Nah ist Und schwer zu fassen der Gott - the god is near and hard to grasp. Benjamin Myers uses this Holderlin quote to open his exhilarating account of Rowan Williams' theology. Myers sees three main periods in Williams' thought. The first extends from Williams' undergraduate days to the late 1980s, and this is characterised as being dominated by Wittgenstein and the question of the relation between language and sociality. During this period Williams entered the world of Russian Orthodoxy and completed his doctoral thesis on Vladimir Lossky's apophatic theology. For Lossky, personhood is a kenotic reality, echoing the "enormous movement of painful, ecstatic self-renunciation" which constitutes the Trinity. As Myers puts it, "we are most human when we are cracked, when each self bleeds out into the lives of others." Also during this period, Williams' exposure to the thought of Donald MacKinnon and his study of T.S. Eliot led him to develop what Myers terms his "tragic moral vision". Williams' refusal to accept the consolation of fantasy, and his deep suspicion of the human tendency for self-delusion, lead him to argue that to act morally is to act against the grain of the world, even when our actions are tragically doomed or limited, even when our actions seem to go against what is humanly possible. Every act is enmeshed in a web of tragic relations and therefore cannot be unambiguously good. And yet act we must, for God is at work in this damaged world, and so must we be. The event which begins the Christian tradition is the resurrection, an event of rupture which shatters our language and cannot be captured by our narrative. For Williams, Jesus is the fullness of divine meaning in one human life whose weight buckles the structures of human language. God is unutterably strange, not because He is so far away, but because in Christ He has come unbearably near. The cross is God's own negative theology, destroying our human capacity to make and share meaning, until our language itself is baptised and renewed. For Williams, "the Christian tradition as a whole ... is this continuing process of the conversion of human language to God."
From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, Williams entered into a dialogue with Hegelian thought in order to address the realtionship between identity and difference. In 1992 Williams was consecrated Bishop of Monmouth and his theology of Christ as the head of a reconciled human community was challenged by the palpable and seemingly irreconcilable differences within the church. He engaged with the work of Gillian Rose, who was arguing that both the teleological approach (in which difference is eliminated through synthesis) and the postmodern ethical theory of the Other are inadequate. Instead of attempting to seek resolution we should work at sustaining the broken middle, the 'agon' of difference "where we endure the anxiety of difference without seeking the relief of synthesis". Williams developed Rose's work into a Christian theology of identity in which all social life is interpreted as kenosis - a willingness to endure difference and a resistance of the desire to achieve synthesis. However, this is not a passive position but involves continual movement towards the other and continual work in order to achieve growth. Thus the church will be a community marked by a patient struggle sustained by the Holy Spirit.
Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002 and since then has devoted much attention to the Christian doctrine of God. Myers presents a picture of Williams' trinitarian vision which I found deeply compelling. Augustine had famously distinguished between frui (enjoyment: choosing something for its own sake alone) and uti (use: choosing something for the sake of a higher goal.) For Augustine, only God can be enjoyed in this sense: to try to enjoy worldly objects as "the end and sum of our joy" is to consume them, to exclude them from possessing any other meaning other than the satisfaction of our own desire. Williams developed this Augustinian concept of desire into a doctrine of the trinity. God is an infinite ground of objectivity and love, and within the love of God itself there opens up a differentiation: God loves God. This desire cannot be gratified by the other partner, and so the excess of love for the other is deflected into a Third: the Spirit, who "sustains the exchange between Father and Son precisely by being more than that exchange, by personifying their mutual excess of love ... In short, God is a trinity of love: the lover, the beloved, and a constantly expanding surplus of love itself."
Perhaps this brief and inadequate summary conveys the impression that this is a dry and academic book. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are frequent interludes presenting and discussing Williams' poetry, often in relation to the icons which have played an important part in his spirituality. I was particularly moved by the presentation of Williams' poem on the Penrhys estate, which I have visited recently with other Baptist ministers from South Wales. The embedding of a discussion of Rublev's trinitarian icon within the exposition of Williams' doctrine of the trinity allowed me to build a bridge between the abstract theology and my daily, messy spirituality where I turn up, scruffy and unlovable, to prayer and find that God has saved me a seat at His table and is looking at me with love. Indeed, this is what I most loved about this book. It is a portrait of a brilliant yet humble man who constantly works away at the inevitable tensions between his intellectual life, his spiritual journey and his practical ministry. He gives me hope that my discipleship is both indispensable in practice and intellectually tenable. Moreover, Benjamin Myers writes in an engaging and inspirational style. I would recommend this book to all who like thinking and ideas, and who are convinced that Jesus offers a real hope in our often tragic world.
You can buy this book at Amazon here but why not support a small local bookshop and order it from Harvest Bookshop here?
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