Rowan Williams: Idols, Images, and Icons

Rowan Williams gave the closing lecture of the Cadbury Lectures this past March. 

Rowan Williams on Charles Dickens

The Archbishop of Canterbury's commemorative address, given at Westminster Abbey on the bicentenary of Charles Dickens.

It’s difficult to tell the truth about human beings.  Every novelist knows this in a special way, and when Dickens sets out to tell the truth about human beings he does it outrageously, by exaggeration, by caricature.  The figures we remember most readily from his works are the great grotesques.  We have, we think, never met anyone like them, and then we think again.

The truth is extreme, the truth is excessive.  The truth about human beings is more grotesque and bizarre than we can imagine.  And Dickens’ generous embrace of human beings does not arise out of a chilly sense of what is due to them, but out of a celebratory feeling that there is always more to be discovered.  Even his villains are exuberant.  It was George Orwell who pointed out that when Mr Murdstone sets David Copperfield one of those appalling sums in his unhappy childhood, it is couched in terms of calculating numbers of Double Gloucester cheeses. Orwell points out that a real Murdstone would never have thought of the cheeses - it’s part of that overflow, that unnecessary excessive sense of what is human that takes us from page to page in Dickens, eyebrows raised and breath bated.

Dickens is the enemy not so much of an unjust view of human beings, as of a boring view of human beings.  He loves the poor and the destitute, not from a sense of duty but from a sense of outrage that their lives are being made flat and dead.  He wants them to live.  He wants them to expand into the space that should be available for human beings to be what God meant them to be.  In Hard Times, he left us, of course, one of the most unforgettable pictures of what education looks like if it forgets that exuberance and excess, and treats human beings as small containers for information and skill.

And that sense of the grotesque is, strange as it may sound to say it, one of the things that makes Dickens a great religious writer.  As we’ve heard [in the earlier reading from The Life of Our Lord] he could write simply and movingly about Christ.  He could, in A Christmas Carol, leave us one of the greatest modern myths arising out of the Christian story.  But he had relatively little time for conventional religion, and no time at all for those who substituted conventional religion for that exuberant celebration of the human, which he was interested in.

[Extract from Bleak House] - “Mr Chadsbans he wos a prayin wunst at Mr Sangby’s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a speakin’ to hisself, and not to me.  He prayed a lot, but I couldn’t make out nothink on it.”

The Chadsbans and the Jellabys and all those other (again, I’m afraid) unforgettably exuberant hypocrites in his books – these are the people for whom at the end of the day, he wishes judgement to be passed.

But that sense of excess in the human spirit and the human heart also leads on to another side of Dickens – equally serious, equally religious, much more disturbing – that side of Dickens which makes him indeed a novelist to stand alongside the very greatest imaginative spirits in Europe.  And this is Dickens’ sense of the tragic.  Dickens writes about people ‘in hell’, and he knows what hell is like.  He describes people in the hell of deceit and self-deceit -  William Dorrit, Mr. Merdle, Lady Dedlock - people who cannot live, literally, when their myths about themselves are destroyed.  Because part of this sense of exuberance in Dickens is the recognition that all of us live by projecting myths and dramas about ourselves.  We tell stories about ourselves, we write scripts for ourselves, and we love to act them out.

But what happens when those stories and those scripts are so far from reality that we cannot actually survive the touch of truth?  Tragedy in Dickens is so often about that appalling moment when a myth is shattered, and a person with it.  And along with the hell of deceit and of self-deceit, there are the hells of obsession – of Mr. Monks and Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam and Bradley Headstone.  The people who have lost all their freedom, and for once are losing their exuberance because they have been taken prisoner by something in themselves, locking them in, weighing them down.  They are part of Dickens’ unparalleled portraiture of self-destruction.  And perhaps these depictions of hell – the hells of self-deceit and obsession and self-destruction – perhaps the depictions of these hells owed something to Dickens’ own painful self-awareness.  A man who recognised the gap in his own life, so often, between aspiration and reality; a man who in his own exuberance drove himself towards self-destruction – and yet in that very process, again as we have heard, drew out extraordinary levels of sheer joy, festive celebratory hearing, of what he had to say.

