Not long ago, I discovered a small community of mushrooms growing beneath my largest zucchini plant. Three responses, distinguishable only at the conceptual level, led to what I hope constitutes some kind of spiritual growth.
The first was a kind of awe at how quickly and quietly the fungi had come to be in the garden bed. I likely would not have noticed had I not been led to investigate the produce of the cucumber vines whose lilted conquest of the trellises was now complete. The toadstools—whether several organisms or a singular one I still know not, not desiring to disturb their ground—had an entire life history which I existed on the utter periphery of. And to be truthful, that is the case for nearly every creature in the garden, fungus or plant or insect or animal or fay. From my perspective, the garden is my summer project: I dug it, built it, filled in its soil, cared for the plants my wife buried in the rich dirt, and as its suzerain I provide it care in exchange for the fruits I desire from it. And perhaps my caretaking is not unobserved, nor uncelebrated; but the garden is its own world, in which my presence, whether welcome or reviled, is always intrusion.
The second was the immediate and firm conviction that the mushrooms posited a threat to the health of my plants, and that they must be removed. I habitually catastrophize: developments are unwelcome, often, because they represent loss or failure or hardship or pain than they represent success or joy. And so for a moment I contemplated whether my shears or my trawl were the more appropriate instruments; where to the eggplant and the squash and the tomato I had been Visnu, to the dolt I would be Siva.
But this violence was checked by a new thought, one that I believe I was only open to as a result of so many months of care given in the garden: what if, in fact, the mushrooms served a purpose about which I was unaware? What if, rather than parasitic growths upon the raised bed I had built for the plants, their presence was both fitting and gratuitous, that is, beautiful? Perhaps, I thought, the small cove created by the zucchini stalks and the shaded ground about the cucumber vines, cornered by the trellises and the wood plank walls and mounded dirt, was exactly the sort of place the mushrooms would be welcome, to mutual benefit.
Niches sometimes exist to service parasites and predators, of course, the difference being that predators often serve a purpose in the wider environment where parasites often provide benefit only to themselves. My new perspective on the garden did not delude me about the notion that all such developments in the vegetable beds would be positive: I had already experienced no little consternation at a persistent, though small, community of beetles, and had been debating how best to annihilate them so as to save the precious leaves of my plantings. But in this particular case there seemed to me to be an immediate and intuitive matching between the presence of the fungus and the emptiness into which it had come to being; the Daoist and Buddhist equivocations between the emptiness of being and the contingency of becoming shone suddenly luminous to my mind.
A simple search proved my epiphany correct: mushrooms are quite good for the garden and its inhabitants, as they enrich the soil in symbiosis with the other plants. The law, or nomos, of their exchange lends itself towards an account, or logos, of the systems that they function within. In Greek antiquity, the word drawn from the human world to understand the order intrinsic to the superficially chaotic world of nature is oikos, naming the household as a system of relationships and reciprocities, inclusive of but distinct from the more restrictive oikia as a physical structure in which people live in. The kosmos of heaven and earth are, in this way of thinking, an oikos whose nomoi, “customs” or “laws,” testify to an intrinsic rationality manifesting itself in the material accidence of the things in the world. These possibilities preexist and outlive their individual actualizations: all things are woven together on the loom of being, and can be unwoven and rewoven into any number of scenic tapestries, not always clearly or self-evidently by whose hand or for what purpose. But the textus (from tego, tegere, a weaving word) of the world conceived as oikos, always demonstrates certain customary exchanges that manifest a deep well of reason. Learning oikonomia, the “law of the household” in the exchanges of nature, leads us to consideration of oikologia, the “account of the household,” the contemplative vision of the underlying pattern or substructure of the natural world.
This kind of thinking in Hellenistic and Near Eastern philosophy made its way into postexilic Jewish tradition in the form of the sapiential literature. The Chokmah or Sophia figure of Proverbs 8:22ff, Lady “Wisdom,” is also woven into the fabric of the natural world, and her function in tying God to the world extends also to human beings, whose personal fullness of being and moral becoming are rooted in the selfsame divine wisdom that governs nature. Other Israelite Wisdom authors, of course, complicate this picture: Qoheleth’s extended argument is precisely that the mundane world often does not seem to be governed by God’s Wisdom, while Job seeks to stress that the divine Wisdom which governs nature does not always admit of a discernible role in the suffering of human life—in part, because God is not obliged in every instance to explain his Wisdom to the human mind. But in general, this is the point at which Jewish Tradition meets with Hellenic and Roman philosophy on the one hand and South and East Asian philosophy on the other, that human flourishing is achieved in deconstructing the separation, mental and otherwise, that humans construct between themselves and the natural world. In Daoism, for example, animals are superior students of the Dao to humans precisely because they have no concept of the Dao which separates them from the Dao’s reality;1 in much of Mahayana Buddhism, the criterion of nibbana/nirvana is the “extinction” of those conditions upon our ordinary consciousness that causes us to conceptualize and compartmentalize the world through false concepts of identity and attachment. The fundamental nature of the Mind, in Chan and Zen Buddhism, is thus in fact enlightenment itself: the goal of this kind of Buddhist practice is not acquiring something that is lacked but in stripping away the barriers that prevent liberation through experience of this bedrock emptiness.
“Sophiology” is a popular topic in contemporary Christian theology largely through the influence of Russian theologians like Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), and Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944). It is essentially the attempt to take the figure of Wisdom (preferentially named in Greek as Sophia, as opposed to Hebrew Chokmah, due to the primacy of Greek in early Christian thought) seriously, and to integrate her as a character into orthodox, Nicene, Chalcedonian theology and Christology. But often lost on newcomers to sophiology as a discipline is that, for the Russians, Sophia’s initial significance was economic and ecological, as well as phenomenological and aesthetic, rather than purely philosophical or theological. Michael Martin has done an excellent job cataloguing this,2 as have other scholars. But it raises the question of what sophiology entails as a separate discipline, apart from the different kinds of thinking and activity it incorporates; what is it to provide an “account” (logos) of Wisdom (Sophia)? What is Sophia?
There is, obviously, a great deal to say by way of response to that question, but my suspicion is that my threefold movement in the garden begins to point us in that direction. Sophia is, among other things, that rational connectivity between subject, object, and wonder which itself serves to unite human, world, and God in an existential communion. Sophia is she who enables our theoria, in monastic language, or our photismos, the illumination of our souls concerning that central ontological point at which God speaks creatures into existence, where the angelic powers administer their enlightening energies to lesser creatures, in the deepest possible encounter, “without words.” And so to invite her ministrations requires, to no small degree, that we learn to have interior emptiness: that, detached from concepts about the true flow of reality, we might have absolute receptivity to the reality of the world and the reality of God that shines through it, as it really is, and not merely as we perceive or conceive it to be.
See, e.g., https://psyche.co/ideas/there-has-never-been-a-time-when-this-article-didnt-exist.
See Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn Toward A Poetic Metaphysics (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015); idem, ed., The Heavenly Country: An Anthology of Primary Sources, Poetry, and Critical Essays (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2016); and his website, The Center for Sophiological Studies.