Abstract
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, has long been fascinated by the Eastern Christian tradition and in Looking East in Winter he introduces the rest of us to key themes and personalities, readjusting our perception of the Orthodox tradition and revealing the much-needed corrections that the tradition offers to Western Christian thought and culture. Williams acts as a guide who navigates the reader through the Philokalia (an anthology of spiritual writings published in the eighteenth century) and works from more recent Russian figures. He engages with a range of sophisticated thinkers, whose work is not merely academic but also deeply contemplative—a rich tradition that Williams carries on himself in this work, illustrating this mode of doing theology to the reader and inviting her to the same. The book is composed of a set of lightly revised essays and lectures, which means that, at times, the persistent threads running throughout the work are not as obvious or clearly articulated as they might be. The reader must do some work to draw those out, and while not necessarily an easy task, it is a generative one: the reader is invited into a sense of collaborative contemplation in her own reading of Williams’s writing and his explanations of others’.
The image captured in the title is drawn from Diadochos of Photike in the fifth century: ‘looking east in winter we feel the warmth of the sun on our faces, while still sensing an icy chill at our backs’ (p. 8). Our sensory awareness is divided, yet we are present to both experiences simultaneously, in hopeful anticipation of the one reality warming and transfiguring the other—‘this is the promise that the Church must embody if it is to be credible in what is at the moment a notably wintry world’ (p. 8). Throughout the book Williams captures the inescapable interrelationality of doctrine and spirituality, thought and action, both personal and political; this is the contemplative tradition we particularly need in our cultural moment.
The opening section (‘Prologue’) is one that many readers will find themselves wading through, though with attention and determination there are plenty of gems to pick up along the way. Williams introduces the Philokalia to us as theological reflection grounded in the practice of contemplation—an approach exemplified by the dominant voice of Maximos the Confessor, and carried by Williams himself. The work of Evagrios Pontikos, in particular, has often been appraised as problematic (including by Williams himself), as his world-denying dualism can lead to unsettling implications. Yet Williams now shows that, when read in light of Maximos’s later explanation and extensions, Evagrios’s spirituality is compatible with incarnational theology, and grounded in embodiment and this-worldly action. Evagrios’s most valuable contribution (in my opinion), and which we need Maximos’s and Williams’s help to read rightly, is ‘the diagnosis of how knowledge is inflected by passion, and how our perceptions may become “diabolical” when dominated by the question of what individual profit or satisfaction may be gained from the object of knowledge’ (p. 187). Williams returns to this theme throughout the book, continually naming this deeply challenging reality that (hopefully) the reader will recognize in the brokenness of their own humanity as well as in others. Our ways of seeing and knowing are so warped that we perceive others in relation to ourselves—our needs, desires and distortions—rather than through a lens of solidarity and our common life. Evagrios, Maximos, and Williams call us to a ‘natural, God-reflecting state of human intelligence’ (p. 31), formed by Word and Spirit, that empowers a selfless receptivity to the world. Our desire for this truly natural state of ours never reaches its fulfilment or terminus, but is continuously blossoming in us, even as we pursue that which is yet unknown to us.
The following section (‘Analogue’) develops these themes in four shorter chapters which explore how these ontological considerations are worked out in the life and growth of human persons and community. The anthropology is deeply trinitarian, and Williams shows how our intimate participation in the life of Christ, in which dependence is fundamental to what it means to be human, liberates us to respond unselfconsciously to the other in solidarity rather than self-interest. These chapters land us in the emphases that ‘resting upon, and being animated and directed by, Word and Spirit’ (p. 3) are the foundations of human existence, and so must be the focus of our discipleship and our being in the world.
In ‘Dialogue’ (chapters 6–10) Williams works out the practical implications of all this for our ways of making meaning and the exercise of power, examining church liturgy and tradition, social relations, and political action. He moves from an anthropology shaped by liturgy and contemplation that describes ‘restored and life-giving’ human relations to then ask how these might be realized in human society in general and in ‘a theologically informed politics’ (p. 5). It is these emphases that are of greatest interest to this reader.
In chapter 6, Williams explores ‘liturgical humanism’ and draws on Alexander Schmemann and Olivier Clément to outline a distinctly Orthodox notion of liturgy as suffused with anthropology in such a way that it must be made manifest in human culture and behaviour. This is liturgy that is responsive to the world in real-time rather than mere repetitive ritual, that makes us mindful again of human identity in Christ, moves us towards God and towards one another, and that flows into embodied action in our material and social world. Williams offers a gentle rebuke to the overblown concern that our liturgy (whether traditional or contemporary) is ‘instructive, even instantly intelligible, let alone entertaining’ in favour of attention to whether ‘it looks as though it is credibly changing the vision and the policies of those participating, so that they are awakened to the active realities of person, liberty, communion and—ultimately—resurrection’ (p. 157). Williams points to the implications liturgy has for social ethics, environmental action, and care of the vulnerable. While there is nothing particularly new in this claim of the shared status of those at the edges of life in any way, grounding it in the liturgical repetition of remembering strengthens the notion of solidarity as the mode of our engagement with contemporary culture in our public and private spheres.
