Sophiology and Tradition, Part 2

Enter Sophia

“Night with Her Train of Stars” by Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman

A blessed Feast of the Assumption to all of you. And, if I do say so myself, it’s a great day to post this second installment of my essay on “Sophiology and Tradition.”

Among his many original insights—the Darkness of God, the Ungrund, the Three Worlds—is Boehme’s elevation of Wisdom (Sophia) from the generally accepted position in his age as holy personification to actual Divine Person. As a result, Boehme liberated legions of Christian thinkers and mystics by providing them with a new understanding, indeed, a new revelation concerning the Christian mystery. Within decades of his death, his ideas had spread like a fructifying enzyme throughout European Christendom and eventually made their way to Russia, in a way rejuvenating at least some pockets of Christian thought and understanding in the alternative modernity. Nowhere was this more remarkable than in England.

When the Englishmen John Sparrow and John Ellistone began translating and publishing the works of Boehme in the early 1650s they probably could not have imagined what an enormous impact their efforts would have not only on English theology and spirituality but on English literature as well. In addition to Blake, for example, Boehme inspired the Metaphysical poets Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne as well as the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who praised Boehme as among those who were able to help him “prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system,” a gift the cobbler has bestowed on many.[1] At the time Ellistone and Sparrow were busy with their publishing endeavors, England was embroiled in civil wars; as a result, mystical works of dubious orthodoxy (such as Boehme’s) were more freely published than they would have been during times in which government censors were not preoccupied with more pressing concerns. Timing is everything.

One of the first in England to find inspiration in Boehme’s theosophy was the Anglican priest John Pordage (1607-1681). Pordage’s exposure to Boehme provided him with perspectives previously unavailable in the Anglican (or any other) church. He was radically changed. In particular, he was transformed by the revelation of Sophia he found in Boehme. As Pordage writes,

“[Wisdom] is everything, I am nothing. She is my oil, my energy, my elixir, my gentleness, my joy, my pleasure, my fecundity, my everything. I myself am mere shadow; She is my divine, eternal, essential autonomy. She is the wheel within my wheel; her oil lubricates the wheels of my spirit. She lightens all of my burdens. She makes all to blossom and become verdant, to laugh and rejoice, without causing any uproar, loud laughter or noise to be heard in the pathways of our properties and forms. O blessed Sophia! I confess that you are the most inward, hidden and invisible of spirits; that you are the quickest, finest, sharpest virtue and piercing energy, which penetrates my spirit and sensual and rational energies and capacities. You pass through all of my doors and gates, although they are locked fast. You enter in and depart hence and waft incomprehensibly through them when it pleases you so to do. O divine Sophia, foster and perfect your work eternally! Work and weave inwardly in my wheels with your wine and oil, until you have utterly accomplished your work to your praise and glory.”[2]

While Pordage draws here on the traditional symbolic lexicon of Judeo-Christian mysticism—the wheels he mentions reminiscent of those in Ezekiel, not to mention the rhetoric of pleading he employs characteristic of much Christian mysticism—under Boehme’s tutelage he is ploughing new imaginative ground. And he is also, from an orthodox, institutional Christian perspective, openly flirting with heresy. Nevertheless, Pordage’s courage in speaking and writing of the new revelation of Sophia drew to him many like-minded individuals, the theologian Thomas Bromley and the mystic Ann Bathurst among them; but none proved more significant than the great sophianic visionary and mystic Jane Lead (1624-1704).

Lead found herself drawn to the Pordage circle not long after the death of her husband in 1670, and she quickly became a central figure in that community. Indeed, after Pordage’s death, she became the de facto leader of the group which would eventually result in the foundation of The Philadelphian Society for the Advancement of Piety and Divine Philosophy (better known as The Philadelphian Society) in 1694. Immersed in the figurative environments of Boehme and Pordage, Lead experienced visions of Sophia from at least 1670. At the beginning of her multi-volume account of her visions, A Fountain of Gardens (1696), she recounts her first visionary experience:

