Why Sophia?
As we arrive at a better feeling for who Sophia is, we begin to understand why She might be sseful to us, and why we might see Her as so fundamental. We have seen that we can find Sophia in poetry and all the arts, in myth and in everyday life. And it is imperative that we cultivate a certain kind of common ground, ways to speak with one another that will not become dogmatic, reductive, or any kind of monocrop.
If we go into a beautiful wild field, plow everything under, plant a single species of corn, and spray the field with fertilizer and pesticides, we may think we have done something very sophisticated and scientific, rational and efficient. But life depends on diversity. Life is interwovenness. Not only do we need a diverse diet, but the food we need thrives in a diverse natural ecology. Sophia demands a recognition of the ecological dimension of life, the interwovenness of life, and the interbeing of the basic principles of life, allowing us to speak of those principles while encouraging diversity. This is not easy to do, and the present text may fall short in many ways, but it is crucial for us to make these attempts.
The poet Rumi stands as an excellent exemplar for working with a spiritual common ground, and even a kind of spiritual common law (a concept we will return to later). Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and others enjoy Rumi’s poetry and find it nourishing for their spiritual growth. When Rumi speaks of the Beloved, we can think of that in many ways, and in many Ways (spiritual paths, paths in attunement with the Cosmos). When Rumi speaks of God, we can even think of that in many ways, and in many Ways. Rumi not only welcomes many kinds of readers, but he also explicitly encourages humility and silence. Inclusiveness and humility go hand in hand (we could also say mutual illumination and mutual gratitude go hand in hand). And all of us need silence in order to receive the dictates of wisdom, love, and beauty.
In one of his poems, Rumi writes about Moses coming across a shepherd calling out to God. The shepherd was asking, “Where are you?” and telling God how he wanted to comb God’s hair, bring God milk, and even kiss God’s “little hands and feet” when it’s time for God to go to bed. Moses scolds the shepherd, telling him how inappropriate his words and intentions are, essentially calling them worse than foolish and irreverent. The shepherd feels a deep sense of repentance. He tears at his clothes and wanders off into the desert. But then, in a moment of cosmic profundity, God’s voice speaks to Moses:
You have separated me
from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to unite,
or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in Indian do what they do.
It’s all praise, and it’s all right.
It’s not me that’s glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!
Rumi then tells us that God “began speaking deeper mysteries to Moses. Vision and words, which cannot be recorded here . . .” He tells us:
It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot our human intelligences.
It would shatter all writing pens.
Sophia shatters all writing pens, fries all laptops and tablets, melts down all servers and NSA spying devices. The voice of God in this poem is the voice of Wisdom. And Wisdom’s question holds for all of us: Are we here to unite or to sever? We must all cultivate prophetic vision to at least some degree, and we must each decide whether we will become visionary forces for good, or narrow-visioned forces of evil. Are we here to unite or to sever, to cultivate wisdom, love, and beauty—or their “opposites”?
As for Moses, he wanders into the desert, searching for the shepherd, perhaps with the same kind of energy with which one searches for a loved one or a lost child. Moses finally finds him and tells the shepherd about what God revealed. Moses tells the shepherd to worship in whatever way he wants. The shepherd then tells Moses that he has transcended all of this:
“The divine nature and my human nature came together.
Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can’t say what has happened.
What I’m saying now
is not my real condition. It can’t be said.”
Rumi concludes by telling us:
When you eventually see
through all the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again
and again,
“This is certainly not like
we thought it was!”[1]
We don’t endorse here any simple-minded relativism or perennialism, and we shouldn’t project that onto Rumi. But we may still recognize in a general way some kind of “right mindfulness”[2] or perhaps “right state of being,” something Rumi calls here a “broken-open lowliness” that has to do with humility (and even the humiliation of the ego) rather than typical dominant culture self-loathing. In other words, we find a common sensibility, a space of common wisdom, common love, and common beauty.
And then there is the burning—probably inescapable. That goes together with the humiliation of the ego, that can feel to the ego as harsh, but which liberates us in the end.
None of this makes all views and all practices equal in a simple-minded way. At the same time, if Rumi also speaks from a broad spiritual perspective, the kind of perspective Sophia represents, then we can recognize and honor an equalizing of all things that goes beyond ordinary intellectual categories—an equalizing that allows them to remain in their difference (a harmonizing nonduality of unity and diversity).
