November 2022 Print

Gertrude Von le Fort’s Metaphysical Response to Modern Godlessness

By Isabella Childs

Few years have seen such monumental events as the years spanning the lifetime of twentieth-century German Catholic writer, Baroness Gertrud von le Fort, who lived from 1876 to 1971. During Von le Fort’s lifetime, Germany saw the rise of the German Empire, the fall of the German Empire, World War I and devastating defeat, the authoritarian socialist rule of Hitler, World War II and devastating defeat, and the Russian Communist rule of East Germany. Worldwide violence and fear marked Von le Fort’s adult life, during which technological and political changes and devastating bloodshed outpaced the early twentieth century’s fanciful faith in humanity and hope in progress.

Von le Fort’s response to all this global upheaval was conversion. Born into a Protestant aristocratic family in Minden, Westphalia, to Prussian officer Baron Lothar von le Fort and Elsbeth von le Fort, Von le Fort enjoyed a happy childhood and a rigorous education with private tutoring and education at Hildesheim Girls’ College. She made the choice, unusual for women in her time, to pursue advanced studies in history and philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Marburg. Von le Fort spent time in Italy, gaining an appreciation for the Catholic Faith. She met Edith Stein, the influential German philosopher and convert from Judaism, who eventually became a discalced Carmelite and died at Auschwitz. In 1926, at the age of fifty, Von le Fort entered the Church. Her poetry collection, Hymns to the Church, voices the exchange between her soul and the Creator, in mystic verse comparable to that of St. John of the Cross.

Von le Fort wrote over twenty books, containing poems, short stories, and novels, but the essence of Von le Fort’s philosophical thought and her answer to the political and spiritual turmoil of her time is contained in her influential book, The Eternal Woman (1934). Many have philosophized on the problems of the day and their solutions. The secular world attempts to attribute spiritual and moral suffering to a failed economic system, as Communism did in Von le Fort’s day, or a lack of equality and freedom of expression, as in our day. Von le Fort’s vision is deeper. She sees a world that has forgotten the meaning of sacrament, of symbol, forgotten the fundamental identity of the human being as creature. Woman, considered metaphysically, casts light upon this relationship of the creature to the Creator in a special way. When the face of the eternal reality of womanhood becomes visible, the identity of each human creature is also unveiled.

Woman as Symbol

Von le Fort’s Eternal Woman is not meant to be simply an examination of woman’s biological and psychological states, nor is it meant to be primarily a refutation of feminism gone wrong. “It is rather a matter of the cosmic, the metaphysical countenance of woman; of womanliness as a mystery, its religious rank, its archetype and ultimate image in God” (1-2). The metaphysical identity of woman is glimpsed in her willingness to surrender. In her surrender to man, in her submergence within the stream of generation, in her reverence for the natural order, and in her humility before God, woman is the bearer of the religious identity of the creature.

Von le Fort makes the profound observation that the human person only exists as “submerged in the presence of the timeless, the absolute; and thus absorbed… appears no longer as a value in itself, but as a thought or mirror of the eternal, as its symbol or vessel” (1). Whenever we human beings try to attribute the eternal directly to ourselves, we lose sight of our God-given value. Whenever we attempt to be greater than we actually are, independent of God, we degrade ourselves to a level below our nature. “Only an age profoundly bewildered or misled in its metaphysical instincts could attribute the idea of eternity, be it regarded as absolute value or absolute duration, to a creature, without becoming aware that the latter, instead of being exalted, is thereby instantly annihilated” (1).

A society obsessed only with the human personality, which is an individual and temporal reality, loses sight of the value of the person, who is eternal. In our day, this disordered philosophy has been taken to its extreme conclusion by those who imagine they can change their God-given personhoods based upon whims of personality. In her day, Von le Fort saw the annihilation of nations due to the annihilation of the person. Communism and Socialism, which promised the exaltation of the individual, the freeing of the individual from the cogs of industry, really annihilated the individual, both literally and metaphysically, because such atheistic ideology denies the value of the creature by denying the Creator. The value of the creature has its source in God alone.

Far from being a weakness, “surrender is the absolute power that the creature possesses” (14). Von le Fort imaginatively embodies this philosophical reality with the character Blanche de la Force in her 1931 novella, The Song at the Scaffold.

