Sophia (wisdom)
Personification of wisdom
(in Greek, "Σοφία" or "Sophia")
at the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey.
In Hebrew texts
Sophia is adopted as the term in the Septuagint for Hebrew חכמות Ḥokmot. In Judaism, Chokhmah appears alongside the Shekhinah, 'the Glory of God', a figure who plays a key role in the cosmology of the Kabbalists as an expression of the feminine aspect of God. It is a central topic in the "sapiential" books (i.e., the eponymous Book of Wisdom as well as Ecclesiastes and Proverbs). A key passage which personifies Wisdom/Sophia in the Hebrew Bible is Proverbs 8:22-31.
In the New Testament
Paul refers to the concept, notably in 1 Corinthians, but obscurely, deconstructing worldly wisdom:
"Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (1 Corinthians 1:20)
Paul sets worldly wisdom against a higher wisdom of God:
"But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory." (1 Corinthians 2:7)
The concept of Sophia has been championed as a key part of the Godhead by some Eastern Orthodox religious thinkers. These included Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov whose book Sophia: The Wisdom of God is in many ways the apotheosis of Sophiology. For Bulgakov, the Sophia is co-existent with the Trinity, operating as the feminine aspect of God in concert with the three masculine principles of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Roman Catholic mysticism
In Roman Catholic mysticism, Hildegard of Bingen celebrated Sophia as a cosmic figure in both her writing and her art.
Protestant mysticism
Sophia can be described as the wisdom of God, and, at times, as a pure virgin spirit which emanates from God. The Sophia is seen as being expressed in all creation and the natural world as well as, for some of the Christian mystics mentioned above, integral to the spiritual well-being of humankind, the church, and the cosmos. The Virgin is seen as outside creation but compassionately interceding on behalf of humanity to alleviate its suffering by illuminating true spiritual seekers with wisdom and the love of God.
The main difference between the concept of Sophia found in most traditional forms of Christian mysticism and the one more aligned with the Gnostic view of Sophia is that to many Christian mystics she is not seen as fallen or in need of redemption. Conversely, she is not as central in most forms of established Christianity as she is in Gnosticism, but to some Christian mystics the Sophia is a very important concept.
In Gnosticism
A feminine figure, analogous to the human soul but also simultaneously one of the Feminine aspects of God and the Bride of Christ, In Gnostic tradition, the term Sophia refers to the final and lowest emanation of God.
Almost all Gnostic systems of the Syrian or Egyptian type taught that the universe began with an original, unknowable God, referred to as the Parent or Bythos, or as the Monad by Monoimus. It can also be equated to the concept of Logos in stoic, esoteric, or theosophical terms (The 'Unknown Root') as well as the Ein Sof of the Kabbalah and Brahman in Hinduism. It is also known as the first Æon by still other traditions. From this initial unitary beginning, the One spontaneously emanated further Æons, being pairs of progressively 'lesser' beings in sequence. The lowest of these pairs were Sophia and Christ. The Æons together made up the Pleroma, or fullness, of God, and thus should not be seen as distinct from the divine, but symbolic abstractions of the divine nature.
Nag Hammadi
In the Nag Hammadi, Sophia is the lowest Æon, or anthropic expression of the emanation of the light of God. She is the syzygy of Jesus Christ (i.e. she forms a unity with Christ, being cojoined with him), and Gnostics believed that she was the Holy Spirit of the Trinity. Sophia is depicted as the creator of the material universe in On the Origin of the World. Furthermore, the planet Earth and everything on it was indeed created by the Old Testament God, but he is depicted as fundamentally corrupt. Because Sophia created the material universe and its god (also known as Yaldabaoth, Samael, and Demiurge) either without her syzygy1 Jesus Christ or, in another tradition, because she tried to breach the barrier between herself and the unknowable Bythos.
1 In Gnosticism, a syzygy is a divine active-passive, male-female pair of aeons, complementary to one another rather than oppositional; in their totality they comprise the divine realm of the Pleroma, and in themselves characterise aspects of the unknowable Gnostic God. The term is most common in Valentinianism. In some gnostic schools, the counterpart to Christ was Sophia.
A mystical depiction of Sophia from Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, Altona, 1785.
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Originally Posted by Antje De waal
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