JESUS IS OUR SOPHIA
The Historical Jesus and the Cosmic Christ
© 1998 by Sea Raven
"... Christianity is currently a much devalued religion and the figure of Christ himself has been disempowered for many by a very human depiction of his attributes and qualities. The rather faded and nauseous figure who emerges from pious tracts and tub-thumping evangelism has little to do with the figure who emerges from the Gospels." Caitlin Matthews, Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom, Aquarian Press 1992, p. 137.
Words like these from the Western Esoteric/Pagan side keep me in dialogue, with one foot firmly planted in both the Christian and the Pagan camps. The universalists have always understood the Cosmic Christ to be an inclusive metaphor. In this text, Caitlin Matthews (1) has "attempted to give an overview of the Goddess in her many manifestations as mediator of wisdom. Concentrating on the Western tradition, it explores the development of the Goddess of Wisdom, Sophia, from earliest times up to the present day. It deals primarily with Sophia on her own terms and, where possible, in her own words. It is the metahistory of an idea and its metaphors." (Emphasis added)
This last sentence is crucial if Sophia is going to make any sense to the average person in Protestant pews of a Sunday morning. Sophia is an idea and a metaphor, not an embodied incarnation of God/dess. What's even more important for Christians, however, is that Jesus the Christ is also an idea and a metaphor.
The milk and honey Eucharist, Sophia's Table, in Part 2 of Wisdom's Feast (2) is a profound and disturbing ritual because it follows the familiar format of Christian Communion to honor Wisdom, and the metaphor takes on breath and being. Perhaps part of the reason this experience is so disturbing is Judeo-Christian indoctrination and prohibition against worship of any god-form other than God or Jesus. In a pagan context I can freely invoke and honor the Horned God and the Lady Crowned with Flowers in all their aspects and manifestions. To do this in a "Christian" ritual seems to cross a boundary that few would want to cross without a long spiritual journey.
Creation's Wisdom has decreed that when we plant radish seeds, we get radishes; cats beget cats; maple trees produce a particular shape of leaf and flavor of syrup; even the patterns of star systems move and have their own unique being in the Cosmos. Sophia's Eucharist reminds me that the man Jesus is not -- was not -- God. He was a teacher of Wisdom, pointing to the spirit of God. Nor is Wisdom an incarnate god or goddess. Wisdom runs the Universe. Wisdom creates the Cosmos itself, and Sophia is her name.
Jesus Seminar fellows such as Borg, Crossan, and Funk, are careful to speak in terms of a "pre-Easter" and a "post-Easter" Jesus, a pre-Easter incarnate spirit person and mediator of the sacred, and a post-Easter Cosmic Christ. Cole, Ronan, and Taussig's book, Wisdom's Feast, lays out the likely process by which the followers of Jesus transformed their experience of him and his message into the realm of holy metaphor. Caitlin Matthews is clear that the history of the Goddess Sophia is the history of the rise of patriarchy, the subordination of women, and the shift away from the Sacred Marriage as the primary sacrament for human relationship. (3)
For First Century Christians to claim Sophia as an aspect of their experience of Jesus as Christ was a major milestone on the long road back for the Goddess and feminine empowerment.
"No matter how many tributaries of Sophia's myth we follow, the principle river undoubtedly flows through the sapiential books of the Bible. These consist of Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. ... Their influence has been considerable, since within Proverbs, Wisdom and Sirach are all the major references to Sophia as Lady Wisdom. Most Marian liturgies and devotions draw upon these books. The metaphors presented in the sapiential books become the lingua franca of Sophia in succeeding centuries, providing an array of poetical veils with which to shroud Wisdom." (Matthews, p. 97)In John's Gospel, The Word was made flesh and pitched its tent among us. "This gives the game away, for here Wisdom, who once dwelt in the tabernacle in the desert as the Shekinah, is fused with the Logos, the Word, who is now incarnate in Christ." (Matthews, p. 143) Jesus brought a vision of how to live life that no one else had, not even "the masters of our age."
Sophia seems to be the "Goddess of choice" for progressive Christian feminists (men as well as women) in the closing years of the 20th Century, especially Protestant feminists, starving for a feminine icon, and reluctant either to reclaim Mary, or to venture into Pagan waters. The Institution has of course done its part by ruining or attempting to ruin the careers of anyone associated with "re-imagining" Creator. Fortunately, burning people at the stake is no longer considered to be the best way to deal with heretics. But this paper is not another proof-text about feminine imagery in the Bible, or in Judeo-Christian tradition. Those battles are being fought, and I think won for the most part, except where die-hard conservatives control the purse strings -- and that too, is not what this paper is about. My point is that, as revealed metaphor, Jesus and Sophia are manifestations of the Cosmic Christ -- possibly the most powerful and universal metaphor of all.
In 1 Corinthians 1:23, 25, Paul writes, "We are preaching a crucified Christ ... a Christ who is the power and the Sophia of God." A few verses later (30) he continues, "By God's action Jesus Christ has become our Sophia." And then a few verses later (2:6-8), "But still we have a Sophia to offer those who have reached maturity: not a philosophy of our age, it is true, still less of the masters of our age, which are coming to their end. The hidden Sophia of God which we teach in our mysteries is the Sophia that God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began. She is a Sophia that none of the masters of this age have ever known." (Cole, et al., p. 33)But Paul is speaking metaphorically, not literally. The Cosmic Christ is neither male, nor female, slave nor free; and while Wisdom may be represented as a female polarity with the Hebrew male god, at the Cosmic level, where Jesus is raised up as the Christ, all that earthly dichotomy is meaningless. So is the present day hysteria over the sexuality of Jesus. The man Jesus, the pre-Easter Jesus, was not the Christ. Jesus became the Christ or was revealed as the Christ after his death. We humans have a very difficult time with metaphor. We must have an image, an icon, a thing to visualize in order to grasp abstractions like Wisdom, Love, Language, War ... The ancient Hebrews were onto a great truth with the Commandment to make no graven image of God, nor even to speak God's name. It is an impossible Commandment to obey, and yet when we do not obey it, we find ourselves in theological conundrums such as the argument about the divinity versus the humanity of Jesus, and whether the Holy Spirit is masculine or feminine.
To borrow John Shelby Spong's phrase, the change that Christianity must make or die is to realize that metaphor is real, and it is not literal. "The language of faith is its liturgy ... the ordinary Christian does not tend to think theologically, but responds liturgically." (Matthews, p. 137). But the prescribed forms of most liturgies do not spring from spiritual experience. When they do, as in the infamous liturgies involving Sophia at the recent Reimagining Conferences, they not only challenge patriarchal assumptions, they speak to that inner child-self who only understands symbol and metaphor, that deep place where creativity lives and the revolution begins. It frightens the institutional powers that be, as well as the theologically naive.
NOTES:
1. Caitlin and John Matthews are experts (some would argue "scholars") in Celtic myth and Western esotericism. In Caitlin's book, she traces the history of the metaphor of Sophia "from the Black Goddess to the World Soul." Return to Text
2. Wisdom's Feast ________ Hal Taussig et al Return to Text
3. That discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, but I think it is an important thread that has been dropped from the tapestry. Return to Text