Tuesday, November 21, 2006
(10:00 PM) | Anonymous:
Winning the Brother for Christ (i)
The topic of conviviality, or “life together”, is one in which both politics and theology have a declared interest; so much so that it is sometimes possible (albeit often unwise) to treat political and theological formulations of the matter in an analogous fashion. There have been monasteries run like communes, and vice versa; there have been political and spiritual vanguards with strikingly similar conceptions of their relationship to the wider social or ecclesiastical body. By the same token, the ancient jibe at the Church of England as “the Tory party at prayer” was not only a piece of psephological observation: it identified a structural feature of the church, a common style of spiritual architecture. To be “a bit of a lefty” in the established Anglican Church is even now to be a more-or-less cosseted maverick.Archbishop Rowan Williams is not by nature a maverick, for all that his professed enthusiasm for the novels of Philip Pullman and the music of the Incredible String Band may seem to declare him one. The maverick is a parasite upon normalcy, deploying a kind of anti-camouflage in order to remain at all times in the foreground. Such stylish temporizing cannot long endure the kind of lucidity with which Donald MacKinnon perceived the historical situation of the church; and Dr Williams, whatever his differences with Professor MacKinnon, is an heir to that lucidity. Accordingly, the Desert Fathers, as they appear in his short introduction Silence and Honey Cakes, are not a thrillingly truculent collection of militant anchorites, repudiating the hypocrisies and spiritual compromises of their age in a kind of tonsured adolescent sulk. Neither are they cosseted; above all, they are not self-cosseting.
The Desert Fathers’ flight into the desert, to the solitude of their cells, was not an evasion of conviviality, an abrogation of responsibility for one another, but an attempt to confront, to take the measure of, the irresponsibility of hasty and compulsive speech and action. That haste and that compulsion they knew as sin, and as their own nature, which they recognised not only as occluding their own “personal relationship” to God but also - and far more seriously - as obstructing the salvation of others.
Williams begins with the observation that “[o]ther people in their actual material reality do make things a lot more difficult, when what we think we want is spirituality – the cultivation of a sensitive and rewarding relationship with eternal truth and love”, and poses the Desert Fathers as delivering an “uncompromising message” in response to this impulse: “[t]he actual substance of our relationship with eternal truth and love is bound up with how we manage the proximity of [our] human neighbours”. This is undoubtedly true enough as far as it goes; but what emerges from Williams’s account of the desert monastics is a somewhat more radical inversion of priorities. What we have to fear is not that others will somehow mangle our quietus with their noisome proximity, which we must therefore “manage” in order to maintain a spiritually nurturing conviviality, but that the very faculties and powers with which we might hope to obtain mastery of the situation cannot fail to express themselves in guilty and destructive ways.
The next time Williams speaks of “management”, then, it is in the context of the exercise of a stifling dominion over others:
Jesus himself speaks bluntly about this when he describes the religious enthusiasts of his day shutting the door of the Kingdom in the face of others: “You do not enter yourselves, and when others try to enter, you stop them” (Matthew 23:13). And he goes on to describe how such people exert themselves to gain even one convert, but because they are only trying to make others in their own image, they make them twice as worthy of condemnation as themselves. The desert teachers are well aware that by fleeing to the isolation of prayerful communities they do not automatically leave behind this deep-rooted longing to manage the access of other people to God. This is why they insist upon an ever-greater honesty about the self…because everyone is drawn almost irresistibly back towards this urge to manage.
The discipline of the Desert Fathers is to “die to oneself”, to renounce judgement and to “cover” the sins of others by admitting even greater sins of one’s own. One can imagine this escalating into a bidding war; but the point is not to spur one’s interlocutors on to ever greater heights of confessional loquacity, but simply to enable others to confront their own failings honestly. The example of Macarius explicitly connects this personal kenosis with the imitation of Christ: “Of Macarius we read, in an unforgettable image, that ‘he became like a God on earth’ because when he saw the sins of the brothers he would ‘cover’ them, just as God casts his protection over the world”.
Williams’s account draws out two contrasting kinds of reciprocity in the Desert Fathers’ accounts of the vicissitudes of common life. In the first, my self-satisfaction and desire to make others in my own image causes my sins to become reflected and magnified in others: whenever I “judge” and “manage”, my sinful nature is revealed to me in the distortions it wreaks on others’ lives. In the second, my self-abrogation and openness to grace becomes the occasion for others to “face mercifully” what they are then drawn to admit about themselves. This second reciprocity is known as “winning” the neighbour: “the neighbour is won, or converted, by Macarius’s ‘death’ to any hint of superiority in his vision of himself. He has nothing to defend, and he preaches the gospel by simple identification with the condition of another, a condition they cannot themselves face honestly”.
If nothing else this is admirable psychological ju-jitsu, and testifies to both the seriousness and the deftness with which the desert teachers addressed the problems of emotional discipline in a “prayerful community”. But there is more to it than that, as Williams makes clear in his discussion of the significance of the Desert Fathers for the contemporary church:
Inevitably we think in terms of winning and losing, of this or that controversy which must be resolved in accordance with God’s will so that we prevail in God’s name. It isn’t that the desert tradition knows nothing of controversy, of course; these documents come to us from an age compared with which many of our squabbles are pretty tea-partyish. It is simply that they leave us with the question of whether any particular victory in the constant and supposedly invigorating life of debate leaves some people more deeply alienated from God – and the nastier question of what we are going to do about it if that is so.
There follows a statement of principle: “The church is a community that exists because something has happened which makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant”. The frustrations of Anglican liberals who would have liked to have had hedgehog-song-humming Rowan Williams as a champion in the highest of places within the church hierarchy are largely owing, I believe, to the Archbishop’s commitment to this principle; likewise the fury of those who demand that “church leaders” act as a kind of megaphone for their own necessarily distorted sense of righteousness.
