A Conversation with

Rowan Williams
John F. Deane | Issue 80

Rowan Douglas Williams was born in Swansea, south Wales, in 1950, into a
Welsh-speaking family, and was educated at Dynevor School in Swansea and
Christs College, Cambridge, where he studied theology. After two years as a
lecturer at the College of the Resurrection, near Leeds, he was ordained
deacon in Ely Cathedral before returning to Cambridge. In 2002, with eleven
years experience as a diocesan bishop and three as a leading primate in the
Anglican Communion, Archbishop Williams was confirmed as the 104th
bishop of the See of Canterbury: the first Welsh successor to Saint Augustine
of Canterbury and the first since the mid-thirteenth century to be appointed
from beyond the English church. Dr. Williams is acknowledged
internationally as an outstanding theological writer, scholar, and teacher. As
Archbishop of Canterbury his principal responsibilities were, however,
pastoralleading the life and witness of the Church of England in general
and his own diocese in particular by his teaching and oversight, and
promoting and guiding the communion of the world-wide Anglican Church
by the globally recognized ministry of unity that attaches to the office of
bishop of the See of Canterbury. In December 2012 the queen conferred on
him a peerage of the United Kingdom for life, and in January 2013, he was
installed as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Among his many
publications areGrace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and
Love (Continuum, 2005) and the poetry collection Headwaters (Perpetua,
2008). A new collection of poems is forthcoming from Carcanet in 2014. He
was interviewed by John F. Deane.
Image: There is a rich tradition of Welsh poetry that touches on faithpoets
like R.S. Thomas, George Herbert, and others, and also Hopkins, who was
influenced by Welsh poetry. Do you feel yourself a part of that tradition?

Rowan Williams: Those are names of massive importance to me. When I was
a teenager, I began to read a bit of classical Welsh poetry, in Welsh, though
my Welsh isnt anything like fluent; and I discovered poets like Dylan
Thomas and David Jones. When I was about seventeen, a couple of very
important anthologies of Welsh poetry were published. These days the term
Anglo-Welsh poetry is controversial, but at that time, in the sixties, it was
still somewhat exciting. Reading those books, I certainly felt that here was a
world I understood: the world of people who have been molded by the Welsh
landscape, Welsh history, the experience of industrialization, of the country
itself, and the experience of certain kinds of historic Christianity. And by the
half-heard echo of the Welsh language in the background. I found that in R.S.
Thomas, Gillian Clarke, certainly David Jones, Dannie Abse, Jeremy Hooker
these were important names for me. I wanted to belong with all that.

Image: You wear many hats. How does writing poetry fit in with your larger
literary and practical tasks?

RW: Poetry always just makes its own time to get written. Ive never set aside
time to write, but just tried to allow enough opportunity for inner vacancy
where images and sounds can mill around and settleand then you try to
judge the moment when its all ready for finding the words. Long journeys,
waiting for trains, a late night.

Image: In the Old Testament, prophets were people who scarified society
for its misdirected values. Would you see the churches today as failing, in that
they have been mild and genial instead? For instance, in the years when we
had such troubles in the north of Ireland, never once did I hear any church
come out vociferously and say that such slaughter was sinful and wrong.
RW: I think for a lot of Christian history the church has wobbled uncertainly
on such things, willing to be quite forthright on certain kinds of sins, usually
personal, usually sexual, but not so forthright about violence, or money
either. One of my colleagues used to say that in many many years of going to
confession, hed been asked about all sorts of areas in his personal life but not
once been asked about how he was using his money. He said that that was
something he ought to be as accountable for as anything else in his life.

Partly, the church has been willing to go with the grain of humanity about it,
rather than against; and partly, the church has been fatally involved with
power. In point after point, there has been a persistent refusal to take on board
the fact that the Gospel is about the turning upside down of power. The one
thing you absolutely cannot do, according to the Gospel, is use straight
coercive power. Its not to say that the church doesnt exert discipline in
certain areasof course it doesbut the basic model is not that of coercion.

