The Imitation of Christ admonishes us: “Even if you knew by heart the whole Bible and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would if profit you without the love of God and his grace?” “Everyone has a natural craving for knowledge, but of what avail is knowledge without the fear of God?” “An unlearned person who serves God is surely better than a learned one who proudly searches the heavens while neglecting himself.” “Give up your excessive desire for learning. Therein are to be found only illusion and inner emptiness.”
If we step backward in history, we find something similar in one who is perhaps the greatest saint in the history of the Church: Saint Francis of Assisi. Again and again, he emphatically referred to himself as “simple and ignorant, without knowledge and ignoratnt” (simplex et ydiota, ignorans et ydiota).
In the so-called First Rule we find, for instance, these sentences: “Let us be on our guard against the wisdom of this world and the prudence of the flesh; for the fleshy spirit tries by all means to have the word but is little concerned with carrying it out; it seeks not for inner religion and sanctity, but fot that which will be seen by men” …Finally, there is also the witness of Holy Scripture itself. We might recall, for instance, the biting scorn with which Paul, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, describes the wisdom of the Greeks and contrasts it with the simplicity of the Christian message. The Cross of the carpenter’s son of Nazareth is, for the believer, the wisdom of God, which men, for all their wisdom, have not known (2 Cor 1:21-25).
