Jacob Boehme on the Virgin Mary as the Incarnation of Sophia

Benjamin West, The woman clothed with the sun fleeth from the persecution of the dragon

In observation of the Feast of the Assumption, I thought I'd share an excerpt from my book The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics on Jacob Boehme's thoughts on the Virgin Mary and Sophia.

Central to Boehme’s Christology—and the locus of its intersection with his Sophiology—is the role of the Virgin Mary.

First of all, Mary is for Boehme the vessel of the Incarnation, “a bright Morning-Star, above other Stars.”1 Boehme esteems her above all other creatures, much in resonance with the notion of hyperdulia, and not at all in harmony with much early modern Protestant theology. The reason she is to be esteemed is clear to Boehme:

For she bare the Saviour of all the world, without any earthly mixture; and she is also a virgin of chastity, highly blessed by her Son Jesus Christ, in the Divine Light and Clarity, more than the Heavens, like the Princely Thrones of the Angels. For out of her went forth the body, which attracts all Members to it; which are the children of God in Christ. And therefore her Glance [Luster or brightness] is above the Glance of Heaven; and the Glance of her soul is in the holy Trinity, where all other children of Adam (which are born [or begotten] in Christ) are also Members therein, in that One Christ Jesus.2

He knows such an idea will draw suspicion from the Lutheran authorities and he anticipates their concerns, asking, “Or dost thou think I make a God of her?”3 He does not believe she is: “No, the Invocation does not belong to her.” Nevertheless, Boehme believes Mary’s place in salvation was built into God’s plan, drawing on Genesis 3’s promise that the woman’s seed would trample the serpent’s head.4 Indeed, Boehme reads Mary’s divine role as antecedent not only to the Fall, but to the creation itself: “She was known in God in the highly precious Name JESU, before the foundation of the World was laid.”5 In Boehme, Mary’s hyperdulia is intimately related to her sophianic nature.

In Boehme, as the Word incarnated in Jesus, so in a similar (though not identical) fashion Sophia is united with Mary. As he writes in Three Principles of the Divine Essence, “the same virgin in the Wisdom of God, in the Word of God, hath in the bosom of the virgin Mary, given itself into her virgin-Matrix, and united itself, as a property, not to depart in Eternity.”6 He explains further:

Therefore we set it down here (according to our knowledge) that the pure chaste virgin (in which God was born [or generated]) is the chaste virgin [that is] in the presence of God: and it is an Eternal virgin; before ever Heaven and Earth was created, it was a virgin, and without blemish; and that pure chaste virgin of God put itself into Mary, in her Incarnation, and her new Man, was in the holy Element of God; and therefore she was blessed among all Women, and the Lord was with her, as the Angel said.7

This aspect of Boehme’s system, indeed, may have been the most radical for his time. Interestingly, the Incarnation of Christ is answered by Mary’s union with Sophia by a reciprocal movement. “We cannot say,” writes Boehme,

that the heavenly virgin of the Mercy of God (that is, that which entered into Mary out of the Counsel of God) is become Earthly; but we say that the soul of Mary hath comprehended the heavenly virgin: and that the heavenly virgin hath put the heavenly new pure Garment of the holy Element, out of the chaste virgin of God (that is, out of the [Barmhertzigkeit, Mercifulness] or Mercy of God) on to the soul of Mary, as a new Regenerated Man: and in that same she hath conceived the Saviour of all the world, and born him into this world.8

The double event—Christ’s incarnation tied to Sophia’s manifestation—bears with it important cosmological and salvific consequences upon which Boehme elaborates in ways very different from (though not antithetical to) more traditional Christian notions of atonement.