The basic idea of Sophia is that we want wisdom, love, and beauty in our lives, we want honor, reverence, an intimate sense of sacredness. We want to love and to be loved, and to experience ourselves as loveable and honorable, and to touch our capacity for love, to make it real by allowing love to flow through our being. This is the source of our true joy and also the functioning of wisdom. When love flows through our being, we can think creatively and insightfully, we experience inspiration, and we act in an honorable way, with a sense of the sacredness of life. The experience of love unleashes our fullest potential. And we need a way of talking about all of these things.
I don’t want to force anyone to think or speak in the ways I do, and this can make the image and the metaphor of Sophia all the more helpful. It has a fluidity to it, and a general applicability that we can adapt to our own unique functioning, our own soul purpose. If we try working with this archetypal image, it can strengthen, heal, and nourish us and our World. But what matters most is working with wisdom, love, and beauty in whatever ways feel most compelling. That’s essential.
Sophia serves as a stand-in both for our own highest values and the bridge to those values (and She also serves as a stand-in for the fact that path and goal are not two things—She demands that we forgo all our agendas). Any mention of Sophia should come across as, for instance, our own intimate understanding of the divine, or of wisdom, science, art, family, honor, reverence, and so on, and also that which puts us in touch with the divine and with wisdom or whatever matters most to us. This is not a collection of words that presents a path that we have to walk, but contemplations that facilitate our own walk on our own path. We have to find ways to think together, not only among humans, but among other beings, including sacred powers and inconceivable causes that bring about all things.
Part of the lesson of Sophia is that we can begin to experience an appreciation of our own path and the paths that others must follow (follow-and-create, altogether) in this life. We can begin to see that all of us really do want the same things in spirit. We don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “I would like this to be the worst day of my life. I hope for maximal suffering today—for myself and all beings.” Instead, we aim for what we love, we aim to relate to what we love and revere in an honorable way, and therefore we aim for the wisdom to handle things well, and we aim for an experience of the beauty of what we love and revere. Consciously or not, we strive for happiness and love, for peace, wonder, and deep trust in ourselves and the mystery of life, but we often make a mess of it. We can therefore appreciate one another’s struggles and failures.
As an image, Sophia reminds us that something in this Cosmos wants us to tap into wisdom, love, and beauty, wants us to keep trying, keep failing better, keep working more effectively, because it really is possible for us to experience true peace, love, healing, joy, deep trust, and great wonder, and we should focus on supporting one another in whatever way we can, because as you and I do better, all beings do better.
This mutual help is facilitated by shared metaphors and practices that don’t demand conversion to a viewpoint or conversion to a religion, but which allow us to think in harmony, each with our own voice, uniquely but cooperatively. We can say of each other’s practice of life, and our practice of life together, “I accept that,” and truly mean it. The Buddhist can listen to the sincere Christian practitioner—the practitioner who has made the teachings of Christ real and directly, intimately experienced the living presence and mystery of the divine—and they can say honestly, “I accept that”—and vice versa, with no fear on the part of the Christian that in saying, “I accept that” to the Buddhist, that they have lied or committed some heresy.
Sophia stands for this kind of inclusiveness. LoveWisdom is our home, and it can help us find home. Wisdom can matter to us equally, and it transcends all of our concepts. Life transcends our concepts, the divine transcends our concepts. A figure of our sacred imagination is not merely “imaginary,” and it can convey this transcendence as it activates our hearts, minds, bodies, and worlds so that we can embrace a variety of forms and manifestations. Genuine wisdom always appears in a variety of forms—as does genuine love and beauty.
Of course, we cannot give up our discernment. That’s essential to wisdom. Wisdom is not a matter of mere opinion, belief, or “feeling”. We must hold each other to the highest standards, especially in ethical terms. Wisdom must mean nonaggression, nonviolence, and non-neglect—and thus not creating suffering for each other.
We can understand one another’s practice of life as an attempt to actualize wisdom, love, and beauty, and we can allow one another to challenge anything in a practice of life that doesn’t seem wise, loving, and beautiful, anything that seems too coarse and unskillful. This can manifest as something extreme or something rather subtle. We obviously cannot respond to neo-Nazi or neo-Fascist ideology with, “I accept that.” Some “belief systems” are too distant from wisdom, love, and beauty for us to do anything but take a stand on behalf of the victims of such systems (including the ones professing them, for they have become victims too, and we cannot resolve our problems by making enemies of each other or any sentient beings).
