Orthodox Models

Woman in Christian Tradition
by George H.Tavard, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, pp. 151-170.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Greek patristic theology, the subsequent Byzantine developments both before and after the separation of the eleventh century between Rome and Byzantium, and some of the more recent theology of Greek and Russian Orthodoxy stand in homogeneous continuity. Within the limits of this volume, however, there can be no question of tracing the historical curve of reflection on womanhood through this long period of Christian thought. Yet the Western world, especially in its American form, has unfortunately remained estranged from the spiritual and theological realities of Orthodoxy. Recent Orthodox theology is not easily understandable to readers who are not themselves familiar with Greek patristics and with the continuous stream which links modern authors to the Greek Fathers. Since I have treated the Fathers in Part One, I will now make a brief survey of some of the stepping-stones over which the oriental tradition passed between the career of John Chrysostorn and twentieth century speculations on the eternal principle of womanhood.

As a rule, the Hellenic structure of society was still less permissive for woman than were the Latin norms of social behavior, even though the first centuries of the Christian era coincided with a progressive movement of feminine emancipation in Greece. In its perennial struggle with the pagan elements of Hellenism, the Church helped toward the spiritual emancipation of woman by freeing her from the obligation of entering marriage and by making it possible for her to live as a virgin, spiritually free and legally protected. At least in some regions, particularly in Syria, women were admitted early to ecclesiastical office as deaconesses. Everywhere a new ideal of womanhood was promoted through the image of the Virgin, the All-Holy (Pan-agia), the highest creature in the order of redemption, the first fruit of deification, in whom human nature has been—much more than restored to its primordial status—raised to a state higher than the first through the process of deification. By looking upon sex as a second creation logically, if not chronologically, following upon sin, Greek theology avoided the pitfall of Latin theology where mankind was commonly equated with Adam the male, and therefore womanhood viewed as an adjunct to him. Instead, both sexes were judged to be accidental accretions on the original oneness of mankind. In this case, the superiority of man over woman remains merely social or legal and can never become spiritually normative.

Gregory of Nyssa summed up the matter in these words:

Having regarded or rather having foreseen in advance by the power of his anticipatory knowledge in which direction the movement of man’s free and independent choice would incline, and having thus seen what would happen, [God] added to the image a division into male and female: a division which has no relation to the divine Archetype, but which, as we have seen, is in agreement with irrational nature.(1)

Mankind as the image of God is not sexed. Sex was superimposed upon the image which alone is properly constitutive of mankind. Separation and dividedness, opposition and polarity, dialectic and contradictories are not primordial but have resulted from man’s choice in sin. Yet the spiritual man, the true “gnostic,” recovers oneness in the very state in which human nature is now shared and experienced: reunion can arise out of the separation of the sexes. The theology of the Byzantine Middle Ages as well as that of recent Orthodoxy has insisted that sacramental marriage, no less than the transcendence of sex through the monastic or the virginal life, belongs to the way of deification, the restoration of the image of God to its intended fullness.

The praises which oriental hymnody likes to shower on both the Church and on the All-Holy Virgin, the Theotokos, are not therefore to be understood as tokens of a “high” ecclesiology or of a more or less extravagant cult of Mary: they actually express visions of, and insights into, the state of mankind as deified. Through the Church in her glory and through Mary in her elevation to heavenly power, one perceives mankind as set in the harmony of a restored cosmos in which God is all in all. Thus, the Acathistos Hymn, written by an unknown poet toward the beginning of the seventh century, addresses the Theotokos:

Hail, through whom creation is renewed....
Hail, atonement for the whole cosmos!
Hail, God’s kindness to mortals!
Hail, trust of the mortals in God!(2)

Likewise, Romanos (d. 556), the great hymnwriter of Byzantium, frequently speaks of the Theotokos as the privileged instrument and medium of God’s action. Romanos’s testimony is particularly relevant. For his many hymns do not only extol Mary; they also depict the specific function of woman as such in the divine economy. Though antithetic, the images of Eve and of Mary are nonetheless in many ways similar. Mary corrects what Eve did. Yet it is Eve, rather than Adam, who understands redemption. A hymn on the nativity shows Adam and Eve talking together, Adam reluctant to believe Eve’s contention that redemption is being effected through a woman:

Eve: Look at the wonders: see the virgin who knows no man heal our wound with the fruit of her conception....

Adam: . . . The voice of the singer does not charm me this time, for that is a woman, and I fear her voice; taught by experience, I fear the female sex. I like the sound, but the instrument worries me: will she mislead me as of old, and bring me shame, the woman full of grace?

Eve: . . . You will never again find me a dispenser of bitter advice. The past is gone, and all is new, thanks to the son of Mary, the Christ.(3)

Echoing older traditions, the poet Romanos sees Eve as the initiator of the fall and Mary as the instrument of the Incarnation; yet he also identifies Eve, and through her, woman, as the one who believes first. Mary is both the counterpart and the daughter of Eve: “A woman has destroyed, a woman has restored, a virgin from a virgin.”(4) But the feminine function in the economy does not end with Mary the Theotokos. Mary Magdalen witnessed the resurrection before the Apostles. And Romanos has her say to these: “What has happened was providential, that women, having fallen first, should first see the one who has resurrected.”(5) Within the renewed order of the universe according to the economy of salvation, woman is first in faith and highest in the hierarchy of the restored image of God.

As used in the poetic visions of Romanos, the feminine typology does not end with the exaltation of Mary and the restoration of Eve. His rendering of the parable of the ten drachmas (Luke 15:8-10), in his sixth hymn on the resurrection, identifies the woman of the story with Christ. This was not entirely new, and Romanos could have been inspired to do so by Cyril of Alexandria.(6) Drawing on the Old Testament texts on wisdom, Romanos establishes an equation between the three terms, woman (specifically the woman of the parable), wisdom, and Christ, who is, according to Paul, the wisdom of God:

The number of the drachmas is clear to all: ten, that is, the sum total of all the possessions of the Lord who created the universe in Wisdom. The woman is, according to Scripture, the Virtue and the Wisdom of the Creator, that is, Christ, the Wisdom and Power of God. The ten drachmas are the Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Thrones, Dominations, Angels, Archangels, Cherubim and Seraphim, and the First-Born whom Life and Resurrection lost, sought and found fallen.(7)

Thus creation takes place in Christ, the wisdom of God, who therefore encompasses in himself all creatures, the invisible world of the angelic spirits and the world of man, fallen and restored. But the English language fails to express this properly, for wisdom, Sophia, is a feminine term both in Greek and Hebrew. We ought to say, were it linguistically possible: Christ, the Wisdom of God, encompasses in herself.

