Isaiah 11 - The Peaceable Kingdom

¹ There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
  and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

² And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the spirit of counsel and might,
    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
³ And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

  He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
    or decide by what his ears hear;
⁴ but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
    and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
  and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth,
    and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.
⁵ Righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist,
    and faithfulness the girdle of his loins.

⁶ The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
    and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
  and the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall feed;
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

⁹ They shall not hurt or destroy
    in all my holy mountain;
  for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

Psalm 22 - I Will Tell of Thy Name to My Brethren

²² I will tell of thy name to my brethren;
       in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee:

²³ You who fear the Lord, praise him!
       all you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
       and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel!
²⁴ For he has not despised or abhorred
      the affliction of the afflicted;
   and he has not hid his face from him,
      but has heard, when he cried to him.

²⁵ From thee comes my praise in the great congregation;
       my vows I will pay before those who fear him.

²⁶ The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied;
       those who seek him shall praise the Lord!
      May your hearts live for ever!

²⁷ All the ends of the earth shall remember
       and turn to the Lord;
   and all the families of the nations
       shall worship before him.
²⁸ For dominion belongs to the Lord,
       and he rules over the nations.

²⁹ Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down;
      before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
      and he who cannot keep himself alive.

³⁰ Posterity shall serve him;
      men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation,
³¹ and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
      that he has wrought it.

Methodius of Olympus - Christ "Assumes" Adam and Redeems Him

[L]et us now consider how doctrinally correct [St. Paul] was in comparing Adam to Christ, inasmuch as he not only considers Adam as a type and image of Christ, but also that Christ became the very same as Adam through the descent of the Logos into Him. It was only fitting, after all, that the first-born of God, His first and only-begotten offspring, should become man and be joined as His Wisdom to mankind’s first man, first-formed and first-born. For this was Christ: man filled with the pure and perfect Godhead, and God comprehending man. Most fitting was it that the eldest of the Aeons, the first among archangels, when about to mingle with men, took up His abode in the first and eldest man of humankind—Adam. For thus, in remodelling what was from the beginning and moulding it all over again of the Virgin and the Spirit, He fashioned the same Man; just as in the beginning when the earth was virgin and untilled, God had taken dust from the earth and formed, without seed, the most rational being from it.

Now let there come to my support the prophet Jeremias as a trustworthy and clear witness: 

And I went down, he says, into the potter's house; and behold he was doing a work on the stones. And the vessel which he was making with his hands fell; and he made it again another vessel, as it seemed good in his eyes to make it.

So while Adam was still as it were on the potter's wheel, still soft and moist and not yet, like a finished vessel, strengthened and hardened in incorruptibility, he was ruined by sin dripping and falling on him like water. And so God, moistening His clay once again and modelling the same man again unto honor, fixed and hardened it in the Virgin’s womb, united and mingled it with the Word, and finally brought it forth dry and unbreakable into the world, that it might never again be drowned by the floods of external corruption and collapse into putrefaction. . . . 

Thus, just as in Adam all men die, so also in Christ, who assumed Adam, all were made to be alive.

St. Methodius of Olympus (250-311 AD), The Symposium: a Treatise on Chastity, 60.

Lubac - Sin Shatters Single Divine Image, Jesus Assumes and Redeems It

In these conditions, all infidelity to the divine image that man bears in him, every breach with God, is at the same time a disruption of human unity. It cannot eliminate the natural unity of the human race—the image of God, tarnished though it may be, is indestructible—but it ruins that spiritual unity which, according to the Creator’s plan, should be so much the closer in proportion as the supernatural union of man with God is the more completely effected. Ubi peccata, ibi multitudo.¹ True to Origen’s criterion, Maximus the Confessor, for example, considers original sin as a separation, a breaking up, an individualization it might be called, in the depreciatory sense of the word. Whereas God is working continually in the world to the effect that all should come together into unity, by this sin which is the work of man, “the one nature was shattered into a thousand pieces” and humanity which ought to constitute a harmonious whole, in which “mine” and “thine” would be no contradiction, is turned into a multitude of individuals, as numerous as the sands of the seashore, all of whom show violently discordant inclinations. “And now”, concludes Maximus, “we rend each other like the wild beasts.” “Satan has broken us up”, said St. Cyril of Alexandria for his part, in order to explain the first fall and the need of a redeemer.”' And in a curious passage, in which the recurrence of an ancient myth may be discerned, Augustine explains the matter similarly in a symbolical manner. After establishing a connection between the four letters of Adam’s name and the Greek names for the four points of the compass, he adds:

Adam himself is therefore now spread out over the whole face of the earth. Originally one, he has fallen, and, breaking up as it were, he has filled the whole earth with the pieces.

That was one way of considering evil in its inmost essence, and it is a pity perhaps that the theology of a later period has not turned it to greater account. Instead of trying, as we do almost entirely nowadays, to find within each individual nature what is the hidden blemish and, so to speak, of looking for the mechanical source of the trouble which is the cause of the faulty running of the engine—some exaggerating the trouble, others inclined to minimize it—these Fathers preferred to envisage the very constitution of the individuals considered as so many cores of natural opposition. This was not taken as the first or only cause of sin, of course, but at least as a secondary result, “equal to the first”, and the inner disruption went hand in hand with the social disruption. . . .

Let us abide by the outlook of the Fathers: the redemption being a work of restoration will appear to us by that very fact as the recovery of lost unity—the recovery of supernatural unity of man with God, but equally of the unity of men among themselves. “Divine Mercy gathered up the fragments from every side, forged them in the fire of love, and welded into one what had been broken. He who remade was himself the Maker, and he who refashioned was himself the Fashioner.” Thus does he raise up again man who was lost by gathering together once more his scattered members, so restoring his own image. Like the queen bee, Christ comes to muster humanity around him.² It is in this that the great miracle of Calvary consists:

There were at that time all kinds of miracles: God on the Cross, the sun darkened. . . the veil of the temple rent. . . water and blood flowing from his side, the earth quaking, stones breaking, the dead rising. . . Who can worthily extol such wonders? But none is to be compared with the miracle of my salvation: minute drops of blood making the whole world new, working the salvation of all men, as the drops of fig-juice one by one curdle the milk, reuniting mankind, knitting them together as one.³

For a change of metaphor there is that in which Christ is likened to a needle the eye in which, pierced most painfully at his passion, now draws all after him, so repairing the tunic rent by Adam, stitching together the two peoples of Jew and Gentile, making them one for always.⁴

Divisa uniuntur, discordantia pacantur:⁵ such from the very beginning is the effect of the Incarnation. Christ from the very first moment of his existence virtually bears all men within himself ⁶—erat in Christo Jesu omnis homo. For the Word did not merely take a human body; his Incarnation was not a simple corporatio, but, as St. Hilary says, a concorporatio. He incorporated himself in our humanity, and incorporated it in himself. Universitatis nostrae caro est factus.⁷ In making a human nature, it is human nature that he united to himself, that he enclosed in himself, and it is the latter, whole and entire, that in some sort he uses as a body. Naturam in se universae carnis adsumpsit.⁸ Whole and entire he will bear it then to Calvary, whole and entire he will raise it from the dead, whole and entire he will save it. Christ the Redeemer does not offer salvation merely to each one; he effects it, he is himself the salvation of the whole, and for each one salvation consists in a personal ratification of his original “belonging” to Christ, so that he be not cast out, cut off from this Whole.

