World: What then, am I not wise and full of knowledge?
Wise Man: You are not wise, if I choose to consider you foolish, so that through your folly I might become wise — all the more because “your wisdom is foolishness” [1 Cor. 3:19].
The Apostle’s word which the Wise Man brings forth is no mere figure of speech, but the very foundation of his whole resolve: “the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God” (1 Cor. 3:19). This is not a simple rhetorical reversal, as with beauty and goodness, but a divine judgment, spoken through the Apostle’s own mouth. The world believes itself wise because it knows how to calculate, foresee, and accumulate — yet it is precisely this cunning, once severed from God, that proves to be blindness. St. Basil the Great says that a philosophy which does not lead to the knowledge of God is like a rudderless ship: the faster it sails, the further it drifts from the good harbor.
Here lies the heart of the whole conversation up to now: the World has tried, one by one, glory, beauty, goodness, and now wisdom — and at every step the Wise Man has answered not by contradicting the facts, but by refusing to grant them the final word. So it is here too: he does not say the world has no knowledge at all, but chooses to regard it as folly, so that through its folly he might grow in true wisdom — the kind, says St. Isaac the Syrian, that is not learned from books, but from humility and the fear of God.
St. Paul calls the world’s wisdom “perishing” precisely because it feeds on passing things and dies along with them. He who renounces it is not left poorer, but is opened to another knowledge — the one Christ gives to the poor in spirit, showing that the folly of preaching the cross overcomes all that this age calls understanding.
