Against Celsus 6.13

Accordingly, then, there is a divine wisdom and a human wisdom. The human is what we call “the wisdom of the world,” which is “foolishness with God”; but the divine, which is different from the human, if indeed it is divine, comes by the grace of God, who gives it to those who have made themselves fit to receive it, and especially to those who, knowing the difference between the one wisdom and the other, say in their prayers to God: “For even if someone is perfect among the sons of men, when the wisdom that comes from you is absent he will be counted as nothing.” And we say that human wisdom is a training ground for the soul, but divine wisdom is its goal; and the latter is also called the “solid food” of the soul by the one who said: “Solid food is for the perfect, who because of practice have their faculties trained to distinguish good and evil.” This view is indeed truly ancient; not, as Celsus supposes, in that its antiquity goes back to Heraclitus and Plato. For before these the prophets distinguished the two kinds of wisdom. For the present it is enough to quote from the words of David what is said about the man who is wise with divine wisdom, who “will not see corruption,” he says, “when he sees wise men dying.” Divine wisdom, then, being different from faith, is the first of the so-called “gifts” of God; after it, second, for those who know how to make such distinctions precisely, is what is called knowledge; and third, since even the simpler people who come to piety as well as they can must be saved, is faith. That is why Paul says: “To one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit.” Therefore you would find that it is not ordinary people who have received divine wisdom, but those who excel and stand out among all who are devoted to Christianity; nor does anyone expound the matters of divine wisdom to the most uneducated or to slaves or to the most ignorant.