Not in vain does John assert that the Word came and dwelt among us, for in this way he teaches us the great mystery that we are all in Christ and that the common personality of man is brought back to life by his assuming of it.  . . . The Word dwells in us, in that one temple he took through us and of us, so that we should possess all things in him and he should bring us all back to the Father in one Body.⁹

1 Where there is sin, there is multiplicity. Origen, In Ezech., hom. 9, n.1: “Ubi peccata sunt, ibi est multitudo, ibi schismata, ibi haereses, ibi dissensiones. Ubi autem virtus, ibi singularitas, ibi unio, ex quo omnium credentium erat cor unum et anima una. Et, ut manifestius dicam, principium malorum omnium est multitudo, principium autem bonorum coangustatio et a turbis in singularitatem redactio” (Baehrens, p. 405). [Google translate: Where there are sins, there is multitude, there schisms, there heresies, there dissensions. Where there is virtue, there is singularity, there is union, from which all believers were one heart and one soul. And, to say more plainly, the beginning of all evils is multitude, but the beginning of good things is narrowing and reduction from multitudes into singularity.]

2 Hippolytus, In Cantic. I.16.

3 Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. 45 c. 29 (PG 36, 662-64).

4 Paschasius Radbertus, In Mat., lib. 9 (PL 120, 666).

5 What was divided is united, discord becomes peace. Fulgentius, Ad Monimum, lib. 2, c. 10 (PL 65. 188).

6 Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus, assertio 15 (PG 75, 293-96).

7 He became the flesh of our universal humanity. Hilary, In Psalmum 54, n. 9 (Zingerle, p. 153).

8 He assumed in himself the nature of all flesh.

9 Cyril of Alexandria, In Joannem, lib. 1 (PG 73, 161-64).

Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (1947; tr. 1958), 33-40

Jordan - Only Power is in Surrender - From Preface to Le Fort's 'The Eternal Woman'

. . . 

Gertrud von le Fort’s message is drawn from the mainspring of Christian revelation. Her basic theme is that strength which according to St. Paul “is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Strength in weakness, in a power-drunk, secularized world bristling with arms and at the same time bleeding from a million wounds because man, both physically and mentally, has run amuck!

In The Song at the Scaffold, Blanche de la Force, the young Carmelite novice, is portrayed as holding the likeness of the Christ Child in her arms. “So small and so weak,” she says. But Sister Marie of the Incarnation replies: “No, so small and so powerful.” Even more cogently Sister Marie adds a little later that “to tremble is to be strong,” for in trembling we realize, as does fearful little Blanche, the very moment she is trampled to death by an infuriated crowd of revolutionists, “the infinite frailty of our vaunted powers.”

In The Wedding of Magdeburg, a historical novel dealing with an episode in the Thirty Years’ War, Gertrud von le Fort, in a breath-taking sentence has thrown down the gauntlet to all the believers in a merely material progress, to all the worldly perfectionists and superficial rationalists. “Christ,” she says, “does not emerge in a struggle against the Cross, but on the Cross—just as love always is triumphant in surrender.” And this leitmotif keeps recurring throughout her writings to make us realize the paradoxy of Christian truth by the standards of eternal life. Seeming defeat ending in conquest, supreme sacrifice in triumph, crucifixion in resurrection — against the backdrop of historic scenes this appears as the fruit of all human experience, if we but tremble in the strength of Christ.

Perhaps the realization that man’s weakness is his a real and only strength, his surrender to God's holy will is the only true victory he can achieve, perhaps such an awareness is more connate to feminine than to masculine nature. Of course, we must understand these terms properly as spiritual principles and polar forces which can find their expression in both man and woman. In both there can be pride, and both can be children of Mary as true handmaids of the Lord. It is from this premise that Gertrud von le Fort has developed her profound metaphysical interpretation of womanhood. The eternal femininity as a theological mystery is the subject matter of The Eternal Woman, which in her own words deals with “the religious significance of femininity and its ultimate reflection in God.”

Again we must remember what St. Paul says about a strength being made perfect in weakness or, as some translators render the passage more aptly, power revealing itself in infirmity. Power and strength ultimately are not of this world, but of the kingdom of God. There is only one way to achieve it: by surrendering to God's will. To use Gertrud von le Fort’s own words: “Surrender to God is the only absolute power with which the creature is endowed.” And again:

To bring about his salvation, all man has to contribute is his readiness to give himself up completely. The receptive, passive attitude of the feminine principle appears as the decisive, the positive element in the Christian order of grace. The Marian dogma, brought down to a simple formula, means the co-operation of the creature in the salvation of the world.

Mary’s fiat, then, her willingness to let God’s will be done, appears as the power in her infirmity. In woman’s constitutive desire to surrender, to give herself, rests the very depth of life, for such surrender is the expression of the creature's unquestioning acceptance of the will of God. That is why Gertrud von le Fort says pointedly that “the world can be moved by the strength of man, but it can be blessed in the real sense of the word, only in the sign of woman.”

In her novel The Child's Kingdom, which represents the introduction to a medieval trilogy not yet completed, Gertrud von le Fort has clearly indicated the sequence she has in mind. “First,” she says, “comes creation which is the glory of God, then comes conception which is the humility of woman, and only then comes action which is the power of man.” The implication is obvious that there can be no action, no “masculine” activity in life without the “conception” of divine grace preceding it. Gertrud von le Fort throws further light on her reasoning when she goes on to say that “the hour preceding all creation is not called our power, but our helplessness— which is the only omnipotence. . . Helplessness thus is transfigured into “omnipotence,” for by surrendering the creature becomes co-powerful with the Creator. All the achievements of man depend on this primary act of creative surrender which leads to a divine partnership. Did not Christ Himself tell Pilate that he would have no power unless it were given him from above? (Jn. 19:11.)

The issue is fundamental and should be brought home to all those who are willing to meet the challenge of Christian thinking. What Gertrud von le Fort says as a Catholic, others have expressed just as convincingly so from their denominational perspectives. C. S. Lewis, for instance, when he wrote that “our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice” (The Problem of Pain, page 39, New York: Macmillan, 1944). The Anglican scholar proceeds to explain that our highest activity must be response, not initiative, because “our freedom is only a freedom to better or worse response.” Nicholas Berdyaev, the late Russian philosopher, has reached conclusions along similar lines. “Within the sphere of humanity and in the natural world,” he writes (Freedom and the “Spirit, page 177, New York: Scribner's, 1935), “there had to be a pure and spotless being capable of receiving the divine element, a feminine principle enlightened by grace.” As one of the Greek Orthodox faith he sees this being in Mary, the Mother of God. Her fiat was “the answering love of man to the infinite divine love.”

Modern man finds it difficult to absorb such thoughts, for he has torn off the veil of faith. He tries to deny the mystery of life and to ignore its transcendent reality. Woman is as much lost in the resultant chaos and anarchy as man. She has given up her birthright, as it were, by discarding the veil, by forcing her way from the depth of life to the foreground of life. In this light we can well understand how the symbol of the veil became a pivotal element in Gertrud von le Fort’s thinking. It is an eminently feminine symbol which indicates that woman is inaccessible in her innermost being when she becomes the mother of life, and birth is born out of her depth, in silence and solitude. “The unveiling of woman,” says Gertrud von le Fort, “always means the breakdown of her mystery.” And she quotes the words of another great contemporary poet of Germany, Ruth Schaumann: “It is always the mystery which bears fruit while what is patent, and revealed, is an end.”

On woman, then, centers the dominant issue of human history. Pride or surrender is the tremendous alternative. Clearly the struggle is not only one of our day, for the present is but a mirror of the past. There is an almost straight line linking up the naturalistic and pragmatist philosophies which have weakened man’s metaphysical outlook on life. The “age of reason” has led to an age of chaos. The schools of thought which made all values relative, or strictly secular and profane, developed of necessity an anarchic individualism which became the forerunner of modern paganism. Because it had become spiritually hollow and indifferent, the modern world apostatized morally and intellectually. Amidst carnivals of despair man set up new idols, built in new Towers of Babel, only to find himself lost in the mad whirl of demonic forces which nowadays has assumed gigantic proportions. 

Amidst this pitched battle between darkness and light it is woman’s specific calling to restore the right balance which is a prerequisite of all stability. “Women,” said Archbishop Richard J. Cushing of Boston in a recent address, “must restore to political and professional life the emphasis on the spiritual, an emphasis now so sadly lacking; we rely on them to help win the spiritual battle against the evils of secularism.” Dare we hope that in an age which cheapens womanhood by primitive and inanely vulgar displays, such higher ideals will prevail? Has the trend run its course which started from the pretense that woman could make her best contribution toward human progress by being “equal” to man, rather than being herself? If woman, both physically and spiritually, fails to exercise her specific function as mother of life, mankind faces a vacuum where her mystery ought to bear fruit. In the midst of anarchy and despair the right balance must be restored between the masculine and the feminine forces, and woman must assert her influence as a woman, by means of her healing, womanly power, to restore order to a derelict human race. This book is an invaluable contribution toward that end.

Max Jordan, Preface p. vi-x. In The Eternal Woman by Gertrud von le Fort (1954)

Astell - Edith Stein & Gertrud von Le Fort on Mary's Embodiment of Womanhood

 

The Virgin Mary in Stein’s Writings on Woman before 1933

. . .

[I]f we survey references to Mary in Stein’s lectures on woman and to women, chronologically arranged, we observe a gradual shift from glancing to Mary as an objective, ideal model for virtuous imitation, to a call for consecration to Mary and innermost identification with Mary. The shift, one may say, is from a woman’s desiring to be like Mary, to a daring desire to participate somehow in Mary’s own being, to be and to become Mary for God and others, to take Mary as a personal symbol. Indeed, individual expressions found in Stein’s later writings—those composed between 1931 and 1933—closely resemble those found in [Gertrud von] Le Fort’s [The] Eternal Woman, published in 1933.

Discussing women’s call to “motherliness in national life” in a 1928 talk, for example, Stein warns: “motherliness must be that which does not remain within the narrow circle of blood relatives or personal friends; but in accordance with the model of the Mother of Mercy, it must have its root in universal divine love for all who are there, belabored and burdened.” Similarly, in “Ethos of Woman’s Professions” (1930), Stein points to Mary as a model mother for mothers, a model spouse for wives practicing domestic virtues, and a model of communal service for those in public life: “For example, Mary at the wedding in Cana in her quiet, observing look surveys everything and discovers what is lacking . . . Let her be the prototype of women in professional life.” Writing in that same year (1930) about fundamental principles of women’s education, Stein observes, “There is an ideal image of the gestalt of the feminine soul. The soul of the first woman was formed for this purpose, and so, too, was the soul of the Mother of God.” Her nature determined by her “original vocation of spouse and mother,” the ideal gestalt of a woman’s soul, according to Stein, is “expansive and open to all human beings; quiet . . . warm, clear, . . . self-contained, empty of self, mistress of itself,” like Mary’s own.

Stein saw the unfolding of this gestalt as the aim of an educational process especially suited to woman’s nature. In “Problems of Women’s Education” (1932) she insists: “Since Mary is the prototype of pure womanhood, the imitation of Mary must be the goal of girls’ education . . . The imitation of Mary includes the imitation of Christ, because Mary is the first Christian to follow Christ.” That same essay presents “the perfect ideal of woman” as virgin and mother as “exemplified by the Virgin Mother,” and heralds “this perfect ideal” as “the goal of the entire education of girls in a spiritual sense,” rendering girls inwardly free later to choose religious life, consecrated singleness, or marriage, in keeping with their personal vocations; free, too, to be truly maternal and fruitful in their virginity and singleness, and to be spiritually virginal as married women, achieving in either case a full realization of their womanly personhood. For Stein, a spiritual brideship belongs both to the fruitfulness of the virgin and to the “virginity” of the married woman, both of whom are called to an intimate union with Christ. Here, too, Mary is the model. In “Separate Vocations of Man and Woman” (1931), Stein points to the unparalleled closeness between Mary and her Son Jesus: “He formed her so closely after His own image as no other human being before or after; He gave her a place in the Church for all eternity such as has been given to no other human being. And just so, He has called women in all times to the most intimate union with Him.”

Mary’s unique election and closeness to Christ imply and necessitate for other women a mysterious participation in Mary’s Christ-centered life that exceeds mere imitation of her observable attitudes and actions, her admired virtues. Stein’s later essays, therefore, take a turn toward Le Fort’s understanding of Mary as “Eternal Woman.” In “Spirituality of the Christian Woman” (1932), Stein writes, for example: “Woman’s destiny stems from eternity. She must be mindful of eternity to define her vocation in the world. If she complies with her vocation, she achieves her destiny in eternal life.” Stein continues: “Every woman who wants to fulfill her destiny must look to Mary as ideal . . . Every woman has something in herself inherited from Eve, and she must search for the way from Eve to Mary.” Riveted by the discovery of a special two-in-oneness between Mary and every woman—a two-in-oneness beautifully apparent in holy women—Stein speaks in “The Church, Woman, and Youth” (1932) of “a collaboration of Mary with every woman wherever that woman is fulfilling her vocation as woman.”

By 1932, Stein had become convinced that traditional Marian devotions—e.g., May Crownings, occasional pilgrimages to Marian shrines, popular hymns, the public recitation of the rosary—are insufficient, in and of themselves, as supports for the women of her day, who need the strength of a deep, constant, lived relationship with Mary. The dogmatic bases for the Marian devotions need to be “set much more forcefully,” Stein urges, so that a genuinely devout life and striving for holiness finds nourishment in them: “Only the one who believes in the unlimited power of the Help of Christians will surrender to her protection, not only in communal repetitive prayer but in an act of surrender; and Mary will protect whoever stays in her care.” In that same talk, given at Augsburg in 1932, Stein asserts:

Those women who want to fulfill their feminine vocations in one of several ways will most surely succeed in their goals if they not only keep the ideal of the Virgo-Mater before their eyes and strive to form themselves according to her image, but if they also entrust themselves to her guidance and place themselves completely under her care. She can form in her own image those who belong to her.”

Eternity and Surrender: Mary and Le Fort’s Symbolic Women

Edith Stein’s vocabulary of eternity, destiny, vocation, and surrender in 1931 and 1932 presages Le Fort’s The Eternal Woman (1933), but it may also echo Le Fort’s The Veil of Veronica (Das Schweisstuch der Veronika), an autobiographical novel first published in 1928. Stein’s earliest extant letter to Le Fort, dated October 9, 1933, reveals her familiarity with that novel of religious conversion. Comparing her own mother to Veronica’s strong-willed grandmother in the novel, Stein implicitly likens her own conversion at once to Veronica’s and to Le Fort’s. In that first novel of Le Fort’s, the girl Veronica responds to the gift of grace with an act of total surrender to God, whereas her aunt Edelgart, likewise graced in her youth, stops short of a complete self-giving to God and long endures the disfiguring inner torment that results from that refusal, until she too, finally, surrenders and comes to peace.

Commenting upon Le Fort’s characteristic vocabulary of eternity and surrender, Sr. Laetifera Colet, SSpS, explains, “By the eternal, [Le Fort] refers not merely to the timeless and the absolute, but more specifically to the infinite dimensions of the mind and will of God.” In choosing the word “surrender,” instead of “the more positive words, devotion or self-giving, or the more negative ones, resignation or submission,” Le Fort evokes the paradox of surrender as “at once a yielding and a conquest, weakness and power, annihilation and creativity, anonymity and openness, captivity and freedom, death and life.” In Le Fort’s theological novels, “[human] fulfillment or frustration is in direct proportion to [each one’s] capacity to surrender to the divine will”—a mysterious capacity that Le Fort associates with “the mystery of woman.” “Wherever woman is most profoundly herself,” writes Le Fort, “she is so not as herself but as surrendered, and wherever she is surrendered, there she is also bride and mother.”

Finding the full meaning of her existence in her surrender to the will of God, woman—as Le Fort envisions her—is inherently “symbolic,” the sacramental sign of the divine presence to which she is related, whether through obedience or disobedience. Called to surrender, empirical woman remains a symbol of that surrender, “even when the individual no longer recognizes [the] meaning [of her symbol], or when [she] has gone so far as even to reject or deny [it].” As Le Fort explains in the introduction to The Eternal Woman, “This book is an attempt to interpret the significance of woman not in the light of her psychological or biological, her historical or social position, but under her symbolic aspect.”

. . .

For this symbolic womanhood, the symbol of symbols can only be Mary, whom Le Fort names “the Eternal Woman.” Assumed into heaven body and soul, Mary enjoys eternal life in a completely human and womanly manner different from that of the separated souls of the faithful departed. Le Fort does not refer primarily to this Marian privilege, however, in calling her “the Eternal Woman.” Rather, Le Fort sees Mary’s eternal status in her perfect conformity to the divine wish and will, in her fiat to the Incarnation and to each and every detail in God’s providential plan for her life and the life of her Son, including his death at Calvary, “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23).[31] Sinless, free in her yes to God and free from any egotistic rebellion, Mary shares in God’s own eternity through the constancy of her surrender to him. While every human—man and woman—is called to this holiness, Mary alone—Mary the woman at Christ’s side (cf. John 2:4; 19:26), Mary the New Eve and Mother of all the living, Mary the Immaculate Conception, Mary the Mother of God—has realized this call in a perfect way, through every earthly trial foreseen for her, through her faithful surrender to God grounding each of her actions, all of her suffering, each of her joys.

From 'The Virgin Mary as “Eternal Woman”' by Ann Astell, Church Life Journal December 10, 2018

Ratzinger - Women in the OT Central to Spousal Theology of Christianity

If one begins by reading backwards or, more precisely, from the end to the beginning, it becomes obvious that the image of Mary in the New Testament is woven entirely of Old Testament threads. . . . .

In the history of the patriarchs, Sarah-Hagar, Rachel-Leah, and Hannah-Penina are those pairs of women in whom the extraordinary element in the path of the promises stands out. In each case the fertile and the infertile stand opposite each other, and in the process a remarkable reversal in values is reached. In archaic modes of thought, fertility is a blessing, infertility is a curse. Yet here all is reversed: the infertile one ultimately turns out to be the truly blessed, while the fertile one recedes into the ordinary or even has to struggle against the curse of repudiation, of being unloved. The theological implication of this overthrow of values becomes clear only gradually; from it Paul developed his theology of spiritual birth: the true son of Abraham is not the one who traces his physical origin to him, but the one who, in a new way beyond mere physical birth, has been conceived through the creative power of God’s word of promise. Physical life as such is not really wealth; this promise, which endures beyond life, is what first makes life fully itself (cf. Rom 4; Gal 3:1-14; 4:21-31). 

At an earlier stage of the Old Testament’s evolution, a theology of grace was developed from this reversal of values in the song of Hannah, which is echoed in Mary’s Magnificat: the Lord raises the humble from the dust, he lifts the poor from the ashes (1 Sam 2:8). God bends down to the humble, the powerless, the rejected, and in this condescension the love of God, which truly saves, shines forth both for Hannah and for Mary, in the remarkable phenomenon of unblessed-blessed women. The mystery of the last place (Lk 14:10), the exchange between the first and the last place (Mk 10:31), the reversal of values in the Sermon on the Mount, the reversal of earthly values founded upon hybris, all of this is intimated. Here also the theology of virginity finds its first, still hidden formulation: earthly infertility becomes true fertility. . . . 

Near the end of the Old Testament canon, in its late writings, a new and, again, entirely original type of theology of woman is developed. 

The great salvific figures of Esther and Judith appear, taking up again the most ancient tradition as it was embodied, for example, in the figure of the judge Deborah. Both women have an essential characteristic in common with the great mothers: one is a widow, the other is a harem-wife at the Persian court, and thus both find themselves—in different ways—in an oppressed state. Both embody the defeated Israel: Israel who has become a widow and wastes away in sorrow, Israel who has been abducted and dishonored among the nations, enslaved within their arbitrary desires. Yet both personify at the same time Israel’s unconquered spiritual strength, which cannot boast as do the worldly powers and for that very reason knows how to scorn and overcome the mighty. The woman as savior, the embodiment of Israel’s hope, thereby takes her place alongside the unblessed-blessed mothers. It is significant that the woman always figures in Israel’s thought and belief, not as a priestess, but as prophetess and judge-savior. What is specifically hers, the place assigned to her, emerges from this. The essence of what has previously been seen is repeated and strengthened: the infertile one, the powerless one becomes the savior because it is there that the locus for the revelation of God’s power is found. After every fall into sin, the woman remains “mother of life”. 

In the theological short-story type of the woman-savior, one finds already presupposed and newly expressed what the prophetic preaching had developed with theological profundity from the image of the great maternal women and what is considered to be the proper center of the Old Testament’s theology of woman: Israel herself, the chosen people, is interpreted simultaneously as woman, virgin, beloved, wife and mother. The great women of Israel represent what this people itself is. The history of these women becomes the theology of God’s people and, at the same time, the theology of the covenant. By making the category of covenant comprehensible and by giving it meaning and spiritual orientation, the figure of the woman enters into the most intimate reaches of Old Testament piety, of the Old Testament relationship with God. Probably the notion of covenant was at first largely patterned after the model of ancient Eastern vassal indentures, in which the sovereign king assigns rights and duties. This political and legal notion of the covenant, however, is continually deepened and surpassed in the theology of the prophets: the covenant relation of Yahweh to Israel is a covenant of marital love, which—as in Hosea’s magnificent vision—moves and stirs Yahweh himself to his heart. He has loved the young maiden Israel with a love that has proved to be indestructible, eternal. He can be angry with the wife of his youth on account of her adultery. He can punish her, but all this is simultaneously directed against himself and pains him, the lover, whose “bowels churn”. He cannot repudiate her without rendering judgment against himself. It is on this, on his personal, innermost bewilderment as lover, that the covenant’s eternal and irrevocable character is based. 

How could I betray you, Ephraim, or hand you over, Israel. . .? My heart turns against me, my mercy catches fire all at once. I do not act according to the fire of my anger, I no longer annihilate Ephraim, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst. I do not come to destroy all in flames (Hos 11:8 f).

God’s divinity is no longer revealed in his ability to punish but in the indestructibility and constancy of his love. 

This means that the relationship between God and Israel includes not only God but also Israel as woman, who in this relationship with God is at once virgin and mother. For this reason the covenant, which forms the very basis of the existence of Israel as a nation and the existence of each individual as Israelite, is expressed interpersonally in the fidelity of the marriage covenant and in no other way. Marriage is the form of the mutual relationship between husband and wife that results from the covenant, the fundamental human relationship upon which all human history is based. It bears a theology within itself, and indeed it is possible and intelligible only theologically. But above all, this also means that to God, the One, is joined, not a goddess, but, as in his historical revelation, the chosen creature, Israel, the daughter Zion, the woman. To leave woman out of the whole of theology would be to deny creation and election (salvation history) and thereby to nullify revelation. In the women of Israel, the mothers and the saviors, in their fruitful infertility is expressed most purely and most profoundly what creation is and what election is, what “Israel” is as God’s people. And because election and revelation are one, what ultimately becomes apparent in this for the first time is who and what God is. 

Of course this line of development in the Old Testament remains just as incomplete and open as all the other lines of the Old Testament. It acquires its definitive meaning for the first time in the New Testament: in the woman who is herself described as the true holy remnant, as the authentic daughter Zion, and who is thereby the mother of the savior, yes, the mother of God. In passing, one might mention that the acceptance of the Canticle of Canticles into the canon of Scripture would have been impossible if this theology of love and woman had not existed. The Canticle is certainly, on technical grounds, a collection of profane love songs with a heavily erotic coloring. But once the songs have entered the canon, they serve as an expression of God’s dialogue with Israel, and to that extent such an interpretation of them is anything but mere allegory.

Thus we can now say the figure of the woman is indispensable for the structure of biblical faith. She expresses the reality of creation as well as the fruitfulness of grace. The abstract outlines for the hope that God will turn toward his people receive, in the New Testament, a concrete, personal name in the figure of Jesus Christ. At that same moment, the figure of the woman, until then seen only typologically in Israel although provisionally personified by the great women of Israel, also emerges with a name: Mary. She emerges as the personal epitome of the feminine principle in such a way that the principle is true only in the person, but the person as an individual always points beyond herself to the all-embracing reality, which she bears and represents. To deny or reject the feminine aspect in belief, or, more concretely, the Marian aspect, leads finally to the negation of creation and the invalidation of grace. It leads to a picture of God’s omnipotence that reduces the creature to a mere masquerade and that also completely fails to understand the God of the Bible, who is characterized as being the creator and the God of the covenant—the God for whom the beloved’s punishment and rejection themselves become the passion of love, the cross. Not without reason did the Church Fathers interpret the passion and cross as marriage, as that suffering in which God takes upon himself the pain of the faithless wife in order to draw her to himself irrevocably in eternal love.

Joseph Ratzinger, Daughter Zion p. 12-24

Chapp - The Message of the Gospel is "Come Out of Hell"

The blog post this was taken from was a defense of Hans Urs von Balthasar's teaching on hell, especially in Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved" (1988), against criticisms by Ralph Martin in A Church in Crisis (2020).

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So why this obsession with a densely populated Hell? The reasoning they employ is not complex and boils down to three assertions.  First, the charge is made that the soft universalism of so many in the modern Church has led to a diminishment in our fervor for evangelization.  Second, it is alleged that a great deal of the laxity one finds among Catholics themselves is also attributable to this alleged universalism.  As one very dear friend of mine who is a devout Catholic . . . put it to me: “if everyone goes to heaven anyway why should I bother to bust my chops to be morally good or to go to Church?” A third charge, more theologically sophisticated than the first two, claims that this soft universalism robs the Gospel of its dramatic, existential seriousness since it presents us with salvation as a fait accompli.  What all of these points have in common is their proposed solution: an evangelical style that once again places the threat of damnation front and center as the linchpin for any effective strategy for conversion.

But are any of these assertions true? Is it really true that the desire to avoid Hell is the primary motivation behind the desire to convert to the faith or to embrace it with more vigor? And is it really true as well that the primary motivation for wanting to bring people to Christ is to make sure that they avoid Hell? My answer might shock you because my answer to those two questions is yes.  But I do not mean by that answer the same thing [some] mean and my answer thus comes with one important caveat:  Heaven and Hell are not “places” where I might end up “in the future after I die” depending on whether or not I checked the right box on the religion survey, but present realities in the here and now.  They are spiritual conditions of the soul which every human being has intimations of and which give us a participatory foretaste of eschatological realities.  Sin is the dis-integrative power of dissipation and entropy, the power which grips us like a vice even as it rips us apart from within.  It alienates and annihilates and is the source of our deepest existential anxieties and creates our deepest miseries in life.  It is the libido dominandi that lives in us all and which creates the despair within us where, try as I might, I cannot escape the furies of my own decrepit soul and the self-inflicted horrors of my incessantly compromised choices.

We can experience a foretaste of Heaven in this life as well in all of the various joys that come our way through our participation in all that is true and good and beautiful.  We naturally desire all of these things and move toward them to the extent that we see them properly, and in their proper hierarchy, and with a sincere hope that they will bring us happiness, which is, as Aquinas noted, what we all most deeply want. But these joys are often lost due to our ignorance of what is truly good and of our disordered desire to sacrifice higher goods to lower goods, which is the very essence of sin and its idolatries which is why only an affirmation of the true God as the highest Good can save us from these counterfeit substitutes.  But the joys of this life also run up against the ultimate barrier: death.  Which is why in this life even our deepest joy will be tainted with the patina of the loss of everything in the final dissolution of all things in death.  It is the blunt and brutal reality of death that hollows out our experience of the good from within our terror—a hollowing out that empties the good of its goodness and leaves us with the haunting suspicion that there is no deeper good at all, but merely passing pleasures. This is why Saint Paul referred to death as Satan’s sting and the greatest generator of sin since the realization of our terminal finality is what robs us of the motivation to seek the higher goods and the greater joys they bring since death seems to call the reality of those higher goods into question.  The higher goods and the deeper happiness are hard to achieve and require a death to the libido dominandi which alone appears “real” to us. Sin thus whispers in our ear, “it is all a sham and there is no God so live within the shallow waters of proximate procurements.”

This is why Christianity burst upon the ancient world with an explosive and liberating force. It was presented as the “euangelion” (good news!) which was a Greek term used by imperial Rome to announce a great victory for the Empire but redeployed by Christians to announce an even greater victory accomplished by one greater than Caesar.  It was presented as a liberation from the oppressive spiritual principalities and powers that capriciously and arbitrarily ruled this world through death and force and coercion.  The message was not “believe this or you will go to Hell” but rather “believe this and you will come out of Hell.”  The greatest evangelist the Church has ever seen, Saint Paul, rarely spoke of the eternal torments of Hell that awaited those who rejected his message of the crucified and risen Christ. Such talk is foreign to his manner of approach. Instead he preached the risen Christ as the conqueror of death and sin and thus as the great liberator from our chains of bondage to the regime of decay. What he preached was that the Hell in which they were living was not their truest destiny and that the higher spiritual goods were now eminently attainable in the new Kingdom of life and grace.  In other words, Paul preached a message that emphasized that the new Christian ordo was an ordo of eschatological rupture with the worldly world and the breaking in to this world of a supernatural light that had the power to transform everything from within as it healed the broken bonds of our fractured and despairing souls.

. . .

My point in all of this is that it is precisely this experience of integrative liberation that should be the prime mover of our evangelizing, as it was with St. Paul.  In my 25 years of teaching theology, in both high school and university, I never once walked into a classroom thinking to myself, “these kids are sinners in the hands of an angry God and are in danger of suffering eternal torments in Hell and so I must save them from God’s just wrath.”  Rather, I said to myself, “I am in possession of a great treasure, the truest Beauty, and the most liberating narrative the world has ever known or will know, and I want to release these students from their bondage to the honey laced arsenic of our culture and to show them the only path to the deepest happiness.” And, to toot my own horn, I was damn good at it.  And I don’t mention this to build myself up but to point out that this message still works, as it did in the days of St. Paul, and that some kind of reversion to a hyper Tridentine emphasis on mortal sins, Hell, damnation, and the superficial “litmus test” orthodoxy of pinched-up neo-scholastic inquisitors, is not only a recipe for pastoral disaster, but is also deeply contrary to the Gospel Paul preached. Indeed, it is an anti-Gospel of pharisaical anxiety wrapped up in the laced surplices of sanctimonious sadists.

It is both instructive and ironic, is it not, that one of the greatest evangelists of our time, Bishop Robert Barron, is also a man who shares the real hope that all will someday be saved, and who teaches what the Church teaches with regard to the possibility of salvation outside of the visible confines of the Church.  This gives the lie to the notion that one will not be properly motivated to evangelize unless one first believes in some version of the massa damnata.  It is my contention that the infernalists who get so hypoxic over his approach are not so much afraid that his evangelizing style won’t work, but precisely because it does. Because his success invalidates their thesis that a Church that does not step forward with its eternal damnation foot first is a Church of relativists and indifferentists.  Likewise with Balthasar whose views on Hell do not seem to have robbed him of his fervor and who spent his entire life explicating the Gospel in profound ways.  One would think, in other words, that if  Martin's thesis is true—namely, that only a message that most will be eternally damned will motivate us to evangelize—that Barron would close up shop over at Word on Fire and Balthasar would never have written a word, and both would have retired to life on a tropical island in order to sip relativist Pina Coladas on the beach of indifference.

. . .

As I said, I too believe that we must appeal to a message of liberation from the bondage of the Hell that is within us all, but that is far different from a message of a not so latent “insiders versus outsiders” logic where the insiders have the proper union card and the outsiders don’t.  Of course, I am not denying that the Church provides us with all the means of salvation and that, therefore, faithful inclusion in her life does afford us great treasures of grace.  Because it does.  But don’t tell me that there isn’t a strong element of a very superficial understanding of what it means to be “saved” and “unsaved” in their thinking. There is a strong forensic tone to it all and a strong tone deafness to the movement of the Holy Spirit outside of the visible structures of the Church. The Church is necessary for salvation insofar as she is the conduit of those graces of the Spirit. But the vocation of the Christian is not to draw neat lines in the sand between the saved and the unsaved, but to offer up their prayers, supplications, penances, and sufferings in solidarity with those still awaiting liberation from bondage.

The fact of the matter is that Martin and other like-minded traditionalists get something very wrong. Namely, that the indifferentism and lukewarm laxity that afflicts the modern Church has been primarily caused by a loss of belief in the reality of eternal damnation for most. In reality, the laxity in the modern Church has not arisen from a lack of faith in the eternal horrors of Hell.  Rather, the laxity comes from a lack of faith in the existential reality of Heaven. In fact, it comes more specifically from a generalized lack of faith in the eschatological power of supernatural realities in the first place.  Because if people really and truly believed in the reality of our liberation from bondage and the joys of Heaven, and truly understood what these realities mean, then the very real possibility of eternal loss would be powerful and palpable.  Furthermore, if people had a deeper grasp in faith of what such liberation means then the question of why I should strive to be morally good even if all end up in Heaven someday answers itself.  We seek moral goodness because it is liberative and integrative.  It opens us to beauty and a holistic happiness. And the more we are on that path the more we begin to realize that Heaven isn’t a Disney World in the sky, or an undifferentiated “reward” for having been a “good person,” but is rather a nested hierarchy of souls that have differing capacities for love, and thus beatitude, depending on what one has done in this life. Jesus says that in his Father’s Kingdom there are “many mansions.”  I think this is what he meant.  Finally, none of this will come without purgation, in this life or the next.  And that purgation will be painful and difficult.  Even among those Catholics who feel confident of their ultimate salvation there is still a rigorous desire to do penances now, to lead a life of holiness now, precisely in order to avoid such purgations later.  Therefore, I do not need to believe that anyone is in Hell in order to desire the highest and most luxuriant of Heavenly mansions and to avoid the fiery cauldron of purgatory.

What all of this points toward is that our style of evangelizing needs to focus first and foremost on the true, the good, and the beautiful. It needs to build on our natural desire for happiness and our natural desire for the higher spiritual goods of life.  It needs to build on the natural thirst for Transcendence that all people feel.  And then it needs to show how Christ is the fulfillment of our deepest and most inchoate and hidden desires.  It needs to show how we do not even know what it is we should desire and that Christ points the way.  It needs to show that Christ has overcome the tribulations of this world and is the only person who holds the key to unlocking our chains.  It needs to foreground the positive aspects of the Gospel message as our liberation from the bondage of sin and death in the eschatological present.  Only then can it speak of the real possibility of an eternal loss because only then will people truly appreciate what is at stake.

But by all means … continue on with the eschatological census taking.  I hope one of those so engaged will apprise me of what they find. Because so far nobody has ever really figured it out. Not even the saints. Perhaps, most especially the saints.

From Universalism, Balthasar, the Massa Damnata, and the Question of Evangelization by Larry Chapp

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch. 9 (Pt. 2) - The Desire to be Famous in Heaven; Nature of Art

We were standing close to some bushes and beyond them I saw one of the Solid People and a Ghost who had apparently just that moment met. The outlines of the Ghost looked vaguely familiar, but I soon realized that what I had seen on earth was not the man himself but photographs of him in the papers. He had been a famous artist.

‘God!’ said the Ghost, glancing round the landscape.

‘God what?’ asked the Spirit.

‘What do you mean, “God what”?’ asked the Ghost.

‘In our grammar God is a noun.’

‘Oh—I see. I only meant “By Gum” or something of the sort. I meant . . . well, all this. It’s . . . it’s . . . I should like to paint this.’

‘I shouldn’t bother about that just at present if I were you.’

‘Look here; isn’t one going to be allowed to go on painting?’

‘Looking comes first.’

‘But I’ve had my look. I’ve seen just what I want to do. God!—I wish I’d thought of bringing my things with me!’

The Spirit shook his head, scattering light from his hair as he did so. ‘That sort of thing’s no good here,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ said the Ghost.

‘When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact we see it better than you do.’

‘Then there’s never going to be any point in painting here?’

‘I don’t say that. When you’ve grown into a Person (it’s all right, we all had to do it) there’ll be some things which you’ll see better than anyone else. One of the things you’ll want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At [74]present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed.’

There was a little pause. ‘That will be delightful,’ said the Ghost presently in a rather dull voice.

‘Come, then,’ said the Spirit, offering it his arm.

‘How soon do you think I could begin painting?’ it asked.

The Spirit broke into laughter. ‘Don’t you see you’ll never paint at all if that’s what you’re thinking about?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked the Ghost.

‘Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country.’

‘But that’s just how a real artist is interested in the country.’

‘No. You’re forgetting,’ said the Spirit. ‘That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.’

‘Oh, that’s ages ago,’ said the Ghost. ‘One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.’

‘One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.’

‘I don’t think I’m much troubled in that way,’ said the Ghost stiffly.

‘That’s excellent,’ said the Spirit. ‘Not many of us had quite got over it when we first arrived. But if there is any of that inflammation left it will be cured when you come to the fountain.’

‘What fountain’s that?’

‘It is up there in the mountains,’ said the Spirit. ‘Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else’s: without pride and without modesty.’

‘That’ll be grand,’ said the Ghost without enthusiasm.

‘Well, come,’ said the Spirit: and for a few paces he supported the hobbling shadow forward to the East.

‘Of course,’ said the Ghost, as if speaking to itself, ‘there’ll always be interesting people to meet. . . .’

‘Everyone will be interesting.’

‘Oh—ah—yes, to be sure. I was thinking of people in our own line. Shall I meet Claude? Or Cézanne? Or——.’

‘Sooner or later—if they’re here.’

‘But don’t you know?’

‘Well, of course not. I’ve only been here a few years. All the chances are against my having run across them . . . there are a good many of us, you know.’

‘But surely in the case of distinguished people, you’d hear?’

‘But they aren’t distinguished—no more than anyone else. Don’t you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.’

‘Do you mean there are no famous men?’

‘They are all famous. They are all known, remembered, recognised by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgement.’

‘Oh, of course, in that sense. . . .’ said the Ghost.

‘Don’t stop,’ said the Spirit, making to lead him still forward.

‘One must be content with one’s reputation among posterity, then,’ said the Ghost.

‘My friend,’ said the Spirit. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘Know what?’

‘That you and I are already completely forgotten on the Earth?’

‘Eh? What’s that?’ exclaimed the Ghost, disengaging its arm. ‘Do you mean those damned Neo-Regionalists have won after all?’

‘Lord love you, yes!’ said the Spirit, once more shaking and shining with laughter. ‘You couldn’t get five pounds for any picture of mine or even of yours in Europe or America to-day. We’re dead out of fashion.’

‘I must be off at once,’ said the Ghost. ‘Let me go! Damn it all, one has one’s duty to the future of Art. I must go back to my friends. I must write an article. There must be a manifesto. We must start a periodical. We must have publicity. Let me go. This is beyond a joke!’

And without listening to the Spirit’s reply, the spectre vanished.

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch. 9 (Pt. 1) - The Teacher Explains Heaven and Hell

‘But I don’t understand. Is judgement not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?’

‘It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. . . .  ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.’

I suppose he saw that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.

‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven”, and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.’

‘Is not that very hard, Sir?’

