Thursday, Memorial of St. Albert the Great, bishop
(Wisdom 7:22b-8.1)
The poet T.S. Eliot in 1934 felt the anxiety that grips many in our Information Age. He wrote back then, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Wisdom tells how to live happier, more meaningful lives. Yet too many people today lack it as the multiple medical problems attest to even as medical knowledge has allowed us to live longer.
In the first reading the sage who wrote the Book of Wisdom finds twenty-one attributes of wisdom. The number is considered absolutely perfect because that it is the product of the perfect number (seven) and the number of divine attributes (omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence). Of these attributes he includes “loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly, firm, secure, tranquil” – qualities that we might use to describe a wise person.
Such a person was St. Albert the Great. Although he lived in the thirteenth century, Albert was canonized in the twentieth as a patron for scientists. He performed scientific experiments and developed a system of classification for the plants and animals he studied. He also taught philosophy and theology, served as a diocesan bishop, and later advised kings and popes. Very significantly, he recognized and encouraged genius in his student St. Thomas Aquinas whom he later defended against charges of heresy. But he may be considered a saint because he was “loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kindly, firm, secure, tranquil.”
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