Of the three states of being which The Cave of Treasures presents, two are known to us experientially: the state of nakedness (of living with the wound of sin, in death’s shadow), and the state of being clothed in ‘garments of skin’ (of living within an economy of mercy). The sacramentally pledged state of being robed in glory is known to us only by virtue of faith-filled hope.

This hope is illumined by a flicker of ontological remembrance. We perceive it in both body and mind, variously with delight and with pain, as a yearning for infinity. But we do not, now, know what it was like to subsist in a prelapsarian nature formed by God’s hands and quickened by his breath, functioning according to a God-like structure; nor do we know what it will be like for this structure to find itself restored by redemptive grace in eternal life, in Christ.

This fact poses a conundrum we cannot suavely farm out to ivory-tower theologians. It concerns us intimately. In existential terms we might state it like this: we do not, in fact, know what is natural to us. Therefore we struggle to live naturally. In Christian terms, the natural state of man is to subsist in the divine image and to correspond to God’s likeness. This harmonious subsistence was brought to an end through the event we refer to as the Fall. As a result of it, human nature, made for immortality, found itself restricted by the necessity of death, caught up in the wheels of calculable time. As Panayotis Nellas has written in an important book,

experience proves that the historical reality of man is different from that which we have seen to be defined by the phrase ‘in the image’. In the Christian perception of things this is to be ascribed to the fact that the historical reality develops within the unnatural situation in which man has found himself since the fall.

For us, it does seem ‘natural’ to be governed by instincts and physical necessities, to suffer, decay and die, realities symbolized and held by the garments of skin. Yet in terms of our nature’s intended purpose and potential, these factors are anomalous. What is natural is to be governed by the Word, and thereby to know, in God, freedom, harmony and joy. More or less consciously, human beings seek a way back to life as it was before. Our quests for knowledge, development, justice, freedom and the rest, says Nellas, are in roundabout ways ‘quests for [humankind’s] iconic nature’.

Experience, however, proves again that humanity does not find today what it seeks. This, in the Christian view of things, is not because it is impossible for humanity to find these things, or because they do not belong to it, but because it begins from a false starting point and a mistaken orientation. The false starting point is the failure to appreciate the unnatural condition in which we find ourselves, and the mistaken orientation is that we are searching for something which is natural in the midst of what is unnatural. What is naturally good for man can be found if it is sought at its real source, and if man in order to find it makes full use of his natural powers.

As long as we construct our lives on a merely empirical basis, we shall carry on mistaking what is provisional for that which endures. A broadening of perspective is required, not to dismiss the provisional – for it is precious – but to evaluate it rightly, to learn not to expect it to yield what it cannot. Our deep experience must be drawn back to ‘its real source’ and oriented well if we truly wish to thrive. With this in mind, we may consider certain tensions apt to mark our quest for affective and sexual integrity; that is, for chastity.

In Norwegian historiography, the Battle of Stiklestad has the epic resonance of the Battle of Hastings. It was pitched on 29 July 1030. In the course of it, King Olav Haraldsson, freshly returned from exile spent in what is now Ukraine, was killed with an axe. His death was a cruel blow to the faction he had led, which had no obvious new figurehead. The king was sorely mourned. His body was washed and laid out. Then something strange happened. The hagiographical Passio Olavi, written a century and a half later, describes the incident as follows:

When the time of Olav’s passion was ended and the king’s servants had washed his sacred body in a hut, the water, mixed with the holy martyr’s blood, was poured out in front of the door. A blind man who happened to pass that house slid at the place still wet with the blood-and-water mixture. When the man touched his eyes with wet fingers, his darkness disappeared at once and he got back the sight he had earlier enjoyed. Astonished, he who had experienced this divine miracle set about finding out where the blood came from that had been mingled with the water. He learned that it must have been by merit of the holy martyr Olav that he had regained sight. All who heard tell of this miracle marvelled, praising God and his love for having chosen to make his martyr known by means of such an unusual miracle.

From then on, Olav’s body occasioned many miracles. It was perceived as a conduit of grace, conveying in its materiality the fruits of a sanctified life. Olav’s body manifested his Christ-configured soul, purified through trials to become a mirror apt to reflect God’s healing mercy. People came in droves to pray beside the body, to see it and touch it. What is more, though Olav was manifestly dead, his body showed continued signs of organic life: the bishop of Nidaros (medieval Trondheim) had to keep cutting his hair and nails, ‘for both grew as when he was a man fully alive in this world’. The national unity which Olav had been unable to establish while alive gradually formed around his incorrupt body and the cult that ensued.

Countless variations on this story could be told from all over Christendom, by no means only from the mist-shrouded distant past. Edgar Alison Peers, professor of Spanish at Liverpool for decades until his death in 1952, shares a memory about his friend Dom Edmund Gurdon, the English Carthusian who served as prior of Miraflores in Spain. One day, Gurdon had sent two brothers out to dig a grave for a monk who had just died. After a short while, the brothers burst into Dom Edmund’s cell, terribly excited. They were carrying a spade on which there were fresh bloodstains. The prior thought at first there had been an accident.

But when they could speak coherently they told him that they had dug down to a depth of about 6 feet, when one of their spades struck against something soft and, when it was pulled out, had blood on it. Very much astonished, they put it down, and with their spades gradually uncovered the body of a young man. There was no sign of his habit, nor of any planks, but his tonsure was there, and blood was running from a wound in his arm. ‘He looked as if he was asleep.’ They had left him untouched, and come to tell Dom Edmund so that he should see the miracle.

The modern narrative mirrors the medieval. We might expect, next, commotion, wonder-hunger, even a degree of self-advertising display. There was none of it. Dom Edmund told his brothers that he did not intend to go to the cemetery. ‘Of course, I believed them,’ he said. ‘I would have done so even if there had not been blood on the spade.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I said, there are many saints in the Carthusian Order. Cover him up again and give him a cross, so that he won’t be disturbed any more.’

For Dom Edmund, a supremely rational, supernaturally minded Englishman, the phenomenon the brothers had met in the graveyard was exceptional, yes, but not abnormal. On the contrary, it stood for what ought to be a Christian norm. It is not man’s spiritual faculties alone that have been made in the image of God, but his physical being also. Christian belief in the resurrection of the flesh presupposes the body’s potential and call to resist corruption.

This has always been a stumbling block to unbelievers, indeed to some believers, too. The notion of the soul’s immortality appeals even in a post-Christian age. We like the thought that something about us carries on somehow after we are dead and gone. The vague associations evoked by the word ‘soul’ represent an idealized projection of what we might think of as our noblest self. The thought of the body’s immortality, meanwhile, is widely met with ridicule. For all our body-consciousness we are keen, when the time comes, to leave our bodies behind.

The body does, though, point beyond itself. It carries a hunger, not just for sensual satisfaction, but for eternity. A splendid Psalm (Psalm 62), which David sang out in the Judaean desert hiding from Saul, begins with this visceral confession:

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where no water is.

The Vulgate, which has shaped Christian consciousness in the West, renders the notion of the flesh’s fainting differently, and suggestively, by the exclamation: ‘quam multipliciter tibi caro mea!’ (following the LXX’s ποσαπλῶς σοι ἡ σάρξ μου): ‘in what multiple ways my flesh tends towards you’, or even, ‘in what multiple ways my flesh is yours’. There is imprinted on our physical being a craving that is, as T. S. Eliot put it in The Rock, ‘Crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh’.

It is hard to entertain a chaste approach to the body if we have a reductive understanding of that of which the body is capable; if we reduce a dimension of ourselves configured to the image of God simply to a discardable garment of skin. We carefully, sometimes obsessively, attend to the body’s present needs, appetites and pains. But are we not often deaf to its crying out for ways to transcend itself while staying fully itself? Are we not closed to the thought that our senses’ claims may call for something that cannot be found in this world?

To say this is not to denigrate the here-and-now of sensual experience, or to recommend exsanguine sublimation patterned on a dualist frame of mind. It is to root the supernatural in nature, our nature, and thereby to broaden (infinitely) the range of desire. Only thus can we learn to seek proportionate responses to what our flesh faints for and spare ourselves repeated frustration.

Naturally, erotic intimacy can be one way of tending towards the sublime. The testimonies of lovers abound from every age and cultural sphere. Certain narratives posit sensual awakening as a corrective to an arid spiritual search turned in on itself to become subtle self-satisfaction. A parable of this process is told in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha. After a noviciate spent among ascetics, the eponymous hero rediscovers the world and is, for the first time, touched by it thanks to the wise courtesan Kamala. Entranced by her beauty, he is tempted, first, to see her as a trophy to be conquered, even ravished. Kamala corrects him: ‘Love can be begged for, bought, given, found on the street, but you cannot take it as spoil. The way you have thought out for yourself is quite wrong.’

It takes her to teach him what reciprocity means, and surrender. She draws him out of self-centred existence into an experience at once of encounter and ecstasy:

She taught him, who in the things of love was still a boy tending to throw himself blindly and insatiably into pleasure as into an abyss – she taught him from scratch the doctrine that one can’t take pleasure without at the same time giving it; that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every look, each smallest spot on the body carries secrets the awakening of which paves the way to happiness for those in the know. She taught him that lovers can’t part after celebrating love without admiring each other, without having been conquered in the measure in which they themselves have conquered, so that neither is subject to a surfeit or to boredom or to the ugly sense of having abused or been abused.

For Siddhartha this insight marks a crucial stage on the journey to enlightenment. He could have reached it otherwise, but this path opened up before him.

Much as he enjoyed following it, he was never inclined to mistake it for a goal. He ascertains the troubling proximity of lust and death. And he perceives, even in Kamala, a hidden fear: ‘fear of ageing, fear of the autumn, fear of having to die’. He recognizes the loveliness of that which they have known together. But he sees that it cannot be an end in itself. It is evidently transitory, whereas both he and Kamala yearn to embody a beauty that endures.

The human will to embody beauty is, I suspect, underrated. But it lives in us as a consequence and expression of our iconic nature. He in whose image we are made is Beauty. Beauty is naturally the end towards which we strive. An echo of this striving is heard, no doubt, in our times’ focus on fitness and good looks. But beauty is about more than being pressed into shape. Beauty is a function of art. Art must be carefully practised and deliberately refined. It seeks expression.

For years I have been haunted by a throwaway statement in Tim Winton’s weird, in some ways perverse, novel Breath. One of its characters sees, looking back over life, that he awoke to a new dimension of being one day in adolescence, out on an Australian beach, when he noticed surfers riding a wave. It was new to him: ‘I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.’

To do something beautiful for its own sake, for the intrinsic delight of it, without thought of gain: this, I’d say, is a way of beginning to live chastely in this world, poised to balance elegantly on whatever surging billow providence provides as a means to bear us homeward, towards the shore.

Could it be, as Winton suggests, that such gratuitous seeing and acting in pursuit of beauty is stranger to men than it is to women?

Perhaps no form of concrete human enterprise grants a premonition of the body’s possible ascent towards transcendent beauty more clearly than dance, an art form in which iron discipline enables, over time, breathtaking freedom of expression. The reclusive Norwegian poet Emil Boyson framed this ascent in words:

Dét at du finnes i verden, gjør at livet kan leves.
Du er den skjulte sangfugl, du er nymånens skjønnhet,
du er den hvite lengsels-sky, du er hvirvelstormen
som river oss ut av oss selv og lærer vor søte smerte
at Alt skal skiftes om lik et klædebon, og at éngang,
når skjebnens mål er fullt, må denne jords åsyn forgå.

Hvem skulle tro at DU, som holder i din hånd
de ytterste hemmeligheter, kjent ellers av Gud alene,
selv er en sky ung pike, som tusen passérer på gaten
og ingen vet annet om enn at du liker kryss-ord,
tørrer støv for din mor, taler fornuftig om været,
og strikker små trøier til barnet din søster venter i mars!

Ræddes du aldri, når natten er tyst, for ditt væsens gåde?
Blev det vor lodd at gruble, fordi din panne er klar?
—Hva vet du om spørsmål og svar! Du smiler og går forbi
mot virkelighetens grense, forunderlig ett med din skjebne,
og mens vore hjerter sitrer, forvandler du dig pånytt
og finner, fortapt i en frihet du aldri har prøvd at fatte,
benådelsens strenge mønster som er blitt ett med din kropp,
og synker sammen som død når din siste dans er til-ende.