One may see a relationship between Romanos’s vision of Sophia and that which another poet, Saint Ephrem of Syria (c. 303-373) had spun, two centuries before, around another feminine image. I am not arguing a historical influence, although Romanos himself had travelled to Byzantium, where he lived during his mature years, from his native Syria. Ephrem, in any case, was Semitic and wrote in Syriac, while Romanos was a Greek. The point, however, is that for both poets a feminine activity presides over the world.

One can easily perceive the rich poetic possibilities of this line of thinking. The poems of Ephrem of Syria present the interesting characteristic that they are purely Semitic and totally innocent of Hellenism. In them the great Syrian poet vividly paints the picture of a world which is somehow around God, in which God dwells and is to be found, and which is quite distinct from the present world: that is the world of Paradise. Ephrem describes it in physical terms that are not unlike the coranic descriptions, yet he makes it abundantly clear that such analogies are to be understood spiritually rather than materially. As seen by him, the entire created universe is encompassed by the “air” of Paradise, which acts like the great mother of the world:

Learn from the fire
that the breath of the air supports all:
when fire is shut in
in an airless space
its flame wanes,
its breath weakens.
Who has ever seen a mother nursing
with her entire body!
The whole Universe
hanging on to her,
while she herself hangs on to the One
who is the feeding power of the Universe!(8)

In the Syriac language used by Ephrem, the word “air” is feminine, which renders the image plausible: the feminine air is the mother of the universe and is itself sustained and fed by the One, by God. In Paradise, the divine air carries in itself the nutritious power of the Eucharist: “The scent of Paradise / acts like bread, / and this breath of life / like drink. . . .”(9) Thus Paradise, in Hymn XI, is a banquet where man feeds on divine food: “The air of Paradise / is the delightful source / which Adam sucked / when he was young. / Like a breast, this air / nourished his childhood. .. .”(10) Paradise is the first creature of God; it is the all-encompassing mother of the universe. The fall has estranged man from this mother, but the Christian aspires to return to Paradise and to eat again at “the Table of the Kingdom,”(11) where one feeds on the air of Eden.

With Ephrem, as with Romanos and the Acathistos Hymn, these views were poetic images of great evocative power. Undoubtedly they also expressed theological convictions, although these, especially as they appear in the perspective of Ephrem, maybe difficult to put in the relatively clear terms of speculative theology. However, enough ingredients were available in the theology of the Greek Fathers to open the way to a theology of the feminine in God.

The oriental authors tend to see God and the world in less sharp an opposition than appears to the Latin mind. Or, granted that the essence of the Divinity remains ultimately unknowable, that it must ever escape inspection by a created mind, that even Revelation cannot allow us to fathom the hiddenness of God, God nonetheless makes himself known in his actions and activities, which are like a halo around the core of the divine Abyss. Classical Western theology will handle the problem by distinguishing between God in himself and God in his works, between the inner life of God and the created effects of his acts. What is directly known of God is only a created effect, either in the world of nature where God is known through his visible works, or in the soul where he is known through the gift of his grace. Even the highest mystical states will be understood by most Western mystics and theologians as man’s awareness of God’s action in the recesses of his soul rather than as an immediate encounter between God and man. While acknowledging the fundamental difference between God and his works, Eastern thought tends to distinguish between the works of God as they are posited outside of himself and the divine activity or “energy” by which God posits them: this activity is identical neither (as in some Asian forms of pantheism) with the works it creates, nor (as in Latin theology) with the essence of God. To participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) implies not a reception of created grace as Latin theology will see it, but a deification (theosis) by union to the divine “energies” which are God’s own action. The Cappadocian Fathers already alluded to the distinction between God’s Ousia and his energeiai, although this remained unsystematic and there was no hint of anything feminine about the activities of God.(12)

This fundamental orientation of Greek soteriology raised a major problem when Origenism (that is, the ideas of Origen’s work on The Principles, as spread and developed after his death) threatened to alter the very structure of the Christian faith. The question concerned the nature of the created world and its relationship to God. The Origenists were hellenizing, neo-Platonist Christians strongly influenced by the neo-Platonism of the Alexandrian philosophers Iamblichus (312-337) and Proclus (411-485). For them man was not created in time; he was an eternal soul who, after living in God for countless ages, had fallen by sin into a material body. After living in the world of the divine Ideas, in God, he had been thrown temporarily into the present world. The process of Christian life is a return to the Father, to the world in God, by way of asceticism and mystical contemplation.

Although this theology nearly won over to its side the monastic movement, it was systematically fought by the Councils (mainly the Fifth Ecumenical Council, 553) and by many theologians.

At the theological level, the problem was to assign an acceptable status to the Platonic world of Ideas, which could hardly be ignored in the context of Greek culture. The unknown author called Dionysius or Pseudo-Dionysius, a Syrian monk of the fifth or early sixth century,(13) elaborated an impressive theology of the invisible world, which he equated with the world of angels: created by God, it is distinct from, although actively related to, the world of men. The utter transcendence of God is affirmed; yet intelligent creatures (angels and men) participate in the divine nature, being illuminated down the celestial hierarchy of angels, to which the Church’s hierarchy corresponds on earth. Although Dionysius wielded considerable influence over later theology, the common answer of Greek Orthodoxy to the allurements of neo-Platonic philosophy was provided by Saint Maxim the Confessor(14) (c. 580-662): it is in the divine Logos, and not among angels, that the heavenly counterpart of the present world dwells. The Logos enfolds in himself the model (logos) of all created beings. Man is not this logos, although he participates in it, and his participation is properly constitutive of his being. Man himself is created as a microcosm, an epitome of the whole world. The dividedness which he now experiences in himself as spirit and flesh, and in mankind as male and female, is not primitive. Man was created in oneness but fell into estrangement through sin. As forcefully expressed in the text quoted at the beginning of this chapter, sex is “a division which has no relation to the divine Archetype.” But the divine economy will not allow man to remain estranged and divided forever. The entelechy deposited in him longs for his return to unity. Monasticism is the model for all Christian life, for it witnesses to, and constitutes an education for, the reintegration of man in unity. Already sex has been overcome. “By his birth of the Virgin, [Christ] suppressed the division of human nature into male and female.”(15) In those somewhat cryptic words, Vladimir Lossky sums up Saint Maxim’s conception of the beginning of overcoming human dividedness.

