Abstract
This collection of public lectures fittingly marks the end of Rowan Williams’ tempestuous ten years as Archbishop of Canterbury. It deals, with remarkable force and energy, with some of the central cultural, economic and political issues of our day: secularism, human rights, pluralism, the environment, economic and community justice and religious diversity. What makes this a book to read and re-read is the way in which he engages with major contributions to contemporary debate while all the time seeking to relate his own contributions to such discussion to fundamental Christian insights and myth.
The use of the word ‘myth’ at this point may surprise but it is central to Williams’ argument, as comes out clearly in his discussion of questions concerning our stewardship of the environment. In ‘Changing the myths we live by’ he seeks to forge an alliance with the formidable Mary Midgley. In her 2003 book, from which Williams takes his own title, she launches a stinging attack on the stories that underlie our contemporary ways of envisaging the world in which we live, ‘reducing it to a store of neutral stuff that can be processed by the mind and the will.’ Not only that, she is deeply critical of the behaviourist picture of mind and will: ‘reason has been made to betray Itself by means of a reductive account of material reality, and human reality in particular, in which we have a model of thinking and acting that is essentially no more that a description of loosely interlocking functions. Human thinking is a highly successful way of manipulating the environment.’ Behind this lies a view of mental activity as ‘essentially a programme for physical hardware.’ (pp. 175-176) What we need, so Williams argues, is a different view of reason, one which sees it as taking responsibility for its capacity to change and manipulate the natural world. As one of A.S. Byatt’s characters in The Biographer’s Tale puts it, we need to use our intelligence to limit the ruinous effect of our intelligence (p. 190). And where religion can help is in asking and helping to answer the question what all this activity generative of growth is for?
Midgley herself is critical of early modern religion that has contributed significantly to the idea ‘that the fate of nature is to be bossed around by a detached sovereign will, whether human or divine’ (p. 176). But Williams wants to argue that there are important strands of Christian thought which do not take a detached or bossy view of our relationship to nature but which rather see nature as a gift of God, as indeed a communication from God. Here he draws particularly on forms of Eastern theology, notably on Maximus the Confessor. A longer quotation may serve:
‘[E]very existent reality is a logos (a word, an intelligible structure) that carries in a specific way the universal and eternal logos in virtue of which everything comes to be … The further implication is that each existent reality communicates, in and by virtue of the eternal Word, the character of God; and that to respond appropriately to creation is part of responding to God and indeed of knowing God. Creation is itself an act of divine self-giving, the bestowing of God’s activity in and through what is not God; so for the created intelligence the world is gift, a means of receiving something of the life of God.’ (p. 177)
This is a theme that recurs throughout the volume: human beings are to be ‘priests’ of creation, to ‘name the world aright’, to acknowledge it as God’s gift, to ‘orchestrate the reflection of God’s glory in the world by clothing material things with sacred meaning and presenting the world before God in prayer’ (p. 178). In this sense the human vocation is ‘liturgical’ and this is realised most fully in the eucharist where participants are defined by communion rather than by consumption. The practical consequences of this in terms of our care for the environment should be clear enough.
One can read this book as a series of attempts, of occasional utterances seeking to establish more clearly the outlines of a contemporary version of the Christian myth, able to equip its adherents to deal with the pressing problems of our age. And just as it is not always easy for the reader to construct a coherent picture of the theology which underlies Paul’s occasional utterances in his letter, so too here. At least we know that these chapters are all from the same pen! But there is an occasional, ad hoc character about them which gives them a freshness at the same time as it presents its own particular challenge to the reader.
In a long and closely argued piece entitled ‘Ethics, economics and global justice’, he enunciates a theme which occurs frequently through his writings: ‘ethics is essentially about how we negotiate our own and other people’s vulnerabilities. … When we begin to think seriously about ethics, about how our life is to reflect truth … we consider what is owed to weakness, to powerlessness. … Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at risk in the life of another and works on behalf of another’s need.’ (p. 213) The recognition of human vulnerability, the insistence indeed that any understanding of what it is to be a human being with rights and dignity should take human vulnerability and disability seriously as reflecting what it is to be fully human (human dignity is not simply to be associated with a particular set of capacities, p. 153) is part of the truth which our lives should reflect, part of the myth concerning the gift of material life in creation. Whatever else we are created as, we are not created as invulnerable, fully ourselves only when fully in control of ourselves and others.
This established, Williams can then engage in a review of capitalism which recognises the virtue of certain kinds of mutual sharing of risk and wealth in early forms of venture capitalism, while being profoundly critical of those forms which eschew all risk and act as if there were no need to pay attention to the limited nature of the world’s resources or indeed to the need to add value to them, if there is to be any sustainable growth. The real problem underlying our recent economic woes is not so much greed as pride, which ‘is most clearly evidenced in the refusal to acknowledge my lack of control over my environment, my allusion that I can shape the world according to my will’ (p. 212). And change can come only through freeing ourselves from the illusions which hold us. ‘We change because our minds or mindsets are changed and steered away from certain powerful but toxic myths’ (p. 213).
In one way one can read this book as a collection of pensées on themes which recur throughout. Simply dipping in can prove remarkably rewarding. One looks forward to many of these themes being more fully developed as Williams takes up his new post and returns to academia. But this is not to suggest in any way that the real value of this book lies purely in its potential to generate more fully developed arguments of a theoretical kind. Its heart lies in that almost throw-away remark defining ethics as being about ‘how our life should reflect truth’. It’s about the importance of empathy, of developing a kind of intelligence which can reflect on who we are and control and limit a purely technical intelligence.
What of the place of religion in all this, of religious bodies in the wider world of civil society? Are they to be seen as just another set of communities, struggling to find a place in society, to preserve and further their own interests, or do they, properly at least, have a quite different standing and claim to be heard? In a remarkable address to a Christian-Muslim Conference given to mark the anniversary of 9/11 in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, he takes his starting point in the moment on the 9th of September 1906 when the Satyagraha movement was born in Johannesburg. Gandhi had called for non-violent resistance to racial laws imposing registration and fingerprinting on all Indians in South Africa. A Muslim in the audience, Haji Habib, proposed that this should be done in the ‘name of God’. Williams notes the seriousness with which Gandhi viewed such a proposal and that Gandhi was joined by many Muslims in this consciously religious struggle against racial oppression.
What, then, for religious communities and for Christians in particular, is it to seek to act in the political field ‘in the name of God’? Williams’ response is rooted in his understanding of faith as not, essentially, something that I possess or do, something that gives me a particular standing within society, a place at the table, a corner to be fought for. Rather, ‘to believe in God is to be a “trustee” of God’s truth…. When I claim truth for my religious convictions, it is not a claim that my opinion or belief is superior, but a confession that I have resolved to be unreservedly at the service of the reality that has changed my world and set me free from the enslavement of struggle and rivalry. To witness to this in the hope that others will share it is not an exercise in conquest, in signing up more adherents to my party, but simply the offer of a liberation and absolution that has been gratuitously offered to me’ (p. 304). Such a witness may be deeply costly – the book ends with a remarkable account of the life and spirituality of Etty Hillesum who died in Auschwitz – and may bring the church into conflict with current consensus. But it is when the church is least concerned to protect its own interests but to speak truth that it receives as a gift that it may carry most conviction. I think of the witness of Bell and Bonhoeffer during the war. Above all the church is there to witness to the dignity of human existence, as something non-negotiable; and to do so, even when it would suit us to torture those who threaten us or to neglect the vulnerable and the poor whose claims on us stand in the way of our progress and enrichment. It is to remind all those within civil society that the goods which they strive to achieve for their own communities are due to all, to insist on a universalism which challenges our local concerns and upholds a vision of the common good which embraces all. It is in this kind of witness that the church and faith communities in general can offer invaluable service to our societies as they struggle to build a just world.
Coming Next Month
Next month, Iain R. Torrance discusses “Thomas F. Torrance’s theology of ministry and the pressing issues of today”, while Benjamin Johnson asks “Did David bring a gun to a knife fight?” We also publish a sermon preached by Philip Buckler to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Honest to God.