Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

Sophia as Fourth Anima Stage

Sophia as Fourth Anima Stage

Jung’s Psychology of the Transference (CW 16 §361) names four stages of “the heterosexual Eros or anima-figure”: Hawwah (Eve), Helen of Troy, the Virgin Mary, and Sapientia (Sophia). The series is mirrored in Goethe’s Faust — Gretchen, Helen, Mary, the eternal feminine. Each stage names a level of the Eros cult: Eve, “purely biological”; Helen, “still dominated by the sexual Eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level”; Mary, “religious devotion… spiritualizes him”; and Sapientia, “something which unexpectedly goes beyond the almost unsurpassable third stage” (Jung CW 16 §361).

Jung asks the load-bearing question: “How can wisdom transcend the most holy and the most pure?” His answer is one of his most aphoristic — “Presumably only by virtue of the truth that the less sometimes means the more” (Jung CW 16 §361). Sophia is the “spiritualization of Helen and consequently of eros as such.” That is why, Jung adds, “Sapientia was regarded as a parallel to the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon.”

Von Franz amplifies: “Sophia is called philanthropos — ‘the one who loves man.’ She is an attitude of love toward mankind, which naturally means being a human being among human beings” (von Franz, Problem of the Puer Aeternus). Sophia is therefore higher than Mary not because she is more rarefied but because she is more incarnate: “a little less is still more.” Edinger uses the same passage as a clinical key: most patients live in the first stage or the beginnings of the second; the dreams that allude to Mary or Sapientia are the dreams of an Eros completing itself (Edinger, Mysterium Lectures).

Hillman registers a divergence. He cites the four stages but treats them as a “phenomenology of the anima-figure” rather than a developmental ladder a man climbs (Hillman 1985). The disagreement is part of the larger hillman-revises-jung-on-anima thread: anima for Hillman is image, not stage.

Relationships

Primary sources