Life is made bearable because, in this world, you exist.
You are the hidden songbird. You are the new moon’s beauty.
You are the white cloud of yearning. You are the tornado that
pulls us out of ourselves and lets our sweet pain know
that all will be changed like a garment and that one day
when fate’s measure is full the face of this world must pass.

Who would have thought that YOU, who hold in your hand
ultimate secrets known otherwise to God alone,
should be a shy young girl whom thousands pass in the street,
about whom nought is known except that you like crosswords,
do housework for your mother, speak sense about the weather,
and knit little vests for the child your sister expects in March.

Are you never fearful, in the quiet of the night, of your being’s enigma?
Is it your unfurrowed brow that obliges us to brood?
What do you know of questions and answers? You smile as you pass
on your way to reality’s frontier, strangely united with your fate;
while our hearts quiver you are again transformed,
finding, lost in a freedom you have never sought to fathom,
the rigorous paradigm of grace made one with your body,
then collapsing as if dead at the end of your last dance.

In such performance we intuit the work of unification we are called to effect, reconciled to our fate, as grace’s pattern is made one with our body, bearing us beautifully up towards the boundary of all that is.

‘You are the tornado/pulling us out of ourselves and letting our sweet pain know/that all will be changed like a garment and that one day/when fate’s measure is full the face of this world must pass.’ How little Virginia Woolf had understood when she ridiculed a famous ballerina of her day for spending life ‘hopping about from foot to foot’.

In current usage ‘sex’ is variously an activity, a commodity and a compulsion. One can ‘have’ it, ‘buy’ it, be ‘addicted to’ it. Etymologically speaking, ‘sex’ refers to a state of being. The Latin noun sexus derives from seco, which means ‘to cut off’ or ‘to amputate’. The same root gives us ‘secateurs’. Sexus refers to the division of a species into two kinds, male and female, each incomplete without the other. By extension it came to denote the sexual organs. Only fairly recently was it adopted as the direct object of verbs denoting human endeavour.

Genesis does derive gender difference from a sort of amputation. The story of it crowns the creation narrative. From the initial ‘Let there be light!’ God had ordered reality by graceful distinctions, drawing light from darkness, earth from heaven, dry land from water, and so forth. When at last the scene was set and the earth was ready, he drew woman from man (Genesis 2.21-23):

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’

These resonant cadences from the King James Bible convey the moment’s solemnity. The Hebrew text, meanwhile, has a dimension we might call playful, an expression of astonished delight. When Adam awakens from sleep, he cries out,

זֹאת הַפַּעַם עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי לְזֹאת יִקָּרֵה אִשָּׁה כִּי מֵאִישׁ לֻקְחָה-זֹּאת

Martin Buber, a formidable Hebraist, renders this verse: ‘Now this time round, here she is! Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. Ishah shall be her name for from Ish she was drawn.’ I do not think it disrespectful to compare the Biblical Adam’s stuttered naming of this well-known stranger (‘Ish-Ish-ah’) to the ‘Pa-Pa-ge’ duet at the end of The Magic Flute, when Papageno falls at last into the embrace of her whom, so far, he has only known as a gnawing sense of absence. The Mozartian heroes are also paradisal creatures of a kind.

In both symbolic narratives, man and woman meet with a loud exclamation of ‘Yes!’ Having sought his mate in vain in the range of creatures coming before him to be named, Adam knows her when he sees her, roused from his first siesta. The sole insufficiency of life in Eden is blissfully repaired. He is no longer alone.

Rashi of Troyes, a contemporary of the founders of Cîteaux, remarks that the Hebrew noun conventionally rendered ‘rib’ (צֵלָע), suggesting the formation of woman from man’s bare bones, is susceptible of a different reading. The same noun is used, he points out, in the Exodus account that reveals to Moses the pattern for the tabernacle, God’s earthly dwelling, when it is said: ‘And for the second side (צֵלָע) of the tabernacle, on the north side, [you shall make] twenty boards’ (Exodus 26.20). ‘For this reason our rabbis have been able to say that man was created with two faces.’ Man and woman are intended to live face to face. They are to affirm each other’s personhood in the relational, Greek sense of the word for person, πρόσωπον [prosōpon], made up of πρός/pros (‘towards’) and ὤψ/ōps (‘eye’). I am a person in so far as I meet the eye of another and the other’s eye meets mine. As long as man could not see himself in the eyes of woman, he was but half a man.

Paul Claudel had valuable insight on this topic. In addition to being a poet, he was a careful exegete with an imaginative span at times as broad as Origen’s:

‘God created man in his own image: to the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’ The image of God exists by reason of this twofold nature. In Adam, the image of God, there was a latent something which in response to grace would give life to a woman. We do not read that God blew into Eve, as he did into Adam, ‘a spirit of life’. This spirit was transmitted together with the portion of flesh which the hand of the Almighty set apart, which was no dead matter but living and alive. It is a bough cut off from the main stem. But the root remains in the depth of the male. And henceforth he has inside him something defined by an absence, a lack, a void that no flesh, nothing mortal can suffice to fulfil.

Drawing on the riches of the liturgy, Claudel adds a twist to this interdependence of the sexes. He refers to the fact that the Church, in its office for 8 December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, lets us read a text from Proverbs. The reading likens Wisdom, the principle by which God acts in the world, to a woman, and insists that this figure was conceived before creation began: ‘I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth’ (Proverbs 8.23-24). Biblically speaking, writes Claudel, man may enjoy the status of being first-born, but woman was first conceived. ‘And if she, the preordained figure of eternal Wisdom, is no stranger to the cause, creation and presence of any existing thing, she is no stranger to the raising-up of man.’

This may seem lovely but a bit unreal. You may find it tiresomely aestheticizing. Let us try, therefore, to root the poet’s intuition in experience.

A testimony is at hand in a book by Jacques Lusseyran, the French resistance hero born in 1924, when Claudel was France’s ambassador in Tokyo. Lusseyran, blind from the age of eight, is chiefly remembered for his visionary memoir, And There Was Light. Less well known is his Conversation amoureuse, a confession addressed to the woman he loved, Marie, a few months before the two died together in a car crash, on 27 July 1971. The Conversation amoureuse is an exceptional document, a searingly honest account of sexual experience, alive with light and joy. It steers liberatingly clear of the pornographic. Lusseyran, who only ever saw Marie with his heart and hands, was a man able to envisage sex chastely.

What Claudel inferred from Scripture, Lusseyran knew by instinct: ‘I saw it when I was sixteen: I saw I would never be a man as long as I had not found woman.’ Many a teenage boy might say the same, but Lusseyran had in mind more than erotic or romantic conquest; more, even, than the image of perfect love. His manhood, he sensed, depended on finding ‘that part of me which is woman’.

Given current discourse about gender fluidity, we are perfectly set up to misunderstand what Lusseyran says. So let’s not do that. He does not speak of identity conflict. His maleness was self-evident to him. He owned it with much pleasure. But he was keenly aware that being a man does not amount to self-sufficiency. On the contrary: for him, to be fully a man is to be humbly conscious of what one is not, to accept incompletion while passionately seeking wholeness in – and from – the different other. It was clear to Lusseyran that an individual becomes a person when engaged in an ecstatic relationship; that is, in a relation that makes me step outside myself in exposure to alterity:

One cannot live imprisoned always. One cannot forever let life unfold on the other side of the fence. Human beings destroy one another. It is necessary, too, that they unite. It is urgent. There must be destinies that meet in an embrace. There must be a being, at least one, of whom one is never afraid, of whom one thinks as of oneself; who is sure of your protection, be it in the face of death, should death’s prospect arise, a being whose eyes do not judge you, whose hands do not chase you away.

Such a statement has universal validity. It could be applied to friendship. But it becomes a matter of life or death in the male–female relationship. For man-without-woman, and woman-without-man, is incomplete.

It is thought-provoking to read what Lusseyran wrote about growing up in the 1930s, almost a century ago. ‘I wanted to be a boy. It didn’t trouble me at all. Still, there were times when I didn’t quite feel like a boy, because I couldn’t be a girl at the same time.’ Girls, he says, saw things more clearly on the whole: ‘Most said they wished to be boys.’ He concludes: ‘It wasn’t about being otherwise. To become the opposite is never a solution. It was about being both.’

How can this exacting, necessary union be effected?

First we must learn to recognize the terms of the conflict within us. It is a tall order, for consciousness of it arises in puberty, ‘which is nothing but distance and burning’. ‘When one is very young, love hurts terribly. No one ever speaks of this, but it does hurt. Love bursts open in our sex and our head at the same time, pricking us, shouting at us, wanting the body at once.’ It is, says Lusseyran, ‘like a fire whose smoke clots our heart’. It provokes foolishness, even aggression. Woe to him or her who lives through this trying, intoxicating time without a friend to confide in.

As we grow, awakening is offered us: think of Adam’s emerging from sleep. The question is whether we are ready and sufficiently free to seize this opportunity.

In a flash, a boy knows that his body is no object, but a living being; and that a girl’s body is another being still more alive, and so fragile that, were one mad enough to name its parts, one would shatter them. It is this embodied soul, this soul upon the body, that all, almost all, wish to forget. It frightens them.

Sexuality is more than a matter of physical need, physical functions. It is ‘an overflowing, an inundation of soul’. It takes courage to recognize this fact. Lusseyran speaks of the promise held out by sexual union and of the disillusionment that can ensue. He stresses that his point of view is male, so partial. He hopes Marie will have ‘like courage and speak of love as it is for a woman. It seems to me that it would be better for women to speak first; that they know more about it than we.’

With this condition in place, he submits that a man never dreams less than when he makes love, that at that moment he is what he does in a state of abandonment, and that for this reason it makes no sense to speak, as one did of old, of a man ‘possessing’ a woman. In reality, says Lusseyran, the opposite is true: he gives all. That is why, once the gift is symbolically given, he may fall into a state of desolation, even rage, confusedly attempting to maintain command of self where nothing seems to be left. Having been, briefly, one with the other, he falls back into separateness, well-known and troubling. At this point sadness can descend on a couple. There are those, Lusseyran admits, who may rise up and dance. But how many pray? The question is put, here, by one who is by no means overtly religious.

About his wife Lusseyran says a beautiful thing: ‘All my movements are free; she has freed them.’ Yet he acknowledges that there remains between them a gap of irremediable solitude. She, woman, incarnate in Marie, represents that without which he is not a man. The distance between them seems momentarily not to exist. Then it returns. That is when love is put to the test: ‘It is after [the act of] love that love begins,’ if each feels courageous and safe enough to acknowledge, having glimpsed completion through the other, that neither is complete; that it is tending beyond ourselves that makes us human. No one has a claim on completion. It can only be bestowed on us by way of fugitive gifts, for which we must be grateful:

It is about time we understood that there is in woman a man and in man a woman, and that each human being must work throughout life to know his or her name. Nothing, that is obvious, is gained by imitation. The day on which all boys pass as girls and all girls as boys, no progress will have been made. The distance to be covered cannot be reduced to the order of appearance. Nor to that of the professions. No claim [to equality] will open the door to the mystery. If each of us is the other in secret, the work must be done secretly. And only love can accomplish it.

‘The decisive image’, says Lusseyran to Marie, that towards which he tends, ‘was not you, it was you in me’, a transformative encounter enabling a fulfilment of self beyond self, in transformation. For love alters us. ‘If our love keeps us as we were, it is because we mistook it for love, whereas in fact it was something else.’

Jacques Lusseyran’s Conversation amoureuse gives us an idea, by no means exhaustive, but valuable all the same, of the way in which man and woman interact naturally. Sadly, their relationship has been upset. When Scripture speaks of the origin of sin, the first casualty is the natural, free relationship between the sexes. The fall lets Adam and Eve know what it means to be ‘cut off’. They no longer find themselves in one another. They hide. They are ashamed.

When God calls them to account, his sanction affirms their estrangement. He says to the woman: ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3.16). From this verse, a myth has grown. Readers – predominantly male readers – have deduced an image of needy and unbridled female sexuality, with woman cowering in the throes of desire at the feet of the providentially domineering male. This image was far from the mind of the inspired author. This is not just a hunch. It is an observation I can ground lexically.

