Rowan Williams

An Introduction

Rupert Shortt

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780819225849
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Biographies religieuses

The first occupant of Lambeth Palace in several generations with an international reputation as a theologian, he is nevertheless often considered a difficult writer, more admired than read and understood. Many people remain puzzled by how his social radicalism can coexist with a reputation for orthodoxy in doctrine.

Rowan Williams: An Introduction is the first thorough account of the Archbishop's career and evolution as a thinker. A long biographical chapter is followed by three further sections on key aspects of Williams's theology, spirituality and politics.

The result is a sympathetic but not uncritical profile of a leader with unmatched talents for enhancing dialogue between Christianity and secular culture.

Chapter One

STUDENT, SCHOLAR, PASTOR

Rowan douglas williams almost died not long after birth. The future Archbishop caught meningitis in February 1952, four months before his second birthday, and was thought lucky to have survived. He remained a sickly child, walking with a limp for a decade or so afterwards. The loss of hearing in his left ear was permanent. When the worst of the trouble subsided, doctors advised that his life should be made as easy as possible. Williams says that this placed a heavy burden on his parents, Delphine and Aneurin. ‘He might have turned out spoilt, especially being an only child,’ according to John Walters, a Swansea-based priest and lifelong friend. ‘But the reverse was true. I think it helps explain Rowan’s compassion.’ The ordeal has stopped him from ever cycling or driving (but not from cultivating a fine singing voice), and accounts for something about Williams’ posture. In conversation he habitually twists his head as an aid to hearing. This reinforces the sense that he listens well.

Aneurin Williams, an engineer employed by the Ministry of Works, was one generation away from the mines. His wife came from a farming background. At the beginning of the 1950s they lived in Ystradgynlais, a village at the top of the Swansea valley. Then as now, the area was heavily Welsh-speaking; in contrast to today, many upwardly mobile families chose to speak English. The Williamses were an example: Delphine, especially, had ambitions for Rowan, and one result was that he didn’t acquire competent Welsh until his forties. Native speakers now describe his command of the language as impressive.

The family moved with Aneurin’s job — to Cardiff in 1953, and back to Swansea seven years later. Their long-term home was a modest house in Oystermouth, a suburb on the western edge of the bay. At this point they belonged to the Presbyterian Church of Wales, but the allegiance wasn’t unwavering. When their ten-year-old son came home one day asking if they could join the local Anglican congregation, Mr and Mrs Williams didn’t object.

All Saints’, Oystermouth, stands halfway up a hill with long views across Swansea and the surrounding sea. The original church (now the southern side of the building) was medieval; the nave and north aisle were added in the 1860s. A huge triptych depicting the Nativity dominates the interior, and the style of worship reflects a solid but not extravagant strain of Anglo-Catholicism. Going to sung Eucharists there must have astonished a child raised in the monochrome atmosphere of Calvinistic Methodism. John Walters draws a tongue-in-cheek parallel between the Williams family and the Russian envoys in eleventh-century Constantinople. Dazzled by the splendour of Byzantine worship, they instantly decided that Orthodoxy should become the new faith of the Slavs.

Aesthetics were only a part of the All Saints’ experience. The schoolboy also fell under the spell of the Vicar, Eddie Hughes, whose 34-year incumbency had begun in 1946. He was a man of rare quality. Rowan sang in the choir, served at Mass, and spent regular sessions discussing the faith with his guru. The years of illness (including lengthy spells off school) had given him an unusual amount of spare time, which he filled by voracious reading in fields such as history and folk-lore. This fed his appetite for knowledge. ‘It must have been an extraordinary situation,’ says Donald Allchin, one of Williams’ later mentors, ‘having this very bright boy knocking at the vicarage door and saying things like “I think I can understand so-and-so, but I’m not quite clear about the Trinity. Could you explain that to me please?”’

