Lady Wisdom, Lady Love (Artful Devotion)

Wisdom has built her house;
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine;
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her young women to call
from the highest places in the town,
“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
To him who lacks sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Leave your simple ways, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

—Proverbs 9:1–6

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Lady Wisdom, or Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), is a female allegorical figure from the book of Proverbs (1:20–33, 2:13–18, 8:1–36, 9:1–6). I enjoyed searching for songs about her; the pool is ampler than I expected. I found a few that directly reference Sunday’s lectionary passage—“Wisdom (Has Built Her House)” by Angela Lashley, “Wisdom’s Table” by John L. Bell and Doug Gay, and “God’s Wisdom Spreads Her Table Well” by Kevin Keil—but didn’t find them as compelling as the two I settled on, below.

(Update, 11/28/20: I’ve just come across “How Long?” by Ordinary Time, based on the Call of Wisdom in Proverbs 1. It’s quite good!)

LATIN JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL: “Lady Wisdom” by Lannie Battistini, on Nomenclatura (2014)

FOLK ROCK: “Lady Wisdom” by PureFusion, on Elegy (2010)

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In Divine Wisdom: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt writes,

The symbolism of icons of the Divine Sophia is far from standardized and is decidedly ambiguous. . . . Images of wisdom remain the most abstract of all holy pictures, for the Divine Sophia never existed as a real being. Even the gender of Sophia in Russian icons is ambiguous, as in different centuries and locations the personified figure is sometimes associated with Christ or Mary or depicted as an androgynous angel with “feminized” features otherwise attributed to Gabriel. (56)

In 2015 contemporary Ukrainian Greek Catholic iconographer Lyuba Yatskiv secured a major commission to decorate the interior of the newly built Church of Sophia, Wisdom of God, on the campus of Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Her design for the apse (the semicircular recess behind the church’s main altar), reproduced above, shows Wisdom as a winged bishop holding a cross-shaped crozier in her left hand while raising her right hand in a gesture of blessing. At her table are the wine and bread of the Eucharist, which she invites all to come and partake of. The chi-rho monogram above her, with an alpha and omega on either side, is a reference to Christ, while the seven pillars bear symbols of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the bright star of the Father sheds light from above. Below Wisdom, there blossoms the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, with its four rivers flowing, and flanking her are personifications of the seven virtues.

To learn more about the project, including design proposals from other artists, click here.

This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.

To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 15, cycle B, click here.