Rowan resigns

Rowan Williams today resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, effective at the end of the year. The church’s loss is the gain of everyone interested in theology, philosophy, literature and ‘spirituality’, as Williams will take up academic life again by becoming Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge in January 2013. As reported by Radio 4′s The World At One (Wato), Williams is deeply loved and admired in many parishes for his love of people, his ability to listen, his excellent preaching, and what can only be described as his presence. Having met him a couple of times I can also point out that he’s quite funny. If that sounds close to hagiography I admit that I think he is pretty close to being (maybe he is?) a genius and a saint.

One of the Wato interviewees suggested that Williams’ Archbishopric had been a ‘tragedy’ because his full range of amazing gifts couldn’t be fully exercised due to all the brouhaha about homosexuality. I think that’s correct but also wrong. Those who see his tenure as a failure because the church hasn’t unified on the issue understate his achievement not merely in keeping the church together but in enabling a conversation to happen. Williams’ many gifts are precisely what enabled this to happen. Yet the word ‘tragedy’ is a fitting one to apply to the church’s attempts to respond to homosexuality, but that is not to say its response is only bad or is a complete failure. Indeed, as an enthusiastic reader of Gillian Rose, Williams knows that failure is to be expected at the political and institutional level but that there are different ways of failing and some are better than others. As Williams will hopefully know from his interest in the tradition of negative theology, failure is inevitable but he failed in the right way. Gillian Rose: ‘love’s work, the work I have been charting, accomplishing, but, above all and necessarily, failing in, all along the way.’

Heideggerian inflected spirituality

Not only is one of the key terms in the title almost impossibly vague, but I’m going to deal here in possibly hopeless generalisations. I do so because, despite the massive caveat, I think there is a certain character to some contemporary Anglican theologians, reflecting the influence of Heidegger (more or less explicitly), that is preferable for the Christian theist to many other current options. I use the term spirituality because this is not just a matter of intellectual acrobatics but deeply bound up with the way people live, with personalities and sensitivities, with the ‘visceral register’ (William Connolly).

 

In Being and Time Heidegger suggests that from the very beginning of the western philosophical tradition seeing has been considered the main mode of understanding. Platonic philosophy aimed at contemplating the Forms, and this fed into Christian conceptions of contemplation and prayer. Aristotle considered contemplation the highest human activity, but, in contrast to Plato, seemed to have pictured it as a mental review of and rumination on ideas within the mind. Heidegger also remarks on the two contrasting postures or moods of ancient and modern philosophy as wonder (thaumazein) and doubt respectively. Heidegger makes various moves to get beyond the Cartesian doubt and detached gaze. His notion of truth as unconcealment and disclosure in some ways re-activates the ancient posture of wonder and receptivity before phenomena, but he cannot ignore modernity’s doubt. It seems to me that in Heidegger a receptivity to Being through disclosure, combined with a hermeneutical spiral and awareness of the thrownness of Dasein, combine both wonder and doubt, producing a tertium quid.

 

I’m not sure what to call this philosophical posture (I’ll drop the term ‘mood’ because it could be confused with Heidegger’s own use of it). I take it as attempting to be receptive and open to the disclosure of Being through the immanent world (in contrast to an invisible realm), whilst refusing certainty in the expectation of constant revision. In theological terms one could describe this through a mixture of negative theology, repentance as a regulating principle of theology, and a certain balance between transcendence and immanence. This posture seems common to Andrew Shanks, Rowan Williams and George Pattison. They share a certain reticence and reserve in the manner in which they handle metaphysical speculation. This does not mean they do not believe in, say, the resurrection or the communion of saints (answers will differ depending on who you ask), but that they do not overestimate the importance of such beliefs nor assume they can be held with certainty. Shanks takes directly from Heidegger the notion of truth as openness rather than truth as correctness, which downplays formulations of belief in favour of openness to shaking experience. Pattison, who has written extensively on Heidegger, authored Thinking about God in an age of technology, foregrounding the nature of the need to pose the question of God in as fruitful a way as possible. Hardly a rallying cry for the troops.

