Sophia Philanthropos

In the Wisdom of Solomon, Sophia is named philanthropos — “a loving spirit,” “kind to man” (Wisdom 1:6, cited Jung 1952). Von Franz takes this epithet as the load-bearing description: “Sophia is called philanthropes — ‘the one who loves man.’ She is an attitude of love toward mankind, which naturally means being a human being among human beings and loving other human beings. That is the highest form of eros” (von Franz, Problem of the Puer Aeternus).

The position is unexpectedly modest. Sophia ranks higher than the Virgin Mary — higher even than the spiritualized maternal Eros — not because she is more elevated but because she is more present: “a little less is still more” (Jung CW 16 §361, paraphrased by von Franz). The “idealistic love for mankind, wanting to do only good,” is less than “just being human among human beings.” Sophia is the figure in which abstract benevolence has condescended to the concrete neighbor.

Von Franz uses the image clinically. The puer who has not turned toward Sophia produces only “negative wisdom… bitter because he does not love human beings… he remains in inhuman isolation” (von Franz, Problem of the Puer Aeternus). The same figure read positively gives the discrimination by which the feeling-function becomes wisdom — feeling raised from mere preference to the recognition of what each person, each situation, intrinsically is.

Sophia philanthropos is therefore the answer to the standard misreading of Sophia as a remote intellectual abstraction. The tradition’s wisdom is not contemplation of the eternal at the cost of the concrete; it is the contemplation of the eternal in the concrete neighbor. This is the register in which Sophia and the anima-as-mediatrix coincide.

Relationships

• sophia
• sophia-as-fourth-anima-stage
• eros
• feeling-function
• anima-as-mediatrix

Primary sources

• jung-answer-to-job (Jung 1952, citing Wisdom of Solomon)
• problem-of-the-puer-aeternus (von Franz)