If You Thought Your Head Was Spinning Before...!

Sophia, The Wisdom of God, is a word coming into rather common use now, but its meaning is not always clear. I asked a friend who has translated many writers from the renaissance of Russian philosophy…the Russian Sophiologists if you will: “What is Sophia?"

“Sophia is what all men seek,” he replied,…and then after some thought… “Sophia is the blue sky, the azure of it, though usually the sky is gray or even somehow we live as if we prefer the gray sky.”

So the young Vladimir Soloviev on a truly gray day when he had been rebuffed by his first sweetheart, suddenly finds all his conciousness suffused with blue, the azure of the sky, and within that aetheric blue he sees or feels that ‘eternal womanhood’ is, unlike its particular local representative, holding out a flower to him. And the German romantic who called himself Novalis has a character of his dream of a blue flower in which he sees the face of his beloved whom he may meet but has not yet.

On the face of it there is a rather long road from the Wisdom books of the Old Testament to this romantic vision, and yet it may be a road worth traversing if indeed the one leads to the other. It seems that it can be worth traveling both ways in that case, for perhaps many who speak of Sophia now have not made the journey back to the ground of Divine Wisdom, and it may be that there are theologians who have not often looked to the sky or to the blue among flowers.

-Ripped off from pg. 77 of Theology of Wonder by Bishop Seraphim Sigrist (ellipses indicative of my omissions)

I have no knack for theology. I often look to the sky, but do not like blue flowers. I like white flowers; specifically: the daisy. Of course, the gold and white daisy goes well with the afternoon blue. I am one of those who speaks of Sophia without having made the journey back to the ground of Divine Wisdom. I have, like Soloviev, a sensitivity to the spiritual worth of jilted romantic love. So much so, that I seek out women who are more likely than not too good for me, though this means I spend most of life pining. I do not compromise when it comes to love. My brother thinks that I will lose this aspect of my character if I am lucky. This may be true, but the above passage suggests that one who is learning to worship God need not seek to lose this, but can try to channel it into his worship.

My favorite idol is woman: beautiful in body and soul. How does God destroy my idol? Like He always does: by becoming small enough to enter into it. If I desire to be conquered by a woman God conquers me through this woman by making her a window to the beauty of eternal womanhood. How does this work? Hang on for dear life, I have to talk about Rod Stewart now.

I was listening to a Rod Stewart classic today (my mom never tires of saying that Rod is a ‘serial monogamist’)

Have I told you lately that I love you?
Have I told you there’s no-one else above you?
You fill my heart with gladness,
Take away all my sadness,
You ease my troubles that’s what you do.

Good old Rod seems to be getting a little carried away here. On the one hand his lover “takes away all [his] sadness” on the other she “eases [his] troubles”. These are not the same sort of thing. When all of our sadness is gone, we have forgotten the cross. That is how I respond to women: I let them fill me with an ungodly joy that leads me away from religion. I feel, when I am in this state, that “there’s no-one else above” her, not even God. That last line about easing his troubles feels like a little bit of unhelpful guilt popping in, a kind of correction aimed at appeasing God: “No, what I mean to say is, you ease my troubles. Yeah, that’s it, that’s what you do.” Later in the song, Rod makes an appeal that they turn to prayer together.

There’s a love that’s divine.
And it’s yours and it’s mine, like the sun.
And at the end of the day
We should give thanks and pray
To the One, to the One.

I agree Rod, we should pray, but not because the divine love belongs to us, but because it belongs to God. And isn’t it strange that he talks about the sun belonging to them? But that is an accurate description of what God forgetting joy feels like: the sun itself is burning inside of me.

What Rod and I need is a good dose of Sophia via rejection, which is what is being talked about in the above quote from Bishop Seraphim’s book. Rod’s and my theology is more akin to a making, a poeticizing, of our beloved, than it is a receiving of the truth handed down from heaven. Mercy comes to us primarily in the form of an “unlucky” love life, which is really a blessing in disguise. We are knocked back on our feet by our heaven-storming love, our attempts to capture the sun. As we fall back to earth like Icarus, we have a little time to think about what we did wrong. That is as close as I usually get to theology. One fine day Rod and I may stop storming heaven and just fly around on the breeze like birds.