Grünewald, Isenheim altarpiece. c1510. Painted for the Monastery of St. Anthony that specialized in helping people with skin diseases and often erogtism caused by rye fungus. Jesus is depicted with the marks of the disease.
St John points and the text by him says: ‘He must increase, I must decrease.’
“We think of John the Baptist in Grünewald’s painting of the crucifixion, with his strangely pointing hand. It is this hand which is in evidence in the Bible.” Karl Barth, lecture.
“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” Psalm 22:14-15.
‘You must recognise that God is so unlike whatever can be thought or pictured, that, when you have got beyond the stage of self-indulgent religiosity there will be nothing you can securely know or feel. You face a blank: and any attempt to avoid that or shy away from it is a return to playing comfortable religious games. The dark night is God’s attack on religion.’
Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment
Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking-and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone. Generosity of the disaster. There death, and life are always surpassed.
— Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
“Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me to be burned unread.”
Kafka letter to friend Max Brod
Photograph depicting inscriptions carved by prisoners in the Beauchamp Tower, Tower of London, by Sir Benjamin Stone, 1898 (via Victoria & Albert Museum)
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