illustration from Boehme's 'Signatura Rerum,' 1621

Cyril O’Regan has argued that “Mary is not in any sense the theotokos” in Boehme and that the theosopher emphasizes the humanness of Mary and Jesus...and…operates in terms of the Alexandrian axiom that what Christ does not assume, he cannot save.”9 I think this is an extreme representation of Boehme, colored by O’Regan’s project—framing Boehme in terms of Valentinian Gnosticism, a school of thought with which Boehme could not have been familiar. As B.J. Gibbons has observed, “If Boehme was a Gnostic, he was a Gnostic standing on his head.”10 Boehme is not writing as a professional theologian, but as a theosopher and as a mystic. Boehme writes in a symbolic and multivalent language. Reading him through a heresy-hunting lens does him (and, conversely, the reader) a great injustice. Indeed, the contrary motion Boehme illustrates through the dynamic of Christ’s descent to man and Mary’s ascent to Sophia needs to be read in its entirety, not one piece at a time.

Just as Mary’s union with Sophia provided Christ with a very physical means to make his way to man, for Boehme, that same union also makes it possible for each human person to find his or her way to Christ. In describing this process, he uses what is possibly his most intimate language, as we can see in a passage from The Way to Christ:

When Christ the corner-stone, stirreth himself in the extinguished Image of man, in his hearty conversion and repentance, then Virgin Sophia appeareth in the stirring of the Spirit of Christ, in the extinguished Image, in her virgins-attire before the soul: at which the soul is so amazed and astonished in its uncleanness, that all its sins immediately awake in it, and tremble and shake before her. For then the judgment passeth upon the sins of the soul, so that it even goeth back in its unworthiness, and is ashamed in the presence of its fair love, and entereth into itself, denying itself as utterly unworthy to receive such a jewel. This is understood by them who are of our Tribe, who have tasted this jewel, and to none else. But the noble Sophia draweth near in the essence of the soul, and kisseth it friendly, and tinctureth the dark fire of the soul with her Rays of love, and shineth through the soul with her Kiss of Love: then the soul skippeth in its body for great joy, in the strength of this Virgin-love, triumphing, and praying the great God, in the strength of the noble Sophia. 11

In most of Boehme’s writing, Sophia comes off as a divine principle, a quality (note Boehme’s usual employment of the neutral pronoun), while here Sophia is quite clearly a being, and quite clearly feminine. How does one interpret such a passage? Is this poetry? Theology? Do we take Sophia as a reality, that is, as a person, supernatural, perhaps, but still a person? When reading Boehme anytime, and perhaps especially when reading Boehme on Sophia, adhering too closely to any conceptualization will result in a shallow understanding. Boehme’s Sophia—as is the case with most sophiologies—needs to be read holographically.12 That is, we need to read Boehme’s Sophia on several different levels at once, holding that which shines through the text in an attitude of active waiting, allowing its many layers and textures to resonate through our own souls while suspending our critical faculties: faculties which so eagerly wish to lay claim to the victory of interpretive conquest.

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

1 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 18.83.

2 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 18.93.

3 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 18.94.

4 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 17.97 – 106.

5 Jacob Boehme, The Fifth Book of the Author, in Three parts. The First; Of the Becoming Man or Incarnation of Jesus Christ the Sonne of God, That is, Concerning the Virgin Mary… [translated by John Sparrow] (London, 1659), 1.11.65. Hereafter as Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

6 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 18.37.

7 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 22.31.

8 Jacob Boehme, Three Principles, 22.37.

9 Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse, 46 – 47.

10 B.J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought, 62.

11 Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ, 57 – 59.

12 I am interpreting “holographically” in terms of a kind of quantum mechanics of reading.

“May the holiness of Thy name shine anew in our remembering”: Sophia in Exile

We all have books that have changed us or the way we think about the world, about ourselves. My own list would include William Blake’s Jerusalem, Kathleen Raine’s Defending Ancient Springs, Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on beekeeping and agriculture, the work of Goethe, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, and Guillaume Apollinaire, among many others.