More subtle cases might include saying to a professed Christian, “Do you really think that was the most Christian thing to do there?” or saying lovingly to a dear friend, “You talk a lot about Yoga, and I see you wearing your fancy yoga pants and carrying around that high end yoga mat, and here you are reacting in the same old way to the same old thing.”
Sometimes we have to be soft and subtle when we point out these sorts of things, and sometimes we have to speak up with some energy. Sophia represents the discernment to sense when we need to speak up, and the dedication to find the best ways for doing so, which may mean surprising fierceness or exceptional gentleness.
Sophia must not become a new “religion,” but must function as an image, as an inspiration in the soul. Sophia does not replace our spiritual path; She facilitates it. This is something like the way indigenous Elders from various traditions can gather in mutual respect and mutual illumination, and can coordinate rituals and prayers, without anyone’s having to give up their own tradition. It is also like Christians, Muslims, and Jews who go to Buddhist temples to practice their very own religion. There are even Christian monks who become Buddhist monks while remaining Christians. They do not replace Christ with Buddha. Rather, they relate to Buddha as a teacher, a divine emissary who can help them become better Christians, a teacher who can help them contact the divine, to enact the divine in their own life. We attempt here to offer Sophia in this spirit, in the spirit of bringing us all together and helping us realize our own unique path and lineage, as well as our common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty.
Buddhist-Christian dialogue has become quite successful at mutual illumination, and indeed every tradition offers wisdom, every tradition values love and compassion, every tradition holds grace and beauty in high regard, and every tradition offers practices and inspirations to help us actualize our own deep spiritual commitments and soul purpose. Sophia represents all such mutual illumination, mutual nourishment, mutual inspiration, and mutual liberation. We can relate to Her as the wisdom, love, and beauty that appears in each tradition and all traditions. She is the name and image we can give to that shared resonance, that mutual respect and mutual recognition, mutual gratitude and mutual support, mutual reverence and honor.
Because the dominant culture in many ways discourages it, we might not have thought much about how to engage with this mutual gratitude and support. Likewise, we may not have thought much about our soul purpose, and here too Sophia can help, whether we think of our purpose in religious, spiritual, political, or philosophical terms. Sophia can help us tap into our soul purpose and begin to have a deeper sense of meaningfulness in our lives, without being told what we are supposed to believe.
Sophia supports us but always demands that we stand on our own two feet—because wisdom, love, and beauty is already our own true Nature, and can become our Culture as well. We often obscure them, but we can let go of these obscurations, and release the duality between Nature and Culture, as well as the duality between Nature and Mind. Sophia can liberate us into the sacredness of the World.
Imagine the horrible trick the divine would have played on us if we were placed in a World fundamentally at odds with the divine itself, and fundamentally at odds with our own true nature. Imagine the horrible trick the divine would have played on us if we were placed here without the capacity to understand—and wonderstand—what the divine demands from us, without the capacity to attune with the divine.
It seems the vast majority of religions and spiritual traditions agree that we do have the capacity to attune with the divine, and people who don’t consider themselves “religious” still have some sense that human beings have the capacity for discernment, for love and compassion, and for living life in a beautiful way, creating moments and works of beauty here and now. We have the capacity and the responsibility to cultivate the whole of life onward, and to sustain the beauty of this world, to experience and perpetuate love, and to receive the guidance of true wisdom.
Sophia is just the image of this basic capacity, a symbol of the soul itself, and thus of the Cosmos. She is the image that embodies the fact that all traditions value wisdom, love, and beauty, and that these are essential to us. Only in and through and as these things can we realize what we are and bring our potential to fruition, for the benefit of all.
Importantly, we know that Sophia is functional, not just a theory. As a figure, She not only appears in the Bible and in the Apocrypha, but She also appears in the Gnostic and Alchemical traditions. And She is alive and well today. Joyce Rupp, a contemporary Catholic monastic, wrote a book about her experience with Sophia. Here is what she says about what motivated her to write that book:
This book was born on a sunny day as I sat among the myriad colors and fragrances of my friends’ rose garden. I was watching over their two-year-old, Elizabeth Ann, who was delightfully playing among the flowers, talking to them, laughing, and splashing the roses with her little watering can. It was there that I became keenly aware of Sophia’s presence. I looked at the beautiful child at play, and I remembered how Sophia (Wisdom) speaks of herself in Proverbs . . .