This emphasis on the shared life continues in chapter 7, where Williams draws on the work of Ivan Kireevskii and Aleksey Khomiakov in particular to unfold developments in nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy regarding the place of doctrine and tradition, and the shape of the contemplative tradition. Insights emerge for the communality of doctrinal discernment and the importance of attention to the shared life of the local Christian community as a source of knowing, in contrast to dependence on external criteria alone. This understanding of tradition is grounded in an anthropology that takes seriously the distortions of both an individualistic culture and individuals themselves. This theme continues in chapter 8, where Williams demonstrates a vision of justice that truthfully responds to reality, rather than balancing competing interests and contending powers. He describes the first step in learning discernment as ‘learning how to identify and bring to stillness the urge to reduce the world to the terms of my desires’, and then secondly, ‘learning how to read the various and complex situations of the historical world with an eye to how they serve or fail to serve fundamental human solidarities’ (p. 192). All this points us towards the contemplative tradition as an educator of the passions that shape our perceptions and our political action.
In chapters 9 and 10 Williams works out these general claims and the particular challenge to an overly cognitive and rationalistic mode of discernment via the subversive nature of ‘holy folly’ and the ‘holy fool’. The ‘holy fool’ (iurdstvo) features repeatedly in the Russian literary tradition as an eccentric ascetic with almost clairvoyant vision, who disrupts established norms and conventions. They are ‘figures who defy convention so as to show something of the anarchic character of divine grace or the drastic opposition between divine and worldly power’ (p. 195). Though seemingly irrational, actors in this tradition are supposedly offering a reasonable act of worship (Rom. 12:1), dismissive of self-regard. Here Williams exposes the limits of our ability to recognize holiness when we see it: we must consistently question our perception—shaped as it is by self-interest. While the ‘holy fool’ illustrates this tradition, martyrs are the most dramatic example of all, and in chapter 10 Williams relates the story of Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891–1945), a social activist and ‘reckless defender of French Jews’ (p. 216), who was executed at Ravensbruck and canonized in 2004. This moving chapter calls us to absolute renunciation as a basic imperative that expresses the fleshly solidarity in suffering that is entailed by our membership in the Body of Christ, and which should be outworked as instinctively as a mother's response to the suffering of her child. This call to love our neighbour, and the maternal paradigm involved, is not naïve, it is ‘terrible’, and requires us to be strictly disinterested. Our engagement with the other must not be paternalistic or agenda-driven but unquestioningly attentive to the particularity of the other and to the sheer physicality of the person and their need. This is ‘the beginning of that more complex asceticism that strips us of our fascination with the story of our own passions, chastens our uninvolved curiosity about others, and readies us for imaginative entry into the standpoint of another’ (pp. 231–32).
The concluding chapter (‘Epilogue’) explores the eschatological implications and signficance of all that has gone before. Building on Zizioulas’s reading of the eschatological context and meaning of the Eucharist, Williams applies this pattern to reading Scripture, prayer, and the communal life of worship and discipleship. This framing is a necessary counter to the increasing perception of spiritual practices as tools to be operationalized in the pursuit of personal growth or even the late-modern shaping of the self. There is a temptation to adopt facets of a contemplative tradition as an attempt to improve ourselves or to control at least something of our lives in these turbulent times. Instead these spiritual practices, even when executed individually, are communal enactments of the Church and foretastes of the eschatological realization of the final goal of our creaturely existence.
Realistically, while some readers of Looking East will be enraptured by almost every page, others, especially those less familiar with the Eastern tradition, will need to dip in and out to avoid getting bogged down. Yet even the latter group who are gathering the gleanings will enjoy a rich feast. It is not an easy meal, however, as Williams offers profound challenges to the orientation of much of popular spirituality in the Western tradition: we often tend towards interiority, self-absorption, over-emphasis on the cognitive, and political inaction—at least I don’t think it's just me and my tribe. Williams squarely faces the reality of these passions and impulses, a diagnosis that is sorely needed whenever we discuss anthropology, and consistently draws our attention to the implications of anthropology for our life in the world. He writes into the polarization of the political arena, rebuking a distorted understanding of the institution of the Church and her practices that aims to grasp and exert cultural, and even political, power. He writes that the Church is not ‘a human organization striving for success and influence, let alone trying to win elections; nor is it an organization devoted to cultivating “private” virtue or holiness, or to providing a satisfying spiritual gloss to unchallenged human comforts and compulsions’ (p. 5). Instead Williams draws us—in a manner that is both academically satisfying and deeply contemplative—to an enacted spirituality that outworks our relational mutuality, and attends to our embeddedness in body, time, and space.