One book that significantly changed the way I think in recent years is Margaret Barker’s The Mother of the Lord, Volume I: The Lady in the Temple. In the book Barker argues that the religious reforms of King Josiah (7th c. BC—you can find him in the Bible in 2 Kings) were centered on expelling the worship of Hokmah (Wisdom/Sophia) from Hebrew temple worship. That is, she argues that, prior to Josiah, Wisdom as the consort of Yaweh was venerated (dare we say it?) as a goddess. To be fair, Barker does not make an absolutely airtight case in the book, but then it would be nearly impossible to do so. The winners write history, after all, and Josiah was obviously the winner. There is very little in the way of a paper (or parchment) trail. Nevertheless, she does some impressive scholarly detective work and makes some very intriguing assertions. One fascinating point is that the Jewish communities in North Africa of the period (in and around Alexandria) were in fact exiles/refugees fleeing Josiah’s purge of Hokmah in order that they might preserve her worship in relative freedom. Take into account that the Wisdom Books, particularly Wisdom and Sirach which celebrate Sophia’s participation with Yaweh in not only Creation but in Jewish history, were written by Alexandrian Jews and Barker’s thesis gets all the more tantalizing. I have not been able to shake Barker’s insights.

Reading Barker made me rethink my position on Valentianian Gnosticism. It now seems to me that the Gnostic mythos of Sophia and her exile at least echoes the exile of Sophia from official Hebrew religion. When read in this light, things seem very different from the almost knee-jerk rejection of Gnosticism one finds among mainstream theologians going back to the Fathers. Maybe we need to rethink this one.

With this in mind, I found myself needing to rethink Valentin Tomberg’s Our Mother prayer:

Our Mother, Thou who art in the darkness of the underworld,

May the holiness of Thy name shine anew in our remembering,

May the breath of Thy awakening kingdom warm the hearts of all who wander homeless,

May the resurrection of Thy will renew eternal faith even unto the depths of physical substance.

Receive this day the living memory of Thee from human hearts,

Who implore thee to forgive the sin of forgetting Thee,

And are ready to fight against temptation, which has led Thee to existence in darkness,

That through the Deed of the Son,

The immeasurable pain of the Father be stilled,

By the liberation of all beings from the tragedy of Thy withdrawal.

For Thine is the homeland and the boundless wisdom and the ail-merciful grace, for all and everything in the Circle of All. Amen.

Tomberg, who wrote another book, Meditations on the Tarot, that made me rethink the world and myself (not to mention rethink Catholicism), wrote this prayer around the time of his conversion to Catholicism (though it does not appear in any of his Catholic works). As I write in The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, I attributed what one might call the “Gnostic overtones” of this prayer to the influence of Rudolf Steiner (Tomberg had been an Anthroposophist prior to his conversion). Steiner offers a similar verse:

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God

Lucifer has slain her,

And on wings of cosmic forces

Carried her away into the depths of space.

Christ-Will

Working in us

Shall tear her from Lucifer

And on grounds of spiritual knowledge

Call to new life in human souls

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God.

Having read Barker’s intervention, now I’m not so sure these prayers are as tinged with Gnosticism as we have been trained to understand it.

My take is that Tomberg and Steiner intuited the condition of Sophia in the world, an intuition that jibes with some aspects of Gnosticism and with Margaret Barker’s scholarly excavation. They were certainly not the first. As I have argued throughout my work, many others have arrived at similar insights regarding Sophia’s seeming captivity in darkness, Jacob Boehme, John Pordage and Jane Lead, Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, and Thomas Merton among them.

As I’ve written before, it’s not really Sophia who strains in captivity. We do. But it surely seems as if she is imprisoned, when it’s really we who are. Such a reciprocity! And the only way to awaken her (us) is through contemplation, intentionality, presence. As Goethe wrote, the Eternal Feminine, indeed, draws us ever onward.

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

Confessions of a Sophiologist: The Dangers of Sophiology

William Blake, "The Assumption of the Virgin," 1803

We live in a truly schizophrenic cultural moment: a world that is coming to recognize that the earth is a living being while simultaneously yawning (if not applauding) as a traumatized seventeen-year-old girl is euthanized. Enter Sophiology.

