Marie-Louise Von Franz – Eulogies – Carl Jung Depth Psychology

The Fountain of Love and Wisdom: An Homage to Marie-Louise von Franz

Marie-Louise Von Franz Eulogy given at the funeral service in Kusnacht on the 26th of February 1998 by Gotthil Fisler:

We are gathered here together to bid our farewell to Marie-Louise von Franz.

Many of you here today knew her personally and were accompanied by her down longer or shorter paths in your lives.

Others have come because they attended her lectures or were gripped by her books.

Each one of us experienced her differently, each in his or her own personal manner.

One’s “fate” was constellated during almost every encounter with her.

I usually felt a bit of trepidation prior to each analytical hour, not because I was in any way afraid of her, but because I knew that, despite her benevolence and affection, I would be led to my own inner truth as it emerged from my dreams and active imaginations.

The message of the unconscious always stood at the center of our encounters.

This unfaltering relatedness to the autonomous psyche (the independent, self-acting “objective psyche” contiguous to ego consciousness) determined her life like nothing else.

Rather than speaking today about details and events of her outer life or about her comprehensive scientific works, I would simply like to share with you several dreams both from her earlier as well as final years, some that may help us reflect, and others that may help console us.

Many years ago Marie-Louise von Franz told my wife and me a childhood dream that she also mentioned in her essay, “The Unknown Visitor.”

She had this dream shortly after her family fled from Berchtsgaden over Salzburg to the border town of Feldkirch and then into Switzerland.

Fleeing the oncoming revolution in Austria, the family then settled in the village of Rheineck in the Rheintal. She was at that time almost four and a half years old.

I was walking with my father and mother and sister through the streets of the village that we were staying in after having fled {Austria].

My father was holding my hand. Suddenly at a distance an older and a younger man appeared in the street and rapidly approached us.

My father called out, appalled, “There they are!” I asked, “Who?”

He answered, “The gods, they are coming to test us. Each person has an iron plaque inscribed with his name, his birthday and his day of death.

One must preserve one’s plaque unharmed. Whoever’s plaque is broken falls into the hands of the gods.”

We ran back into the room of the hostel where we were staying.

My father opened the chest in which the family silver was kept and withdrew these plaques.

They were enameled in white with black letters.

The inscription on my plaque looked like it had been shattered by a hammer. I was horrified.

I showed it to my family but they began to back away from me.

I then stepped out of my body and hovered up on the ceiling near a bright round light into which I entered.

From there I looked down and saw myself below sadly holding my plaque.

At this point, I came to the decision that I wanted to live and returned to my body. And I wanted to go and meet the gods.

So I then approached the door.

As I went to open it, the door handle began to move. They had come. I awoke screaming.

As Marie-Louise von Franz explained, she had had a traumatic war shock.

Household help had reported to her of the atrocities occurring at the time in World War I.

And these descriptions had eliminated any belief that she had had about a good and loving God since “a loving God could not allow such appalling events to occur.”

Thus she felt compelled to confront this unknown God, and this fact-occurring already in earliest childhood-influenced and determined her entire life.

In a later active imagination she believed that these two figures had been the gods Wotan and Loki.

Wotan played a major role throughout her entire life.

Wotan was, however, a nature god.

At the seaside, when she was sixteen years old, she was overwhelmed by an experience of the divineness of nature.

Thereafter, nature (in a comprehensive sense) was a divine force for her both as emotional/inner psychic nature and as the nature of the earth, plants, and animals.

This was one of the reasons why she studied philology, because in antiquity nature still lived. In her book, The Visions of Niklaus von Flue, she writes that Wotan has two characteristic features that are missing in Yahweh of the Old Testament, namely, the intense relationship to cosmic nature and, through the art of divination (that is, oracles), his bearings in the principle of synchronicity.

These two characteristics are apparently nonetheless parts of a wholistic God-image which seems to encompass not only darkness and evil but also cosmic nature and its meaningful revelation in synchronistic events.

Only within the context of these two features is it possible to have an individual encounter with the divine in the hie et nunc [here and now] in which the genius loci and surrounding nature can be meaningfully integrated into the psychic sphere of the individual where it then appears to him in its totality as the “one cosmos.”

This entails an immense elevation of meaning lying within the life of the individual-an increase in the meaning of the individual person . . . imparting greatest weight to his or her conscious comprehension and ethical behavior.

In an active imagination much much later in life, Marie-Louise von Franz realized that this new divinity did not actually have to do with Wotan but with the puer aeternus, the eternal youth, the eternally youthful creator god.

In a traumatic dream during the Christmas holidays just prior to her nineteenth birthday (which she mentions in her book, C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time) she finds herself in a chamber in the middle of the earth where she sees the “face of God with an expression of such despondency and sorrow that no human being could bear looking at it.”

At the end, this dream also deals with the birth of the new god experienced by her as the birth of Aphrodite rising out of the sea.

She interpreted this birth of a feminine divinity as the manifestation of the Self since it was her own dream, the dream of a woman.

Her life was, in a sense, ordained by the highest form of love.

Yet beyond the individual meaning of this dream, the psychology of the unconscious entails the deepest form of feminine science. (That is, the symbolic understanding of images brought forth by the unconscious is of a synergic, feminine nature.)

She once wrote that “symbolic thinking is a form of loving understanding, a light that does not dispel the god

Eros.”

The psychology of the unconscious is always involved with uniting the opposites, the union of consciousness with the unconscious, masculine and feminine, the above and the below, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.

This is not a random or coerced unification but rather a new birth which necessitates the bearing and enduring of the suffering entailed in the emergence of a new symbol, a new point of view thus enabling both sides to uphold their vested rights while they are simultaneously comprehended as unified in oneness.

Marie-Louise von Franz repeatedly said that as the world falls apart we can be genuinely creative, we can work to form and shape the messages of the unconscious, we can struggle to grasp and realize the mysterium coniunctionis, that is, the union of the opposites.

Within the personal realm, this new birth enables a meaningful cooperation between consciousness and the unconscious in which neither side is lessened or harmed.

A great moment of fortune in the life of Marie-Louise von Franz was her meeting C. G. Jung when she was still an eighteen-year-old student at the gymnasium in Zurich.

Soon thereafter her collaborative work with Jung ensued.

Carried by a deep veneration and love for him-coupled with inconceivable discipline and incredible rigorousness-she rendered her life’s work prolific and profound.

When we read her essays and books, we often have the impression that, thanks to her vast knowledge, she just wrote those things down.

She confided to one of her caretakers that every sentence that she wrote was like lifting a heavy stone.

She once said to me that a man can dedicate his entire life working for some cause (or toward some objective), but a woman could accomplish the superhuman for a person she loved.

When Jung died, she thought that she could no longer write a single word.

She had to learn from the ground up to write toward some objective.

I believe, however, that till the end of her life she still wrote out of her love for Jung.

Her incurable illness and her dependence on caretakers which endured so many years repeatedly raised for some of us the question of the meaning of life.

Probably she actually had overworked herself but the question of God still stands in the background.

Why did God let this woman suffer so long, a woman who was so religiously dedicated to His own divine process of struggling toward consciousness and salvation, and who sacrificed to Him so many of the comforts of life?

On numerous occasions and in various ways she showed an admirable ability to take on her own fate.

She once told me that in her younger years Jung had cast an African oracle with her.

The prophesy set forth that, in the end, the Highest Judge would come. (This was a sign of great good fortune, and she actually experienced many incredible things; yet many had to remain secret which is why she could not talk to me about them.)

But subsequently an ”After Judge” would come, and this predicted great misfortune.

This calamity was her illness.

She was nevertheless glad that she had cast this oracle because she knew that this misfortune belonged to her fate. She had no illusions.

She knew that God was not only loving but that one had to live in fear of Him as well.

One time when I spoke to her about her illness I mentioned that men and women who felt passion and pity were in a way more loving than God, and she answered, “Yes, nature is incredibly intelligent, but fearfully cruel as well.”

She carried her fate not only stoically.

Four years ago, as she had a bout of flu and could not eat anymore, she thought that her solution had come; she would simply stop eating and the problem would then take care of itself.

Subsequently she dreamed:

She was at Bahnhofenge.

She set her leg on the track, thinking that the train would now run over her.

But as the locomotive drove out of the tunnel she began to scream loudly for help.

Somehow she was rescued.

But then a dark cloud enshrouded everything so that she could no longer see.

In this darkness she felt the coat of a large dog and grasped onto it.

The dog then spoke in a human voice saying: “Don’t do that. Everything is organized.”

As she then told this dream, she laughed mischievously: it is all organized, the ticket ordered, the hotel reserved.

She now knew that she had to carry her suffering and would still have to wait.

Prior to and after this dream, she had captivatingly beautiful dreams that pointed to her completion.

These were dreams that made her profoundly happy. I would like to share with you a few of these images.

For example, she dreamed that she was near a farmhouse where there were many people dressed in black.

A young farm laborer was digging a hole for a coffin.

Out of the casket rose an old man who was suffering from the same illness as she.

He wanted-unconditionally-to live.

The farm laborer argued with him, saying that he belonged in the casket; he threw him back into the coffin and closed the lid.

I stood passively on the side, thinking, “This has nothing to do with me.”

In the farmyard stood a tree, probably a horse chestnut.

But it was a magnificent tree with passion flowers the size of dinner plates.

And she herself had once planted this tree. In each flower there was a little tomato.

She plucked one, ate it, and knew that it was the cibus immortalis, the food of immortality.

She commented to me then that the old man was the will to live, a willpower that does not want to give in and which just extends her suffering.

The laborer thinks that it· is time to die. (Years later, as it became increasingly difficult to take in nourishment, she said that she still wanted to eat, the will to live generally being the strongest drive.)

And she then added that tomatoes in Austria are called “paradises,” and that tomatoes are often considered to be aphrodisiacal fruits from the Tree of Knowledge.

In the summer of 1994, a woman visited her who wanted to convince Marie-Louise to collaborate with her.

This woman, who was a medium, was convinced that the Christian and Buddhist spirit were uniting in the beyond in order to save the world. Marie-Louise von Franz promised nothing, saying that she would first like to consult her dreams.

The following night she dreamed that she was working in the laundry at the monastery in Einsiedeln.

She was told that Jung would come down from heaven to the wedding of the Black Madonna.

She belonged to the one hundred elect who would be allowed to participate in the marriage festivities.

She said at that time that the unconscious was indeed preparing a form of help for the world and a union, not in the heavenly spiritual realm, but rather a union of above and below, a union of spirit and matter.

The Virgin Mary was considered very early to be “the earth” and the Black Madonna a nature goddess.

And yet the union occurs within the Christian framework, which Marie-Louise von Franz had never been able to accept.

Nevertheless, the dream filled her with such happiness.

Two years ago, she dreamed that she saw a tree in marvelous bloom.

It stood in water with little earth around it.

In all earnestness she said to me that she wanted us to know that the wind could easily topple it.

In August of last year, Marie-Louise told me that she had dreamed that she had written an eight-volume work on Arabian alchemy.

The eight volumes were there in front of her and she was very pleased.

She understood the dream as saying that her life work was now completed.

Last November she dreamed:

It is evening and she still had to rake together the hay so that the dew of the night would not moisten it. And in the dream, she knew that night would rapidly come.

She then told me that she now had to set her estate in order.

On this past Christmas, she said that she was no longer fighting and this was something which was new for her, for up till now she had always fought.

She was still mentally alert and crystal clear, and she was interested in every individual who visited her as well as in what was happening in the world.

And she remained so till the very end. It was, however, often difficult to understand her because at times she could hardly speak at all.

She wanted to die, and of death she had no fear.

Many years ago she said that, with her book On Dreams and Death, she had convinced herself that, after death, life still continues.

One of the women who helped take care of Marie-Louise for many years-at times with considerable self-sacrifice and to whom we cannot be grateful enough-had a dream while she was there spending the night just a couple of weeks before Marie-Louise’s death.

The woman dreamed that she descended the stairs down to the ground floor where Marie-Louise was sleeping.

There in the entrance stood C. G. Jung, aged, well-dressed, the very manifestation of wisdom.

He smiled at the dreamer, went into Marie-Louise’s room and sat on her bed They then had a long amiable conversation.

Marie-Louise was so happy when she heard the dream because she knew now that Jung would come to take her to the beyond.

She would then be together with him and possibly with the people to whom she really belonged.

She had already “known” for a long time that Jung lived there.

She had once given him a gift of a precious Chinese frog carved from jade.

He had found the gift so valuable that he specified that this “jewel” would be returned to her upon his death.

A few weeks after his death, she dreamed that she was looking into a brook and saw what she took to be a bit of human excrement, something “made by man.”

As she got get closer, she saw that it was this little frog. It suddenly lifted its front leg and waved at her.

This dream was a sign for her that Jung lived on, and it was with this frog in her hand that she passed away. (The frog, by the way, is a symbol of resurrection.)

Marie-Louise von Franz died at 2:15 A.M. on February 17, 1998.

A few years prior to her death, she dreamed that in an old city a new building had been built with a perimeter of seventeen regular sides, a construction that was earlier believed to be impossible.

In Arabian alchemy, the seventeen-sided geometric form symbolized the union of psyche and matter which was the very center of the research that she performed. In addition, the number 17 is the number of completed individuation, the accomplishment of totality.

Nevertheless, we must not forget: death is always an experience of something terrifying and full of awe.

But these dreams from the close proximity of death show the merciful face of God.

It is for us, as well as for the world, an immeasurable piece of providence and good fortune that a woman like Marie-Louise von Franz lived, and that we were able to meet her. Her spirit lives on among us . . . as well as in her numerous works. ~Gotthil Fisler, Homage to MLVF, Pages 55-63

Nora Mindell’s Eulogy: In tribute to Marie-Louise von Franz at her memorial service on February 26, 1998

Dear ladies and gentlemen:

As members of a foundation dedicated to supporting Dr. Jung’s and Dr. von Franz’s studies in synchronicity, we would like to pay tribute to Marie-Louise von Franz today by sharing with you excerpts from a personal conversation that we had with her three summers ago at her lovely round Stube table in Bollingen.

As most of you know, Dr. von Franz was not only well versed in Chinese mythology, eastern divinatory techniques, diverse mathematical systems, and the arcane wisdom of the I Ching, but her knowledge sprang from a well of profound experiences and insights accrued during her lifelong study of the objective psyche.

Toward the end of her life, this great lady even cheerfully proclaimed that Jung’s ideas were so “mind-boggling” that she was just beginning to grasp them herself!

One summer’s afternoon at Bollingen over tea, Dr. von Franz spoke with us about the Lo-shu and Ho-t’u mandalas considered to be cosmic plans of the universe that underlie the basic structure of the I Ching.

The Ho-t’u, “Older Heavenly Order,” she pointed out, is quaternarian, a picture of absolute totality outside time and space-totality as it ever was and ever will be!

By contrast, the Lo-shu, “Younger Heavenly Order,” wanders along like the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. The meaning that it embodies is the same as the Ho-t’u, but the Lo-Shu is clothed in the manifestations of material and psychic processes.

Whenever you ask a question of the I Ching, these two matrices of energy dynamically interact, setting in motion an answer on two levels: one relating more to issues emerging in the foreground of reality and the other to eternal patterns, values, and states of mind.

For example, after Dr. von Franz first met Jung, she wondered if she should try to see him again.

She consulted the I Ching and got hexagram no. 17, Following.

The text reports: ”An old man defers to a young girl and shows her consideration. By this he moves her to follow him.”

This image prophesied the unswerving direction that her life would take at the same time that it responded to the momentary question utmost in her mind.

This double mandala pattern is a coniunctio of heaven and earth, time and timelessness, spirit and matter, the transcendental mystery which plays a central role in C. G. Jung’s and Marie-Louise von Franz’s works.

Dr. von Franz devoted her life to writing books which shed light on this arcane opus, but it is a mark of her greatness that she struggled to experience what she wrote and taught, always consulting the clear, unspoiled spring of the unconscious for guidance.

Speaking of the interaction between the Lo-shu and the Ho-t’u in relation to the divine marriage on that afternoon, her voice took on a special quality of eros as she commented: “Jung once said that what is happening now is forever. So when we sit here now it is transient, and at the same time it is the Self-we will sit here together forever.”

None of us spoke for quite a while afterward.

I am sure that all of you have had experiences of the Self in which eternity and the here-and-now spontaneously come together in a numinous way.

As Dr. von Franz talked, we entered another time dimension that was inexplicable; by means of her capacity for relating to the collective unconscious, the opposites came together miraculously.

In closing, we wish to send you a message, dear Marlus. “Please do not forget that so many of us sitting here are immensely grateful and touched by the good fortune we had of becoming acquainted with you. We have experienced your dedication, your wisdom, your love, your loyalty, and your enduring search for a deeper understanding of the living psyche.”

We have been together.

We are together today.

We shall remain together for all time . . . .

Nonetheless, we shall miss your earthly presence intensely. ~Nora Mindell, Homage to MLVF, Pages 65-67

Valedictory address for Marie-Louise van Franz at the burial service held

in the Reformed Church, Kusnacht, Switzerland, on February 26, 1 998

Anne Maguire

I am deeply honored to receive the singular invitation to deliver this valedictory address for our dear departed friend, Marie-Louise von Franz, a truly great lady whose passing is marked by those of us gathered here on this sad day, a day when the reality of our loss is realized as we bid her earthly self adieu.

I doubt not that each one of us present this day has had his or her life transformed in some way either by personal contact with her, or through knowledge of her literary creative work, which in turn has introduced her to a vast world audience.

She was born at a momentous time, in the first terrible winter of the Great War, in the German city of Munich, itself a city under the aegis of the little hooded kabir, the Munchener kindt-the child. A cloaked figure akin to the phallic kabir of the ancient world-Telesphoros, a companion and guide of Asclepius, the god of medical healing.

At the same time he was a youthful double of Asclepius and was known as “the one who brings to completeness,” the god of inner transformations.

Three years after her birth, toward the end of the war, she was brought by her Austrian parents to Switzerland; eventually she became a citizen of her adopted country and lived her life here.

At the age of eighteen years, one afternoon in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, she was invited by a friend to meet Carl Gustav Jung.

The meeting was portentous, for on that day she was introduced to the reality of another realm of reality-the hidden inner world.

As the unconscious presented itself to her through the medium of Dr. Jung she was utterly astounded.

During that afternoon Jung had described a young woman he had treated who “lived on the moon.”

When Marie-Louise heard this, she decided to approach the professor and ask him if he meant that it was “as if ” the girl lived on the moon.

Dr. Jung answered her and told her that it was not “as if ” but the girl did live on the moon.

She told me that at that moment she thought either “he is crazy or I am.”

That meeting circumscribed the fateful moment of transformation in her life.

The following year, in 1934, she began to work with C. G. Jung and did so until his death in 1961.

The statement made by Jung and which had so perplexed her led to a lifelong search for the inner truth as concealed in the unconscious world of objective psyche.

It was then that she learned of the importance of the dream as a message from that interior world.

She had a splendid rational intellect with an incisive mind, which enabled her to become a deep, and later an inspired and inspiring, thinker. Her ability to grasp and to discern had a rapierlike character, yet she was always able to explain a point or enlarge an aspect of a problem, with an exquisite but immensely patient clarity.

This aspect of her personality belonged to the archetype of the teacher for she was, in my view, unassailable in that particular field.

She retained, it seems, this lucid clarity of mind until she died.

As a multilinguist and medieval Latin scholar, she collaborated with Jung in the study of alchemy, she contributed related studies to two of his major works, Aion and Mysterium Coniunctionis. In her early years as a psychotherapist, she dreamed that she was walking upon ground where “no one had trodden before.”

Some time later she was to begin her monumental creative work upon the fairy tales and later with the archetypal world of numbers.

These previously unexplored fields were to occupy her energies for many years.

Perhaps for a moment may I speak of the fairy-tale studies.

Today they are so much a part of Jungian training and psychotherapy that one forgets the immense primary work undertaken by Marie-Louise in those early years.

As a young woman she enjoyed the natural world, particularly the mountains where she liked to walk in summer and ski in winter.

She liked nothing better than to be immersed in nature with the greenness of its trees, the flowers under foot, and the splendid mountains themselves.

She had an exceptional knowledge of animal lore and a profound sympathy with that world.

She held the present view that the natural world is in fact doomed by man’s gross unconsciousness and ignorance of the spirit of wild nature, a spirit which if left alone could and indeed would bring about a reparation of the damage to which the earth and its seas have already been subjected, but only if left alone by man.

With such vital interests in the importance of the dream in an individual life and the domination of the spirit in the natural world, it is clear that the domain of the fairy tales, those age-old traditional tales, should call to her.

She answered the call and was seized by the material.

She read thousands of fairy stories from all over the world.

This empowered her to perceive those hidden secrets held in them, which engendered their fascination.

