rise of Neo-Modernism, such authors “destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision”. The consequence of this is pantheism and emanationism of the sort elaborated by the pagan philosophers of the third century fighting their rearguard action against the advance of the gospel. But these ideas can easily, and far more damagingly, be brought into a false synthesis with Christian theology. As Pius X goes on, “they would show to the non-believer, hidden away in the very depths of his being, the very germ which Christ Himself bore in His conscience, and which He bequeathed to the world.” (Pascendi, 37)
In claiming that the faith which comes to us through preaching belongs to us instead by nature “welling up from the depths of the subconscious”, Modernism admits of both liberal and conservative manifestations. If there were truly a connaturality between nature and grace and the religious aspirations of mankind were all of supernatural origin, then why not embrace the world and make the faith as little offensive to it as possible? From this arises the liberal form of Modernism. On the other hand, if Catholicism is merely one form of poetry among many, giving expression in its very particularity to the common “religious sense” then surely those very particularities should be accentuated and refined to the highest possible degree. From this arises the conservative form of modernism. As the Fourth Lateran Council expressed it, “They have different faces indeed but their tails are tied together inasmuch as they are alike in their pride.” What neither can bear to hear is that “Believing in Jesus Christ and in the One who sent him for our salvation is necessary for obtaining that salvation. Since without faith it is impossible to please God and to attain to the fellowship of his sons, therefore without faith no one has ever attained justification, nor will anyone obtain eternal life but he who endures to the end.” (CCC 161)
Neither the proud wisdom of this world nor any secret knowledge of the fallen spirits has any power to raise man to the vision of his Creator. There is no technical or esoteric way to God, only childlike faith and simple, unmeritable love.