The Love of Wisdom

While reading book one of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, my mind recalled a portion of St. Augustine's Confessions. In book III, iv 8, Augustine tells of hunger for God - his starvation for Truth. At the age of eighteen, young Augustine began to search for Truth in the pages of philosophy. While reading Cicerco, he discovered that the Greek word philosophia means "love of wisdom." After years of misery, Augustine found the Truth...
I found Boethius to be in a similar state when Philosophy comes to comfort him. This instance seemed familiar to me -this voice of reason, of transparancy, of Truth- speaking clearly to the disheartened man. Then I turned to Proverbs chapters 8 and 9, where wisdom calls out to those who will listen. Boethius remembers how Philosophy implanted herself in him and told him, "Follow after God." Wisdom in Proverbs speaks of how she was there with God "in the beginning," and that "He who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord." I have grown up in a culture where Philosophy is portrayed as the deepest thinking, the greatest understanding, the highest knowledge...the journey of the search for Truth. But after reading Confessions and then Consolation, two works I knew almost nothing about until recently, I was directed to Proverbs, a book from which I have been taught for longer than I remember. And in the pages of Proverbs, I made the connection between Wisdom and Philosophy. Wisdom itself is rooted in the character of GOD...Philosophy is the search for that characteristic, that Truth. They have the same end, the end where Augustine found what he had been desiring his whole life: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding." ~Proverbs 9:10. "The fear of the LORD": the realization of Who He is, and the response to that revelation, is the deepest wisdom, the greatest philosophy....
All this time I thought the two were separate. Now I know that they find their source in One Who knows me and Whom I have known for much of my life...the One from which comes every good thing, the One Who gives us the "love of wisdom."