The Problem of Matter and Femininity – The Way Back to True Order

The times we live in are a time of disintegration. Church, culture, and religion have lost their center. The power of faith has become a weak feeling, discipline a game of opinions. Where seriousness, dignity, and responsibility once stood, arbitrariness and self-centeredness now reign.

Master Reding founded the Christian monastery of Nigredo to counteract this—not as an escape from the world, but as a conscious return to its foundation: to order, spirit, embodiment, and completeness.

Martial

The Nigredo monastery is martial in the truest sense: not violent, but orderly, disciplined, and alert. It is aimed especially at men who feel that something within them remains unfinished—the longing for a true path, for a sense of purpose, for service, and for responsibility.

For the man who no longer experiences himself as responsible loses his form.
He becomes soft, unclear, driven. The Nigredo Monastery wants the opposite: It calls men back to their task of being bearers of order, preservation, and truth.

The Violation and Devaluation of the Feminine – and the Flight into Abstraction

The feminine is the receptive, the nurturing, the unifying. But today's zeitgeist has devalued it – first through suppression, then through exaggeration.
Today, femininity has become either an ideology or a function.
The receptive, the preserving, the formative has been repressed in favor of an activism that has lost its depth. Mothers are no longer allowed to be mothers.

The Church also has a part in this. For centuries, it has viewed the feminine with suspicion, as a temptation rather than a revelation. Thus, matter was declared a danger instead of being recognized as a vessel of the spirit. But without the acceptance of matter, the spirit remains disembodied, abstract, and sterile.

In this division lies the fundamental evil of our time: Humanity has lost the unity of spirit and form, of heaven and earth. He wants to understand without receiving – to act without listening – to create without serving.

Flight of the Masculine – The Spiritual Imbalance

As Marie-Louise von Franz describes, when the masculine principle fails to acknowledge the feminine within itself, it often flees into the intellect and homoerotic acts. Instead of allowing the depth of feeling, relationship, and devotion, the man seeks security in thought, in systems, in mental constructs. This flight into abstraction is not true spiritualization, but a defense against the reality of the soul.

Von Franz calls this a one-sided spiritualization of the man: The intellect becomes a substitute for relationship, thought a shield against feeling. The man talks about life instead of living it. He idealizes the spirit to avoid confrontation with the body, the soul, the woman – and thus with his own vulnerability.

But this flight is not a solution, but a form of repression. What is not accepted pushes back – usually into unconscious, exaggerated, or contradictory forms of expression, such as homosexuality. Thus, the power of the spirit becomes arrogance, and the search for truth becomes a retreat from life.

To integrate the feminine within oneself means to feel without losing oneself; to receive without fleeing; to love without possessing. This is the true maturity of man.

Parzival – The Path of the Unfinished Man

Parzival is the archetype of this conflict. He seeks the Grail, but fails because he doesn't ask. He wants to win, wants to know, but he doesn't ask about the suffering of others. He remains blind to the mystery that reveals itself only to the humble.

Only when he goes through error, shame, and silence does he mature. He realizes that knowledge without compassion remains empty. Thus, he becomes a true knight not through struggle, but through insight.

Parzival represents the modern man: courageous, searching, but cut off from the inner feminine. He must walk through the darkness – through the Nigredo – to find the heart.

For only those who honor the soul can understand the spirit.

The Martial Path – Order through Discipline

The Nigredo Monastery is not a place of weakness, but of formation. Here, faith becomes flesh again. Work, prayer, silence, and chastity are the four pillars of restoration.

The monastery is martial because it demands clarity. Each brother is responsible for his work. Piety here is not an escape, but a daily struggle against inertia, vanity, and self-pity.

Chastity is not a moral prohibition, but the mastery of one's own energy. The man who preserves his strength carries it not in fragmentation, but in concentration.
He directs it upwards – toward the work, toward God, toward service and protection.
Thus, chastity becomes an inner strength that harmonizes spirit and body. Sexuality has a value again, we

There is a special place to live one's life. In the marital bed.

Back to the Father

"We must return to the Father," says Master Reding. But this path does not lead through contempt for the feminine, but through its restoration. Only those who honor the mother can recognize the Father.

The Father represents order, spirit, direction. The mother represents form, life. The man who unites both carries heaven within himself.

Without the feminine, the masculine becomes hard. Without the masculine, the feminine becomes aimless.
Only their union brings wholeness – in the world, in the Church, in humanity.

The Man's Responsibility

In the Nigredo Monastery, the responsibility lies clearly with the man. Not as domination, but as service. He maintains order so that the feminine can blossom in protection. He creates space in which life can grow.

When the man fails, the family disintegrates. When the family disintegrates, culture dies. Therefore, renewal begins with him – in silence, in work, in prayer. Not in words, but in deeds.

The martial spirit of the Nigredo Monastery calls the men of this time back:

to piety instead of complacency,
to chastity instead of distraction,
to responsibility instead of self-searching.

For the world doesn't need a watered-down religion, but men who can stand again – firmly grounded in matter, rooted in the soul, directed toward the spirit and true love, divine love, the agappe.

Only through them can the sacred be embodied again. Only through their transformation does the new balance of feminine and masculine arise – the rebirth of living faith, from the darkness of the Nigredo into the light.