Blanche is an extremely timid girl by nature, born under traumatic circumstances—her mother goes into premature labor due to early uprisings of French peasants before the French Revolution and passes away shortly after delivering Blanche—and Blanche grows up with deep trauma already developed within her. Blanche enters the Carmelite convent in Compiègne, partly out of a desire to avoid the growing unrest of the burgeoning Revolution. The narrator, speaking to his friend, describes Blanche as the most unheroic heroine: “Blanche de la Force was the last on your list of heroines. And yet she was not a heroine in your sense of the word. She was not elected to demonstrate the nobility of mankind but rather to prove the infinite frailty of all our vaunted powers” (Song at the Scaffold, 14).

It is precisely in her fear, in her weakness, that Blanche is able to die a martyr’s death in the shadow of the guillotine. When the Carmelites are captured by the Revolutionaries, Blanche has fled the convent and gone over with revolutionary women. When Blanche sees her sisters ascending the scaffold singing, however, she timidly joins her voice to the nuns’ glorious Veni Creator. She is immediately trampled to death by mob women. The irony of Blanche’s name disappears, as her weakness really becomes a force. Blanche becomes a symbol of humanity; as the mother superior of the convent notes, Blanche seems to take on “all the fear in the world,” joining herself to Christ’s redemptive suffering (59).

Like the character of Blanche, woman reminds man that both are equals before God, both creatures endowed only with the power of surrender. Woman’s reverence before the divine reflects both the obedience of the universe to God’s will, “the bridal earth” (Eternal Woman, 6), as well as man’s receptivity to God’s creativity.

John Singer Sargent, The Acheson Sisters (1902).

Woman as Lived Reality in Time and Eternity

Does the power of surrender, seen most clearly in woman’s earthly existence, mean earthly powerlessness? Does becoming a mother and retiring to the background of social, political, and cultural life mean a loss of historical importance?

Von le Fort asks these questions, which many people before her asked, and which many continue to ask.

Von le Fort answers that woman may not be present in the historical moment, but her role of bearing children extends her influence far beyond the reach of the apparently more active man. As a physical and spiritual mother, the woman “conquers time… The timeless woman is she who has become engulfed in the stream of the generations; the maternal woman is she who has submerged herself in the child” (72).

Von le Fort believes that a single woman in the world may have a career externally identical to that of a man, but her motherhood will be inseparable from her more superficial identity and external pursuit. Motherhood can never become for woman the special assignment of a certain time; it is her task, simply and utterly” (67). Woman, as mother, is rooted in her identity as bride—virgin and mother—and in her care of generations, physical, cultural, and spiritual.

In a sense, the motherly woman stands for all of humanity in that she devotes herself in a special way to all that is weak and small. The virgin, who does not bear children in her body, “represents the inherent value of the person as independent of every achievement,” while the mother who retires to the background of society to raise her children “demonstrates the final value of her every gift, her every achievement, entirely independent of success or recognition” (33). There is always a temptation to base human worth on personality and external achievements instead of on the person as created by God in the divine image. Woman, in her apparent self-effacement, shows the triumph of the person over external validation.

In becoming a bride, woman finds herself and her charismatic achievement “along the path of Mary,” the path of cooperation (32). Though woman is often a cooperator with man, this is not a loss either for her or culture. “Upon the principle of their cooperation all life depends, and the field of their power ranges over all things, even over the domain of intellectual creation” (33). There would not be a Dante without a Beatrice, a Saint John of the Cross without a Saint Teresa, Von le Fort points out.

Woman’s cooperative existence represents “the dawn of the humility of the creature” (48). The union of man and woman mirrors the wholeness of the Cosmos, itself a reflection of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Woman reveals to man his identity as a cooperator with God. “In the cooperation of woman as the mate of his spirit, man experiences his own creativeness as a mere cooperation in the work of God who creates alone” (48).

The willingness to be blessed, to be fruitful, which the motherly woman lives out in a visible way, is the right attitude of every creature in the face of the Creator. “The passive acceptance inherent in woman, which ancient philosophy regarded as purely negative, appears in the Christian order of grace as the positively decisive factor” (4).

Gertrude von le Fort [www.gosc.pl/doc/3002212.Pisarka-milosci-nieodwolalnej].

Mary: Revelation of the Creature

Mary’s Fiat expresses “the mystery of Redemption in so far as it depends upon the creature” (4). The most a human being can contribute towards his salvation is surrender to God. Mary, in her act of surrender, reveals both essential womanliness and the religious quality of every human being.

