Sophia from Boehme to Corbin and Beyond in Ten Minutes

For a Panel on Sophia in the Western Tradition at the Conference “Wisdom and Pedagogy,” Guainville, France, Saturday July 19, 2023.

Sophia from Boehme to Corbin and Beyond in Ten Minutes

My task is to evoke the mystery of Sophia as She has been imagined by a few adventurous souls in the West from Jacob Boehme to the present. I will attempt it by refracting Her image in a kaleidoscope made from fragments of the visions of many people who will here necessarily be anonymous; I, of course, am the maker of this imperfect instrument. Do not take its shifting images literally.

Where Is She?

Between the transcendent and unknowable Deity and the literal world of history, physics, and the ravages of Fate, there are other worlds, at least as real as the one we seem to know. They are intricate webs of entangled, subtle bodies, each the manifestation of a person. And there are persons of every degree—from the most dense and rudimentary being of a slab of shale, to the brilliant erotic glories of the angelic countenances. These worlds are the Dwellings of Revealed Divinity, and in her totality she is sometimes called Sophia, the Face of Wisdom. Her presence is the Soul of the Worlds.

Who Is She?

She is the In-Between, the between-us, mediating transcendence and immanence, and so personifying relationship itself. Her relationality includes all beings in their various mixtures of darkness and light, and this begins her cosmic story. In one Gnostic myth “The sufferings that befell her took the form of various emotions: sadness, fear, bewilderment, confusion, longing; now she laughed and now she wept…” The drama unfolds Her manifold personalities, refracted differently in every time and place. Her manifestations include Eve, Helen, Mary the Mother of God, and Sophia Herself. Her great mythologies define the theater of metamorphoses that we have come to call psychology.

So She is also known to us as psyche, anima, soul, that magical energy that causes life and draws us into relations. “With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us imagine incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that we should fall, should reach the earth, entangle ourselves there, and stay caught …” She draws us into entanglements and relationships with every being we encounter.

We’re embedded in psyche, in what we call imagination and fantasy. We live in fertile confusion, surrounded by presences whose weird attentions we largely ignore. In this blooming buzzing confusion we can sometimes, with great effort, make out a bewildering variety of her personalities. Two consequences of her presence are primary. As anima she personifies our unconsciousness—our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. And here is the strange miracle: She is the source of our feeling of personal interiority and brings the sense of having an interior life, of being me. Your autonomy is a fiction. She makes possible our sense of personal reality. She personalizes existence. And because her consciousness is mythical and magical, she pluralizes the persons of our psyche even as she makes us feel our individual reality.

Her presence reveals that the smallest unit of being is two—we cannot survive without an other. Whether we conceive of this primary other as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, a Fravarti or a Paredros, She is indispensable to our personality and without Her we are “lost in vagabondage and perdition.”

The poles of this archetypal dyad are mutually constitutive—the Manifest Angel needs her corresponding creature as much as the creature needs its Angel. A further mystery ensures that this relationality cannot be captured by intellect. At the heart of each person, Angelic, human, animal, plant or mineral, lies an atom of the unknowable hidden God. Thus each member of the pair can say “I am known only by you just as you exist only by me. Who knows you knows me, although no one knows me, so that you too are known by no one.”

This unknowable kernel of mystery is the enigmatic origin of love. But this isn’t a love that unifies. This cosmological love is what we can call imaginal love—and in these worlds “when we love we want to explore more and more widely to extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy.” This loving comes first—ontologically. Only through love is it possible to recognize persons, and to experience our place among them. A key to understanding this fundamental ontology comes to us from Lou Andreas-Salomé. In a letter to Rilke she wrote this,

… we became friends hardly by choice but rather through a subliminally consummated marriage. Two halves did not seek completion in each other. But a surprised whole recognized itself in an unfathomable totality. So then we were rather like primal siblings…

Stunningly she extends this primordial kinship, saying that it is “not limited [to] human beings alone, but opens simultaneously even to the dust of the cosmos.” That is the love towards which Sophia points.

How Do We Find Her?

“Two halves did not seek completion in each other. But a surprised whole recognized itself in an unfathomable totality.” The primordial dyad is not a dualism, and so points towards the metamorphoses that dissolve the schisms and binary oppositions that have caused so much damage in Western cultures. The surprise is the energy of the Eternal Eve, the motive force of love and creation. That can never be the result of two halves forlornly seeking completion in each other. That completion signals closure. Creation is not closure, not need. Love is not needy. The cosmos is not needy, it is alive. a dualism explodes into a pluralism

An analogous transformation occurs when we realize that literalism is a mode of imagining. The literal and the metaphorical both disappear. Literal truth, solid facts, certainties, fundamental realities—these are all merely hard but temporary little nubbins congealed for a time in the living cosmic fire that we lamely call imagination. It is necessary to have such fictions, but they are mutable and not the absolutes we imagine them to be. They are not the goals of creation.

Likewise another binary can be pluralized. The characteristics that are variously grouped together as masculine do not collectively name one half of any whole. They are better seen as faces of some of the many persons of the divine. As the literal is an essential fiction, so is the presumed unity of rationality, power, control, force and stability, or whatever other traits may be suggested. So many of the attributes of what are called Him, are better imagined as faces of the Goddess. She is the Matrix, the mundus imaginalis, the metamorphic countenance of reality.

If any of this is to be useful, we need to know how to encounter this confounding Person who is the elusive source of all that we are and may be. To meet Her we can begin by giving thanks. We don’t find Her by seeking; but perhaps we might, by showing hospitality for a stranger—for strange and alien She certainly will be. If we are capable of welcome, we will find that humility and humor are part of the package. Then we’ll be prepared for life in the society of beings who animate the world.

Conviviality introduces what might be the most important intuition of mystical theology: You cannot enter the world of the imaginal by housebreaking, or by rational thought. You have to expand the thought of the heart so that the doors of your perceptions open and your entire sensorium can resonate as if receiving arpeggios charged by distant lights. Understanding in the deepest sense is participation and communion, and communion always takes the form of music.

These thoughts from John Coltrane give us both joy and a mission:

I think the main thing musicians would like to do is give a picture…of the many wonderful things that they know of and sense in the universe… I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way.