Some Notes for Further Reflection
- Wallace Stevens, a major American poet of the 20th century, wrote a poem entitled “Connoisseur of Chaos.” The poem begins like this:
“A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. “
Usually I find Stevens’ sensitivities and vision to be deeply flawed and misleading, but now and then there is an insight or a flow of words that jars one into an awareness inviting new explorations. This dialectic between order and disorder is one of them.
Consider this line from another of his poems, “The Idea of Order at Key West”:
“Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea…”
As one critic points out: “This line highlights what Stevens calls the human ‘rage for order’—our deeply ingrained, creative urge to use art, language, and imagination to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent universe.”
And: “In ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ Wallace Stevens explores how the human imagination creates meaning and structure in a chaotic world, using a singing woman to represent the artistry that interprets raw nature. The poem emphasizes that the world is given shape through human perception, as the speaker observes that the sea’s indifferent noise is transformed into art, highlighting our inherent drive to organize existence.” (My ancient Chinese poet friends and I would beg to disagree with most of this wording!)
Yes, the urge to order, to organize, the reality that we encounter, to organize existence, is truly deep in us…and not just in artistic sense. Walk into a messy room and immediately you feel the need to “straighten things up.” But the “disorder” of a “messy room” may sometimes be preferable to the “order” which we create. The order of a fascist or communist police state is in fact a profound disorder. But the disorder of an anarchic commune which supposedly frowns on any organizing principle has nevertheless a concealed order within it that is toxic to human flourishing. Our notions of what constitutes order and what is disorder certainly depends on something even much deeper in us.
Consider this: The first Europeans who came to this continent looked upon the wilderness as a “great disorder” that badly needed ordering. It was a “chaotic and indifferent” world (actually for many it was also the realm of Satan). So: trees cut down, fences built, land plowed, this part is “mine,” that is “yours,” etc. Most Native Americans saw all that activity as a profound disorder because they had their own different organizing principles.
Consider this: A wall is really an instrument of an organizing principle, dividing “mine” from “yours,” inside from outside, this country from that country, etc. Robert Frost wrote a poem, “Mending Wall,” in which he is puzzled and laments why his neighbor wants this wall between their two farms. The poem begins: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” and concludes with this: “He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”
Consider: Two different gardens.
This:
And then this:
They illustrate two very different organizing principles and two very different senses of “order.” They come from what could be called two different wisdom traditions. Both require extensive human engagement; both reveal the deep human urge to organize; but each emerges from a distinctly different vision of the man-nature relationship.
Now consider someone like John Muir, who entered the wilderness of Yosemite and saw not “raw chaos” (Stevens) or a resource to take possession, but rather he said it was his “cathedral.” When we enter a cathedral we enter a space profoundly organized for worship, for prayer, for a realization of the Presence of the Holy Mystery. Obviously Muir discerned and experienced a profound order in the encounter with wilderness.
Finally: in the Western Tradition, the Absolute Divine Reality is the Great Organizer, using Divine Wisdom which produces out of chaos various dimensions of order we call “creation” and whose agent in this work is a mysterious figure named Sophia. She is named in the Wisdom literature in the Old Testament, and some Russian theologians and writers (Solovyev and Bulgakov and even Pasternak) have built a whole theological/spiritual vision around her: the sophianic vision.
- Cosmos and Paradise
Cosmos: The word comes from the Ancient Greek word kósmos, which translates to “order,” “good arrangement,” or “beauty”. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was the first to apply this word to the universe to describe its inherent harmony. Today the term cosmos primarily refers to the entire physical universe viewed as a complex, orderly, and harmonious system. In modern science and astronomy, we define cosmos as the universe as a whole. While “universe” simply refers to all matter and space, using “cosmos” implies that the universe follows strict structural organization and physical laws rather than existing as chaotic chaos. It is interesting that this very early view of the cosmos we live in saw it as beautiful, as something that fills us with wonder.
In Genesis we find the creation story that in many ways undergirds Western Civilization. We see the making of the “cosmos” as an “ordering” of a primordial chaos, the ultimate “messy room”!….it is all organized and laid out in a careful, deliberate way. And the Divine Artificer calls it all “good.” This “divine order” comes to be known as “Paradise.” And it is also called a “garden,” and of course we all know the rest of the story.
In the Wisdom books of the Old Testament we return to this creation story but in a more subtle and more elaborate way. Creation is totally the work of God’s Wisdom, and this has a mysterious feminine aspect. In the Hebraic books (like Proverbs and Ecclesiates) she is named Hokmah; in the Greek work, the Book of Wisdom, she is Sophia. And Divine Wisdom is not God somewhere “out there” beyond all human existence. No, she infuses all creation; she is the principle of organization for what is real.
Consider: Sophia(Hokmah) is God’s Master Artisan. In Proverbs 8, she states she was brought forth before the earth was made. She is present alongside God during creation, acting as a “master worker” or artisan through whom the world is structured. This signifies that wisdom is built into the very fabric of reality. To live with Sophia (Hokmah) is to align your life with the natural, moral, and spiritual architecture of the universe designed by God.
She rejoices in the inhabited world and delights specifically in the human race.
Divine Wisdom is not some secret, esoteric reality for an elite few; it does not call for special powers or capabilities. On the contrary, Sophia(Hokmah) is highly accessible and vocal. In Proverbs 1 and 8, she stands at the city gates, crossroads, and marketplace, shouting to passersby to abandon their foolishness. In Proverbs 9, she builds a seven-pillared house and prepares a banquet of wine and meat, inviting the simple to eat, drink, and gain insight.
