The Roman rite of the liturgy of Mass preserves, at the offertory, a telling ritual. It occurs just after the priest has received the host from the acolyte and placed it on the corporal, named for its function of holding the Lord’s Body, Corpus Domini: a square piece of linen symbolizing at once the Infant’s swaddling clothes and the Crucified’s shroud, a sign that God encounters, carries and saves us bodily. The acolyte next brings the chalice into which the priest pours, first wine, then a tiny drop of water. Wine is richly significant in Jewish–Christian tradition. In the context of the eucharistic liturgy, we recognize in it a representation of Christ’s divinity. The water, meanwhile, stands for our humanity.

The disproportion between the elements is not just quantitive, it is metaphysical. ‘The mystery of faith!’ the priest will exclaim a little later. Here we are at the heart of it. In the incarnation, mystically exhibited on the altar, the uncreated being of God is united to our contingent nature. The union is immediate and perfect. In the chalice, the water does not stay a discernible entity apart, the way oil would have done. It merges with the wine. It even brings out a new quality in it, revealing a fresh potential: think of how a connoisseur drops water into young claret to boost oxidization and release flavour. While performing this action, the priest recites the following, very ancient prayer:

Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti et mirabilius reformasti: da nobis, per huius aquae et vini mysterium, eius divinitatis esse consortes, qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps.

God, who wonderfully formed the dignity of human substance, then reformed it even more wonderfully; grant us by this mystery of water and wine to be sharers in his divinity, who deigned to partake of our humanity.

The act of creation is evoked by the choice of a tactile verb, condere. To get a sense of it, recall that, in German, it developed into ‘Konditor’, a pastry chef, who brings forth delicious creations through careful handling. Origen had this aspect of creation in mind when he observed that the Lord, having made each other part of the universe by means of a word – ‘God said… and there was’ – on the sixth day made man, uniquely, with his hands: ‘The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being’ (Genesis 2.7).

The offertory prayer speaks of God’s act of forming ‘the dignity of human substance’. The phrase ‘human substance’ sounds clunky. It is not one we would ordinarily use, but here we must if we are not to miss the point: the very matter of humanity is wonderfully fashioned and dignified. Our initial form was wonderful. It was then deformed. But God wrought a re-formation that rendered it more wonderful still, apt, by grace, to commune in divine nature.

With consummate economy, this prayer, recited daily worldwide at countless altars on behalf of all humanity, puts the origin and finality of our nature before us. An account of chaste living must unfold within this perspective, attentive not just to what and where we are now, but to where we come from, to where we are going.

The verse, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Genesis 1.26), is probably the most exegeted passage of Scripture. Sages both Jewish and Christian have pored over it for millennia, dissecting every syllable, letter and diacritical sign. Yet even a fleeting acquaintance with the Old Testament reveals that God has no image. The mere thought of fashioning such a thing is considered an enormity.

How, then, can God be said to communicate it? How can the human being embody it? Evidently God did not envisage man as a walking idol. Jonathan Sacks, whose voice I sorely miss, remarked that the word ‘image’ must refer to something

quite different from the possession of a specific form. The fundamental point of Genesis 1 is that God transcends nature. Therefore, He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings ‘in his image’, God gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative.

This is true. Yet the Fathers saw a further, ontological dimension in this formula. They found in it a statement of what human beings have it in them to become.

They were careful not to read Genesis anthropomorphically. They were wary of fancying God, as it were, at work before a mirror, casting glances at his reflection, then reproducing what he saw in clay intended to become a material self-portrait. Rather, our ancestors in faith fed the phrase ‘in our image’ into their inward concordance, available to them since they knew much of Scripture by heart. They were keen to make Biblical sense of what the word ‘image’ might really stand for.

