On 10 April, A N Wilson, writing in The Daily Telegraph (may require free registration), gave this appraisal of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:
If one reason alone had to be found for wishing to hold on to Anglicanism, it is our new Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams is infinitely the most interesting person to emerge into public life in our country for a generation. After decades in which all public figures indulged in soundbite utterance on every subject, we hear at last the lilting, clever voice of a man who thinks before, and while, he so mellifluously speaks.
Some of his words are, like those of the mysterious angel in Tennyson, hard to understand. Some of them are poetry. Sometimes, they cut to the heart of our contemporary concerns. He speaks of very old things, such as the human hunger for God, in new, but not in trendy or toe-curling ways. He is probably a saint, but he does not seem like a man who has cut himself off from the darker experiences. He is neither one of those lovey-bishops who constantly woo the headline-writers by saying "controversial" things, nor is he, like some Christian leaders of recent years, pathetically apologetic for his Church or his creeds. He is smilingly confident without being cocky.
When I hear him talking, I think - I'd like to hear more of this. Living a life based on this set of propositions would be a good thing to do. Moreover, imaginative unselfishness of the particular kind embodied in Dr Williams's Christianity would be a good antidote to many of its alternatives: to rampant consumerism, to overconfident social Darwinism, to the hate-filled paranoias of Judaism and Islam and the smug pessimism of the atheists.
Yesterday, Rowan Williams gave the University Sermon at Cambridge. The Times reports:
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, today launched a powerful and unprecedented attack on the Government over its policy in Iraq. He accused Tony Blair and his ministers of rushing into the war, of not being sufficiently truthful and of creating "a weakening of trust in the political system of our nation". Arguing that trust could be restored by the admission of error or miscalculation, Dr Williams even made a case for civil disobedience, arguing that political obedience in our age has become "problematic". Anglican theologians have never sanctioned compliance with "unjust law", he said. ...
He condemned the "idle and selfish hearts" of those who advocate Christian obedience while themselves being slow to bring their own thoughts "under obedience to Christ". Dr Williams said: "Part of the continuing damage to our political health in this country has to do with a sense of the events of the last year on the international scene being driven by something other than attention. There were things government believed it knew and claimed to know on a privileged basis which, it emerged, were anything but certain. There were things which regional experts and others knew which seemed not to have received attention."
Dr Williams, a former lecturer in divinity at Cambridge, addressing a congregation of academics, clerics and students, continued: "Forgetting the melodramatic language of public deception, which is often just another means of not attending to what is difficult and takes time to fathom, the evidence suggests to many that obedience to a complex truth suffered from a sense of urgency that made attention harder." He indicated that the Government had, by its behaviour over Iraq, lost its right to obedience from its citizens.
"We do not usually look in our rulers for signs of advanced contemplative practice. Nor do we say, even as Christians, that no obedience is due to unbelieving governments. But we do say that credible claims on our political loyalty have something to do with a demonstrable attention to truth, even unwelcome truth." ...
Dr Williams said Christian obedience must be an "intelligent obedience" that involved a careful questioning. "Whatever may have been the theology of obedience in past ages, we cannot now ignore the democratisation of knowledge and the deepened awareness of how ideological distortions may be sustained in public life."
The full sermon can be found here. In the course of his sermon, the Archbishop spoke also about education:
Christian obedience in its biblical sense can never be just a passive conformity to commands in the hope that this will somehow ensure a reward for us. It is properly an obedience given where we see authority engaged with a truth beyond its own interest and horizon - ultimately with the truth of Christ. The obedience of the pupil, at any educational level, is rightly and credibly demanded when the very shape of the intellectual exercise is visibly to do with a mind being pressed and moulded into truthfulness by a reality that has nothing to do with the petty power games that intellectual life can sometimes produce. The best teacher, the one who has most claim on obedience, may be the one who is at times least fluent and confident, most puzzled and engaged and troubled by the truth. The best master is the one who is most visibly mastered by demands and standards that have nothing to do with the serving of his own personal interests. If obedience is a form of attention, the attentive person is the one who should command obedience.
(All this made me recall the words of Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association: 'There's an enormous range of things that are larger than us that we can belong to and be part of, some of which are prepackaged. Being an Orthodox Jew, for example, or being a Republican are prepackaged ones. Being a teacher, someone whose life is wrapped up in the growth of younger people, is a non-prepackaged one. ... Aristotle said the two noblest professions are teaching and politics, and I believe that as well. ...')