In Wisdom 10, Sophia is credited with steering salvation history, directly rescuing Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Lot, and guiding Moses and Israel through the Red Sea.
The Book of Wisdom describes her as a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, and a reflection of eternal light.
Sophia is the source of good governance and order. She provides the blueprint for a just society. Through her, monarchs reign and lawgivers decree what is just (Proverbs 8:15-16). King Solomon famously loves her and begs God for her company to help him rule justly.
- The Order of Jesus vs. the Order of the Pharisees
In the Synoptic Gospels the Pharisees represent and manifest a profound disorder. But this disorder looks and feels like a solid order with cultural, economic, political, and religious underpinnings both then and now. In the Gospel of John this disorder is basically called “the world.”….what people generally call “the real world.” Social relations and our relationship with God is totally distorted. Questions do arise: who does this ordering? (Certainly not Sophia!) And how does this happen?
The language of Jesus, his teaching, comes as a jolt, almost incomprehensible then and now. Think of the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables….the last shall be first….gain is loss, loss is gain…pray for those who persecute you…. forgive endlessly, etc. In all this we are called, invited, to an order we no longer can even recognize. We are once more invited to Wisdom’s banquet.
In the Letters of Paul, specifically 1 Corinthians, we are told once more about God’s wisdom as contrasted with what Paul calls human wisdom—two very different kinds of order. But not only that….the Divine Wisdom will appear as utterly foolish, an absolute absurdity, in contrast to the well-thought-out, thoroughly calculated, pragmatic human wisdom. Paul of course is focusing on the Cross of Christ where what we see is the execution of a criminal.
Paul explicitly states that the “word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). To the intellectual Greeks, a crucified Savior was illogical; to the status-seeking Jews, it was a stumbling block. Yet, Paul argues it represents the absolutely paradoxical fullness of God’s Presence and Power. True divine wisdom is a hidden mystery that cannot be discovered via human senses or intellectual study.
So: every time we make the Sign of the Cross, we invoke Divine Wisdom, we proclaim Divine Wisdom, we entrust ourselves to Divine Wisdom.
And then this: among the last words of Jesus on the Cross to a human being trapped in the order of the Pharisees: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
- Merton and the Sophianic Vision
Not surprisingly, Thomas Merton has a profound grasp of the sophianic vision. And we can witness this especially in two of his writings. The first is a short meditation in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Merton writes a beautiful reflection, entitled “The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air,” in one section of this collection (p. 131-132). Merton is meditating in his hermitage during the quiet transition from night to morning. He describes the “point vierge” (the virgin point) of the dawn, where nature awakens in a state of pure innocence before human activity and technology take over the day. While modern humans wake up to clocks, thermostats, and the static of electric shavers, they completely miss the divine proclamation happening right outside their windows.
Important background matter: In the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, the deacon stands before the congregation right before the Gospel is read and loudly proclaims “Wisdom! Let us attend!” (or Sophia!) to command the absolute focus and reverence of the people. Merton uses the rooster’s first crowing and the early morning birds as this “dawn deacon,” shouting out a liturgical warning that the brilliant, sacred light of a new day—and God’s presence—is about to unfold:
“’Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking. Electric shavers filling radios with static. ‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.’”
The second instance is a long poem he wrote in 1962 entitled “Hagia Sophia,” Holy Wisdom. At that time he was deeply into the Russians, like Bulgakov and Solovyev, who helped him articulate this beautiful vision of a sophianic order which transcends all our art, all our knowledge, all our calculating…..
You can find the full poem here (though poorly laid out):
https://www.centerforinterfaithrelations.org/2022/05/06/reflect-hagia-sophia-by-thomas-merton/
The poem is structured (“ordered”) along a monastic day beginning with the first prayer of the dawn, Lauds. So it begins:
“Dawn. The Hour of Lauds.
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness.
This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom,
the Mother of all,
Natura naturans.
There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless
gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility.
This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.
I am awakened,
I am born again at the voice of this, my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.”
And it concludes at the end of the day with Compline:
“Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina.
Now the Blessed Virgin Mary is the one created being who enacts and shows forth in her life all that is hidden in Sophia. Because of this she can be said to be a personal manifestation of Sophia, Who in God is Ousia rather than Person.
Natura in Mary becomes pure Mother. In her, Natura is as she was from the origin from her divine birth. In Mary Natura is all wise and is manifested as an all-prudent, all-loving, all-pure person: not a Creator, and not a Redeemer, but perfect Creature, perfectly Redeemed, the fruit of all God’s great power, the perfect expression of wisdom in mercy.
It is she, it is Mary, Sophia, who in sadness and joy, with the full awareness of what she is doing, sets upon the Second Person, the Logos, a crown which is His Human Nature. Thus her consent opens the door of created nature, of time, of history, to the Word of God.
God enters into His creation. Through her wise answer, through her obedient understanding, through the sweet yielding consent of Sophia, God enters without publicity into the city of rapacious men.
She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.
She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible mercy, to die for us on the Cross.
The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep. Night embraces the silent half of the earth.
A vagrant, a destitute wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A homeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without identification, without even a number, a frail expendable exile lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and entrusts Himself to sleep.”