It was not the first time that I had experienced this deep awareness of Sophia’s presence. There had been many moments in my life when the sudden recognition of her radiant presence had pressed tears into my eyes. Oftentimes it happened when I looked upon something in nature and felt a wordless connection between the vast beauty of the universe and the goodness of Divine life.
This kind of recognition happened when I saw Elizabeth at play. In an instant all the years that stretched between Elizabeth’s age and my own were connected. I saw how Sophia had touched my heart time and again and had brought me to truths that had indeed changed my life. I knew then that I wanted to write about Sophia’s presence in my life. I wanted to tell how her activity in my spirit has led me to many truths which now inspire my life’s journey and give order to my inner being.
And what does Sophia mean to a contemporary spiritual practitioner? How does one connect to Her? Rupp continues:
How can I hear Sophia’s voice in the busyness of my days? Proverbs assures me that she is everywhere, calling out to me. How can this powerful source of inner light and guidance be discovered and received? From my experience I believe that Sophia is most always heard if I allow my knowledge, insights, and events to gestate in my heart. This means that I must have some solitude for reflection. Taking time for this has been an ongoing struggle and tension in my life. I know intellectually that I must have time, space, and quiet in order to have this gestation occur. I yearn for this time, but my life gets so full, so busy, that I never seem to “have enough” of the time for solitude and quiet that I long for and need. Yet, when I am faithful to setting aside enough deliberate time for reflection, I find that my spirit is much more attuned to hear Sophia's voice throughout the whole of the day. Because Sophia is “a breath of the power of God. . . a reflection of the eternal light . . . more splendid than the sun” (Wisdom 7:25-26,29), she can give light and perspective on the things that stir and struggle in my heart.
The quiet spaces in my life are necessary if there is to be a movement from the head to the heart, for it is in the heart that wisdoms are born. I can know and experience many things, but they remain only knowledge until I allow them to sink into the depths of my heart, there to toss and to turn, to weep and to wail, to leap and to dance. Sophia helps me to take facts, data, events, experiences, down into my spiritual womb. There they sit in me, gestate, and are transformed into truths which are eventually brought up into the light of my consciousness. These discovered truths give my life a right ordering, where the best of who I am can come to be realized.
Sophia is a life-giving energy in my spirit. She guides me as I look back on my life, enabling me to see in a different light what I have taken to be only pain and anguish. Sophia also helps me to taste and to relish blessings that tumble unexpectedly in my most common moments. It is Sophia who causes me to hear in my life’s journey the sounds of One who calls me farther, deeper, longer, purer, than I ever imagined possible. It is she who guards and guides me, smelling the danger and the smoke of annihilation in my false decisions, wrong turns, and confused times. And it is Sophia who draws me to touch into the heart of love, pleading with me to not be so afraid of losing a part of myself in the process.
Sophia coaxes, urges, encourages me to come into the deep recesses where I have not yet been transformed. She guides me inward, saying, “Do not fear; be of great courage; you will find blessings for your spirit in these dark places of your deepest self. You will bring them up into the light and discover that they are your greatest treasures.”
That is why it is so necessary to accept the gift of time for reflection and to find a quiet space where I can go on a very regular basis. I need to be there with my hopes high, believing that Sophia, the Divine Light, is always there, filling my darkness, urging me on to growth. I believe that this is true for all of us. She never leaves us and she waits, giving us the time we need to discover the wonders and the wisdoms of who we are and how we are connected to all of life.
This very dialogue of ours, via these contemplations, arises as a time for reflection, a chance to experiment with Sophia as an animating figure and a living loving image, as metaphor and magic, as presence and as the vitalizing energy of WisdomLoveBeauty in our lives. We need to take these things both more seriously and more playfully than we have in the dominant culture, as a general trend over the last millennium or two.
Sophia means the engagement of our total intelligence, the creative intelligence of our Original Mind, and She has functioned this way for a long time. If we work with Her image in whatever way feels most vitalizing (in accord with well-verified lineages of practice), we will follow in the footsteps of some of our wisest ancestors and world sages.
