Sophia and Shekinah, A Look at the Divine Feminine in Western Monotheism

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Sophia and Shekinah: A Look at the Divine Feminine in Western

Monotheism

 

 

" If language is the gateway to the Ineffable, then women need

linguistic passage to that realm " (Gottlieb 23)

Jewish and Christian theology speaks of God in male language

and images while insisting that such language and imaging is not

adequate to describe the divine. Still, the language persists and

continues to create the not-so-mistaken illusion that the feminine is

discounted in the Western monotheistic traditions.

While patriarchal ecclesiastical hierarchies continue to

insist that the language used represents the divine reality, many

scholars in these traditions, both contemporary and long deceased,

say otherwise. Feminist, liberation, and creation theologians join

others in searching for new metaphors in old stories and mounting

evidence shows their success. One primary source for such metaphors

is in Biblical era Wisdom theology.

Wisdom theology was an important genre in the Middle East.

This highly pragmatic theology sought meaning in life by examining

life itself, always searching for the best ways to live. The Book of

Proverbs hints that Wisdom was God's master plan for creation and

was, in fact, the first of all creations (Armstrong 67).

The development of Wisdom theology helped the Jewish people

work through the loss of the monarchy following the Exile. During

this period, the Jewish people had to change their societal focus

away from a central government, oriented around a king, to a new

society oriented around families and extended households. The

feminine images found in Wisdom theology provided important metaphors

for this restructuring. These images celebrated the grace and

benevolence of God. Israel was indeed the chosen people and Wisdom

lived among them as sister, spouse, mother, teacher, lover and friend

(Matthews 134).

Prophetic theology of an earlier time had attempted to

discredit and disembowel the Canaanite and Hebrew Goddess cults. In

part, this was an attempt to honor the second commandment by

eliminating masculine and feminine images of God as idolatrous (In

Memory 133). However, a tendency to anthropomorphize the divine

resulted in the submersion of the feminine while the masculine

remained intact. What started out as a defense of the oneness of God

left God fragmented and bereft of the feminine. This view has

persisted into modern times.

In contrast, Wisdom theology was an attempt to defend

monotheism by bringing in contemporary and indigenous beliefs in the

interest of imaging a God/dess who was relevant to a people in new

circumstances (Johnson 93). Instead of destroying the Goddess cults,

Wisdom theology, using what Fiorenza calls " reflective mythology " (In

Memory 133), used the language of the Goddess cults to speak of the

Israeli God. This was not easy. A constant struggle, which

continues to this day, erupted over how to present feminine images of

God without becoming ditheistic and distorting traditional Jewish

faith.

Over time, terms such as Sophia, Shekinah, and Spirit came

to describe God's active presence in the world while God became a

transcendent figure distanced from the material world. This

emphasized the " distinction between God's presence in the world and

the incomprehensible reality of God " (Armstrong 89).

Sophia

Sophia, the Greek word for Wisdom, was the earliest feminine

personification of God found in the Hebrew Bible. She appears in the

Book of Job and the Book of Proverbs in the canonical scriptures. In

Proverbs she is said to have existed before the creation of the world

as the first of God's creations.

In the apocryphal book Sirach, Wisdom or Sophia represents

Torah. She is a universal and cosmic force associated with the

history and covenant law of Israel. The apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon

contains a retelling of the salvation history of Israel using Sophia

imagery instead of YHWH imagery (Johnson 89).

Elizabeth Johnson, in She Who Is, gives five possible

interpretations of the theological significance of Sophia:

1) Personification of the cosmic order, representing the meaning

God has implanted in Creation.

2) Personification of the wisdom sought for and taught in

Israel's schools.

3) The symbol of the divine attribute go God's

discerning intelligence.

4) A quasi-independent divine mediator between the material

world and a totally transcendent God.

5) A female personification of God's own being in creative and

saving involvement with the world. This last interpretation is based

on the functional equivalence of the acts of Sophia and God (Johnson

90).

Sophia represented not only those characteristics Westerners

traditionally associate with the feminine: fertility, birth, nurture,

sensuality, sexuality, chastity. She also represented a full range of

other characteristics including a certain bloodthirstiness and

punitive powers (Patai 109). Descriptions of the attributes and

activities of the Divine Sophia are almost identical with those of

the masculine God.

In Gnostic tradition, Sophia aspired to forbidden knowledge

and fell from grace. Her grief over this act formed the world of

matter in which she was forced to wander seeking to be reunited with

the Source which was God. While this mythology was eventually

suppressed, it would later resurface in Christian, Islamic, and

Jewish traditions as a counterbalance to orthodox theology (Armstrong

96).

In the Islamic tradition there are ten spheres of influence.

The closest to the material world is believed to be the home of

Muhammad's daughter Fatimah, wife to his successor Ali. Because it

was through Fatimah that the holy succession was made possible, she

is viewed as the Mother of Islam and a representation of Sophia

(Armstrong 179).

The Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism also contains a

vision of Sophia. The 12th century poet and visionary Ibn al-Arabi

had a vision of Sophia which led him to envision all women as potent

incarnations of Sophia because they inspired a love in men which was

ultimately directed toward God. While androcentric, this view

brought a feminine dimension to a tradition in which God was viewed

as almost exclusively male (Armstrong 236).

Early Christian Wisdom theology associated Jesus with Sophia

and many contemporary theologians believe that Jesus drew on the deep

well of Wisdom theology in his teachings. Some believe he saw himself

as a wisdom teacher and as the child or messenger of Sophia. By the

end of the first century C.E. Christ was viewed by the early church

as Sophia herself (Johnson 95).

Recapturing the spirit of Sophia has led to some new

reinterpretations of the life, death and ministry of Christ.

According to Fiorenza, the Sophia-God of Jesus did not require

sacrifice or atonement. Jesus' death was not willed by God but was

the result of his lived-out experience of the divine Sophia. Jesus

was not crucified to atone for the sins of the people; instead, the

crucifixion was the result of the violent fear created in the

powerful by Jesus' preaching the good news of God's goodness and the

equality of all people (In Memory 135). For many feminist and

liberation theologians it is Christ's (and Sophia's) identification

with the poor, the oppressed, the outcast which is the important

message of the Gospel.

Elizabeth Johnson echoes this in She Who Is when she writes:

" Christ crucified, the Sophia of God. Here is the transvaluation of

values so connected with the ministry, death, and resurrection of

Jesus: divine Sophia is here manifest not in glorious deeds or

esoteric doctrine, but in God's solidarity with the one who suffers.

While seeming to be weak and defeated, the personal Wisdom of god is

in fact the source of life " (95).

 

Many Gospel passages refer to the Sophia Wisdom theology in

relationship to the person and nature of Jesus. Yet a mystery emerges

when we turn to the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Instead of

the feminine Sophia, John uses the masculine Logos to refer to the

second person of the Trinity. Why is this?

Before John's Gospel was written, Christians had no trouble

linking Christ with Sophia. Gender may have been a partial

explanation for the shift; by the time John was writing patriarchal

structures were re-emerging within the Christian sect and the role of

women in the ministry of the church was being once again suppressed

(Johnson 98).

Johnson gives several possible answers. First, the Book of

Wisdom already equated Logos and Sophia with each other, a connection

which would have been known by people in Biblical times. Second,

Logos was a key philosophical concept in Hellenistic philosophy of

the times. Third, Logos was already used to signify the apostolic

kerygma. Finally, the word Sophia was problematic due to its

adoption by many of the suspect Gnostic groups (97).

Karen Armstrong, in A History of God, provides another

possible explanation for the shift from Sophia to Logos in John's

Gospel. An Aramaic term memra (word) may have been the term used by

John. This term indicated the activity of God in the world and may

have been used by John in the same way. If so, it is synonymous in

meaning with Sophia, Shekinah, and Spirit (89).

Unlike other names for God -- Son of Man, Son of God, Logos,

etc. -- Sophia was fully representative of the full gestalt of God.

Sophia was " God's gracious nearness and activity in the world "

(Johnson 99) and showed a special relationship with God. This

relationship led to the development of the doctrine of incarnation

that led in turn to the doctrine of the Trinity. Johnson writes:

" What does it mean that one of the key origins of the doctrines of

incarnation and Trinity lies in the identification of the crucified

and risen Jesus with a female gestalt of God? Since Jesus the Christ

is depicted as divine Sophia, then it is not unthinkable -- it is not

even unbiblical -- to confess Jesus the Christ as the incarnation of

God imaged in female symbol. Whoever espouses a Wisdom Christology

is asserting that Jesus is the human being Sophia became; that Sophia

in all her fullness was in him so that he manifests the depth of

divine mystery in creative and graciously saving involvement in the

world. The fluidity of gender symbolism evidenced in biblical

Christology breaks the stranglehold of androcentric thinking that

circle around the maleness of Jesus. Wisdom Christology reflects the

depths of the mystery of God and points the way to an inclusive

Christology in female symbols (99).

Shekinah

The Shekinah is the feminine presence of God, a central

metaphor of divinity in Jewish mystical and midrashic texts from the

1st century C.E. onwards. Shekinah is an abstract noun of feminine

gender, first appearing in the Mishnah and Talmud around 200 C.E.

where it is used interchangeably with YHWH and Elohim, two masculine

names of God. The word evolved from the word Mishkan that refers to

the tent built in the wilderness to hold the Torah. This was built

at God's request " so I can dwell among you " (Gottlieb 20-21).

Shekinah, also represented by the Holy Spirit, is described

by Johnson as the " divine presence in compassionate engagement with

the conflictual world, source of vitality and consolation in the

struggle " (86). She is a God/dess of passion and compassion, capable

of feeling the weight of our joys and passions with us. In modern

feminist theological terms she represents the " erotic power " of God.

Johnson describes this characteristic in this way:

" When the people are brought low then the Shekinah lies in the dust,

anguished by human suffering. To quote an example from Mishnah,

referring to capital punishment by hanging: `When a human being

suffers what does the Shekinah say? My head is too heavy for Me; My

arm is too heavy for Me. And if God is so grieved over the blood of

the wicked that is shed, how much more so over the blood of the

righteous' " (Johnson 86).

 

At first, the Shekinah, like the Divine Sophia, was a way to

deal with the problems of an anthropomorphic theology in light of the

need for a more culturally sensitive theology. Over time,

this " presence " of God took on form and substance and became closely

related to the personified, female " Community of Israel " (Patai

110). In late Midrash literature the Shekinah was depicted as an

independent feminine divine entity who argued with God in defense of

man (Patai 96). This aspect of God contained both the love and the

divine punitive power of God, paralleling such goddesses as the Hindu

goddess Kali in cruelty. One Talmudic legend has it that the

Shekinah has the power to take the souls of meritorious men and women

with a kiss. The six that she has done so with are Abraham, Isaac,

Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam (Patai 109).

The Shekinah was said to live in the Mishkan, as the active

presence of God in the lives of an exiled and wandering people.

During times of settled life, the Shekinah was resident in the Temple

of Jerusalem. When the Temple was destroyed the presence of the

Shekinah became a spiritual home for the people of Israel. She

became known as " She Who Dwells Within " , a fitting image for a

nomadic people. Many symbols of contemporary Judaism carry within

themselves a meaning related to the active presence of the Shekinah.

Among these are the marriage canopy, the fall harvest booths, and

the prayer shawl (Gottlieb 124).

By 1000 C.E. the Shekinah had become YHWH's wife, lover and

daughter, in many ways embodying male projections of the feminine as

emotional, earthbound, and sexually dangerous (Gottlieb 22). In many

Jewish texts the Shekinah is the " exiled element of the divine...an

outcast, the degraded woman, raped or abused, abandoned in her

marriage, homeless in the streets, bereft of her children, and with

none to comfort her. Shekinah is the consummate female victim "

(Gottlieb 42).