With this view of sex as accidental to human nature, Maxim could not possibly suggest any hint of a male-female polarity in God. The heavenly world of the logoi lies in the Logos, in God, who can never be seen as a feminine figure, even when the biblical image of Sophia is applied to him.

Yet the question is now clearly posited: if God encompasses a world of “energies,” if there is in the Logos a world of logoi, the eternal patterns for all creatures, or if there is around God a radiation of the divine light, is it not likely that this divine world will be seen as a feminine image of God, as a divine Sophia related to, yet somehow distinguished from, the divine Ousia, the unknowable, ineffable essence of the Divinity? Or, to express the matter differently, if, in the process of creation, God may be seen as the Father of man (which is a commonplace of all theology), can be not also be seen somehow as the Mother? As long as the dangers of Origenism and its sequel, Messalianism, persisted, the point could hardly be raised. But it was bound to become a live theological possibility as soon as that threat had vanished. It is certainly not by accident that Justinian (483-565), the emperor who condemned Origenism at the Council of Constantinople (553), also built the great Church dedicated to Holy Sophia, the divine wisdom manifested in Christ. Inaugurated in 538, the church was not erected as a monument to victory over Greek philosophy; yet the condemnation of 553 was the logical outcome of a christology which placed wisdom in God himself rather than in an eternal world emanating from God.

As long as the theological vocabulary about the divine “energies” was clearly metaphorical, the question of the divine Sophia could also be handled and answered at the level of metaphors. In himself, in his eternal and hidden essence, God is ultimately unknowable, and the theology called “apophatic” attempts to approach his inaccessible light by renouncing what he is not, without being ever able to grasp what he is. God is known in his activities because these activities are experienced: man is created, redeemed, and progressively deified. If the wisdom of God is that which has been made known of him, wisdom and essence are really one and the same, although conceptually distinguished: Sophia is the essence of God entering human life through his activities. The activities of God, his “energies,” are God as active outside of himself, as positing and creating effects the sum of which constitutes the created world. The difference between God as unknowable Ousia and as manifested and shared “energeia” is relevant to man’s situation as participant in the divine nature, yet unable to fathom the depths of this divine nature; but it is not relevant to God himself, who is utterly simple despite being both at rest in himself and active outside of himself. At this level, there is no danger of personalizing or hypostatizing the divine “energies” and no threat to the traditional concept of God as Three and One.

During the fourteenth century, however, Saint Gregory Palamas(c. 1296-1359), archbishop of Salonica, followed by several Councils of Constantinople (June and August, 1341, 1351, 1368), was led to affirm a real distinction in God between the divine “energies” and the divine essence or Ousia. The deification of the Christian implies a participation in the “energies,” but not in the Ousia; likewise, the knowledge of God reaches the “energies” alone, not the Ousia. Although the essence and the “energies” are really distinct in relation to us, each is nonetheless adequate to the totality of God: “What is manifested, what makes itself accessible to knowledge and to participation, is not a part of God, lest God be divided because of us: but the whole of God shows itself and does not show itself, the whole is known and is unknown, the whole is participated in and cannot be participated in.”(16) Palamas affirms the paradox of all Christian dogma: God is transcendent and incarnate; he is in himself and he is also in man; inexhaustible, he shares his life with his creatures.

The theology of Gregory Palamas bears relevance to our study in one of its possible consequences: if the “energies” of God are proclaimed to be really distinct from the divine essence, we are not far from the temptation to identify the energies with the divine Sophia understood as an eternal feminine principle. Palamas himself does not seem to have envisaged this possibility. His problem was still the old concern of Greek theology: to defend the Fathers and the monks against attacks inspired by a philosophical Hellenism embodied in the works of Barlaam the Calabrian (d.c. 1348). His concern was not directly to investigate, and still less to systematize, a Trinitarian theology. But in terms that appear strangely germane to those of Mother Julian in England at approximately the same time, Palamas did allude to the motherhood of Christ:

Christ has become our brother by union to our flesh and our blood; and he has in this way assimilated himself to us.... He has bonded and adapted us to himself, as the bridegroom does with the bride, by becoming one flesh with us through communion to the Blood; he has also become our father through the holy baptism which makes us like to him, and he nurses us from his own breast, as a mother, filled with tenderness, does with her babies... .(17)

It is the humanity of Christ that Palamas has in mind here. Palamas operates in the realm of metaphors—brother, bridegroom, father, mother—to dramatize the humanity of the divine Logos.

It has been pointed out that, whereas the divine Sophia in the great Church of Byzantium is Christ the Logos, several Russian Churches dedicated to Holy Sophia, like the cathedrals of Kiev and Novgorod, built in the eleventh century, extol a more feminine image of Sophia, embodied in the icon of the Virgin Mary.(18) Likewise, it is in Russian theology that the question of the female aspect of God has been raised directly.

The material covered so far in this chapter provides a necessary introduction to the speculations of the Russian sophiologists of whom I have to speak now. Undoubtedly, the sources of a sophiology are broader than traditional Orthodox thought. Sophiology constitutes a systematic attempt to discover the feminine element in God and to understand it in terms that are compatible with traditional Trinitarian faith. It was not the first such attempt. Under the influence of the Jewish kabbala and its doctrines on the attributes of God, some Christian humanists of the Renaissance had already tried it.

The kabbala enjoyed considerable fame in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when a number of Christian scholars assumed that it contained a genuine tradition deriving from the Old Testament and supporting the main tenets of Christian theology. The Jewish kabbalists understood God to be a source of emanations rather than the author of a creation. From him as Ein Sof (the Infinite) there emanate ten sephiroth or attributes: first, Principle or Crown, from which there derive two by two, like gnostic syzygies, Wisdom and Intellect, Mercy and Justice, Victory and Glory. Out of the last two couples, which relate to each other like Father and Mother, two more sephiroth proceed, Beauty and Ground. The tenth sephirah, Sovereignty, sums up the system of sephiric emanations. Primordial Man (Adam kadmon), the heavenly model of man, embodies the sephiroth in himself.