The word used to render ‘desire’ in Genesis 3, תְּשׁוּקָה (t’shuqah), is no common noun. It occurs only three times in the Hebrew Bible. This should prompt us to be on the alert: very likely there is a reason why the redactor adopted this term in this context, since its second occurrence is found just a few verses on (the third, apparently unrelated, is in a different book, the Song of Songs 7.11). In the protology, we find this particular ‘desire’ again in Genesis 4.7. There the Lord warns Cain of what will happen if he persists in an attitude of truculent rebellion, envying Abel instead of learning from his virtuous example. The Lord asks Cain why he sulks at the rejection of the offering he has brought:

Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire [תְּשׁוּקָה] is for you, but you must master it (Genesis 4.6f.).

This usage puts paid to any notion of ‘desire’ as a state of dependent inferiority. In Cain’s engagement with sin, it is sin that has the upper hand. Sin is the stronger party. Its desire is not fawning. It is an attitude of manipulation, a way of entrapping Cain and of subjecting him to its designs. If we allow this resonance to sound in the previous passage, too, the one in which God addresses Eve, the tables are turned. The woundedness of male–female relations after the fall is not a matter of one being fatally at the mercy of the other; it is a matter of each attempting to exploit and control the other, albeit by different means. Communion has given way to rivalry and menace: such are the wages of sin. This is where healing is required by grace and patient effort both between men and women and within each one of us, in so far as there, too, there is strife of this kind to be reconciled.

Håkan Hagegård as Papageno in Ingmar Bergman’s television production from 1974, flanked by Irma Urrila’s Pamina. Together the two characters sing, ‘[Love’s] high purpose is evident: nothing is nobler than to tend, as woman and man, man and woman, woman and man, towards divinity.’ Bergman had a profound understanding of the opera. He insisted that it is ‘no silly fairytale’ and spoke of ‘the gospel of the Magic Flute’.

Catholic moral theology qualifies certain inclinations and types of behaviour as being ‘objectively disordered’. It may appear a harsh-sounding phrase. In normal speech, to be ‘disordered’ is to be wrongly put together. Who can presume to make that kind of judgement of another? In theology, meanwhile, the language of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ has a different resonance. We shall need to do some groundwork to hear these words truly, as the Church intends them.

A good place to begin is the Septuagint’s rendering of Genesis 2.1, telling of God’s outlook over creation on the seventh day: καὶ συνετελέσθησαν ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ ἡ γῆ καὶ πᾶς ὁ κόσμος αὐτῶν. Jerome put this into Latin as, ‘Igitur perfecti sunt caeli et terra, et omnis ornatus eorum’, which produced the now charmingly quaint-sounding version of the Douay-Rheims Bible: ‘So the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the furniture of them.’ What on the first day had been ‘void and empty’ (Genesis 1.2) is fully furnished. The Vulgate translates the Greek κόσμος (kosmos) as ‘ornatus’. Ornateness is tantamount to beauty, but beauty that springs, not from a random heaping-up of lovely things; this beauty is produced by the perfectly thought-out coherence of the whole. The root sense of ‘kosmos’ is ‘order’. We still draw on this sense in certain circumstances. The function of cosmetics is subtly to accentuate a facial symmetry that, unaided, might escape our notice.

At the beginning, human nature was perfectly part of this perfect order. It was oriented towards eternal life and the manifestation of God’s substantial grace. Man and woman, creatures of dust, were robed in glory, called to carry transcendence into creation and to live in a tension uniting earth and heaven, the material and spiritual realms, not only in their souls and minds, but in their bodies. Their very existence had a unifying, priestly character. ‘Like a priest with fragrant incense’, wrote St Ephrem, ‘Adam’s keeping of the commandment was to be his censer.’ The commandment carried into the moral and rational order the existential imperative of configuring man’s iconic potential – his being created in God’s image – to God’s likeness. Man was invited to choose beatitude, which meant he was at liberty to reject it. His sacerdotal sacrifice lay in the ordering of his free will according to God’s call.

Man’s decision to disobey, to direct himself by appetite rather than by trust in God’s precept, disrupted this order. The event we refer to as the ‘fall’ represents a corporate descent into disorder, a reality you and I, postlapsarians, take for granted: we have known nothing else.

St Paul provides an analytical summary of the drama which Genesis 3 relates by way of narrative. This is how he goes about it in Romans 5.12-19, which I have conflated in order to demonstrate the principal theses that interest us.

Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned. Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.

Paul traces a chain of causes and effects that upset original kosmos. This chain sets out from disobedience, a perversion of the will causing man to choose a course whose nefarious consequence is known to him: God had stated that, were he not to keep the (one and only) commandment set for him in Eden, he would die (Genesis 2.17).

Adam’s disobedience is described by Paul as trespass or transgression. These English terms well convey the sense of their Greek equivalents παράπτωμα (paraptōma, from piptō, meaning ‘to fall’) and παράβασις (parabasis, from bainō, meaning ‘to go’). They are concrete nouns to do with movement. The first syllable of ‘tres-pass’ contracts the ‘trans’ we find in ‘transgression’. The Latin preposition ‘trans’ corresponds to the Greek ‘para’ – think of ‘paranormal’, which refers to phenomena beside or beyond a norm which they subvert. So parabasis means an ‘overstepping’, paraptōma a ‘falling beside’. A direct path had been pointed out to Adam to take him on a straight, joyful journey through life, from time into eternity without interruption, enabling him, the royal priest, to rise to full stature as a son of God by adoption. He willingly rejected this itinerary. He chose instead to fall into a ditch, then to roll into the bushes, where we find him, who had stood, a moment ago, unselfconsciously dignified at the heart of creation, hiding for shame ‘among the trees’, seeking to avoid both the face of God and the gaze of his fellow human creature (Genesis 3.8).

This state of affairs, says Paul, can be generically labelled as sin. Here, too, we are dealing with a word whose history is rich in lessons. The New Testament word for ‘sin’, ἁμαρτία (hamartia), is derived from a verb that, in ancient Greek, was used of games. It meant ‘to miss the mark’ in the javelin or in archery. Later it came to denote, more generally, ‘to fail of one’s purpose’. So used are we to thinking of sin in terms of guilt that it is useful to be attuned to this semantic range. Sin, which conditions us all, is of its nature disordering, attracting us away from the goal towards which we would naturally move, had our nature not been struck with a cognitive affliction. To live in this state of bewilderment, says Paul (and this is the fourth, last element in his causal chain), is death, the opposite of the thriving for which we were made, which is not just a state of animation, but glorious, transformative fullness of being in God.

It should be clear that, on this reading, we all live lives marked by disorder, be it simply for the fact that we live with the prospect of death, an anomaly in the kosmos God intended. Whatever diverts us from the realization of personhood in communion with others, from the healing of the rift between man and woman, from the choice of generative life and the rejection of a culture of death, from the divinization by grace of our humanity – all this is, formally speaking, disordering, pulling us away, be it pleasurably, from our God-given purpose, potentially causing us to set off into the wilderness instead of finding our way to the Vision of Peace, the New Jerusalem ‘compact together’ (cf. Psalm 121.3), where the promise made in Eden is fulfilled and our nature perfected, with that in us which is of the image of God perfectly conformed to him who is the Image, our peace and delight for eternity.

Presupposing this background, the Catechism of the Catholic Church thus speaks, for example, of the disordered exploitation of natural goods harming the environment (n. 339), of a disordered attachment to creatures causing forgetfulness of the Creator (n. 1394), of lying and calumny, the trampling underfoot of truth, as being ‘intrinsically disordered’ behaviour (n. 1753), of a ‘disordered desire for money’ disrupting the social order (n. 2424), and so forth. In all these instances we see a possible good diverted from its true finality. Disorder stands for a re-emergence of something of that primeval chaos over which the Spirit hovered to produce from elemental forces that which was, is, and forever remains good.

Disorder can make itself felt, too, in the intimacy of our hearts, bodies and relationships. The Catechism speaks of disordered appetites (n. 37). These make themselves felt as lust – ‘luxuria’ in the Latin typical edition. Luxuria contrasts with healthy desire in as much as it is not directed towards communion, through surrender with another, but intent on self-satisfaction, for which purpose another human being is instrumentalized, not encountered as a person, but used as a means towards an end. Lust is thus ‘disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure’, and sexual pleasure is ‘morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes’ (n. 2351).

We face a near-universal problem. Rare are those men and women who have never found sexual desire, in itself noble, to be overwhelming and confused. We are vulnerable in this area. The core of our physical being is touched. We are susceptible to being terribly hurt, apt to hurt terribly. To submit that we will benefit, and benefit others, by learning self-ordering is simply to appeal to experience: it is what Kamala taught Siddhartha, who had come to her to learn the art of love.

In a perspective of faith, the stakes are higher. The believer knows that the senses ultimately yearn for ecstasy beyond the sensual. Deep calls on deep at the noise of floodgates that contain, in frail flesh, energies which are of God and rise towards God (cf. Psalm 41.8). We are carried to the limit of creaturehood.

A verse from the Song of Songs frequently recurs in the writings of the Cistercian Fathers: ‘Ordinavit in me caritatem,’ ‘You have set love in order in me’ (Song of Songs 2.4, according to the Vulgate). The Fathers took it for granted that all men would need such ordering. A century or so later a school of remarkable Cistercian nuns, based at Helfta, explored what such ordering might mean from a feminine perspective. These men and women were mystically minded. But they were fully of flesh and blood. They shared this conviction: the fruitful ordering of human love can only be fully accomplished when the ordering principle is Wisdom from above. Here we might recall Claudel’s observation that Wisdom’s Scriptural form is feminine. ‘O Sapientia’, the Church sings on 17 December, when it enters the last, luminous phase of Advent:

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to the other and ordering all things with strength and sweetness: come and teach us the way of prudence.

Have we always expounded the Church’s teaching on the ordering of affection in a way that matches the strength of our words with corresponding sweetness? Sometimes, perhaps on account of inexperience, we may have wanted for prudence, making a loveable goal, gloriously vindicated through the incarnation, appear as little other than a bleak mid-winter freezing of desire.

Delicacy is called for in the re-ordering of disordered love. We are dealing not with programmable machines, but with embodied souls, than which nothing in creation is more sensitive. To channel this sensitivity is a demanding proposition. In a conversation with Bruno Monsaingeon in 1994 Yehudi Menuhin, speaking of himself as a young man, declared that he had been ‘very vindictive’ and ‘very, very passionate’. He added: ‘I don’t know what kind of character I would have been had I not been able to fulfil myself to a certain extent. I might have been a very unbalanced character… But anyway, all of that went into the music.’ This is a statement of universal validity. You may object: I am not possessed of creative genius crying out for expression! That may be true. But we all carry in us, such is the Christian’s conviction, a desire to be consecrated, for our being to be divinized. That amounts to a fantastic affective impetus, which can result in imbalance if not ordered well.

Much in a person’s life can stand in the way of affection’s right ordering. Privations and surfeits, wounds and attachments from early on can set lives on a path that goes against the ordered grain, an ‘objectively disordered’ path which nonetheless seems to the person concerned the only path possible, the only chance to find fulfilment and joy. Such situations call for respect and patience. To say this is not to call the kosmos into question. It is to regard the complexity of life with intelligent compassion in truth, a prerequisite for pastoral care and for friendship.

Further, things are often not quite what they seem. Apparent promiscuity may be a default way of dealing with a burden of love or anguish. Etty Hillesum wrote in her diary on 4 September 1941: ‘I am unhappy again. I can quite see why people get drunk or go to bed with a total stranger.’ So imperious can our need for consolation be. Etty realised, though, ‘that isn’t really my way.’ What her way was she gradually learned. In November 1941, in a watershed moment, she knelt for the first time in her life, on her bathroom floor. In December she wrote, ‘The foolish and passionate desire to “lose myself” in [Spier, her lover] has long ago vanished, has grown “sensible”. All I have left of that feeling is the will to “yield” myself to God, or to a poem.’

She did not stop reverencing human love; she dug to its core and discovered it to be a symbol pointing towards an encompassing reality. She wished for something absolute. A single destiny or passion was no longer enough for her. ‘God’, a word that had spelt for her an ideal notion, came to point towards a presence within reach. While in this movement of ascent, she saw at the same time that subsisting at high altitude is hard: ‘I shall probably have to seek my deliverance in bad pieces of prose,’ she noted, before wryly adding, ‘just as a man in extremis may seek deliverance in what is aptly called a “tart”, because he needs someone to still his deep hunger.’

