Sophia

Sophia (σοφία) names the feminine hypostasis of wisdom across the Lineage and, in its philosophical register, the highest of the intellectual virtues. The two registers — Sophia as personified divine presence and sophia as contemplative excellence — are held in one word from Heraclitus forward. The tradition’s distinguishing claim is that wisdom is first a presence and only second a property: she descends, suffers, and is sought before she is possessed.

In Heraclitus, sophia is the cosmic oneness of mind whose action is logos: “Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things” (Fragments, Heraclitus 2001). With Plato and Aristotle, sophia is distinguished from phronesis and reserved for “the abstract and immutable” (Adkins 1960). The Hebrew Wisdom literature personifies her as Hokhmah; the Hellenistic Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus give her the speaking voice of a divine consort: “I came out of the mouth of the most High” (Ecclesiasticus 24, cited Answer to Job). Jung reads this Hellenistic Sophia as the late-classical psyche’s compensation for Yahweh’s forgotten feminine: “He had a consort, his consort was Sophia, but he forgot about her — or more precisely repressed her” (Edinger 1992, paraphrasing Jung).

The Gnostic Sophia carries the figure into cosmogonic catastrophe — Sophia as Achamoth, the lower wisdom fallen into the void (Jung, Alchemical Studies §451; Hoeller 1982). The alchemical Sapientia Dei of the Aurora Consurgens is her medieval recovery: “the archetypus mundus… through which God becomes conscious of himself” (Edinger 1992). She is the Shulamite “dark but comely,” the prima-materia seeking rescue.

In Jung’s four-stage typology of the anima — Eve, Helen, Mary, Sapientia — Sophia stands at the summit as “the spiritualization of eros as such” (CW 16 §361). She is the anima as philanthropos, “the one who loves man” (von Franz). For Corbin, the Sufic Sophia is theophanic rather than fallen: “the Image of the Godhead” in which “creative divinity” is contemplated (Corbin 1969).

Sophia is the form in which the Lineage names wisdom as feminine, embodied, and sought.

Relationships

• anima
• four-stages-of-anima
• anima-as-mediatrix
• coniunctio
• hierosgamos
• ego-self-axis
• anima-mundi
• world-soul
• mercurius
• logos

Primary sources

• jung-answer-to-job (Jung 1952)
• von-franz-aurora-consurgens (von Franz)
• corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)
• hillman-anima-anatomy-personified (Hillman 1985)
• fragments-heraclitus (Heraclitus)