A man, then, who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly.  A man who portrays human beings in hell.  And yet when we read him, it does not read like bad news.  Because what does he have to say at the end of the day about redemption?  In some ways not a great deal.  Or rather there is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved happy ending, and an immense burden of recognised, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering.  He achieves the balance of those two most perfectly, for one reader, in Bleak House, where the past tense of Esther’s narrative is balanced by the present tense of unhealed suffering, the rain still falling on the Lincolnshire wolds.  But in that book, which one reader at least thinks is perhaps his most profoundly theological – though he wouldn’t thank me for that – in that book, we have one of the strangest, most shocking images that he ever gives us of compassion and mercy, and that is the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock.  At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration, “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour” says Sir Leicester, with his typical dryness about his wife who has fled from him in guilt and terror.  And in that appallingly stiff phrase we hear something of the hope of mercy.  Almost silent, powerless, Sir Leicester after his stroke, dying slowly in loneliness, and stubbornly holding open the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony.

“We may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace”, says Dickens for his children.  And perhaps for us as grownups, or people who might quite like to be grownups one day, that image of the hope of God’s forgiveness is shockingly, startlingly, expressed in that lonely figure stubbornly holding the door open, revoking no dispositions made in our favour.  Powerless to enforce love or justice, and yet indestructibly, even extravagantly, offering the only kind of love that is appropriate – the extravagant and excessive nature of human beings.  An utterly unreasonable compassion, which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.

the strangeness of Easter

“Theologies” of Easter only do their job, perhaps by their very theoretical untidiness, by their capacity to point back towards the disorienting “He is not here” of the very first Easter witness; back to the confusing narratives and the frustrating impossibility of pinning down and defining “the” Easter experience. . . .

The cross ceases to be an ideological weapon when it is recognized not only as mine but as a stranger’s; and it is the stranger whom we meet on Easter morning. To stop with Good Friday is to see the crucified simply reflecting back to me my own condition and even to remember the crucified, in the superficial sense, can merely leave us with a martyr for our cause. The women come on Easter morning to look for the corpse of a martyr and the find a void. If we come in search of the “God of our condition” at Easter, we shall not find him. . . . Holy Week may invite us to a certain identification with the crucified, Easter firmly takes away the familiar “fellow sufferer.” It does not even allow him to be a consoling memory, a past hero; he is not here because he is risen, because his life continues and is not to be sealed off with a “martyr’s” death. There is at Easter no Christ who simply seals our righteousness and innocence, no guarantor of our status, and so no ideological cross.

~ from Resurrection by Rowan Williams

my new employer

CMU PRESS

Mission Statement

"CMU Press is an academic publisher of scholarly, reference, and general interest books at Canadian Mennonite University. Books from CMU Press address and inform interests and issues vital to the university, its constituency, and society. Areas of specialization include Mennonite studies, and works that are church-oriented or theologically engaged."

First day on the job over and done with. I've been shoved into an office I'll be sharing with three sessional professors, not that I'm complaining or anything. I met Simon, who teaches advanced calculus to a class of six. Another fellow strolled in later that afternoon and his cellphone would not keep quiet. Coffee in the staff and faculty lounge may rival the Blaurock's. CMU personal, I'm told, take their coffee culture very seriously - much talk is wasted on who will be making coffee, whether they'll make it strong enough, when to start the new pot, etc. Quite the fixation, but a welcome one. The lounge is also host to a variety of reading material - so anytime I'm tired of "Mennonite studies" I can snag the latest TLS, London Review of Books or any other pretentious academic rag I lay eyes on. 

Did you know the New York Review of Books has a section for personal ads, suited, of course, to the single bibliophile? See example below:

"VERY ATTRACTIVE, slender professor of English, DJF, loves foreign films and classical music, seeks her soulmate, a genuine and successful mensch (55–67) for friendship, love, and whatever follows. NYC. Call (212) 300-3767." Titillating indeed. 

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Over the holidays, I saw a romantic comedy starring Ricky Gervais. Shmaltzy, yes, but Gervais is, as always, a charming slimeball. Here's an audio sample of an amusing interview between Gervais and Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that I stumbled across recently. It's from the Simon Mayo Radio Show on BBC Radio 5 Live. I love it when Williams does this sort of thing.