Holy Wisdom in the Trinity

 triquetra

Recently one night when I was trying to fall asleep, I saw a vision in my mind of three intersecting circles. I tried to picture what shape would appear in the areas of intersection but couldn't clearly see it. Last evening, despite my lack of drawing skills, I sketched the three circles joined together. As it turns out, this ancient symbol is called a triquetra, representing a variety of spiritual/religious ideas, prominent among them the Holy Trinity. Often it is difficult to articulate a concept merely with words, so a symbol such as the triquetra operates to deepen understanding through a visual and metaphorical representation. The concept is grasped intuitively as well as intellectually. 

The shape of the intersecting areas resembles a flower or a bird, such as a dove, both feminine symbols, and I saw clearly a trinity within a trinity, where the inner region is part and parcel of the surrounding circles. My working theory is that this hidden, inner region represents the feminine aspect of God, which I believe is most accurately named Holy Wisdom (Sophia in Greek).  Just who is Wisdom? I certainly do not claim to have a perfect vision of what I wish to convey, but I have delved deeper into this mystery of the sacred feminine, and these are some of my findings.

"Sophia can be described as the wisdom of God, and, at times, as a pure virgin spirit which emanates from God. The Sophia is seen as being expressed in all creation and the natural world as well as, for some of the Christian mystics..., integral to the spiritual well-being of humankind, the church, and the cosmos. The Virgin is seen as outside creation but compassionately interceding on behalf of humanity to alleviate its suffering by illuminating true spiritual seekers with wisdom and the love of God" (Wikipedia).

 Sophia by Mary B. Kelly

There are too many biblical references to transfer here, but these are some key passages on the nature of Wisdom:

"For in her there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and subtlest. For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. Though she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the man who lives with Wisdom. For she is more beautiful than the sun and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light, she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against Wisdom evil does not prevail. She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well" (Wisdom 7-8:1).

Here Wisdom is portrayed as an emanation, rather than a creation, as she seems to be elsewhere. Perhaps in the case of Wisdom, the word creation has the connotation of giving birth, as in the creation of a poem or song that is not only crafted, but is brought forth by the artist from a divine source. Proverbs 8: 22-31 describes Wisdom as being "brought forth", which is a definition of giving birth or being fathered:

 "The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. Where there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man."

 Sophia by Hildegard of Bingen

Sophia, in Catholic theology, is the Wisdom of God and is thus eternal. In my vision, Sophia is co-existent with the Trinity, part and parcel of it, operating as the feminine, motherly aspect of God in concert with the three masculine principles of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As I've before stated in regard to the Catechism, God is pure spirit and is not separated into the masculine and feminine as human beings are. Mine is a human attempt to illustrate a divine concept. It seems to me that Sophia, while contained by the whole Trinity, specifically flows out from the Holy Spirit. Rather than being a fourth member of the Trinity, she is a divine spirit who is of the Trinity, the feminine principle brought forth to reflect the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. She is hidden within the Trinity, mirroring God's glory, grace, power, and love, like the moon reflects the sun.

Holy Wisdom emanates from God and is particularly associated with the bridal-maternal function of the Holy Spirit which I have previously described, borrowing from Scott Hahn's terminology in First Comes Love. Continuing on my reflections of his themes, I perceive a tri-fold parallel between three persons comprising the Sophia and the three familiar persons of the Trinity. Holy Wisdom corresponds to the Father (see Luke 7: 33-35, Wisdom as Mother); Ecclesia (the Church, the Bride of Christ) to the Son; and Shekinah (the presence of God strongly associated with the Ark of the Covenant) to the Holy Spirit. In this way both the masculine and the feminine are represented within the three circles of the Trinity. I see no way in which this idea contradicts the teaching of the Church, but rather provides a mystical interpretation of the nature of God as both paternal and maternal, as the Catechism states.

