I recently had an extended discussion with a couple of friends about the nature of Divine Wisdom, which is called Sophia (in Greek) and Hokhmah (in Hebrew). We find this Divine Wisdom as a feminine co-creator with God in Proverbs 8, and as the Creative Spirit sent by God to create and sustain the world in Wisdom 7. Indeed, Wisdom is strongly correlated as the character trait that is associated with God's Spirit and those indwelt by God's Spirit (cf. Deut. 34.9; Is. 11.2; Dan. 5.11, 14; Wis. 1.6; 7.7, 22; 9.17; Sir. 39.6; Acts 6.3, 10; 1 Cor. 2.4, 13; 12.8; Eph. 1.17). Anytime any person or chain of events is guided by God's will toward God's ends, this is the gift of Wisdom at work gently but persistently influencing things in a Godward direction. Thus, it is God's Spirit who is ultimately active to shape and mold and guide creation to fulfillment in its Creator, as the Spirit strives and suffers with us to bring about the new birth of Creation (cf. Romans 8).
CONFUSION OF CREATOR AND CREATION IN BULGAKOV'S SOPHIOLOGY
This idea of God's Spirit working in Wisdom (Sophia) has given rise to the study of Wisdom in Theology which is Sophiology. To get a flavor for what is at stake in Sophiology, and the complexity of the issues involved, you might read through this Symposium on Wisdom in Christian Tradition. One of the more famous (and infamous) 20th century expositors of Sophiology is the Russian Theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Although I am not a Bulgakov scholar, my understanding is that while he taught in Paris from 1926-1944, he was influenced by the Russian religious philosophers Vladimir Solovyov and Pavel Florensky, secular philosophers such as Friedrich Schelling and Nikolai Berdyaev, and Western theologians such as Jacques Maritain and Emil Brunner.
For Bulgakov, Sophia seems to be the feminine aspect of God in relation to creation that unites and mediates between the masculine hypostases of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In my understanding of Bulgakov it seems that Sophia is the "soul of the world", the "Anima Mundi", who brings about the unity of humanity and nature. She is the life of the cosmos, the unity of all creatures, the divine glory and the humanity of God revealed in creation. However, Bulgakov seems to also distance Sophia from complete identification with God: Sophia is not the Fourth Hypostasis, she is the expression and revelation of the Holy Trinity, the mirror and image of God. She is the perfect creature in which the Trinity is reflected. Thus, Sophia is the mediator between God and creation, the bearer of the divine life to the world. United with God, she transfigures creation and leads it to deification, also known as theosis, or "participation in the Divine Nature".
Thus for Bulgakov, Sophia represents the Divine in creation, the spiritual essence that permeates and unites all things. As the World Soul, Sophia is the means by which humanity and nature participate in and manifest the divine. Sophia is intrinsically connected to, but not identical with, the Trinity. For Bulgakov, Sophia is both of the nature of God, and of the nature of creation, and is worshipped as the Divine Feminine in a way that often overlaps with the honor that is paid to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokos. However, again, Sophia is not identical with the essence or nature of God. The essence of God is unknowable and inaccessible, beyond all categories. Rather, Sophia is the first revelation of the Trinity, that aspect of God which is turned toward the world and manifests the divine life.
Bulgakov writes that Sophia is the outpouring of what is within Godself-- intradivine love and life-- into the external plurality of the world. Thus Sophia becomes the self-revelation and self-presentation of God to Himself and to the world. So, Sophia is eternal yet also created, existing before the creation of the world as the divine Idea and plan for creation. She is the model according to which the world was made, the ideal universe existing in the mind of God. Thus, Bulgakov's concept of Sophia reveals and manifests the Divine Nature, making it knowable, but is not identical to that unknowable essence. She is the link between the transcendent being of God and the immanent presence of God in the world. Sophia is the outshining of the intra-trinitarian love in relation to the world.
In this back-and-forth of Wisdom as Divine yet not Divine, Bulgakov seems to me to go too far, yet not far enough. If Wisdom is indeed created, he is ascribing far too many Divine traits to her, and causing her to subsume a role as mediator that is only proper to Jesus Christ and his Spirit. Furthermore, the "divine Idea and plan for creation" is precisely the Logos which Christ incarnates, and to confuse a created being with that Divine Logos is a grave misattribution. As Athanasius notes, for any entity to effectively mediate between God and creation, that entity must be God. Otherwise it will be finite and unable to link us back to the Infinite fullness of Godself. Furthermore, only God can fully reveal what is within God, since nothing other than God has access to what is within God in God's essence. Thus, if Wisdom is not God, it cannot mediate between God and creation, and it cannot reveal what is in God's inner essence. And not only that, we would be idolators for ascribing a mediatorial role and revelatory power to created Wisdom. This is too far.
