What is the difference between wisdom, understanding, and knowledge?

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Asked to answer this very popular question.

Understanding is personal. Wisdom and knowledge remain so even if you don’t possess them. Not so with understanding. My understanding is not your understanding. My wisdom is not mine. You cannot own wisdom nor knowledge, but your understanding of wisdom or knowledge is your own.

The weird one out the way, let’s deal with the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Philosophy means “the love of wisdom.” It took philosophy to define knowledge. Knowledge is a true belief, justified. That’s three components. Defined against knowledge, I would say that wisdom is simply true beliefs, but that’s not really right. A true belief is just a fact. Facts are not knowledge until you understand why they’re important, i.e. justification. Why is this belief true and why should I pay attention to it? That’s the distinguishing factor behind knowledge.

Wisdom earns its relevance, on the other hand, through a purely personal process. Something is wise if it gives you something you didn’t have before and it helps you. Knowledge, on the other hand, is an attempt at being universal, through the justification. Wisdom does not need to be absolute or universal, it’s happy being subjective and only valid for a small subset.

It’s worth mentioning scripture. The Bible has three books colloquially called “wisdom books”. Their purpose is to help humans understand the mind of God, what God wants, how we can live in concert with Him. Traditionally, the message of the three wisdom books get a little deeper as you progress through them. Proverbs is simple, Ecclesiastes is sophisticated, Job is deep. When you get to Job, you start to realize that God isn’t subject to justification. Job asks God to justify His actions and God only reminds Job that God is God, and Job is Job, and Job can never understand God.

It’s humans that need justification, God has no need of it. So while spiritual ‘knowledge’ can exist, spirituality will always remain above knowledge. Justification ties facts together. If one agrees that God is the source of all that is good, meaning all wisdom, then there are good things that cannot be justified. God alone is the arbiter.

Pardon me for this excursion from the realm of reason, but I need to impress that not everything can be connected through epistemelogical justification.