In 1961 Rowan won a place at Dynevor County Grammar School in central Swansea. His bond with John Walters was cemented by their shared dislike of sport. To begin with the two were forced to watch the other boys play football, despite not participating, but eventually they persuaded their teachers that they were better off left to their own devices. In Rowan’s case these included music and poetry. He preferred polyphony to pop, and had read a lot of Dark Age Welsh verse, apart from more standard works, by the time he reached the sixth form. The child has proved to be the father of the man in other ways. On winning a prize for Latin in 1966 he spent his book token on Johan Huizinga’s two-volume classic, The Waning of the Middle Ages. Soon before this, at the age of fifteen, he wrote an essay on St David for his school magazine. The piece disentangles historical and legendary strands connected with the saint, and includes this description of an abbey timetable:

Later, after being ordained priest, he continued his studies under St Peulin or Paulinus (not to be confused with the Roman monk who helped to convert Northumbria to Christianity in the next century), and then embarked on a preaching tour . . . The life in his monastery was noted for its harshness, and somewhat resembles life in a modern Trappist monastery; the monks, bearded, and with the front of their heads shaven, wore garments of coarse, undyed homespun, ate only bread and herbs, drank only water, and spent much of their time tilling the soil, using no oxen for ploughing but yoking themselves to the plough; candidates for admission had to wait outside the monastery for ten days to test their patience . . . Yet in spite of this severity, David himself was the kindest of men, and the monastery radiated that joy in loving God which was so characteristic of the Celtic monastic saints.

But the budding historian never seemed withdrawn or nerdish, Walters recalls. ‘Rowan wouldn’t have ended up as vice-captain of the school if he hadn’t been popular. He also made his mark on the stage. I vividly remember him as the voice of the Washerwoman’s Daughter in Toad of Toad Hall! At sixteen, already endowed with his almost preternaturally deep tones, Williams won acclaim in the part of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. A reviewer commented on the challenge of the role (a kind of Greek Chorus), and praised him for his ‘command, dignity and sincerity’. Two years on and by then the Dynevor magazine’s editor, Williams was discoursing fluently and at some length on the subject of human rights:

Thus far, I have spoken little of man’s duties: it is only too often forgotten that these must go hand in hand with rights. Many are prepared to talk much of their own rights, less about the rights of others, and hardly at all about their duties. We are, by the very fact of our existence, involved in humanity, and each individual is responsible to and for the rest of mankind. The great curse of the civilised world today is sheer selfishness, lack of concern and fear of ‘involvement’; and therefore, I would in conclusion suggest that ... we should strive to promote not merely awareness of what human rights are, but also what they mean . . . for in no other way will the Declaration of Human Rights ever become a reality for the world we live in.

Perhaps the gravity — and with it the implied optimism — stand out more at a distance of thirty-odd years. There seems to have been no doubt in the mind of the schoolboy that the path ahead consisted in prolonged engagement with the best that has been thought and said in the history of the world. This in turn would be shown forth in his life. Like other Christians, especially many Nonconformists, he saw an obvious link between Christian compassion and the rhetoric of the Left, and has been happy to call himself a socialist ever since. His reason for doing so (‘I don’t think the State is morally neutral; there needs to be an element of redistribution in policy’) tends to look callow by comparison with his theology. Liberal Democrats and One Nation Tories could readily cite the same slogan in support of their own agendas. His political writings often have the same forthright quality.

But such debate, though vital, was not quite the heart of the matter. As a teenager he started to see everything against the horizon of his faith. The sense that religion imposes an intellectual straitjacket to be shed in the name of freedom had little or no parallel in Rowan Williams’ experience. Surprisingly, perhaps, he felt continually stretched by Christianity, even when troubled by doubt. Nor did the process involve great feats of will. Struggle there certainly was, but also a willing surrender. Like almost every other believer, he knew more than he could say. If asked, though, he might have argued that only Christianity provides a language comprehensive enough to interpret everything else. The vocabulary concerned is simple as well as subtle. We are conscious and rational and self-determining. We are subject to metaphysical pulls, principally through moral obligation. Science can answer innumerable questions, but not those that matter most. The finite world points beyond itself. Reflection suggests that we are not self-created, and with the eye of faith we can recognise that God’s nature has been projected on to the screen of history in the life of Christ.

