Gnadenthal

The Melancholy of Quidam

Aleksandar Vadim — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

“Nothing could persuade me that this world is not the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.”

— E.M. Cioran, The New Gods

The rulers of the longhouse sat around the table in quiet peace, deliberating. It was a Chinese century, in the old days, when wishing still held power. A cruel general they called „the tumor with a human face“ took the word: A rather reticent man and an avid collector of memories, whose gruesome deeds were passed down all the way through the folklore of the Göktürks and generations later formed the foundation for the Germanic epos of Derjenige, der die Tiefe sah, whose vile hero was dubbed “Quidam”; a name that continues to evoke unease when spoken.

“Sea and fire and woman: three evils.”, he said, lighting the pipe in the arms of his mistress, gazing into the waters of the South Chinese Sea. He dwelled in old memories of the early gatherings of the cabal that their enemies had sneeringly named “the white lotus school” and how they had waged war upon the emperor for centuries and centuries in order to enforce their radical dualistic ideas: The great opponents of Imperiogenesis who longed to end the material world by physical and philosophical confrontation, foreshadowing and anticipating the infamous skopzy and their eerie child-like “white doves”. He reminisced fondly of how they ridiculed the great Greek philosophers; how they tormented and killed; how they sent a mocking letter to the king of the Tres Daciae and how they humbled and humiliated the proud Mohammedan worshippers of Termagant, who stoically endured their torturing: Quidam remembered how his militia had, after listening to the Hindu-Brahmans speak of the Kali Yuga in deep sincerity, laughed and urinated over their holy scriptures and spun their Samsara-wheel so hard and ruthlessly that it broke into two, while on another day they all silently and devoutly dwelled over a Christian pamphlet of Saint Helen that postulated that the entire world was scattered with fragments of the Holy Cross of the Kyrios.

Quidam briefly leaned to the side and enjoyed a few glimpses of the hortus deliciarum and of the face of his mistress that pleased him because her features reminded him of Saint Helen, whose brother had endured the 11 pains of hell under Quidams own hands …Scanning through the anatomy of the poppy, dwelling through the genome of his queen, now remembering the cruel squeals surrounding their Causeway Bay Abductions a peculiar expression came to his mind: “The mystery of preference; or the enigma of desire” he sighed and immediately thought of his first wife, whom they had kidnapped from the steppes of Mongolia or from the Kazakh Kaganate; a round-faced horse-meat-eater whose appetite and preferences he would never fully comprehend and who spent all her nights crying until she concluded to blind herself with a pair of glowing needles, for her dreadful screams to haunt the halls of the longhouse ever since. That memory now sparked in him the deep desire to amplify the eternal suffering and the pain, and to multiply the crying that his ears have grown so accustomed to: By the end of the night, under the dim light of the lampshade, the rulers of the longhouse had decided to incite yet another rebellion that would throw the country into an inferno of extinction and turn many happy families into human soap.

The events that followed this last Great Rebellion would remain an enigma in the chronicles of the white lotus school and later capture the collective imagination of Gweilo-philosophers of many lands and centuries alike to leave dozens of brilliant scholars puzzled, who – just like their ancestors – ended up getting soaked into the thrilling triangle of tea, opium, and perfumes for the rest of their miserable lives. This scholarly tradition would later give rise to years of endless and dull research that would make minds as bright as Alfred Döblin’s and Martin Buber’s lose all academic self-respect and leave them in a state of mental derangement, miserably failing in their quest to understand what verily happened to the white lotus after the Great Rebellion and how they had ceased to exist.

In some gnostic circles of the southern Chinese provinces, it is said that – as the white lotus cabal marched towards the city of darkness – Quidam and his conclave, suddenly struck by the eternal melancholy of the rebel, grew tired of the endless riots, the killings and the torturing, the beheadings and the lingchi, the burned villages and the raped women, the crying children with their self-exiting mothers, etc., so they collectively set foot on a different path in their mission to subjugate the world to their dualism: In the following weeks, a group of Quidam’s closest counselors are said to have gone underground to reform under a series of secret names of obscure and dark meaning like Wukong jiao (“Aware of the Voidness”), Luodao jiao (“Arhet”) and Wenxiang jiao (“Sensing perfume”), where the geography of thought lead them to adopt an idea that they had picked up from the orthodox hesychasts centuries before and that is sometimes referred to as theosis: They would now strive to extract people from the shackles of the miserable material realm in the best tradition of Nanjing decadence – Mixing the essences of a delicate plant they called “Buddha’s hand citrus”, the sanguine red tea of their cruel rituals and their holy dry Amber woods, the group added the burial water of their ancestors to create a dark liquid that they filled into Hetian jade flacons marked with their secret dragon-emblem to quietly circulate among the people in order to shroud the entire world in a mist of uncertainty…

When opened, these initial flacons emanated a scent that would haunt the protectors of the universal order until today: An olfactory rejection of the material world, a single spritz to cause turmoil in the inside world, just like in the outside; and – once briefly inhaled by an unfortunate soul – capable of turning loyal citizens into perennial enemies of the empire and its rulers. The effects of this maneuver were vast, impacting substantial aspects of existence and daily life until the present day but after years of re-examination throughout all of the 19th century it still remained a mystery how that infamous scent would initially be known under the very trivial name of “Winter Palace”.

