Rowan Williams: Staring Into the Dragon's Eyes

Here is how Paul Elie's March 2009 article on Rowan Williams in The Atlantic entitled "The Velvet Reformation" begins:

"Really, I pity him,” a man in the kitchen said in a crisp English accent. “Poor Rowan. He is in an impossible position. He wants to stand with us, I think. But he can’t.”

A West Village apartment; a warm spring evening. In the living room, men and women of middle age nibbled at nuts and flatbreads around a fortepiano. At the kitchen table, a man in a black suit sat signing copies of a book he had written. It was like many a book party in Manhattan’s old-line gay community, except that the author, wearing a scarlet shirt with a clerical collar, was the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, and the book was the story of his struggle to become the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion.

I was there, tagging along with a documentary filmmaker, and I found the Englishman’s remark striking. The point of the party was to honor Robinson, whose ordination as “the gay bishop” had made him a minor celebrity, a cross between Saint Francis and Barney Frank. But the conversation in the kitchen that May evening in 2008 centered on Rowan Williams instead. As archbishop of Canterbury—the so-called Anglican pope—Williams had treated Robinson’s ordination as an unwanted provocation and had refused to invite the new bishop to the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade meeting of the bishops in the Anglican Communion. And yet the people around me weren’t denouncing him as the oppressor; they spoke as if he, not their friend Gene, was the one engaged in an unending struggle against impossible odds.

He is. At a time when Christianity is twisted into a pretzel over the issue of homosexuality, Rowan Williams—alone among the top Christian leaders—is trying to carry on a conversation about it. His approach has been quixotic, at times baffling. But the long-term goal seems clear: to enable the church he leads to become fully open to gays and lesbians without breaking apart."

The rest of the article is well-worth reading. It seems to me, as a casual observer of Anglican church politics, that Elie has pretty much understood his subject and presents him fairly, abeit totally uncritically. In fact, the article swerves toward hero-worship on several occasions as when after pegging Williams as "the great hope of liberal religion: a progressive counterpart to the conservative pope" and noting his self-identification as a socialist and his opposition to the Iraq War, the author can contain himself no longer and burst out with: "Here at last was a religious leader to believe in." I suppose if one has nothing else to believe in, one might get enthused about believing in a religious leader; that wasn't supposed to be the point of Christianity, however.

But what I am interested in his Elie's frank analysis of Williams' role in the debate over the liberalism of The Episcopal Church in the US and the liberal Anglicanism of the West in general. This debate so often is reduced (in this article too) to the issue of the ordination of a homosexual bishop. The tactic is to talk in highly specific terms about just this one issue, so as to deflect attention from the general trend that it represents, a trend toward cultural accommodation to the secular, liberal West and the growing acceptance of heresy and revisionist church practices from liturgy to music to public witness.

Essentially, the point made in this article is that by fighting for unity, delay, conversation, listening and political accommodation, Williams is fighting for the liberal agenda of revision in general. I think this is basically correct. To say that we should think further about how to respond to the general cultural acceptance of homosexuality is structurally the same thing as the Serpent said to Eve in the Garden when he asked "Did God really say?" Of course, God really did not say "from any tree in the Garden" but by asking the question and getting Eve to respond the Serpent was able to draw Eve into in a "conversation" that eventually resulted in the Serpent having an opening to deny God's veracity and, in that situation Eve, who had already surrendered moral clarity, finally was tempted to give in to doubt. Eve made the mistake of dialoguing with an enemy who only wanted to destroy her, not debate with her.

J. R. R. Tolkien knew that one must never stare into the eyes of a dragon (serpent) for to do so is gradually to come under the dragon's power. Everybody knows that - in the sense that alert readers of English literature, which was formed under Christian influence, are aware of this truth as a persistent theme. C. S. Lewis shows how Eustace (in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) got into serious trouble because he went to a modern school where dragons were not on the curriculum.

Rowan Williams seems to have gone to the school of postmodern philosophy in which the ultimate undecideabilty of things is rooted in the agonistic nature of reality, which is at bottom nothing other than the will-to-power. In that school, nature is not created by God with its own peaceful and good intelligibility; it is raw material for the will. If you wonder what it is that Anglicans are waiting for, listening for and trying to discern, it has more to do with whose will to power is going to triumph than any soft wisperings of the Holy Spirit. The school of Nietzsche is a harsh and brutal school, like so many public schools in the modern West, and you don't learn about dragons in such places.