From my eyes must fall scales that turn my gaze merely inward towards my needs, my desires. There is resonance in Christ’s saying, ‘If anyone looks upon a woman in order to lust, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Matthew 5.28). The key element here is the preposition πρός [pros], ‘in order to’. What is evoked is not a spontaneous encounter with beauty stirring a response at once of mind and body. Such experience is not necessarily unchaste. It simply reveals man as man, woman as woman. It can issue in wonder and thanksgiving, be full of joy, lead to love. The subject of the Gospel’s sanction is one who has aroused in himself a hunger for satisfaction, then looks for an object to feed on. In so far as there is sexuality in this scene, it is present as self-centred appetite. The beholder scans his surroundings not as a seeker after fellowship, but as a consumer; his focus is on his lust, not on the other. And this, says Christ, is unworthy of a human being. It debases the prowling subject and humiliates the sought object, present only as flesh.

As the antidote to such predatory looking, the Gospel presents the example of luminous seeing: ‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light’ (Matthew 6.22). The adjective Matthew uses to describe an eye working as it should is ἁπλοῦς [haplous]. It forms a pair with διπλοῦς [diplous]. This pair corresponds to the Latin word-pair simplex-duplex. What makes the eye sound is the fact of being simple, that is, integral. A good case could be made for translating, ‘So, if your eye is chaste, your whole body will be full of light.’

This way of seeing is proper to infants. It always moves me viscerally when such a little one looks me straight in the eye, unblinking and unafraid, curiously benevolent and expecting benevolence, open to take in and freely absorb the surrounding world. I once looked out on reality like that; we all did. Do you remember? I would love to see it that way once more.

Happily, chaste seeing can be re-learned. Or rather, a simple, unmingled eye can be re-acquired. St Bruno assured his friend Raoul of this during his life’s last decade. Settled in Calabria, he explained the nature of the Carthusian call:

What benefit and divine gladness the desert’s solitude and silence reserve for those who love it, only those who have experienced it can know. Here, the strong can enter into themselves and remain there, with themselves, as much as they like, diligently cultivating seeds of virtue and eating happily the fruits of paradise. Here, they can acquire the eye whose serene gaze wounds the Bridegroom with love. Such an eye, being pure and uncontaminated, allows them to see God.

Raoul will have picked up Bruno’s allusion to Gregory the Great’s life of St Benedict. The beginnings of Benedict’s retreat from the world are described there with the words, ‘Solus habitavit secum,’ ‘He lived alone with himself.’ We have encountered this motif before: to see the world and others rightly I must first enter into myself. Only once I know what is there, and let chaos become kosmos, am I fit to acquire an eye that sees serenely. The wound which a chaste eye inflicts does not humiliate or hurt. It is sweet, like the infant’s gaze. It cuts us to the quick but feels like a blessing, reminding us of what sight can be like. To see in this manner is to re-enter paradise, says Bruno. It is part of the process of exchanging the garment of skin for the robe of glory. Sight born of love can become an act of love.

The correlation between seeing and loving is memorably fixed in a gnomic phrase penned by Richard of St Victor, the learned Augustinian born at about the time when Bruno wrote to Raoul and who taught at St Victor in Paris when Eystein Erlendsson, future bishop of Nidaros [Trondheim] and editor of the Passio Olavi, was a student there. In his treatise On Preparing the Soul for Contemplation he affirmed: ‘Ubi amor, ibi oculus.’ That is to say, ‘Where there is love, there will be an eye that sees.’

Were I to seek a descriptive term for this kind of seeing, I would call it contemplative. This may surprise. We think of contemplation as a specialized form of prayer reserved for austere professionals. We speak of ‘contemplative orders’, meaning monastic institutes of enclosure. Contemplation is thought of as a privilege reserved for such environments. Yet the notion points to something pan-human, an exercise without which humanity remains incomplete.

The Renaissance humanists knew this. They stressed it. In Pico della Mirandola’s treatise On the Dignity of Man, a set text for the generations of the Metaphysical Poets, there is a passage I love very much. Pico describes God’s intention in creating human nature. Having made earth and heaven, filling them with life, God longed, says Pico, ‘for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur’. Therefore the Almighty set man in the middle of the world as ‘universi contemplator’, as someone fit to contemplate the whole, sensitive to the connectedness of things and aware of his own rightful place among them.

But what is it really to be a ‘contemplator’?

