Although I was brought up at too early a stage in my adolescence on Thomas a Kempis’ Imitatio Christi with its vivid illustrations of bloodied visage and crown of thorns, sorrowful reproach causing constant moral anguish, it nevertheless matured into something more wholesome, a path of practice and a projected trajectory towards an ideal point of conduct and demeanour. All this belonged to a different register from struggles with religious doubt and, freed from all that self-laceration, emerged into something more Pauline, the idea of ‘the mind of Christ’ which, again, seemed separate from questions about the historicity of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the period that followed the so-called Death of God, this Christology began to prevail. The language does seem to be the projection of a trajectory towards kenosis and self-sacrificial love – so long as it is freed from its darker associations with unresolved masochism but instead confronts far darker political realities.