‘Chastity’ has become a word for antiquarians. It describes a set of attitudes and a code of behaviour associated with a past age. Many rejoice to see it bygone. Hearing the word spoken today, we are more likely to think of thwarted sexuality than of dew-besprinkled strength of virtue ‘fresh as Dian’s visage’.

The unravelling of sexual abuse committed by people, overwhelmingly men, who had professed a vow of chaste celibacy has rightly occasioned a surge of rage throughout society. The ideal of chastity appears discredited, certainly as a mandatory form of religious observance. Revealed to have been, often, not just lifeless but deadly, it is present to us now rather as a decomposing corpse awaiting burial. There is grief clinging to it, yes; but is there any reason to mourn its passing?

It is not my purpose to present an apology for chastity. Nor am I writing as a cultural historian intent on chronicling the demise of a human habitus. Mine is primarily a semantic concern.

I must point out, first, that chastity is not coterminous with celibacy. Celibacy is a particular, not particularly common, vocation. Chastity is a virtue for all. If the institutionalization of chastity has occasioned, or fed into, such frustration, such aberration, it is partly through a reduction of perspective whereby an orientation intended to broaden the heart has, instead, constrained it to the point of suffocation.

To tie chastity down, as has been done, to mere mortification of the senses is to make of it a tool to sabotage the flourishing of character. It is also to misunderstand, misrepresent and misapply the meaning of a complex notion. I hope, in this book, to release ‘chastity’ from imprisonment in too narrow categories, allowing it to stretch, extend its limbs, breathe freely, perhaps even sing. I use these images advisedly. Unless chastity has a degree of full-bloodedness, it is not the real thing, but counterfeit. I shall proceed partly by analysis, partly by examples. If I seem to cast my net disconcertingly wide, bear with me. It is as it must be, for we are, I hope you will come to agree, entering a field the length and breadth of which reach far, very far.

It would be disingenuous not to declare, from the outset, personal interest, even a personal agenda. I entered monastic life in 2002, at a time when cases of historical sexual abuse committed by clerics, including monks, were published so often, so fully, in the English press that I went through periods of continuous nausea. To receive the novice’s habit in such a climate was strange. The garment that stood for my noblest, most joyful aspirations established me in some kind of symbolic continuity with the perpetration of deeds that had caused immense, in some cases irreparable, harm. It was hard not to feel contaminated by association and, to a greater or lesser extent, to interiorize a sense of guilt. This reflex was affirmed when, now and again, I caught a glimpse of what others might see when they saw me.

Let me explain what I mean.

A decade after my clothing, when the extent of sexual abuse in the Church was increasingly acknowledged all over Europe, I was making my way, one blue morning, towards the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, bound for the Oriental Institute, where I was working. On the Via Panisperna, I encountered a middle-aged woman who with calm deliberation spat in my face. I could intuit the depth of wrath and hurt from which her action sprang. Perhaps I could even understand her. There was no way of finding out. She was in no mood to talk.

How might I respond?

That was, and remains, an urgent question for me. Just pious phrases will not do. The real answer must lie in my chaste commitment, in the integrity with which I live it out. For me, as someone who has taken public vows, chastity cannot be reduced to a private matter (though God knows it is that, too); I am held to account for it.

It does seem crucial, then, to have a clear, articulate understanding of exactly what chastity means. But how hard it can be to think and speak of chastity! How easily one comes to seem embarrassing, even to oneself!

There is a paradox here, given how unabashedly we speak of sex. I am of a generation for whom sex, following the cultural battles of the 1960s, had clatteringly descended from darkened bedrooms into the public square in what was intended to be a liberation. The mechanics of reproduction were taught in primary school alongside ’rithmetic and writing. Among teenage boys pornography was taken for granted – hardly in itself a cultural novelty, though its explicitness and copiousness were, leaving slowly healing wounds on the memory.

One was cautioned against the harmful effects of sexual inhibition. I am not suggesting we were indoctrinated. Still, the air one breathed in what I’d say was a pretty standard, Northern-European teenage environment in the 1980s was thick with sub-Freudian suppositions approximately understood, sometimes carelessly applied. These suppositions informed the interpretative paradigm readily to hand when, as an adolescent, I sought parameters by which to establish my place in the world, before the other, before God – in other words, a way to find freedom.

The accepted nomenclature for transcendence was psychosexual. Any yearning, any soul-pain was thought definable in its terms. The general assumption was that the pursuit of a well-balanced, complex-free sexual self was a prerequisite for growth, maturity and thriving.

It took me years to see that, in fact, the process works the other way round; that it does not make experiential sense to ascribe orientational autonomy to the sexual instinct, as if it were a naturally ordering force bound to align other aspects of one’s being to itself in harmonious design. Human sexuality calls out for a structure of personhood upon which to grow, blossom and fruit, much the way a climbing rose needs trellises to rise and spread. Left to crawl on the ground, such a rose turns into a leafy heap. Its beauty will still be visible, by all means. Its fragrance will remain. But long stretches of stem will fail to bud for want of light. Its flowers will be few. Lacking strength to maintain upward momentum, it will collapse into itself. Any gardener’s hand attempting to direct it once it has grown a while, once summer has come, will reach into a tangle of thorns.

In his Rule for monks, St Benedict describes a human type that corresponds to this horticultural metaphor. It is that of the gyrovague, a type of vagrant seeker who spends life walking round and round, without arriving at any determinate destination. The gyrus, in Latin, was the ring in which horses were trained, or the course of a mule that turned a well’s waterwheel, a circuit of aimless drudgery. Such a gyrovague was I, for unnecessarily long, with regard to my maturing as a man.

Looking back, I feel a mixture of regret and wry amusement. For the well around which I dragged my feet was dry. It had never had a drop of water in it. Its morosely two-dimensional account of life and love was a heap of dry bones. Yet I kept circling it, bound to a yoke made up of projections, troubled by the thought that my awakening to faith, going on at the same time, might be nothing but unhealthy sublimation. Was it fear of nature that impelled me towards the supernatural?

Such can the strength of conjecture be that it seems more real than reality. I aspired to live chastely, but regarded the endeavour as sheer mortification. It did not occur to me, I think, to see chastity as possessing an intrinsic, never mind life-giving attraction. I thought of it in negative terms, as not being, not doing what lay at the heart of the contemporary image of masculinity. Hence a further complex arose. In a culture glorifying sexual expression, was chastity not somehow unmanly?

If only I had thought of reading Cicero!

He could have let me discover that, in the ancient world, the goddess of chastity, Diana, was known not only as lucifera, ‘light-bearing’, but as omnivaga, ‘roaming everywhere’, so sovereign and free – the antithesis of the gyrovague. These associations would have appealed to me and cheered me as I retraced my steps in a barren furrow.

For of course I desired openness and light. I desire them still.

What does ‘chastity’ mean? The word ‘chaste’ reached English through the Romance languages from the Latin castus, which in turn is traceable to the Greek adjective καθαρός (katharos), meaning ‘pure’. From katharos we get catharsis. We might spend a moment considering the sense that word grew to fathom.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, uses catharsis as an image for inward cleansing that may come about in one who goes to see a tragic play. Observing the rendering on stage of strong, normally hidden emotion, being invested in the drama by an empathy at once intellectual and visceral, the viewer may tap these same depths in him or herself.

Thus a potentially remarkable process is enabled to begin. The purpose of tragic performance, says Aristotle, is to effect the representation – or, to use his term, the mimesis – of universal human affairs; not to invent outlandish plots for the purpose of engendering a thrill, but to spell out scenarios in which spectators may recognize themselves to get in touch with their inner reserves.

These reserves can be positively or negatively coloured. Aristotle speaks, by way of example, of pity and fear, responses that stand for a wide gamut of ‘passions’ [παθήματα]. Compassion with the enacted drama brings hidden depths into conscious awareness, relieving a charge that, left pent-up, conditions our behaviour and thought in ways that escape the mind’s conscious attention and so curtail our freedom, the way we make choices.

To feel grief for the predicament of Phaedra, whose heart is torn apart by an impossible love; to find, watching Ingrid Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, that one’s stomach churns with the rage of Eva claiming her voice after a lifetime’s submission to maternal tyranny dressed up as care: this is not to indulge in auto-suggestion but to expose oneself willingly to extreme experience, prepared to recognize its resonance, however faint, in oneself, so to permit what, in the depths of self, may have been implicit or suppressed to find outward form, with an inward sigh of relief.

That Aristotle names this process ‘purification’ cautions us against defining ‘purity’ in cultic terms, as if standing in straightforward opposition to the intrinsically ‘impure’; it speaks rather of an equilibrium regained by means of engagement with passions which run wild, to bring these back like rebellious horses under reason’s sway. Aristotle’s pedagogy has perennial value.

The semantic range of katharos spilt over into ‘castus’, its Latin equivalent. Lewis and Short, in their Latin Dictionary, equate castus with integer, noting that the term was generally used ‘in respect to the person himself’, not so much ‘in respect to other men’. Chastity, in other words, is a marker of integrity, of a personality whose parts are assembled in harmonious completeness.

There are telling examples of usage. Listing, in his treatise On Divination, means by which the gods make their ways known to men, Cicero says it is all very well to read the constellations of the stars or the flight of birds, then to try to understand them; but that a man is unlikely to grasp the signified meaning of phenomena unless his soul (‘animus’) is ‘chaste and pure’ (‘castus purusque’). By this, he intends lucid open-spiritedness, a freedom from passionate bias, quite as in the instance of Aristotle’s theatregoer at the end of an effective performance.

This epistemological dimension of ‘chastity’ is taken further in the First Tusculan Disputation. Citing Socrates, Cicero outlines the two ways in which human beings may leave this life. Those blinded by vice – the debauched or profligate, the selfish politicians – will have erred from the goodness and beauty of the gods and be unfit to enjoy their fellowship forever. Such people, he says, have cause to dread death’s hour. Those, meanwhile, who have kept themselves chaste and entire (‘qui se integros castosque servavissent’), not reducing existence to self-indulgence but keeping their minds in ascent, may look forward to beatitude hereafter.

To be chaste in this life is to attune oneself to celestial life, and so have reason to die, says Cicero, ‘like a swan, with singing and desire’.

Aulus Gellius, the second-century grammarian, applied chastity to literary style. Like his colleagues in every age, Gellius thought he was living in a time of linguistic decadence. He invoked the register of ‘chastity’ to praise the prose of Caesar. It stood, he thought, for a standard the world might never know again, for Caesar was ‘sermonis praeter alios suae aetatis castissimi’ (‘of a purity of speech exceeding that of his contemporaries’), in a position to address put-downs even to Cicero, whom Caesar found to be employing unnecessary loan-words.

To be unchaste, it is implied, is to corrupt the elegance of a coherent whole by introducing elements not connatural to it.

From this semantic base, ‘castus’ found its way into the terminology of sexual morality, whether to describe an object (‘a chaste marriage bed’), a person (‘a chaste matron’), or a physical feature (‘a chaste countenance’). These notions are far from the mindset suggested by the medieval ‘chastity belt’, a metal cast with lock and key designed to place the sexual organs out of bounds, whether such a contraption was ever used or merely reflects the prurient fantasy of later times.

For one thing, chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of wholeness sought and healing found.

The examples I have adduced display an intellectual dimension. It matters to one who would be castus (or casta) to have a clear idea of motivating purpose.

This concern is evidenced, too, in the cluster of words which came to represent ‘chastity’ in the Germanic languages, although these sprang from quite another root. Contemporary forms such as keusch, kuis or kysk have their origin in a Gothic term, kūskeis, derived from the Latin conscius. In this lexical family, ‘chastity’ supposes, first, a conscious awareness of the good, whole and pure; then, a will to construct one’s life by these values.

In my mother tongue, Norwegian, the modern derivative adjective, kysk, has long since been consigned to vocabulary’s dustbin. Recycling was not an option. The word had acquired a sense so rigid and frigid that in the end it was useless even for purposes of satire. It simply made one cringe.

This provides food for thought. A term that, at heart, signifies the conscious education of the sexual drive (as physical passion, as capacity for tenderness, as will to live fully), envisaging the gradual attuning of body, mind and soul, had degenerated into a marker of cold disincarnation. Lost was a vision of ‘chastity’ supposing, not the suppression or oppression of sex, but its maturing, with a view to flourishing and fruitfulness. In a Christian optic, one would have to add: and with a view to glory. For the Christian life is life oriented towards beatitude.

How did this impoverishment happen?

Tantalizing clues may be found in what must be the Western world’s most famous hymn to chastity, a contender for countless people’s Desert Island Discs. The aria Casta Diva from Vicenzo Bellini’s opera Norma is inseparable from the legacy of Maria Callas, who made of it her signature piece, singing it throughout her career with the bravura that behoved her status as a ‘diva’ in the commoner sense. Francis Poulenc, who heard her in Milan, was at once appalled and enchanted to see how, at curtain call, she dextrously shoved her tenor co-star ‘into the corner of the wings and advanced by herself into the middle of the stage’ to be adored by her audience. The association of Casta Diva with grand theatricality, vocal pyrotechnics and rapturous applause may have caused us to pay scant attention to the text. So here it is:

Casta diva, che inargenti
Queste sacre antiche piante,
A noi volgi il bel sembiante,
Senza nube e senza vel!
Tempra, o Diva,
Tempra tu de’ cori ardenti,
Tempra ancora lo zelo audace.
Spargi in terra quella pace
Che regnar tu fai nel ciel.

Chaste Goddess, giver of a silver sheen
to these ancient, sacred trees,
turn your lovely countenance
unclouded, unveiled towards us.

Temper, Goddess,
temper still the bold zeal
of impassioned hearts.
Scatter on earth that same peace
which you cause to reign in heaven

On the face of it, this seems pretty harmless and harmlessly pretty: a myrtle-crowned maiden in flowing robes imploring the moon, Diana’s emblem, to shed her chaste light on a troubled world and to grant peace to souls.

In reality, the scene is highly ambiguous. The drama of Norma is enacted in Gaul roughly at the time of chastely-speaking Caesar’s conquest. The heroine is a priestess of Irminsul, a Germanic divinity whose idol, a stripped oak, has roots that reach back to the cosmic tree of Norse mythology, Ygdrasil, possessed of sinuous branches embracing earth, heaven and hell.

Formally speaking, Norma embodies chastity: on acceding to her office she had taken a vow of virginity. She is tied to the altar, says she towards the end of Act One, with an ‘eternal knot’. But she has not been faithful.

Having fallen in love with the Roman Proconsul Pollione, her people’s chief enemy, Norma had borne him two sons in stealth. She secretly remains in thrall to his affection. She will do anything to maintain it. The peace she invokes upon Gaul in this aria is no disinterested peace. It is a ruse by which she hopes to protect her lover from her kin, athirst for Roman blood. For years she has presented as inspired oracles what is simply the dictate of her heart: that no sword be brandished against Pollione. Her hope is that the Proconsul will take her and her children to Rome. The warbling maiden, then, is a perjurer and an impostor.

The soprano Giuditta Pasta, Bellini’s first Norma, in her costume, looking like a First-Communicant directing guests towards the buffet, though sinisterly flanked by the stump of Irminsul.

She is also a tormented, desperately unhappy soul. Norma does not trust Pollione to be constant. Immediately after singing Casta Diva, she turns aside and addresses a secret prayer, no longer to the moon, but to the father of her children:

Ah! bello a me ritorna
Del fido amor primiero,
E contro il mondo intiero
Difesa a te sarò.

Oh, beautiful man, return to me
something of our first, faithful love,
and I, against the whole world,
shall be your defence.

There is stuff here for pathos, for Norma’s hunch is right: Pollione has quite lost interest in her. He is now in love with her novice Adalgisa, whom he intends to abduct and marry, leaving Norma to the dismal darkness of Irminsul’s grove.

This is not all. Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, based his text on a tragedy by the French playwright Alexandre Soumet (1788–1845). Soumet, not much read now, was in his day a towering figure, a member of the French Academy and a pioneer in the composition of new patriotic epics needed in a time of violent disruptions, when history was constantly rewritten in the light of the currently reigning world view. Norma, ou l’Infanticide, first performed in 1831, was the sixth in a series of feminine portraits that extended from Clytemnestra to Jeanne d’Arc. The character Norma was Soumet’s free invention, though he borrowed traits from earlier works. His play is an example of post-revolutionary France’s interest in the Celtic past, an interest tending to be vague in its references, liberal in its syntheses.

Soumet spells out a part of Norma’s story that Bellini and Romani leave implicit. We learn that she had, as a young woman, been held hostage in Rome and had come, in fact, to regard herself as Roman. Privately she calls the city ‘my second fatherland’, yet repatriation and ordination as priestess had forced her to adopt, in public, an anti-Roman stance. In the opera, Norma’s divided loyalties find supreme expression precisely in Casta Diva. Diana, saluted in the figure of the moon, had no place within the Gallic pantheon. True, Bellini lets Norma’s father, Oroveso, and the chorus repeat her invocation, but that is pure artistic licence on his part. Really, Norma’s prayer to a Roman goddess is apostasy to Irminsul and, to boot, a betrayal of her people’s national cult, the heart and soul of their struggle for autonomy.

The scene is thus charged with the irony of multiply accumulated unchastities: the apparently celibate Norma is on fire with illicit love; her children are concealed in the shrine of the god to whom she had trothed virginity; invoking the goddess of the Romans she betrays at once her nation and her faith, revealing a heart in conflict with her public persona; her prayer for the tempering of zeal is in fact a prelude to her knowing abandonment of reason, to issue in bloodthirsty rage. Her prayer to the ‘chaste goddess’ is marked by hopelessness. Norma seemingly takes it for granted that the human heart is fickle, and doomed to stay thus, so that any committal of it, whether to an earthly or to a transcendent love, must be temporary.

The drama of Norma contains a single Christian character: Norma’s children’s nurse Clotilde. Will she, who believes in an incarnate God and in humanity’s capacity for divinization, offer helpful counsel, a sense of direction, perhaps? No.

In the opera Clotilde is reduced to a faintly comical walk-on part devoid of consequence. In the play she is more amply drawn. Her faith, though, has little to say for itself. It is too otherworldly: before God, she proclaims, the universe is as nothing, ‘like a bird in the hollow of your hand’. Clotilde’s Christian profession is bland. When Norma asks a question deserving a serious answer, ‘Does your God heal hearts sick with love?’, Clotilde answers with a sigh, ‘He appeases them.’

Appeasement! Is that all Christianity has to offer a wounded heart crying out to love and be loved, to know and be known? Must the Christian just wait and burn while fire within spends itself and live coals turn into ashes? Has he or she no other response to love’s passion than resignation, eyes mournfully raised heavenward?

Often it has seemed thus. It is a blessing that the cultural shift of recent decades has exposed how harmful a rhetoric of appeasement, drenched in piety, can be when used to silence the voracious hunger of the human heart. Instead of bringing healing, anaesthetics of devout abstraction are prone to cause sickness in the form of arrested tenderness, of vulnerability soured into spite, of unmet affective need seeking satisfaction in addiction or cruelty, or in gradual petrification.

If appeasement is all she is offered in lieu of a cure, it would seem that Norma is destined to sing her anguished heart out, as at the beginning of Bellini’s opera, then to throw herself off the edge of a cliff, as at the end of Soumet’s play.

Clotilde’s capitulation is representative, alas, of much Christian discourse of the past few hundred years. This discourse has much to answer for. In the pages that follow, I will try to broaden a scope that has been scandalously narrowed, redrawing a Christian understanding of chastity based on the classical heritage we have considered, but reaching further. A Christian view of chastity, if it is genuine, is not simplistic. It determinedly embraces the complex fullness of our human condition no less than the divine fulfilment to which that nature is called.

The Christian view of what it is to be sexual, and so, by extension, what it is to be chaste, presupposes a particular view of what it is to be human. My next chapter restates a view of human nature drawn from Scripture, in particular from the first three chapters of Genesis. The early Christians read this protology, the account of the world’s beginning, with attention. The text speaks of man’s making in the image and likeness of God. Some of the Fathers imagined this likeness as a robe of glory. The nakedness that suddenly bewildered Adam and Eve after the fall stood for the loss of this robe, for which the protoplasts, our first parents, tried to make amends by covering themselves with matter. The proverbial fig leaves, however, were strictly pro tem. At the end of Genesis 3, we are told that God, before expelling them from paradise, ‘made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them’ (Genesis 3.21). This is theology in images. In the sequence of clothing, undressing and reclothing, the Fathers found a hermeneutic key to human experience. We may profitably try that key in some of our own rusted padlocks.

My central chapter considers the challenge of maturing to chastity through the prism of multiple tensions. Few find their way to integrity without a sense of being pulled in different directions. The experience may recur at different times of life in different ways. There can be joy in it. There can also be a sense of agonizing conflict. Who has not, at one time or another, stood aghast in front of the bathroom mirror forced to admit what Paul bravely confessed to the Romans, ‘I do not understand my own actions’ (Rom. 7.15)? We are often a riddle to ourselves.

Interior contradiction is treated squarely in Christian tradition, which helps us identify the balancing acts of which our lives consist. Chastity stands for equilibrium. It stands, too, for fearlessness as we find that our homecoming to ourselves, which is what becoming chaste amounts to, is not so much an anxious manoeuvring between Scylla and Charybdis, menaces about us, as the progressive integration of possibilities within. Constantine Cavafy, in his splendid poem ‘Ithaca’, affirms that the goal of our life’s odyssey is found in the journey, in a reconciled fullness that embraces both spirit and flesh:

Τοὺς Λαιστρυγόνας καὶ τοὺς Κύκλωπας,
τὸν θυμωμένο Ποσειδῶνα μὴ φοβᾶσαι,
τέτοια στὸν δρόμο σου ποτέ σου δὲν θὰ βρεῖς,
ἂν μέν᾿ ἡ σκέψις σου ὑψηλή, ἂν ἐκλεκτὴ
συγκίνησις τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ σῶμα σου ἀγγίζει.

Τοὺς Λαιστρυγόνας καὶ τοὺς Κύκλωπας,
τὸν ἄγριο Ποσειδώνα δὲν θὰ συναντήσεις,
ἂν δὲν τοὺς κουβανεῖς μὲς στὴν ψυχή σου,
ἂν ἡ ψυχή σου δὲν τοὺς στήνει ἐμπρός σου.

Do not fear the Cyclops,
Laestrygonians, or angry Poseidon.
Such you will never find along your way
If your thoughts stay high, if choice emotions
Touch your body and your spirit.

You will never meet the Cyclops,
Laestrygonians, or angry Poseidon
Unless you carry them inside your soul,
Unless your soul props them up before you.

