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Sapientia Dei

Sapientia Dei

Sapientia Dei — the Wisdom of God — is the medieval and Renaissance Latin name under which Sophia entered alchemical theory. Edinger, summarizing von Franz’s commentary on the Aurora Consurgens, gives the canonical formula: Sapientia Dei is “the eternal form out of which God created the world… the sum of archetypal images in the mind of God” (Edinger 1992). She is the archetypus mundus, “that archetypal world, after whose likeness this sensible world was made… and through which God becomes conscious of himself” (von Franz, in Edinger 1992).

The figure unites three earlier strata. From Hellenistic Christianity she inherits the Sophia of Proverbs 8 and Ecclesiasticus 24 as the consort and craftswoman of God. From Patristic theology she inherits her identification with Christ as “the pre-existent Logos” and as “the sum of the eternal forms of the self-knowing primordial causes.” From Neoplatonism she inherits her function as the archetypus mundus, the intelligible world that mediates between the One and the sensible cosmos. The Aurora Consurgens — the alchemical text traditionally ascribed to Thomas Aquinas — is the medieval consummation of the figure: a “mystical female figure who appears at first as the personified Sapientia Dei” descends to the alchemist and identifies herself with “the philosopher’s stone… [and] the heavenly Jerusalem” (von Franz, Creation Myths).

For Jung and Edinger, Sapientia Dei is the patristic-alchemical bridge by which Sophia survives the Christian aeon: where ecclesial doctrine projected the redemption of the feminine into eschatology — the New Jerusalem, the Marian Assumption — alchemy attempted it in materia, in the laboratory of the introverted soul. The opus-alchymicum is the redemption of Sapientia from her dispersion in the prima-materia.

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