Image: Perhaps this is where the artist comes in. Perhaps the artist can
perform the function of prophet that the churches have neglected.

RW: Absolutely so. And its an interesting way of coming at it. For me,
prophecy is not just about, as you say, scarifying from a safe distance. It
ought also to be about saying, things do not have to be like this. And if you
say that, you have also to say they might be like that. In other words, you
have to evoke the imaginative alternative, or, in Rilkes phrase, the other
world that is the same as this one. In the prophets you have not only the
castigation of the sins of society, you also have massively powerful images:
the mountain of the Lord exalted above all other mountains and all people
streaming to it; the suffering servant of Isaiah; everyone who thirsts, come
to the waters. You have almost dreamlike, weighty and dense images of
reconciliation and renewal: I will remove the veil cast over all peoples.
Theres an image to conjure with.

Image: The poet Christian Wiman writes: Human imagination is not simply
our means of reaching out to God but Gods means of manifesting himself to
us. Meister Eckhart wrote: The eye with which you see God is the eye with
which God sees you. This brings me to a question youve asked in your own
work: Does poetry call for a wholehearted assuredness that ones faith may
not encompass?

RW: Poetry is always a risky enterprise. You dont know where youre going
when you start writing. One thing you do know is that youre not going to
exhaust what youre talking about; the willingness to take the next step, to
put the next word down, is itself an act of faith. You know youre not going to
encompass it, conquer or control it. Thats what makes poetry an act of faith.

One thing that interests me is the way this image of faith or trust is shot
through all our use of language: The trust that I am understood. The trust that
I will discover something by speaking. By listening. The trust that our words
are not, as some philosophers would like them to be, games in the dark. Faith
is implied in the very fact of the difficulty of the task: you know that you are
going to find something there but you never quite manage it. I cant make
sense of that difficulty we experience without the sense that our language
is about something. Its not just choosing what we want to say.

Thats why difficulty, I think, is one of the most positive things in language,
and poetry which is deliberately working to make language more difficult, for
the writer and for the reader, is actually doing us a great service. We must
remember, its neither a game nor a simple labeling operation. Its neither
arbitrary nor controlled. Somewhere in between is this great, luminous
darkness where we are risking the words that just might pierce that darkness.

Image: That leads me back to the idea of prophecy. Many of these prophets
were called, and they listened. Perhaps part of the task of poetry is listening
and waiting for God to touch us.

RW: Poetry, as you know better than I, has about it a listening quality. When
you write, you dont simply put things down. You listen. When I talk to
people about the experience of writing, quite often I tell them that there are
some poems that walk in and sit down. You hear them coming in. Its a
dangerous metaphor, but you almost channel them. Then there are others
where you have to listen and listen. It takes forever for things to assemble
around the core. There may be moments when, for whatever reason, the
channels are cleared, and something is so powerful and overwhelming that
the appropriate poem streams in.

But most of the time were struggling to clear out the clutter and debris. And
you have to listen for the false moments, for the line where youve gone for
the easy option, when its too much work to listen, so you put down
something thatll fit for the moment.

Image: And this is where the editor comes in.

RW: Recently I was getting some new poetry into print, and an editor, very
gently and very precisely, said to me, Those two lines there, you dont need
those. Youve said it already. When I was writing I felt Id got to make it
more explicit, and it took a sensitive and experienced reader to say, No,
youve said it. Now drop it. Its interesting, isnt it? The one area of life
where the maxim never apologize, never explain might be correct is
writing.

Image: May I turn to your fine book Grace and Necessity? You write that
faith allows authors like David Jones and Flannery OConnor to delve more
deeply into human questions. Does this suggest that there is an unavoidably
theological element to artistic success?

RW: I think it does, in a way; I think that when art succeeds, whatever exactly
that means, there has been some opening up tolets use the jargon
ontological depth. Success is when an artist, in Jacques Maritains terms,
produces an object that has the solidity, the claritas, in the medieval sense,
the radiance, the luminosity, the density, of real things. The poem, the music,
the visual artwork has that density that says that the world is full; the world
is not empty; the world is packed (you can hear Hopkins in the background:
the world is charged).

