Goldmund's Creation of the Refectory Lectern

Goldmund’s Creation of the Refectory Lectern is the first major work Goldmund undertakes after returning to Mariabronn. Rather than make an isolated ornament, he designs a structure for the refectory that joins the natural world, biblical history, and the cloister’s own community. Its two-part composition turns the lectern into a carved account of creation and the word of God, while the years of labor reveal both Goldmund’s emerging discipline and the cost he associates with finishing art.

Choosing a Place and Purpose

Goldmund is asked to begin work for the cloister, but rejects the idea of making an arbitrary piece merely to satisfy curiosity. He wants the work to belong to the house’s existing art, architecture, and daily life. An altar or pulpit would have appealed to him, but the cloister has neither a need nor space for either. Instead he chooses the raised, undecorated niche in the refectory, where a young brother reads from the lives of saints during meals. He proposes carved panels for the lectern and its steps, with figures in half-relief and others projecting almost fully from the wood; Abbot Daniel approves the plan.

The project depends on practical preparation as well as inspiration. Goldmund finds an empty shed beside the courtyard gate and converts it into a workshop. He draws precise plans for a drawing board and other tools, makes a long list of materials for the cloister carters to bring from nearby cities, and selects felled timber at the carpenter’s and in the forest. He stacks the wood on the grassy lot behind the workshop, protected by a roof he builds himself. Working with the blacksmith and his son, Erich, he also has the knives, chisels, drills, and planes made to his specifications. The large, carefully assembled workspace gives the project material form before its carvings begin.

Design: Creation and the Word of God

Goldmund conceives the lectern in two parts: the lower structure represents the world, and the upper structure represents God’s word. The steps grow from a sturdy oak trunk and wind around it. They are to carry images of nature and scenes from the simple lives of the patriarchs and prophets. Above them, the parapet bears the four apostles. The evangelists’ faces also connect the work to people in Goldmund’s life: one is modeled on Abbot Daniel, another on Father Martin, his successor, and Luke is intended to preserve the likeness of Master Niklaus.

As the carving advances, the thick spiral of stairs becomes a small, busy world of creatures, plants, animals, and people. Noah stands among grape leaves and grapes. The staircase balustrade develops into a paradise: a flourishing wilderness of trees, brush, and herbs, with birds among the branches and animal heads and bodies appearing throughout it. Scenes from the patriarchs’ lives occupy this garden. The resulting work is a praise of creation’s beauty, freely expressive yet held together by an inner order and discipline. Its location gives that carved world a daily function: it surrounds the reading of saintly lives at the communal meal.

The Workshop and Its Collaborators

Once the work begins, after the snow has fallen and Christmas has passed, Goldmund withdraws from much of the cloister’s ordinary social life. He no longer waits for students after class or drifts through the woods and arcades. He eats at the mill and allows only Erich into the workshop. Even Erich is sometimes met with silence, as Goldmund concentrates on the work.

Erich becomes more than a helper. During the months of carving, he carries out small tasks and watches the project develop; Goldmund sometimes explains his methods and lets him try carving. Goldmund is pleased to have a believer and disciple, and considers asking Erich’s father to release the young man so that he can be trained as a permanent assistant. From the second year of the project, Erich formally serves as Goldmund’s apprentice. Their work therefore includes the possibility of a continuing craft relationship, not just assistance on a single commission.

The project does not extinguish Goldmund’s need for movement. Over the two years he works on the group, he seldom loses a day to restlessness or boredom, but when such moods return, he gives Erich a task and leaves for the countryside. He walks or rides among the woods, visits a peasant’s daughter, hunts, or lies looking into the treetops and undergrowth. After a day or two he comes back and resumes carving with renewed energy. The alternation between retreat into work and brief departures keeps the wandering life present within a project that requires sustained commitment.

Figures, Memory, and Artistic Fellowship

Goldmund works on the evangelists when he feels at his best, when his work seems harmonious and free of doubt. He feels especially successful with the figure bearing Abbot Daniel’s features, whose face radiates kindness and purity. He is less satisfied with the figure modeled on Master Niklaus, although Erich admires that one most. To Goldmund, it expresses discord and sadness: lofty creative ambition shadowed by awareness of art’s limits and grief for a lost unity and innocence. The portraits thus do more than decorate a religious structure; they preserve distinct judgments and memories of the people represented.

Goldmund first shows Abbot Daniel’s completed figure to Narcissus, concealing the other statues under a cloth and placing that one alone in the light. When Narcissus is busy, Goldmund waits until the next day to bring him to the workshop. Narcissus responds to the work with joy and astonishment. He recognizes in it the flowering of what Goldmund has carried within him, and begins to understand art as a path to knowledge different from his own intellectual and spiritual discipline. He had previously treated art as less serious than thought and science, because he associated the senses with transience; Goldmund’s carving changes his understanding of the range of human ways of knowing.

Goldmund, in turn, explains that completion brings a particular emptiness. He anticipates the work being taken from the workshop and installed, followed by praise, while he returns to a bare workroom and thinks of what he failed to achieve. Narcissus acknowledges that the two friends cannot fully understand one another’s experience, but sees a shared condition in the artist’s relation to finished work: it can leave its maker ashamed and facing the need to begin again.

Completion and Aftermath

A few weeks after that exchange, the large work is finished and installed. It becomes the possession of the cloister community: others look at it, judge it, and praise it, and Goldmund is honored for what he has made. The unveiling is marked by a festive meal at the fathers’ table, with the house’s oldest wine. Goldmund enjoys the fish and venison, but Narcissus’s interest and praise warm him more than the wine. The scene confirms the work’s public success while preserving the private uncertainty that accompanies its completion: Goldmund’s workshop and heart feel empty, and he is unsure whether the sacrifice demanded by the work has been worthwhile.

The lectern’s completion leads directly into another commission rather than ending Goldmund’s work at Mariabronn. Abbot Daniel has already requested an altar for the Mary chapel at Neuzell, where a Mariabronn father serves as priest. Goldmund plans a Madonna for it, intending to preserve in the figure the image of Lydia, the knight’s daughter. He treats the commission as less important than the work he most wants to pursue and expects it may become an opportunity for Erich to develop as an assistant. As he chooses wood with Erich and prepares the altar, however, he resumes his walks and sometimes disappears for days. The lectern therefore stands as a completed achievement of concentrated labor, but not as a final settlement of the tension between the workshop and Goldmund’s continuing desire to wander.