The Pious Practice of the Divine Sophia : Gottfried Arnold’s (1666-1714) Conversion

The Pious Practice of the Divine Sophia : Gottfried Arnold’s (1666-1714) Cconversion

In Leipzig in the year 1700 there appeared a booklet entitled “The secrets of the divine Sophia of Wisdom, sung and written by Gottfried Arnold”.207

This is one of the most remarkable of the learned pietist’s many remarkable books. It is tender and full of personal confession, yet it is learned and rich with quotations. “Poetic Praises and Sentences of Love About the Divine Wisdom” conclude the book.

This book on the secrets of the divine Sophia is nothing less than an attempt to see the divine Wisdom of creation, the Christ of creation, and the Christ in us, as a unity that effects our inner conversion and becomes the scope  of  our  lives.  The  train  of  thought  and  feeling  in  Arnold’s  most edifying and gently written book exhibit a similar texture to that of Seuse’s booklet “Von der ewigen Weisheit”, where the literature of wisdom and vision, of innermost feelings and conversion, are entwined. The close proximity to Gregory of Nyssa is also apparent.

The erudition of this book is of secondary importance, but nonetheless indispensable, for Arnold is, even as a mystic, in need of legitimation. In his “Geheimnis  der  göttlichen  Sophia”,  he  relies  on  the  deuterocanonical, biblical Book of Wisdom. Ever since Luther’s translation, this book had been  banned  from  the  official  canon  of  the  Old  Testament.  So,  with historical erudition, Arnold must prove its antiquity and dignity. Moreover, and this is even more important for the pietist and edifying author, beyond its antiquity the book’s holiness and quality of offering God’s grace have to be proved. It must be a demonstrably revealed and edifying book, and as such, it must cause a spiritual effect; it must touch the soul. Its holiness must become manifest by effecting the beginning of an inner unfolding, which, grounded in the soul, is led by the image of Wisdom.

Arnold makes a considerable effort to prove that the “Book of Wisdom” is part of the Bible. He employs the erudition that was a feature of the monumental “Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie” (1700) to prove that the “Book of Wisdom” was accepted in the ancient church, beginning with Cyprian and Justin Martyr up to Augustine and Isidore of Seville.208  He knows, however, that the “so-called Wisdom of Solomon” is merely attributed to the great king, and he quotes and modifies St. Jerome’s critical theses, “that the well known Philo may have set the Greek text - not the younger, who lived after Christ, but the older, who lived one and a half centuries before Christ’s birth, at the time of the High Priest Oniar.”209 For Arnold, however, these historical and critical deliberations are not very important, since it is ultimately only the inner witness that counts. 

His pious believers are not concerned with the unresolved dispute of worldly learned men, but long for the “Father and the Holy Spirit in the simplicity of their hearts, and strive to fulfil his will and to capture Wisdom’s education, in the examination of the book. Then they acknowledge whether a doctrine comes from God or whether this or that book spoke from itself and its own spirit. They will perceive by themselves the divine performance of the heavenly truths in the Book of Wisdom and in Jesus Sirach, and they will acknowledge how miserable, unfounded and perverse statements based in the world are.”210

Where  learned  objections  do  not  count,  the  testimony  of  the  spirit remains, and touches souls. In the process of grace, the soul is merely a receptacle, and only in receiving is the soul able to perceive something other than self-produced false glamour. The real, active impetus of the soul is to be touched by the divine Sophia, and Arnold found himself touched by her. 

In his foreword he writes, “Since I paid some more attention to my own feelings and what occurred in them, and since I learned to put this together with the holy scripture, this was found to be a matter of fact that God the Father did not only want to reveal his Son Jesus Christ and to explain him through his miracles, but that also the divine Wisdom especially expressed itself mightily in its secret effect.”211 Holy Scripture witnesses and effects the inner touch, therefore the inner touch effected by the “Book of Wisdom” is a proof of its holiness and, consequently, of its partaking in the biblical canon. Arnold writes “What is written in the ‘Book of Wisdom’ happened to me. I did not know that all derived from it (i.e. the Wisdom).”212  Arnold, feeling himself  touched,  presupposes  that  the  inner  movement  he  experiences derives from divine power. This effect of God’s Wisdom is the testimony of the spirit and the power.

Arnold is aware that he gets himself into considerable difficulty with this theology. His most significant problem is that the Christology of God’s mediating word is indiscernible from his doctrine of the divine Sophia. He tries to approach his problems in two steps: 1. Wisdom is conceived as the “revealing,  glorifying  and  announcing  force  of  the  entire  high-Holy Trinity”213  and 2. this power is seen as being very close to the second and third persons of the Trinity.

