“This cathedral is a compendium of heaven and earth; he shows us the close-knit ranks of the heavenly inhabitants: prophets, patriarchs, angels and saints, sanctifying the interior of the temple with their transparent bodies, singing the glory of the Mother and the Son...” wrote the French writer J.C. Huysmans (1848-1907) in the third part of his famous trilogy - novel “Cathedral” (1898). The book belongs to the “Catholic” period in the author’s work and is to a certain extent an autobiographical work - however, like its two previous parts: the novel “Without Bottom” (Enigma, 2006) and the novel “On the Way” (Enigma, 2009). And yet the main character of this novel is perhaps the cathedral. The image of the Chartres Cathedral (Notre-Dame de Chartres) does not appear at all in the usual philistine light in which tourist guidebooks try to present it - the mystical author sees in it, first of all, Tradition embodied in stone. It is in this sense that he analyzes the sacred architectonics, sculpture and painting of the temple, its esoteric emblems, captured in rosettes and stained glass windows, plunges into a detailed exegesis of this monumental theological Scripture, erected on the remains of a Celtic sanctuary, delves into the innermost meaning of the Hermetic bestiary inhabiting its cornices : all these demons, gargoyles, griffins, harpies and chimeras. The work is filled with excursions into the history of monasticism, numerous quotations from the works of the Fathers of the Church and medieval chroniclers, reflections on Catholic liturgics and the symbolism of temple art. The wide panorama of Christian mysticism and various religious movements presented in the novel required detailed comments, in the compilation of which the editors decided not to limit themselves to dry, lapidary information about certain historical figures, but to give preference to miniature, sometimes almost artistic hagiographic articles. “The most remarkable document of the life of a religious soul in France I consider the work of Huysmans, that hero and martyr of decadence, infinitely alien to modern vulgarity. Huysmans is more interesting and deeper than the “modernists,” wrote N. Berdyaev. “No one has ever penetrated so deeply into the liturgical beauties of Catholicism, or interpreted the Gothic in such a way.” This alone makes Huysmans a great writer.”