The full development of the Shekinah came about through the

mystical Jewish tradition of the Kabala during the Middle Ages. In

the famous 12th century mystical text, the Zohar, Rabbi Isaac argues

that the Shekinah is exempt from the second commandment prohibition

against other Gods besides YHWH (Zohar 86a quoted in Gottlieb 20).

The Shekinah is also represented in Islamic tradition where

she is the sakina or spirit of Allah resident within humans and in

the tent of the Ka'aba. This black stone, once venerated as the

Goddess in Arabia, is believed to be the place where Hagar conceived

Ishmael, ancestor of the Arabic people. This is the shrine Muslims

seek in pilgrimage and to which all Muslims bow in prayer. Believed

to be the seat of the World-Soul, it symbolizes the meeting of heaven

and earth (Matthews 184-5).

This meeting of heaven and earth, the spiritual and the

material, has long been a part of the tradition of Sophia and

Shekinah. Legends tell that both (or are they merely one entity in

different guises?) were exiled to the material world and seek to

reunite with the transcendent God. God in Heaven was believed to

enter the Temple of Jerusalem at regular intervals to copulate with

the Shekinah and send His energy into the world (Gottlieb 35). In

fact, Gottlieb writes, " The task of the male Jewish mystic is to

arouse God's passion so He can copulate with the Shekinah and so send

his Seed/energy into the world " (35). This legend sheds new light on

the Christian tradition of the impregnation Mary by the Holy Spirit.

 

No discussion of the divine feminine would be complete

without a look at the distinctly Christian theology surrounding Mary.

Like the Shekinah and Sophia, Mary is described by many metaphors

including the Temple of the Holy Spirit (Shekinah) and Wisdom

(Sophia) (Matthews 203). In 431, a few years after dismantling

indigenous Goddess worship, the Council of Ephesus declared her

Theotokos, God-Bearer, which echoes the titles of even earlier pagan

Goddesses (Matthews 193). Another image, that of the Black Virgin of

Europe, represents our Western answer to Kali. She is at once both

nurturing and destructive, one who listens, nurtures, answers, and

heals. And when all else fails, receives our soul in death (Matthews

204-5).

Why does the paradoxical goddess-figure continue to persist

in monotheistic religions? Why do contemporary Christians, Jews, and

Muslims search for the divine feminine? Why, in spite of centuries

of suppression, persecution, and abuse does the image of the feminine

refuse to stay buried?

Patai, in The Hebrew Goddess, says that the divine feminine

is a projection of everything a man needs in a woman for his own

survival (153). Man wants a virgin, a whore, a daughter and a

mother. He wants chastity, promiscuity, devotion, and violence. For

Patai the goddess, as seen in Sophia and Shekinah, is a sop to man's

ambivalence to women.

But what about women? Why do women continue to seek out the

divine feminine? Part of the answer lies in Gottlieb's quote at the

beginning of this paper. If we use language as a way to approach the

ineffable God, then women have traditionally been denied a gateway.

We need to see ourselves in the holy and the holy in ourselves and

our sisters. We need to know concretely that we are created in the

image of God/dess, not in some abstract and indefinable way, but in

very real reach-out-and-touch ways. We need to hear our concerns as

mothers, partners, daughters, sisters, friends, and lovers brought

before the congregation of the holy to be validated and affirmed.

Perhaps men need the goddess for reasons of their own. I

believe we all, men and women alike, need the goddess as represented

in the Divine Sophia and the Shekinah for no lesser reason than our

own healing and the healing of the universe, for no lesser reason

than reunification of the divine masculine and feminine in the

oneness of the God/dess who made us all.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler. In Memory of Her: A Feminist

Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983.

______. Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet. New York:

Continuum, 1994.

Gottlieb, Lynn. She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a

Renewed Judaism. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist

Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992.

Matthews, Caitlin. Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom. London: Aquarian,

1991.

Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne, 1990.

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