So they found the creation account illumined and explained by a statement occurring near the end of the canon, when St Paul, imprisoned, tells the Church in Colossae of its call to ‘share in the inheritance of the saints in light’. Christians, says Paul, must know they have been raised out of darkness by the Father’s only Son who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (1.12-15). The ‘image’ at once ceases to be an abstraction. It comes to designate a presence. For man to be made ‘in the image’ is for him to subsist, by nature, ‘in the Son’. The human form is seen from the outset to point towards the Son’s incarnation.

Only the embodiment in person of God’s eikōn will perfect human nature. The image lives in us as a felt imperfection. To be human is to exist with the sense of an absence to be filled. Only in the light of our human substance’s longing for union with the divine do our lesser yearnings make sense. Only the eternal Logos will order these yearnings well and draw them out of chaos into kosmos.

The magnitude of the notion that created matter might become a vehicle for divine self-revelation is brought out in a splendid ancient text: a midrash, or paraphrastic commentary, on the first chapters of Genesis known as The Cave of Treasures. It was composed in Syriac, extant from the fourth century. Hardly anyone reads it any more, at least not in the West. An English translation was published by the Religious Tracts Society in the early twentieth century, furnished with an apologetic preface by the Orientalist Ernest Wallis Budge, who remarked,

On the historical facts which form the framework of the CT, the pious author grafted a series of legends, many of which deserve the descriptions of idle stories and vain fables. The reader will understand that such legends are neither accepted nor endorsed by any member of the Society or by myself. These legends were inserted with the view of making the CT a sort of religious ‘wonder-book’ which would appeal to the vivid & credulous imaginations of Christian natives in almost every country of the Near East.

We, like Budge, pride ourselves on being cleverer than ‘credulous natives’. You may ask why I propose to contaminate you with discredited nonsense, albeit venerable.

I am doing so on good authority. If we leap a century forward in time and consult a monograph by Su-Min Ri, the Korean scholar who in 1987 published the edited Syriac text of The Cave of Treasures after decades of research, we shall find him writing in the Orientalia Christiania Analecta, a publication not given to careless conjectures: ‘On the basis of textual parallels, we take it for granted that St Ephrem knew The Cave by heart even before his Christian faith was consolidated. Only thus could he have used it as he did in all his works.’ Su-Min Ri further identifies echoes in Irenaeus, Justin, Melito of Sardis and Julius Africanus. Closer to ourselves, we know it was a text in whose wake Milton sailed, drawn by its timeless fascination.

The Cave of Treasures speaks in terms foreign to post-Enlightenment sensibilities. Reading it, we must expect the unexpected. We have before us, though, a text that was a source for some of the Church’s acutest minds. Therefore we should not dismiss it offhand. As we enter its world, we must abandon our customary chase for tidy definitions. We must be willing to think in images, to hear in symphony, as contrasting voices unite in novel harmonies. If we do, we shall find sophisticated literature. We shall see human origins, the human condition and human finality in a new perspective. In the Genesis narrative, we shall recognize ourselves.

This is how The Cave recounts what took place on the sixth day of creation:

On the sixth day, which is Friday, at the first hour, while silence reigned over all the powers of the orders of spiritual beings, God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, as our resemblance,’ indicating by the [letter] nun, instead of the alaf, the glorious persons of the Son and the Spirit. When the angels heard this word, they were seized with terror and said among themselves: ‘A great wonder has appeared to us today, the resemblance of God, our Maker.’ And they saw the right hand of God, which took dust from the earth, which is to say from the four elements: the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist. Why did God make Adam from these four feeble elements? In order that, by them, all that is in him might be subject to him. And God fashioned Adam with his holy hands, as his image. When the angels saw his glorious aspect, they were troubled on account of the beauty of his likeness.

The silence of the spheres summons up creation’s expectancy as God prepared to produce the being for whom all other things had been made. In the plural form of the Biblical phrase, ‘Let us make’ (which in Hebrew can simply be a way of expressing deliberation), The Cave of Treasures detects a reference to the Blessed Trinity. From the point of view of Christian theology, this makes sense. The triune nature of God was revealed and became susceptible of articulation in the wake of the incarnation, but its reality is eternal, preceding creation. The image in which human substance was formed is a trinitarian image, relational in essence.

The Cave of Treasures, I have said, is a midrash. The noun derives from the root דרש [darash], which means to scrutinize. In rabbinic tradition it indicated a method of interpretation that goes beyond the literal sense of Scripture to examine the text in every aspect, squeezing out each drop of sense in order to apply this essence to the needs of believers. The concern of The Cave of Treasures is the life (and afterlife) of Adam, the first-formed human being. His life is a paradigm of our existence, yours and mine. The text offers a sweep of world history from the beginning of creation to Christ’s resurrection, dated to the year 5,500.

Adam’s story is told in terms of metaphors of clothing, of a series of garments put on and taken off. This is less odd than it may at first seem. If we look closely, we find the motif of dressing to be central in Genesis 1-3. Western painting and literature tend only to recall Adam’s self-made fig-leaf apron. But this is but one of several vestments in the story. At the end of Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, the Lord puts on them ‘garments of skin’ that he, God, has made (3.21). Before the Fall, too, they were somehow dressed, for otherwise how could they suddenly, upon having sinned, have discovered nakedness?

The Syriacs interpreted these primordial clothes in the light of the Psalter. Where in our Hebrew-based Bibles Psalm 8.6 reads, ‘You made him little less than angels; with glory and honour you crowned him’ (וְכָבוֹד וְהָדָר תְּעַטְּרֵהוּ), the Syriac Old Testament read, ‘with glory and honour you clothed him.’ The Syriac Fathers found in this verb a reference to the original innocence of Adam and Eve. Thus arose a splendid image, crucial to St Ephrem: that of the ‘robes of glory’ which our parents wore at first.

We are presented with a protological sequence dramatically paced with reference to items from a wardrobe: from original glory-clothes through the trauma of nakedness to the subterfuge of leaf aprons to garments of skin made by God. It will be worth our while to consider these items in turn.

When the Lord proclaimed his intention to make the human being in his image the angels trembled. These transcendent beings, assigned to stand watch before God’s countenance singing his glory, were seized with fear at the thought that uncreated splendour should reside in a created being. Even before Adam was formed, the angels exclaimed, ‘A great wonder has appeared to us today, the likeness of God, our Creator.’ The thought alone was awesome.

When God proceeded to form man with his right hand, he made him from the four created elements: heat and cold, dryness and moisture. Another wonder: making an image of himself, why would God make use of such beggarly stuff? He did it so that, by them, all things would be subject to man and show their purpose through him. Adam is a microcosm. He contains in himself the elements of all that exists. Thereby he stands in necessary kinship with creation. In him, dust and glory are conjoined in continuous extension from earth to heaven.

‘When the angels saw his glorious aspect, they were troubled by the beauty of his likeness.’ The still, supine form moved: Adam stretched and stood up. Even his stature, resolutely vertical, pointed him heavenward. God caused the animals to pass before him to be named, ‘while they inclined their heads and adored him’. Then He led him into Eden, to serve ‘as a priest in Holy Church’.

The exaltation of Adam’s first glory is evidenced by its contrast with what follows. The events of the fall, well known, are recounted without melodrama in The Cave. Thereby the objective tragedy is made more apparent. It is not so much Adam’s guilt that is brought to the fore as his existential poverty. He discovers, all at once, that his life is contingent. He sees that what he took for granted – familiarity with God, the glorious robe, lordship over creation – was not his by right; it was pure grace, lost, now, through his own betrayal. Disobedience shattered the life-bestowing bond of trust that was his lifeline to divinity.

Adam in the Garden, at the centre of a triptych that connects him both with God and with the animal kingdom. Of course, he is still waiting for Eve, lodged within him. Painted by the Ukrainian iconographer Lyuba Yatskiv. © ICONART Gallery.

Fallen Adam finds himself reduced to elemental nature. Where before he had stood in a wonderful tension, of the earth but straining towards heaven, he is subject now to the crushing downward pull of gravity. He is drawn towards earth, towards death, towards the grave. That is the cause of his shame: to have lowered himself so far underneath the dignity that was his first lot. His once resplendent body has become a ‘body of grief’ weighed down by needs and passions. Covering himself with matter, Adam strives to maintain decorum, yet more essentially he hides. He wants to merge with material creation from which he no longer stands out. Having forfeited likeness to God, what else could he do? Where else could he look for solidarity, security and, quite simply, distraction?

In the account of Adam’s fall that has formed western consciousness, the story seems to end here. This is where we customarily take leave of Adam, naked, ashamed, pathetically robed. We look at him with embarrassment, the way we might see a disreputable old uncle we would rather excise from the family tree. The Cave of Treasures reminds us, though, that the story is far from finished.

Even before Adam fell for the serpent’s deceit, we are told, ‘God presciently knew what Satan had plotted, so placed [Adam] in his mercy beforehand, as blessed David sings, “Lord, you have been for us from age to age a house in which to dwell,” which is to say, You have made us in your mercy.’ The Scripture cited is Psalm 89.1. In the Grail Psalter it reads, ‘O Lord, you have been our refuge.’

How are we to see the application of this well-known text to this unfamiliar context? The Cave of Treasures ascribes to the relationship between God and man a second original dimension, a dimension beyond, yet able to contain, the familiar dichotomy of first innocence versus subsequent guilt. The truth of the Adam we meet in this text is not adequately defined by the fall. The fall itself is mysteriously held by grace. This meaning is epically brought out when the time comes for Adam to be expelled from paradise. The Genesis account is stern, ringing with imprecations. Centuries of moralist preaching have accustomed us to think God angry, booting Adam out. The tradition of the Cave presents a different picture. Here, Adam is led to Eden’s gate with consoling words. God grieves at the leave-taking, but urges Adam not to despair. ‘Adam, do not be distressed’, he says,

that you must, on account of the sentence, depart from Paradise. I will bring you back to your inheritance! See how I have loved you! On your account I have cursed the earth, but you I have spared from curses. Since you have transgressed, do leave, but do not be distressed. For when time has been fulfilled, I will send my Son, and by my Son your salvation will be wrought.

A later, Arabic version adds: ‘I have clothed you with my mercy.’

The God-given garments of skin are a mercy-cover, a sacrament of kindness. Though stripped of glory, Adam proceeds wrapped in grace. This vesture will give him the comfort and fortitude he needs to till and toil while awaiting redemption. It protects Adam’s present existence, safeguarding his iconic nature in a setting of estrangement. The promise of deliverance will illumine humanity’s exile. From the first, Adam is told, ‘You must go forth from me, but I will bring you back.’ God is for him a refuge. Adam is a stranger on the earth, yes, but a shielded, sheltered stranger. He can hold his head high, not for proud self-assurance, but for God’s assurance of love. He is a bearer of hope, the herald of a covenant of grace.

Thus reassured he can set forth from Eden, which according to The Cave of Treasures lies on the summit of a mountain reaching ‘above all other mountains and higher than them by 300 spans by the spirit of the air’. Paradise is part of the cosmic order we know, yet at the same time set above it. It looms there in seclusion, not menacingly, but beckoning. ‘For Eden’, the text goes on, ‘is a type of the true Church. And the Church is the mercy of God that is to spread itself over all mankind.’

Adam has known God’s mercy. His task, and the task of his descendants, will be to draw that paradisal mercy down upon the world like a protective firmament. Once expelled from Eden, Adam settles on its outskirts, a short way down the mountain. God directs him to a cave there. It is to be for him a place of worship and waiting. There he is to serve as priest. Adam blesses the cave and puts in it frankincense, gold and myrrh collected from the edge of paradise, signs of blessedness known and lost awhile to which he aspires to return. In the fullness of time, the Magi’s prophetic gifts will make it clear that this return is finally at hand.

