I would propose that Wisdom offers all of the benefits of the Gaia hypothesis but none of its shortcomings. In the Bible, to begin with, Wisdom is not herself divine. She is “the beginning of God’s work” (Proverbs 8:22) without being herself God. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams calls Wisdom a sort of “eternal feedback” in the Godhead (80). She preserves God’s transcendence while also animating the world with interconnected purpose. Represented both as the feminine Binahand masculine Chokmah in Jewish mysticism of the kabbalah, and in a variety of ways in Christianity (whether the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, or Christ himself), Wisdom offers a monotheistic alternative, or at least complement, to the Gaia hypothesis. […]
[James] Lovelock may already have realized this deficiency. He is no longer embarrassed by theological language. “It is time,” he writes, “that theologians shared with scientists their wonderful word, ‘ineffable’; a word that expresses the thought that God is immanent but unknowable”(222). But theologians, it turns out, have a far better word than that: Wisdom, who is so often connected to the Virgin Mary. There is even an image in Byzantine art in which Gaia, emerging from the earth, appears to pass on the baton to the garden-dwelling Virgin, who bears her earth-centered devotion far more successfully (see 271or fol. 147r). In such images, rich with reverence for nature, Mary incorporates all that Gaia offers, but does so within the matrix of monotheistic love. […]
Mary as Wisdom represents a cosmology, addressing “modernity’s atrophied ability to think symbolically with the subtlety and holism of religious consciousness in past times” (101). It is Wisdom, far more than Gaia, who speaks through the residents of towns like Formosa, and who speaks for future generations that do not yet have a voice. For “wisdom opened the mouths of those who were mute, and made the tongues of infants speak clearly” (Wisdom of Solomon 10:21).