Letter #68: Escape From the Prison of Meaning!

The Eternal Feminine vs Women

Spong

I don’t know whether you’re a hero, but you’re certainly on a roll. (Is that a Dad joke? I’m Dad and it made me laugh, so maybe it is.)

Following your graceful train of thought from Novalis’ description of Christianity as a lost love, to his heaven-directed yearning for his own idealized lost love, to Dante following his lost Beatrice to the throne of God, I was, of course, reminded of the conclusion to Goethe’s Faust: “The Eternal Feminine draws us upward.”

When I googled the quote to make sure I had it right, up came — well, what would you expect? A number of feminists complaining that the ideal of the Eternal Feminine only served to inspire men from the blankety-blank patriarchy, or that men should represent the Eternal Feminine too, or that the whole cursed notion bound women to male ideas of what femininity should be.

And there it is: living examples of individuals longing to escape from the prison of meaning.

To be clear, we shouldn’t leave the impression that medieval writers had no idea of women in their fleshly reality. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” is an example I remember fondly. The young wife of an older man is interrupted during her tryst with one young lover when a second lover begs her to lean out the window for a kiss. It being a dark night, she sticks her bare backside out the window… and hilarity ensues. There’s an amusing 15^th century German poem about a severed phallus who lives in a nunnery where the holy women take turns putting him to use. And Boccaccio’s wonderful Decameron is so full of stories of misbehaving priests and nuns that Savonarola included a copy in his Bonfire of the Vanities.

At the same time, the image of Mary — mother of God, perpetually virgin Queen of Heaven and unsullied ark of the New Covenant — presided over the medieval imagination like the Eternal Feminine incarnate. If you want to see the individual emerging like a butterfly from the cocoon of that high ideal, you only have to walk through a museum that features paintings of Mary through the ages. She begins as a distant, stern-faced queen sitting rigid on her golden throne, then slowly morphs into an individualized mother full of feminine tenderness and the sorrow of wisdom. But at the same time her halo softens from a solid gold disc to a faint tiara of light, sexualized paintings of nude women from classical myths begin to proliferate. The ideal becomes human. The human is made of flesh with all its pleasures and woes.

It's easy to understand why a woman might feel burdened with the task of representing the Eternal Feminine on earth just as a man might feel burdened by having to represent the justice and wisdom of God to his wife and kids.

But can we break free of such ideals and still mean what we are meant to mean? It’s an old question — made new for a new age.

Yer loving, Dad