Noetic Sophia versus Worldly Sagacity

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 13 pages

From Lucifer of September 1890, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XII as The Dual Aspect of Wisdom. The occasion was a letter of advice, of a kind editors receive often, and she opens by allowing the principle behind it — that he who can take advice is superior to him who gives it — before observing that this particular letter does not meet the condition, since what it asserts is not its author's own wisdom but that of the age he lives in.

The charges she is answering are quoted: that Lucifer prefers barbarous antiquity to modern civilisation and its inestimable boons, that the wisdom of the century is in no way inferior in philosophy to the age of Plato, and that Theosophists are too fond of the dim yesterday and unjust to the bright noon-hour of the highest civilisation and culture. Her reply distinguishes two things the one English word covers — the noetic Sophia of the title against worldly sagacity — and the two epigraphs set the tone for how she takes the correspondent's confidence: Job's "no doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you", and Matthew's "but wisdom is justified of her children".

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