Seeking learning, and the grace of insightfulness: the issue of wisdom in Orthodox tradition

I wish to talk today about Wisdom, in a two-fold sense: both in its sacred aspect, as spoken about often in the Old Testament and taken to a new and high pitch in the Christian Evangelical and Patristic tradition, and wisdom in the more common and contemporary understanding of that term; wisdom, that is, as an element of culture (a sacred term, certainly, that would almost count even as an enduring religious value in a radically secularized age), one that distinguishes the wise from the merely clever