SOFIOLOGY. - A philosophical-theological or Gnostic doctrine (see GNOI Russian contemporary) of a series of recent Russian thinkers concerning the foundation of the world, especially of man and the God-man, Christ in God, Eternal Wisdom; it may also be described as a doctrine on the transparency of the beauty of Eternal Wisdom in creatures. The method of s. is more artistic-intuitive than properly discursive; at the basis of s. is a mystical experience, not clearly supernatural, but rather intuitive, visionary, and natural.
I. PRINCIPAL REPRESENTATIVES
The first true sophologist is Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900). Among his followers are the priest P. A. Florenskij (b. 1881), Archpriest S. N. Bulgakov (1871-1944), the two brothers Sergei N. and Evgenii N. Trubetskoi (1862-1905; 1863-1920), the symbolist poets, among whom principally V. I. Ivanov (1866-1949), then L. P. Karsavin (b. 1882), V. Il'in, L. Zander (a disciple of Bulgakov and author of the work God and the World [in Russian], 2 vols., Paris 1948), and in a very restricted sense also N. A. Berdjaev (1874-1948), and others.II. DOCTRINE
Soloviev speaks of Sophia first in the Lectures on God-Manhood (on theandry; 1878-1881), in the third part of La Russie et l'Église universelle (1889), and in a long autobiographical poem Three Meetings (i.e., with Sophia-Wisdom; 1898). Poetically he describes her as a feminine being of singular beauty, as an “eternal friend.” Speculatively he defines her as “the unity produced in the divine organism of Christ,” “the body of God, the matter of divinity pervaded by the principle of the unity of God,” as “created unity, principle of humanity, the ideal or normal man,” or also “the perfect ideal humanity, contained from eternity in the total essence of God or of Christ,” or, finally (in a discourse of 1898 on A. Comte), as “a great real and feminine being, the true, pure, and full humanity itself, the highest and most comprehensive form and the living soul of nature and the universe, which is always united with divinity and unites all things with it.” Soloviev sometimes distinguishes Sophia from “the unity of the world,” which, with the fall, separated from God, sometimes rather identifies her with II. The principal work of Florenskij is the book The Pillar and Foundation of the Truth (Moscow 1914; cf. 1 Tim 3:15). The criterion of truth for him is spiritual beauty; Sophia, as the “fourth hypostasis,” participates in the life of the Most Holy Trinity. From the perspective of the hypostasis of the Father, she is the ideal substance, foundation of the creature, the power or force of its being; from the perspective of the hypostasis of the Son, she is the reason, sense, meaning, truth, or justice of the creature; from the perspective of the Holy Spirit, she is the spirituality, holiness, purity, freedom, beauty of the creature. More concretely and in the order of salvation, Florenskij sees Sophia as the body (the individual humanity) of Christ, then his social body or the Church, and within the Church especially that creature who shines most in her virginal and immaculate beauty: Mary, the Mother of God.More than any other, Bulgakov developed the sophianic theme, first more from the philosophical point of view (in the book The Unwaning Light, Moscow 1917), then more theologically. Fundamental are two trilogies: 1) the moral theology expounded in the book The Burning Bush; the doctrine on St. John the Baptist, contained in The Friend of the Bridegroom; and angelology in Jacob’s Ladder; 2) the doctrine on divine humanity, which comprises the three volumes: The Angel of God (christology); The Comforter (pneumatology); and The Bride of the Angel (ecclesiology and eschatology). Like his predecessors, he identifies Sophia not so much with personal wisdom, i.e., with Christ, but with the essence or substance of God common to all three divine Persons. For him Sophia is the same as the idea of God, the eternal prototype of the created world in God, the name of God, the all, a living and unified being, the soul of the world; she corresponds to the love of God, according to its passive, feminine (the eternal femininity, according to the expression already used by Soloviev), creaturely character, with a receptive love. Accused of introducing a fourth hypostasis into God, Bulgakov later distinguished between hypostasis and hypostasized entities, affirming that Sophia is not a hypostasis, but only a hypostasized entity (personification). Indeed, in Bulgakov’s system Sophia sometimes appears as an intermediary being between God and creature, sometimes identical with God or with the creature. According to him, she has “a double face”: with her face turned toward God she is his image; with her face turned toward the world she is its eternal foundation.
III. ORIGIN AND ARGUMENTS OF THE DOCTRINE
The following have influenced the formation of s.: the cult of the Wisdom of God in the East, both in Byzantium (the Hagia Sophia) and in Russia; the doctrine of the Protestant mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) on the “Virgin Sophia”; the followers of Böhme, namely among the German idealists Hegel and especially Schelling and von Baader, and the English mystic Pordage; some celebrated Russian writers, Bukharev, Gogol, and Dostoevsky.Then there is the undoubted influence of the Platonism of Philo and Neoplatonism, directly and through German idealism. Bulgakov sees in the same line the figures among the Pythagoreans, the names among certain mystics, the ideas in Plato, the entelechies in Aristotle, the Hebrew characters in the Kabbalah, the divine energies of the Palamites, and Sophia.
The sophianists see a confirmation of their doctrine in Sacred Scripture (especially in the theophanies and the sapiential books of the Old Testament; the apparitions of God, the “glory” of God, the “name” of God, the cloud and the pillar of fire, are for them manifestations of Sophia) and in the teaching of the holy Fathers Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, on the prototypes of creatures in God as ideas of God, thoughts, intentions, providences, predestinations.
Another argument is drawn by the sophianists from Byzantine liturgy. From the fact that the cult of Sophia has both a christological and a Marian character, that Sophia is venerated both in the feasts of Christ (Christmas and Easter) and of the Blessed Virgin (Nativity and Assumption), they conclude that Sophia can personify differently and should not be identified solely with Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Church, etc.
A similar argument is drawn from Russian iconography, especially from the three representations of Sophia: 1) at Yaroslavl (a host of different representatives of the Church surrounds the group of the Crucifixion); 2) at Kiev (the Blessed Virgin with the Child, surrounded by saints and angels, enthroned in a temple built on seven columns; allusion to Prov 9:1); 3) at Novgorod (one sees a winged and fiery-colored corner, with on one side the Blessed Virgin and on the other St. John the Baptist; above this main group, in a small medallion, one sees again Christ, and higher up angels). The scenes represented in these three icons inspired the titles of Bulgakov’s books. Common to these three images is the bond between celestial and terrestrial humanity: the presence of Christ and his Mother. More difficult is the interpretation of the angel in the Novgorod icon (perhaps inspired by Western sources; cf. the account of the Blessed Henry Suso, in his *Horologium sapientiae* of 1334, of a vision in which he saw Eternal Wisdom sometimes as a youth, sometimes as a most beautiful virgin; on the other hand, see also the account of the apparition of Wisdom to the young St. Cyril, apostle of the Slavs, inspired by Gregory of Nazianzus). Soloviev, Florenskij, and Bulgakov see in the angel “the angel of the creature,” “the ideal soul of the world,” “the divine all-unity in Wisdom,” in a word, the divine Sophia.