As the months passed, she came to probe this hunger ever more deeply. Etty Hillesum set off to Westerbork in 1943 carrying her New Testament and Rilke’s letters, faithful to her intent, expressed on 29 May 1942, to ‘look things straight in the face, even the worst crimes, and to discover the small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by man’s senseless deeds’. The chronicle of her determination recounts a life that is little by little transfigured in charity.

Etty’s was in many ways an objectively disordered itinerary, not without trespasses, which she readily acknowledged; yet a pattern of order was secretly being formed by the strangely coloured threads that composed her life’s tapestry in patterns that, seen from too close up, seemed simply deranged.

Jacques Lusseyran touches on a similar paradox when he speaks of the fifteen months he spent in Buchenwald until his release on 12 April 1945. That period taught him a great deal about human nature. He saw men who, in ordinary life, had been ordering pillars of society: in the camp they rose at night to steal others’ bread. He saw believers ‘who sought their faith everywhere, yet did not find it, or found it was so small it was no use to them’ in an environment void of pious props. What astonished him, though, was the goodness he found in unexpected places:

How do you explain that in Block 56, my block, the one person to volunteer day and night for months to look after the furiously insane, calming them and feeding them, to care for those suffering from cancer, dysentery and typhoid, to wash and comfort them, was a man who, so everyone said, was in civil life an effete salon pederast, one of those men in whose company one would not like to be seen. Yet here he was, the good angel – no, we must say more: the saint, the only saint, of the infirmary block.

The love in us that needs to be ordered is not just of the carnal kind. It can happen that disorder in the realm of physical passion coexists with order – with ‘the beauty of order’, as people liked to say in the Middle Ages – in the higher sphere of charity. God, who sees everything from on high, will evaluate as a whole these parallel processes unfolding bewilderingly within the confines of a single life.

The way to order, for most of us, goes through disorder; to try to sidestep it is to risk sidestepping life. To be aware, be it subliminally, of the disorder I carry, yet to pretend it does not exist, is to entertain illusion. On that basis no meaningful relationship, and no spiritual life, is possible. How can I ever be healed if I am determined to give the impression I am not sick?

‘I have come’, declares the Lord, ‘not to call the righteous but sinners to conversion’ (Luke 5.32). If you admit the definitions proposed at the beginning of this section, we might paraphrase: ‘I have not come to call those who in any case walk straight (for they know where they are going); my mission is to those who have taken a wrong turn. I call them by proposing metanoia, a new outlook on reality.’ Christ, ‘the fairest of the sons of men’ (Psalm 44.2), reveals order’s beauty. But he is not surprised by our disorder, however shabby it may be.

When we read the lives of saints, we repeatedly see God’s magnanimity in letting men and women act out lengthy spells of disorder preceding their awakening to grace, as if the seven days of creation, with gradual distinctions, were re-enacted in individual lives; as if we all had to make a customized exodus journey home from Egypt – not such a long trip, really, but protracted by serial rebellions, delays and misapprehensions. These, too, play their part in God’s providence. They are meant to teach us something: ‘You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not’ (Deuteronomy 8.2). This remains the bottom line when it comes to confronting my disorder. Am I prepared to own and name that which is in my heart? Will I, from that point of departure, let God’s call order and reform me?

Yehudi Menuhin at 12, in 1928. In old age he said about this stage of his life: ‘As a small child, I imagined that if I could play the Chaconne of Bach inspiringly enough in the Sistine Chapel, under the eyes of Michelangelo, all that is ignoble and vile would miraculously disappear from our world.’ To entertain such thoughts so early in life is sublime and terrifying. What tension within! Tension that must somehow be ordered and released so as not to implode destructively.

The Second Book of Samuel tells the story of a very public adultery. The story begins with the words, ‘It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful’ (2 Samuel 11.2). The king was aroused. He called for the woman, slept with her, and sent her away, treating her as a harlot, though no mention is made of an emolument. When the woman, Bathsheba, later sent word that she had conceived, David’s concern was to conceal his agency.

He had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah, a royal officer, recalled from the war he was fighting under David’s banner, hoping he would use home leave to spend a pleasant night at home. Uriah, a conscientious fellow, declined. He told David, ‘The Ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?’ (2 Samuel 11.11). At this David coolly adopted a different approach. He had Uriah re-despatched to the front and assigned to a position in which death in battle was assured. Why? To keep himself from losing face, to avoid having to confront a subaltern and admit that he, the Lord’s Anointed, had casually trodden both on a divine commandment and on the law of common decency.

It is an extraordinary feature of the Hebrew Bible that it recounts so matter-of-factly the abysmal moral failure of one of its heroes. Proposing the perfectibility of human nature, Scripture insists that it is wholly God’s work. Left to our devices we are capable of falling to great depths. David’s adultery was not a momentary surrender to disorder in the heat of passion; it was calculated and violent. The king did not think twice of assassinating Uriah and, alongside him, other faithful soldiers; the manoeuvre by which he had Bathsheba’s husband done away with was suicidal, strategically speaking. The whole battalion suffered loss (11.16-21). When report was made to David, he sent to tell Joab, the commander, ‘Do not let this matter trouble you’ (11.25). It is unsettling to find, in Holy Writ, a statement that would not sound out of place in the drawl of Marlon Brando’s Godfather. Such is the power of blinded eros. It can draw us into collusion with death.

David’s action had consequences for his house and family. The thing he had done ‘displeased the Lord’ (11.27), who sent Nathan the prophet to chastise him and to say that as a result of his action, ‘the sword shall never depart from your house’ (12.10). Having sown the wind, he would reap the whirlwind (cf. Hosea 8.7). A curse did fall thenceforth on David’s house. Shortly after the murder of Uriah, David’s son Amnon committed incest with his half-sister Tamar. Obsessed by the thought of her, he summoned her, ravished her, then spurned her, finding that, as soon as his fantasy was spent, he felt for her nothing but disdain, ‘indeed, his loathing was even greater than the lust he had felt for her’ (13.15).

Absalom, another of David’s sons, learned what had happened. He avenged his sister Tamar by murdering Amnon, his brother, falling into a morbid pattern: the first recorded death in human history, as Scripture recounts it, was a death by fratricide (Genesis 4.8). The son whom David begot by Bathsheba once the child born of their first union had died, was Solomon. His career was stellar, yet there runs throughout it a sinister undercurrent, linked with lust. ‘Solomon loved many foreign women… Among his wives were 700 princesses and 300 concubines’ (1 Kings 11.1-3). Allowing for rhetorical hyperbole the picture painted is one of institutionalized compulsion. Surrender to self-obsessed eros dulled Solomon’s spiritual senses: ‘his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God’ (11.4). To enthrone lust as the heart’s governor is to surrender to idolatry. As a result (11.11), the bond between the land and the Davidic line was severed. After Solomon’s death the kingdom was divided. National integrity would be for millennia but a fond memory.

It gives food for thought that the inspired authors trace this rot, affecting a whole people, back to a particular act of death-dealing luxuria.

David’s act and its impact are imprinted on Christian consciousness. A key text in liturgical prayer is Psalm 50, ‘A Psalm’, says the Septuagint, ‘of David, when Nathan the Prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba’. We tend to dismiss these narrative headings nowadays, considering that modern research has given us a more sophisticated view of the Psalter. What interests us is not the construct of Davidic romance, but the possibility of detecting Ugaritic antecedents.

Yet there is nothing naïve about the Davidization of the Psalter. Athanasius says, in his Letter to Marcellinus, that the Psalter contains all of Scripture by abbreviation, as if in an enclosed garden (n. 2). The believer is to make this garden his own, to walk the length and breadth of it, finding there authoritative articulation of ‘the movements of each individual soul, the ways in which it changes and the means it needs to correct itself’ (n. 12). The attribution of this panorama to David makes him like Everyman in medieval drama. He represents the human condition. Finding David in the Psalms, I find myself in them. They reveal me to myself.

For it is not only we who read the Psalter. The Psalter reads us. It is like ‘a mirror to the one who prays, letting him contemplate himself and the movements of his soul in them’ (n. 12) – and by no means only the edifying movements. The Psalter confronts us with our heart’s darkness. Have we the nerve to enter it, it can have a cathartic effect, like the performance of tragic drama. That is why the censoring of the Psalter for liturgical use, pruning it of passages we deem not nice, is misconceived. It makes of the Psalter a book of devotions rather than, as Athanasius taught, the measure of ‘the whole of human existence’ (n. 30).

St Benedict ordained that monks, seekers after truth, should sing Psalm 50 each day at dawn. Every time the sun rises they are to remember King David in disgrace, and so be mindful of that in themselves which resists grace, while imploring the Lord to pardon, order and heal. There is timeless immediacy in this text, whether it is recited monodically in a monastic choir, solemnly performed (the way Mozart at 14 heard it in Allegri’s setting), or murmured solitarily, as in the introspective paraphrase of Thomas Wyatt, a poet who, in his dealings with Henry VIII, did not lack occasion to meditate on the misdemeanours of princes:

And I beknow my fault, my negligence,
And in my sight my sin is fixed fast,
Thereof to have more perfect penitence.
To thee alone, to thee have I trespassed
For none can measure my fault but thou alone.
For in thy sight I have not been aghast
For to offend, judging thy sight as none
So that my fault were hid from sight of man,
Thy majesty so far from my mind was gone.

Note Wyatt’s stress on retreat from visibility to hiddenness, from lucidity to fantasy. Eros, says one of our times’ best authorities on this matter, stands for ‘a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a “divine madness” which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him to experience supreme happiness’. Ordered clear-sightedly it can give a foretaste ‘of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns’. Left to ache blindly, it becomes ‘warped and destructive’. An absolutization of eros ‘strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it’. Blind eros, claiming omnipotence, imprisons us in ourselves, closing our eyes to the other instead of opening our eyes. Let us consider three aspects of the dynamic by which this vital force can turn death-dealing.

We may call the first aspect erotic intoxication. In such cases eros is conceived of as a force of agency that elevates human beings in an ecstasy pushing at life’s extremity. We have an account of it in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. This work, premiered at Ludwig of Bavaria’s Königliches Hoftheater in 1865, was inspired by a twelfth-century romance, but its mood is Wagnerian through and through. The opera posits the relatedness of eros to death, which Siddhartha discovered in Kamala’s school. The two are figured in two magic potions, one of extinction, the other of love.

Act One shows us the Irish princess Isolde aboard a ship, on her way to an arranged marriage in Cornwall. She is consumed with rage and sadness. Her future husband’s agent, Tristan, once slew her heart’s true love. Isolde might have killed Tristan then, but did not; now, facing a future she abhors, she would repair past negligence. She asks her maid to prepare a mortal potion she intends to drink with Tristan to finish off both him and herself. The maid, changing the recipe, mixes a love potion instead. As soon as Tristan and Isolde drink it, the world about them – the wind, the sun, the salty sea – ceases to exist. They have eyes for nothing but each other. They do not meet each other’s gaze. They drown in it, telling each other, ‘You are me, I am you, I am no longer myself.’ Their chemically induced passion cancels any meaningful notion of ‘self’. Mooring at Cornwall, Tristan exclaims,

O Wonne voller Tücke! O truggeweihtes Glücke!

O wileful bliss! O happiness pledged to deceit!

He is unselved by what lives in him. He knows that this is so, yet surrenders. Isolde does the same. The sweetness of annihilating bliss is too great.

When the two reunite in Act Two, their euphoric singing leaves us in no doubt: they are quite out of their minds. Later in the same act, wileful bliss reveals its true face as perversion, spelt out in Wagner’s libretto. The music is gorgeous. The words are lovely, too. Charmed, we must really pay attention to note the sickness of erotic inebriation in which there is no trace of romance. Tristan and Isolde seek, not communion, but possession. Possession, they see, can only become final in death. They start to yearn for death. Renouncing the day, they opt for the night. Their choice contrasts with a key New Testament motif: ‘We are not of the night, nor of darkness’ (1 Thessalonians 5.5). In a spiralling duet they sing:

O sink hernieder,

Descend

Nacht der Liebe,

O Night of Love,

gib Vergessen,

grant forgetfulness

dass ich lebe;

that I may live;

nimm mich auf

take me up

in deinen Schoss,

into your bosom,

löse von

release me

der Welt mich los!

from the world.

The Liebestod motif makes its first appearance in an effusion of Tristan’s, aspiring to be ‘ever one’ with Isolde, yet to be ‘nameless’, deprived of personhood, offered up to a divinized Love which uncannily resembles ancient Moloch, who consumed his children. When Isolde develops the theme at the end of the opera, the music’s sublimity, cutting right through us, can make us forget that she is, in fact, throwing herself dying into the arms of a corpse. Such is the fulfilment of this kind of eros.

The German director Christoph Schlingensief, adulated for his productions of Wagner, reflected on this theme in a 2009 memoir subtitled ‘A Diary of Illness by Cancer’. The cancer in question claimed his life the following year. ‘I am sure,’ he wrote, ‘that in my case cancer is somehow linked to Bayreuth’. He says he has come to believe that Wagner’s music is ‘dangerous music, celebrating not life, but death’. Immersion in this imaginative world had led him ‘to open a door within myself I ought never to have opened’. He does not blame Wagner. But he maintains that the eros immortalized by Wagner can lead into, precisely, a night in which there is no light by which to move. He cites the conductor Christian Thielemann as saying, ‘I’ll never conduct Tristan again. It is the death of one.’ Schlingensief adds, ‘Quite’. The divinization of eros is not innocent. Even false gods require offerings.

The grand Shakespearean actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies hints at like awareness in an interview she gave in 1988, aged ninety seven. Clearly still moved, she referred to what she called ‘one of the greatest experiences of my whole life’.

It was just after the war. I was staying with Ivor Novello, who was a very great friend of Kirsten Flagstad’s. And she’d come over here to sing in a performance to raise money for the Save the Children Fund. It was in the Harringay Arena. She came trotting in, onto the arena; I can see her now, in a little flowered dress, bowing and smiling, and went up onto the stage and then sat. And the minute the music started, the first note – Malcolm Sargent was conducting –, she became… a dedicated priestess. And when she sang, it was… her voice… I can only describe it: it was molten gold.

Flagstad sang Isolde’s Liebestod. Ffrangcon-Davies sat entranced, hand in hand with Sybil Thorndike: ‘Tears were pouring down our faces.’ The two felt they were being translated into a different realm. Eros, be it through high art, touches depths in us for which we have no words. It calls forth a sacrificial impulse of which we may not be aware – except in the darkness of the night. It matters to resolve freely in advance, in the light of day, at which altar we wish to perform it.

A second aspect of the eros–death nexus takes violent form, at least implicitly. Harold Pinter evokes it in the opening dialogue of Ashes to Ashes, a play first presented in London in 1996. It is an unsettling scene. There are only two characters on stage, Devlin and Rebecca. When the curtain parts we see ‘Devlin standing with a drink. Rebecca sitting’. There is silence. Then:

REBECCA
Well… for example… he would stand over me and clench his fist. And then he’d put his other hand on my neck and grip it and bring my head towards him. His fist… grazed my mouth. And he’d say, ‘Kiss my fist.’

DEVLIN
And did you?

REBECCA
Oh yes. I kissed his fist. The knuckles. And then he’d open his hand and give me the palm of his hand… to kiss… which I kissed.

Pause

And then I would speak.

DEVLIN
What did you say? You said what? What did you say?

Pause

REBECCA
I said, ‘Put your hand round my throat.’ I murmured it through his hand, as I was kissing it, but he heard my voice, he heard it through his hand, he felt my voice in his hand, he heard it there.

Silence

DEVLIN
And did he? Did he put his hand round your throat?

REBECCA
Oh yes. He did. He did. And he held it there, very gently, very gently, so gently. He adored me, you see.

The identity of the man from Rebecca’s past remains unclear in the play. So does the precise nature of their relationship, even as the unknown man’s posture and gestures are gradually, sinisterly adopted by Devlin, who initially purported to deplore them. A few contextual clues are given, images suggestive of Holocaust movies, but we must look outside the text for a Sitz im Leben. We find it, of all places, in an essay by Gitta Sereny, the intrepid historian of Nazism and biographer of Albert Speer.

In 1998 an actor friend told Sereny that Pinter had written the play ‘after reading your book’. The playwright confirmed this, saying he was intrigued by the paradox Speer embodied. While masterminding Hitler’s slave-labour factories, Speer remained ‘a very civilized man… horrified by what he saw when he visited the factories’. He was outwardly humane, yet ruthless. He inspired affection while facilitating violence. This sets the scene for Ashes to Ashes, a play that, according to Sereny, is ‘about a man and a woman who both care for and hate one another, and explores the way in which force and coercion can produce sexual magnetism’.

As if through a magnifying glass it shows us the worst of the conflict between Adam and Eve after the fall, albeit in the setting of an English drawing room.

The scene Pinter puts before us is one we would, frankly, rather not consider. The imposition of male force is troubling. Even more so is Rebecca’s submission and her affirmation, ‘He adored me, you see.’ Her statement takes us to the heart of the matter. Human beings sometimes rationalize humiliation and hurt in terms of desire. It can seem a way of holding on to influence or agency in the midst of affective obliteration. When such recourse is channelled through physical instinct, it can present itself erotically, even though the realization of eros entails compulsive repetition of past pain. Two individuals can be locked in a mutually destructive dynamic: one acting out a claim to omnipotence; the other melting into compliance, fantastically construed as a state of being desired and valued.

Liliana Cavani brought a representation of this psychological complex to celluloid in 1974 with her film The Night Porter. In it, a former concentration camp guard meets an ex-prisoner in a smart Viennese hotel after the war. Ostensibly their roles have been reversed: he is a mere porter, she a wealthy guest. They are inexorably drawn back, though, into their relation as it formerly was, defined by dominance on his part, servility on hers. The film sparked controversy. Vincent Canby began a fulgurating review in the New York Times with, ‘Let us now consider a piece of junk.’ An argument can be made for a more tempered approach.

Cavani’s script came out of in-depth conversations with female camp survivors. She was struck by the need many had to return to places in which they had suffered degradation. Their goal was not just to remember what had happened, but to keep confronting a part of themselves. One said, ‘I shall never forgive the Nazis for having made me touch a part of myself I did not know was there.’ We can go to great lengths to survive, to find comfort, to make sense to ourselves of what is senseless. That is how we try to hang on to a dream of dignity.

‘Our nature’, says Cavani, ‘is complex, sometimes a lot more complex than we think.’ It is no coincidence that both she and Pinter chose the backdrop of World War Two to conduct enquiries into fatal eros. The universe of the camps is a symbolic touchstone for Western consciousness. By it, we distinguish darkness from light – at least we have done so for the past seventy years, while the Shoah has been kept in corporate remembrance: the scandal of amnesia lies before us now.

Against this backdrop, evil is relatively easy to pinpoint. The risk is that we think perverse behaviour confined to extreme environments. We have been poorly prepared to acknowledge it in our midst, not to mention in environments supposed to be radiant with light.

The unravelling of abuse in the Church has been terrible. It has forced us to diagnose an ulcerating wound in need of healing. We face a legacy of sin and crime that calls out for reparation. We recognize patterns of abusive behaviour. Thereby, and this is an advantage, we are helped to develop effective measures of prevention. A key insight gained pertains to the link between sexual abuse and the abuse of power. Such abuse is often minutely calculated. Pinter’s and Cavani’s scenarios find their counterpart in testimonies about clerical abuse now available, alas, in abundance.

We see seduction used to construct a web in which a victim is trapped, bound by spiritual dependence and loyalty, even the sense of being ‘adored’. We hear of instances of Christ’s name being blasphemously used as a tool of power to establish a grip on another’s life every bit as tight as the one that introduces Ashes to Ashes.

At the outset there may have been grace, or what felt like it. The testimony of one former nun begins with words addressed to her confessor, who later abused her: ‘I was sixteen when I met you. Without you I doubt I’d ever have risen from the state I was in, wrecked by pain, cast up onto childhood’s riverbed. The light you carried restored meaning to my life.’ Yet within this context of light, unfreedom encroached. The young girl was flattered by the priest’s claim to see in her a born contemplative. ‘Will you let me guide you?’ he asked. How could she not? Did he not embody mystic power? Guidance would require, she was told, surrender on her part. The form which that surrender took over time is spelled out. ‘He held between his hands my brain, my heart, my soul, my spirit, and my body.’ When she protested that it could not be right for him to move her hands underneath his habit, she was told, ‘It is a gift of God. At this degree of love, the two have but one desire.’ Then: ‘I owe the fruitfulness of my apostolate to our relationship.’ She must cast aside scruples, he insisted. Did he not offer Mass after their trysts? Did that not prove that what took place between them was blessed? Erotic coercion is exercised, in this example, by means of words and charisma. Nonetheless, its violence is deadly.

The third tendency I wish to signal under this heading is pornographic. Pornographic eros is unilateral. It has no encounter in view, only self-indulgence. Rooted in a consumerist mindset, it slots easily into the logic by which our society works. In a world of free trade, it somehow seems reasonable to purchase stimuli by which to still – at least momentarily – sensual appetite. The explosion of pornographic trade shows how widely this mindset is adopted. The trade’s managers vindicate it in terms of consumers’ ‘freedom’ to desire. The flip side is the epidemic spread of pornographic addiction, a servitude as cruel as any.

Auto-eroticism considers only one subject-agent. The lust object is regarded precisely as such, an object deprived of personhood, a physical presence whose function, and sole interest, is to satisfy another’s desire. We have considered the significance of prosōpon, the Greek word for ‘person’. In antiquity, a negated form of this noun was used as a synonym for ‘slave’: aprosōpon, literally, ‘a faceless one’, an identityless human form become merchandise. The term is of obvious relevance to performers of pornographic make-believe. Their faces are not what viewers look for.

But what if such an aprosōpon reveals a human face? What if a voiceless one begins to speak? The chances are we shall find bottomless sorrow.

Such sorrow is put into words in the harrowing autobiography of Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman first raped at twelve, then, at fifteen, given to a soldier in marriage as payment for debt, then sold into prostitution. From infancy she was regarded as ‘money on legs, an asset, a kind of domestic livestock’. Her husband was savage: ‘Many soldiers are.’ We sense the wounds he carried, results of terrible things seen and done. This does not excuse him. But it shows how vulnerability may transmute into violence, in a lethal spiral.

During her first years in the brothel, Somaly Mam remained in a state of rebellion. She loathed what she had become, being bought and sold, subjected to humiliations and excruciating pain. Repeatedly she tried to run away. Each time she got caught. ‘I tried never to look a client in the eye,’ she writes. She did not want to see the reflection of what he saw when he looked at her. It was a minimal but conscious act of defiance.

Gradually, she had no more strength to defy. She came to think that her fate was sealed. Of all the heart-wrenching aspects of her story, none perhaps is more tragic than the change that took place when she was not yet twenty: ‘from that point on I capitulated.’ The light in her eyes was gone. She accepted to see herself the way others saw her, as Nobody: ‘I told myself I was dead.’ She did not even have a name. When later she managed to establish a new life for herself, she adopted ‘Somaly Mam’, which means Lost in the Forest. ‘It was the truest name.’

This story, too, is a story of extremes, yet it speaks of universals. It permits us to see how dehumanizing eros can become when indulged as the craving of a hungry subject consuming faceless others as fodder, whether in the flesh or virtually.

This kind of eros is in the strict sense perverted, that is, ‘turned away’ from its purpose. Instead of creating communion, it accentuates loneliness. The chances are that it also arises from loneliness. That is why it must be dealt with sensitively.

Men can find it difficult to recognize this aspect of sexuality. Perhaps too much of their self-image is at stake. Women often see it with greater precision, even compassion. A pathetic picture of the genesis of potentially perverted eros is painted by Jennifer Lash in her novel Blood Ties, the story of a dysfunctional family.

We follow one character from conception. He is called Spencer, named after the Fulham pub the Spencer Arms. Spencer is the fruit of a union between the elusive Lumsden and Dolly, a nineteen-year-old child unfit to be a mother. ‘Spencer, born on a day of considerable cold in mid-winter in England, was one among millions. At first unnamed, he struggled for warmth, response and nourishment like all the rest.’ These he failed to find. His mother ‘was fearful to get to know him’.