“While in that debate within my Mind, there came upon me an overshadowing bright Cloud, and in the midst of it a Figure of a Woman, most richly adorned with transparent Gold, her Hair hanging down, and her Face as the terrible Crystal for brightness, but her Countenance was sweet and mild. At which sight I was somewhat amazed, but immediately this Voice came saying, Behold I am God’s Eternal Virgin-Wisdom, whom thou hast been enquiring after; I am to unseal the Treasures of God’s deep Wisdom unto thee, and will be as Rebecca was unto Jacob, a true Natural Mother.”[3]

We see here again a mysticism at once grounded in biblical metaphorical languages (Rebecca and Jacob, the Figure of a Woman—Revelation 12— the Cloud, the Voice) but augmented by imagery singular to the vision and, again, bordering on heresy: “Behold I am God’s Eternal Virgin-Wisdom…” The interesting thing with the lapse into apparent heresy here by Lead—and by Pordage and Boehme before her—is that, like the other images of her vision, the figure of Sophia claims scriptural warrant.

The most obvious (and acceptable to a Protestant readership) example of this is found in Proverbs 8, as Sophia speaks in her own voice:

‘The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
I have been established from everlasting,
From the beginning, before there was ever an earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills, I was brought forth;
While as yet He had not made the earth or the ]fields,
Or the primal dust of the world.
When He prepared the heavens, I was there,
When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,
When He established the clouds above,
When He strengthened the fountains of the deep,
When He assigned to the sea its limit,
So that the waters would not transgress His command,
When He marked out the foundations of the earth,
Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in His inhabited world,
And my delight was with the sons of men.’ (8:22-31)

But those not held by a reductionist Protestant sense of sola scriptura could easily turn to the Book of Sirach:

‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,
    and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in high places,
    and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone I have made the circuit of the vault of heaven
    and have walked in the depths of the abyss.
In the waves of the sea, in the whole earth,
    and in every people and nation I have gotten a possession.
Among all these I sought a resting place;
    I sought in whose territory I might lodge.’ (24:3-7)

So we have a problem. Taken literally, these passages attest to Sophia as divine person emanating from God. But the hermeneutic traditions—Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox—resist such an interpretation (which is the most obvious), claiming that Sophia is but a personification of the divine energies. Why is that?

I don’t think there is one standard answer—other than “Because we’ve always interpreted it that way!” But the resistance of clerical and ecclesial bodies to actually read these passages (and others) as written over the millennia is incontestable (interpreting The Song of Songs as only about the relationship of God to the Church—and not as an erotic epithalamium—is another egregious example). One need only point to the controversy surrounding Fr. Sergei Bulgakov’s Sophiology that began simmering in the Russian Orthodox Émigré Church in 1920s Paris before reaching a roaring boil a decade later under censure of the Moscow Patriarchate. Bulgakov (1871-1944), a mystic as well as a formidable theologian and philosopher, nevertheless held his ground, though his Sophiology has had but a marginal impact on Russian Orthodox theology—and he continues to draw the ire of the ecclesial gatekeepers who continue to hold his Sophiology as heretical. In general, the theological establishments of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy have marginalized Bulgakov—whom John Milbank describes (along with Henri De Lubac) as one of the two most important theologians of the twentieth century—by ignoring him: a standard tactic of message control.

Sophianic mystics, then, occupy an odd place in the history of Christianity: they have phenomenological and scriptural warrant for their insights, but, as yet, lack the ecclesial imprimatur of a tradition—any tradition. But here’s the thing with tradition: it’s relative. Indeed, “traditions” are almost always arbitrarily set at some likewise arbitrary moment on the continuum of history—for Protestants at the Reformation, for Catholics (in fact if not in word) at the Council of Trent, for Orthodox at some amorphic moment when Christianity received Imperial approval—all of which simultaneously lay claim to a posterity that goes back to, at least, the time of the Apostles. All of these are exercises in absurdity. Indeed, the fact that Sophiology can be called heresy by these ecclesial jurisdictions—who themselves condemn each other as heretics—highlights the madness that is ecclesial authority. Nevertheless, the palimpsest of sophiological intuition bleeds through religious experience and discourse over the centuries to an astonishing degree—and appearing at times in all the iterations of Christianity—to replenish religious traditions tumid with the accretions of their own theological and ecclesial bloat.

