He wrote as he spoke, in a slightly military bark that woke you up and made sure you were thinking — there was no dozing in the garden of Gethsemane in his company

The voice of Nicholas Lash was unmistakable. After his death at his home in Cambridge in the early hours of 11 July it will continue now only in his writings, but it is no less vivid because he wrote just as he spoke: that sharp, precise, slightly military bark woke you up and demanded that you think at your best and believe at your best and made you aware that proper thought was a condition of proper belief. And Nicholas did not tolerate anything less than rigorous thought about God and religion because without it, he feared that God would be betrayed in his mystery; he was drawn to a faith that is prepared to face darkness as a condition of true engagement with the divine.

You didn’t sleep when Nicholas was on form – and when was he not on form?

As a candidate at Downside he was refused entry into the novitiate because he was “too full of life and beans”. The community, one suspects, simply could not face a bean-filled life under the Lash. In his company I frequently found myself stirred into a better form of faith than I had had up to that point. He conveyed the conviction that Catholic faith is, for every Catholic and in every context, fides quarens intellectum – and this is a human and spiritual programme that is neither optional nor destructive if it is the case that God is truth and we are geared to what is truthful. You knew he took God seriously and held out as an essential aspiration that we find our way to “non-idolatrous worship”. “Faith in God, and in God alone, is inherently iconoclastic,” he wrote.