Sapientia Nulliformis (Formless Wisdom) is, indeed, a strange title for a blog. Thus, it is fitting to explain--in my first ever blog post--the meaning of the term and the reason it was selected as the name for my website.
I'll be frank: I did not put a lot of thought into the title--at least not proximately--before it was chosen. I had been thinking about starting a blog for a while. I finally had the time and motivation to start it, and I needed to pick a title straight away. Then, Sapientia Nulliformis came to mind rather quickly. It was a term I encountered in my graduate studies in theology. It struck me then--as it still does now--as a beautiful expression of the highest form of wisdom attainable by the human person: the wisdom of the Saints.
The term derives from the work of St. Bonaventure, whose time at the University of Paris overlapped that of St. Thomas Aquinas. While St. Bonaventure is not as well-known as Aquinas, he nevertheless embodies, along with St. Thomas, the height of scholastic theology (see Pope Sixtus V's Papal Bull Triumphantis as quoted in Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris, #14).
In his Collations on the Six Days of Creation (no. 2), St. Bonaventure treats wisdom as fourfold: uniform, omniform, multiform, and--finally and most especially--nulliform. Without going into detail, the first three forms of wisdom correspond to the wisdom of first principles, wisdom discovered through examining creation, and wisdom acquired through sacred scripture. All of these are forms of created wisdom. Their origin and goal, however, is uncreated wisdom: the wisdom that God Himself is. This is the reason it is formless wisdom, wisdom without a form, not because it is utterly lacking in form, but because it is supremely beyond all forms. This thought is tied closely to the apophatic tradition of the Church Fathers. It is an acknowledgment that God is beyond comprehension, because He is so much more than our finite minds could ever encompass. Since man cannot truly possess the divine wisdom in its fullness, nulliform wisdom is totally different than the other forms of wisdom: it is not about cramming knowledge into our minds so much as having our entire being immersed in divine light. It is the wisdom of the saints and mystics (see Christopher Cullen, Bonaventure, 26). Ultimately, it is the loving union of man with God, which conforms man to God in a complete act of mutual self-donation. Nulliform wisdom is the goal of every other form of wisdom.
As such, Sapientia Nulliformis was chosen as the title of this blog as a description of its aim, not of its contents. Sapientia Nulliformis expresses the distant and ultimate goal of this blog and of this blogger: the union of the author and his readers with perfect, eternal Divine Love itself, the Triune God.
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