In perhaps my favorite passage of Scripture of all time, the hypostasis Wisdom (Sophia) is described in Chapter 7 of the deuterocanonical text Wisdom of Solomon as follows:
The Nature of Wisdom
There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy,
unique, manifold, subtle,
agile, clear, unpolluted,
distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen,23 irresistible, beneficent, humane,
steadfast, sure, free from anxiety,
all-powerful, overseeing all,
and penetrating through all spirits
that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.24 For wisdom is more mobile than any motion;
because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.25 For she is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.26 For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.27 Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God and prophets,28 for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
29 She is more beautiful than the sun
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be more radiant,30 for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.Now compare this to how Sophia is described in Proverbs 8:
22 “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
23 Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24 When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
25 Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
26 when he had not yet made earth and fields
or the world’s first bits of soil.
27 When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28 when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
29 when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30 then I was beside him, like a master worker,
and I was daily his delight,
playing before him always,
31 playing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
Next, compare all these descriptions of Sophia to Christ as Logos in the Gospel of John chapter 1:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
It is hard to for me to not see an obvious parallel between Sophia as a divine hypostasis and Christ the Logos. It seems to me that Christ the Logos was modeled on Sophia, which was then influential in the Neoplatonic conception of the “One” in gnostic forms of Christianity.
What are we to make of all this? To me, Sophiology is rich theological ground for recovering a sense of the divine feminine in Christian theology. That Christians are hungry for a sense of the divine feminine is obvious in Catholic Mariology. It seems to me that Mariology picks up where Sophiology was abandoned.
I tend to think all mystics and contemplatives have a finely tuned sense for the necessity of divine femininity as a metaphysical contrast to the masculine principle. Thomas Merton, the great Catholic contemplative, recognized this in his ode to Sopha Hagia Sophia:
“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom,the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in word-less gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator's Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.
We do not see the Blinding One in black emptiness.
He speaks to us gently in ten thousand things, in
which His light is one fullness and one Wisdom.
Thus He shines not on them but from within them.
Such is the loving-kindness of Wisdom.
All the perfections of created things are also in God;
and therefore He is at once Father and Mother. As
Father He stands in solitary might surrounded by
darkness. As Mother His shining is diffused, embracing
all His creatures with merciful tenderness and light.
The Diffuse Shining of God is Hagia Sophia.
We call her His "glory." In Sophia His power is
experienced only as mercy and as love.”
Merton makes a subtle reference to Taoism with his line about the “ten thousand things,” which represent the manifest multiplicity and particularity of God’s emanated reality which is intelligible and categorizable by our minds only via the power of the Logos, The Word, or God’s Wisdom, Sophia, the Mother of All Things.
Merton recognizes, like all great mystics, that if one is going to personify the cosmic emanations of God at all through the limitations of gender as a guiding archetypal metaphor, then one must include both the Masculine and the Feminine, both the Active and the Passive, both the Father and the Mother.
Every ancient system of wisdom has recognized the essential androgyny of Mother-Father-ness built into the Godhead. It has been the great poverty of the orthodox Christian tradition to have completely masculinized the Godhead by turning the Logos of Christ into a strictly masculine principle with no sight of the feminine anywhere except his human mother Mary, who Catholics have always seen as holy and maybe even divine but never as full member of the Trinity worthy of actual worship.
While it is true that the Incarnation of Christ-as-Logos in Jesus of Nazareth was masculine insofar as Jesus was an ordinary man, the Christ-as-Logos itself is beyond the limitations of masculinity and in fact both encompasses and gives rise to the logic of all genders.
Paul sees the implications of the Universal Christ clearly in his statement in Galatians 3:28 that “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
What is the relationship between Christ as Sophia? Sophia was said to be there “in the beginning” just as Christ the Logos, the Word, was there “in the beginning.”
It’s hard to not see the obvious Greek influence on the conception in John of Christ as Logos. Heraclitus wrote:
“All things are in flux; the flux is subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) bound opposites together in a unified tension, which is like that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string.”
This is the key thing to understand about the Logos: it is a rational principle, an organizing principle. It is a kind of rational blueprint through which The One is filtered when the Many is emanated from The One. When the Many emanates from The One, it does not do so in a purely chaotic way. There is order and rationality in the emanation process, and the Logos is the highest ordering principle, the highest template for rational harmony and unity in the universe. It is the ontological foundation for all order and rationality.
So, when the Gospel of John says, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” we have to understand this in terms of the emanation model from the One. All “things” come into being through the Logos. The key word is “through.” Christ is not the Ultimate Principle, Christ is not the Almighty Father, the highest Absolute One, but the divine ordering principle “through which” the Almighty Father manifests Creation into an ordered multiplicity of distinct “things.”
The author of the Gospel of John obviously had Sophia in mind when developing his Christology, following the Wisdom of Solomon when it says
“25 For she [Sophia] is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;”
This “pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty” is functionally equivalent to how the Christ as Logos functions in being the rational ordering principle “through which” all things come into being.
Paul makes this connection between Christ as Logos and Sophia as well, writing in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
What did he mean by “the wisdom of God”? This is clearly a reference to Sophia.
It is hard to not see a parallel between Christ as Logos and Wisdom as Emanation of the Almighty who “penetrates” everything and was formed by God “at the very beginning.”
Wisdom is “one” and can do “all things” and “renews all things.” This “renewal” is also a function of Christ:
16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16)
So, Christ as Logos renews the inner self just as Wisdom “she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls.”
Wisdom “passes into holy souls” just as Christ through the Holy Spirit dwells inside us.
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2:20 )
John 1 says “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.”
And Wisdom also is described in Proverbs 8 “was beside him, like a master worker.” Just as the world was made “through” the Logos so too Wisdom was a “master worker” alongside the Creator.
Similar to how in John, Christ as Logos is “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it,” Wisdom is
more beautiful than the sun
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be more radiant,
30 for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.
I am not suggesting that Wisdom is Christ but clearly the theological framework for understanding the higher Christology of Christ as Logos was influenced by the Stoic philosophical framework of Wisdom as an Emanation of the Almighty. It is this Emanation which acts as an “image” through which God the Father is expressed.
This Logos/Sophiology can also be traced back to Genesis 1, where God creations by means of the power of speech (The Word),👍
“Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.”
And notice how Sophia is described in the Wisdom of Solomon:
26 For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
This “reflection of eternal light,” is that not the same “light” God speaks into existence at the beginning of creation, an eternal light that exists prior to the creation of the Sun, moon, and stars?
I strongly believe Sophiology is critical to all Christians interested in the contemplative and mystical tradition. Sophia is the key to understanding the nature of Christ as Logos. As such, Sophia is key to understanding Christianity as a wisdom tradition and restoring balance to the traditional emphasis on masculinity in orthodox theology.
Paul writes, “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, (1 Corinthians 1:30)”
Christ “became to us wisdom from God.” Translated into Sophiological terms, Christ in the highest Christological terms operates according to the logic of the divine feminine, restoring femininity to the masculinity of the traditional masculine Trinity.
I am perfectly ok with heresy so I have no theological problems with admitting Sophia as a fourth hypostasis to the Trinity. It has never made sense to me that you could have a Father and a Son but no Mother, no femininity? Spiritually and metaphysically, that does not make sense. Eastern philosophy, in this sense, is far more ontologically balanced in recognizing the essential and necessary balance between the feminine and the masculine, the yin and yang, which mutually reinforce and complement each other.
If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on Sophiology and the divine feminine in Christianity, I also put out a YouTube video recently on the same topic: