Learning from the women who followed Jesus

Learning from the Women Who Followed Jesus

The meaning of [a] creative culture hinges upon the religious significance of woman. This is what Léon Bloy expresses with the words: plus une femme est sainte, plus elle est femme. This is to say: “the holier a woman is, the more she is a woman.” This also is Dante’s meaning in that wondrous passage of his great poem when he looks upon Beatrice while her eyes remain steadfastly fixed upon God. Here Dante…sees God because her glance is upon God. This is the religious significance of woman and at the same time the meaning of the love between man and woman, recognized and portrayed in its ultimate depths. Here the symbol of the mirror, which so often appears in poetry, rises to its highest potentiality…. Woman, who along the broad lines of earthly import denotes the union of all creation, on the higher plane signifies also the glance toward the Creator….

For cultural life, then, the absence of the one half of existence has an import similar to that which heresy means for the Church. Heresy is always the outcome of one-sidedness and isolation. By substituting a part for the whole, and making that part absolute, it falsifies the truth. Again the image of the Eternal Woman becomes visible over the destiny of the woman in her times: Mary, according to the teaching of the Church the conqueror of heresy, restores through the mystery of charity the totality that God wills.

Baroness Gertrud von Le Fort