Studia Theologica -Nordic Journal of Theology

Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sthe20 Saints in public Holy lives and the function of theological speech in the political theology of Rowan Williams Patrik Hagman To cite this article: Patrik Hagman (2021): Saints in public, Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology, DOI: 10.1080/0039338X.2021.1939153 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0039338X.2021.1939153 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 10 Jun 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=sthe20 Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1080/0039338X.2021.1939153 Saints in public Holy lives and the function of theological speech in the political theology of Rowan Williams Patrik Hagman This article explores the way Rowan Williams understands saints as theo-politically significant. By surveying a number of key texts by Williams in different genres, the author argues that the saints for Williams are highly important for his political theology. For him, the saints make a political theology possible, since they witness to the world as rooted in Gods will. This, in turn, is significant for understanding how theological language works, since it goes beyond the limits of “realistic” discourse, bound by a certain secular understanding of the way the world “is”. The significance of this feature of theological language is demonstrated by discussing texts by Martin Hägglund and Theo Hobson. That theological language is complex and has different functions in different contexts is an elementary insight, yet it is something that often causes confusion. I give examples of this below, instances where criticism of theological statements for a lack of realism seems to fail to grasp the function of these statements. In this article, I will try to clarify how theology in its “proclamatory voice” relates to the “realistic voice” by exploring the political theology present in the writings of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. More specifically, I will show that the way Williams understands the function of the saint as a locus of political significance is able to shed light on the workings of theo-political language.1 As I will demonstrate below using a number of Williams’ writings in rather diverse genres,2 Williams tends to end his arguments – regardless of whether he is writing an academic study or lectures to the general public – with rather overt political statements. I suggest that these © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 Saints in public passages are more than mere applications of a particular theological or spiritual thought complex; and are actually part of the very structure of Williams’ theological thinking, with the ultimate purpose of saying something about how our common world is structured. I will demonstrate the significance of this function using two cases: Theo Hobson’s criticism of Williams’ ecclesiology as an example of a common critique of church-centered political theology; and Martin Hägglund’s critique of the notion of eternity in his secular political theology. My aim in this article is thus to, on the one hand, explore the shape of Williams’ theological argumentation, but also, more broadly, to explore what makes theo-political language function. Two cases of confusion regarding theological language: Hobson and Hägglund Williams’ political thinking has been widely praised. But – if we exclude questions of church policy during his time as Archbishop of Canterbury – it may also be the aspect of his theological output that has been most heavily criticized.3 In part, this is to be expected, since political issues are relevant to a wider audience. However, writers that do engage with his theology in depth, such as Theo Hobson4 and Williams’ biographer Rupert Shortt,5 also focus their criticism on this area. Hobson, in his critical study of Williams’ ecclesiology, pinpoints his concerns at the tension between “two powerful theological impulses”: The first is a postmodern (meaning above all “cultural-linguistic”) Catholicism: the actual practices of the church are the outward essence of this religion. The other, less officially acknowledged, impulse is eschatological universalism: the truth of this tradition lies in this heralding of a new unlimited human community.6 Hobson thus perceives a tension between a focus on the church as a tangible community upheld (or produced) by its practices, above all the Eucharist, and the prophetic proclamation of the Kingdom of God in its fullest sense. The tension consists in claiming that the latter is contained in the former, while common experience would tell us that this rarely is the case. This tension is not unique to Williams’ work of course, nor is Hobson alone in pointing this out. That there is such a tension in the traditional Christian understanding of the church is probably not in dispute – but Patrik Hagman 3 opinions regarding how to handle it differ wildly. In a way, one could claim that this criticism goes back at least as far as the Protestant Reformation, if not further. Certainly, this is when the distinction between the Visible and the Invisible church enters the theological vocabulary7 and becomes the standard (Protestant) way of dealing with the discrepancy between the church as it actually is, and the church as it should be theologically. For the reformers, the notion of the invisible, or hidden, church was a way to accommodate the need to criticize (or reject) the church hierarchy without giving up the ideal of catholicity.8 However, as is often the case, this approach over the centuries has had unforeseen consequences. Williams rejects this distinction; thus, his ecclesiology represents a reaction against this approach.9 He writes I think that, ultimately, the separation of two elements here, an inner relatedness to Christ and an outer flexibility about words and forms, takes away something vital from the idea that God calls into being a tangible human community, whose common language is the carrier of its common relatedness to Christ’s invitation. Move away from this, and the visible reality of the Church becomes something almost optional, in a way that makes more abstract the interdependence of believers on one another – their interdependence precisely as visible, material, historical and language-using subjects.10 Thus, over time the separation of the invisible and the visible church introduces a new fundamental logic in the Christian tradition: the idea that true faith can exist apart from the concrete life of the Christian community. This idea can take very different forms, ranging from conservative to liberal versions,11 but they often share the notion that this faith is somehow insulated from the manifest problems of the practical life of the church. It is this insistence on the “visible reality of the Church” that exposes Williams to criticism such as Hobson’s.12 These differing positions on ecclesiology highlight the underlying question of how such a disagreement arises. I refer to this ongoing debate, suggesting that there is a real theological difficulty here which has to do with the way theological language functions. Put very basically, it would seem that theology needs to speak in two registers: a realistic voice that, for instance, talks about how things “actually are” in the local parish, and a proclamatory voice which could be taken to describe how things should be, i.e. what the Kingdom of God should mean for life in this world. To put it this way is, however, to concede the game to the position above represented by Hobson. If the two registers relate to each other simply as “what is” 4 Saints in public and “what ought to be”, then it would be a clear error to claim that things are in a certain way when one’s intention is to talk about how they should be. However, the way these two registers function is altogether more complex; and it seems that the lack of clarity about this issue forms the basis of a wide range of misunderstandings and debates. To give another example: in Martin Hägglund’s recent provocative book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, he maintains that a belief in eternity necessarily makes life meaningless and eliminates all value of life in this world. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. … The question of what I ought to do with my life – a question that is at issue in everything I do – presupposes that I understand my time to be finite. For the question of how I should lead my life to be intelligible as a question, I have to believe that I will die. If I believed that my life would last forever, I could never take my life to be at stake and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.13 For Hägglund, belief in eternity thus undermines not only all meaning, but also all political or social ambition. When religious people thus profess that their faith inspires or even commands them to care for the poor, the needy, or for the environment, they are deluding themselves. According to him, what they profess is a secular faith, the belief that since our lives are finite, they have value and thus are worth caring for. In his 450-page work, Hägglund discusses writers such as Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Martin Luther King as well as Marx and Hegel. However, the basic understanding of time and eternity is not really developed at all.14 In his argument, it acts as a silver bullet to all religious thinking. While Hägglund’s argumentation can be criticized in many ways,15 I want to focus on the way he assumes that he can exhaustively define eternity negatively as “the absence of time”, and then logically claim that human beings either live according to such a concept or not. This does not merely display a lack of nuance (there could be more alternatives and one’s belief in eternity could function in different ways), but also a lack of understanding of how religious language works. In a way similar to Hobson, Hägglund assumes that if the proclamatory voice of religion speaks of eternity in a way that in some sense contradicts a realistic understanding of how the world is, what is going on is either hypocrisy, lies or profound confusion. Patrik Hagman 5 This becomes very clear in his discussion of grief. Here Hägglund discusses C.S. Lewis’ book A Grief Observed. In this frank recounting of his grief over the death of his wife, Lewis describes how the belief in an afterlife fails to console him, how he is unable to overcome the longing of being together with her here on earth. Hägglund quotes Lewis professing his irritation with believers who say, “there is no death”, or claim that death does not matter. Hägglund comments: In speaking out of his experience of mourning, Lewis here articulates a profound faith: not faith in a transcendent God, or in a life exempt from death, but faith in the irreplaceable value of life that is bound to death. If what happens matters and our actions have consequences, it is because they are irreversible and cannot be undone. … The sense that something matters thus emerges from a secular faith, which sustains the commitment to a finite and fragile form of life.16 Hägglund does not consider the possibility that belief in eternity could have any other influence on our perception of finitude than the denial of its meaning. What Lewis is doing in these pain-filled passages, however, is trying to navigate between erroneous understandings of what belief in eternity means for life within time. When describing the moment at his wife’s deathbed and quoting Dante’s Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana, it clearly does not mean that “there is no Joy Davidman for C.S. Lewis in heaven”,17 rather, it means that the language of eternity offers a way of relating to mortality that neither denies the horror of death nor reduces life to a vain, possibly heroic, struggle to avoid the inevitable. It is not my purpose here to try to elucidate the Christian doctrine of eternal life,18 but rather to point out that this failure to understand the way theological talk functions is analogous to Hobson’s problem with an ecclesiology that – in his view – overestimates the holiness of the church. The common trait is that in both instances a certain sense of what is realistic – Hobson’s awareness of the church’s failures and Hägglund’s analysis of how meaning arises from finitude – is used to judge the proclamatory voice of theology. While it is usually a sound habit to be realistic, I maintain that using this approach is to misunderstand how the proclamatory voice of theology works. Political theology – mapping the territory This question is of central concern to political theology, which is also how Hägglund frames his argument.19 Political theology is a term – 6 Saints in public and a field of academia – that can be described in a wide variety of ways.20 Luke Bretherton defines political theology as “an interpretive art for discovering faithful, hopeful and loving judgements about how to act together in response to shared problems”.21 He understands that the politics that political theology studies has three dimensions: (1) the nature and form of the polis, (2) that which shapes the common life over time, and (3) the relational practices through which a common world of meaning and action is created and cultivated.22 This definition intentionally leaves out what he terms “non-confessional political theology”, i.e. political philosophers that “utilize the Christian archive out of recognition that, at least in the West, much of the language and conceptual grammar has roots in theological beliefs and practices”.23 While Hägglund’s argument for atheism is clearly at home in the non-confessional type of political theology (though one could perhaps argue that his is a very Lutheran kind of atheism), I hope to show that Williams’ decidedly confessional political theology has relevance for Hägglund’s thesis as well. In academia, it has become commonplace to distinguish between public theology and political theology.24 This, of course, can be done in many ways. I propose a distinction of these terms, one that may not fit historically, but one which, nevertheless, clarifies my purpose for this article. I would suggest that whereas public theology is concerned with the role of theology – or religion more broadly – in the public political discussion,25 political theology is more interested in Christianity and religion as a set of political practices in itself, and thus not politically interesting for political discourse alone.26 Thus political theology will be at least as interested in who is saying something, and how, as in what is being said. Rowan Williams is, of course, one of the fairly few present-day voices that are clearly at home in both these traditions. Throughout his life he has shown interest in political issues and his collections of essays and speeches, Faith in the Public Square (2012), is one of the best examples of public theology in recent years.27 It is worth pointing out, however, that a huge aspect of its “publicness” is due to the fact that it has been written by the (now former) Archbishop of Canterbury. My point is that public theology is, in a sense, dependent on a social reality, the existence of the Church, which it tends to underemphasize and thus analyse insufficiently. This, in turn, says something about the importance of political theology as the study of the structures that make a Christian political discussion possible. Therefore, I will not focus on Williams’ contributions to discussions about secularism, religion and law, the environment, the economy or religious diversity (all subheadings of the above-mentioned book), Patrik Hagman 7 important and insightful as they are.28 Instead, I am more interested in the politics involved when Williams is doing theology more generally – a politics that also enables his “public theology”.29 This interest thus broadly fits within Bretherton’s third dimension of politics. Jonathan Cole provides another useful definition of political theology: “a mode of political analysis that proceeds from the conviction that politics (however defined) is embedded within a Christian ontology and shaped by a Christian historical teleology”.30 What I will try to do is to unveil a central characteristic of how Williams’ politics connects to and flows out of a Christian ontology.31 A politics of awe and amazement This characteristic is on display in this quotation from the very different book Tokens of Trust (2007): I’ve often preached – like others, I’m sure – on how, when we come back to our places after taking communion, we ought to look at our next-door neighbours with awe and amazement. The person next to me – whom I may love deeply, may not know at all, may dislike, may even fear – is God’s special, honoured guest, praying Christ’s prayer, living from Christ’s life. Just for this moment, they are touched with the glory of the end of all things; and so are we.32 If there is politics in this – and I believe there is – it is of a very particular kind: the politics that arises from our looking at our neighbours with awe and amazement. I will postpone the question of in what sense such a proposal is political, and instead first ponder on what we are looking at, and what kind of looking we are talking about here. Williams offers some elaboration on exactly what we might be looking at when we look at our neighbour post-communion: One of the simplest possible definitions of the Church is to say that it is meant to be the place where Jesus is visibly active in the world. And once we have said that, we can turn it around and say that where Jesus is visibly active, something very like the Church must be going on.33 This is a statement that invites the kind of criticism Hobson articulates. Williams is, however, clear that such a declaration is never without complications. Without claiming that the church is more Christ-like than our 8 Saints in public common experience tells us it is, Williams goes on to give some fairly every-day, but nonetheless very “churchy” examples of holiness. Examples of when the church – as he puts it – “works”: the culmination of the Jubilee 2000 campaign; the work of a retired minister and his wife in an area of South Wales with social problems; and an Anglican religious community in the Solomon Islands, whose peacekeeping work involving martyrdom, exemplifies the church at its best. These, especially the latter two, are given as examples of fairly ordinary, every-day saintliness. One could easily respond to this by saying “well, yes, but look at all these other examples where the church fails to be anything like Christ”. This, however, would be to misunderstand what Williams is doing. Williams is not building a quantitative argument for Christianity. Nonetheless, whenever the argument being put forward is pushed to the point where the question “Yes, that sounds nice, but is any of this real?” almost becomes audible, Williams points us towards the saints as examples. How, then should we understand why Williams is making this move? Taking responsibility for God Another, less ordinary, example is found in the previously mentioned book, Faith in the Public Square, where the closing essay deals with Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum.34 While Williams’ book is a collection of essays which originated over a long period, I think it is safe to assume that it is significant that this particular text has been chosen to close the book. On one level the essay, called “Religious lives”, deals with the popular distinction between being spiritual (good) and being religious (bad). The way Williams describes the extraordinary life of Hillesum indicates, however, that there is more at stake than yet another example of a religious life under grave circumstances. Williams wants to demonstrate how Hillesum exemplifies a particular way for God to be in the world. Proceeding from Wittgenstein’s35 notion that life experiences may “force” the concept of God upon a person, Williams explores how in her letters from the concentration camp Hillesum understands her purpose to be to “take responsibility for God”.36 Hillesum writes You cannot help us, … we must help You help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.37 Patrik Hagman 9 There must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness?38 Williams argues that a religious life, such as Hillesum’s, but also more generally, is a life where “certain realities become visible”; it “takes responsibility for the appearing of God”.39 It is thus more than a life marked by certain religious truth claims. Rather than pointing towards a particular understanding of reality, it makes a claim to be such a reality itself. This is an altogether more dynamic notion of how the “eternal”, in Hägglund’s terminology, relates to present day life. It is not motivated by a desire to fulfil a religious or moral duty. It is, in a sense without motivation, beyond this responsibility in itself. Williams writes: Etty Hillesum does not decide that the world would be a better place if belief in God persisted, and so decides to make her life a locus for God. Something unarguable is happening to her apprehension of who she is, something exhibited in her material life; and whatever happens becomes part of the uninterrupted conversation with God, that listening to a foreign voice in the heart of the self, which becomes habitual.40 This, of course, is the essential difference between embodying an ideal and embodying, well, God. God, in order to be God, must remain the subject of any form of being in the world. Hillesum testifies to the reality of God by providing God with a place to become visible in the world. At the same time, this is not a case of a frail human being overtaken or “possessed” by a powerful being. It is actually the opposite: in a situation of deepest darkness, like that of the concentration camp, God’s presence is all but extinguished – unless Hillesum gives God a shelter in her very self. The Christological parallels – indeed Mariological – are clear here, and Williams points to the very particular theological content of Hillesum’s mode of witnessing. [T]he idea that the paradigm religious life is one that “gives shelter” to a vulnerable divine presence, a narrative that seeks to embody God, to take responsibility for the appearing of God (and of suffering and love), has a particular resonance with the Christian and 10 Saints in public Jewish tradition, and illuminates why a life like Etty Hillesum’s is hard to read without that tradition in mind.41 As Jesus comes into the world as a defenceless child, God’s (knowable) presence in the world is frail and relies on humans being responsive and responsible enough to carry that presence. Central to this notion of life as testimony, embodied in Hillesum, is thus the notion of responsibility. This gives us an important clue into what makes a saint; responsibility is – in one sense – the founding virtue of saintliness. Hillesum thus provides another example that Hägglund’s thesis encounters problems with when facing empirical reality. Hillesum’s diaries give ample examples of how an intense engagement with the eternal feeds into a strong and radical involvement with the temporal world and the people living – and suffering – in it. Hillesum’s life takes place within an extreme political situation. But this discussion sheds light on the political theology of Rowan Williams because of how he positions her life in the current discussion. According to Williams, Hillesum’s is a life which enables a culture to feel and show grief and pity, and without which it would be difficult to understand what God in the Christian sense means. To give over a life, in any circumstances, not only the dramatic and terrible context of Westerbork and Auschwitz, to making a habitation for grief and for God is the most effective resistance possible both to a secular reduction of human meaning to the level of arbitrary choice and commodified feeling or imagination, and to a pseudo-religiousness, a spirituality, in which religious symbolism itself becomes a fashion accessory for the postmodern self.42 We see here how Williams turns once again to a clearly political language at precisely the point where he wants to sum up the crucial significance of a life like Etty Hillesum’s, pointing to the way capitalism configures meaning and religious symbolism. Ultimately, he seems to suggest, a life lived open to the presence of God will act as a node in a kind of politics different than the secular reductionisms of capitalist societies. Mystic embodiment This function of the saints, both in the world and in Williams’ theology, is clarified substantially in his 1991 study of one of the most iconic of Patrik Hagman 11 Christian saints, Teresa of Avila. In the closing chapter of that book, Williams turns to the concept of mysticism, arguing against the then still prevalent idea of mystical experience as a common core of different religious traditions. In its stead, Williams proposes a model of mysticism based on function rather than content. [The mystics’] lives become a classical exegesis of the tradition’s basic texts and stories: something like what used to be called a règle vivante in monastic communities – someone from whose conduct you could reconstruct the text on which it was based. But, more than this, such a life becomes a point of access to a truth in danger of being overlaid by the passage of time. The sort of people who tend to be called mystics must, in other words, be understood as having a clear function within a specific religious tradition; and if we want to generalize about mysticism, we should concentrate more on this comparability of function than on any supposed comparability of the content of experience.43 Again, this concept of becoming a “living rule” is much more nuanced than merely trying to live up to the moral and ritual teachings of one’s tradition – the measure of someone’s saintliness is not how close their “is” is to the “ought”. As the example of Hillesum also indicates, the mystic saint might very well end up in a very different place than the tradition one inhabits might have expected. The mystic nurtures an access to the sacred that is not controllable and is, therefore, unpredictable. “For a religious tradition to foster and sustain the forms of non-ritual access to the sacred is for it to take a necessary and calculated but still quite genuine risk”.44 What is exceptional with the truly great saints, in Williams’ analysis, is that someone like Teresa of Avila witnesses not only to one particular strand of the Christian tradition. In contrast with the older religious studies model of mysticism, where one universal mystical experience gives rise to different traditions, Teresa is able to see a deeper unity behind different religious experiences. Perhaps, though, what gives particular greatness to those figures whose work and life have been seen as classical and authoritative in Catholic tradition is their capacity to see the unity of all these different aspects of spirituality, because they see the unity of the divine act underlying them. Any one such figure may in practice 12 Saints in public concentrate on or have an attrait towards a particular style, but will be able to set it in the context of a coherent theology – and sometimes at least to acknowledge also the proper and legitimate diversity of spiritual paths.45 These figures, Williams argues, can function as guides