Words or images or musical sounds that are charged in that way are an
extraordinary testimony to the fact that we human speakers have been given
the bizarre and utterly unpredictable gift of doing something a little bit like
Godproducing a reality that is charged, that is present, and that passes the
radiance on to another level.

Image: For me, too, Flannery OConnor has been hugely interesting in that
her letters are written from the perspective of an extremely conservative
Catholicism, but her stories simply avoid all of that and bring the Christian
figure in in a way that is not at all conservative, without preaching in any
way.

RW: She does show that if you really inhabit that world of classical
mainstream Christian religionof grace, incarnation, spirit, sacramentyou
neednt worry about getting it across, because the world that youre
depicting is one where you can actually trust the material to do the job, where
you can let go in the confidence that some truth will come through. Were
back to this power and control question: if you really believe that the
kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ,
and not the other way around, then you ought to be more relaxed than
otherwise about these things. More ready to let the meaning happen. Which is
exactly what Flannery OConnor does with such shocking and transfigurative
effect.

When I read the essays as well as the fiction of Marilynne Robinson, whos a
great favorite of mine, its the same thing; shes writing about a particular
way of being human which is unintelligible without some reference to grace,
and yet that reference to grace doesnt need to be spelled out all the time.

Image: This phrase religious poetry has been bothering me a great deal.
Religious here appears to be a limiting term. It would be better to have
another. Spiritual is wrong. I wonder, would faith poetry be workable?

RW: Faith would work better for me than religious, because religious
poetry always strikes me as poetry written to serve religious purposes.
OConnors art, for example, is good in and as what it is; its not made good
by being religious. And spiritual is so often used as shorthand for not
wanting to be religious in any way that would limit you.
Yes, the idea of a poetry of faithjust as a poetry of eros, a poetry of vision
is rooted in one of the central aspects of our being human. Having faith is a
central aspect of being human just like erotic attachment, just like a vision of
the world around us, just like having a hope in the future. And, to me, a
poetry that is, lets say, religiously significant, is a poetry that works as poetry
out of that human depth.

Image: Id like to ask a question suggested by the poet James Harpur: in The
Wound of Knowledge, you trace the roots of Christian spirituality and explore
its apophatic, negative theology. If the great holy silence is the ideal of some
of the mystics (Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross) doesnt poetry, with its
emphasis on ideas, expression, and words, undermine that ideal?

RW: I certainly dont think poetry is interested in ideas, and Id go along with
those who say that ideas kill poetry. You dont write poetry because you want
to get your ideas into verse. Surely the interesting thing about great poetry is
the silence it generates. This is a complex area, but the great holy silence at
the heart of things is not just an absence or a cessation. Its what happens
when youve been led to this point.

The instance that often comes to my mind is the very first time I sang in a
performance of Mozarts Requiem. I remember the half-minute or so after the
last bar. Thats what it was all leading up to: the moment when, after all that
work, after all those sounds, you get to that very brief moment of silence. An
audience that has shared that music attentively will respond to that very brief
moment. How long exactly the gap is between the end of the sound and the
beginning of the applausewhether in a good play, address, or piece of
musicis an essential part of what the work has been getting to. The silence,
when you get there, has become pregnant.

Image: Your poetry is not exclusively about faith, but the poems about faith
are the ones that have touched me most. In Emmaus, for instance, the
presence of Jesus is disturbing; the reality of resurrection is powerful. Theres
a line, a solid thumb and finger tear the thunderous gray bread. I find that
word thunderous to be a magnificent, an inspired choice. Its a gift.
RW: I dont quite know where that came from, but that is one of the poems
that really did walk in. It all began with a sudden, unexpected picture: I
was listening to a rather dull lecture, and there happened to be a picture on
the wall of the Emmaus supper. What clicked for me was an image of those
visual games where you see two profiles facing each other, forming a cup in
the middle, and I thought, there! thats Emmaus. I was struggling to find
words for that. Then also theres the sense that, at the table at Emmaus, as the
bread is torn apart in the middle eastern way, its like the clouds breaking, its
like the rain coming. So the poem ends with that image of drenching rainfall.