Adam’s cave outside paradise’s walls becomes a second image of the Church, the Church in exile, we might say, or the pilgrim Church. Here Adam dies and is buried, having first instructed his sons to heed a God-given command: when at a future time they leave the mountain they must not abandon Adam’s bones. They are to bring his body and re-bury it in the middle of the earth, where man’s salvation will be wrought. Adam’s sons promise to do as they were told. They pass the instruction down through generations, even as their number up near the cave declines.

The greater part of humanity is pulled further and further down the mountain*,* away from the scents and sounds of paradise. The story of our race is presented as the story of a gradual downward sliding from the open views of the heights towards the lowlands, inhabited by Cain since the fratricide, the haunt of self-seeking, self-absorbed mankind. One by one, the mountain dwellers descend, drawn by lust, curiosity and appetite. Once they merge with the dwellers of the plain, they find they cannot re-scale the mountain. Its rocks turn into fire.

For a while, however, human beings were able to maintain, even in this world of tears, a life patterned on the life of paradise. They remembered. They worshipped. They prayed in the cave, recalling Adam’s origins, his fall, then the mercy that sustained him. With time, memory faded, and with it the yearning to return to beatitude. By the end of the first millennium, we are told, only Noah and his sons were left within reach of the cave. There they built the Ark. In the middle of it, like an altar, they installed Adam’s body, surrounded by the paradisal gold, frankincense and myrrh. When waters of retribution swelled upon the earth, the Ark rose. It hovered for a moment in the air. It turned north, then south; then, again from the middle, east and west, blessing the flood with the cruciform and saving sign. Then it sailed. And the world was submerged in its baptism of death, in the hope of new life.

The middle of the earth, where Adam was to be interred, is Golgotha, of course. The rest of the text briskly sums up the course of the world until Christ’s redemption. Christ’s Passion seals humanity’s call, symbolically put before us in the itinerary of Adam. Strikingly, the symbolic framework of The Cave of Treasures intersects with imagery well known to us. It is common, in Northern Europe, for pictures of the Crucified to feature a skull underneath the cross. That skull is not generic. It is Adam’s, which had known the touch of God’s hands and been crowned with glory. When blood and water trickled from Christ’s side, we read in The Cave, they flowed into Adam’s mouth. God’s promise was fulfilled. Adam was saved, after waiting for millennia. By a decree of restitution drawn up in Christ’s blood, he was restored to freedom from death’s dungeon.

At that point, the garment of skin could be shed. The robe of glory was available to clothe humanity anew. The two Adams, old and new, could meet in an embrace, father and Son, son and Father. The tree of the cross is revealed as the axis on which the world turns. Christ shows us Adam’s true face. Contemplating Christ, we see what man was meant to be: Ecce homo! The Cave of Treasures sets out their intertwining destinies in a masterful Two-Part Invention:

At the first hour of Friday, God formed Adam from dust; and at the first hour of Friday, Christ was spat on by the cursed sons of his crucifiers. At the third hour of Friday, the crown of glory was placed on Adam’s head; and at the third hour of Friday, the crown of thorns was placed on the head of Christ. At the sixth hour, Eve gave Adam the fruit of bitterness of death. At the sixth hour, the assembly of the lawless gave Christ vinegar and bile. For three hours, Adam stood stripped under the tree. And for three hours Christ hung naked on wood. From Adam’s left side, Eve came forth, the mother of mortal children. From Christ’s right side baptism emerged, the mother of children who will not see death. On Friday Adam and Eve sinned. And on Friday their sin was forgiven. On Friday Adam and Eve were stripped. And on Friday Christ stripped himself and re-clothed them. At the ninth hour of Friday, Adam went down to the low-lying earth from the heights of Paradise. And at the ninth hour of Friday, Christ went down into the lower regions of the earth from the height of the Cross, to visit those who lay in the dust. In all things, Christ was made similar to Adam, as it is written.