for the Christian community precisely because their witness is broad and nuanced enough for a whole community of believers to identify with. So, while there is no denying the strong personality of most such saints, it is not their individual experience of God that enables them to embody a tradition, but precisely their ability to transcend that individual experience. While Williams is clear that Teresa is no social reformer,46 when he goes on to describe the actual content and significance of Teresa’s witness, we again see him turn to a more political language. The paradox of Christian mysticism – at least on Teresa’s account – is that there is no detached divine absolute with which to take refuge. We may and must detach ourselves from all that keeps us from God: our Sin, our fearfulness and false humility, our pride of race or family; but the God with whom we are finally united is the God whose being is directed in love towards the world, which we must then re-enter, equipped to engage with other human beings with something of God’s own wholeheartedness because we have been stripped of certain modes of self-protectiveness: of an understanding of our worth or loveableness as resting on prestige, achievement or uniformity.47 There is, thus, no opposition between the contemplative and active life (if we broaden these terms somewhat beyond their traditional monastic meanings). For Teresa, the contemplative enables a true engagement with the world; and such contemplation without such worldly concern would be deeply un-Christian. Unlike Hägglund’s argument,48 contemplation is not true contemplation if it undermines interest in the temporal world. We can thus summarize that – for Williams – a true engagement with God will result in life choices that can well be described (or perhaps are best described) as political. Moreover, in the case of Teresa, too, we get some political content – a strong criticism of the culture of honour, that Williams deems more generally relevant than her particular situation (even though he maintains that it is a result of that particular situation). Patrik Hagman 13 To criticize the conventions of honour was implicitly to challenge the secular basis of social unity. Unity, for Teresa, is not innate by virtue of birth; it can be discarded without damage to the person. Communities can exist with other bonds – that is, friendship with each other and with God; for the Christian the existence of such communities is an essential witness to God’s own saving disregard for honour, human and divine.49 Note that Williams is insistent on keeping the very particular Christian theological “content” that the saints exhibit in their lives together with the political implications of it, as if he wants to bypass the conventional “therefore we ought to” commonly used to link Christian beliefs together with moral exhortations. It is not by living up to a standard set by theological ideals that the saints become saints, it is by living a life made possible by those ideals. What the saints do show, he seems to say, is that when trust in God is taken absolutely earnestly, a certain kind of community is inevitable. Furthermore, it will be a community that displays characteristics that differ from the present society, differences that are best described in political language. Living icons My final example is again taken from a very different kind of book by Williams, his 2008 study Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. As a whole, with its careful reading of Dostoevsky’s novels, the book explores the analogy of God as author. Saints – albeit fictive one’s – play a significant role here too, and Williams develops his view of their function by exploring the holiness of characters such as Zosima, Aljosja, Sonya and Myshkin. Since by now we know where we are going with this, I will start by displaying where Williams – at least on my reading – ends up on his journey through Dostoevsky’s work. Here is the heart of Dostoevsky’s concern, and it is something unquestionably urgent in a cultural setting where depthlessness looks like becoming normal. … For Dostoevsky one of the characteristic motives in planned violence, individual or political, is the determination to extinguish dimensions in the other that exceed what is chosen and granted. And the contemporary cultural scene is one which strongly suggests that there is more than one style of violence directed against these rebel dimensions in humanity: to take the most obvious example, the global economy works on the 14 Saints in public assumption that local solidarities and patterns of shared meaning are all accidental to the fundamental practice of human beings in the world, which is the unrestricted exchange of commodity and currency. All particulars are levelled or assimilated to each other on the principle that everything has an exchange value that can be clearly determined. And the principle is applied equally to objects and to practices or skills: hence it becomes possible to quantify quite strictly the value of activities that were formerly regarded as given meaning by their intrinsic human worthwhileness, and surrounded accordingly by informal cultures and disciplines. The point at which the activity of nursing the sick can be expressed in terms of a producer supplying a customer is the point at which the culture of nursing the sick begins to disappear.50 Here too the political language surfaces in the last few pages of the book (though political issues are discussed here and there throughout the study, in connection with the political themes of Dostoevsky’s novels). My interest here, once again, is not primarily in the content of Williams’ politics, but rather in its form and, specifically, the function of the saint.51 He develops this theme at some length in the book. Of the various saintly figures created by Dostoevsky, the Elder Zosima stands out, not least because he gets to tell his whole life story himself (sort of)52 in book six of The Brothers Karamazov. Williams identifies “responsibility for all” as the central theme of the notion of holiness explored by Dostoevsky, and here we are reminded of the point made above about the unity between contemplative and active life.53 In his reflections on his life, Zosima himself seems to make the connection between clearly religious themes such as sin and forgiveness, the notion of responsibility (echoing Hillesum’s thoughts cited above), and clearly political questions such as the discrepancy between universal human rights and the glaring inequality in the means to fulfil the most basic human needs.54 In what way is such a politics actually enacted (rather than merely formulated) by Dostoevsky’s saints? Williams brings attention to the recurring theme of desecrated icons in Dostoevsky in the last full chapter of his work (before the “Conclusions”). From this he develops a concept of “iconic