For instance, in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates says that he learned what he knew about love from a woman named Diotima. We should find this particularly interesting since Socrates notoriously claimed to know nothing. That he admitted knowledge about anything should get our attention. That his only admitted knowledge was about love should further provoke our soul. That this knowledge (even in the sense of wisdom) came from a woman who initiated the great philosopher into the mysteries of love will, if we handle it properly, make our soul sing and dance.
The great Arabic philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi—who is also known as Ibn ‘Aflatun, “Son of Plato”—enjoyed a similar encounter with a woman who initiated him into the mysteries of love:
One night [the poet relates,] I was performing the ritual circumambulations of the Ka’aba. My spirit savored a profound peace; a gentle emotion of which I was perfectly aware had taken hold of me. I left the paved surface because of the pressing crowd and continued to circulate on the sand. Suddenly a few lines came to my mind; I recited them loudly enough to be heard not only by myself but by someone following me if there had been anyone following me.
Ah! to know if they know what heart they have possessed!
Ought you to suppose them safe and sound, or to suppose that they have perished?
How my heart would like to know what mountain paths they have taken!
The fedeli d’amore remain perplexed in love, exposed to every peril.
No sooner had I recited these verses than I felt on my shoulder the touch of a hand softer than silk. I turned around and found myself in the presence of a young girl, a princess from among the daughters of the Greeks. Never had I seen a woman more beautiful of face, softer of speech, more tender of heart, more spiritual in her ideas, more subtle in her symbolic allusions. . . . She surpassed all the people of her time in refinement of mind and cultivation, in beauty and in knowledge. (from Corbin 1997: 140)
The fedeli d’amore are the “faithful to love”. The woman Ibn ‘Arabi saw was a young Persian woman named Nizām, but he sees her as Grecian—because he sees her as Sophia, and has associated Sophia with Her Grecian manifestations. He sees her with a particular kind of consciousness, one which the philosopher Corbin describes as,
so characteristic of the fedeli d’amore that without this key one cannot hope to penetrate the secret of their vision. We can only go astray if we ask, as many have done in connection with the figure of Beatrice in Dante: is she a concrete, real figure or is she an allegory? . . . a divine archetypal Figure can be contemplated only in a concrete Figure—sensible or imagined—which renders it outwardly or mentally visible. When Ibn Arabī explains an allusion to the young girl Nizām as, in his own words, an allusion to “a sublime and divine, essential and sacrosanct Wisdom [Sophia], which manifested itself visibly to the author of these poems with such sweetness as to provoke in him joy and happiness, emotion and delight,” we perceive how a being apprehended directly by the Imagination is transfigured into a symbol thanks to . . . a light which reveals its dimension of transcendence. From the very first the figure of the young girl was apprehended by the Imagination on a visionary plane, in which it was manifested as an “apparitional Figure” (sūrat mithālīa) of Sophia aeterna. (139, emphasis added)
This young woman does for Ibn ‘Arabi what Diotima did for Socrates: She initiates him into LoveWisdom. As Corbin puts it, “speaking with the stern authority of a divine initiatrix, she divulges the entire secret,” the secret of what Corbin refers to as “the sophianic religion of love” (139).
As an aside, we can note that, as Zachary Markwith (2012) points out,
Ramakrishna worshiped the Hindu Goddess Kali, while Ibn ‘Arabi saw the Persian girl Nizam as a symbol of the Infinite and Absolute Reality that is beyond forms, yet is also the Source of all sacred forms. Remarkably, both sages were able to appreciate other religions after witnessing a manifestation or symbol of Divine majesty and beauty in the feminine form. While Ramakrishna and Ibn ‘Arabi came from different religious, historical, and cultural contexts they arrived at a strikingly similar understanding of the universality of religions through contemplating God through the form of the feminine. We believe that this was not an accident, but a reoccurring theme in the lives and teachings of many mystics because the feminine theophany is a direct manifestation or realization of the infinitude of God, the knowledge of which makes all sacred forms intelligible. It was a beatific vision of the Infinite through the feminine that enabled Ramakrishna and Ibn ‘Arabi to appreciate, albeit in different ways, the various sacred forms that they encountered as so many “unique repetitions” of Divine wisdom and beauty. (20)
We should stress that our interest in Sophia’s religious function honors those who would like to work with Her image to facilitate their spiritual growth in a religious way. But we should not restrict Sophia Herself to anything “religious” in any conventional sense. She can help anyone at all of any religious orientation, and the no-religious or even atheistic as well, because LoveWisdom requires each person to engage their own imagination, which is informed by their own practice of life, their own religion (or lack of it), and fundamentally their philosophy of life (including their philosophy of religion, no religion, or non-religion). Our own highest commitments determine what Sophia will mean for us (at least initially, for She will expand our mind and explode all our initial meanings), along with the philosophical teachings we willingly receive with respect to those commitments, and the practices we engage in to bring them to life.