My fourth chapter looks at the negotiation of passions from a monastic point of view. Why bother? Because monasticism was, from earliest times, a theological laboratory. While councils, ecumenical and partisan, argued and fought over points of doctrine, the Church’s faith was put to the test in a parallel, experiential universe: that of the monasteries. The early monks and nuns were seekers after coherence. They wished to live in a way that realized their potential as men and women created in the image of the Word made flesh. This included the pursuit of chaste integrity. Endowed with self-knowledge, unafraid to call a spade a spade, these brothers and sisters of ours, though they lived long ago, provide insight to illumine and assist us still, floundering as we are in our post-postmodernity.

This chapter on the monastic quest culminates in an exposition of different ways of seeing. In fact, you will find that the motif of sight runs like a thread throughout the book. To inhabit the world chastely is to see it in truth and to see myself and humankind truthfully within it – that is, to become a contemplative. Contemplative life is often envisaged as near-disembodied, an existence of angelic aspiration or presumption. This is a ridiculous notion. The human being as such is contemplative. I submit that much perplexity regarding our nature springs from failure to acknowledge this dimension of who we are, all of us. That is why I have written, as a coda, a final chapter on contemplation, thinking it might usefully cast light from a different angle on the argument preceding it.

I began this introduction with a disclaimer. I must conclude with another: I make no claim to completeness. The present book is not a treatise. It is an essay.

Some readers will be annoyed that little is said in celebration of sexuality enacted as a nuptial dimension of our divinely imaged nature. This is a noble theme, embedded in Scripture. One has but to think of the Song of Songs, which a strand of rabbinic tradition considered the holiest book in the canon. If I have refrained from engaging more explicitly with this theme, it is on account of my state of life. I write as a man engaged to live celibately; this colours my own understanding of chastity. It enriches and limits my perspective. In a matter such as this, one must speak of what one knows. I invite others to make contributions from other vantage points. More are needed, from men and women. If my inadequacies inspire others to pursue their own Christian reflection on this theme, I shall be delighted.

Other readers, knowing the book’s author to be a Roman Catholic bishop, will be peeved that little is said about controversial issues in explicit defence of the Church’s moral doctrine. I am committed to this doctrine. I believe in its goodness and reasonableness. Anyone who wishes to know what the Catholic Church does teach on a given subject can open that great treasure trove, the 1992 Catechism, which raised this genre of literature to a new level. I spend much of my time expounding this teaching and making it known: that’s my job, quite simply.

This book’s purpose is different, however – which is not to say it is unrelated to my episcopal charge. A bishop’s ministry is ‘pontifical’. To be a pontifex is to build bridges. Given the amnesia to which the West has succumbed regarding its Christian patrimony, a chasm extends between ‘secular’ society and the Church’s sacred shore. When attempts are made to holler across, we risk misunderstanding: for even when the same words are used on either side, they have acquired different meanings. What poses as ‘dialogue’ easily ends up being a dialogue de sourds. Bridges are needed to enable encounter. Christians must present their faith integrally, without temporizing compromise; at the same time, they must express it in ways comprehensible to those ill-informed about formal dogma. They will often do this most effectively by appealing to universal experience, then trying to read such experience in the light of revelation.

That is how the Fathers preached. That is why their words ring still with such engaging clarity. We must learn to speak likewise, grateful for the riches passed down from of old and respectful, at the same time, of our own strange times. No life-giving word was ever uttered with scorn.

In Jerome’s rendering of the First Epistle of Peter, the Apostle exhorts us: ‘Animas vestras castificantes in oboedientia charitatis in fraternitatis amore simplici ex corde invicem diligite attentius’. We could put this into English as follows: ‘Making your souls chaste in the obedience of charity, in love of the brotherhood, having become whole, love one another from the heart more attentively’ (1.22). It is a bracing statement. St Peter teaches that attentive love requires, on the part of the loving subject, wholeness born of a chaste endeavour conceived of in terms of a transitive, dynamic verb – ‘castificantes’ – not of a lazy noun that spells the effect of passive, appeased resignation.

The essence of becoming chaste is not a putting-to-death of our nature, but its orientation, enacted through integral reconciliation, towards fullness of life.