Many years later a pale Gweilo-scholar leaving a sanatorium-bar in Vienna, gently sighing with the same longing for the beautiful dark and thrilling mysteries of China that had once corrupted his ancestors, and with a whiff of Winter Palace clinging to his neck, will finally offer a reasonable answer to this long-debated question to his anguished, unfortunate interlocutor: “It is very simple,” he said, “they were rebels,…thugs nonetheless, who operate mainly in the dark;… and do keep in mind, that in winter the sun sets early.”

Maria Lactans

N.N. — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Encounter with an Angel

Christoph Laible — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Johann went into the wood to gather nettles and goldenrod for his sick sister, an angel appeared.

‘The spider or the snake,’ said the angel, and drew a spider and a snake from his robe.

Johann dropped his basket.

‘The spider or the snake,’ the angel repeated.

‘The spider,’ stammered Johann, who had gone quite pale.

‘Good, the spider,’ said the angel, and laid the spider in Johann’s hand, and kept the snake for himself.

‘You may ask me eight questions. A spider’s leg for each.’

‘Why do angels never show themselves?’ Johann burst out, and he closed his fingers around one of the spider’s legs and tore it off, and the creature twitched.

‘Because then you would no longer believe,’ said the angel.

‘And why do you show yourself to me?’ asked Johann, and tore the second leg from the spider.

‘Because you do not believe,’ said the angel.

‘Will my sister die?’ asked Johann, and plucked out the third leg, and the creature twitched a little less, and Johann sobbed.

‘Yes,’ answered the angel.

‘Is there nothing I can do?’ asked Johann, and the tears fell, and he plucked the fourth leg, and the creature went still.

‘No,’ said the angel. ‘There is nothing.’

‘Can you do something?’

‘I have never yet done anything, but I can.’

‘Will you do something?’

‘No,’ answered the angel.

‘Why will you do nothing?’ cried Johann, and crows flew up from the boughs of the firs.

‘Because she believes.’

Johann hesitated, and at last tore out the spider’s last leg and threw its body onto the forest floor.

‘What would have happened if I had chosen the snake?’

‘Nothing, of course,’ said the angel, and the snake ate the spider’s body. ‘Snakes have no legs, after all,’ said the angel, and vanished.

Bocanje

Origines Adamantius — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the novel The Bridge on the Drina by the Yugoslav Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, the bride Fata Osmanagić, married against her will, casts herself out of defiance and despair, during her wedding procession, from the world-famous bridge of Mehmed Paša Sokolović into the cold waters of the river Drina, and thus into death. The builder himself was a Serbian peasant boy, abducted by the Ottomans in the course of the so-called levy of boys, who over his long life rose even to grand vizier and set this monument of stone in his homeland: a bridge over that river which divides Occident and Orient — the former border of Eastern and Western Rome, and then, after the great Western Schism, the border between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. When the Ottomans pressed into the Balkans, conquered wide tracts of land, and a part of the South Slavic population was brought over to Islam, the religious fragmentation of this region was sealed once and for all.

To the Turkish language the Yugoslavs owe a word that can only inadequately be rendered as ‘defiance’: Inat. This feeling may have moved Sokolović to build the bridge, and Andrić surely had it in mind as the fictional bride throws herself into the flood. That very Inat may also have moved the Croatian women — and, more rarely, men — above all in Bosnia, who had remained faithful to the Catholic faith, over the many centuries of Ottoman occupation, to have Christian ornaments, with the cross as their central motif, tattooed upon visible parts of the body: fingers, hands, forearms and upper arms, the breast, and even the brow. For these indelible marks one used simple needles, and for the ink a mixture of charcoal, soot, honey and the breast-milk of women in childbed. This custom was called ‘Bocanje’ — that is, ‘pricking’ — and the motives were, besides conjectured Illyrian traditions now surely lost forever in the thicket of history, above all the hoped-for protection against a forcible conversion to Islam, against the abduction of the women and the carrying-off of the boys into the units of the Janissaries (that very fate which had befallen the vizier Sokolović). Even where such things could not be prevented, one hoped nonetheless, even under forced deportation, to preserve the Christian and national identity of the abducted. The cross was to admonish the Croats of their faith, and the initials of the name, which were often added too, to recall their nationhood. It was surely also the Catholics’ veneration for the dynasty of the Kotromanić — that short-lived Bosnian kingdom, with its beheaded king Stjepan, his consort, the fugitive queen Katarina, and their two children, carried off into Turkey — that these tattoos were meant to express.

‘…a character indelebilis, an ineffaceable mark upon the soul of the faithful.’

The Ottomans at last vanished, and the wheel of history turned on; allies and arch-enemies exchanged their roles, again and again, upon the stage of the great theatre of the world, and today these traditional tattoos have almost entirely disappeared — as has the archaic-seeming, rural-peasant milieu from which these women came. Today’s tattoos among the Croats (upon which Adolf Loos pronounced his famous verdict) scarcely differ from those in other, Western lands. Now, the phenomenon here described in brief may of course be regarded from various perspectives — as, say, the testimony of faith of a minoritised group, delivered up for better or worse to the victors and permanently at the edge of annihilation. According to Catholic teaching, the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and also the three sacraments of ordination are a character indelebilis, an ineffaceable seal upon the soul of the faithful, much like the religious tattoos on arms and hands here discussed. Did one wish, as it were, to confirm this indestructible, invisible mark of grace by an indelible brand upon the skin as well? Or was it perhaps even the wise insight into, and confirmation of, the dogma Grace presupposes nature and perfects it — and a constant, irrevocable reminder to live one’s Christian faith in the world and to confess it, to keep a perpetual admonition not to sin and not to deny oneself? ‘The hearts have long been drifting in the current of the vast,’ says the poet Benn, and so it is with the truly courageous testimony of faith of the Croatian women. Phenomena such as Islamic expansion, or Communism, one may perhaps be able to resist by such an act, but whether it can also protect the faithful against the temptations of the present — hedonism and materialism — is highly questionable. How much, indeed, do the crosses that adorn the tattoos of modern people recall talismans worn proudly in the restless race for money and pleasure in the Calvinist-capitalist modernity of which Max Weber spoke. How much, today, do the religious exercises of many a Christian testify more to the pride of Cain than to the humility of the Mother of God … fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum …

‘Now her defiled skin felt like a shirt of nettles, grown into the flesh, leaving no possibility of escape.’ So it runs in Doderer’s tale The Tattooed Woman, and it is a wonderful, poetic description of all those signs and marks that a person cannot remove again, which are inescapably bound up with him. There came to my mind, beside the tattoo, such things as amputation, circumcision, the duelling student’s Schmiss, but also physiognomy, skin colour — indeed, Platonically speaking, the body as such. Yet the greatest and clearest indelible sign that a person bears with him is, I believe, his life itself: his doing, his forbearing, and finally the words he wrote and spoke. How I hope that the marked self of us all will be transfigured into a beautiful, new being — that our scars, of body and of soul, may be healed at the resurrection of the flesh.

What remains of the custom of the Croatian women? A historical detail, at any rate — but if one grasps the history of mankind as a history of salvation, then no event is arbitrary, none is mere ornament; everything strives, so I would believe, toward reconciliation, however difficult it may be to comprehend. In the year 1941, members of the ‘Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland’, under the command of Major Jezdimir Dangić, murdered five Catholic nuns, and their martyred bodies were thrown, together with tens of thousands of corpses of murdered Bosnian Muslims, into the waters of the Drina. Perhaps some of the venerable sisters too bore the traditional Croatian tattoos upon their arms and hands, and went with them into martyrdom…? So I think sometimes, and a verse of the Croatian poet Tin Ujević comes to my mind, in which he says that the blood that is shed — the common defeat of mankind in war and atrocity — is yet only a common history of all souls.

Sacred Prostitution

Mona Salva — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On Montsalvat, the castle where the chambers sway, a fair young wench once stole into the quarters of her king and gave herself to him as a girl of pleasure. He possessed her with an unquenchable thirst for her body, and paid her for her services a handful of glittering rubies.

Sheltered by the deep folds of her garments, the girl guarded Hades’ greeting to her like a treasure of high worth — one that need only be possessed for it to unfold its power — and bore it gathered up in a cloth into a pouch, always close to her breast.

Something had changed since she had given herself to the Grail King. Whenever knights who found their way into the grotto of Montsalvat now slaked their thirst upon her, she gave them, to carry away, an unspeakable secret. The brave Grail-seekers whom fate had cast into the depths of the castle grew drunk on her as on heavy wine, and when they went their way again, they were changed. Hardier, bearing a secret unspeakable as that of the sphinxes, which strengthened them — yet they could not say why.

How this knowledge, the thing men call the erotic, propagates itself lies hidden in the allegory of the blazing candle. It reveals itself once one has gazed long into the dancing flame. How long? Long enough to see within it the woman with surging hips, or that other whom one once glimpsed, fleeting and reeling, from the corner of the eye at some feast — for at feasts one sees her always. Is she real, this time? Hunger, thirst and weariness have worn reason down.

There have been those already who thought that behind the slender flame Isis tarried — as behind a bleeding veil, the glittering breast — and almost she turns her gaze upon you and begins, with her voice, to anoint your ear, for it sounds like melting amber in a ransacked crypt: My absolute sister.

Ah, who has stolen from me the god out of the harts?

I am one of the girls of the Grail. My name is Salome, and I stand before you, young knight. You have ridden far, and it has made you weary. But your weariness is not of the kind that takes a night slept through for curare, to cool your brow. YOU have grown weary as one grows old, and now you stand before me. The hand of time runs on in black velvet. Melancholy is abroad, and through you too it passes, like a surge of sepia through Atlantean ruins. Slow, dense and …true.

I wear my hair braided into a knot with the purple ribbon, as the Greek woman wore it when she knelt before Aphrodite. You fancy me the silhouette of an antique courtesan, risen as from a shard of clay. Do you grieve for the broken pitcher in which the thirst of Dionysus was once kindled? The beauty of my body is a gift to the Muses.

I draw near you in silks, all but flowed toward you: Angel, I called to you, let us stand like a wick and its daughter, a spiral staircase of wax.

I hover about your body, touched your hand with my slender fingers, and there I sang my girlish laughter.

You are a Christian, yet my eyes call back to you a time when concubinage stood in free consent between the gods and women. I am slender and serene, like an Attic spring with a white nape. Turn freely into my lap. Its rose is yours, to deck your member; say thou to me, name me freely as you will: Isis, Grail or Magdalene. I am your girl of pleasure.

Drunkenness, the first torch is aflame.

On bare feet, as the nymphs walk, I dance around you. You let it please you, and so I loosed a veil from my dress. At its hem garnets clatter, like lusts to be snatched at/ they hang like wine-tears or wound-pearls at my leg, decking my hip in rhythm.

Then the veil glides over your naked face, over the lids and over the lips/

our desire has fallen from the same wound. You ask yourself where it lies? Is it the gaping behind the eye? Or the one behind the first word?

Numbness, the second torch too was burning. Follow me, I adjured you, and you followed me to the watercolour threshold, where one thing flows into its own likeness.

Catch the red pearls with the tip of your tongue, drink as Magdalene at the body of Christ, for he was her grave and he was her garden. That is the cannibal truth of bodies: come into the grotto — passion is the Corybant of suffering.

A god holds sway in us whenever we desire; and each time we consume ourselves in longing for another, we begin, in that thirst, to feel our powerlessness before his infinitude.

I am only one of the girls we are, here to trace your path with flourishes of swaying hips. I do not ask how many jewels you paid the cherub to be let into the grotto. Poor knight! Did you think the Grail was like the accolade — a thing honestly won, a thing to be found for you like a treasure, in mute and shimmering devotion, like a chest full of goblets, jewels and coins? Like shell-grease in the moonlight, in the cabin of a wreck on the sea floor?

Or did you believe it were like beauty in the veil of my scent — that it lay like pollen on my lips, that it hid in the flowing of the garments, in the rose of my lap?

Beg freely for the coup de grâce; your Grail is always already spilled, poured out into the air of Montsalvat, into the air, the drunken, drunken air/ where the torches crackle and the girls float/ My God looks on! / An angel has given herself up.

Yet the feeling dies out, the flame passes away.

My absolute sister,

who has stolen from you the angel out of the harnesses?

Edible Martyrs

Joachim Bessing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In one of her summer Instagram stories the other day, Betony Vernon’s right forefinger could be seen sinking, with gentle pressure, into a little Agatha cake — right there beside one of the candied cherries that, on the pink-glazed surface of the dome-shaped confection, stand in for the nipple. The feast of St Agatha has always fallen on 5 February. That Mistress Vernon — who herself has the finest breasts among the living — has Minne di Sant’Agata brought to her on other days too points up the kinkiness of this martyr’s dish.

That someone would rather die for a conviction than conform appears, depending on the perspective one takes, either foolish or heroic. With the martyrs it is, moreover, the manner imposed on them of reconsidering their decision that separates the noble hero’s death from martyrdom. At least this holds for the early martyrs, the ones who have passed into myth. In the later course of Church history not only does their number steadily grow; increasingly, too, those put to death in a rather civilised manner — meaning: without physical torture — come to be declared martyrs. One example is Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest who, in the Auschwitz concentration camp, had himself executed by phenol injection in place of a fellow prisoner seized after an escape attempt. Kolbe was beatified in 1971 by Pope Paul VI. In the early eighties his canonisation by John Paul II then followed, on the grounds of his martyrdom. Since then St Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast is kept on 14 August, has also been patron saint of, among others, CB-radio operators and drug addicts. With both attributions one can only marvel at the counsel of the Holy See. Perhaps his martyrdom by injection of a chemical substance prompted the feedback where junkies are concerned.

That the cult of St Agatha was fashioned in a less shabby, incomparably more splendid, more imagination-kindling and, above all, culinarily interesting way has of course to do with her less shabby, more splendid martyrdom, which has stirred the imagination for centuries — the martyrdom to which we, Betony Vernon included, ultimately owe the delicious breast tartlets. There is such Agatha pastry in Switzerland too, where it is — no surprise there — brittle and ring-shaped (ringli, in the Swiss diminutive), so that it can now recall the symbol of a breast pictogram only in the abstract.

No one really knows, after all, whether Agatha ever existed at all. The whole story could just as well be a product of fantasy — even that of some Agatha herself. Mishima, famously, had indulged since puberty in extravagant Sebastianades. It is surely no exaggeration to say that the manner of self-killing he ultimately chose — the opening of the lower abdomen by a cut drawn horizontally with the short dagger from the heart’s side across to the liver — was meant to lead him into a realm of death comparable, in the quality of its torment, to that of St Sebastian. Whether the Yule log served at Christmas in the French bourgeoisie is really meant to symbolise that tree against which Sebastian was pierced by the arrows — as the monarchist Jean Raspail lately still maintained — and likewise whether the Japanese code, in which seppuku remains central and to this day barely sublimated, can know anything comparable to our martyrdom at all, shall not be pursued further here.

In Agatha’s case what interests us above all is the reason she was made a martyr. According to legend it was a Roman who wished to bed the young Christian woman. To break her resistance he forced her into prostitution, where she nonetheless managed to preserve her virginity. To bring her round after all, he then had both her breasts cut off. Since her steadfastness seemed irreversible, her martyrdom found its finale on a gridiron over the embers, where, in her virginal state, she was grilled to death.

That from this symphony of intolerable cruelties the amputation of the breasts was singled out and dressed up for cultural exaltation speaks of a keen sense for marketing. Not only are there paintings of Agatha surviving to this day that show her with her breasts on a dish, a serving platter and the like. There are also the cakes. And in earlier times, when the relic trade still mattered, when crusades were still pilgrimages, there were surely also waxen images of Agatha’s breasts, hawked roadside to the pilgrims.

In the Middle Ages, before the invention of printing — an incomparably more imagination-kindling age — the production of candles and votive images in wax was bound up with the production of confectionery. In this era, which also lies before the invention of refined sugar, colonies of bees supplied both wax and honey. Whoever drew candles also made votive images. And as nourishing fare the Lebzelter offered what were called Lebkuchen. It is quite possible that it was one of these Lebzelter who, inspired by the legend of Agatha’s martyrdom, devised an early form of the little Agatha breasts. In Sicily, where — alongside Calabria — the cult of Agatha is still kept up vividly to this day (and, in the form of this peculiar oral communion, savoured as well), so-called Frutta di Martorana were made very early on from marzipan, which had come from the Arabs: replicas of fruit as lifelike as possible, distributed as alms to the poor, who could not afford the originals. Poverty, too, is nothing but a martyrdom. Most, admittedly, would gladly recant — only they do not know the password.

The effect the martyr saint’s severed cake-breasts were meant to trigger on the palates of the faithful may be imagined as much the same as that of the symbolic fruits: the bitterness that is simply proper to truth is transcended by the sweetness of the martyr’s dish. For the moment of culinary enjoyment, of the childlike biting-through, as Michael Balint called it, the one who is in reality bound beholds another realm.

The erotic enjoyment of martyrdoms, on the other hand, from which Mishima could still profit, is gradually becoming difficult. The profanation of ritualised suffering has advanced. The style-forming power of the Catholic Church is barely present any longer. Even in Rome the shrines in the relic processions have lately been carried about chiefly by African bearers, since even at the Holy See the so-called shortage of skilled labour is making itself felt. Only in the developing countries is there still new blood. Here the commodity Hope still finds fertile markets, and young people, too, can imagine nothing lovelier than a life in God.

Of the belief in St Agatha, one day probably only the Minne di Sant’Agata will survive. Presumably also the reason why, despite the blessed Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds, as I peel with relish the skin from a grilled chicken at City Chicken I must still think of the martyrdom of poor Bartholomew.

Or want to?

A Night in the Casa di Ospitalità Nazareno

Johannes von Ohrid — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The moment I step into my double room — having walked the darkened passages that had once been hospital corridors, corridors through which the sick, who only weeks before had been holding stimulating conversations in the cloister, arm in arm beneath the arcades and discoursing on Neoplatonism, the mystics and the Waldensians, now, after their hospitalisation, walking arm in arm with their loved ones instead and, in reverent hope, seeking the doctors’ glances so as to sway their own fate through dozens of devout gestures and expressions, mutely performed their endless, painstaking labour of suffering; having contemplated those corridors, now emptied of every patient and decorated with photographs of the Holy Father and of laughing children, with Lourdes water and figures of St Francis — I can breathe the air one can breathe only in hospitals and in monasteries; the air one breathes in childhood, taken alone by one’s mother to a boarding school long before all the others will arrive, and later in the barracks, in a kind of Utopos or Eutopos that no longer holds anything to remind one, in a strange land, of what is one’s own; in those endless moments before one opens the window and the old light illumines the cross and the figure of the Virgin, one can breathe generations of solitude: there is a pneuma one awaits, for which one prepares and which one cultivates, singing soft hymns each day and praying each hour; and there is another that reaches one wholly without warning, filling the lungs with all the heaviness of earth and the weight of the world, letting the one who breathes it feel, for a single instant, all the suffering and all the beauty of the world.

Spoleto, Umbria, 1 September 2023

A Letter from the Skete

an Anonymous Brother from the Holy Mountain — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Monastic life is like a tale, an adventure; at times, it resembles paradise, yet it can easily evoke the likeness of hell. Each day unfolds with intensity, full of movement, never monotonous.

We rise at four in the morning, though as monks, we are often up even earlier to pray. At four-thirty, the bell tolls, calling us to the church. There, we begin our morning prayer, lighting candles, kissing icons, bowing low, listening to hymns and singing along. In prayer, we feel even the most distant souls as if they were beside us, sharing in our gratitude to God and conversing with Him with all our hearts.

Our morning prayer lasts two hours. Immediately afterward, we have a small bite to eat and start our day’s tasks. Each monk has his own responsibilities—caring for visitors, painting icons, preparing meals, tending the garden’s fruits and vegetables, making soap. The monastery farm is alive with vibrant colors, hosting plants of every kind. With the natural and organic products we yield, we offer aid to some local families.

Monastic life provides endless options; every day we learn something new. At one in the afternoon, we gather in the church for a brief prayer time, followed by our communal lunch. Our saints advise silence during meals, so one of the brothers reads a sacred text, filling our hearts with tranquility as we listen. These readings are never monotonous; they provide a profound peace.

After lunch, we say a one-minute prayer together, and the brother responsible for that day’s dishes cleans up. Following lunch, we may rest or return to our assigned tasks. Shortly after, we come together again for evening prayer, lasting an hour to an hour and a half. Here, we thank God and chant the hymns of the saint of the day. These hymns inspire us deeply, as each one tells of the lives of the saints, reminding us of the limitless strength within each human being.

Through the saints’ lives, we learn that every person is an extraordinary being, created for goodness. Their struggles teach us how spiritual life can be woven into our existence. To “transform” every evil into beauty—seeing even challenges as opportunities—shows us that the greatest battles and the highest victories are found in beauty.

After evening prayers, we may have a night service or a meeting. On quieter nights, we retreat to our cells to reflect on the day’s journey: tidying, reading religious books, praying. Giving thanks to God for each day’s miracles, taking account of the day, and examining our conscience—these practices nourish our spirit profoundly. Among His fresh wonders, I offer my heartfelt thanks for my brothers, praying that He always watches over them.

During the services, it’s not always too easy to keep your mind on the prayer. If you’re chanting or reading, it’s very easy to think other things and your mind will travel to other places. Also if you’re helping at the altar, you’re busy with candles, incense or oils. Even if you’re not doing anything else but just staying up with your prayer rope, it’s difficult to keep your mind on the words which you hear. So it’s a perpetual spiritual war with our minds, our thoughts. Because everything – even sins – starts in our mind at first; and only afterwards do we see the result on our bodies.

And at night, when I went to my cell after a long day, I’m all alone, just God and me. Maybe this is one of the most difficult parts of our life. Because whatever you did, whoever you saw during the day, at the end you’re all alone. Not any family member, not any friends or any beloved person. If you’re competent enough to deal with it, and if you’re worthy to call God to your cell, your cell can be heaven, otherwise you can handily turn to a cinch of the Satan.

Scriabin and the Synpoesy of Sound

Jan Juhani Steinmann — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, born on Christmas Day of the year 1871 in Moscow, bore a secret in his breast — a mystery, as it were, trans se ipsum, a secret of his own day-after-tomorrow, a mystery of posthumous need.

Now this secret of Scriabin’s bears not primarily upon his remarkable day of birth — which he read, with all due unpretentiousness, as the sign of his election; nor upon his colour-synaesthesia, which allowed Scriabin to perceive the several keys each as invested with a colour; nor even upon the often surreal-seeming genius of, say, his ten piano sonatas or the Poème-Nocturne; but upon the paradoxical unavailability of Scriabin’s last, admittedly unfinished work, the Mysterium. Paradoxically unavailable because this work had to fail itself in order one day to be able to succeed.

Scriabin intended the said Mysterium as a messianic Gesamtkunstwerk which, as a symphony of the senses, was to encompass tones, scents, colours, effects of light and mist, dance and moving architecture. Conceived for a total playing time of seven days, the Mysterium was, with the support of hundreds of participants, to be performed without cease in a cathedral in the Himalayas until the whole of humanity had attended it and, in the course of a collective ecstasy, had passed through a musical-mystical catharsis. The aim was thereby to raise humanity into a higher state of transcendent unity. What was already latent in Scriabin’s earlier works — such as Le Poème de l’Extase, Prométhée or Vers la flamme — was in the Mysterium to attain an incommensurable heightening, indeed to realise the sacred artwork non plus ultra.

Scriabin himself understood himself here as a redeemer-figure in the service of God, called to create the Mysterium for the salvation, sanctification and heightening of humanity. Owing to his relatively early death in April 1915 — Scriabin was forty-three — only seventy-two sketched pages of the L’acte préalable of the Mysterium lay ready at the time of his death. From these sketches the Russian composer Alexander Nemtin later reconstructed, over a span of twenty-eight years, the possible further unfolding of the Mysterium, which in 1973 was given its première as Preparation for the Final Mystery (Part 1: Universe, Part 2: Mankind, Part 3: Transfiguration) and has since stood as Scriabin’s Mysterium. The playing time of the Nemtin version, some two hours and forty minutes, is considerable — yet, against the 168 hours potentially envisaged for the entire Mysterium, only a fracture.