According to the nature of edifying literature, internal testimony grants truth. In the desire for piety, Christ’s grace and wisdom are no longer distinguished. The meaning of this devout identification “of the appreciated souls is to leave no space for the hardening reason; the reader should share this in the simplicity of his heart. If the soul feels a strong hunger after the fruition and communication with the heavenly wisdom, it sets its belief in the highly praised Name of Jesus and really finds true salvation and life there.

Then through lengthy practice and community with Christ, it perceives that in him the entire plenitude consists. It recognises that Christ’s spirit and the spirit of wisdom are not distinct spirits, but one united spirit and an indestructible being”.214

If Wisdom is the form of God’s appearance, her power neither becomes effective exclusively in the soul’s knowledge nor in simple obedience. The effects of Wisdom become perceivable in the innermost core of the soul, which feels itself overcome by God’s power and then recognises its own image in itself.

This theology of the image, which becomes praxis pietatis, reveals the seminal reasons of every individual life. This message “reveals itself to the soul especially and most clearly, after it stood in penitence under the power of the Father in the law, and was drawn by the Son and his Gospel and stood for a long time in the realm of the love of Jesus, and has overcome all appropriate castigations and proofs. 

Then Sophia seizes the soul even tighter, and brings its purifying and cleansing fire into the soul, edifies the temple of the new mighty body from Christ’s humanity, who was born in flesh in the soul. Wisdom sets its fire in the midst of the soul, and prepares the essential return of the Holy Spirit and of his great and perfect reign in man’s spirit. The Holy Spirit of prophecy, who is the very spirit of Wisdom and the spirit of Jesus, comes closer, and anoints and permeates the tender and surmountable new humanity and strengthens it with its fire and light, so that the soul perceives in itself, with its inner eyes, a fiery castle, a burning bush, and the holy of holies, in which God’s name Jehova Jesus lives in the spirit and reveals itself in his essential and perfect victory.”215

Arnold’s text is a brilliant example of perfect pietistic prose. The textsparkles  with  biblical  metaphors  and  the  divine  strength  from  which  it claims to live. It describes the power of the soul’s conversion and rebirth. The alchemistic, purifying fire becomes the hardening fire of the spirit; the pain of birth becomes the joyful grief of the tender new spiritual body, strengthened by the spirit of wisdom. And at the end, fiery Wisdom reveals itself in celestial Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2), in the burning bush (Exod. 3:7), and in the divine name, the tetragram, in which Arnold recognises the name of Jesus, and transforms it into a pentagram.216

Such a rebirth changes one’s life. It is experienced as the essence of transformation, in which the old Adam is destroyed and the new, essential, inner image appears as the spiritual, mighty body. This spiritual body reveals the scope every reborn soul finds in itself in its own way. This image derives its power from divine might, and attracts and leads everyone to their goal. The spiritual, mighty body is the cause and aim of every life, and it alone makes perfection possible. Through the mighty body, the life of the reborn receives its meaning and direction. Pious practice consists in the orientation according to the inner image of the “Christ in us”.

Arnold connected his personal pious practice very closely to the image of the  Sophia.  He  interpreted  the  image  of  the  heavenly  wedding  as  the personal soul’s wedding with the divine Sophia. With this interpretation, he stands in the tradition of Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux. Before the mystical wedding, the soul must, of course, be purified, for the secret of the virgin wisdom “must only be accepted and held fast in a chaste and pure mind and conscience, and it is only the pure hearts that the Holy Spirit endows to see God. 

The tough, earthly and sensual man has no business here.”217  Arnold shares in the Platonic tradition of Philo and Gregory of Nyssa when he asserts that the secret of wisdom’s virginity is of a pre- lapsarian,  primordial,  heavenly  nature.  For  him  it  is  obvious,  “that  the eternal Wisdom is not restricted to man’s and woman’s sex, as it found after the fall into unnature, decay, and shame, but that she is in heavenly pure understanding  a  perfect  pure  virgin.”218    

This  divine  virginity,  above  all earthly  sexuality,  is  the  origin  of  the  mighty  body  that  will  guide  us internally according to the image of Christ’s birth.

In order to explain the history of sexuality, Arnold retells the history of the fall, then the history of Christ’s becoming flesh, and then discovers the history of the final unity of the sexes. For Arnold, the divine Sophia is not identical with primordial Adam. Adam is a hypostatical person, subordinated to Sophia. 

He is related to Sophia, for she is his Eve, as she mediates God’s Wisdom to him. But their relationship is not a sexual one. Adam has two sexes, following the Platonic tradition. Before his fall, Adam, the archetype of humanity, was united with his Sophia, the first Eve. Because of his fall, he lost access to his inner Eve, and through the new Eve, made from his rib, he also lost his inner female aspect. Through Christ’s birth of a virgin, however, the loss of the female aspect in man is redeemed. 

