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.”
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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