And yet, it seems Bulgakov does not go far enough. Because if his intuition is right that Wisdom is a Mediator between God and creation, who reveals the depths of Godself to us, and hence is worthy of prayer and worship, then we need to ascribe full Divinity to her. In fact, it would be far simpler to say Wisdom is in fact the personification of the Holy Spirit, the Third Hypostasis of the Trinity, who mediates between God and Creation precisely by actualizing the Mediation of the Second Person of the Trinity in time and space.
This is why I depart from the Sophiology of Bulgakov and some other modern Russian Theologians. Sophia seems to be much more easily explained as a Name for, and Personification of, the Holy Spirit who manifests the Logos that is the Son in the field of spacetime. It seems to me that the reason Russian Sophiology often runs uncomfortably close to idolatry is that it takes an eternal aspect of God— Divine Wisdom— and turns it into a creation of God, and then struggles not to worship her as God, while also clearly worshipping her as God. This is a big part of why Bulgakov is a controversial figure in Orthodox Theology. If I remember correctly, a great deal of the pushback against Bulgakov is rooted in this ambiguity: Is Sophia Divine or created? Is She a Divine Hypostasis or an Energy? Is she a Fourth "Person" alongside the Trinity, or not? Is she a Mother Goddess? I would cut this Gordian Knot by simply asserting She is the Divine Mother, who is the personification of the Holy Spirit, who flows forth from the Father, through the Son.
A TRINITARIAN SOPHIOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT
So, let me give an account of my own understanding of Sophiology: In terms of the Trinitarian relationship to Creation, I tend to see the Father as the Transcendent Source of value that desires to bring Creation into being, the Logos as the complete expression of the infinite possibilities in the Divine Mind, and the Spirit as the immanent personal Energy of God which actualizes potential in the field of spacetime. And for me, the essence of Wisdom is that activity which actualizes potential in such a way that it maximizes life and love. Wisdom makes the potential actual, so to speak. So, with these presuppositions, it is the Spirit which is Divine Wisdom taking the infinite potential of the Logos and actualizing, or birthing, that potential into actuality in spacetime.
Thus, all the meditating and motherly functions of Sophia, taking the Pattern and Possibility of the Logos and "making it real", are descriptions of what is done by the Spirit. With these presuppositions, there is no need for Bulgakov's hypothesis of yet another mediating factor separate from Spirit and Son which is called "Sophia" and which has an ambiguous relation to the Godhead as an "uncreated creation".
In discussion with my friends, one of them picked up on some hints of Hegel and Plotinus in what I wrote. I have read some writings by Hegel-- most of Phenomenology of the Spirit and a few dozen other pages from other works-- and I am not sure I fully grasped what I read (does anyone really understand Hegel?). But I have read quite a bit about Hegel, mainly from Keith Ward, Diogenes Allen, and Slavoj Zizek. I am attracted to aspects of Hegel's dialectical thought through them, though as a "right wing" (idealist) Hegelian, not as a "left wing" (materialist). As for Plotinus, I have never read him directly. From what I have read about him, I find he set the stage for many developments in Trinitarian theology, but was heavily re-visioned by Alexandrian and Cappadocian Theologians to fit the Biblical data.
With that in mind, I am a Trinitarian panentheist of the Keith Ward variety: Creation exists in God, but God is not contained by creation (so, definitely NOT pantheism). As Acts 17 says "In God we live and move and exist". As such, I would say that God is our label for the Ultimate Reality that contains the totality of "created and uncreated reality". And I would also say that Classical Trinitarian doctrine is an accurate representation of what God is "immanently" in Godself (and not merely "economically" in relation to creation). God may be much "more" than the Trinity, but God is not less than the Trinity.
As such, I would emend any Hegelian or Neo-Platonic schema of the Divine to include that (a) God does not need creation to be God: There can be a non-contingent Ultimate Reality without any lesser or contingent realities; (b) Thus the Holy Spirit subsists in perichoresis-- intersharing interdependence-- with the Father and Son in eternity, before any spacetime or contingent creation.