Within ‘contemplation’ we spot a root familiar from modern vernaculars. It yields words such as ‘temple’. Contemplation originates in a cultic setting. We can be more specific, as it happens. The verb contemplor first pertained to the vocabulary of bird-flight divination. Imagine an oracle enclosed in a temple looking expectantly out through a hole in the roof, like the one we see in the Roman Pantheon. Patiently, she would look for auspices, omens in the form of avian behaviour by which the gods revealed their good pleasure. Presupposed is the notion that the world is mediatory and significant, pregnant with meaning to be pondered.

Contemplation of this kind was not only practised by solitary augurs cooped up in hallowed houses. It could be a social activity, enabling communities to work out a shared purpose. This is how it is described in the second book of Homer’s Odyssey, when Telemachus sets out on a quest to seek his missing father. He is concerned about Penelope, his mother, assailed by suitors. He worries about his inheritance. He needs to know whether Odysseus is dead or alive. Before the inhabitants of Ithaca he states his case. The crowd listens keenly. People are sensitive to Telemachus’s plight. Mutual attention develops in a horizontal exchange as the word passes from speaker to assembly, and back. Then suddenly something happens overhead. Telemachus has just finished a sentence when:

… τῷ δ᾽ αἰετὼ εὐρύοπα Ζεὺς
ὑψόθεν ἐκ κορυφῆς ὄρεος προέηκε πέτεσθαι.
τὼ δ᾽ ἕως μέν ῥ᾽ ἐπέτοντο μετὰ πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο
πλησίω ἀλλήλοισι τιταινομένω πτερύγεσσιν:
ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ μέσσην ἀγορὴν πολύφημον ἱκέσθην,
ἔνθ᾽ ἐπιδινηθέντε τιναξάσθην πτερὰ πυκνά,
ἐς δ᾽ ἰδέτην πάντων κεφαλάς, ὄσσοντο δ᾽ ὄλεθρον:
δρυψαμένω δ᾽ ὀνύχεσσι παρειὰς ἀμφί τε δειρὰς
δεξιὼ ἤιξαν διά τ᾽ οἰκία καὶ πόλιν αὐτῶν.
θάμβησαν δ᾽ ὄρνιθας, ἐπεὶ ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσιν:
ὥρμηναν δ᾽ ἀνὰ θυμὸν ἅ περ τελέεσθαι ἔμελλον.
for his sake Zeus of the wide brows sent forth two eagles, soaring high from the peak of the mountain. These for a while sailed on the stream of the wind together, wind and wing, close together, wings spread wide. But when they were over the middle of the vociferous assembly, they turned on each other suddenly in a thick shudder of wings, and swooped over the heads of all, with eyes glaring and deadly, and tore each other by neck and cheek with their talons, then sped away to the right across the houses and city. Then all were astounded at the birds, when their eyes saw them, and they pondered in their hearts over what might come of it.

Millennia have passed. Nonetheless this marvellous text still permits us to sense the excitement of the crowd. All eyes of a sudden look upward. The assembled mass undulates to the rhythm of the birds’ performance, majestic and menacing. The spectacle absorbs, yet points beyond itself. The Ithacans know that what they witness means something. Something will ‘come of it’ concerning the matter in hand, namely the possibility of Odysseus’s return.

Thus we see what it might mean, in natural terms, to live contemplatively. It is a matter of standing still and watching, paying attention to what happens round about, prepared to step out of our preconceived ideas, alert to the prospect of new-found sense to be weighed in our heart.

This example comes from poetry, but such seeing is no less at the basis of natural science. What does a scientist do, if not observe phenomena of nature in order to establish what they mean? Exclamations of wonder can result, delighted cries of ‘Eureka!’. Some feature in a beautiful book by Richard Dawkins, an anthology of science writing edited as a labour of love. Among the pieces is an excerpt from the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s Truth and Beauty, which in turn cites an exchange of two grand physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein. The former shares with the latter this confidence:

If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty – by forms I am referring to coherent systems of hypothesis, axioms, etc. – to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are ‘true’, that they reveal a genuine feature of nature… You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.

The casual, ‘You must have felt this too,’ is moving. Dawkins cites Chandrasekhar citing it. This suggests a complicity extending beyond the correspondence of Heisenberg and Einstein, two old friends. Indicated is an aspect of scientific endeavour as such. Heisenberg’s association of beauty and truth reaches beyond that of Keats (‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’), which is of the order of sensibility. The beauty in question here is twofold. It is conceptual, apparent in axioms only a trained intelligence can read, but it also unfolds before the eyes, in the ‘almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us’. The tremendum suggests quasi-religious experience. Heisenberg speaks of something revealed. The apocalypse, though, is this-worldly. Nature is the revealing subject. Reverent fear flows from an insight we have pursued from different angles: what is natural is marked by integrity. Nature is essentially chaste.

If this kind of seeing is illumined by faith, a further dimension opens. We find the process described by a contemporary of Heisenberg’s, a contemplative in the technical sense: the Carthusian Jean-Baptiste Porion (1899–1987). Porion was a subtle intellectual. At the same time he breathed monastic simplicity. In a letter from 1980 to the philosopher Georges-Hubert de Radkowski, he described contemplative life as ‘une découverte inépuisable du même’. The phrase is hard to render. The ‘inexhaustible discovery’ regards an object which, in itself, remains the same yet always appears surprising, new. The contemplative gaze, become virginal, is relieved of preconceptions. The beholder is free to encounter the other as other, with wonder. Thereby life is released from monotony, infused with freshness.

At stake is not rarified mystical experience, simply a transformed outlook on the world. ‘I can’t say I’ve made much of a career in the way of the interior life,’ wrote Porion to Charles Journet in 1955, ten years before the latter became a cardinal; ‘yet I couldn’t conceive the least regret for having set out on it. No, it is a thousand times more interesting to fail in this area than to succeed in any other.’

How this attitude translates into practice is seen in a letter Porion wrote to his sister after a quarter-century of monastic life. We must imagine the setting. A Carthusian lives as a hermit in a little house set on a cloister. The monks gather in church for the long night Vigil, then for Mass and Vespers. The rest of the time is spent, normally, in solitude. When a novice is clothed in the Carthusian habit, the community accompany him to his hermitage, which will be for him a sanctuary. He expects to remain in it until his brothers carry him out into the cemetery. In this life of stability, the window of the monk’s cell is a privileged window on the world. Does he not get bored with the view? On the contrary, writes Porion:

I ascertain the riches contained in a single perspective, the outline of a mountain, say, with its pine trees in the golden glory of May, in the mists of October, or whenever. We must become the mirror of this beauty and its echo. It always reveals something new, yet each time says it all. I do wonder whether travel is worth the bother. What harmony, what inexhaustible harmony, unites the spirit to every being that with divine freedom follows the law imprinted on its nature!

Like the physicist Heisenberg, Porion, the monk, looked out and saw a beautiful wholeness. He was aware of being privy to a kind of revelation. For him, though, the revealing subject was not Mother Nature, but the Creator whose ordering laws nature displays. To learn to see in this way is to discover a significant universe.

This universe beckons to us. It calls forth a response. To sit silently by one’s window and look out becomes a personal experience: God’s sustaining action is present in what exists. ‘I make all things new,’ says the Lord (Revelation 21.5). This applies even to things that are, in themselves, familiar and old. Porion bears witness that things are more than they are in themselves. And that he, contemplating them, becomes more himself when drawn out of himself into a gratuitous encounter.

Chastity enables us to live thus, attentively and reverently. It stands for a way of being alive in the world. It lies within the reach of our choice, though of course we must opt for it reasonably. The liturgy lets us pray for a chaste mind. In a weekday Lauds hymn we find the lines, ‘Evincat mentis castitas/quae caro cupit arrogans’: ‘May the mind’s chastity subdue/what arrogant flesh lusts for.’ Chastity relates, here, to meekness, that much underrated virtue we think of as a dormouse, though it is leonine: courage is called for to combat cupidity’s conceit. A chaste mind will inform our interactions. It will shape our actions as well: the way we eat and drink, open and shut doors. We have established the connection between chastity and fasting. Appetites overlap. It is an illusion to think I can be temperate in one without being temperate also in others. Conversely, the clearness of mind and strength of body we find when we fast have equivalents in the realm of chastity.

When Dom Porion looked contemplatively out of his hermitage window, he was alone. But we can see other people, too, in this way, personally. We see them then with honour, to pick up a term that in St Benedict’s Rule sets the norm for human relationships. To honour someone is to affirm his or her irreducible alterity. It is to recognize their dignity, even when this may be compromised by presumption, fear or base actions. It is to look on them with hope, aware of what they have it in them, by God’s grace, to become.

The Gospels give instances of how Christ looked at others. From these we can learn a lot. We have already considered the scene in Simon’s house, when he saw the sinful woman approach him yet was not repelled. The fact that he looked at her peacefully transformed her. When, out on a journey, a young man ran up to him and asked how he might know life, ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him,’ moved by his sincerity. The youngster was unable to make the decision required to obtain what he longed for. Jesus’s gaze left him aggrieved (Mark 10.17-22). Still, for someone to see, without condemning, the conflict of desires that may rage in my heart is benediction. Towards the end of the Gospel, in the high priest’s court, he who had been named the Rock denied the One he professed to be Son of God. Jesus, led away to be scourged, ‘turned and looked at Peter’ (Luke 22.61). The bitterness with which, as a result, Peter wept still rings in our ears thanks to the empathy of Bach’s Passions.

To be seen in truth is an intimate experience. Sight can in fact be more intimate than touch. As any pastor knows, people often go out in search of sexual adventure because they do not feel seen, suffer from this fact and crave a substitute. The risk is that pleasure serves, then, to exacerbate sadness and make loneliness worse. Intimacy does not have to be sexual. Sex can stand in intimacy’s way.

The non-possessive freedom of chaste intimacy shows itself sometimes in shared contemplation of an object exterior to the beholders. Consider these evocative lines in Hans Bethge’s rendering of Mong-Kao Jen’s poem, ‘While Awaiting a Friend’, which Gustav Mahler set to music in Das Lied von der Erde:

Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite
Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu genießen, –
Wo bleibst Du nur? Du läßt mich lang allein!

I long, oh my friend, to enjoy
By your side this evening’s loveliness.
Where are you? You leave me waiting long.

Who has not yearned for someone just to sit like that by our side and be moved by what moves us? When Anton Webern went to hear the first performance of Das Lied von der Erde in Munich, this part so moved him that he told Alban Berg he had felt as if his heart rang with the imperative, ‘Out with the rubbish! Upwards! Sursum corda!’ Often our deep desires are purer than we think.

The communion this poem sings of endures. In Jean François Billeter’s elegiac homage to his deceased wife Wen, the Swiss Sinologist speaks of the raw grief provoked by the beloved’s absence, as if a vital part of himself had been removed. All the more amazing are the sudden moments in which Wen is there:

It suffices to listen to a few bars of music we loved for our shared joy to possess me and bowl me over. At such times I need no image of her, no specific remembrance. She is with me in the music.

The tangibly continued reality, beyond separation wrought by death, of shared joy: is that not a validation of chaste love?

At the beginning of the book I cited Norma’s question to Clotilde: ‘Does your God heal hearts sick with love?’ We have looked at ways in which healing may happen. The fire of erotic impulse, intrinsic to human nature, can brighten and warm our lives as a source of gladness and fruitfulness. It can also erupt in conflagrations of deadly passion. In a Christian optic, eros is an impulse towards the divine, but it is not itself divine. It has its part to play in ordering human existence towards its true goal, the knowledge and love of God. It must not be mistaken for the goal.

The Church refuses to either absolutize or materialize eros and, in consequence, sexuality. That is, here and now, a counter-cultural position to assume, but the here and now will pass. The Christian vision of human nature endures.

While the Church regards kindly those who struggle to live by the commandments, she insists that with God’s help it is possible; not only can it be done, it can make us flourish. ‘Choose life!’ (Deuteronomy 30.19). This imperative holds. A Christian desires and is called to be fully alive, no less. But sometimes we need help to know what life is and where it is found. We need to be taught where we come from, where we are going, what means we have at our disposal, who is there to help us. This book is a modest attempt to provide a few indications.

‘Be reconciled to God’, writes Paul to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 5.20). The injunction regards our passage from enmity to friendship with God. It can also be read existentially, as if to say, ‘Be unto God people who are reconciled.’ Herein lies a call to integrity and self-acceptance, to live with our longings, limitations and losses. We must accept the fact of being persons, turned towards and needing others, not self-sufficient individuals. We must accept our need to be saved: the disorder we carry is more than we can sort out on our own. Like musical instruments, we must be harmonized, rightly attuned by a pitch not of this world. The reconciliation of the senses is part of this enterprise. Chastity equilibrates it. It points, not to mindless mortification, but rather, as Pavel Florensky wrote in an exuberant text, ‘to wholeness, healthiness, unimpairedness, unity of the inner life, in general to the normal state of the inner life, to a person’s unfragmentedness and strength, to freshness of spiritual powers, to the spiritual organizedness of the inner man’.

Antiquity’s emblem of chastity, Diana, was lovely but fierce. She had several strings to her bow. She was goddess, too, of the hunt and of fertility: ancient idols commonly show her many-breasted. The early preachers of the Gospel clashed with her adherents at Ephesus. Christianity’s progress had occasioned a decline in the trade of local silversmiths who made little shrines to Diana. A trade-union riot resulted, described in the Acts of the Apostles (19.23ff.). People cheered for Diana at the top of their voices, causing commotion, threatening violence. Ephesus was a town in which attitudes to the body could issue in militancy.

To the Ephesians Paul traced the outline of what, much later, would be called a theology of the body: ‘no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church’ (Ephesians 5.29). Neither fertility nor chastity, Paul suggests, can be reduced to ideological positioning. Only a mystagogical, sacramental perspective will do them justice.

Diana was jealous of her purity. Ovid tells of Actaeon happening upon her one day while she was bathing in a grove. Diana was furious. She glared at him, ‘blushed like a dawn cloud’, reached for her arrows. Finding none, she splashed him with water and shouted, ‘Now, if you can, tell how you saw me naked.’ No sooner had she spoken than Actaeon was subject to troubling metamorphosis. Antlers burst from his forehead, ‘his ears/Folded to whiskery points, his hands were hooves,/His arms long slender legs.’ Terror filled his heart. He had become a deer. The fact of having drawn too close to naked virtue had made of him an animal.

The Christian embodiment of chastity would assume a different character. The early Church saw it above all in the Virgin Martyrs, those young heroines (Agatha, Lucy, Agnes and Cecilia) whose names we still repeat daily in the Roman Canon of the Mass. Chastity, we have seen, is not coterminous with celibacy. But sexual continence practised in the name of faith bears privileged witness to chastity. The Virgin Martyrs show that the following of Christ is worthy of such sacrifice; further, that one may, nurtured by friendship and sacramental grace, forego an active sexual life and yet be joyful and fulfilled, maturing to full stature, transmitting life.

Cecilia was a Roman maiden engaged to a youth named Valerian during the papacy of Urban I (222–30). Graced illumination gave her knowledge of what Paul expounded to the Church at Ephesus as a mystery of faith. She was given certainty that Christ was the spouse of her soul and that this nuptial compact would define her in time and for eternity. She prayed that Valerian might come to understand what this meant. Her prayer was heard. The two resolved to live together in virginity. This was not because they were frightened of sex or thought sex unclean. It was because they had glimpsed the state of union with God which human sexuality exists to signify. In the normal run of things, spousal intimacy will direct bodies and minds towards this union. In the case of Cecilia and Valerian the process worked the other way round: union with God revealed the sense of earthly nuptials.

Cecilia’s Christian witness caused scandal in a city still largely pagan. She was arrested, then condemned to suffocation in the baths. When the city’s prefect heard she was still alive after 24 hours, he ordered decapitation. The henchman struck thrice, unable to sever the head from the trunk. Roman law did not permit a fourth attempt. He left Cecilia bleeding, therefore. She lived on for three days. Then she died, and was buried by Pope Urban. This story, told in ancient chronicles, was confirmed by observation in the jubilee year of 1600. During restoration works at the abbey of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, on the site where Cecilia’s family had held its titulus, the martyr’s remains were found. Not only were they, like those of the Carthusian dug up at Miraflores, in a state of incorruption. The twisted position of Cecilia’s head also corresponded exactly to the story of failed execution. The find was a sensation. Swiss guards had to be brought in to control the traffic of pilgrims wanting to pray in the physical presence of one of Rome’s most beloved saints.

Among them was the sculptor Stefano Maderno. He saw the body, and rendered what he saw in marble. His monument – unforgettable – is displayed to this day underneath the abbey church’s main altar. One day in mid-November 1887, the fourteen-year-old Thérèse Martin from Lisieux knelt before it. She had travelled to Rome to ask the Pope to let her enter Carmel despite her young age. St Cecilia had until that day meant little to her. She had known her as patron saint of music, assuming Cecilia had acquired this role because she sang well. In Rome she found that, no, the reason was another: the proclamation had been made ‘in remembrance of the virginal song of praise she sang to her Divine Spouse hidden in her heart of hearts’. At once Thérèse felt for her ‘the tenderness of a friend’. The harmony of Cecilia’s life was what she wished for. A compelling example of generative chastity was present to her, in that venerable church, in the form of an inward song.

Maderno’s statue underneath the high altar in the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, in a drawing by J. Petot that featured in the geographical journal Il Giro del mondo on 9 June 1870. How remarkable to produce such a lifelike image of one dead.

Thérèse did not have the option of ascending to the gallery of the abbey church to see a work of art that takes the modern visitor’s breath away. Pietro Cavallini’s west wall fresco of the Last Judgement, painted around 1300, was hidden by a secondary wall during redesign in the 1720s, another example of how fashions change. Only in 1900 was it recovered. Today it is considered the first example of modern painting in Rome, antedating Giotto’s work at the Lateran. At the centre is Christ, the universal Judge, bearing the wounds of the Passion, robed in imperial purple. Worshippers pass under him as they leave the church, reminded that to be human is to be answerable. ‘Adam, where are you?’ A response is called for. Accountability pertains to our dignity. Responsibility for our choices is part of the texture of our glorious robe. Christ’s outstretched right hand does not dismiss or repel. It signals elevation. It shows the height to which we must aspire, which he would help us reach.

Flanking Christ are gorgeously coloured angels with wings so vivid one can hear them flutter. As they ascend, they become increasingly incorporeal, assumed into sublimity. The angels make me think of something Menuhin once said about the Adagio movement of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 10 in G Major: ‘Those opening twelve bars – the wonderful sense of rhythmic continuity and this extraordinary serenity of Beethoven. It’s a kind of shedding of everything that is flesh. And yet it remains human.’ Needless to say, a man is not an angel. The Word’s incarnation bestowed on human nature a distinction surpassing that of cherubim and seraphim. Nonetheless Cavallini’s angels convey a message to us. They recall St Paul’s assurance: ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye’ (1 Corinthians 15.51f.). We cannot imagine what this change will be like; how the integrity of our iconic nature will manifest itself in an eternal reality unnarrowed by space and time; but we should think about it, often. ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13.12).

On either side of the angels the apostles are enthroned, six to the right, six to the left. Their features are vivid, a world apart from the stylized depictions of the ninth-century mosaic in the apse at the church’s opposite end. For this book’s front cover, I have chosen the portrait of Matthew, a man transformed by meeting Christ’s gaze. The Lord found him in a place of shame, but was not ashamed to call him; no, he accompanied him home, into the life this average man had built for himself in the lowlands, not yet knowing what heights existence may reach. Jesus subverted this familiar world, not obliterating it, but showing its insufficiency to fulfil the supernatural desire that lay dormant in coin-counting Matthew. The presence of God’s Son had awakened it. The tax collector could not, thenceforth, keep walking about in garments of skin. He longed to be reclothed with the robe of glory.

From the outset, Matthew observed Jesus closely. That is plain from the Gospel he wrote, rich in detail. St Dominic, that most humane of preachers, carried the Gospel of Matthew on his person at all times, we are told. It was for him an invaluable resource as he preached to the Cathars, rationalists who struggled to accept the theological significance of ordinary life and of the human body.

According to the Legenda Aurea, Matthew brought the Gospel to Scythia after the Lord’s resurrection. People there did not like their established notions to be challenged in Christ’s name. To keep themselves out of the preacher’s sight, they blinded him. By a miracle, Matthew’s vision was restored. Decades earlier the light of glory had touched him while he sat immersed in the murk of his customs booth. He was someone who had known both metaphorically and physically the interchange of darkness and light. He had learned not to fear it. That is why he could teach others with authority not to be afraid.

Cavallini represents Matthew as a young man. He upholds the cross with resolve, yet his face is marked by an expression of inquisitive kindness. His eyes look towards the glorified Son of God, whom the Church invokes as the Desired of the Nations. In him God satisfies our deep aspirations with good things, restoring the iconic potential of our nature. We hope at the last, at the opportune time, to stand before his throne integral and free. Then he will crown our everlasting youth, restored like an eagle’s, with joy (cf. Psalms 102.5, 42.4).

Meanwhile we progress with patience from what is partial to what is whole, ordering and making chaste our bodies, souls and minds in the obedience of charity. The eyes of our love are opened thereby. We pass from blindness to sight. The journey is laborious at times, but leads through lovely landscapes. The further we travel, the more keenly we are conscious that we do not walk alone.