The fallacy of the Fall

Question: Do you believe, along with the Gnostics, that Sophia is fallen and in need of redemption? Why or why not?

I am horrified by the Gnostic myth that Sophia is "fallen" and in need of redemption. Not because to make mistakes and need help is outwith my understanding – quite the opposite! - but because it is yet another example of a woman, albeit one who represents the Wisdom of God, being blamed for our human situation of partial separation from the Divine Being. I really don't like the blame culture which both this, and the story interpreted as 'The Fall', are a part. Both Eve and Sophia have suffered from ultimate misogyny.

It seems to me that the interpretation of the story of 'the Fall' in Genesis make more sense, as has been suggested by some scholars such as Richard Smoley, when understood in terms of a choice Adam and Eve made – the choice to seek out knowledge and to learn to discern good and evil. They got what they wanted, although the life it entailed/entails is not an easy one: it's not a rose garden here!

Similarly, the role of Sophia was a positive one: rather than having fallen from grace, my view would be that Sophia chose to 'fall' into matter and become manifest, as Caitlin Matthews says (in her fascinating book 'Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom' which I have just begun reading) 'in every atom, permeating all things like the sparks that run through charcoal.' This, of course, also means that Sophia also resides in all of us, that she is the 'divine spark' which dwells within us. Sophia's choice and its consequences make Sophia knowable and accessible, not least to those outwith the theological framework of belief in Jesus as the Incarnation of God.

(This is probably a complete irrelevance, but it occurs to me that in the book & film 'Sophie's Choice', the choice the eponymous Sophie made was to sacrifice her daughter Eva ('life') for the sake of her son Jan (derived from the name Johanan which means 'YHWH is gracious')

By her motherly love Sophia, he Wisdom of God, is also an inspiration both toward similar compassion to our selves and to others, and of the impulse to return to our Creator, the ultimate Divine Being, not through rejecting the material world, but through understanding and knowledge of the God who is within all and is all.

In terms of the so-called 'problem of evil' (and of suffering) which the stories of the 'falls' of Eve and Sophia claim to address: it seems to me to be unreasonable to blame anything outside of our selves for the existence of these. Fear, the unreasonable fear of difference, separates us from one another, such that we fail to see that the harm we inflict on one another is actually harming us all, including our selves. It is humans whose evil creates suffering, not God, and until we begin to open ourselves to one another, accept our commonality, and live in fellowship, then evil and suffering will persist. 

As Robert Burns wrote:

Many and sharp the num'rous ills inwoven with our frame.

More pointed still we make ourselves, regret, remorse, and shame.

And man, whose heav'n-erected face the smiles of love adorn, -

Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn

(Man was Made to Mourn. 1784)

I believe that God mourns with and for us, and wants our inhumanity to end, so we become fully human as we are created to be, with all the capacities that that includes.