The Undivided Moral Life

A Thesis on Cultural Polarization and Historical Political Divides

The unity of the divine life and the lives of collective fools.

Beginning With God: The Core of Proverbs

Proverbs is a notoriously difficult book to make sense of. The first several chapters function as a loose narrative, with Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly offering competing visions. We’ve seen before that these two visions run parallel to one another: two women calling the wayfarer into their house, each preparing a meal to be eaten, standing atop hills next to the city gates.

Beginning in Proverbs 10, the work opens up in koan-like statements, visions of the wise life cascading down, each one a rich fruit waiting to be peeled, savored, and pried open at the pit. There are familiar chestnuts like “iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another”, and ear scratchers like “better to live on a corner of a roof than in a house with a cranky wife.” Not all of these have aged well, even if the wisdom concerning domestic tranquility is apt.

Commentators have offered accounts of how the aggregate pieces fit together, and in what order—if any—they might be most profitably read. For my money, there is no way to make sense of why proverbs about domestic tranquility belong beside friendship and barnyards. The most compelling one, I think, is fairly simple: that the world and any account of wisdom exist within God, and that life consists not of ordered steps or instruction, but of where we find ourselves in our lives with God. In that way, barns and spouses and money and sex just fit together because all of it belongs to the maelstrom of life.

In the same way that the way into wisdom begins as equally with money as with barns and spouses, the failures of wisdom and the embrace of folly takes place not by a wholesale collapse all at once, and are not restricted to one particular vice. Our journey into foolishness is an incremental falling apart, one habit at a time. For wisdom is a totalized existence: to say that the world exists as God’s is not just to say something about the origins of the world (3:19), but to say something about what it means to live in light of that origin, and to live toward ascending the holy hill of Proverbs 1-9 well.

Making Wholeness Out of Fragments

The clouds part in Proverbs 16 as once again the LORD takes center stage:

1 To humans belong the plans of the heart,
    but from the Lord comes the proper answer of the tongue.

² All a person’s ways seem pure to them,
    but motives are weighed by the Lord.

³ Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
    and he will establish your plans.

⁴ The Lord works out everything to its proper end—
    even the wicked for a day of disaster.

⁵ The Lord detests all the proud of heart.
    Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished.

⁶ Through love and faithfulness sin is atoned for;
    through the fear of the Lord evil is avoided.

⁷ When the Lord takes pleasure in anyone’s way,
    he causes their enemies to make peace with them.

⁸ Better a little with righteousness
    than much gain with injustice.

⁹ In their hearts humans plan their course,
    but the Lord establishes their steps.

The LORD has been absent for some time in Proverbs before chapter 9, but appears here again, as if to remind a world seeking wisdom that the way up the holy hill is one which appears in piecemeal fragments—through rooftops and kingly glances and barns—but which is less fragments than a kaleidoscope. It appears in fragments which are actually refractions, mirroring the God who makes a way of wisdom in the world.

Photo by Joao Tzanno on Unsplash

In this section, we find that God is a just God, a provident God, seeking the humble and establishing the righteous. The way of God is one which encompasses beginnings and ends, because this is the kind of God who is: one who is whole and complete, without beginning or end. To live in God’s world well is not just to confess that God has loved the world and given it wisdom, but to confess that this God is just and no idols will be welcomed in it. It is to recall that the world has not just a beginning, but an end, and that the way between is marked by that coherence.

For God is one, and the wise way through God’s world is likewise one, singular, undivided. The virtues are like this: singular, refracting out like sunlight through glass into barns, bedrooms, sunrises and wombs. To neglect part of the vision is to break the vision.

Consider 16: 32:

Better a patient person than a warrior,
    one with self-control than one who takes a city.

Here, we find one who has considered strength as their center, the whole of the way of the world instead of a restrained portion. They are pit over against the patient, the one who—like the prologue to chapter 16 describes—knows God’s providence as the bedrock of the world instead of securing a stronghold. It is not, in other words, that caring for one’s home is bad so much as partial: folly comes, in turn, with taking a part of moral action as the whole thing, stretching a pillowcase over the whole of the bed.

This is the story of the world, though.