We can readily see the truth of this general claim about Sophia’s broad inclusiveness in the fact that Socrates encountered a figure that worked for his own spiritual orientation, which differed from that of Ibn ‘Arabi, which in turn differed from that of Joyce Rupp (the Catholic monastic quoted above). All of these in turn differ from the experience of the artist who made the Image of Sophia seen in Figure 1 (which you can find by looking HERE).
This image shows Sophia in one of Her “eastern” manifestations, as the “Perfection of Wisdom,” or the Wisdom that goes beyond all “knowledge” (Prajnaparamita). The Indologist Heinrich Zimmer tells us that this work was commissioned in the 13th century by the Indonesian (Singosarian) king Rajasa Sang Anurvadhumi (cited in Campbell 1974: 217). Though the sculpture is of Sophia, it is also of his queen, whom he apparently saw or wanted to see as Ibn ‘Arabi Saw Nizām. The king commissioned a sculpture, and Ibn ‘Arabi himself wrote a book of poetry, which Corbin characterizes as “a celebration of his meeting with the mystic Sophia” (140).
We can receive this as a truly vitalizing and refreshing thing, something magical and wondrous that comes to life within us as it simultaneously brings us to life. As Corbin notes, Nizām is for Ibn ‘Arabi “the visible manifestation of Sophia aeterna, [eternal Wisdom]” and it seems to have had a transformative effect on Ibn ‘Arabi (141). Corbin wants us to see that we need such visible manifestations. We should understand this not as some sort of “need” in the sense of “neediness,” but a need in the sense of something essential, like air and water. We need air, water, and Image (again, not mere “imagination” or “fantasy,” but a power in the soul the soul’s own nourishment). We need food for the body and food for the soul. Sophia is food for the soul. Without Her or something like Her, we become malnourished, and we develop soul scurvy.
Because of this, any figure of Sophia, “real” or “imagined,” can invite, provoke, evoke, or conjure insight and inspiration, just as it did for Ibn ‘Arabi and others before and after him. By working with Sophia—really, by working with LoveWisdom in any form, in a serious yet playful way . . . deadly serious and yet joyful and with a light touch—we open ourselves to seeing the World anew.
G.K. Chesterton gets at this in relation to St. Francis, who married Sophia in the form of Lady Poverty. This sacred marriage facilitated a transformation of his soul, and a transition into sagehood or sainthood. As Chesterton saw it:
The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.
We can offer a humble correction to the last line—and anyway, Chesterton himself already had it better written in the first line. The joy of life that the saint experiences does not arise from faith, but from an intimate experience of the divine. Spirituality is precisely not a matter of faith, but a matter of practice-and-realization.
As for the comparison with the poet, we may remind ourselves here of the great composer Haydn. Haydn was most certainly a genius, and his opus stands in no one else’s shadow. He supposedly had a very simple method of dealing with any blocks in his creativity—one that every artist could adapt in their own Way (their own philosophical path of life), and every scientist could also adapt it—each and every one of us can. When Haydn felt the flow of creativity and insight getting stuck, he would step away from the music and pray the rosary. So simple, yet so tremendously effective. Why would we ever bother composing with limited human capacities when we can allow the divine to compose the music for us?
If we work with Sophia, She can compose the music of our lives and set us dancing. She can illustrate and illuminate all things, including our own soul. This is the way LoveWisdom functions in general, and we needn’t rely on a particular image for that to happen (and, ultimately, we must transcend all images in order to fully realize ourselves and fully liberate our vision and our imagination).