Every close contact with him when they were alone seemed to leach her; his very touch, the weight of him if he fell against her, the scramble of him trying to get on to her knee or into her bed, seemed to threaten her, to accost her. She would push him back with increasing ferocity. When simply his presence became too much for her, she would keep him shut up in the small bedroom, while she sat alone biting her nails and smoking cigarettes in front of the flickering black-and-white television screen.

It is senseless to intrude into such melancholy with facile attributions of guilt. Poor Dolly could not give what she had not. That did not keep her indigence from having a defining impact on Spencer. Meeting no response outside, seeing no one look at him, the child turned in on himself. He cried less often, for what was the use of it? He refused to eat. ‘The extent of his self-expression was denial, refusal, silence.’

Something strange happened to his eyes. It was remarked on by Lily, a friend of Dolly’s.

‘Those fish eyes’, Lily said, ‘they’d haunt me. They’re not the eyes of a child, no way.’ But of course they were the eyes of a child. But a child who had to find some manner to contain within himself, within his small limbs and frail person, the stench, the refuse of all the attempts he had made to extend, to proceed, to find, which had always been instantly rebuffed and returned to him. Unable to receive, he would stagnate; he would stagnate with all the experience, the sight and sounds and sense he could not give, buried into the little, dump housing of himself… More and more the things which engaged him had to be anything over which he had both access and control.

He was an infant. That something could only be his body. Lash, mother of seven, writes with pity of the one way Spencer had of affirming to himself that he was alive. Having been whisked off to Ireland to Lumsden’s frigid parents, to whom his arrival was ‘most unsavoury and inconvenient’, he finds himself for the first time in his life immersed in silence. It is not a beneficial, healing silence. It hangs over him ‘like a fluttering bird, wings spread to the furthest emptiness’.

In a strange bed, in the high room, unslept in for so long, the weight of the silence was a brutal force, a huge constraint, a quiet, choking scheme without pattern or movement. Spencer kicked off the covers to make some space; to feel some sense on the rough skin of his legs and knees. He held his hand fast on the only sense agent still in his possession, he clung and wrung and rubbed his penis as if this movement could keep out the last final stiffness, that the weight of the bird and its stretched wings everywhere could reduce him to.

We might think his future prefigured in this nocturnal vision, with sexual gratification increasingly internalized as the one known means to pacify a legitimate and in itself healthy affective need. But no. Spencer turns out to exemplify man’s capacity to conquer freedom against all odds. His yoke of loneliness is set to be shattered.

There is a warning, though, in this narrative, a reminder of the despair from which self-enclosed eroticism can spring and to which it can lead.

The ways in which eros is brushed by death’s wing invite us to look into our hearts, asking God for truth there, and spaciousness, and openness to love. ‘Then’, as David sang once he realized what he had done to Bathsheba, owning his waywardness, ‘shall for joy upspring/The bones that were afore consumed to dust’ (from Psalm 50, again in Wyatt’s version).

The Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad (1895–1962) was proverbially fond of knitting. Here she is before her debut at Covent Garden in 1936, about to sing Isolde. If underneath this peaceful, matronly exterior a priestess to Eros could lie hidden, ready to surface when summoned, similar depths are likely to be found within all of us.

Towards the end of Deuteronomy, we find this provision about military service: ‘When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be charged with any business; he shall be free at home one year, to rejoice with his wife whom he has taken’ (24.5). The passage indicates the regard in which marriage was held in Biblical Israel, not just as a civic institution, but as an eruption of joy in the community. Scripture adopts the simile of marriage to describe God’s relationship with his people, notably in Hosea, a book that makes it clear, at the same time, that the married state is no doddle. The joy of spouses is exacting. But what true joy is not?

In post-exilic Judaism the custom developed of greeting the sabbath in terms of nuptial rejoicing. ‘Already in Talmudic time’, notes Jonathan Sacks,

Shabbat was seen as a bride, and the day itself as a wedding. ‘Rabbi Chanina robed himself and stood on the eve of Shabbat at sunset and said, “Come, let us go and welcome Shabbat the queen.” Rabbi Yannai donned his robes and said, “Come O Bride, come O Bride.”’

This motif underlies a splendid hymn set for the conclusion of the candle-lighting rite that introduces the domestic service welcoming Shabbat. It was written by Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, Thomas Wyatt’s senior by three years, who taught in Hadrianopolis. Each of the nine stanzas is followed by the refrain,

לְכָה דוֹדִי לִקְרַאת כַּלָּה פְּנֵי שַׁבָּת נְקַבְּלָה

Come, my Beloved, to greet the Bride; let us welcome the Sabbath.

The final stanza reads,

בּוֹאִי בְשָׁלוֹם עֲטֶרֶת בַּעְלָהּ
גַּם בְּשִׂמְחָה וּבְצָהֳלָה
תּוֹ אֱמוּנֵי עֵם סְגֻלָּה
בּוֹאִי כַלָּה בּוֹאִי כַלָּה

Come in peace, Crown of her husband;
Come with joy and jubilation,
Among the faithful of the treasured people.
Enter, O Bride! Enter, O Bride!

The image of the crown recalls a line from Proverbs, ‘A good wife is the crown of her husband’ (12.4). There is resonance, too, of the line from Psalm 8 we considered in ‘You Are What You Wear’ ‘with glory and honour you crowned him’ (Psalm 8.6). The theological use of bridal imagery presupposes rootedness in human reality. The emblem of the first dispensation of grace, the crown, is restored to man by woman. By virtue of their committed union, wholeness is given back to both.

This motif is enacted in the service of crowning that remains an integral part of a Byzantine Christian wedding. Having entered the church after exchanging rings in the narthex, the bridal couple is questioned by the priest as to the freedom of their commitment. Prayers are said. The Great Litany is sung. The priest then places a crown, first on the bridegroom’s head, then on the bride’s, crowning each ‘unto’ the other. He blesses the pair thrice, saying each time, ‘O Lord our God, crown them with glory and honour.’ Does this not indicate that, there and then, paradise is palpably present on earth by way of a pledge? There is, in these crowns, a reference to the crown of martyrdom. The accompanying prayers make it explicit. The married state is a state of Christian witness, ever costly. But above all we behold the Edenic crown of glory, the restoration of humankind to its primordial dignity.

It cannot be stressed enough that Christian marriage is only comprehensible, and realizable, in the light of this opening-up to transcendence. Christian marriage is categorically distinct from a secular social contract. It does not merely seal a bond between individuals who care for one another. It enacts a re-creation, a fulfilment of human nature in the healing of the wound of loneliness inflicted by sexus, enabling woman and man to find in one another the human completion for which each yearns. Integration on the horizontal, relational plane raises the two up, together, into a further communion along a vertical axis. In the Byzantine marriage rite, crowning is followed by a reading from the epistle of St Paul to the Ephesians. It proclaims that the oneness between husband and wife, while engaging them fully in body, soul and mind, also points beyond them. It is incarnate and concrete. At the same time it is iconic, the symbol of a mystery: ‘This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church’ (Ephesians 5.32).

No more radical way could be found of expressing the reach of the bridal covenant. It foreshadows the eschatological accomplishment of man’s vocation for whose sake, so the Fathers insisted, the world was made: the final and eternal reconciliation of human and divine nature envisaged in Scripture as the Marriage of the Lamb (cf. Revelation 19.7). When this Marriage is accomplished, all flesh will cast their crowns before the throne of God in an act of adoration (cf. Revelation 4.10). There will be no further need for symbols when we are immersed in the real.

In the first centuries of Christianity, it was commonly assumed that the end of time was near, that our lovely but transient world would cease in whatever way it might please God to make this come about. What, then, was the point of marriage and procreation? Some denigrated the nuptial covenant as being earthbound, sexual intercourse in marriage as being recalcitrant refusal of a spiritual call. This tendency was condemned by the Church, sometimes from what might seem unlikely quarters. At the council of Nicaea in 325, the aged, ascetic monk Paphnutius, a disciple of Antony, staunchly defended the ideal of Christian marriage, affirming that a married man’s intercourse with his wife deserved the name of chastity.

Even as God’s salvation is realized personally, not generically, marriage, which points towards salvation, is a personal union. The spouses, who administer the sacrament of marriage to each other, are ‘no longer two’; they become ‘one flesh’ (Mark 10.8). Theirs is an all-encompassing, ontological togetherness whose seal is definitive and therefore indissoluble. A graft is accomplished in marriage that cannot be woundlessly undone. ‘A resolution is made,’ wrote Ida Görres,

that is realized in the slowness of a whole life. For the other, too, is not yet fully what he nonetheless is, but only embryonically. He must become it. For that purpose a lifetime is required, until our truest kernel has penetrated and conquered all the superficial and invalid layers of our self, until a human being truly subsists, manifesting itself in truth. The fact that this inner self discerns the self in the other, and is bound and allied to the other, so that the two may help one another towards self-realization, this too is marriage.

A related insight is found in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack, the fourth volume in what is (for now) her tetralogy extending from Gilead. When Della, the preacher’s daughter, looks on Jack, she sees ‘a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world’, almost disturbing in its brightness. Thanks to her seeing it, Jack becomes aware of it. He is, as it were, seen into being, drawn despite himself into conscious personhood. An inkling of this possibility had inhabited him since he first met Della. He knew there was something in her that uniquely called forth something in him.

In celebration of this fact, he performed one of his life’s most uncharacteristic actions: one night, on his way back from work, he bought ‘a small geranium plant with a red blossom on it and set it on his windowsill’. The geranium indicated that the bleak, featureless boarding-house room casually housing his dismal existence had, by virtue of another’s loving sight, the makings of a garden.

While the early Church upheld and blessed the married state, it also fostered the state of consecrated virginity. The two may appear to stand in contradiction. But no. When I entered monastic life, an old monk said to me, ‘Remember, you’ve no right to live a sterile life!’ I have always been grateful for that remark. It qualifies celibacy and reveals its meaning. The celibate, no less than the married man or woman, is called to a generative life of communion, to see and to be seen, to love and to be loved; but where spouses are agents of communion to each other, the consecrated celibate surrenders unmediated to sacramental at-onement. He or she becomes a symbol of the Church, whose nuptial compact with Christ we have seen evoked in the Letter to the Ephesians.

The vocations to marriage and to the virginal state complement and illumine one another. This mutuality is spelled out in the prayer of consecration that crowns the perpetual, solemn profession of a Benedictine nun:

This gift, Lord, has flowed into certain hearts from the fount of your liberality: no prohibition has diminished the honour of matrimony, and your first blessing remains upon its holy union, but you have granted that there should nonetheless be souls who, guided by your Providence, renounce the chaste bond of marriage. Desiring that mystery, they do not imitate the act of marriage but they love what it signifies.

‘Chastity’ is associated in like measure with the married and virginal state: there is no distinction of degree; both are blessed. Both require a degree of battle, like any elective affinity. To bind oneself to a privileged love is to order other loves, letting motions of the heart and flesh be tempered by a will illumined by grace and reason.

We may recall that ‘virginity’, in the language of the Church, is not exclusively a physiological definition. It also indicates a state of grace. States of grace are something we can grow into. In the offertory prayer considered above, humanity’s recreation is hailed as being ‘more wonderful still’ than its creation. Something similar is said in a collect for the second week of Lent. It begins, ‘Deus, innocentiae restitutor et amator’ (‘God, restorer and lover of innocence’). ‘Innocence’ is more than pristine immaculateness. In the logic of grace it is something that can be restored. The same principle applies symbolically, mutatis mutandis, to virginity.

Virginity, to be fruitful, must be chosen as a vibrant option for life. It cannot be merely lugubrious resignation to sexual abstinence. We are culturally conditioned to think of virginity as pickled maidenhood. We associate it almost exclusively with women. The idea of masculine virginity provokes sniggers in our social context. A man who is a virgin is likely to dissimulate this fact, which carries social stigma. It is illuminating to consider an evocation of a man’s resolve to embrace virginity. We find it in George Mackay Brown’s many-layered novel Magnus. It tells the story of St Magnus of Orkney (1080–1117) with poetic licence, yet grounded in historical fact. It chronicles the crystallization of a man’s supernatural call to live and die for Christ.

Mackay Brown struggled with this book. He referred to his manuscript as a ‘gory battlefield’. He fought, and won. A key passage tells of a maturing that took place in the months preceding Magnus’s journey across the sea to Trondheim to attend the burial of Erlend, earl of Orkney, whose corpse he would find laid out in the metropolitan cathedral, near St Olav’s relics. That trip would seal Magnus’s fate.

He is a young man, and handsome. His body, that spring, had taken ‘a first kindling, blurrings of warmth and light’. He is ready for love, surrounded by the expectation that he will soon marry. A man of his standing lived to secure his own succession. Magnus desired this end, sanctified by God and affirmed by the very movement of nature that April: ‘The hill was opened by the plough. Fire and earth had their way with one another. Was everywhere the loveliest spurting of seed and egg and spawn.’ The Orkney landscape lay open as a parable of earthly felicity: ‘The fires of creation. Out of the mingled fires of men and women come new creatures to people the earth. This is a good ordinance of God.’

In Magnus’s heart, though, a competing ordinance speaks. He awakens to Christ’s call. It bids him to abandon everything pertaining to this earth to obtain the pearl of great price, to be ready for that Marriage of which earthly marriage is an image. Magnus knows he must follow that call, though it causes pain, and not only to himself. A wife has been found for him, Ingerth. He does not, in the Biblical sense, ‘know’ her: ‘The bed lay between them white and unbroken. Magnus slept in his own room. He dreamed. He was in a place of burnings and ice.’ He hears a voice that addresses him, gentle and affirmative, but nonetheless exacting:

No, but there is love indeed, and God ordained it, and it is a good love and necessary for the world’s weal, and worthy are those who taste of it. But there are souls which cannot eat at that feast, for they serve another and a greater love, which is to these flames and meltings (wherein you suffer) the hard immortal diamond. Magnus, I call thee yet once more to the marriage feast of the king.

‘From that hour – it is said – Magnus enrolled himself in the company of virgins.’

The way he must walk to fulfil his call and become himself, avoiding ‘missteps’, involves the orientation of all his energy in one direction. A different fire is kindled in him, no less ardent than the first, yet other in kind: ‘the fire that had long tormented the bridegroom began to harden to a cold precious flame. Fire and fire burned in their different intensities.’

Magnus’s hallowed commitment does not make him unworldly. Celibacy is not meant to make men and women into angels. It is one way of making them gauge the depth of their humanity, which God assumed in order to make effective therein his love. Magnus explains this breaking-open of his being to his kind, warm-blooded friend Hold Ragnarson, mystified by Magnus’s cold marriage:

How shall I put it, my dear friend? It isn’t that the rage of fire – which you so shrewdly observed in me in March and April – had died down. No, it is fiercer than ever. But it is no longer fixed on one object – the fertile conduit in the sweet flesh of woman – it has undergone a transmutation, it is diffused in a new feeling, a special regard for everyone who walks the earth, as if they all (even the tinkers on the road) were lords and princes. And this regard – it extends beyond human beings to the animals, it longs to embrace even water and stone. This summer I began to handle sea, shells, larks’ eggs, a piece of cloth from the loom, with a delight I have never known before, not even as a child. You remember that morning last week when we fished with five Birsay men off Marwick Head. I had the helm myself. You remember that great lithe cod that was drawn in on the hook. Mans from Revay caught it. I was pierced with the beauty and the agony of the creature.

Having plumbed the depth of need, being touched there by the sanctifying, unifying power of God, Magnus comes to verify a personal bond with all creation that, for being spiritual, is manifest to him through the senses. He is alive to a new capacity for wonder and compassion. He is sensitive, too, to the secret agony of Ingerth, who, from being ‘like a bee imprisoned in a burning window’, wilts: ‘Subtle witherings began to appear in her flesh before the summer was over.’ It is one thing to adopt a fierce proposition for oneself, another to impose it on others. Magnus weeps at what he sees. Tears, he realizes, cannot be avoided in this world. Having asked, ‘Is God to blame for all this suffering?’, he corrects himself:

What an empty question! Look at the agony on this crucifix I have round my neck. This crucifix is the forge, and the threshing-floor, and the shed of the net-makers, where God and man work out together a plan of utter necessity and of unimaginable beauty…

Hold ‘smiled at the deep sincerity of his friend… at the beauty of the images he uttered… but in truth he was more perplexed than ever.’

What Magnus says makes sense, however. In love, we find ourselves by giving ourselves. The living water gushing up within us is made to be outpoured, not to be dammed up. For most, marriage is the school in which these lessons are learned. For some, they are acquired in consecrated solitude. For all, friendship is proof that nourishing intimacy can well be found in celibate relationships. Chaste giving and receiving is likewise at the heart of generative love. A pontifical statement on St Joseph, in whom the Church sees both a virgin and a spouse, reminds us:

Being a father entails introducing children to life and reality. Not holding them back, being overprotective or possessive, but rather making them capable of deciding for themselves, enjoying freedom and exploring new possibilities. Perhaps for this reason, Joseph is traditionally called a ‘most chaste’ father. That title is not simply a sign of affection, but the summation of an attitude that is the opposite of possessiveness. Chastity is freedom from possessiveness in every sphere of one’s life. Only when love is chaste, is it truly love. A possessive love ultimately becomes dangerous: it imprisons, constricts and makes for misery. God himself loved humanity with a chaste love; he left us free even to go astray and set ourselves against him. The logic of love is always the logic of freedom.

Whether our generativity is biological or spiritual, we can take this counsel to heart.

A newly married couple crowned, oriented towards the altar on which is enacted the sacrifice by which Christ restored to humanity the robe of glory.

Gunnel Vallquist, translator into Swedish of Marcel Proust, once inscribed for me her diary of the Second Vatican Council, which she covered from start to finish as a correspondent for the Swedish press. She wrote out Galatians 5.1: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free.’ That phrase represented for her, as it must for any Christian, the core of the Gospel and thereby of the Church’s mission.

Does the Church’s teaching on sex and chastity liberate? Many people think it does not. At this point, though, a couple of distinctions are called for.

First, we are muddled as to what it means to be ‘free’. Ordinarily we think of freedom as scope to do what we feel like. We think in terms of freedom from, not of freedom unto. In Christian terms, freedom is about enabling commitment. The Biblical view of human nature, evidenced in Christ, regards the human being as essentially relational, oblative and covenantal. On this account, unhindered pursuit of momentary inclinations is not freedom. It is enslavement to whim, which, empirically speaking, rarely produces lasting happiness. Sensational thrills can come of it, true, but they are not much of a foundation on which to construct a life.

Secondly, the freedom Paul speaks of is of a specific sort: that for which Christ has set us free. This freedom presupposes a call to self-transcendence. The finality of life, Biblically speaking, is not limited to present thriving. Such thriving is a good, but by positing it as the be-all and end-all of existence, we sew ourselves up in our garments of skin. We lose sight of the robe of glory that alone reveals the sense of our yearnings and alone bears the promise of satisfying them.

Holiness, life everlasting, configuration to Christ, the resurrection of the body: these notions do not feature much, now, in people’s thinking about relationships and sexuality. We have become alienated from the mindset that brought about the soaring verticality of the twelfth century’s cathedrals, houses holding the whole of life while elevating it.

Was not a proposal recently made to fit a swimming pool on the rebuilt roof of Notre Dame de Paris? It seemed to me apt. It would symbolically have re-established the dome of water that sealed earth off from heaven on the first day of creation, before God’s Image was manifest in it (cf. Genesis 1.7). It would have cancelled, again symbolically, the piercing of the firmament at Jesus’s Baptism, which portended a new way of being human. Whatever fragment of mystery might remain within the church itself would have been performed beneath the splashing of bodies striving to perfect their form. The parable would have been significant.

Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed.

Understandably, a movement will then be afoot to consign these to the archives. For what will be the point of them? Become this-worldly, the Church accommodates the world and makes herself reasonably comfortable within it. Her prescriptions and proscriptions alike will reflect and be shaped by current mores.

This calls for on-going flexibility, for secular society’s mores change quickly, also in the sphere of liberal reflection on sex. Certain views propounded as liberating and prophetic well within living memory – regarding, for example, the sexuality of children – are now rightly seen as abhorrent. Yet new prophets are readily anointed, new theories put forward for experimentation in an area that touches us at our most intimate.

It is time to effect a Sursum corda, to correct an inward-looking, horizontalizing trend in order to recover the transcendental dimension of embodied intimacy, part and parcel of the universal call to holiness. Of course we should reach out to and engage those estranged by Christian teaching, those who feel ostracized or consider they are being held to an impossible standard. At the same time we cannot forget that this situation is far from new.

In the early centuries of our era, there was colossal strain between worldly and Christian moral values, not least concerning chastity. This was so not because Christians were better – most of us, now as then, live mediocre lives – but because they had a different sense of what life is about. Those were the centuries of the subtle christological controversies. Relentlessly, the Church fought to articulate who Jesus Christ is: ‘God from God’ yet ‘born of the Virgin Mary’; fully human, fully divine. On this basis she went on to make sense of what it means to be a human being and to show how a humane social order might come about.

Today, Christology is in eclipse. We still affirm that ‘God became man.’ But we largely deploy an inverted hermeneutic, projecting an image of ‘God’ that issues from our garment-of-skin sense of what man is. The result is caricatural. The divine is reduced to our measure. The fact that many contemporaries reject this counterfeit ‘God’ is in many ways an indication of their good sense.

What a contrast with earlier times. Nicholas Kavasilas, who lived at the time of Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich, wrote:

It was for the New Man that human nature was originally created; it was for him that intellect and desire were prepared. We received rationality that we might know Christ, desire that we might run towards him. For the old Adam is not a model for the new, but the new a model for the old.

In the midst of present perplexity, with the Church weighed down by a history of abuse, with society’s deconstruction of categories that, just yesterday, we thought normative, and with no shortage of people who, like the peers of Isaiah, ‘put darkness for light, sweet for bitter’ (5.20), we need to be recalled to this perspective. The Desert Fathers’ shortest dictum tells us to ‘look up, not down.’ The advice is sound. The Church, surely, is called to provide the compass by which people of good will might orient themselves in times of confusion, not to run after the crowds like a puffing old spaniel striving to keep up with the hunt.

This is not to say that the Church should condemn the world. ‘Neither do I condemn you.’ These words of Jesus addressed to the woman caught in adultery remain a norm to which any ambassador of Christ is held. So do the words that follow: ‘Go your way, and from now on do not sin again’ (John 8.11). Avoid wrong turns! The freedom for which Christ has set us free is freedom to follow him and to obtain the blessedness he has in store for us, not to get lost in the woods. The Church, said Pope John XXIII, is ‘Mater et Magistra’. As a teacher she has the duty to be clear; as a mother she is exacting, but tender and forbearing.

The Christian proposition of chastity is unattractive when put forward with rage or outrage, attitudes betraying self-righteousness on the part of its proponents. God, meanwhile, as John 8 shows, regards the affairs of human hearts and bodies with illusionless patience – though let us remember that ‘patience’ is more than a capacity to hang on and wait; at its heart is the root patior, which means ‘I suffer.’

A compelling picture of God’s patience is drawn in a short story by Marguerite Yourcenar. It features in her collection Feux, which instantiates nine paradigms of experience by evoking typical characters from literature. The paradigm of ‘salvation’ is represented by Mary Magdalene.

In Christian tradition, Mary Magdalene enters the scene of the Gospel drama as an incarnation of passion. Yourcenar, drawing on apocryphal sources, qualifies and complicates this outlook. In her story, Mary was betrothed to John. When John heeded Jesus’s call, leaving her on the eve of their wedding, she felt betrayed. The One who claimed her lover as Beloved Disciple appeared to her a rival in the field of eros. She wanted revenge. She would take it by way of seduction, employing the dynamic of manipulative ‘desire’ that may colour, as we saw in our reading of Genesis 3-4, the relationship of woman and man in a fallen world.

When Christ was invited to dine in Simon the Pharisee’s house, Mary struck. Potent in her charm, she entered the banqueting hall as a fury of passion, determined to claim for herself the Man she mockingly called ‘God’, who had stolen her man. Her purpose was to enact retaliation, playing on age-old allurements and fears.

