Sophia - The Loss of the Feminine in the Image of the Holy Spirit (part 2)

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The theologians and churchmen who formulated the doctrines of

the Incarnation and the Trinity at the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon

in 325 and 451 CE - doctrines that were the foundation of the edifice of

Christian theology - inherited the Iron Age attitudes of the patriarchal

cultures in which they lived. They assumed, without questioning their

premises, that nature was inferior to the spirit and the female to the

male. They defined their doctrines on the basis of the legacy they

received from the Tanach, which clearly differentiated the beliefs and

practices of Judaism from those of the surrounding pagan cultures and

rejected the image of the goddess. With no feeling for the older images,

it is easy to understand how the intellect, split off from its psychic

ground, became entangled in its own formulations and came to believe

that these were divine revelation.

The writings of the Jewish philosopher Philo (early first

century CE) were crucial to the transfer of the wisdom imagery from

Sophia to Christ. He lived in andria at the turn of the millenium,

and his writings had a great influence on Christian as well as Jewish

theologians. Philo, attempting to bridge the gap between Greek Stoic

philosophy and Judaism, was the first theologian to formulate the

concept of the Logos as the *intermediary* between the father god and

his creation, and to identify the Wisdom imagery of the Tanach with the

Greek concept of Logos. Philo's writings were imbued with a strong

antipathy towards the female.

In complete accordance with the general beliefs of the time,

whatever was female was inferior and secondary to the male. The contrast

between the 'life of the world' and the 'life of the spirit' was made by

associating worldly life, the physical senses and the body with natural

life, and all of these with the image of the female. Spiritual life, in

contrast, was associated with the mind and with intellectual activity,

and with the image of the male. 'Progress', Philo wrote, 'is indeed

nothing else than the giving up of the female gender by changing into

the male, since the female gender is material, passive, corporeal and

sense-perceptible, while the male is active, rational, incorporeal and

more akin to mind and thought.'

This sounds like a restatement of Aristotelian thought. Philo

writes of Sophia as the *daughter* rather than the *consort* of the

father god and, in a telling passage, evocative of Athena and Zeus, asks

how Wisdom, the daughter of the deity,

'can rightly be spoken of as a father? Is is because, while Wisdom's

name is feminine, her nature is manly? ... For that which comes after

God, even though it were the chiefest of all the other things, occupies

a second place, and therefore was termed feminine to express its

contrast with the Maker of the Universe who is masculine, and its

affinity to everything else. For pre-eminence always pertains to the

masculine, and the feminine always comes short of and is lesser than it.

Let us, then, pay no heed to the discrepancy in the gender of the words,

and say that the daughter of God, even Wisdom, is not only masculine but

father, sowing and begetting in souls aptness to learn, discipline,

knowledge, sound sense and laudable actions.'

Within 100 years, as Engalsman writes, Philo's influence on

Christian theologians, compounded with their own doctrines, had broken

Sophia's power so that Wisdom was no longer personified as a feminine

image:

'She was superceded by a masculine figure who took over her roles ...

Ultimately, Sophia's powers were so totally preempted by Christ that she

herself completely disappeared from the Christian religion of that

time.'

The lost myth of the mother goddess and her son gradually makes its

return in the doctrines formulated by the early Church during the course

of the third to fifth centuries. It reappeared in the doctrine of 's

perpetual virginity and in the title of God-bearer (Theotokos) that was

bestowed on her at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. 's Immaculate

Conception of her son, as Jung among others has pointed out, makes her

different from other mortals by removing her from the 'stain of sin',

and therefore suggests that she is a goddess and her son a god.

This dogma was the first stage in raising to the status of

the ancient goddess, a process that has apparently taken place quite

unconsciously in Christianity over the last 2,000 years. Another version

of the old myth returned in a strange guise: the Church itself became

mother and assumed the former nurturing imagery of the goddess. Clement

of andria (150 - 220 CE) wrote of the Church that 'she alone had no

milk because she alone did not become woman, but she is both virgin and

mother, being undefiled as a virgin and loving as a mother; and calling

her children to her, she nurses them with holy milk.' The Church

nourished the faithful, as the goddess had once nourished her sons, the

kings of Sumeria and Babylonia, with the milk from her breasts.

More specifically, the Church assimilated the attributes and

functions of Sophia. The Church, from the beginning conceived as

feminine, was Mother. She was the Bride of Christ, as Israel had been

the bride of YHWH. And she was the embodiment of Wisdom. The text of the

Song of Songs was used to support the idea that the Church was the

beloved of Christ and the repository of Wisdom. The Church was described

by one early Christian writer, Methodius, as 'a power by herself,

distinct from her children; whom the prophets ... have called sometimes

Jerusalem, sometimes a bride, sometimes Mount Zion, and sometimes the

Temple and Tabernacle of G-d.'

to be continued ...

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fa

http://www.kingseyes.demon.co.uk/greatgoddess.htm