What is the Appearance of Divine Sophia?

Since the sixth century, the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodoxy has been Constantinople's Hagia Sophia Cathedral and, since the eleventh century, that of Russian Orthodoxy in two cathedrals dedicated to that same Holy Wisdom. Yet few Orthodox believers would recognize any icon of Sophia.Vladimir Solov'ev, in his poem “Three Meetings” (1898), describes three visions of Sophia—each a somewhat indistinct image of feminine beauty, suffused in a “golden azure” light. Possibly, Solov′ev's perception of Sophia originated in an icon he saw as a child (his first vision having occurred when he was nine); the Orthodox church, however, found his almost fanatical obsession with the divine femininity of Sophia to be highly objectionable. In particular, the Sophiology based on Solov′ev's writings, and advanced after his death first by Pavel Florenskii and then by Sergei Bulgakov, was attacked by the church throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Bulgakov's idea of Sophia was seen by the church as “involving a fourth feminine hypostasis in the Holy Trinity” who acted as a “gnostic intermediary between God and the world”; it was condemned as heretical. The church's unyielding position in this controversy was (and is) that only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the true Sophia—the Divine Wisdom of God—in accordance with 1 Cor. 1:23-31: “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”