 

Coronation of Mary

 

As my concept of Sophia relates to the Virgin Mary, I see that the Immaculate Heart of Mary mystically represents Sophia at the heart of the Trinity. Mary can be understood as the mystical sanctuary of the Holy Spirit by virtue of the Incarnation of Jesus through her. Mary's Assumption and Crowning in heaven portray the divinization that she received by virtue of God's grace and Jesus' redemptive act on the cross, and His resurrection, which is the hope of all Christians. Mary also reveals the indwelling Sophia, or feminine aspect of God, in the ancient archetype of Mother, Maiden/Bride, and Wise Crone, corresponding with Holy Wisdom, Ecclesia, and Shekinah. Mary was not divine; she was completely human, but she partakes in the divinity of her Son, as we find explained in 2 Peter 1: 3-4:   

"His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire." The faithful are all destined to become kings and queens, sons and daughters of God.  The divine feminine is also glimpsed through Ecclesia and her relationship to the Holy Spirit, which is analogous in a certain way to the Incarnation:

"In the Divine Mind, in God's Archetypal Idea of creation, the Holy Trinity eternally sees Ecclesia as intimately united to Christ and 'ensouled' by the Holy Spirit. She so partakes in the divine life that she is, with Jesus Her Divine Spouse, the end of creation, which God made with her in mind and for her sake. The Church of the Living God is no mere human institution; she is Ecclesia Mater, 'spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners'. Our minds cannot comprehend the length, width, height and depth of our loving, all-embracing, cosmic Mother. Ecclesia (pronounces eh-klay'see-uh), the Latin word for 'Church', is sometimes used as a proper name when one wishes to emphasize the fact that Holy Mother Church is a mystical Person, not a mere society or organization, as the word 'Church' might imply to some" (from the Mystical Rose Catholic Page). 

Finally, Mary is associated with the Shekinah by virtue of her identification as the "Ark of the New Covenant" portrayed in Revelation 12, as the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. This woman is woman, Mary, the new Eve, daughter Zion, Ecclesia. Mary is the holy face through which we recognize the sacred feminine, or Holy Wisdom, who we also experience as "Mother Nature", Mother Church, Bride of Christ; and Shekinah, the presence of God.

The Bridal-Motherhood of the Holy Spirit

I feel like I am almost back to square one on the issue of the feminine divine and the Holy Spirit. As I was researching this topic online, I came across some references to Scott Hahn's book, First Comes Love. There was evidently some controversial material in chapter 10 regarding the the "bridal-maternal" imaging of the Holy Spirit, and in a later addition it was relegated to an Appendix at the back of the book, which is where I found it today in my copy from the library. Hahn is attempting to characterize who the Holy Spirit is by what He does. The idea is that we have a difficult time relating to the Holy Spirit, because unlike the Father and the Son, this aspect of the Trinity is without a face. In the Bible we have the name of the Spirit meaning breath and fire, and He is also called living water, the power of God, and love.

Hahn sums up how the Spirit functions this way: "What a mother does in the natural order, the Holy Spirit accomplishes in the supernatural order, in Mary, and through the Church. What earthly mothers do finitely and inchoately, the Spirit accomplishes infinitely and perfectly.  In sum, as our mothers gave us birth, so the Spirit feeds the children of God with spiritual milk. As a mother groans in labor, so the Spirit groans to give us life." Then he goes on to say that this does not mean that the Holy Spirit is somehow engendered as feminine, quoting the Catechism, as I have done, concerning God as neither man nor woman, but pure spirit, etc...

There is a little problem with that logic, to my mind. The Father and Son are clearly engendered as masculine. Though, as George S. Montague pointed out in Our Father, Our Mother, the metaphor "Father" was never meant to exclude the motherhood of God, the language itself gives us a heavily masculine image of God, despite all of the motherly references made in the Bible, even by Jesus himself. Yes, Mary reveals the feminine face and maternal love of God, but she is not herself divine. Which gets some folks all up in arms who misunderstand the Church's extreme veneration of her.