But wherein lies Scriabin’s secret of his own day-after-tomorrow? It lies in the very primordial moment of the Mysterium — namely, in the need of the apocalyptic, toward which the Mysterium was to be created. Apocalypse means, in its originary sense, ‘unveiling’ (from the Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις, apokalypsis: unveiling, disclosure or revelation); it thus marks the epistemic moment of the unconcealment of truth as such — yet understood out of that principial need, for which only the lifting of the veil of the worldliness of world can bring the salvation that is due.

Truth in the apocalyptic sense is therefore always already beyond itself, is trans se ipsum, for it realises itself only ever from the end of all things. Truth is ‘eschatological’ (from the Ancient Greek τὰ ἔσχατα, ta éschata: the uttermost things, the last things), for its irrefutability proves itself only in the Last. This holds, moreover, for Christ as well, who as the Anointed of God can fully disclose and verify himself only at his second coming, τὰ ἔσχατα.

I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life, I am a boundary, I am a summit, I am God.

The paradoxical unavailability of the Mysterium thus lay always already in its soteriological orientation, which — even granting Scriabin’s actual messianic election — will make itself possible only out of that need which transcends the work of the Mysterium into a salvation necessarily greater than any intention to evoke it. For it grows not merely out of the principial need, but comes to pass, in the first place, only from a temporally a-linear completion. The Mysterium thus had not only to fail in order to succeed posthumously, but in order to be able to be made possible from the end of every possible un-need.

Is everything thereby already said of Scriabin’s secret? No — for in the apocalyptic need it is intimated to us according to what necessity of the poietic the Mysterium is to be realised. ‘Poiesis’ denotes making (from the Ancient Greek ποίησις, poiesis: making, producing, fashioning) — that is, the force that gives birth and generates within the work. The Mysterium was thus laid out so as to turn from need (Not) into a Notwendigkeit — a necessity that, in German, literally spells the turning (wenden) of need — which will make this turning-need into the poetry of the movement.

Scriabin’s poetry lay here in the flexion into the hope of music — more concretely, in a soteric synpoesy of unveiling sound: that is, a con-densation-together and con-densation-with of apocalyptic tonality (from the Ancient Greek σύν-, syn-: together and with).

The marks of this Scriabinian synpoesy are, on the one hand, the paradox that withdraws from the purely conceivable; on the other, the necessity of musically poeticising all that is inconceivable — for music makes music of itself, just as poetry poetises itself. Further, its progressivity into the open, for Scriabin’s music creates in the free and the spontaneous, yet toward the one — albeit unavailable — telos of redemption. This incompleteness then completes itself in the adequate paradox of the fragment. The nearness to the Universalpoesie of Schlegel and Novalis sounds unmistakably through.

Scriabin’s Mysterium was thus never laid out to be completed, for the apocalypse will create itself only in the breach of possible impossibility. The last time of becoming was and is the un-becoming in the fragment, which challenges us, the afflicted, to co-poetise, co-hear and co-compose within it — exactly as Scriabin’s collective ecstasy also foresaw. The Mysterium was and will thus only ever be a summons to us all to mysticise ourselves; it has, in the last, a theotic character, for it wills the deification of all (from the Ancient Greek Θέωσις, Theosis: divinisation, deification) who will be exposed to it.

We reckon Scriabin’s secret, then, wholly to the noblesse rebelle, for the nobility of the apocalypse revolts, in his œuvre, in poetic freedom; and the revolt of the divine ennobles therein the insurrection against all that is unapocalyptic, un-soteric, amystical and un-theotic. Scriabin’s soteric synpoesy, in the twice-fraught chord of the apocalypse, was his noblesse rebelle — which could fulfil itself only in so far as it will have been able to have fulfilled itself.

Scriabin is one of us who have destiny in view. He is, with Christ, in our very midst, where his redeeming co-poetry sounds through our spheres — from his Préludes, by way of his Third Symphony, Le Poème Divin, to the unsayability of the Mysterium.

Stigmata (1999)

Anselm von Patmos — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Christianity is not a religion of the body. Through Jesus’s sacrifice and his resurrection the body loses its spiritual significance. The circumcision of the flesh in Judaism, as a mark of the bond between God and man, is in Christianity internalised — or, rather, spirit-ualised. Acting in the sense of God, or of Jesus, stands foremost; yet this “in-the-sense-of” can also be read as a “just-as,” whereby one passes from representation to imitatio. To imitate — or repeat — the actions of Jesus introduces three different kinds of corporeality into Christianity. Asceticism and martyrdom permit the corpo-real imitatio, in that through repetition they re-live the sufferings of Jesus. In both cases this is, admittedly, an externally imposed burden — one for which, however, a person resolves of their own accord. Ascetics and martyrs choose this torture of their own free will — a torture that, in the case of the martyrs, is made analogous to the crucifixion of Christ and thus constitutes a god-forsaken experience, agonising in both soul and body. At the same time one must ask to what extent this kind of imitatio corresponds to a sound exegesis of Christianity, since humanity has already been redeemed through Christ’s death on the cross, and this feat therefore demands no repetition in the form of martyrdom. That suffering holds a high place in Christianity is surely indisputable; yet the handling of it oscillates always between a nearness to God thereby made possible and the hope — or belief — of having been redeemed from it.

