Sophia

[Mr Cheese]

Sophia: Means “Wisdom.” Like the Logos this is considered a primal form. While the Logos is personified as male, Sophia is female. Logos has a direct and intellectual basis for guidance, Sophia is inspirational (sometimes even sensual). The basic idea is comparable to wisdom being Sophia (sofia) or “Holy
Spirit” in the form of pure wisdom. Pistis, means faith, hylic, or Prunikus Sophia refers to the imperfect or earthly state of the living, or earthly form from Pleromic origins. ”As appropriated by Sethianism and the Gnostics in general, Sophia is a hypostatized form of Hokmah, (i.e., the divine Wisdom of Proverbs 8, Job 28, Sirach 24).” ( See; Turner.)



It may be interesting to you
that there are certain similarities that western Gnosticism shares more in
common with the Orthodox and eastern Christian churches than it does with
western Christianity. As the east and west began to diverge over the centuries,eastern theologians and philosophers came to emphasize what we call in English “theosis” or the transformation and transcendence of the human into the divine.

For example, Basil the Great reportedly put it by saying “the human being is an animal that has the calling to become God.”
You can see that such an idea is similar — though not exactly the same — as our concept of “gnosis” or the gaining of experiential knowledge of the divine within us. For example, in the Gospel of Thomas we read Jesus saying that, “I am the light that pervades all things. I am the totality. From me the totality come forth, and unto me did the totality extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there” (saying 77). Yet at the very same time, we also read Jesus say that we too can take up the same kind of relationship to God and the “totality” or pleroma (spiritual realm): “They who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become them, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to them” (saying 108). In other
words, gnosis is conceived as being a radical transformation of the self by
which we become “divinized” — or more precisely, we come to see the divine that
is already in the core of our being, all around
us, “pervading all things.”

This is ultimately what we mean by gnosis, which is
both this state of enlightenment and the process by which we pursue it.
This kind of thinking never became a major part of Latin Christianity, and I
think this is part of why today many Gnostics feel such a split from western
Christianity but also why so many people are becoming interested in Gnosticism.
On the other hand, it is true that some western Christians, especially mystics
and visionaries, took up the theme of Sophia and developed it into what became
known in Latin as “Sapientia” or Wisdom. Sapiential theology, which was
promoted by people like Hildegard of Bingen, revolved around focusing on the
feminine relationship of the individual to divine wisdom, the mediation of that
space between the divine and the human, so that it can be crossed, or entered.
This, however, never has really become a part of the mainstream Christianity of
the west.

Sophia is a very complex force in contemporary Gnostic belief. Sometimes we
speak of her as a being, like a character, and sometimes like an abstracted
force like Wisdom, but in essence she stands as a symbol that transcends this
kind of category and is at the same time neither one and both, as we can read in
texts like the Thunder Perfect Mind. Let me try to summarize, however, three
fundamental roles that Sophia plays to the system of Gnosticism.
Sophia functions as a representation or symbol of the forces that can propel us
along the journey of gnosis, as well as the goals for which we strive. Gnosis
– “knowledge” — is in the end seen as leading to “Wisdom,” something even more
intimate, a deep and indissoluble connection between the human person and the
spirit/God. Sophia also represents the importance of the feminine nature of
this process, emphasizing such charcteristics as silence, the “dark night of the
soul,” mystical awareness.
This helps us see a second function of Sophia. In the Gnostic system, she
serves as a sort of counterbalance to Christ. She complements Christ, and makes
Christ complete, just as he makes her complete. The Gnostic Christ is above all
both the Logos or Word and the speaker of the Logos, sending it out into the
world, as he does in the Gospel of Thomas. Sophia complements this by
representing what the Thunder Perfect Mind calls “the silence that is
incomprehensible” — the moments when words and even the Logos/Word fail us and
we are simply overwhelmed by the mystery of what we experience as we move along
life’s journey. As human beings, we face the paradox that we must speak about
the spirit in order to move toward it, but in the end we must also find that we
can never speak in a way that contains the spirit within material language.


Similarly, Christ is experienced fundamentally as Light, illuminating our
journeys, Sophia is experienced as darkness — the darkness of the
night where we abandon our pretensions and surrender to the beauty of the divine
that pervades our very beings. We could carry these ideas out in many different
examples. If Christ is a solid, like a rock, strong and ever-present, Sophia is like liquid — always present, but in the way she flows around us gently,
passively it would even appear.

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