These essays were written over a twenty‐year period (1978‐1998), during which Rowan Williams went from promising theologian to prominent Bishop. Few treading such a path manage to maintain both erudition and wisdom. This collection demonstrates that Williams is the exception. There is very little in the history of theology and philosophy (both Analytic and Continental) that Williams hasn't read. What's more, he manages to read it reverently, discreetly, soberly and in the fear of God.
The “conversations” of the subtitle take place with Lossky (chapter.1); Hegel and a postmodern Hegel via Gillian Rose (2, 3 and 4); Balthasar, singly and in contrast with Rahner (5 and 6); Barth (7 and 8); Rene Girard (9); Wittgenstein together with Bonhoeffer (10); Simone Weil (11); Don Cupitt (12); Marilyn McCord Adams (13) and Maurice Wiles (14). In addition to these principal conversation partners, we meet many others, from Aquinas to John Howard Yoder. The range in itself invites awe. There are not many public figures who know their Roy Bhaskar as well as their Dionysius the Areopagite.
Dr. Williams is undoubtedly a good reader. Mike Higton makes much of this in his somewhat starry‐eyed “Editor's Introduction”– Williams apparently “performs” the texts he reads, in “a process of ‘ecstatic’ attentiveness”. But Higton also mentions Williams' “theological vision”. And theological vision requires not just good reading or good “performance” of others' texts. Theological vision requires some work in composition too, some creation. In conversation, the man of theological vision doesn't just listen – he speaks.
Williams' work is made for posterity. He refuses arguments and positions which will only ever be things temporal, and keeps his thinking trained on things eternal. This twenty‐year retrospective shows how often he is right. The case made in his 1979 essay “Barth on the Triune God” still seems pertinent –“If it can be shown that Barth is actually operating (even unconsciously) with a concept of revelation defined in advance of his exegesis of the records of revelation, substantial questions are raised about not merely the ground but also the shape of his articulation of the doctrine.” Similarly Williams' refusal of Cupitt's overbearing theological Puritanism quite early in the Cupitt project (“On not quite agreeing with Don Cupitt”, first published in 1984) looks like a better decision year on year. The same might be said for his challenge to “Doctrinal Criticism” as practised by Maurice Wiles – his 1992 Festschrift essay is a nail in the coffin of 1970s liberal theology, hammered in with love. But it is not just analytic philosophical reduction that Williams resists. His quarrel with Marilyn McCord Adams' work on the Problem of Evil seems well chosen (“I suspect that it is more religiously imperative to be worried by evil than to put it into a satisfactory theoretical context”); but equally he is keen to oppose those whose post‐modern enthusiasms leave them identifying the sacred with the void. That such an identification leads to a “basically dishonest rhetoric of risk or cost, “redescribing resignation as heroism” ” (the quotation is from Gerald Graff) is a recurring theme.
Furthermore, Williams doesn't just make good critical decisions. He also makes perceptive, interesting choices of whom to champion. Taking up Balthasar in the early 1980s was brave, reading orthodoxy from the political left in a way that must have inspired the young John Milbank. The same bravery and independence of mind can be seen in the championing of Russian 20th Century Theologians. The essay here dealing with Vladimir Lossky and the Via Negativa (“substantially a chapter from a doctoral thesis”) shows how well Williams makes connections: “there is much in his work for those struggling to achieve some kind of rapprochement between systematic theology and what is inadequately called “spirituality”. The same making of connections made Williams' engagement with René Girard influential. And whoever thought that Cambridge would produce a postmodern Hegelian? The work on Hegel in this collection is particularly substantial and thought provoking.
So what of “theological vision”? Williams has stuck to a task he set himself very early on: to seek an apophatic theology which, whilst it corrects the distortions of cataphatic theology, yet acknowledges distortions of its own. This entails taking a via media between “an eternal return to the same” (modernity) and “an eternal alienation between thought or speech and the void” (postmodernity). That middle way is fraught with difficulty, an obstinate struggle for a Christian Truth that is “profoundly elusive”. Intellectual conclusions from such a project will be minimal. Devotional benefits will be great. Above all, Williams teaches us a God‐attentive patience.
But can anything this nebulous in thought, and fatally Prufrockian in expression, really be called “vision”? The writing, necessarily tortuous, at times becomes complacently so. It is absolutely guaranteed that when loins are girded up for a paragraph of the type “This does not mean x, in fact it means y” the quantity of words expounding y will be with comic inevitability three of four times those of x.
Fans of Williams will not mind this at all, but maybe fans are the problem. Williams' introduction thanks Mike Higton for “initiating and carrying through” the publication, which, with touching naivety, Williams calls “an exemplary work of selflessness”. Presumably it is Higton who set the time‐frame for the essays (which otherwise seems a little arbitrary), who selected them (could others have been included?) and who decided on the non‐chronological order: “I have tried to arrange it so that, if read from start to finish, the reader might be aware of being taken on a wandering and circuitous but continuous journey.” Such a journey is called a wild‐goose chase; and the promise of it is hardly going to tempt one to read the book “start to finish”. Williams needs no help producing a work to be left unread on the shelf of the vicarage study. What he does need, if he is to be more than a superb theological reader and critic, is a bit less awe.