‘I mean, that is the real sense of what they will say. In the actual language of the Lost, the words will be different, no doubt. One will say he has always served his country right or wrong; and another that he has sacrificed everything to his Art; and some that they’ve never been taken in, and some that, thank God, they’ve always looked after Number One, and nearly all, that, at least they’ve been true to themselves.’

‘And the Saved?’

‘Ah, the Saved . . . what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.’

‘Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?’

‘Hush,’ said he sternly. ‘Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.’

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch. 8 - Fear of Exposure ("Nakedness") Prevents Progress

 A Ghost hobbled across the clearing—as quickly as it could on that uneasy soil—looking over its shoulder as if it were pursued. I saw that it had been a woman: a well-dressed woman, I thought, but its shadows of finery looked ghastly in the morning light. It was making for the bushes. It could not really get in among them—the twigs and leaves were too hard—but it pressed as close up against them as it could. It seemed to believe it was hiding.

A moment later I heard the sound of feet, and one of the Bright People came in sight: one always noticed that sound there, for we Ghosts made no noise when we walked.

‘Go away!’ squealed the Ghost. ‘Go away! Can’t you see I want to be alone?’

‘But you need help,’ said the Solid One.

‘If you have the least trace of decent feeling left,’ said the Ghost, ‘you’ll keep away. I don’t want help. I want to be left alone. Do go away. You know I can’t walk fast enough on those horrible spikes to get away from you. It’s abominable of you to take advantage.’

‘Oh, that!’ said the Spirit. ‘That’ll soon come right. But you’re going in the wrong direction. It’s back there—to the mountains—you need to go. You can lean on me all the way. I can’t absolutely carry you, but you need have almost no weight on your own feet: and it will hurt less at every step.’

‘I’m not afraid of being hurt. You know that.’

‘Then what is the matter?’

‘Can’t you understand anything? Do you really suppose I’m going out there among all those people, like this?’

‘But why not?’

‘I’d never have come at all if I’d known you were all going to be dressed like that.’

‘Friend, you see I’m not dressed at all.’

‘I didn’t mean that. Do go away.’

‘But can’t you even tell me?’

‘If you can’t understand, there’d be no good trying to explain it. How can I go out like this among a lot of people with real solid bodies? It’s far worse than going out with nothing on would have been on earth. Have everyone staring through me.’

‘Oh, I see. But we were all a bit ghostly when we first arrived, you know. That’ll wear off. Just come out and try.’

‘But they’ll see me.’

‘What does it matter if they do?’

‘I’d rather die.’

‘But you’ve died already. There’s no good trying to go back to that.’

The Ghost made a sound something between a sob and a snarl. ‘I wish I’d never been born,’ it said. ‘What are we born for?’

‘For infinite happiness,’ said the Spirit. ‘You can step out into it at any moment. . . .’

‘But, I tell you, they’ll see me.’

‘An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.’

‘You really mean? . . .’ said the Ghost, and then paused. My suspense was strained up to the height. I felt that my own destiny hung on her reply. I could have fallen at her feet and begged her to yield.

‘Yes,’ said the Spirit. ‘Come and try.’

Almost, I thought the Ghost had obeyed. Certainly it had moved: but suddenly it cried out, ‘No, I can’t. I tell you I can’t. For a moment, while you were talking, I almost thought . . . but when it comes to the point. . . . You’ve no right to ask me to do a thing like that. It’s disgusting. I should never forgive myself if I did. Never, never. And it’s not fair. They ought to have warned us. I’d never have come. And now—please, please go away!’

‘Friend,’ said the Spirit. ‘Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?’

‘I’ve already given you my answer,’ said the Ghost, coldly but still tearful.

‘Then only one expedient remains,’ said the Spirit, and to my great surprise he set a horn to his lips and blew. I put my hands over my ears. The earth seemed to shake: the whole wood trembled and dindled at the sound. I suppose there must have been a pause after that (though there seemed to be none) before I heard the thudding of hoofs—far off at first, but already nearer before I had well identified it, and soon so near that I began to look about for some place of safety. Before I had found one the danger was all about us. A herd of unicorns came thundering through the glades: twenty-seven hands high the smallest of them and white as swans but for the red gleam in eyes and nostrils and the flashing indigo of their horns. I can still remember the squelching noise of the soft wet turf under their hoofs, the breaking of the undergrowth, the snorting and the whinneyings; how their hind legs went up and their horned heads down in mimic battle. Even then I wondered for what real battle it might be the rehearsal. I heard the Ghost scream, and I think it made a bolt away from the bushes . . . perhaps towards the Spirit, but I don’t know. For my own nerve failed and I fled, not heeding, for the moment, the horrible going underfoot, and not once daring to pause. So I never saw the end of that interview.

[Explanation of the above from Ch. 9: This put me in mind to ask my Teacher what he thought of the affair with the Unicorns. ‘It will maybe have succeeded,’ he said. ‘Ye will have divined that he meant to frighten her; not that fear itself could make her less a Ghost, but if it took her mind a moment off herself, there might, in that moment, be a chance. I have seen them saved so.’]

Lewis - The Great Divorce Ch.3 - Visitors Arrive; Ghosts and Bright People; Grass You Can't Pick

 I got out. The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got ‘out’ in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard.

At first, of course, my attention was caught by my fellow-passengers, who were still grouped about in the neighbourhood of the omnibus, though beginning, some of them, to walk forward into the landscape with hesitating steps. I gasped when I saw them. Now that they were in the light, they were transparent—fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.

Then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn’t break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond. There was a leaf—a young tender beech-leaf, lying in the grass beside it. I tried to pick the leaf up: my heart almost cracked with the effort, and I believe I did just raise it. But I had to let it go at once; it was heavier than a sack of coal. As I stood, recovering my breath [28]with great gasps and looking down at the daisy, I noticed that I could see the grass not only between my feet but through them. I also was a phantom. Who will give me words to express the terror of that discovery? ‘Golly!’ thought I, ‘I’m in for it this time.’

. . . 

[T]he solitude was so vast that I could hardly notice the knot of phantoms in the foreground. Greenness and light had almost swallowed them up. But very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains. Sometimes I could make out in it steep forests, far-withdrawing valleys, and even mountain cities perched on inaccessible summits. At other times it became indistinct. The height was so enormous that my waking sight could not have taken in such an object at all. Light brooded on the top of it: slanting down thence it made long shadows behind every tree on the plain. There was no change and no progression as the hours passed. The promise—or the threat—of sunrise rested immovably up there.

Long after that I saw people coming to meet us. Because they were bright I saw them while they were still very distant, and at first I did not know that they were people at all. Mile after mile they drew nearer. The earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew. Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh. Some were bearded but no one in that company struck me as being of any particular age. One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless—heavy thought, in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that. They came on steadily. I did not entirely like it. Two of the ghosts screamed and ran for the bus. The rest of us huddled closer to one another.