Thus she came to understand perhaps better than anyone else in the world the archetypal structure of the natural world in these tales and in unconscious psyche.

She saw, as it were, the skeletal structure of psyche, inasmuch perhaps as one sees the singular distinctive skeletal shape and pristine beauty of a deciduous tree in wintertime when unhindered by its leaves.

This immense work and the knowledge thus gained from her creative genius I am sure led her to become a master analyst and an incomparable interpreter of the dream.

There was, however, another facet to this multifaceted personality which she possessed, an aspect not usually immediately apparent because of her innate modesty and her primary introverted attitude.

She had a dislike for the vulgarly ostentatious and unseemly power drivenness, and thus her eros to which I refer held a certain quality of reticence.

In her lectures, one was always aware that behind her powerful intellect her eros was, albeit shyly, constantly palpably present.

I always thought her eros to be totally genuine, all pervading and enveloping-the true charitas.

She was a kind woman, and real love has much to do with kindness.

In her attitude to others, it seemed to me that she desired that all should benefit from her own knowledge and her experience which she gave freely and generously, just as she gave her hospitality.

She endeavored to aid them to reach the hidden inner truth as she perceived it to be.

This was the spirit by which she lived, always seeking to bring a soul to the light of illumination.

I believe it is because of this true kindness that we have come gladly to remember her today with our love, albeit we are deeply saddened by our loss.

In the last years, she bore stoically, nobly, and with immense courage a devastating physical illness.

She was indomitable until the end of her earthly life.

Yet in spite of her suffering she retained her richly perceptive insights, her capacity to emit the trenchant asides, her kindness to others, and last but by no means least, her sense of humor.

She astonished me, how in pain, disabled in body and sometimes with the speech difficulties which accompany this illness, she was able to joke, and to laugh with abandon, and express herself in her own inimitable way.

During one dark evening not very long ago, whilst recumbent on her bed, after we had discussed the unus mundus, she told me that she had dreamed a wonderful dream the night previously.

In it, her illness was cured and had left her completely healed in body.

She told me she was immensely happy in the dream, and she added that she would be leaving soon.

The dream brought her great joy.

She strove throughout the years of her tribulation to participate consciously in her individual pathway to wholeness, as it unfolded in her dreams and outer life.

I see her as a woman who sought ever the inner spirit of creative truth and fought for justice in the acceptance of that truth.

This is the spirit which gathers us together today-we her many friends, who loved her, companions who accompanied her throughout her years of prime life, and those of her years of travail, caring, and looking after her. In particular,

I would like to mention those nursing companions, faithful, devoted, and tireless in their love to ease her passage from this life and who served her so well, and also those who contributed to her comfort in diverse ways.

With respect I mention Barbara Davies, friend, assistant, and collaborator, who became her writing hand, Julia Brunner, Alison Kappes, N omiki Kennedy, Vicki Reiff, Mary Scheinost, Regine SchweizerViillers, Zita Tauber, and Anne-Marie Wobel.

It was her wish to stay in her own home.

I felt she would have liked to die in Bollingen, which she loved, but that was not God’s will and so she died in her townhouse with all the good spirits of her past, and her students, analysands, and friends came to her, not forgetting her late dear friends, Barbara Hannah and Franz Riklin, and their regular gatherings

together in that house. Her named devoted companions supported her and permitted her to have her wish in this respect.

I am very sorry that my dear friend of over thirty years, Marie-Louise von Franz, has died.

She leaves the world a poorer place, and although in the years to come undoubtedly some will endeavor to emulate her work and perhaps even forget the originator, they will surely fail because none will possess the unique combined attributes contained in the creative genius of this great lady.

Because of her love and reverence for the soul, may I with respect quote a few lines from the beautiful poem, “Ode to the Soul,” by the great Islamic physician-philosopher lbn Sina who died a thousand years ago.

Ode to the Soul

Out of her lofty home she hath come down, upon thee

this white dove in all the pride of her reluctant beauty:

veiled is she, from every eye, eager to know her, though

in loveliness unshrouded radiant, unwillingly she came,

and yet perchance still more unwilling to be gone from theeso

she is torn by griefs.

Why then was she cast down from her high peak? to

this degrading depth?

God brought her low. But for a purpose-wise,

that is concealed even from the keenest mind

and liveliest wit.