Take my latest read: The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics by Michael Martin. Just the title alone gets me all giddy. So what is all this Sophia stuff all about? It's definitely hard to pin it down, but as the title suggests it has much to with bridging world and God more poetically.
Somewhere along the way, the Divine became split off as a spectator to creation (also known as Deism — or Pure Nature — which coincidentally is the faith some of our founding fathers aspired to). Blame can be placed on the Western Enlightenment and its progenitors (cough, Erasmus & Descartes). In the process, we lost our enchantment and the “mediate immediacy of God's presence in the world.”Even Christian theology became rigid and dogmatic, and had lost its mysticism and magic. All this rationalization reoriented the hierarchy from God to man to man to God, therefore leading to a “culture focused on the nominalist human subject; self contained, self-absorbed, materialistic and subsequently calcified, impervious to metaphysics, and desensitized to the supernatural.”
As a counterpoint to all the rationalization, many theologians and philosophers on the fringes of the Church decided to explore the more Feminine expression of the Divine. Sophia became the the substantial reality that unites God with creation; a “figure as reflective, living, adaptive, simultaneously literal and figurative, as both person and principle.” For Boehme, She was seen as a cosmological change agent and a immanental and transformative sense of Being. (I even connected this sensibility to a recent experience I had with entheogens.)
Sophiology was not necessarily a movement that could ever be codified or institutionalized easily since it was founded on poetic expression. It was believed the Romantics never gained traction with it, “because they remained at an aesthetic, conceptual level without ever really becoming actualized.” Hence, so much of the lived experience the Church provided was missing from these ideas and expressions.
Other sophiologists were aware that religion should not only be a purely interior experience detached from symbolic expression: so much of the problem with the spiritual, but not religious ilk of the day. Folks like Rudolf Steiner offered a corrective with his concern for the common folk and "peasant wisdom". Steiner also saw Christianity as a “universal and defining spiritual-natural event for humanity” that healed the ontological breach between God and world. And sophiology became the “connective tissue, as it were, between the real and the ideal, between flesh and spirit, makes knowledge possible and, more importantly, makes the awareness of God's presence possible.”
For Boehme, the German Romantics, and Steiner, Sophia bridged the space-in-between, the unity of opposites, and the metaxy that we play in. The Russians also got in the game, giving Her more rigor. Bulgakov placed Sophia in theosis, not only of the human person but of the cosmos as well (a theme Teilhard de Chardin would run with years later).
Today, the Feminine principle of Divinity often gets co-opted as “personifying Wisdom as female as opposed to an assertion of a feminine face of God.” Nevertheless, Sophia becomes a necessary corrective to the hyper-masculine rationalization that overtakes theology, metaphysics, and philosophy. As Martin notes, “the poetic engagement with Creation offered by sophiology simultaneously opens the way to a science more concerned with care than domination, an art renewed and redeemed in the presence of the Beautiful, and secure return of cosmology to religion.”
In a future post, there is one sophiologist that I would like to spend more time with (whom Martin covers in his book): our Unknown Friend, known as Valentin Tomberg.