. . .
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)