Note 227 — Chapter V · THE PRAISE OF WISDOM.

In Wisd. vii. 22 &c. the language appears to some to rise above poetical personification, and to imply a conscious hypostatising of Wisdom. Dante, a good judge on this point, certainly thought otherwise (Convito, iii. 15); he evidently holds that the Sophia of the Book of Wisdom is precisely analogous to his own very strong personification of divine Philosophy. Still such language may have partly prepared the way for the well-known Gnostic myth of Achamoth or Sophia (comp. Baur, Three First Centuries, E. T., i. 207). It was well, as Plumptre remarks, that Philo adopted Logos rather than Sophia as the name of the creative energy. A system in which Sophia had been the dominant word might have led to an earlier development of Mariolatry (Introduction to Proverbs in the Speaker’s Commentary).