The clear outcome of this esoteric doctrine is that the feminine principle has been introduced into the Divinity itself. Some of the Christian kabbalists were to maintain it there, or to interpret it as a medium between God and creation, although this could hardly be achieved without impairing traditional orthodoxy. For Paracelsus (1493-1541), an eminent doctor who lived in Protestant Germanic lands but whose doctrines were questionable by Protestant standards, heaven and earth were born of a primordial matrix, the water which supported the Spirit of God: “Before heaven and earth were created, the Spirit of God brooded over the water and was carried by it. This water was the matrix; for it is in the water that heaven and earth were created, and in no other matrix.”(19) This matrix is the primordial motherly substance of all. Then heaven and earth became the matrix of man: “Man emerged from the first matrix, the maternal womb, of the Great World.” As the image of the Great World (macrocosm) of heaven and earth, man is the Little World (microcosm). Then man himself became the matrix of woman, who was created out of him. Finally woman “became the maternal womb of all men and will remain so to the end of the world.” After the Great and the Little World, she is the “Littlest World”: “For the world is and was the first substance, man the second and woman the third. Thus the cosmos is the greatest world, the world of man is the next greatest, and that of woman the smallest and least.”(20) As one can see, the discovery of an eternal feminine does not necessarily cause woman to be raised up, but can still place her at the bottom of the scale of being.

The sophiologists were also indebted to the Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), whose more or less heterodox system integrated evil into God as a necessary motor for starting the movement of emanations. The male and the female principles, which originated in the male and female elements of the divine world—called, respectively, Fire and light—coexisted originally in Adam. The externalization of woman resulted from Adam’s fundamental fault of seeking for companionship outside instead of inside himself, where woman belonged in the primordinal order of humanity.

Another line of thought which had a direct influence on sophiology is more surprising than these classical loci for a doctrine of the eternal feminine. The French sociologist and philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) tried to form what he called the “religion of humanity,” in order to give spiritual depth to what he foresaw as the last stage of mankind, the “positive” age destined to succeed the theological and the metaphysical stages. The “Great Being” which he equated both with God and with mankind he described in feminine terms. Comte had a direct influence on the Russian sophiologist, Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900).(21)

In the thought of Soloviev, the eternal feminine, Sophia, stands at the meeting point of God and the world, belonging to both and at home in both. From the standpoint of creation, she is the “soul of the world,” the collective entelechy of the universe which expresses her through “nature”; with the advent of man, she passes from a vegetal and animal life to a spiritual life, becoming now Adam, in whom the created world finds its natural acme and in whom the “soul of the world” reaches its highest embodiment. From the standpoint of the creator, Sophia is the divine purpose and vision in view of which the universe is made, which is already enscribed in it in a hidden manner, and which must be progressively manifested in the history of man until its ultimate fulfillment. These two aspects are one, so that the soul of the world must be equated with the divine purpose: it is a theanthropy, a divine-human reality, what Soloviev calls Godmanhood. With the coming of Christ, immense progress was made in the manifestation of Godmanhood. For Christ is himself the divine Sophia incarnate; the Virgin Mary, as his human mother, embodies the motherly aspect of the divine Sophia; the Church, as his bride, is the body of the divine wisdom. Accordingly, in his Lectures on Godmanhood, delivered in Moscow in 1878, Soloviev calls Sophia the world soul, and the body of Christ, the Church, the divine Mother,(22) the ideal mankind, the real form of the Divinity, the manifestation of the Spirit.(23) In the mutual enrichment of the two aspects of Sophia, human and divine, the mystery of redemption takes place: God becomes man and man is deified.

If the overshadowing that descended upon the human Mother with the active power of God produced the incarnation of Divinity; then the fertilization of the divine Mother (the Church) by the active human beginning must produce a free deification of humanity.(24)

In a volume published in Paris, La Russie et I’Eglise universelle (1889), Soloviev further develops his concepts. The notion of Sophia becomes less a philosophical theory about the structure of the universe and more a Christocentric view of the process of creation-deification. In this context, it is immediately relevant to a theology of womanhood. For the three incarnations of wisdom are man, woman, and society. In man, the soul of the world, hitherto confined to a subrational state, reaches awareness: “The sensitive and imaginative soul of the physical world becomes the rational soul of humanity.”(25) Adam, the male, is mankind, the “image of God,” a “universal being,” although he is so only potentially and his task is to become so really. Woman and society are born in the course of this transition of man from an ideal to a real universality. Man must first know himself, therefore establishing a dichotomy in himself between the knower and the known: the knowing subject, which Soloviev calls “active,” is the principle of manhood, and the known object, which he calls “passive,” the principle of womanhood. In thus knowing himself, man activates his embodiment of Sophia as the union of the divine Word and the terrestrial nature: maleness corresponds to the Word and femaleness to nature. Thus Soloviev can write:

The human individual, being in himself subjectively the union of the divine Word and earthly nature, must begin to realize this union objectively or for himself by an external reduplication of himself. In order really to know himself in his unity, man must distinguish himself as knowing or active subject (man in the proper sense) from himself as known or passive object (woman). Thus the contrast and union of the divine Word and earthly Nature is reproduced for man himself in the distinction and union between the sexes.(26)

For Soloviev, mankind is man; woman is no more than the “complement of man,” as society is his “extension.”(27) “Man properly so called (the masculine individual) contains already in himself in potentia the whole essence of man; it is only in order to realize that essence actu that he must, first, reduplicate himself or objectify his material side in the feminine personality, and secondly, multiply himself or objectify the universality of his rational being in a plurality of individual existences organically bound together and forming a corporate whole, human society.”(28) In this complex which is the human manifestation of Sophia, woman stands as “object,” as matter," as “passive” correspondent of the activity of the male, as “heart and instinct” contrasting with “reason and consciousness.”(29)

In this analysis womanhood is a secondary aspect of mankind, a moment in its development. But this needs to be corrected on two counts.