Image: Youve written about tragedy. Could you speak about the tragic and
its relation to faith and art? Why do we take hope and even the promise of
redemption from the deus absconditus and the crossas we do from tragic
art? Why, for example, despite appearances, isnt Lear (and the cross too) a
form of nihilism?

RW: As soon as we find words for what is appalling in our experience, what
seems to be empty, toxic, meaningless, we have done something with it,
reintroduced it into the human world where questions and thoughts can be
tried out. Nihilism would be the absolute refusal to speak or representor
else it would be the insistence that there could be only one way of responding
to what is appalling, and that is despair. Once youve found a word or an
image that connects this atrocity with the rest of human experience, even in
the most fragile or attenuated way, youve turned away from nihilism, even if
there is no consolation, explanation, or resolution.

The crucifixion is an atrocity that rightly silences us at first; then we just (so
to speak) lift up the cross, as we do in the Good Friday liturgy. We lift up the
sign, in hope that it will generate other words and thoughts, as we see
happening in the New Testament.

Image: Recently, in an interview, Thomas Kinsella said that he has been

maturing into disbelief; and Seamus Heaney said not long before he died
that he no longer had any religious belief. These writers emphasize the
possibility of going beyond belief, reaching a stage that you might almost
describe as mystical. Their lives are sufficiently engaged with love, truth, and
integrity. Are we to believe, do you think, that these people are actual
believers, whether they admit it or not? Or is that merely a way of trying to
satisfy our own anxieties?

RW: When people like that say these things about belief, very often what they
seem to mean is this: if you put me on the spot and ask me what I believe to
be true, in the abstract, I dont know where Id begin. But in them you see a
use of language going back to what we were saying earlier about poetry: its
precisely theologically informed in that it is dense, full of radiance,
of claritas. Something theological is going on, and they know it.

The last thing Id call Seamus, for instance, is an agnostic, in the sense of
somebody who floats uncertainly around; he has a real commitment to the
language and all that it means. Very often we tie down the notion of belief to
mean having a quick answer to what you think is true out there, rather than,
how do you inhabit the world youre in, the speech you speak, and the vision
you see.

And at that level I feel faith goes on, God-relatedness goes on, and I dont
worry too much about the uncertainty of what the answers might be. Now,
Im talking about other peoples experience; I say the Nicene Creed every
Sunday without my fingers crossed, I feel enormously grateful to use those
words and to believe thats the world I inhabithallelujah for it! But I can
also see that for a great many people, those words have been filtered through
so many stale and unhelpful media that they dont come alive. But so long as
some things do, and do in the way that we find in people like Seamus and
others, I can only thank God for them.

I dont think thats Christian imperialism. Im not trying to take away the
sincerity of peoples doubts; it is just to say, if you have any religious
commitment, youre bound to believe that some of this miraculous radiance
in words will come through.

Image: Image was founded in 1989. The cultural landscape seems to have
changed in the past twenty-five years, with more openness to religious or
spiritual vocabulary within the mainstream culture and more interest in the
arts within the church. What need is there now for journals like Image, if
any?

RW: Its a vital contribution. One of the things that most needs saying to the
cultured despisers of religion today is that the classical language of faith is
overflowing with resources for imagining and understanding human
experience at depth. As Ive said on other occasions, when people compare
Christian belief to belief in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, I want to ask,
where are the Divine Comedies or Matthew Passions or Four
Quartets inspired by the tooth fairy? Image and enterprises like it show the
seriousness of the language of faith in keeping the human world large and
difficult and interesting.

Yes, the climate has changed a good dealbut that still needs affirming and
bodying out, and Im glad its being done with such energy and style.