However, as soon as I say that, I must say regarding (a) that this must be a logical distinction and not an existential distinction, since eternally God has desired to create a distinct created world, and thus we know of no God apart from the Divine will to be a Creator. So, does God need creation to be God? We can say no logically. But existentially it seems that God thinks otherwise.
In regards to (b) and the idea of the Spirit as actualizing what is potential in the Logos: If Nicene/Cappadocian Trinitarian doctrine is accurate (and I think it is), then the Spirit is always at work in eternity actualizing the relationship between the Father and Son, apart from any created world. Whether we go with a quasi-Augustinian idea of "Spirit as Bond of Love between Lover and Beloved", or a dialectical idea of "Thinker THINKING Thought", or simply posit that eternally the Spirit proceeds FROM the Father TO the Son, it seems clear that the Spirit is always the active relation who actualizes the connection between Father and Son.
DIVINE SOPHIA IN RELATION TO CREATION
What happens in the immanent Trinity overflows into the actions of the economic Trinity ("as above, so below"). Thus, the actualizing role of the Spirit carries over into Creation at large as She gives birth to what is potential in the Logos. As I said above, it is precisely this actualizing that is called "Wisdom", for Wisdom is that quality that takes potential and makes it actual, takes what is abstract and makes it concrete, takes what could be and causes it to become what is. And this is true at the cosmic level in the birth of the Universe in the Big Bang (or whatever method the Spirit used to create the field of spacetime). It is also true at the personal level as the Spirit brings us to new birth in Christ, when the Spirit leads us to realize our true identity in Christ by sacrament and faith. And it is also true in the Incarnation, when the Spirit takes what was always possible in the Logos-- the embodiment of the Infinite Logos in finite personhood-- and makes it actual in the womb of the Blessed Theotokos.
Now, if it is the Spirit who acts to actualize Divine potential in Creation, it may be asked if the Father and Son are also "active" in Creation. Emphatically yes, because the Nature of the Trinity is that no Hypostasis acts apart from the other two. The Father creates through Christ by the Spirit. The Son saves and redeems by the power of the Spirit to unite us to the Father. The Spirit acts in Creation through the Logos (i.e. the Logos provides the purpose and pattern for all the Spirit's activities) as sent by the Father (i.e. the Love of the Father is the value or "ought" that motivates all that "is" actualized by the Spirit). There can be no Divine Action that does not involve the value for action, the potential to act, and the power of action.
I realize all of this is a rather strong doctrine of Wisdom as Fully Divine, synonymous with the Third Person of the Trinity, as the personification of the Holy Spirit as a Divine Mother. But I also get that Wisdom is only ever grasped and observed when it is embodied in a created form: As in a Wise Person, or a Providential State of affairs which reaches a certain Christward Telos. So, I do think there is room to see Wisdom as a created "entity" realized in material form in specific persons and in the totality of reality.
In this way, Wisdom is both the personification of the Spirit of God in the field of spacetime, and wisdom is also the ultimate fulfillment of creation when we fully partake in theosis through Christ by the Spirit. So, perhaps there is a distinction to be made between Wisdom (capital W) and wisdom (lower case w) in a similar way to how we might distinguish the Divine Logos and created logoi, or Divine Love and various human loves. And this distinction probably proceeds from something like the Palamite essence/energies distinction, with Divine Wisdom falling on the side of essence as the personification of the hypostasis of the Spirit, and created wisdom(s) falling on the side of creaturely participation in the Spirit's "energia".
Now, is any of this a matter of salvation? Probably not. If we view Wisdom as something like the highest created reality (with Bulgakov) then we are deeply aware she is a gift from a Loving God to unite us with Godself. Despite any flaws or needless paradoxes in Bulgakov's thought here, it still functions as a well-intentioned sign to point us toward God, and remind us the created world is in God, animated by Divine Wisdom. However, if we view Wisdom as the personification of God's own Spirit (with me), then we understand her as the personal Energy of God actualizing the Love of Christ in our lives. This view offers all of the benefits of Bulgakov's Sophiology, with none of the confusions or drawbacks. It offers us a clearer vision of the Divine nature of Wisdom and clearer Path toward theosis, with less of a chance of confusing the creation with her Creator. However, in both, we are drawn into theosis through Jesus by the power of the Spirit. And that commonality is more important than the differences.
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