The essential insight of Sophiology is that the cosmos is infused with the Glory of the Lord, Sophia (Wisdom). The world may be fallen, but, at moments, sometimes due to our intentionality and sometimes due to a free movement of grace, that glory shines through the creation and we are illumined. Sophiology is the antithesis of the “pure nature” (natura pura) theologies and philosophies that arose during the early modern period and infect much of modern and postmodern thinking, however removed they might be from questions of religion. Pure nature entertained the question of whether or not God’s grace could be absent from any part of creation. You should seriously ask yourself whether it could.

Prior to his conversion and ordination, the Russian Orthodox priest and theologian Sergius Bulgakov was an avowed materialist and Marxist economist. In 1895, as he travelled across the steppes and took in a majestic view of the Caucasus at sunset, the young materialist and Marxist found himself confronted with an unexpected realization:

“Suddenly, in that evening hour my soul was joyfully stirred. I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask of deception—if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence, and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me!”1

Bulgakov would go on to become the primary architect of the theological defense of Sophiology, which got him into a lot of trouble with the Russian Orthodox Church. He didn’t really care. (I write more extensively about Bulgakov’s Sophiology in The Submerged Reality).

So, one danger of outing oneself as a sophiologist is that it threatens job security (depending on the job). At the very least, it causes some to suspect the sophiologist of heterodox ideas. And. let’s face it, Sophiology is heterodox whether one is coming from either a religious or a secular standpoint.

But perhaps the biggest danger of Sophiology is that once someone comes to a sophiological understanding, one realizes that everything one has thought I needs to change. Once you realize the goodness that inheres Creation, you cannot but reassess your relationship to Creation. Once you reassess your relationship to Creation, you are forced to reconsider your relationship to human community and what it means to be human. And, from a sophiological perspective, to be human is to be simultaneously in congruence with both nature and supernature. This is the supreme danger.

This is dangerous because once this happens you have to question our “civilization”’s absurd and nearly diabolical reliance on technology and the synthetic manipulation of nature and, even, the human person. This calls into question the deplorable amount of chemicals and synthetic hormones we take into our bodies and our environments to the point where Alzheimer’s and dementia run rampant through our elderly while obesity, asthma, autism, and learning disabilities afflict our children. A regular diet of chemicals and hormones can in no way be “harmless”: I’m sorry, but the herd is not being protected. And I won’t even mention the horrors implicit to a childhood spent online and not out-of-doors.

There are more dangers with our technocratic obsession: a culture of surveillance that makes Orwell look like a Pollyanna; the possibility of the ultimate AI World Dictator; a devotion to industrial farming and rampant consumerism that has wreaked havoc on the environment.

One way to think about the problems plaguing us is to think about our obsessive need to control—nature, economic growth, other human beings, and so forth. This is pathology writ large.

Sophiology, on the other hand, is not about controlling. Instead, Sophiology is concerned with presence: to nature, to other human beings, to that which shines through nature and other human beings. This presence is born only of a contemplative approach to the Things of This World.

Once you do this, though, you find yourself at odds with civilization as it has come to be in its disfigurement. Sophiology is the return to life as life, in relationship with nature and supernature.

As I have argued in my books, such a way of being is characterized by a “poetic metaphysics.” The over-reliance on rationality has resulted in madness. There is another way. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “And for all this, nature is never spent.” The world is definitely charged with the grandeur of God. And, as St. Francis of Assisi sings, “O Creatures all! Praise and bless my Lord, and be grateful! Serve Him with deep humility.”

A beautiful version of the Anglican hymn, “All Creatures of Our God and King,” based on St. the Canticle of St. Francis.

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including one on The Metaphysical Poets.

1 Sergius Bulgakov, A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944, trans. Natalie Duddington and James Pain, ed. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (London: SPCK, 1976), 10–11.