On the one hand, true mankind is not achieved at the level of individual man. Likewise, womanhood cannot discover its true model in the ideas of passivity, complementarity, materiality, and emotionality, notwithstanding Soloviev’s belief that these have a constitutive function in relation to concrete womanhood. The model is to be found in the perfection of these qualities. Man, woman, and society are no more than “a seed,” which needs to grow and reach maturity or perfection: “The gradual growth of this seed is accomplished in the process of universal history; and the threefold fruit which it bears is: perfect Woman or deified Nature, perfect Man or the God-Man, and the perfect society of God with men, the ultimate incarnation of eternal Wisdom.”(30) These perfect embodiments of the three elements that constitute the visible manifestation of Sophia are no other than Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Church:

. . . there is fundamentally only one human being. And its reunion with God, though necessarily threefold, nevertheless constitutes only a single divine-human being—the incarnate Sophia, whose central and perfectly personal manifestation is Jesus-Christ, whose feminine complement is the Virgin Mary, and whose universal extension is the Church.(31)

And again, in a most forceful text:

Mankind reunited to God in the Holy Virgin, in Christ, in the Church, is the realization of the eternal Wisdom or the absolute substance of God, its created form, its incarnation. Truly, it is one and the same substantial form . . . which shows itself in three manifestations that are both successive and permanent, both really distinct and essentially indivisible, calling itself Mary in its feminine personality, Jesus in its masculine personality— and reserving its proper name for its total and universal apparition in the fulfilled Church of the future, the Spouse and the Bride of the divine Word.(32)

On the other hand, if there is a male and a female pole in wisdom as embodied in human life and even as perfectly manifested in the order of the Incarnation, the proper image of Sophia as eternal Godmanhood and soul of the universe remains a feminine image. For, in relation to this world, Sophia is the divine mother of all; in relation to God, she is the eternal bride face to face with the Father, the abysmal fount of Divinity and of nature, of divine and human life.

In September, 1898, Vladimir Soloviev wrote an autobiographical poem describing three personal encounters with the divine Sophia: one in Moscow when he was a child, one in London, and one in the Egyptian wilderness. Each time, the apparition contrasted with some aspect of imperfection in the human situation of Soloviev at the time; and each time it took the form of a vision of beauty filling the sky with blue and gold light, in the midst of which the smiling face of Sophia shone, transforming Soloviev interiorly and changing his relationship to the world. This image of Sophia Soloviev calls “the royal purple of Divinity,” “the holy Light”; he addresses her as “flower of God,” “eternal Friend,” “Model of feminine Beauty.”(33)

For Soloviev did not regard Sophia as an imaginary figure or as a philosophical concept, although he used imagination to describe her and philosophy to define her. He had met Sophia in a living encounter. He had seen the eternal feminine, Godmanhood, the first expression of God and the Mother of all things. He even composed this prayer to her, which provides a fitting conclusion to this brief survey of his sophiology:

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. An-Soph, Yah, Soph-Yah ...

0 Thou, the most holy divine Sophia, the substantial image of beauty and the delight of the transcendentally extant God, the bright body of Eternity, the soul of the world and the queen-soul of all souls, by the fathomless blessedness of Thy first Son and beloved Jesus-Christ, I implore Thee to descend into the prison of the soul; fill this darkness of ours with thy radiancy; melt away the fetters of our spirit with the fire of love, grant us freedom and light; appear to us in a visible and substantial manner; become thyself incarnate in us and in the world, restoring the fullness of the eons, so that the deep may be covered with a limit and God may become all in all.(34)

As clearly indicated by the beginning of this prayer, with its reference to the kabbalistic formula, Ein-Sof, Soloviev consciously drew on non-Christian sources. Largely for this reason, his sophiology could not be accepted as a correct statement of Orthodox theology. More recent attempts to restate a sophiological doctrine have taken care to free it from non-Christian undertones. It is not possible at this point to make a complete survey of these developments, since much of this literature has not been translated from the Russian. Because of the availability of the major works of Sergius Bulgakov (1870-1944) in Western languages, I will say a few words about his version of sophiology.

The relevant works of Bulgakov deal with Trinitarian theology, and easily constitute the most impressive modern investigation of this fundamental Christian mystery. Bulgakov’s speculations show a thorough acquaintance with the theological tradition of both East and West. His work purports to be faithful to the central tradition, while carrying it forward to a renewed appreciation of the Trinitarian mystery. It is from this height that it envisions an anthropology, specifically the nature and function of womanhood.

At the heart of the Divinity is the Father, “who is Silence, Mystery, Transcendence, even in the bosom of the Holy Trinity.”(35) Seen as God, or, to use traditional language, as the fontal Person or Hypostasis of the Trinity, the Father is the Essence (in Greek, Ousia), the ultimate Abyss of Being, unrevealed even to itself, before whom the only possible theology must be negative: we cannot know him unless he reveals himself. The Ousia of God can reveal itself, taking on, as it does so, the characteristics of Sophia. The unrevealed Essence reveals itself as ultimate Wisdom, the Source of universal being and of all beings; the apophatic Abyss shows itself to be also and at the same time a cataphatic Ground; the eternal Night is an eternal Light.

In this context, Sophia denotes the revelation of the Father. As self-revelation, or revelation to itself, it is eternal: the Father reveals himself eternally as Wisdom, and this eternal Wisdom is manifested in the two Hypostases of the Son and the Spirit. Together the Son and the Spirit constitute a revelatory Dyad through which the Father reveals himself to himself. They are a divine world expressing the unfathomable richness of the Father. The Father also reveals himself outside the divine world, through the process of creation. Corresponding to the divine Sophia there is a second, creaturely Sophia, the image of the Father manifesting itself in the cosmos and especially in man, the creature in which the cosmos reaches the level of consciousness and becomes able to relate itself freely to God.

The divine Sophia and the creaturely Sophia are not only correlated; the latter is also the image of the former. The Abyss of Divinity reveals itself in a creaturely Image because it has been able first of all to reveal itself in an eternal Image. The divine Sophia of the Logos and the Spirit revealing the Father shines through the creaturely Sophia. If the absolute Ousia is the Father, the Sophia is the Mother of the created universe, the eternal womb where the creaturely Sophia is conceived. As this implies, the eternal Sophia, the Dyad of the Son and the Spirit, contains already in itself the Image of the world to be made, the Image of man: the divine Sophia is The-anthropy, Godmanhood.

