Eve is the gateway to the Earthly Paradise. The Harlot is the humanity that has lost itself in the labyrinth, and has forgotten Eden. The saints are the symbol of the soul that finally remembers its dignity, and seeks by all means the way back. Finally, the Blessed Virgin is at the same time the Gate of Heaven and the Closed Garden.

In short, it certainly cannot be said that femininity is excluded from Christianity! Rather, if this aspect has taken a back seat, the cause is not to be found in religion itself, but in the political vicissitudes and power games inevitably connected to it. To confuse religion with the institution that derives from it is a common error, yet a huge one: although there is a very close relationship between the two aspects, there remains a fundamental difference.
The Church as an institution is not Christianity in its totality, but represents one of its possible manifestations. Moreover, the concretization of an Idea on the material plane is necessarily imperfect.
So to criticize Christianity on the basis of what the Church has been (or even worse, what the Church is now) would be like judging the entire Human Being on the basis of the life of a single man.
The last stage of our brief journey into the feminine side of Christianity concerns precisely the history of one of these unexpressed potentialities: a very precious image, to which, however, historical vicissitudes have not given the opportunity to fully manifest itself, as it deserved.

Sophia is the Holy Divine Wisdom: “Sophia” is in fact the Greek word for “wisdom”. She is a personification of the merciful and benevolent side of God, and takes on the appearance of a female figure, so much so that one could define it as the feminine side of God. Its importance is so high that some theologians have even included it in the divine Trinity, albeit with different roles depending on the author.
The origin of this figure is found in the Bible, in what are called wisdom books. In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom says of herself:
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his activity,
before all his work, even then.
From eternity I have been constituted,
from the beginning, from the beginnings of the earth.
When there were no abysses, I was begotten;
when there were no springs full of water;
Before the foundations of the mountains were set,
before the hills, I was begotten.
When he had not yet made the earth and the fields,
nor the first clods of the world;
When he gazed upon the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle over the abyss;
when he condensed the clouds above,
when he gazed upon the springs of the abyss;
when he set the limits of the sea,
so that the waters did not go beyond the beach;
When he laid the foundations of the earth,
then I was with him as an architect
and was his delight every day,
delighting before him at all times;
delighting in the terrestrial globe,
placing my delights among the sons of man.”

Sophia, therefore, is an emanation of God, pre-existent to creation and even eternal. The book of the Bible of the same name, “Wisdom,” describes his nature as follows:
“Wisdom is the most agile of all motions;
Because of its purity, it spreads and penetrates into everything.
It is an emanation of God’s power,
a genuine outpouring of the glory of the Almighty,
and therefore nothing defiled infiltrates it.
It is a reflection of the everlasting light,
an unblemished mirror of God’s
activity and an image of His goodness.”

Sophia is the Lord’s delight; Also in Wisdom it is written of her that “she is more beautiful than the sun and surpasses every constellation of stars; compared to light, it is superior,” and it is specified that she is the handmaid of the God of the Fathers, and that she sits next to him on the Throne.
Holy Wisdom is also the means by which God works creation. Also in his book it is said that he was present at the creation of the world, and that through it man was formed.
As a conduit between God and Creation, Sophia is also “a spirit of friendship to men.”

This is how the biblical author invokes her: “Send her from the holy heavens, send her out of your glorious throne, that she may assist me and accompany me in my labor.” And in the book of Sirach it is written:
“Thus shall he who fears the Lord act;
He who is faithful to the law will also obtain wisdom.
She will go out to meet him like a mother,
she will welcome him as a virgin bride;
he will feed him with the bread of understanding,
and the water of wisdom will give him drink.
He will lean on her and will not waver,
he will rely on her and he will not be confused.”

In the same text, Sophia herself declares herself to be well disposed towards humanity:
“Draw near to me, you who desire me,
and be satisfied with my products.
Since the remembrance of me is sweeter than honey,
the possession of me is sweeter than the honeycomb.
Those who eat me will still be hungry
, and those who drink of me will still thirst.”

An objection often leveled at this understanding is that Sophia is not a deity per se, but “merely” the poetic embodiment of God’s wisdom. A similar view, however, could also be extended to God himself: a poetic personification of a cosmic principle.

In his poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” William Blake wrote:
“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Genii or Divinity, giving them names and decorating them with the properties of woods and rivers, mountains, lakes, nations, and everything that their wide and numerous senses could perceive. And especially they studied the genius of every city and town, placing it under its mental divinity.
In the long run, a system was formed, but some took advantage of it, enslaving the people and attempting to abstract the mental deities from their objects. This is how the clergy began: choosing forms of veneration from the fairy tales of the poets.
And in the long run they claimed that it was the gods who ordained these things. Thus men forgot that all gods dwell in the bosom of man.”

In our years we can see a similar tendency, albeit in a certain sense reversed: the poetic image is discarded, preferring the concrete and unambiguous words of logic.
A reduction to language without poetry would certainly satisfy a more intellectual mind, and would probably be more in step with our times. But it would be paid for with a loss of beauty and with the even more serious risk of crystallizing the symbol in its specific meaning.
The strength of the symbol lies in its vagueness, which allows it to shine with new light as the centuries follow one another. The symbolic image is never defined in individual details, and this enables the men of every age to receive it according to their specific individuality. If, on the other hand, we threw away the symbol, after translating it into definite and unequivocal words, we would have made it clear, but we would have precluded this capacity for adaptation and evolution, fossilizing a living force in a concept that is as precise as it is static.
Religions and their history, moreover, are not composed of logical definitions and precise and well-defined images, but of protean entities that escape any attempt at univocal description.
Let’s take for example the symbol of the Woman in Christianity: the image of Sophia comes to be confused with the Virgin Mary, so much so that according to some the two are the same figure.
And again, Sophia can be understood as an image of the Church, understood as a mystical body that pre-existed humanity itself.

This apparent confusion actually hides a precious treasure.
It is a powerful method of thinking, very different from the logic that clarifies and separates every concept. We could call it symbolic thinking: an approach that values similarities and affinities, while overshadowing specific differences.
This is how sometimes an excessive precision of thought paradoxically makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to understand the facts of the spirit: religion often does not follow the paths of logic, precisely because it deals with entities that transcend the physical world.
So don’t try to separate the various female figures of Christianity, as if they were different species to be catalogued in a strict taxonomy. Know that each of them has its own particularity; But there is no clear division separating them, and so in order to understand one one must also meditate on all the others.

 

The biblical description of Wisdom shows an influence of Hellenistic culture, and it is precisely in these environments that the image of Sophia was later taken up and developed.
In particular, the idea of Sophia as a feminine emanation of God has found wide diffusion in Gnosticism, where, however, it is framed in the anti-cosmic context of those environments, strongly distrustful of creation and its Creator.
Even in the context of ecclesiastical Christianity there were recognitions towards Holy Wisdom: one of the largest and most majestic churches of antiquity, the basilica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was dedicated to her.
Sofia could be the figure capable of mending those deep rifts that create disagreement between the different religions and cultures in which man is divided: even the pagan world, in fact, recognized its central importance. Is not the philosophy of the ancients a love of Wisdom?

Even in the Middle Ages the figure of Sofia can be glimpsed; Saint Hildegard of Bingen described it in her Liber Scivias:
“I am Wisdom. Mine is the roar of the thundering Word, through which all creation came into existence; and it was I who called all things to life with my breath, so that none of them is mortal in its kind; Because I am life. Truly I am life, whole and undivided—not hewn out of any stone, or sprouted from branches, or rooted in manly strength; but all that lives has its root in me. For Wisdom is the root whose flower is the thundering Word.Shining like a flame above the beauty of the fields, to indicate the earth – the material from which humanity was shaped. I shine in the waters to signify the soul, for as the water floods the whole earth, so the soul also pervades the whole body. I burn in the sun and moon to signify Wisdom, and the stars are the innumerable words of Wisdom.”

The great German mystic Jacob Böhme also spoke of Sofia, who also transmitted its message to his disciples and followers; but perhaps the most obvious historical manifestation of Sofia took place in the twentieth century, in the context of Russian Orthodox Christianity. Some thinkers in particular elaborated a real theological system centered on Sofia: the poet Vladimir Solovyov was its precursor, but it was some theologians, including Pavel Florenskij and especially Sergej Bulgakov, who brought Sophianic Christianity to completion, elaborating a systematic thought that was both simple and profound, strong in the fire of innovation, albeit without denying even one iota of the heritage of teachings and symbols of the history of their religion.
Unfortunately, their efforts were rejected by the Orthodox Church. In 1935 Bulgakov’s sophiology was rejected as heretical. He himself defined this closure as follows:
“The doctrine of the divine Sophia has nothing to do with the proposition of new dogmas, and certainly cannot be described as a new heresy within Christianity, although this is the point of view adopted by certain ‘guardians’ of the faith, who see in complete stagnation the only guarantee of a true faith, and consequently they fear all new ideas.”
The secular authorities also moved against Sofia’s ambassadors: Florensky was arrested by the Soviet authorities, and after a harsh period of imprisonment he was executed in 1937.
Thus the opportunity for a great renewal of Christianity was lost, an evolution that does not deny the roots of tradition, but represents its normal continuation, like a plant on which flowers finally bloom: Sophia as mediator between Man and God, between the Creator and creation, and the dream of the advent of Divine Humanity, as the fulfillment of the Human God of the Incarnation.
When an idea intends to manifest itself on the historical plane, however, there is no way to stem it; Its advent can be postponed, but it is still inevitable.

La Sapienza returned to Europe in 1952, when the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung wrote “Answer to Job”: a text that goes far beyond psychology understood as a medical science: a real milestone in the history of the spirit. Although it did not receive the reception it deserved, it is no exaggeration to call this book one of the most important of the twentieth century, both for its ideas and for the fundamental consequences that they could arouse.
In his book, Jung describes how Sophia’s appearance on the scene coincides with a change in the image of God, an evolution caused in the Eternal Father by the historical confrontation with the Human Being, and which will culminate in the incarnation. Jung, like Bulgakov, also describes Sophia as the medium of creation, and therefore as an intermediary between God and man; in Sophia he sees the prototype of the Virgin Mary, who allows men salvation and immortality.
If the East responded to Sofia with the weapons of repression, the West responded to Jung’s ideas with disinterest and incomprehension. But the seed was not sown in vain, and there were some, albeit few, who knew how to gather these precious indications; among all, the French philosopher Henry Corbin.

And today? No matter how much the “huge red dragon” of the Earth Power struggles against Sofia, it constantly returns, each time with more force and clarity. Like a buried root, Wisdom always sheds new shoots, and perhaps there will come a time when the plant will be able to grow towards the light.
In the book of Proverbs it is said that:
“Wisdom has built herself a house,
she has carved its seven pillars.”

We just have to wait: time will tell us if Sofia’s image will be able to show itself to man and in man, giving a new benevolent and maternal face to religion.