Stigmata are the third possibility of imitatio, one that differs, however, from the first two in that it presupposes no voluntariness. On the contrary, it is rather the unexpected appearance of the stigmata that is, among other things, constitutive of the imitatio. Despite this distinction, the foregoing criticism — whether this kind of suffering requires repetition — seems justified in the case of the stigmata as well. To what extent is the experience of Jesus’s suffering on the cross an affirmation of faith? If Jesus died for the redemption of humanity, then humanity cannot be redeemed once more through renewed suffering. At the same time, it is not only Jesus’s crucifixion that is inscribed in the stigmata as meaning, but also his resurrection, since they serve the Apostle Thomas as proof. Stigmata are thus not only bound up with Jesus’s suffering; they also point to — and thereby prove — his resurrection. The stigmata become the ex/impression of the divine, whereby the fleshly wounds oscillate between the corporeal and the figural. The stigmata are a wound of love from God, which, though they manifest corpo-really, must be read metaphorically. It is an inversion of the Christian transubstantiation, in which the outer shell of God changes — that is, the accidents of bread and wine remain the same while their substance changes. Bread and wine are thereby to be read not metaphorically but as the actual body and blood of Christ. With the stigmata it is the reverse, in so far as the wounds are indeed the physical imitatio of Jesus, yet this corporeality masks its figural meaning. The stigmata are thus a corporeal metaphor: they feign immanence but in fact represent transcendence.

Here an unexpected parallel opens up with the medium of film, which likewise, through its claim to — or effect of — realism, feigns an immanence — presents itself as self-enclosed — in order to prevent any crossing over into transcendence. The imprints of light burned onto the film strip are the physical and physicalist evidence that conceals the transcendent experience. Film generates transcendence not because of but despite its realism. Realism does not seem to be a top priority in Rupert Wainwright’s film Stigmata (1999). The film’s historicity reveals itself not only in an ecstatic storm of cuts — a staccato back-and-forth between shaky close-ups, with action scenes flickering fragmentarily across the screen — but also in its artificial colour palette, whose over-stylised contrasts take their cue from an MTV aesthetic. This hyper-artificiality stands diametrically opposed to the rationality of the priest Andrew Kiernan, played by Gabriel Byrne, who has given up his profession as a scientist and now, on the Church’s behalf, examines miracles for their credibility, or authenticity. Paradoxically, his task is not one of confirmation but merely one of refutation, whereby he is in fact to prove a negative — namely, that the phenomena are not a matter of divine agency. Yet in precisely this respect Stigmata is profoundly religious, for it understands that faith is constituted also through an un-provability, which is why only an “it-is-no-miracle” can be confirmed — one that, however, permits no converse inference. It is much the same with the stigmata, whose corporeality — that is, their positivistic element — can by no means be adduced as revelation or proof of God.

At the same time, the film does not trust its own faith and gives itself over to a postmodern scepticism that needs empirical proof in order to believe. The hairdresser Frankie Paige, played by Patricia Arquette, draws the Vatican’s attention with her stigmata, and the Vatican sends Kiernan to investigate. The marks, however, are not only wounds of love; entirely in keeping with horror convention, it is the fleshly suffering that stands in the foreground. In postmodernity, faith must be externalised, since in the digital age a fundamental scepticism prevails that does not accept an inwardness. Yet here the postmodern snake bites its own tail, since even the bodily proof is now no more than a reference to a further reference. The stigmata from which Frankie suffers are no direct reference to Jesus. Instead she is haunted by the spirit of a dead priest who, by means of an apocryphon, seeks to strip the institution of the Church of its power, and who himself suffered the stigmata. Frankie’s stigmata thus become the reference of a reference to a reference. The citation of Jesus becomes a “floating signifier.”

The film Stigmata opens up a critical perspective on the representation of the transcendent in postmodern culture. It balances on the narrow ridge between immanence and transcendence, between bodily presence and metaphysical meaning. In a world marked by digital scepticism, the body becomes the arena of spiritual proofs; yet even these physical manifestations dissolve into a chain of references. The postmodern condition mirrored in the film thus transforms religious experience into a complex play of signs, in which the direct connection to the divine appears increasingly fragile. This development calls into question not only the representability of the transcendent but also the nature of faith itself in a media-mediated reality.

The Melancholy of the Seas

Johannes von Ohrid — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The sea is a thought of God that no one has thought to its end.

Das Dorffest 2026

Augustinus Glastoniensis — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Am Samstag war es wieder so weit.

Sommerfest im Juni

Johann vom Gespaltenen Felsen — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Das Wetter hielt. Ausnahmsweise.