At this point we reach the heart of the problem of man and woman. For Sergius Bulgakov, man is the highest expression and manifestation of the creaturely wisdom at the level of nature. But this sophianic man is not a single individual, any more than the eternal Sophia, the Mother of the world, is a single Hypostasis. As the divine Sophia cannot be adequately revealed in the Logos or the Spirit but requires both for its manifestation, likewise the creaturely Sophia in humanity is man and woman. The polarity of the sexes constitutes no accident, as the Fathers thought. It belongs intrinsically to the structure of Godmanhood:

Interiorly, in the spirit, man is defined by the polarity of the masculine and feminine principles; and even in his exterior being, he is not only man or woman, but he is precisely man and woman, he is this ontological and which expresses the fullness of Theanthropy, of the image of God in man.(36)

This insight is formulated differently in The Wisdom of God, where the divine Wisdom, as abiding in the Son, defines Adam, and, as abiding in the Spirit, who is himself in the Son, defines woman within the unity of man and woman:

The Son and the Holy Spirit together constitute Godmanhood, as the revelation of the Father in the Holy Trinity.... This same relation, since the Incarnation, is reflected in that between Christ and the Church. Human hypostases are reflections of the Logos, the Heavenly Man, the ‘New Adam’. But the Holy Spirit, since he abides in the Son, is also a prototype of human hypostases. Thus man, created in the image of God, has been created male and female. Husband and wife, though they differ as two different exemplifications of human nature, manifest in their unity the fulness of humanity and of the image of God enshrined in it. Their union is sealed by the dyad of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, which reveals the Father. They bear within themselves the power of procreation, the image of the unity of the tri-personal God, which is to be traced in the whole of mankind as such.(37)

The relation of man and woman in the oneness of humanity is an icon of the relation between the Son and the Spirit in the oneness of the divine Wisdom: “The masculine principle corresponds to the Logos, the feminine principle to the Spirit.”(38) However, Sergius Bulgakov does not confuse the eros, or love, which by uniting man and woman contributes to their perfection as the image of God, and sex, the carnal expression of eros between male and female which, being vitiated by sin, needs to be reeducated through the asceticism of the monastic life or of sacramental marriage. In the proper order of the universe, the relationship of man and woman is destined to be spiritual, since it is founded on the spiritual differences and complementarities of the masculine and the feminine principles. It can take the form of friendship, when the spiritual complementarities are sustained and united by the psychological complementarities of man and woman. It can also be expressed in sex, when the physical complementarities are introduced in the relationship. But whereas spiritual relationship or friendship, being potentially universal, can be multiplied, the sexual relationship, when it is dominated, as it should be, by spiritual eros and by friendship, must be unique. Oriented toward the sacrificial fulfillment of procreation, it needs uniqueness and stability. The ascetic control of sex by the spirit demands also monogamy and the permanence of marriage.(39)

Bulgakov subordinates sex to spirit and, thereby, the sexual differentiations of male and female to the spiritual distinctions of the masculine and the feminine. The general principle is clear: the masculine corresponds to the Logos and the feminine to the Spirit. The twofold aspects of creatureliness, masculine and feminine, belong to the very condition of all creatures and therefore obtain even in the world of angels. Insofar as they are images of God, all creatures are made of two principles. In the case of man, where this differentiation is carried into the “psycho-somatic element,” this means that “the masculine and feminine principles of the spirit are achieved in the form of man and woman. These are predestined, not only to experience spiritual love (the wife must be the ‘helpmeet’, that is, the friend, and the husband must be the head, that is also the friend, though showing his friendship in a different way), but also to be ‘one flesh’.”(40) Eastern theology in general looks at the realities of this world in the light thrown on them by Revelation rather than in what they appear to be in their objectivity apart from the realities of grace. This made it impossible for Bulgakov to describe the feminine and the masculine in empirical terms. Instead of a psychological or sociological description, he provides a strictly theological anthropology: true humanity is divine Theanthropy. It is in that light that we should understand and live the human condition.

Man is created in the image of God, but this image is precisely the Theanthropy, the image of the Father, The image of the Father is the Son, revealed in the God-Man, and the Holy Spirit, revealed in the Mother of God. Man is created in the image of God as man and as woman, according to the two images of the revelation of fatherhood, the condition of son, and that of mother and daughter. The image of the Son of Man corresponds to that of the Son of God; and they are identical in the God-Man. The image of the Mother of man, and also that of the daughter of God, is revealed in Eve, who, after her Fall, is replaced by the new Eve, Mary. Man is created to be son and daughter of God.(41)

In order to discover the constitutive elements of womanhood as conceived in the divine economy, one should look at what has been revealed of the Holy Spirit, who forms the element of “daughtership” in God and, being on the feminine side of the Theanthropy, presides over all Motherhood on earth. Nowhere has the Spirit been revealed with more fullness than in the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Thus the Virgin is the very type of womanhood, the icon of the eternal feminine. “She is, in personal form, the human likeness of the Holy Ghost. ”(42) In the works that I have been able to read, Sergius Bulgakov, has not pushed any further his analysis of the feminine as experienced in the human situation.

Other recent Russian Orthodox authors have done so, although they have not started from the sophiological premises of Bulgakov. In spite of what Bulgakov considered to be the traditional antecedents of his Trinitarian theology, sophiology has not been generally accepted. Vladimir Lossky, who—somewhat inaccurately, I believe—summed up Bulgakov’s theology in the idea that God is “one person in three hypostases,”(43) called sophiology an “ecclesiology gone astray,”(44) its “fundamental error” being the identification of the Essence (Ousia) with one of its attributes or “energies,” that of wisdom (Sophia). But “God is not determined by any of his attributes; all determinations are inferior to him, logically posterior to his being in itself, in its essence. When we say that God is Wisdom, Life, Truth, Love—we understand the energies, which are subsequent to the essence and its manifestations, but are external to the very being of the Trinity.”(45)

Whether this constitutes an adequate criticism of Bulgakov remains a moot question. Yet, whatever one may think of this, the relationship between the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, and womanhood, and the correlative relationship between the Logos, the Incarnate Lord, and manhood have survived, without any sophiological connotation, in Paul Evdokimov’s volume on Woman and the Salvation of the World (1958).