But we have further reasons for finding Sophia in particular a welcome image at this moment in history. We seem to need a healthy dose of the Feminine archetype. For some readers, this will seem immediately sensible, while for others it will provoke skepticism and even confusion. We will have to build the case gradually as we go along (beyond this particular contemplation even). For now, we can call support from C.G. Jung, who dealt very directly with the maladies of the modern soul, and found from this demanding work that the Feminine needs our attention perhaps now more than ever. Here is his student and collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz commenting on Jung’s view of the Feminine:
the integration of the feminine into the world of the masculine Logos to which our culture has been committed up to the present was not simply a personal matter with Jung. He was convinced that in general it is required of everyone these days. Well-meaning writers are forever telling us that we must conquer our aggressiveness, if we wish to avoid a world-wide catastrophe. But reason alone has always proven too weak to cope with such a deep primordial urge. A greater power is needed to match the one sidedness of purely aggressive behavior. The other power is the constellation of an opposing archetype, which today is the archetype of the feminine and which so far has never been adequately integrated into our religious and our scientific images of the world. (1998, 146, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, Inner City Books, Toronto)
We needn’t accept this in order to work with Sophia as an image, but it can be taken as another positive reason for making the attempt. As Goethe puts it at the very end of Faust:
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan. (12104-11)
Everything perishable
Is only a parable;
The inadequate,
This is the event;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The Eternal Feminine
Draws us on.
To summarize:
1) Sophia is Inclusive. She simply stands for wisdom, love, and beauty, and these three are valued in all genuine religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions.
2) Sophia is Functional. We can work with this image in ways that directly benefit ourselves and others. She can improve our quality of life.
3) Sophia activates our Imagination, our Vision, and we need to activate our imagination in order to realize our total creative intelligence—our vision is our life.
4) Sophia Helps us in countless ways, including helping us to honor the Feminine.
And to emphasize again some points that cannot be overstated:
Sophia is not a matter of belief, but of spirituality. She is the life of the soul, which is the life of the world, the life of the divine, the gritty gorgeous reality here and now in which we must open to grace, co-discover-and-create it, as our only realistic chance at happiness and love, as the only realistic confidence we can have for ourselves and all the other beings in this world.
Getting in touch with Sophia means getting in touch with our total intelligence—not merely part of our intelligence, not merely “reason,” but also not excluding “reason”. This means a kind of gnosis or active, responsive wisdom. It means a liberation into larger ecologies of mind and into sacredness.
Sophia is wildness—our own wildness, which is the wildness of the soul, the wildness of Nature, the wildness of the Cosmos. Sophia can be fierce, and indeed, the fierceness and mystery of Sophia in particular, and the archetypal feminine in general, have contributed to the repression of women, Nature, and the feminine archetype. Males in a patriarchal society can react with fear in the face of the wildness, fierceness, and mystery of Sophia and the feminine. This leads to both conscious and sublimated or variously unconscious attempts to dominate the feminine and all that we might associate with it.
In the hyper-masculine (or, better put, encumbered masculine) context of the dominant culture, we can get confused in countless ways in our manner of relating to the Feminine. This goes beyond obvious things, like mistakenly reducing the archetypal feminine to a matter of gender. Archetypes are patternings of primordial awareness, not labels or categories of thought.
We may need to honor Sophia specifically as a corrective for how encumbered the masculine energies have become. But She represents much more than standard interpretations of the feminine archetype tend to offer, because we can see Her as a feminine image of nondual reality. And if we get too woo-woo or precious about Sophia, if we start to project weakness onto Her or any of our neurosis, anxiety, fear, neediness, and all our other forms of ignorance, She can respond in ways that may humiliate us, and bring reality smack into our forehead, sometimes leaving us bleeding, shocked, dazed. It’s good to let those moments truly stop our minds.
Sophia is the soul, the heart-mind-body-world-cosmos in its fullness, which is spacious, open, inclusive—immediately luminous and knowing. Thus, Sophia represents the fullness of our own being, and the fullness of our capacity for living and loving, knowing and being. She is active imagination, resonant relationship—which means an intelligence both compassionate and creative, and able to presence fierceness when needed. Sophia invites and inspires our opening to the fullness of our potential, which may frighten us.
She Herself may frighten us. She is demanding but loving, patient yet urgent.
Sophia commands us to matter. Instead of making real a world of matter that doesn’t matter, Sophia demands that we matter, which means practicing and realizing the profound significance of our own lives, entering intimately into the meaningfulness of all things, the inherent meaningfulness of our own activity.
Sophia says, “Matter!” which not only directs us into meaningfulness, but also directs us into mutual nourishing, for to matter is to mother (the etymology of “matter” is “mother”). Our meaningfulness and purpose have to do with mothering life, as life mothers us, as Sophia mothers us. It has to do with mothering ourselves, as Sophia mothers us. It has to do with mothering all beings, as all beings mother us—seeing all beings as our mothers.
Love (including compassion and care in general) and beauty are matters of wisdom. They too need to be tasted, given birth to—and all our suffering amounts to hunger and to the pangs of birth.
For instance, there is something revelatory in certain cases of experiencing someone’s love, caring, or compassion. We may perhaps think of a certain person as too hard and unfeeling to really care, or we may think ourselves unworthy of love and care, or for perhaps some other strange reason, we can actually find it surprising when we experience love and compassion coming from certain people. It arrives like a great insight to which we often give insufficient attention, gratitude, and shear wonder—though, sometimes we do, at least for a little while. Sometimes it can change our life. Sometimes our own act of love, caring, or compassion can change our life, and the life of all beings.
Creative engagement—so essential to LoveWisdom in general and working with Sophia in particular—means trusting, risking, leaping, discerning, intuiting, imagining. Suspicion inhibits love, and creative engagement seeks to facilitate love. Creative engagement means “relational realism”. It seeks to help us relate to life realistically, to put ourselves in accord with reality (which is inherently relational . . . life arises as interwovenness), and thus come to an attunement with life, which involves a deep affirmation and trust (a big Yes), in the presence of sacredness, the intimate realization of the sacredness and meaningfulness of life.
What is this life of ours?
Sophia means directly experiencing what life is, realizing what we are actually doing with it—and then seeing beyond, sensing what we don’t even know is possible for our own life, and welcoming that into realization. What have we become? What have we allowed ourselves to become—and, What more might we become? Life inherently involves a more—not a gesture of greed, but the reality of possibility, the mystery unfolding. What could we make with our lives and our world together if we let ourselves become seized by love, if we made ourselves available to love, fully available to wisdom, love, and beauty?
Seized by love, we want to learn poetry, we want to learn to dance—we feel spontaneous singing and dancing spring forth. We let go of scraping and scrawling our lives, and we begin to brush them, paint them, shape and sculpt them with gentle hands, cook them with a sense of gastronomic delight. For a moment or two we even set aside our narrow views, and wondrous possibilities emerge—veritable magic emerges. Our creativity becomes unleashed, unencumbered. We invent-and-discover ways to please our beloved. And we seek their presence, become more fully present for their presence, with their presence, by means of their presence (because we allow them to open us).
If Sophia becomes our Beloved, we will seek Her presence in all things—not “things,” but all situations and happenings, all mysteries unfolding like miracles—and we will see Her whole Cosmos and all its unfoldings more clearly and more spaciously, for She will cleanse the channels of our perception—the gateless gate will be found wide open—we’ve always treated it as closed and knocked from the inside.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. ~ Blake
I have failed in my foremost task to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul, that there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state. ~ Jung (Letters)
Sophia is the reality of the soul, and the fact that we cannot escape the soul. Everything unfolds for us in the soul, as the mandala of the soul. As Jung points out, it seems to be a “typically Western prejudice” to depreciate matters of soul, and though we may be foolish little “fishes who believe that they contain the sea,” we must open ourselves to the fact that all of our experience is an unfolding of the soul, that everything we experience is first and foremost a psychic reality (CW 13, para 75). Sophia is the awakening of our soul to itself.
[1] The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks, HarperCollins, New York, 2004, pp. 165-8. It is worth noting, then, that the act of scolding turned out to be an act of love—mainly because of the broken-open lowliness of the shepherd. It is also unspeakably important that this translation fortuitously says it is not like we thought it was. Our thinking is so off the mark that the truth is just not like anything we think. When we speak of WisdomLoveBeauty, there is nothing to compare it to.
[2] We can compare Rumi to Buddha as we eschew any simple perennialism.