Sophia is God’s body, the matter of Divinity, permeated with the beginning of divine unity.
The thought of Sophia was always present in Christianity; more than that, it existed even before Christianity.
– Vladimir Solovyov
Solovyov taught the existence of an aspect of the Trinity known as Hagia Sophia, or Divine Wisdom. He conceived of this mystical "absolute unity" of the Trinity as a female being. Her role in the cosmos is both to cause the appearance of all that is not divine, and to effect the reintegration of all in God. Man encounters the opposition between God and what lies outside Him in the difference between the sexes. Through union with woman by means of love, therefore, and through striving for the union of mankind, man participates in Divine Wisdom’s reintegration of the world in God.
– Vladimir E. Alexandrov
This aspect of Solovyov’s world outlook had a profound influence on the subsequent generation of poets such as the gifted Blok, Biely, and certain others, who expound in their poetry themes for the most part of an erotic-gnostic character concerning the feminine principle.
An intermediary is needed, a boundary between the Nothing of the Creator and the multiplicity of the cosmos. This boundary between the Creator and creation, between God and the world, is Sophia. Sophia is the divine Idea, the object of God’s love: the love of love.
The created world, then, is none other than the creaturely Sophia, a principle of relative being, in process of becoming.
– Sergei Bulgakov
According to Solovyov, Sophia is the companion of God. As such she is the image of the perfect woman-soul. Because God would share his joy with every human, Sophia’s image is accessible to every human being. The eternal woman-soul, a living, spiritual entity herself, carries out the divine will by reflecting her image in mortals. Each person loves an ideal of the other world. In life each individual loves that , essentially human, being who might best reflect Sophia’s image as each individual intuitively conceives it.
– Oleg Maslenikov
You are the emblazoned one! Do you know this? Every person has several raisons d’etre. They are both themselves, a symbol and a prototype. I do not need to know you as a person because I have got to know you better as a symbol.
– Andrey Biely
It is the figure that has haunted him his whole life, his angel, his familiar, transfixed at last. A puff of wind has blown away the mist, and revealed this goddess, as stately as an elm, as subtle as a Gothic Virgin.
– Sir Kenneth Clark
The idea of Wisdom, Sophia, becomes in the Gnosis a female spirit capable of being seen in a vision.
– E. H. Gombrich
If the Trinity was in its essence Unity, the Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race.
– Henry Adams