presence” which, it seems to me, could function as a general concept for the theo-political function of the saint that I have tried to tease out of Williams’ texts. Patrik Hagman 15 Williams suggests Dostoevsky tells his stories of desecrated icons in order to tell us something of the “visible or recognizable forms of the holy”. Holy images contain without simplifying the tensions of the actual world, and they offer a context of narrative and self-identification within which human agents may find a shape and a communicative significance for their activities. … Holy images inform us that our lives are serious – that is, that they may succeed or fail in fulfilling a calling given by the creator, and failure in this is a hideous and painful loss. And they are also a representation that neither distorts nor substitutes for an underlying reality, but is transparent to its workings – “true” images not because they reproduce something absent but because they express, and give a specific vehicle for, something present.55 Icons depict, not so much a thing in the world, such as a holy person, but a world in which holy persons are possible – made possible by something beyond that world, its Creator. It is this which makes any desecration of them so potent. Rather than indicating the falseness of that vision and that world, the very possibility of desecration tells us something about that presence, something about who God is and consequently about the world created by that God. The presence of holiness in the icon has the same form as the presence of Christ in the world – i.e. it is vulnerable, dependent on the care and love of human beings. In that sense, a broken icon is even more of an icon than a “perfect” one. It displays God’s way of being in a particular world. We can here sense, too, (in part) how Williams would answer a critic such as Hobson: The weakness of the church – and its failures to live up to the standards set by its theological ideals – is part of its witness to the world. Subsequently, moving from icons painted on wood to human lives displaying this iconic presence necessarily involves a focus on the process by which that iconic character is achieved, a process that will have the same vulnerable character. Thus, the life story of a Zosima included not only youthful sins and frailties, but also a certain lack of self-awareness about certain details about those lives – e.g. the slightly morbid concept of the younger brother being responsible for living the life the older dying brother will not be able to live. The icon thus testifies to the “dialogic nature of our reality”.56 The presence of the other makes my identity possible in a constant and never-ending exchange, a call-and-response that makes up our lives. 16 Saints in public And the “iconic” other, the holy image either in the literal form of the icon or in the translation of the icon into narrative in the holy person, is likewise not a kind of impenetrable surface repelling my identity, nor a solid presence invading my weak and under defended territory, but a presence that offers to nourish and augment what I am. In the world of human relations, what expresses this is precisely the mutual answerability and taking responsibility we have examined at length.57 We are now at the point, I think, where we can attempt to formulate the precise significance of the saint in the political theology present in Williams’ thinking.58 The examples of political language that I have given from Williams’ writings all rely on something to uphold it. Williams’ political criticism is not merely anti-capitalist rhetoric floating in the air. Neither are the saints’ lives and teachings probed for “resources” for such rhetoric. Rather than grounding such utterings in some kind of philosophical system, metaphysical theory, or indeed, political ideology, Williams points us towards the saints, be it in the form of the great Teresa of Avila, the fictional Zosima or the captivating yet paradoxical figure of Etty Hillesum. This, it seems, is because they possess the iconic presence that grounds political discourse, not in an ideology or in a tradition, but rather in a quite specific world. The saint’s life indicates a world with particular features which can only be described in words in a limited way. In order to ground a different kind of politics, however, that world has to be lived, mere description will not suffice. The saint plays this function.59 Conclusion Let us then return to the moment after taking communion, when Williams wants us to look at our neighbours with awe and amazement. This is a moment when the “is” and the “ought” overlap completely, and where it is possible to catch a glimpse of the world as Christianity claims God sees it. Only based on this reality, where the eternal breaks into the temporal, is a Christian politics possible. This indicates a different relationship between the two registers of theological talk. The saints are not to be understood as rare examples of human beings who are able to live up to the standard set by theological norms; nor are they primarily rare instances when even the “realistic” voice has to agree with the “proclamatory” voice. Rather, the saints challenge the presuppositions of the “realistic” voice. They Patrik Hagman 17 witness to a world that is willed by God, and it is thus a world that differs in purpose, meaning, structure et cetera from what the “realistic” voice would believe. From that world a certain politics follows, one which will have points of contact with the kinds of politics that are possible in a world unaware of its divine origins, but which will also show important differences. Thus, when theologians such as Williams formulate their “precariously high” ecclesiology (to use Hobson’s phrase),60 it is not because they are not being realistic. It is, on the contrary, an attempt to formulate what the church is like; because it exists in a God-willed world. Of course, it can do this in a way that obscures the frailty of the church’s witness, which would be a theological failure – though it seems to me that William’s seldom succumbs to this. To fail to speak of the church in a way that shows how it can be a means for God to exist in the world, however, would be an even worse theological failure. It would be to allow a world that is unaware of its God-willed-ness to dictate how God can be present in his world. Without such proclamative talk, the church is realistically impossible. The same is true for the Christian talk of eternity. The saints are examples of human lives that indicate that the world cannot be described accurately using merely a realistic voice. While Hägglund is right that meaning arises from finitude, that finitude appears in a markedly different light if it is viewed as a God-willed exception to eternity, than if it is seen as a closed-off finite universe.61 The saints’ lives witness to this difference. Rather than being rendered meaningless by their rootedness in eternity, those roots deepen the meaning that arises from their finite existence, and enable them to exhibit meaningfulness even in the face of the utter meaninglessness of human evil, as e.g. Hillesum’s life exemplifies. Williams, on my reading, suggests that the saint is someone who embodies a tradition in a way that goes beyond divisions of time and eternity, practicality and proclamation, because it presupposes a different world from the one where various secular ideologies are the dominating options. When we are looking at the saints – with awe and amazement – our world begins to change, and thus a different kind of politics becomes visible and possible. Patrik Hagman Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology Åbo Akademi University Biskopsgatan 19 18 Saints in public Turku 20500 Finland patrik.hagman@abo.fi Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Notes 1. Ben Myers has previously discussed “Williams’ Theology of Saints”. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 73–81. He suggests that the Saints are a central feature of Williams’ ecclesiology that is ultimately apologetic in nature. “The saint is an argument for the existence of God” (81). Oliver O’Donovan has also described Williams as “a very unconventional apologist”. Quoted in Shortt, Rowan’s Rule, 13. As I hope to show in this article, this is not wrong, but it is too narrow a way to formulate the role the saints play in Williams’ thinking. 2. A few words on method: Williams is a theologian who seems unwilling to present a theology of “his own” in a way that is easily discerned. One looks in vain for the one “big book” or chapters in his books where he lays out his own view. He seems to prefer to let the various subjects of his studies do the talking, or else, refers to the church’s tradition. This makes it complicated to say something very particular about his theology. In the following, I have tried to attend especially to those short instances where he seems to want to make points, by referring to our present world or in other ways going beyond the particular material under study. However, I do want to acknowledge that this introduces quite a bit of subjective choice, since it is not always clear if such passages do indeed reflect Williams’ own thought, or the subject under study (or both!). 3. I am thinking in particular about the “Sharia-controversy”. Shortt, Rowan’s Rule, 390– 402. 4. Hobson, Anarchy, Church and Utopia; Hobson, “Rowan Williams as Anglican”. 5. Shortt approvingly quotes the priest and author Angela Tilby saying: “[William’s] politics had always come out of a different and less sophisticated part of him” (Rowan’s Rule, 175). 6. Hobson, Anarchy, Church and Utopia, 99. 7. The distinction is used by Wycliffe (De ecclesia) and Calvin (Institutes IV, 1,7). Luther seldom calls the church invisible, but uses “hidden” or “spiritual” in much the same sense. The reformers believed that they were following Augustine in this, though that would be a very narrow reading of Augustine. See Lee, Augustine and the Mystery. 8. For Calvin, the invisible church is distinct from the visible, because the latter includes “ambitious, greedy, envious persons, evil speakers and some of quite unclean life”. The reason why this is “tolerated for a time” is practical – either a competent tribunal is not available, or the discipline is not vigorous enough. Institutes IV, 1,7. It is thus not because the true church is fundamentally unknowable that it is invisible, but because the “visible church” is imperfect. So, while Calvin clearly moves in a more individualistic direction in his ecclesiology (compared to e.g., Augustine), for him the talk of the invisible church is not a way to devalue the need for a visible church Patrik Hagman 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 19 displaying the characteristics of a “new unlimited human community”. On Calvin’s ecclesiology, see Locher, Sign of the Advent. See Hobson, Anarchy, Church and Utopia, 45–7; Shortt, Rowan’s Rule, 23–64. Williams mostly seems to avoid this language altogether, but it is interesting to note that in his dissertation on one of the most famous modern critics of the notion of an invisible church in Protestant theology, Vladimir Lossky, Williams merely relates Lossky’s (fairly over-the-top) criticism on this matter without any comment on his own, and then proceeds to Lossky’s similar issues with St. John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, with extensive discussion. One gets the impression that Williams finds Lossky’s judgment on the Protestant ecclesiology mildly amusing but not wrong. Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir”. Williams, Why Study the Past?, 109. For a discussion of Williams’s rejection of the visible/invisible church-distinction, see Cary, “Authority, Unity and Truthfulness”. Hobson’s critique is liberal in character. An example of a more conservative version would be Radner, A Brutal Unity. As mentioned, neither Williams’ position nor Hobson’s criticism is very original; rather it is a very common critique of what is arguably a mainstream position today. For a well-argued response to this type of criticism, see Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 141–69. Hägglund, This Life, 5. Emphasis in the original. This is not to imply that Hägglund’s understanding of time is unsophisticated; all his earlier books deal with time in various senses. For instance, his lack of interest in acknowledging that different religious traditions understand eternity and related concepts in very different ways undermines much of his argument. E.g., for Christianity, eternity is first and foremost God’s way of existing, and to define it negatively as timelessness is thus deeply insufficient. This is a very different concept of eternity than e.g., Buddhism’s Nirvana. On a more philosophical level, the fact that Hägglund ignores that all of the texts he studies – seriously and competently – deny that time and eternity relate to each other the way he claims they do, raises questions about his philosophical method. Thirdly, his lack of interest in understanding the writers he studies in their historical context weakens his argument, especially regarding Augustine, but to a lesser degree also regarding Kierkegaard. Hägglund, This Life, 68. Emphasis in the original. Hägglund, This Life, 65. I have done this elsewhere: Hagman, Om tron, 227–39. Hägglund describes his book as an attempt to combat all forms of political theology which anchor moral or spiritual life in “a religious sense of ‘fullness’” (This Life, 27). Hägglund refers to Peter E. Gordon’s definition of political theology. “In Gordon’s account, political theology is defined by two theses. The first thesis postulates a normative deficit: secular life suffers from a lack of moral substance and cannot establish a viable ground for political life together. The second thesis postulates a religious plenitude: to compensate for its normative deficit, secular life must turn to religion as the unique and privileged resource of moral-political instruction” (“Critical Theory between the Sacred and the Profane”). See e.g., Phillips, Political Theology, 42–4; Cavanaugh, Field Hospital, 99–120; Rasmusson, The Church as Polis. Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 6. For a discussion of the complexities of defining “Political Theology”, see Cole, Christian Political Theology, 11–9. Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 32–4. 20 Saints in public 23. Ibid., 23–4. Bretherton alludes to Carl Schmitt’s famous phrase: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt, Political Theology, 36). 24. This practice is complicated by the fact that we often distinguish two waves of political theology, the first wave including names such as Moltmann and Sölle, who today are appreciated more by self-designated public theologians than by political theologians of the second wave. Current political theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas and William T. Cavanaugh also tend to react more against an earlier generation of public theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray, than the first generation of political theologians. Bretherton is very critical of the term (and perhaps the field?) “public theology”, calling it “a category mistake” since it “assumes that it is necessary to translate theological concepts into the idioms and frameworks of liberalism” (Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, 33). While that certainly is a common practice within the field of public theology, I am not convinced that that practice is intrinsic to public theology – Williams would be a counterexample; nor am I sure that everything that public theology does could be contained in Bretherton’s definition of political theology. 25. See Graham, Between a Rock; Breitenberg, “To Tell the Truth,” 55–96. 26. It is clear that this distinction will not fit everything that is called political theology or public theology, but nevertheless I maintain that this distinction has some heuristic use. 27. For an earlier example of Williams’ work as a public theologian, see Williams, The Truce of God. It was originally published in 1983 and has since been revised. 28. For an overview of Williams’ political thinking (his public theology in my terminology), see Higton, Difficult Gospel, 112–34. See also Frame, “Rowan Williams on War”. 29. I agree with Luke Fodor who argues concerning Williams’ spirituality that always “(1) it is embodied or incarnational; (2) it is public and political in nature; (3) it is purgative and progressive” (Fodor, “The Occasional Theology,” 270). 30. Cole, Christian Political Theology, xxvi. Emphasis in original. 31. The political theology of Rowan Williams has previously been studied mostly based on his engagement with Hegel, via Gillian Rose. See Russell, “Dispossession and Negotiation”. See also (the rather problematic) article Moseley, “Rowan Williams as Hegelian”. Williams wrote three articles on Hegel between 1992 and 1998: “Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity”, “Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose” and “Logic and Spirit in Hegel”. All three are now republished in Williams, Wrestling with Angels. While it is fair to say that the Hegelian perspectives explored in these articles can be seen in some of Williams’ other writings on political issues, it is less clear what relation they have to his more theological or indeed pastoral writings and the political language found there. 32. Williams, Tokens of Trust, 120. There is a very similar passage in Williams, Being Christian. 33. Ibid., 128. 34. Hillesum grew up in a non-practicing Jewish family, and seems to have had little contact with any form of organized religion. Her saintly status is thus not officially accepted by any Christian church, but it is clear that Williams – in the article discussed – is treating her in a way that is at least comparable to how saints are treated by theologians. 35. On the significance of Wittgenstein for Williams’ thinking, see McKinlay, “Ludwig Wittgenstein”. Patrik Hagman 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 21 Rowan Williams, Faith, 318. Hillesum, Etty, 488. Ibid., 506. Williams, Faith, 319. Ibid., 322. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 324. Williams, Teresa of Avila, 197. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 206. Emphasis in the original. Hägglund, This Life, 76–90. “To be saved in the religious sense is to no longer care” (77). Williams, Teresa of Avila, 216. Williams, Dostoevsky, 229–30. It is worth pointing out that Williams’ criticism here indicates what is also problematic with Hägglund’s Marxist view of value in life. Hägglund too, criticizes the way capitalism orders our life so that the only value that is comprehensible is the kind that creates profits (Hägglund, This Life, 212–69). However, his own proposal stays within a strict economic framework where all value is related to time in one sense or another. While probably preferable to the present order, it would still have the effect that “all particulars are levelled”. As always with Dostoevsky, it is more complicated. What we have in book 6 of The Brothers Karamazov is Aljosja’s notes from a conversation with Zosima, thus there is, as Williams notes, room for “critical suspicion and at least a degree of alienation” (Williams, Dostoevsky, 159). Ibid., 164–80. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 208. Williams makes a similar use of the saints in other works too: Williams, Lost Icons, 184; Williams, On Christian Theology, 219. It is interesting that Williams does something very similar in The Tragic Imagination. Even though it deals with a very different subject, Williams evokes the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova on the very last page as an embodiment of the understanding of tragic drama explored in the essay (Williams, The Tragic Imagination, 158). While this might be more of a rhetorical move, it is a very plausible one for Williams to make if the thesis explored above is correct. It is thus insufficient to describe Williams’ understanding of the saints as apologetical in nature, as Myers holds. While the saints clearly can be evoked for apologetical reasons – as in a sense I do in relation to Hägglund in this article – their function in Williams’ thinking has a more fundamental role, as they enable theological talk to challenge conventional notions of what is realistic. The saints thus play a constitutive role in Williams’ thinking, establishing the conditions for “reality”. Hobson, Anarchy, Church and Utopia, 54. 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