Everything Hahn says seems to indicate an understanding of a particularly feminine Holy Spirit. He points out that in Syriac and Hebrew, the word for Spirit, Ruah, is feminine and so ordinarily calls for a feminine pronoun. In fact, he asserts that St. Aphrahat, the most ancient of the Fathers of east Syria and his contemporaries, as well as later Fathers, such as St. Ephrem, regularly observed this grammatical consistency. This practice dropped off after A.D. 400, but Hahn can only speculate as to why that was, noting that there must have been good reasons for it. But were the reasons really good?

Hahn associates God's Wisdom, who is always referred to in the feminine, with the Holy Spirit. In chapters 7-9 of the Book of Wisdom, Wisdom (Sophia) is referred to as "holy spirit" and is described in divine terms, such as "all powerful", "all-knowing", "overseeing all", and "more mobile than any motion."  I have noted previously that Sophia is described in the Bible as a created being. But in Proverbs, Wisdom says that she was "brought forth" by God, which seems to imply either an emanation or a birthing, not a creation.

Another curious thing I discovered is that yet another of my "original" ideas was not original after all. I discussed how the Holy Spirit could be the "Mother" person of the Trinity, even though He proceeds from the Father and the Son (see "Mary as Spouse"). My reasoning was that Eve was made from Adam's rib, so she proceeded from her Father God from the side of the first human son of God. The woman was created after the man, but as the pinnacle of creation, she is also first among creation and is known as the mother of all the living. Evidently St. Methodius of Olympus, an ancient Church Father, said the same thing! He called the Holy Spirit the "rib of the Word"--the uncreated principle of maternity.

Hahn quotes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) regarding Holy Wisdom: " 'Sophia', a feminine noun, stands on that side of reality which is represented by the woman, by what is purely and simply feminine," and he goes on to note that "Spirit", too, is feminine in Hebrew, concluding, "Because of the teaching about the Spirit, one can as it were practically have a presentiment of the primordial type of the feminine, in a mysterious, veiled manner, within God himself."  Like I have been saying, there is this hidden quality of Mary, Sophia, and the Divine Motherhood of God!

God the Father and Jesus are sometimes depicted in maternal terms, and so is the Holy Spirit (and what the Holy Spirit does powerfully evokes motherhood). Wisdom/Sophia is also understood not just as a mother, but as a co-creator and bride. King Solomon was rapturous in his Book of Wisdom: "The Spirit of wisdom came to me...I loved her...and I chose to have her...because her radiance never ceases. All good things came to me along with her...because wisdom leads them; but I did not know that she was their mother" (7:7, 10-12).

Dominican theologian Father Benedict Ashley points out that while the Scriptures sometimes apply the word "Wisdom" to God's Law (Sir 24) and to Jesus (1 Cor. 1:24), "Yet more properly, it is to the Third Person of the Trinity...who is Love, wise Love, that the Old Testament descriptions of a feminine Wisdom are applied." And Scott Hahn finds this conclusion very reasonable. He also notes that Shekinah, the presence, or "glory cloud", of God is a feminine word, too, and the Shekinah seems to be related to the Holy Spirit as well. Are the Holy Spirit, Wisdom/Sophia, and Shekinah one and the same divine person? Hahn makes the associations but never comes to the point of overtly expressing that this could very well be the case. He all but ties the three together as the same being. Why?

Over and over again, despite what the Catechism teaches about God's divine nature as having both masculine and feminine aspects, there is this insistence on only using male pronouns and avoiding asserting any part of God as mother/bride by name (leaving this revelation in feminine language only in relation to Mother Mary and Mother Church). So here we are, still up in the air. So close, but no cigar. I'm going to keep trying to work this out, because if we can use masculine terms to discuss God, despite his being pure spirit, then there seems to be no theological reason not to use feminine terms as well. I will imitate Jesus in calling God, "Abba, Father" and the Holy Spirit "Lord", as the Church teaches. However, if Sophia is the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit is also called "Lady Wisdom."