Interestingly, the work of Margaret Barker goes quite a way toward confirming the intuitions of the sophianic mystics.[4] Over the course of a number of books, Barker has argued that the veneration of Wisdom (Sophia) was an accepted and, yes, traditional part of worship in First Temple Judaism prior to the reforms of King Josiah (7^th century BC). Barker proposes that Josiah’s reforms included the eradication of Wisdom from the Temple as well as the employment of various redactions and emendations of scripture to cover the tracks of the reformers. These events also sent Wisdom’s most ardent devotees into exile in North Africa, particularly the Jewish community around Alexandria. With that being the case, it is no surprise that the Wisdom books—Sirach and Wisdom in particular—are products of the Alexandrian Jewish community.

If Barker is correct, her discoveries actually confirm the insights of the sophianic mystics. One could argue, then, that not only are the sophianic mystics not heretical in their intuitions, but, in fact, they are even more traditional than the tradition as it has been handed down to us. And this sophianic tradition discloses itself not as the product of a dialectic of theological discourses and propositions but as an authentic and immediate experience of reality spontaneously opened in the being of the subject. What is discovered, at that point, is not a set of theological propositions, but reality itself. And this reality confirms the central sophianic intuition: that the phenomenal world and noumenal world are one, and, as the utterance of Sophia in Sirach shows us, Sophia is the mist which covers the creation and through which we apprehend the Real in the interpenetration of the phenomenal and the noumenal.

Surprisingly, a similar phenomenon occurs when examining the work of Blake, particularly, but not exclusively, in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, in its simultaneously apocalyptic, mythopoetic, and prophetic characters reads—somewhat amazingly—as almost a Gnostic text in the way that The Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, and even The Book of Enoch are Gnostic texts; that is, Jerusalem is “Gnostic” not simply as a pejorative hurled at Blake (in the manner of Cyril O’Regan) but as an actual Gnostic scripture spontaneously and mysteriously appearing in early-19^th century England at the hand of a “mad” (who was anything but mad) poet and engraver living and working in Lambeth.

As Kathleen Raine (with Harold Bloom, one of the two greatest authorities on Blake) points out, the epithet “Gnostic” was fist inveighed against Blake by Crabb Robinson—but there were no actual Gnostic texts available for Blake—or anyone—to read at the time, as the Nag Hammadi codices would not be discovered until 1945.[5] Blake could have read various exegeses on the Church Fathers, particularly summaries of Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses (Against the Heresies), and this may account for some of the Gnostic elements in his poetry—particularly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—but the scope and magnitude of the mythology laid out in Jerusalem can in no way be traced to a few scraps about Gnosticism littering early Christian polemics and their modern exegetes. That is to say that Blake, like the sophianic mystics with Sophia, discovered the truths of Gnosticism independent of a Gnostic tradition, though also in the context of a Christian culture and sensibility. It was an act of mystagogical retrieval.

Central to some (but not all) currents of Gnosticism is the exile of Sophia, sometimes framed in terms of her falling asleep. Indeed, loss and retrieval figures significantly in Gnostic literature, notably in The Hymn of the Pearl. This notion is also central to Jerusalem as the separation of Jerusalem (the Sophia figure of the poem) from Albion forms the crux of the dramatic action. Not insignificantly, Barker’s read, stemming from the Enochian Apocalypse of Weeks, is that Sophia was not so much asleep as abandoned—not only in terms of the Gnostic mythos but in Jewish history and culture following the Josian reforms.[6] This is precisely the narrative of Blake’s Jerusalem: Jerusalem is not at fault; Albion, in his madness and despair, has abandoned her.

Mother Mary comes to me.

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[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vol. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 2:98.

[2] John Pordage, Sophia 3.22, reverse trans. Alan G. Paddle (Minneapolis, MN: Grailstone Press, 2018), 59. The original English manuscript of the book has been lost, which explains the reverse translation.

[3] Jane Lead, A Fountain of Gardens [Vol. 1] (London, 1696), 1.18.

[4] This is a thread that runs throughout her work, but her books most germane to our topic here are Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T & T Clark, 2010); The Mother of the Lord: Volume 1: The Lady in the Temple (London: T & T Clark, 2012); and The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023).

[5] Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2. Vol (Princeton: Bollingen / Princeton University Press, 1968), 2:12.

[6] Barker, The Mother of the Lord, 28.