Mary is the living archetype of the Eternal Woman, and also of all human creatures, surrendered to God. “Mary is therefore not only the object of religious veneration; but she herself is the religious quality by which honor is given to God; she is the power of surrender that is in the Cosmos in the form of the bridal woman. It is this that the Litany of Loreto means when, with the power of great poetry as well as great dogma, it invokes Mary as the Morning Star. The morning star rises in advance of the sun in order to lose itself therein, and the divine Son at Mary’s breast signifies, with regard to her, that within the radiance of the Child she herself is submerged” (4-5).

Mary’s exalted role as Dei Genitrix, comes from her profound surrender to God the Father. After giving birth to her divine Son, Mary effaced her own personality, as other mothers do, in the glorious person and mission of her Son. Von le Fort points out that even in Church history, Mary’s personality is entirely eclipsed by her Son. “Even in the dogma most intimately hers, [the dogma of the Council of Ephesus proclaiming Mary Mother of God,] Mary does not come into prominence for her own sake but for that of her Son” (5). Like the hidden aspect of all motherly women, like the spiritual value of the human person, Mary’s human likeness “rests veiled in the mystery of God” (5).

Von le Fort notices it is significant that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was the second to last Marian dogma to be proclaimed (in 1854.) Mary’s Immaculate Conception, both in its historical and metaphysical occurrences, precedes the Redemption of the world, yet it was only defined after the dogmas of the Divine Motherhood (Ephesus, 431) and Perpetual Virginity (Lateran, 649.) The Immaculate Conception reveals the countenance of the unfallen human creature and signifies the coming of the Redeemer.

Mary, the Immaculate Conception, the unfallen creature, proclaims both the first and final comings of the Savior. Von le Fort sees Mary as the Madonna of the Apocalypse. By Apocalypse, she means “the annunciation of a new heaven and a new earth” (15).

If the salvation of the apocalyptic world depends on the revelation of the Redeemer’s Mother with the advent of the Redeemer, the salvation of that world also depends in some measure on the revelation of true womanliness. Von le Forte sees the degeneracy of the modern world as caused in part by the selfish refusal of woman to surrender herself for the good of her fellow human beings. The selfish woman “dedicated only to the most miserable of all cults, that of her own body…has torn asunder the last bond of her metaphysical destiny” (12).

A woman who refuses to surrender, even in the physical sense, tears herself from the sacred mystery of her femininity. Contraception and abortion especially wreak havoc on the woman’s sense of her metaphysical destiny as mother, on the woman’s family, and on the world.

“Here it is no longer the inoffensively childlike face of feminine vanity that is looking at us; in its stead, ghostly and banal, a countenance emerges that denotes the complete opposite to the image of God: the faceless mask of womanhood. This, and not the face of the bolshevist proletarian disfigured by hunger and hatred, is the true expression of modern godlessness” (12). With these striking words, Von le Fort, who surely saw and experienced more clearly than most the horrible effects of Communism in her own country, dismisses the evil of Communism as almost superficial in comparison to the degeneration of true womanhood, womanhood that magnifies the Lord. Woman is meant to be a special emblem of surrender and love, of the creaturely Fiat, and when she fulfills this role, she is “the bearer of salvation,” reflecting Mary (13).

In this Marian age, the renewal of culture and faith in the world depends upon the renewal of the Marian spirit, embodied most clearly by all motherly women. “As the renewal of our culture depends on whether the other half of reality, the woman’s countenance, becomes visible again in the face of the creative man, so the true salvation of the world depends on whether Mary’s features grow visible also in his face” (110).

The mystery of the Eternal Woman, the Marian mystery, is the mystery of the created world and its redemption. “The Annunciation to Mary is a message to every creature, but to the creature as represented in Mary…Redemption [follows] upon the humility of acquiescence…the unfolding of heaven [follows] upon its willing acceptance, upon the ‘Yes’ of the creature” (110).

Enric Monserdà i Vidal (1850-1926), Madonna and Child.

 

Works Cited

Von le Fort, Gertrude. The Eternal Woman. Translated by Marie Cecilia Buehrle, The Bruce Publishing Company, 1954.

Von le Fort, Gertrude. The Song at the Scaffold. Translated by Olga Marx, Ignatius Press, 2011.

 

TITLE IMAGE: John Singer Sargent, Cashmere (1908).