The Ancient Cult of Sophia

Since the rise of scientific modernity began the social schism of mind and nature, successive waves of bright souls have started to realize that there are other ways of knowing outside the paradigm of subject-versus-object that the scientific method necessitates. The cold mechanism that empirical science guts from the world imbues our human minds with a disenchantment, an alienation, and a despair that all arise from seeing the world as something of a physical machine and nothing more. Reactionary movements against this alienating determinism have existed as long as modern science – the Romantics, Transcendentalists, Spiritualists and Occultists of the 19th century; the Post-Modern philosophers of the mid 20th century and the idealistic youth movements that arose in the 1960s; Integral Thought and Visionary Art are among the current iterations.

There is a wonderful parable in the work of Institute of Integral Studies professor Richard Tarnas that I believe illustrates this “other way of knowing” our universe. It is found in his cosmological monograph Cosmos and Psyche. He urges the reader to imagine themselves as the universe; not as the Cartesian dead-weight cosmos of the Scientific Revolution, but as a living – ensouled – universe, endowed with complex, woven, living layers of subjectivity and meaning. Further, he imagines this living universe has two suitors (two minds) who wish to take her (the universe) as their bride: one who is the bare scientist, viewing her as mere object, devoid of life and serving only to be exploited; and one who is a lover – who sees her as a living thing at least as worthy of respect as he. He writes:

To which approach would you be most likely to reveal your authentic nature?
Would you open most deeply to the suitor – the epistemology, the way of knowing
– who approached you as though you had no interior dimension to speak of, no
spiritual capacity or value; who thus saw you as fundamentally inferior to
himself… who related to you as though your existence were valuable primarily to
the extent that he could develop and exploit your resources to satisfy his
various needs; and whose motivation for knowing you was ultimately driven by a
desire for increased intellectual mastery, predictive certainty, and efficient
control over you for his own self-enhancement?

Or would you, the cosmos, open yourself most deeply to that suitor who viewed you as being at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, as endowed with spiritual
depths and mystery, as he?¹

This situation reminds me of something from antiquity, namely the etymology of the word philosophy. Our word, philosophy, is inherited from an ancient and multiform cult that sort of lived beneath the surface of the early Greek and later Hellenistic world. Pointing to this origin in any philosophy course at an accredited university is generally a sure way to get your opinion belittled by your professor. The word, philosophy, once something more than naked syllogisms and idle talk, means, literally, the love of wisdom. Wisdom, called by the feminine noun Sophia among the Greeks, was once the focus of adoration of this “ancient and multiform cult” toward which I have alluded.

The earliest philosophers arose out of Orphism – the religious movement begun by the possibly fictional Thracian bard Orpheus sometime in near pre-history. Orphism, as a religion, survived in some form through Classical Antiquity. However, early teachers that arose and broke out of the Orphic tradition include the figures scholastics count as among the earliest philosophers: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, etc. Bertrand Russell notes of Socrates, “He was the perfect Orphic saint.”² These philosophers did more than construct logical syzygies of premise, premise, conclusion – they loved Wisdom, the awareness of the truth of the world, with a religious and spiritual passion inherited from their cultic origins.

When the modern cosmology arose, philosophy was redefined with it. What had previously been dominated by Platonic conceptions and had given way to an Aristotlean logicality was further transformed into a Cartesian system that tore all remaining romanticisms from the work of the human mind. The division of subject and object inculcated the discipline with the belief in an empty universe. The knowable universe was no longer Sophia, or the work of God as it had been to medieval scholastics, but a swath of only-semi-ordered and purposeless matter. The early figures of the Enlightenment still held on to this transcendental, mystical, and revelatory nature of science. By investigating the world, those early scientists considered themselves to be looking into the mirror (nature) that held the miraculous image of its Creator. But this ethos quickly gave way to another as the scientific method was codified and extended in practice.

Is it possible to re-employ the ancient belief in a meaningful and life-bearing universe without falling prey to the ancient superstitions that went hand-in-hand with such a view? I believe we are stumbling towards that answer. As we realize that our own consciousness and the experiences we have of our world are interwoven and inseparable, thus making solid subject-object experimentation impossible, we move toward a solution to disenchantment. Truly, the division between experimental observer and the controlled experiment is illusory, for even if it is controlled of human factors, the experiment was still conceived, planned, executed, measured, recorded and interpreted by fundamentally human minds. Further, in all cases, there is simply no division between subject and object, because our brains are made out of the same matter that makes everything else; we are continuous with the universe, our environment, and, to look at it in the inverse, there is nothing in our experience of the universe that is not mediated by our human (animal) senses and faculties. There is no knowing truth apart from the subjectivity of the human experience.

Acknowledging this, we can say there is another way of knowing, more complete – less scrutinizing, but deeper – that experiences the universe through love. This is the mystic’s knowing. While Edison may have never invented the light bulb this way, if he lived according to this ethic (and maybe he did – I don’t know) the miracle of electric illumination would have made his heart flutter with ecstatic joy. In short, he would have loved the world he was with. He would have loved life. You see, there is the way you know that a chemical reaction produced hydrogen by listening for the pop when you stick the match in the test tube; there is also the way you know your lover, which includes the knowledge of them you’ve acquired through observation, but also transcends it, because the point of your lover should not be to manipulate him or her, it should be that you smile to be with that person.

So. The universe is my girlfriend. I’ve been courting her a long time, and maybe someday she’ll openly return my affections, but for now it is enough to be happy romancing her mysterious heart. She is a multiform beloved, and to every suitor she is a different woman. My adored cosmos is mine; she is my mystery and my heart to win. Every mind has its own world, because the world and the mind are one; there is no gulf of isolation between knower and known, subject and object. For every mind, there is a universe. The mind is the equal, the flip-side of the universe it experiences, and vice versa. Realizing this brings the soul into adulthood, equality with its destined lover.

Is this sensible? If Saint Francis married Poverty, an allegorical woman, surely I have a chance with a beautiful abstraction too. (Then again, he also preached the Gospel to birds. Is this pathological or simply loving creation too much?) And there was also Socrates, the definitive lover of his Sophia, but he makes me wonder whether a philosopher was such simply because he had no outside chance of a more-than-Platonic relationship, for, as Russell notes while considering his sources for a historical Socrates: “Every one is agreed that Socrates was very ugly.”³ Still, I know the feeling of being in love with Sophia; the world becomes intoxicated with divine madnesses as well as invested with sober reflections. Life becomes meaningful and pleasant; the ego is no longer isolated within itself, separate from all else. When this reborn consciousness takes roots in the fabric of our social reality, a new cosmology will be engendered – one less hostile and cold, and alive with renewed spiritual depth, free from superstition. Bearing in mind this reincarnated purpose for the arts, I close saying: thus ends this, my brief love letter to you, Sophia.

-BTN '08

Notes:
1: Tarnas, Richard. (2006.) Cosmos and Psyche. Viking Penguin Group. p. 39.
2: Russell, Bertrand. (1945.) A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Simon and Schuster, New York. p. 91.
3: ibid. p. 90.