The original unity is achieved, since Christ, who is a man, brings the male aspect back into the female aspect of humanity, represented by Mary, the new Eve. He is a man, born of a virgin, and as a virgin man, he is the compensatory archetype for the first Eve, so that the original bisexual unity is restored: “When Adam in his desire turned from God and tried to love something outside himself and his inner holy Sophia, his Wisdom, he lost his secret bride, from whom, according to the ancients, more could be shown and manifestly proven.

In his fall, the divine Virgin was separated from him; since he was of an earthly disposition and needed a wife, a wife was formed from his rib, as is written in the Scripture. So he lost his inner female nature and only retained his male one. Now man should be reintroduced into his former Edenic perfection. Therefore the praised seed of the wife should bring back to him this lost partner and bless the woman in the man’s company.

For this purpose the Messiah became human and a man in the female sex of Mary, and reintroduced the male part into the body of the virgin woman; but he bore also the virgin image in himself. From here the ground was laid so that the male and the female could become one image and essence and could stand before God, a male virgin as a reborn new creature.”219

When he wrote this piece, Arnold took the virginity of his life very seriously.  Sophia,  who  changed  his  life  first  in  his  rebirth  and  then determined it, for a certain time, until his earthly wedding,220  remained his guiding image. He described this image in a poem based on the Song of Songs, as an example of pious imitation:

So let me see 

Lord what happened to me,     

How you live in my soul,

What your loving seal

In my heart’s mirror

Imprinted essentially. 

This image shall stand   

Before me so that I always see 

What I possess in you

And that I lack nothing

When I choose you 

O fountain of all gifts. 

206 P 197
207 Das Geheimnisz der göttlichen Sophia oder Weißheit / beschrieben und besungen von
Gottfried Arnold. Leipzig 1700. Repr. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1963. Introd. by W. Nigg. The best introduction to Arnold’s work is still: Seeberg, Erich: Gottfried Arnold. Die
Wissenschaft und die Mystik seiner Zeit. 1923. Repr. Darmstadt 1964. Of interest for our concerns  is  Dörries,  Hermann:  Geist  und  Geschichte  bei  Gottfried  Arnold.  Göttingen
1963. Dörries emphasises Arnold’s relationship with Makarios. Büchsel, Jürgen: Gottfried
Arnold. Sein Verständnis von Kirche und Wiedergeburt. Witten 1970.
208 See: Das Geheimnis der göttl. Sophia, pp. 15f. Ch. 2, §§ 13-15.
209 Ibid. § 21, p. 19. See ch. 4. 3. fn. 14 and ch. 4. 12b, pp. 177ff.
210 Ibid. p. 19.
211 Vorrede p. 5.
212 Vorrede § 3, cf. Wisd. 7:12.
213 Vorrede p. 5.
214 p. 35. Nr. 2 and 3.
215 p. 36, Nr. 7, 8. Diese Offenbarung “eröffnet sich der seelen hauptsächlich und am klärsten alsdann / nachdem sie wol unter der krafft deß Vatters in dem gesetz / in der busse / und im zug zum Sohne / als auch unter dem Evangelio und Reiche der Liebe JEsu lange zeit gestanden / und alle dahin gehörige läuterungen und proben durchgegangen. So ergreifet sie Sophia gleichsam noch genauer / und bringet ihr läuterndes und scharff-reinigendes feuer in die seele / machet den geistlichen Tempelbau des neuen krafft-leibes auß der menschheit Jesu / welcher in der Seele nach allen Geburtsschmerzen und wehen im fleisch kommen war / vollends auß / setzet ihr feuer und heerd mitten drein und machet anstalt zur wesentlichen wiederkunfft der H. Geistes / und zu dessen grossen und vollendeten reiche im Geist des menschen. Da tritt denn der H. Geist der verheißung / welcher eben der Geist der Weißheit / und der Geist JEsu ist, näher zu / und salbet und durchdringet die an ihr selbst noch zarte und überwindliche neue menschheit / und stärket sie also mit seinem feuer und liecht / daß die seele mit ihrem gemüths-augen gleichsam eine feurige burg / einen brennenden busch / und das Allerheiligste in sich selbst erblicket, darinnen Gottes name Jehova Jesus im Geist wohnet und sich zum vollkommenen sieg wesentlich hervor thut.”
216 Cf. ch. 3, 5a.
217 p. 39, VI.1.
218 p. 42, Nr. 10.
219 p. 43, ch. VI. 12-14.
220 This wedding was, incidentally, a spiritual scandal for his friends.
221 “Poetische Lob- und Liebes-Sprüche von der Ewigen Weißheit”. Bound together with “Das Geheimnis der göttl. Sophia”. Separate pagination pp. 12f. N. XV. Vers 8, 9.

From the book : Philosophia perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann