It is striking how many of the very best things that happened in the second half of the 20th century came from a collaboration of a man and a woman. Most of these were not romantic, sexual or spousal. They continued the classic Catholic, gendered-generosity-generativity of Benedict/Scholastica, Francis/Clare, Catherine of Siena/Raymond of Capua, Teresa of Avila/John of Cross, Francis de Sales/Jane de Chantal, Vincent de Paul/Louise de Marillac, Claude de la Colombiere/Margaret Mary Alacoque.
We start with the most significant.
St John Paul, St Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Saint Faustina.
John Paul and Theresa were not close friends or collaborators. He harshly refused her request to retire to a life of prayer. In this he extended her agonizing dark night and intensified the depth of her holiness. In the broad scale of things, the two stand over the Church and world of this time as incomparable icons of maternity and paternity.
As far as we know, John Paul and Faustina never met each other. She died at the age of 33 in 1938 in Krakow. He moved to Krakow at the age of 18 in 1938. They lived in proximity to each other. But more importantly, she was the recipient of the revelations from heaven of Christ's divine Mercy; John Paul later as Cardinal and Pope approved and spread this devotion. This was possibly the most powerful visitation from heaven to earth in the century.
Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr.
Balthasar is in a league with Augustine and Aquinas in his encyclopedic erudition, creative brilliance, and insight into our faith. He insisted that his own work was entirely a collaboration with Adrienne and that her own work greatly exceeded his own in significance. He considered her to the greatest mystic since St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Their theological work, combined with that of John Paul and Benedict, defines Catholicism for the foreseeable centuries.
Kiko Arguello and Carmen Hernandez.
Together, these two founded the Neocatechumenal Way. They are clearly partners, although Kiko is a spiritual genius in the league of the greatest (Benedict, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola) while Carmen was theologically trained and probably responsible for their distinctive liturgy (which I personally consider the weak leak in their chain.)
Next we consider partnerships in the active life of charity.
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin
Co-founders of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy was the moving, charismatic force, the Mother of the movement; but she could never have done this without her mentoring by Peter in the Catholic tradition.
Catherine and Eddy Doherty
Catherine is the peer of Dorothy Day in her spiritual wisdom, activism and influence. She founded Madonna House, not unlike the Catholic Worker.
She married Eddy Doherty, a renown journalist, in a "Josephite marriage," in which they both pledged sexual abstinence. Both had prior marriages (hers annulled as her husband was a cousin, in the Russian Orthodox Church) and had children in their previous marriages. Eddy became a permanent deacon.
Next We Consider Marriages of Philosophers
Jacques and Raissa Maritain
Dietrich and Alice von Hildreband
These two marriages have striking similarities: contemporaries, the husbands knew each other. They are certainly two of the most accomplished, influential Catholic philosophers of the century. Both followed St. Thomas although Dietrich leaned more heavily into contemporary phenomenology and personalism. Both wives were substantial thinkers in their own right. Both marriages were Josephite: sexually abstinent, seeking fruition spiritually but not biologically.
Next: the mystic and the atheist doctor.
Elizabeth and Felix Leseur
This wife loved her hardcore atheist husband tenderly, passionately, and with immense suffering. Upon reading her memoir after her death, he converted, spent the remaining 30 years of his life as a Dominican priest, spreading the legacy of his wife.
Next: Professors and their Female Proteges
Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross)
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe
Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt
Academic consensus surely holds Wittgenstein and Heidegger as the greatest philosophers of the century, with Husserl easily in the top ten. So, it is so striking that each had as their standout protege a female student of brilliance and moral/spiritual character.
All three geniuses were detached from religion but moved by powerful spiritual sensibilities. Husserl converted to Lutherism from Judaism and retained a sense of awe as he pursued philosophy detached from faith. Wittgenstein, secular but of Jewish descent, likewise was moved by deep moral, spiritual motives as he detached from formal religion. Heidegger, raised a devout Catholic and attended seminary, renounced the Catholic tradition of dogma and philosophy but proposed in his thought an alternate, non-theistic but strongly spiritual philosophy. All three renounced traditional Christian thought, but lived and taught their own philosophy as a faith or way of life.
Stein, like her mentor, converted from secular Judaism. She became a brilliant Catholic thinke;, a Carmelite nun; a martyr, for being Jewish, in Auschwicz; and a canonized saint. Like John Paul and Hildebrandt, she combined Thomism with modern phenomenology to offer a Catholicism that is contemporary, fresh and traditional.
Anscombe was a brilliant, hardcore Catholic who forcefully denounced the bombing of Hiroshima as well as the acceptance of contraception by many Catholic who rejected Pope Paul's Humanae Vitae.
Arendt was and remained Jewish, if in a secular fashion. Yet she was a profound, insightful moral thinker, astutely scrutinizing contemporary issues from a spiritual/ethical depth. She was student and romantic-sexual lover of Heidegger who was a Nazi. Strikingly, she later reconciled with him in friendship, thus enacting forgiveness, a theme she also studied.
In all three cases, the younger female protege excelled her more prestigious mentor in wisdom, moral character, and spiritual clarity. Clearly, the male geniuses, brilliant but not firmly grounded in the True and the Good, were fascinated by the interior-intellectual-spiritual loveliness of their students.
Conclusion
These twelve partnership have striking resemblances.
- None bore biological children.
- Four were marriages, but three of those were Josephite, sexually abstinent. One entailed a non-marital sexual romance.
- All engaged deeply, passionately in spirituality, philosophy, active charity,
- Five were Jewish with four of them converting; one a Nazi; one remained a secular Jew.
- Most exemplified the classic Catholic marriage of chastity, wisdom, simplicity of life, and closeness t the poor.
- We see in strikingly unique ways, the mutuality, fecundity and serendipity of the male/female encounter. Many (the Hildebrandts, John Paul, Edith Stein, Balthasar, Speyr) delved deeply into the mystery of sexuality/romance/masculinity/femininity/spousality/maternity/paternity. In them we are given the definitive response to the sterile, iconoclastic Cultural Liberalism afflicting our world.
We have here mesmerizing personalities: radiant with brilliance, holiness, moral character, iconic in their masculinity and femininity, and resplendent in chastity, reverence, tenderness and heroism.
We do well to study them, ponder them, pray to them, and emulate them.
