SOFIOLOGY. - A philosophical-theological or Gnostic doctrine (v. GNOSI russa contemporanea) of a number 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 concerning 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. lies a mystical experience, not clearly supernatural, but rather intuitive and naturally visionary.
I. PRINCIPAL REPRESENTATIVES. - The first sophiologist in the proper sense was Vladimiro Soloviev (1853-1900). Dependent upon him are the priest P. A. Florenskij (b. 1881), the archpriest S. N. Bulgakov (1871-1944), the two brothers Sergio N. and Eugenio N. Trubetskoj (1862-1905; 1863-1920), the Symbolist poets, among whom chiefly 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 Dio e il mondo [in Russian], 2 vols., Paris 1948), in a very restricted sense also N. A. Berdjaev (1874-1948), and others.
II. DOCTRINE. - Soloviev speaks of Sophia above all in the Lectures on Divine-Humanity (on theandry; 1878-1881), in the third part of La Russie et l'Eglise universelle (1880), and in a long autobiographical poem, Three Meetings (that is, with Sophia-Wisdom; 1898). Poetically, he describes her as a female 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 God’s unity,” as “created unity, the principle of humanity, the ideal or normal man,” or again as “the perfect ideal humanity, contained ab aeterno in the total essence of God or of Christ,” or, finally (in a discourse of 1898 on A. Comte), as “a great real and fem-
inine being, true, pure, and complete humanity itself, the highest and most comprehensive form and the living soul of nature and of the universe, which is always united with divinity and unites everything with it.” Soloviev sometimes distinguishes Sophia from the “soul of the world,” which, through the fall, separated itself from God; at other times he rather identifies her with II.
Florenskij’s principal work is the book Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Moscow 1914; cf. I Tim. 3, 15). For him, the criterion of truth is spiritual beauty; Sophia, as a “fourth hypostasis,” participates in the life of the Most Holy Trinity. From the standpoint of the Hypostasis of the Father, she is ideal substance, the foundation of the creature, the power or force of its being; from the standpoint of the Hypostasis of the Son, she is the reason, sense, meaning, truth, or justice of the creature; from the standpoint of the Holy Spirit, she is the spirituality, holiness, purity, spotlessness, and beauty of the creature. More concretely, and in the order of salvation, Florenskij sees Sophia as the body (the individual humanity) of Christ, then as his social body, or the Church, and within the Church especially as that creature which shines most brightly in her virginal and immaculate beauty: Maria, the Mother of God.
More than all the others, Bulgakov developed the Sophianic theme, at first more from the philosophical point of view (in the book The Unsetting Light, Moscow 1917), and later more theologically. Fundamental are two trilogies: 1) the Mariology set forth in the book The Burning Bush; the doctrine concerning s. Giovanni Battista, contained in The Friend of the Bridegroom; and angelology in Jacob’s Ladder; 2) the doctrine of divine humanity, comprising the three volumes: The Lamb of God (Christology); The Comforter (pneumatology); and The Bride of the Lamb (ecclesiology and eschatology). Like his predecessors, he identifies Sophia not so much with personal wisdom, that is, with Christ, as 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 wholly unified being, the soul of the world; in accordance with her passive, feminine (“eternal femininity,” according to the expression already used by Soloviev), creaturely character, she responds to God’s love with a receptive love. Accused of introducing a fourth hypostasis into God, Bulgakov subsequently distinguished between hypostasis and hypostaticity, affirming that Sophia is not a hypostasis, but only a hypostaticity (personification). In fact, in Bulgakov’s system Sophia sometimes appears as an intermediary being between God and creature, and sometimes as identical either 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 formation of s. was influenced by the cult of the Wisdom of God in the East, both in Byzantium (the Haglia Sofia) and in Russia; the doctrine of the Protestant mystic Giacomo Böhme (1575–1624) concerning the “Virgin Sophia”; Böhme’s followers, that is, among the German idealists Hegel and especially Schelling and von Baader, as well as the English mystic Pordage; and certain celebrated Russian writers, Bucharev, Gogol, and Dostojevskij.
Then there is the undoubted influence of the Platonism of Philo and of Neoplatonism, directly and through German idealism. Bulgakov sees in the same line the numbers 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 sophiologists see confirmation of their doctrine in Sacred Scripture (especially in the theophanies and the sapiential books of the Old Testament; the appearances 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 ss. fathers Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and John Damascene concerning the prototypes of creatures in God as God’s ideas, thoughts, intentions, providences, and predestinations.
The sophianists draw another argument from the Byzantine liturgy. From the fact that the cult of Sophia has both a Christological and a Marian character, and that Sophia is venerated both in the feasts of Christ (Christmas and Easter) and in those of the Madonna (the Nativity and the Assumption), they conclude that Sophia can be personified in different ways and should not be identified outright only with Christ, the Most Holy Mary, the Church, etc.
They derive a similar argument from Russian iconography, especially from the three representations of Sophia: 1) at Jaroslav (a group of various representatives of the Church surrounds the group of the Crucifixion); 2) at Kiev (the Madonna with the Child, surrounded by saints and angels, presides in a temple built on seven columns; an allusion to Prov. 9:1); 3) at Novgorod (one sees a winged angel of fiery color, with the Madonna on one side and s. John the Baptist on the other; above this principal group, in a small medallion, Christ is again seen, and higher up angels are visible). The scenes represented in these three icons inspired the titles of Bulgakov’s books. Common to these three images is the link between heavenly and earthly humanity: the presence of Christ and his Mother. More difficult is the interpretation of the angel in the icon of Novgorod (perhaps inspired by Western sources; cf. the account by b. Enrico Susone, in the Horologium sapientiae of 1334, of a vision in which he saw Eternal Wisdom sometimes as a young man, sometimes as a most beautiful virgin; on the other hand, see also the account of the appearance of Wisdom to the young s. Cirillo, apostle of the Slavs, inspired by Gregory Nazianzen). 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.