Sophiology

SOPHIOLOGY. - Philosophical-theological or gnostic doctrine (v. GNOSIS Russian contemporary) of a series of recent Russian thinkers on the foundation of the world, especially of man and of the God-man, Christ in God, Eternal Wisdom; it may also be called a doctrine on the transparency of the beauty of the 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, naturally visionary.

I. PRINCIPAL REPRESENTATIVES

The first sophiologist in the proper sense is Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900). Dependent on him are the priest P. A. Florensky (b. 1881), the archpriest S. N. Bulgakov (1871-1944), the two brothers Sergei N. and Eugene N. Trubetskoy (1862-1905; 1863-1920), the symbolist poets, among whom principally V. I. Ivanov (1866-1949), then L. P. Karsavin (b. 1882), V. Ilyin, L. Zander (a disciple of Bulgakov and author of the work God and the World [in Russian], 2 vols., Paris 1948), in a very restricted sense also N. A. Berdyaev (1874-1948), and others.

II. DOCTRINE

Solovyov speaks of Sophia first of all in the Lectures on Godmanhood (on theandrism; 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 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 the divinity pervaded by the principle of the unity of God," as "created unity, the principle of humanity, the ideal or normal man," or again "the perfect ideal humanity, contained ab eterno 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 of the universe, which is always united with the divinity and unites everything with it." Solovyov sometimes distinguishes Sophia from the "soul of the world," which, with the fall, separated itself from God, and sometimes rather identifies her with it.

Florensky's principal work is the book The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Moscow 1914; cf. 1 Tim. 3:15). The criterion of truth is for him spiritual beauty; Sophia, as a "fourth hypostasis," participates in the life of the Most Holy Trinity. From the point of view of the Hypostasis of the Father, she is ideal substance, the foundation of the creature, the power or force of its being; from the point of view of the Hypostasis of the Son, she is the reason, the sense, meaning, the truth or the justice of the creature; from the point of view of the Holy Spirit, she is the spirituality, holiness, purity, spotlessness, beauty of the creature. More concretely and in the order of salvation, Florensky sees Sophia as the body (the individual humanity) of Christ, then as his social body or the Church, and within the Church especially that creature which shines most in her virginal and immaculate beauty: Mary, 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 Light That Never Sets, Moscow 1917), then more theologically. Two trilogies are fundamental: 1) the Mariology set out in the book The Burning Bush; the doctrine on St. John the Baptist, contained in The Friend of the Bridegroom; and the angelology in Jacob's Ladder; 2) the doctrine on divine humanity, which comprises 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 whole, a living being and all one, the soul of the world; she responds to the love of God, according to her passive, feminine character (the "eternal femininity," according to the expression already used by Solovyov), creaturely, with a receptive love. Accused of introducing a fourth hypostasis into God, Bulgakov afterwards distinguished between hypostasis and hypostaticity, affirming that Sophia is not a hypostasis, but only a hypostaticity (personification). In fact in Bulgakov's system Sophia appears sometimes as an intermediary being between God and creature, sometimes as identical either with God or with the creature. She, according to him, 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 the s. was influenced by the cult of the Wisdom of God in the East, both in Byzantium (Hagia Sophia) and in Russia; by the doctrine of the Protestant mystic Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) concerning the "Virgin Sophia"; by the followers of Böhme, that is, among the German idealists, Hegel and especially Schelling and von Baader, and by the English mystic Pordage; by certain celebrated Russian writers, Bukharev, Gogol and Dostoevsky.

Then there is the undoubted influence of the Platonism of Philo and of Neoplatonism, both directly and through German idealism. Bulgakov sees in the same line the numbers of the Pythagoreans, the names of certain mystics, the ideas in Plato, the entelechies in Aristotle, the Hebrew characters in the Cabala, the divine energies of the Palamites, and Sophia.

The sophiologists see a confirmation of their doctrine in Holy Scripture (especially in the theophanies and in 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 holy fathers Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and John Damascene, on the prototypes of creatures in God as God's ideas, thoughts, intentions, providences, predestinations.

Another argument the Sophians draw from the Byzantine liturgy. From the fact that the cult of Sophia has a Christological and Marian character, and that Sophia is venerated both on the feasts of Christ (Christmas and Easter) and of the Madonna (Nativity and Assumption), they conclude that Sophia can personify in different ways and must not simply be identified only with Christ, the Most Holy Mary, the Church, etc.

They draw a similar argument from Russian iconography, especially from the three representations of Sophia: 1) at Yaroslavl (a host 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, stands in a temple built on seven columns; an allusion to Prov. 9:1); 3) at Novgorod (one sees a winged angel of the color of fire, with the Madonna on one side and St. John the Baptist on the other; above this principal group one sees, in a small medallion, Christ again, and higher up one sees angels). The scenes represented in these three icons inspired the titles of Bulgakov's books. Common to these three images is the link between the celestial and the terrestrial humanity: the presence of Christ and of His Mother. More difficult is the interpretation of the angel in the icon of Novgorod (perhaps inspired by Western sources; cf. the account of the blessed Henry Suso, in the 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). Solovyov, Florensky 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.

IV. THE SOPHIANIC CONTROVERSY

Bulgakov was reproached with introducing a fourth hypostasis into God, with admitting between God and creature an intermediary being like the ancient Gnostics, with arriving at pantheism through the identification of Sophia on the one hand with God, on the other with the creature. In 1935 Bulgakov's sophiology (and only indirectly also that of Florensky and Soloviev) was condemned as heretical, first by the metropolitan, future patriarch, Sergius of Moscow, and then by that Russian Church of émigrés which then had its metropolitan see at Karlovtsi in Yugoslavia. The condemnation by this latter hierarchy was prepared by the voluminous book of Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of the Russians in Bulgaria: New Doctrine on Sophia, Divine Wisdom (Sofia 1935). Metropolitan Eulogius, to whose jurisdiction Bulgakov belonged, did not condemn the doctrine, but advised Bulgakov to re-examine it.

V. JUDGMENT FROM THE CATHOLIC POINT OF VIEW

S. is a kind of universal intuition that is artistic, philosophical, theological, and, in a certain sense, mystical. The disadvantage of the intuitive method is the absence of the necessary distinctions between subject and object, God and creature. Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, and others (the two Trubetskoy brothers, on the other hand, remain more within admissible limits), do not sufficiently avoid the danger of mysticism, gnosticism, pantheism, though they always intend "pan-en-theism," that is, seeing all things not as God, but as conjoined with God and founded in him. In a properly understood s., however, inexhaustible riches and treasures lie hidden: God himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is essentially Wisdom; the Son of God is personal wisdom. In the divine Wisdom, whether essential or personal, the world, the creature, every created beauty and perfection is founded. The entire natural and supernatural order is nothing other than an image, a vestige, a trace of the divine prototype (cf. the teaching of the Holy Fathers). Especially are rational creatures images of God, mirrors of his wisdom and goodness, already by their very nature, and still more through Grace; this holds especially of the saints of the Church, first of all of Mary and of Christ, man and God.

Bernardo Schultze