This text points forward to the lovely recitative at the end of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Am Abend, da es kühle war. After the unbearable tension of Jesus’s suffering and death, this piece is redolent with peace. It conveys caressing tenderness. The cry, ‘It is accomplished,’ sung by the solo bass, means exactly what it says. Christ rests. We also can rest. The world’s trauma is healed. Even as Adam’s fall was revealed at nightfall, the dove returned to the Ark at even-time, and now, this evening, our peace is made with God. ‘O lovely time!’ Such parallelism, expounded by the Fifth Evangelist, presupposes the tradition we have considered. It affords a profound understanding of Christ’s saving work understood as reconciliation.

Still more importantly, it takes us to the heart of the Christian condition. For if the story of Adam is told with such care it is because his story is ours. We, too, must negotiate its various stages. To make this statement concrete, let me cite another ancient text, again of Syriac origin. It is a liturgical blessing, pronounced over the neophyte ascending from the full-immersion baptistry. The manuscript it stems from is seventh-century, but the prayer is certainly older. It takes The Cave’s theology for granted. If you would hear the full force of it, try reading it out aloud:

O brother! Sing praise to the Son of the Lord of all, who has made for you a crown more desirable than that of any king. Brilliant is your garment, brother, like the sun: and your face shines like an angel’s. Like an angel you rose up, beloved, from the baptistry by the power of the Holy Spirit. Brother, you have been granted access to the wedding chamber. Today you have put on anew the glory of Adam. Your garments are lovely, your crown beautiful. By the ministry of his priest, the Firstborn has prepared them for you. The fruit Adam did not taste in Paradise has been placed, today, in your mouth. Go in peace, son of the baptistry. Adore the Cross! It will preserve you.

In baptism, we, too, dead in sin, have, like Adam, been touched by the life-giving stream flowing from Christ’s side. We have been raised up and restored. We possess, in potential, the glory from which our father fell. The drama of our Christian life scintillates with glory. It is a drama of breathtaking dimensions. It requires us, at once, to recall our first origins and final end as we lay claim to the truth of our being, showered with grace in the communion of Christ’s Church, which is, as we have seen, ‘the mercy of God spreading itself over all mankind’.

A text like The Cave of Treasures offers us a privileged way of entering salvation by its resolute appeal to experience. The Christian proclamation can easily become rather abstract. This is more the case today than in the recent past, as Christian terminology is increasingly emptied of specific meaning. It is hard to present the Gospel on the terms, say, of the Letter to the Romans to people who shake their heads at the very notion of ‘sin’, see no need for ‘expiation’, so cannot conceive of what ‘redemption’ is good for, never mind ‘sanctification’.

The tendency of our time is to idealize nature, with its impulses and appetites, not to transcend it. While anthropological discourse since antiquity has dwelt on what sets man apart from other species, there is a strange determination abroad, these days, to evidence that we are no more than animals.

This does not mean, though, that our age is impervious to the Spirit. The claims of the soul are evident for being often expressed negatively, a function of pain. While moderns are loath to speak of God, they readily admit to feeling trapped in creaturely limitation. While giving no explicit credence to doctrines of the afterlife, they are consumed with a yearning for more. While determined to assume their incarnate humanity, they vaguely know that our body points beyond itself, since every apparent satisfaction is but achingly provisional.

The imaged anthropology of The Cave of Treasures will possibly go further in this world of ours, obsessed with images, than the admirable but austere definitions of scholastic theology. That is why I am keen to ground my reflection on chastity in the narrative of a dignified substance divinely adorned, then stripped of glory, reduced to a state of confused desire, ever wanting more than earthly life can provide yet able, even among thorns, to know moments of exultant joy, proceeding homeward – whether or not one knows where home is – robed in mercy.

Leaning on this narrative, deeply Scriptural, I will suggest that the wholeness to which a chaste ideal would lead is not contrary to nature but stands for nature’s fulfilment. It is an ideal sprung from our gracious origin and pointing towards our supernatural end. The pursuit of integrity is rarely straightforward. It can take us through momentous tensions, which we shall consider. Still, it is a vital option, an option that stands a good chance of bringing happiness. In the language of Deuteronomy, it stands for the choice of life, not of death (Deuteronomy 30.15-20).

At first glance the anthropology of The Cave of Treasures may seem voluntarist and excessively affirmative: from glory to glory! We have noted, though, the depths to be plumbed between origin and end. The Adam we encounter in this environment is not the villain of radical Augustinianism, but nor is he a hapless victim. He is responsible. He owns responsibility. His story has the density of life really lived. He carries the mark of the fall, yes, of course, but he also remembers the fragrances of Paradise. And he is robed in mercy. This is the crucial insight.

Of Adam’s four stages of growth in The Cave of Treasures, three are conceivable as symbols outside Gospel parameters. Secular anthropologies might accommodate an initial exposure, a fig-leaf disguise, and a finality of relative ‘glory’. Popular narratives of human perfectibility are premised on gloriousness, be its bliss this-worldly. The Christian difference resides in mercy, in the obstinacy of pardoning grace, a quality of gentleness that shows itself to be, in the strict sense, essential.

Once we conceive of human life as potentially embraced and contained by mercy, we avoid three pitfalls: the optimist, progressivist creed of modernity whose refrains we rehearse and pass on, though with ever scanter conviction; the pessimist, despair-inducing hunch that the world is chronically sick and bound for self-destruction; and the fatalist, cynically detached vision that sees the world governed in any case by factors beyond our control – so why not just eat, drink, sleep around, be merry, and opt for oblivion?

The more we are aware of being robed in mercy, the more serenely we can live with ourselves, with our desires and flaws, contradictions and hopes. Mercy gives us courage to remember and look forward. It enables pardon, gives strength for compassion, nurtures hope. The Christian mission is to spread mercy abroad, to let no corner of the world, no single tear-stained destiny, remain untouched by it. The Adam we contemplate, in whom we see ourselves, is at once a teacher of truth and a witness to mercy. He unravels the fullness of our human state in its tragedy and in its glory. Of these, the latter aspect is the more crucial. His desire is fixed on Jesus even before he knows who the promised Saviour is. He is an alter ego with whom we can be reconciled. He can take us by the hand, for he knows where we are going.

Among the spiritual giants of the twentieth century was a man steeped in the spirit of The Cave of Treasures, a compassionate man who understood that spirit, lived by it and passed it on. I have in mind St Silouan of Mount Athos (1866–1938), described by Thomas Merton as the most authentic monk of the twentieth century. As a conclusion to this chapter and a prelude to the next, I wish to share a passage from his prose poem ‘Adam’s Lament’. It speaks of our journey through this world, made up of longing and labour, comfort and hardship, love and loneliness, repentance and praise, resonant with the echo of heavenly harmony. Further, it invites us to make peace with our origin and so, by implication, with ourselves.

I write of thee, O Adam;
But thou art witness, my feeble understanding
cannot fathom thy longing after God,
nor how thou didst carry the burden of repentance.
O Adam, thou dost see how I, thy child, suffer here
on earth.
Small is the fire within me,
and the flame of my love flickers low.
O Adam, sing unto us the song of the Lord,
that my soul may rejoice in the Lord,
and be moved to praise and glorify him
as the cherubim and seraphim praise him in the
heavens,
and all the hosts of heavenly angels sing to him the
thrice-holy hymn.
O Adam, our father, sing unto us the Lord’s song,
that the whole earth may hear,
and all thy sons may lift their minds to God
and delight in the strains of the heavenly anthem,
and forget their sorrows on earth…
O Adam, comfort and cheer our troubled souls.