 

And there’s the rub. These theologians handle Christianity and theology with great sensitivity and sophistication, but precisely those virtues seem to make their version of Christianity difficult for many to follow. Even academics have remarked on their difficulty following some of Williams’ arguments. Perhaps, however, this is where vague terms such as spirituality or posture may help. Perhaps others may be able to share a posture even if they cannot follow the intellectual erudition. But this too seems unlikely. Perhaps this form of spirituality is only accessible to the highly educated, and perhaps it helps to be in a pluralist society (and politically liberal? and middle class?). There are other reasons for disagreement. Few have the stomach for such a reticent theism. Fundamentalists prefer certainty. Evangelicals seem to be more optimistic, more willing to stake a claim that God has done this or that, more likely to feel ‘assurance’. Radical Orthodox, avowedly Platonic-Christian, retains an edge of certainty too, and triumphalism in some forms. Others go the way of Christian atheism or a Cupitt style post-Christian-Buddhism. But for those not yet willing to abandon theism and averse to triumphalism and certainty, and with a different experience of faith (or lack of experiences!), these Anglican writers offer a viable alternative.

Seven theses on art

(i) Art is an action of the intelligence and thus makes claims about how things are.

(ii) As such, it invites contemplation; that is, it sets out to create something that can be absorbed by intelligence, rather than a tool for use in a project larger than itself.

(iii) Thus the canons for understanding art must relate to the integrity of what is being produced, not to goals extrinsic to this process of labour.

(iv) When art engages the will by its own integrity and inner coherence, we speak of its beauty; but beauty cannot be sought as something in itself, independent of what this work demands.

(v) By engaging us in an unforeseen pattern of coherence or integrity, art uncovers relations and resonances in the field of perception that ‘ordinary’ seeing and experiencing obscure or even deny.

(vi) Thus art in one sense ‘dispossess’ us of our habitual perception and restores to reality a dimension that necessarily escapes our conceptually and our control. It makes the world strange.

(vii) So, finally, it opens up the dimension in which ‘things are more than they are’, ‘give more than they have’. Maritain is circumspect in spelling out the implications of this, but it is pretty clear that what this means is that art necessarily relates in some way to ‘the sacred’, to energies and activities that are wholly outside the scope of representation and instrumental reason.

These are taken from Grace and Necessity by Rowan Williams. Here he is summarising the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain, but later in the book he looks at how a similar approach could be freed from Martain’s Thomistic vocabulary.

Vincent Lloyd on the politics of the middle.

Lloyds excellent article ‘Complex Space or Broken Middle? Milbank, Rose, and the Sharia Controversy’ in Political Theology, 10.2, 2009, develops the idea of the politics of the middle. He suggests that we need to keep philosophy and rhetoric separate. Politics proceeds by rhetoric – trying to convince others that your interests are theirs, even if they are not. Philosophy is there to humble the rhetoric when it begins to be taken too seriously. Political claims are necessary but incomplete. The job of philosophy is to stop any political theology mythos taking hold, but such mythoi should be used by associations to out-narrate one another in gaining allegiances. ‘But commitment in the middle is hypothetical, not categorical. Authorities hold sway provisionally, not absolutely.’

Rowan Williams’ speech on Sharia law was an attempt to work this out. Williams was ‘proposing a framework to institutionalize this humility [of a politics of the middle], a framework that would tame the over-reaching claims of both religious communities and the ostensibly secular state.’ In the end you can always leave an association if you decide you don’t believe it any more (Lloyd recognises this is difficult). This upholds the hypothetical rather than categorical nature of their beliefs. Multiple legal jurisdictions keep them humble and working for the best of people, working to secure their allegiance.

This was a great article, and Lloyd is one of the few people who actually bothered to read and understand Williams, unlike the media and politicians at the time. But I have two questions. Can we prevent mythoi from taking hold? Don’t we have to have a mythos in order to act? And can we really act on it if we don’t really believe in it? Isn’t that lack of belief part of political apathy at the moment (in the UK at least)? Can we really prevent ourselves form elevating our own rhetoric into philosophy?

  I agree with Lloyd that Williams’ proposal to institutionalise a political and religious humility is a good idea. Like a politics of the middle it faces up to our pluralist situation and tries to deal with it. It recognises that no beliefs, religions included, can fully answer our questions or exhaust our identity (a good antidote to over-excited ecclesiologies). But surely the state is still going to be somehow controlling. The idea that the state would only interfere to sort out disagreements that cannot be resolved locally doesn’t seem plausible. And governmentality studies would suggest that the state controls or exercises power through various independent and quasi-independent organisations. A politics of the middle seems very attractive but how would it work in practice?