We sin because God is not. We opt for creatures because nothing that is perfect presents itself to us. As soon as John would understand that God was but a man, he’d have no reason to prefer him to my breasts. I adorned myself as for a ball; I doused myself with scent as for a bed. My entry into the banqueting hall caused people to stop chewing. The apostles stood up in a flurry. They feared that the rustle of my skirt would contaminate them. In the eyes of these good men, I was impure, as if continually bleeding. Only God stayed reclined on his leather couch. I instinctively recognized his feet, worn to the bone from walking the roads of our Sheol, his hair alive with the vermin of stars, his large, pure eyes like the one piece of heaven that remained with him. He was disfigured as grief, grimy as sin. I fell at his feet, swallowing my spittle. I could not add sarcasm to this terrible weight of God’s sadness. I saw at once that I could not seduce him. For he did not flee from me. I untied my hair as if better to cover my fault’s nakedness. Before him I poured out my phial of memories.

Christ does not flee from our contradictions. He does not shun in disgust the world of lusts and instant hopes that Siddhartha, in Hesse’s novel, calls the world of ‘people-who-are-like-children’ (I once heard a seasoned confessor say, ‘You know, there are no adults, only children’). He enters that world and calls out to us, ‘Adam, where are you?’ Sometimes he calls, as in Yourcenar’s story, just by looking at us all-knowing, grieved at our estrangement, but not despairing of us.

We easily forget that God has hope for us. He knows we need to grow, and to grow up. In a reading of the Bible’s protology that complements that of The Cave of Treasures, Irenaeus of Lyon presents Adam and Eve as children in the garden: ‘man was a child, not yet having his understanding perfected; wherefore he was easily led astray.’ But therefore, too, he had potential freely to grow, learn and change.

A Christian view of human nature is dynamic. Yes, of course we are conditioned by factors not subject to our choice; of course we carry gifts and wounds of all sorts; these condition us, but do not determine us. What determines a life is not the mould from which it issues but the goal towards which it moves. In Kavasilas’s words, ‘the old Adam is not a model for the new, but the new a model for the old.’ If we believe this, we shall live prospectively, drawn by God’s patient hope for us.

We are in the same boat. The second-century Epistle to Diognetus stresses that, left to ourselves, we are all borne along by ‘disordered impulses [ἀτάκτοις φοραῖς], carried away by desires and cravings’. For some, disorder will be more patently ‘objective’ than for others. But all of us are called to re-orient our lives towards the finality revealed in Christ. In him fullness of life awaits us. Nowhere else.

After the death of Jean Daniélou in 1974, Gunnel Vallquist wrote an essay on ‘The Daniélou Mystery’. She had known the cardinal very well. She set out, though, not from private recollection but from a subject of public prurience: how had it come about that he, a Prince of the Church, had died of a stroke in the flat of a Paris prostitute, his wallet stacked with cash? Vallquist points out that Daniélou had long ministered to women who worked the streets of Batignolles. He helped them with alms to care for their often complicated networks of dependents. This work he carried on also after being created a cardinal in 1969. For Daniélou, such contact, illumined by Christian friendship, with people considered to be beyond the pale was no big deal. So sharp, writes Vallquist, was his awareness of the chasm that separates us all from the uncreated glory of God that the calculation of degrees seemed to him absurd. He did not, by being a friend to prostitutes, relativize Catholic teaching: he wrote strongly in defence of chastity. But he was not shy to visit and assist those who, to reach this ideal, had a long way to go. He was just acting like his Master.

The Christian condition is the art of striving to answer a call to perfection while plumbing the depth of our imperfection without despairing and without giving up on the ideal. Cancelling the ideal is tantamount to turning cathedrals into swimming pools, to replacing Christ’s personal call, ‘Come, follow me’ (Mark 1.17) with a pre-printed message to ‘take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry’ (Luke 12.19). The goal to which we are called lies ever ahead. To stagnate is deadly.

But what if I have no strength to walk, never mind to set out from the musty plains of Cain’s gyrovague children to scale the slope leading back to Mount Paradise? Well, I must learn to let myself be carried. Israel’s exodus, that exemplarily tortuous voyage during which the people tried every trespass, issued in the profession: ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms’ (Deuteronomy 33.27). Providence, Israel saw, had carried through thick and thin. Their realization corresponded to the oracle God gave when they stood on the Promised Land’s threshold: ‘the Lord your God bore you, as a man bears his son, in all the way that you went until you came to this place’ (Deuteronomy 1.31), through all the waterless places.

The primary ascesis required of a Christian is trust. By trust we give up illusory claims to omniscience. We give ourselves into God’s hands and choose to be reformed according to his purpose. Only he can realize his likeness in us, uniting in a chaste whole the disparate factors that make up our history and personality.

An error Christians have often made is to assume that chastity is somehow normal; but no, it is exceptional. Virtue does not come easily to us: when we try to practise it, we find that sin’s wounds cut deep. They condition us to fail of our purpose. Even as we labour to learn charity, patience, courage and so forth, we must labour to become chaste, letting grace do its slow, transformative work. Short of fulgurant exceptions, growth in grace, like other growth, is organic. It happens slowly, secretly, we know not how (cf. Mark 4.27). But it does, in time, bear fruit.

Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, marvels at Christians who practise celibacy. For him, their witness is a sign of the end-times. Subsequently continence came to be taken for granted. Youths embracing the clerical or consecrated life were simply expected to be chaste, without always understanding what their physical passion, a gift from God, represents or how it might be channelled responsibly. Many have lived lives marked by division, as if the senses were pursuing an unruly life of their own to be either suppressed by force of will or anaesthetized.

Marguerite Yourcenar observes with regard to her Magdalene that the process by which vulnerability, desire and love are changed into supernatural attachment is not one of ‘sublimation’ but of orientation. I concur with her that ‘sublimation’ is ‘in itself a very unfortunate term and one that insults the body’. What is at stake is something else: ‘a dark perception that love for a particular person, so poignant, is often only a beautiful fleeting accident, less real in a way than the predispositions and choices that preceded it and that will outlive it’. How do we handle these?

Physical and affective impulses are ordered according to an attraction of soul made conscious through application of the mind. The integral reconciliation of our being (‘integrity’, we have seen, was long a synonym for ‘chastity’) presupposes an élan. In a psalm, the goal towards which Israel journeyed through the desert is described as ‘the desirable land’ (Psalm 105.24, Vulgate). The typology is timeless.

The single ascetic counsel St Benedict gives about chastity is ‘Castitatem amare’, ‘Love chastity’. Only what I love will change me beautifully. Behaviours prompted by fear or disdain tend to disfigure. Love must be honed. The counsel on chastity is complemented by ‘Ieiunium amare’, ‘Love fasting.’ To refrain from feeding an appetite, even a physical hunger, can be a way of learning to love in an ordered, fruitful way.

I stress this aspect of learning. The Law, wrote St Paul to the Galatians, is a ‘pedagogue’ (3.24). The epistle’s rhetoric makes us view the term critically. But to have a reliable pedagogue is splendid. In virtue, as in science and wisdom, we need to be taught. Our conscience must be formed. The point of Christian moral teaching is to outline a process of learning conceived of in terms of conversion and ascesis, i.e. ‘exercise’, a fitting metaphor in our society, which has a gym at every corner. The goal is freedom and thriving. To learn in this way is to see myself in terms of a reality that exceeds me. It is to be freed from imprisonment in my own limited notions.

Such work takes time. Patience is called for, and joy in every forward step. In terms of chastity, a quantum leap is made, for example, in progress from promiscuity to fidelity, whether or not the faithful relationship fully corresponds to the objective order of a nuptial union, sacramentally blessed, between man and woman. Every search for integrity is worthy of respect, deserving of encouragement.

The importance of intentionality in the way we deal with our affections and attractions is helpfully underscored by that quintessentially postmodern movement, LBGTQ+ – an ineffable acronym pointing towards a seemingly endless realm of possibility, like a secular appropriation of the Tetragrammaton. Its influence is felt in many ways, not least in pedagogy. In a 2022 manual used to teach Norwegian nine-year-olds about the facts of life, written by authors learned in cutting-edge research, children are taught that

Gender identity is your own thought about who you are, and about how you see yourself. You can think of yourself as a boy or a girl without being entirely sure. You can wish to be called ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘ze’, or anything you like.

The vista is at first intoxicating: fancy being, and requiring others to accept one as, whatever one likes! The sense of excitement yields, though, to a weight of heaviness. Effectively a child is told to be a demiurge: to create reality anew according to his, her or zir self-perception there and then. Everything is possible, ‘formless and empty’, (cf. Genesis 1.2), waiting to be filled and ordered – by oneself at nine years of age.

Not long ago efforts were made to establish verifiable pathologies of sexual identity. Such categorization now seems terribly twentieth-century. The terms which the acronym LBGTQ+ suggests are self-subverting. For on this account, nothing is objective; choice is all, to be questioned by none. There is much room for confusion. A positive aspect is conceptual liberation from deterministic classifications. The creed, ‘You can be whatever you like,’ may awaken people to the scope of becoming that lies at the heart of Christian hope. The rainbow logo unwittingly reproduces a Biblical symbol whose message is: ‘God is faithful’ (cf. Genesis 9.13).

There is an eschatological thrust in the desire to overcome binary oppositions. Christ came to make the two one (cf. Ephesians 2.14, Galatians 3.28). Trouble ensues when human beings try to accomplish overcoming unaided. Christianity entertains hope of transcending human dichotomies not through pendular alterations, but through a transfiguration in love that realizes our thirst for infinity through graced communion with Infinite Being. A Christian should naturally honour what is good in the aspirations of secular anthropology. He or she should also correct its presumption. Christians know a lot about presumption. From the beginning, presumption has caused humankind to veer off course. It has a way of detaching us from what is real. Still, the havoc wrought by man’s attempts to be self-made may yet lead us back to a taste for lasting, carrying truth.

Grounded in truth, we can reach immense stature. The life that pulsates in us carries an echo of God even when bogged down in self-destructive patterns. St John Climacus, abbot of Mount Sinai during the pontificate of Gregory the Great, speaks of the maturing he has observed in people caught up in what nowadays we would call sexual addiction:

I have watched impure souls mad for physical love but turning what they know of such love into a reason for penance and transferring that same capacity for love to the Lord. I have watched them master fear so as to drive themselves unsparingly towards the love of God. That is why, when talking of that chaste harlot, the Lord does not say, ‘because she feared’, but rather, ‘because she loved much’, she was able to drive out love with love (ἔρωτι ἔρωτα διακρούσασθαι).

It is an astonishing statement. It effectively dismantles the view that would separate spiritual eros from carnal eros. For Climacus, they belong to a single continuum. He calls on ‘the chaste harlot’ to witness his thesis. Yourcenar would approve. This perspective does not ‘insult the body’. It offers neither sublimation nor appeasement. It acknowledges a flicker of eternity in passion. Even disordered eros can kindle a sanctifying love of God that drives out fear. Nothing is beyond God’s ordering power. Nothing in man is unredeemed. Everything natural to man is made in view of the robe of glory. The new Adam waits to embrace the old. The garments of skin are lent us for a while, to warm and protect us. Then we are to leave them behind.

People in the Middle Ages were sensitive to the many-layered significance of Mary Magdalene. What gracefulness in this French statue from the fifteenth century! Mary Magdalene would be an excellent patron saint for the twenty-first.

So these are some tensions through which the way to chastity passes. It is good to think about them, but they cannot be resolved in our heads. A dialectical model of thesis and antithesis striving for synthesis is of limited use. We must live these tensions, grow through them. New dimensions of experience will open up before us. Chastity, which initially can seem to spell constraint, will reveal itself as broad strength full of sweetness. The priest reminds himself of this each day when he vests for Mass. Putting on his girdle he prays for the gift of purity, ‘ut maneat in me virtus castitatis’, ‘that the strength of chastity may abide in me’. To get even a foretaste of this strength, to see it alive in others, is to wish to possess it fully. It frees the body, broadens the heart, illumines the mind, balancing the three.

With this finality in mind, the tensions specific to each one of us may seem less forbidding. They may even reveal an attraction once we realize the purpose they serve, once we are governed by the Word who brings kosmos out of chaos. There is light to be found in the friendly words Rilke wrote to Kappus on 16 July 1903, printed in the volume of letters Etty Hillesum kept under her pillow in Westerbork:

I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.