Then I was beside him, like a master worker When he marked out the foundations of the earth, So that the waters might not transgress his command, When he established the fountains of the deep, When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, When he established the heavens, I was there, When he had not yet made earth and fields, When there were no springs abounding with water. When there were no depths I was brought forth, The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,Īt the first, before the beginning of the earth. Here’s an example of one of Wisdom’s monologues, Proverbs 8:22-31: In this regard, she’s much like the Gnostic aeons, who are also semi-independent extensions of God. In the words of Nicola Denzey Lewis, Wisdom is “God’s active feminine principle, at once a part of God but also separate from God,” as in Proverbs 8, Job 28, and Sirach 24. Since Hokma, like the Greek Sophia, is a feminine noun, Wisdom was cast as a female figure. In the genre of Jewish (“Old Testament”) writing known as “wisdom literature,” Wisdom ( Hokma in Hebrew ) was personified, and she gave monologues describing her great deeds and articulating her perspective on the world. Precedents for Sophia in Jewish Literature In anguish, Sophia repented, and the Father agreed to bring her back to the Pleroma once what had become lacking in her was restored to its natural fullness. Her deficiency rendered her unable to remain in the perfect “Fullness” of the Pleroma, so she was placed just outside of the Pleroma, in a realm above that of her malevolent son. The demiurge, now alone, believed that he was the only being who had ever existed, and created the material world out of his ignorance, foolishness, and malevolence, trapping sparks of divinity within Adam and Eve along the way.īecause of her fall and its dire consequences, Sophia became a flawed being. Sophia immediately realized her horrible mistake and cast her child out of the Pleroma. Her child was the “ demiurge,” a misshapen, belligerent creature that was utterly unlike the other heavenly beings. But she went about it in the wrong way: she conceived without the involvement of her male partner or the approval of the Father. Sophia and the rest of the aeons formed the “ Pleroma” (Greek for “Fullness”), the Gnostic name for Heaven. Like the other aeons, Sophia was the child of a male-female pair of aeons that had come before her, who had given birth with the Father’s blessing. Of the many aeons, Sophia was the last to arise from God. Sophia was one of the “ aeons” – divine entities who were descended from God the Father and who were roughly equivalent to angels. The story of Sophia’s fall (which was part of the Gnostic creation myth) is told slightly differently in the many Gnostic texts that discuss it, but the various versions of the tale all share the basics in common. ![]() In Gnosticism, the “Fall” didn’t occur through Adam and Eve – it happened before the world’s creation, through a mistake made by a heavenly being called Sophia (whose name is Greek for “Wisdom” ). ![]() “Allegory of Divine Wisdom” by Luca Giordano
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