Drawing to a considerable extent on the psychology of Carl Jung, Evdokimov understands the masculine and the feminine in the light of the two psychological principles which Jung calls animus and anima: “Animus and anima, the conscious and the unconscious, introversion and extraversion, the rational functions of thought and feeling and the irrational functions of sensation and intuition, are the infra-complementary parts of the psyche.”(46) They belong to the very structure of the soul: animus, consciousness, extraversion, the rational functions of thought and feeling are masculine, whereas anima, the unconscious, introversion, the irrational functions of sensation and intuition are feminine. For Evdokimov, as for Jung himself, each human being partakes of both, although one series dominates the male while the other dominates the female. However, these distinctions belong to this world and will pass away with its temporality. Eventually, the opposites will coincide and this will be, as hinted at in the Gospel of the Egyptians, one of the characteristics of the Kingdom of God. “A male being and a female being, the many forms of unity in history, are no more than images of the One, of the masculine-feminine in the Kingdom.”(47)

In the meantime, both the identity and the differences of the masculine and the feminine are expressed, as Evdokimov interprets it, in the traditional icon of the Deisis: Christ is seated in the center on a throne of glory over the tomb from which he rose, holding the Book of Life in his left hand, his right hand raised in the gesture of blessing; Mary and John the Baptist stand on either side, turned to Christ with their heads slightly bent, their hands opened toward him in a gesture of prayer. This is Christ, the Image of God, the model of mankind, in whom “there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28), and the two archetypes of the feminine (Mary) and the masculine (John the Baptist). Christ is the universal model, beyond maleness and femaleness:

This means that there is no exclusiveness, but the total humanity and that each one finds himself in Christ. He is the universal Archetype of mankind, the second Adam containing all in himself, as the first Adam, before the birth of Eve, contained the undifferentiated masculine and feminine. The ecce homo—the humanity of Christ—allows no reproduction or imitation, but it is near to all, for all find in it their own truth and their ontological locus as members of the universal, all-encompassing Body. The mystical body of Christ is neither masculine nor feminine, since it is the place where these are integrated.(48)

Mary shows the feminine qualities of receptivity, openness, gestation, hiddenness, fruitfulness, sacrifice. “Living comforter, woman is Eve-Life, who safeguards, vivifies, protects each parcel of the masculine creation ... As ‘Paradise’, the Virgin represents grace, the divine philanthropy. . . . Woman, enstatic, is in herself turned toward her own being. The feminine acts at the level of ontological structure; she is not the word but the being, the womb of the creature.”(49)

The masculine qualities appear in John the Baptist: strength, aggressiveness, action, judgment. “Man, the witness, acts through his virility; ... he is the Violent one’ mentioned in the Gospel, the one who carries away the treasure of the Kingdom. . . . The masculine works at the level of the acts which project it outside of itself. The tool lengthens the arm of homo faber and the entire world becomes, as it were, his continued body.... Man, ecstatic, is essentially in the extension of himself... .”(50) The charisms of man and woman are doled out to them, both in order to fulfill each vocation according to his male or female capacities and also to prepare the eschatological transformation of the Kingdom, where the two will be one. “The divine-human archetype of Christ in his universality is the what common to all. ... The masculine and the feminine are the how; and their archetypes show the forms and the means relating to the very personal and concrete destiny of each specific type, in order to actualize the what that is common to all.”(51) The Christian, whether man or woman, fulfills his calling by orienting his capacities and qualities toward the Image of Christ, by way of the image of Mary or of John the Baptist. He must reach beyond male and female through his male or female characteristics and charisms.

As shown by Evdokimov’s reflections on our problem, the speculations of men like Vladimir Soloviev or Sergius Bulgakov cannot be considered typical of Orthodox thinking on the matter of the eternal feminine. The very romantic version proposed by Soloviev was too strongly influenced by heterodox elements to have left profound traces in Orthodox thought. The more theological effort of Bulgakov has itself been strongly criticized as straying away from traditional Trinitarian beliefs. Nothing is left of sophiology in the more recent and more popular outline of an Orthodox position on womanhood written by Mme Tatiana Struve, “The Vocation of Woman.”

Biblical in her basic approach and familiar with the great currents of Orthodox tradition, Tatiana Struve starts from the anthropology found in the reading of the Bible by the Greek Fathers of the Church. It is in the image of God in man, itself related to the mystery of the Trinity, that a Christian anthropology resides. The feminine corresponds neither to the dyad of the Son and the Spirit facing the Father (sophiologists), nor to the Spirit facing the two masculine models of the Father and the Son. “We would rather say that, through each of the three hypostases, two manifestations are seen; the one is creative, virile, organizational; the other is specifically sacrificial, uniting gift and love.”(52) Thus, the masculine and the feminine would not refer us to the divine Persons in their distinctiveness, but to two aspects of God’s action in general, that is, to two aspects of the energies of the divine nature.

Having thus from the start described the feminine as a self-giving, loving element next to a creative and aggressive masculine element, Mme Struve can easily follow this with a survey of the feminine vocation as it appears through the Bible, which is quite obviously filled with accounts of sacrificial behavior on the part of both God and man. She can also relate the polarization of the masculine and the feminine to the Jungian typology of animus and anima.

As modern psychology has stressed it, the specificity of the masculine and the feminine derives from the common (human) reality; and, the polarization having taken place in mankind, we meet with the animus-anima of Jung, the interpenetration of the masculine and the feminine in each of us. If mankind in its totality is called to the virile vocation of transforming the earth and mastering nature, mankind as a whole is feminine in its eschatological destiny as the bride of Christ.(53)

Woman’s vocation is to manifest in herself an aspect of human nature which belongs to all men, but for which she is constitutionally better equipped. Her “primordial function” is to “unify through giving birth and loving,” to “be a bond, a revealer of love.” Three elements must be joined together in order to bring mankind to its fulfillment, “the divine, the natural, the human.”(54) Pulled in different directions by them, man cannot be at peace until they have been reunited. The three calls that man hears constantly are gathered together into a harmony through chastity (in which love is achieved through reintegration, whereas unchaste love divides and destroys). Thus understood, chastity sums up the feminine vocation: it encompasses wholeness, unity, sacrifice, motherhood; and it inspires joy. Woman must teach this to man; for unless man makes himself receptive to God’s action in him, he cannot be transformed into a guest worthy of the divine banquet of the Kingdom. As openness to God’s action runs counter to the virile drive for domination, man can only learn it from his feminine partner, this “mysterious witness to the role of suffering and oblation.”(55)

To the theological models of womanhood presented at the conclusion of the last chapter we can now add a confirmation and a precision. The Virgin Mary has been confirmed as a model, both in terms of servanthood and in terms of ideal. She is both the handmaid of the Lord and the feminine sign in heaven, thus embodying two aspects of womanhood, service and bringing to perfection. More than in the corresponding Catholic reflection, these two aspects are now jointed inseparably.