Williams made other inferences besides. If Christianity were true, it would demand his all, including the relevant studies as a grounding for possible ordination. He applied to read theology at Cambridge, and was accepted before taking A levels in Latin, English and history.

The university might have been made for him. Religion and high-mindedness were part of the fabric; revolution was everywhere else. Godliness and rebellion were not necessarily opposed, since many of the Church’s grittiest critics came from the inside. The fresher went after a flock of new opportunities with relish, and Cambridge remained the setting for some of the happiest moments in his life. He has always preferred it to Oxford, his second English home.

Things didn’t go all his way to start with. Stephen Sykes, Dean of St John’s, his first-choice college, was away on sabbatical. Williams was interviewed by another don, who turned him down. At this point Christ’s College stepped in with the offer of a scholarship. Christ’s, a smaller place, was also less accommodating to theologians, and took only one student a year in the subject. But it had a vintage crop when Williams arrived: the other two undergraduates on his course, Christopher Rowland and John Day, are now both biblical scholars. Day says that Williams stood out almost at once as ‘a saintly person, much preoccupied by social justice and helping the homeless’. When the tramps he met had nowhere else to go, Williams accommodated them in his college room.

Sara Maitland, an exact contemporary then embarking on an English degree at Oxford, fills out the picture of university life at the time.

Many students were either left-wing or very left-wing. They generally divided into three groups. There were the Trots, people like Chris Hitchens and Tariq Ali; the hippies, of whom I was one; and the sober, duffle-coated types. Rowan was a duffle-coat.

Chris Rowland, another radical activist, soon became a friend. ‘There was certainly great seriousness there, but it was diluted by humour,’ he recalls.

Rowan was extremely well liked, and always willing to have a go at something new. I remember him once conducting a performance of a Mass setting by Rubbra in his second year. I don’t suppose he’d ever done any conducting before, but it all worked well enough. Though preparing for Finals when he arrived, I was very struck by his intellect. He seemed to have read everything. After we’d known each other for about a year I met my future wife. Before introducing them I told her that he was the cleverest person I’d ever met.

So Williams already had an exceptionally well-furnished mind by the age of nineteen. As in Swansea, he was earnest but never really angular, spiritual but not priggish. Other friends noted an unmalicious sense of fun and a talent for mimicry. He soon made his mark in the Divinity School, where Geoffrey Lampe and Christopher Stead were among the leading lights. The person Williams revered above all was Donald MacKinnon, who taught philosophy of religion. This ‘troubled genius’¹ held the Norris-Hulse chair of divinity from 1960 to 1978. Stories about his eccentricities abound: he sharpened pencils with a razor blade as he lectured, and sometimes gave supervisions from under a table. A set of talks on Hegel involved such a lengthy prolegomenon that the subject himself was not even mentioned until the final week of the course. The following that MacKinnon attracted was connected with his mixture of integrity and intensity. He had a more solid training in technical fields such as logic and epistemology than almost any other Anglican theologian in Britain, and a vivid sense of the challenge posed by philosophy to religion. But this awareness was yoked to firm Anglo-Catholic loyalties. MacKinnon’s strong yet self-critical creed supplied Williams with the theme on which all his books have been variations — that faith has less to do with once-for-all answers than with a readiness to engage in further questioning.

Mark Santer, who once studied under MacKinnon and later taught in the same faculty, describes his former teacher as a far more substantial figure than Cambridge colleagues ‘who tended to be either piously conse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Student, Scholar, Pastor
• 2. Philosophy and Theology
• 3. Spirituality
• 4. Politics
• Notes
• Index of Names