A short introduction to what Bourgeault calls the Christian wisdom tradition — the body of practice running through the desert fathers, the hesychast monks of Mount Athos, the Sufis, and contemporary Centering Prayer — that she argues was suppressed by the rationalist turn of post-Reformation Christianity. The book lays out three components: practices, an anthropology of the heart as a real organ of knowing, and a body of teaching transmitted through living lineage.
Bourgeault traces the tradition through Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Jacob Boehme, and the Sufi lineages of Rumi and Ibn al-Arabi, and draws on G.I. Gurdjieff's Fourth Way framework as one modern vehicle for the same transmission. The book is meant to be read as preparation for the more demanding curricula of her later works and her teaching through the Contemplative Society.
Reception
The Wisdom Way of Knowing is the foundational text of Bourgeault's broader Wisdom School project; it is widely used as a reading-circle starter in Episcopal and progressive Catholic contexts and is cited as the gateway to her better-known later books — The Wisdom Jesus, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, and The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three. Within mainstream academic theology the book has been received cautiously: reviewers have noted the project recovers something real about the patristic and hesychast inheritance, while raising questions about Bourgeault's heavy use of G.I. Gurdjieff's Fourth Way as an interpretive frame and about whether the wisdom she reconstructs maps as cleanly onto the historical sources as the book suggests.
Frequently asked
What is The Wisdom Way of Knowing about?
It introduces what Bourgeault calls the Christian wisdom tradition — a lineage she traces through the desert fathers, hesychast monasticism, Meister Eckhart, Sufism, and contemporary Centering Prayer. She argues this tradition was largely suppressed by post-Reformation Christianity's emphasis on rational theology and doctrinal belief.
What does Bourgeault mean by heart-centered knowing?
She presents what she calls three-centered knowing — head, heart, and body — as the anthropology of the Wisdom tradition, arguing that Western Christianity lost access to the heart as an organ of perception distinct from intellectual reasoning. The book proposes practices including Centering Prayer and sacred chanting for cultivating this capacity.
How does G.I. Gurdjieff's work figure in the book?
Bourgeault draws on Gurdjieff's Fourth Way system, especially its model of three centers of knowing, as one modern expression of the ancient wisdom tradition. Reviewers note this as both the book's most distinctive and most contested element — some reading it as a creative synthesis, others as an uneasy conflation of distinct streams.