The precision to be noted derives from the concern of Orthodox authors for the transcendental aspect of the problem of womanhood and for an an: thropology that follows a divine model: anthropology rests on theanthropy. The exact whereabouts of the divine archetype of the feminine remains a moot question, one which may well forever escape analysis. Yet it would seem that femininity must somehow be related to the Spirit. This was already the orientation of the third unfinished Catholic model. On this point there is a remarkable convergence of a section of Catholic theology with the quasi-unanimous testimony of Orthodoxy. I do not think that we should follow this with investigations into the Divinity along sophiological lines. Such speculation wanders too far from biblical and patristic sources. What should remain is a concern for depth: to the practical and ethical frame of thought of much Catholic thinking we should join the ontological and eschatological emphases of Orthodox reflection.

Notes

1. The Creation of Man (P.G., 44, 181-184), quoted in Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London, 1957), p. 109.

2. G. C. Messerman, The Acathistos Hymn (Fribourg, 1958), pp. 30 and 38.

3. Romanos, Second Hymn on the Nativity (S.Chr., 110, pp. 93-95).

4. Romanos, Third Hymn on the Nativity (S.Chr., 110, p. 125).

5. First Hymn on the Resurrection (S.Chr., 128, p. 391).

6. S.Chr., 128, p. 578, n. 3.

7. Ibid., pp. 579-581. :

8. Ephrem de Nisibe, Hymnes sur le Paradis (S.Chr., 137, Hymn IX, pp. 126-127).

9. Ibid., p. 128.

10. Ibid., Hymn XI, p. 145.

11. Ibid., p. 151.

12. On the Cappadocian Fathers see Jean Meyendorff, Le Christ dans la théologie byzantine (Paris, 1969).

13. See Rene Roques, L’Univers dionysien (Paris, 1954); Introduction to La Hiérarchic céleste (S.Chr., 58).

14. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie. Das Weltbild Maximus des Bekenners (Einsiedeln, 1961).

15. Lossky, p. 137.

16. Quoted in Jean Meyendorff, Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas (Paris, 1959), p. 294, n. 62.

17. Ibid., pp. 247-248; italics mine.

18. Sergius Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God (New York, 1937), pp. 185-187; Louis Bouyer, Woman and Man with God (London, 1960), pp. 46-48.

19. Quoted in Paracelsus. Selected Writings, ed. Jolande Jacobi (New York, 1951), p. 87.

20. Ibid., pp. 92, 97-98, 110.

21. Since Auguste Comte (1798-1857) had a dominant influence on Soloviev, we may sum up his ideas on womanhood here. In autobiographical sections of his Systems de politique positive, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris, 1851), Comte stresses the predominant role of three women in his life, his “pious mother,” his “holy companion” Clotilde de Vaux, and his illiterate servant. These become symbols of “activity and intelligence freely subordinate to service” (vol. 1, pp. 12-13). In the future, mankind will be ruled by a “double conjunction of the philosophers with the women and the proletarians.” Woman represents feeling, love, tradition, permanence, the purpose of life, the ideal of society. “The loving sex ... is the chief personification of the true Great Being,” which is identical with Mankind (vol. 1, p. 21). The masculine type reigns in the area of means and achievements; man, usually unable to perceive the goal, is equipped to reach it. Hence “the sacred formula of the positivists: Love as the principle, Order as the basis, Progress as the goal” (vol. 2, p. 65). Positive philosophy ambitions to guarantee the proper priorities within the polarities of mankind and to balance the leadership of the male in the area of action and thought, with the prevalence of the female in the area of purpose and love.

22. Lectures on Godmanhood (London, 1948), p. 206.

23. Ibid., pp. 173-174.

24. Ibid., p. 206.

25. La Russie et 1’Eglise universelle (Paris, 1889), p. 256.

26. Ibid., p. 258.

27. Ibid., p. 260.

28. Ibid., pp. 259-260.

29. Ibid., p. 259.

30. Ibid., p. 259.

31. Ibid., p. 260.

32. Ibid., p. 261.

33. I have been able to read this poem only in a German translation, Drei Begegnungen, in Wladimir Szylarsky, Solowjew’s Philosophic der All-Einheit (Kaunas, Lithuania, 1932), pp. 81-87. The German texts for the quotations are the following: “der Gottheit Königspurpur,” “heilige Leuchten,” “o Blute Gottes,” “ewige Freundin,” “Weiblicher Schönheit Urbild.” I wish to thank Miss Helen Iswolsky for sending me a copy of the German translation of this poem.

34. Quoted by Peter Zouboff in the introduction to Soloviev, Lectures on Godmanhood, p. 12.

35. Serge Boulgakov, Le Paraclet (Paris, 1946), p. 343.

36. Ibid., p. 310.

37. Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God, pp. 120-121.

38. Le Paraclet, p. 314.

39. Ibid., pp. 318-319.

40. Ibid., p. 315.

41. Ibid., p. 350.

42. The Wisdom of God, p. 183.

43. Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p, 62, n. 1.

44. Ibid., p. 112.

45. Ibid., pp. 80-81.

46. Paul Evdokimov, La Femme et le salut du monde (Paris, 1958), p. 195.

47. Ibid., p. 229.

48. Ibid., p. 223.

49. Ibid., p. 211.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., p. 223.

52. Tatiana Struve, “La vocation de la femme,” in Tatiana Struve, Agnès Cunningham, François Florentin-Smyth, La Femme (Paris, 1968), p. 14.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., pp. 46, 48.

55. Ibid., p. 51.

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