5. The Monastery community of Mount Saviour was founded in 1950/52 by Fathers Damasus Winzen from Maria Laach, Gregory Bornstedt, and Placid Cormey, the latter two from Portsmouth Priory, Rhode Island.
6. Wilhelm Koppers, SVD (1886–1961), was a German Catholic priest and ethnographer, as well as a Steyler missionary and early member of the “Vienna Kulturkreis School” in cultural anthropology. He was considered a vehement critic and opponent of National Socialist race theory.
7. Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD (1868–1954), was a Roman Catholic priest, linguist, and ethnographer. He founded the “Vienna Kulturkreis School,” which attempted to develop a universal history of culture; Schmidt is today considered one of the early twentieth century’s most significant comparative linguists.
8. Hubert Rohracher (1903–72) was an Austrian psychologist, philosopher, and jurist. His arguably most famous work, Persönlichkeit und Schicksal (Personality and Fate), was published in Vienna in 1926.
9. Walter Schücker, OCist (1913–77), was confessor, counselor, and leader of spiritual exercises at the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz. In 1951, he and Abbot Karl Braunstorfer founded the prayer community “Friends of the Holy Cross,” which today counts eighteen hundred members. They subsequently founded the Heiligenkreuz Oblate community in 1972.
10. Paul Claudel (1868–1955) was a French writer, poet, and diplomat.
4. Becoming a Monk
1. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) writes the following in his Sonnets to Orpheus I,7, in The Poetry of Rilke, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point, 2009), 363:
Praising, that’s it! One appointed to praise he came forth like ore out of the stone’s silence. His heart, O ephemeral winepress for a vintage eternal to man.
Never does his voice die or turn to dust when the divine moment seizes him. All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape, ripened in his sentient South.
Not mold in the vaults of kings
nor any shadow falling from the gods
can give his songs the lie.
He is one of the messengers who stay, holding far into the doors of the dead bowls heaped with fruit to be praised.
2. John Henry Newman (1801–90), The Mission of the Benedictine Order.
3. See Gen 2:19: “So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”
4. The Abbaye SaintPierre de Solesmes is a Benedictine monastery in Solesmes in the French département of Sarthe.
5. Rainer Maria Rilke, Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen, trans. David Young, Cortland Review (Summer 2013).
6. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I,9. in Duino Elegies & the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 2009), 99.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, I, Ninth Elegy, in Duino Elegies & the Sonnets to Orpheus, 57.
8. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” from Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991), 180.
9. Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) was a Roman Catholic priest from Catalonia, Spain. He was a significant proponent of interfaith dialogue and published numerous works on the subject, including The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man and The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha.
10. Joseph Gredt, OSB (1863–1940), from Luxembourg was a Benedictine monk and philosophy professor in Rome.
11. Evagrius Ponticus (345–99) was an Egyptian monk and theologian who lived in the Nitrian desert with other desert fathers. He originated the “eight patterns of evil,” which were then taken up and developed by John Cassian and survive today as the doctrine of the Seven Deadly Sins.
12. The Apophthegmata Patrum is a collection of sayings (apophthegmata) and stories attributed to the desert fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries AD. The sayings of Abba Poemen, Abba Macarius of Egypt, and Anthony the Great are among the more well known. The apophthegmata are similar to the koans of Zen Buddhism.
13. Rabbi Samson ben Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) was one of nineteenth-century Germany’s leading proponents of Orthodox Judaism and founder of neo-Orthodoxy.
14. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72) was a rabbi, writer, and Jewish religious philosopher of Polish descent. Exiled to the United States, he was active in the civil rights movement. His writing—such as Man’s Quest for God (New York: Scribner, 1954)—and engagement were officially honored by Pope Paul VI, among others.
15. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in The Poetry of Rilke, ed. and trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 223.
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman., ed. Judith Norman and Peter Horstmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181.
18. Negative theology attempts to marry religious faith with the philosophy of reason and to explain religious faith using philosophical tools. It denies the possibility of objective knowledge or proof of God. Characteristics, names, or definitions of the Divine are likewise dismissed as insufficient to describe the distinction of the Divine Mystery. One of negative theology’s most well-known proponents is the medieval theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart.
5. Interfaith Encounters
1. Gustav Mensching (1901–78) was a scholar of comparative religion whose academic contributions play an important role in interfaith dialogue even today. Mensching was partly responsible for the separation of religious studies from theology and the establishment of the former as an independent discipline of inquiry. Mensching saw religion as “the experiential encounter with the Holy, and responsive action by persons motivated by the Holy” (Stuttgart: Curt E. Schwab, 1959, 18–19; excerpt translated by Peter Dahm Robertson).
2. Thich Nhat Hanh (born 1926) is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, poet, author, and founder of study centers.
3. David Steindl-Rast, Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles’ Creed (New York: Doubleday Religion, 2010).
4. The Global Ethic is the formulation of a fundamental stock of ethical norms and values that can be derived from religious, cultural, and even philosophical traditions throughout human history. The “Global Ethics Project” is an attempt to describe similarities of the world’s religions and to develop out of these fundamental norms a shared Ethic, a brief set of rules that can be accepted by all. The project was initiated by theologian Hans Küng.
5. Gustav Mensching refers to this Mystery as “the Holy,” and Rudolf Otto has shown that when we encounter the Holy, we are fascinated and thrilled—that is to say, reverent.
6. Stabilitas loci (Latin for “fixedness of place”) refers to a nun’s or monk’s connection to a specific monastery.
7. This second line of the Lutheran hymn “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig” (O Lamb of God so blameless), well known throughout German churches, translates to “You have borne all sin / Else we would have to despair.”
8. Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) was one of German Romanticism’s most significant poets and lyricists. The quoted poem is an excerpt from “Der Umkehrende” (Turning Back), translated by Peter Dahm Robertson.
6. Hermit’s Life
1. In the style of Theophane the Monk, in Tales of a Magic Monastery (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981).
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchel (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 143.
3. Bear Island lies off the coast of Maine and is one of the five Cranberry Isles.
4. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II,23, in Duino Elegies & the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 2009).
5. Kathleen Jessie Raine, CBE, (1908–2003) was a British poet, academic, and literary critic. Her writing focu
sed particularly on the works of William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Taylor. Founder of the Temenos Academy, she was also highly interested in all forms of spirituality.
6. “Alone with the Alone,” or with the All-One. It is one of my favorite phrases used by John Henry Cardinal Newman, referring to his relationship with God as a face-to-face encounter that none should come between. As a young and lonely man at Oriel College, he was once greeted on a solitary stroll by Edward Copleston, who, with a gentlemanly bow, said, “Numquam minus solus quam cum solus!” (Never less alone than when alone!). Solitude, many saints have learned, is where one best finds God, and solitude cannot be had without silence.
7. Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” from New and Selected Poems (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
8. Scetis refers to the Wadi El Natrun, a desert valley in Egypt. The name Scetis comes from the Ancient Egyptian Sekhethemat, meaning “salt field.” The Wadi remains a site of hermitages and monasteries.
9. Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) was an American philosopher and author. He is best known for his book Walden; Or, Life in the Woods and his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
7. Encounters in Travel
1. The Kohte was a type of tent that originated in (autonomous) German youth movements. It was developed around 1930 by Eberhard Koebel, based on a tent design of the Finnish Saami people (near Inari Lake).
2. The Puszta is the large steppe region leading from eastern Austria and Hungary all the way to Mongolia. It is probable that Austrian youth movements encountered these kinds of long-handled spoons on visits to this region, as trips to Hungary, Romania, and other parts of Eastern Europe were popular.
3. Cardinal Pio Taofinu’u, SM (1923–2006), was the archbishop of Samoa-Apia.
4. For the definition and description of a marae, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marae.
5. The meaning of Puja approximates to “honoring” or “doing honor.” As a ritual, which should ideally be practiced daily, it is one of the primary parts of everyday religious practice in both Hinduism and Buddhism.
6. Bede Griffiths (1906–93) was a British Benedictine monk and one of the twentieth century’s best known mystics. From 1968 onward, he led the Shantivanam ashram and monastery. He is particularly known for his religious dialogue with Hinduism.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 84.
8. Contemplation and Revolution
1. Sangha is the community of lay faithful and ordained clergy who mutually support one another in following the Buddha and the Dharma. Regardless of the exact definition, all traditions view sangha as one of the Buddhism’s “Three Jewels” or “Three Treasures.”
2. See http://www.gratefulness.org, http://viviragradecidos.org, and others.
3. Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was an American Christian Socialist and journalist. Until 1927, she was a radical communist; after her conversion to Catholicism in 1928, she advocated a Christian anarchism. Together with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement and was imprisoned several times because, as both a committed suffragist and pacifist, she could not reconcile her conscience and faith to contemporary political developments. In 2000, Pope John Paul II granted the New York Archdiocese permission to open her cause for canonization.
4. Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), from An Zimmern; excerpt translated by author.
5. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” from Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991), 176.
6. See www.gratefulness.org.
9. Double Realm
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I,9, in The Poetry of Rilke, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point, 2009), 367.
2. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991), 204.
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 69.
4. Dupuytren’s contracture is a thickening and shortening of the connective tissues (fascia) of the palm, most commonly observed around Haithabu, the Viking capital.
5. From the poem “Es ist doch alles nur aus Liebe gut” by German poet and literary critic Will Vesper (1882–1962). Excerpt translated by Peter Dahm Robertson.
6. T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” from Four Quartets in Collected Poems 1909–1962, 199.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke: “Nous sommes les abeilles de l’Univers. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible.” Letter to W. von Hulewicz.
8. W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, accessed July 7, 2017, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sailing-byzantium.
9. P. Otto Mauer, summarizing Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
10. Sonnets to Orpheus I, 9.
11. Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was an Irish writer and literary scholar. In addition to his scholarship and criticism, he also published many works of Christian apologia (e.g., Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man) and novels such as The Great Divorce and The Chronicles of Narnia.
12. Cappadocia is a region in Asia Minor. In the fourth century AD, it was home to many significant figures in early Christianity. Three of these—Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—are today known as the Cappadocian Fathers. They were early advocates of a trinitarian theory of God as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
13. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925” in Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point, 2009), 70.
14. The definition is taken from Thomas Aquinas.
15. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894–1962) was an American poet and writer, generally known as e.e. cummings.
16. “Extinguish My Eyes, I’ll Go on Seeing You.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, 111–12.
17. “Only in Our Doing Can We Grasp You,” from Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, 84; last two lines appended to incomplete translation.
About the Interviewer
Johannes Kaup studied philosophy and Catholic theology at the University of Vienna and is a trained psychotherapist in Daseinsanalysis. He has been active in the field of youth social work and as a religious lecturer. Since 1990, he has been working at ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, where he has conceived and moderated programs in religion, science, and education.
He has received numerous awards as a journalist, among others with the “Radiopreis de Erwachsenenbildung,” the “Austrian Climate Protection Prize,” the “Seniors’ Rose,” and the “Dr. Karl Renner Prize for Literature” in the Radio category.
Johannes Kaup has been a moderator at international congresses and has published five books.
I Am Through You So I Page 20