Rowan Williams: Faith and Human Flourishing

it gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to the second and last lecture given in this year's interfaith lectures in the Humanitas program my name is Johanna Tsukuba and I am the director of that particular program I also teach modern theology in the Faculty of theology and religion and I'm a fellow at Trinity College which is partly hosting these events a very particular welcome of course is due to our speaker dr. Rowan Williams dr. Williams spoke last week for those of you who weren't there on faith force and authority does religious belief change our understanding of how power works in society he used that opportunity to develop a number of deeply theological ideas about power and how they should change or influence the way we look at the operation of or the role of religious institutions and their relationship with political authority his topic today leads on from there well I assume we'll know in a moment and the title is faith and human flourishing religious belief and ideals of maturity and now without further ado I hand over to the man whom to hear you've come dr. Williams we very much look forward to hearing you thank you once again my very grateful thanks for the invitation to be here and to deliver these lectures they've given me an opportunity not so much to think about interfaith issues as usually understood but more to think about fundamental issues in how we define how we understand religion itself and how we understand something about the religious personality now that's the link I want to try to develop this afternoon moving on from the discussion which I initiated last week about the nature of power to think about how that impacts on basic models of religious identity because if the reflections I shared last week on power what it does doesn't mean in the religious context were anything like accurate then there are some reasonably clear implications for how we think about religious identity both individual and corporate I suggested last week that we systematically made mistakes about the nature of power when we tried to apply that language in the setting of religious belief I suggested that the notion of a deity with unconditional power is all too easily turned into a vastly magnified version of what I would like to have for my own liberty and my own self can I own sense of control but also within the categories and vocabulary of traditional religiousness there were a number of factors pulling against that Distortion suggesting that the essence of talking about divine power was something rather more like the freedom to let the other be the freedom it rest in creation the ultimate power that has no anxiety in a rivalry no territoriality and in the course of that noted that for classical Abrahamic faiths as well as in some ways even more for others the divine is not an item inside the universe nor for clarifications sake is the divine an item outside the universe in a spatial sense we're talking about something of another order now quite often religious identity is understood from within and without as having rather a lot to do with what philosophers moral philosophers called heteronomy that is the imposition of law convention norms from outside from the other and thus religious identity is seen as having a very great deal to do with repression to be religious on that account is to be subject to another's will and therefore to be called upon to make dramatic and consistent self-sacrifice you won't need me to elaborate the ways in which that has been abused distorted and used for anti human purposes across the centuries the point is that if that account is correct if that is what religious identity is about then the two items in my title religion and human flourishing don't very easily belong together at the end of the day on the other hand if the sketch I offered last time of how we might as religious people understand power is correct then the picture is more complex and what I intend to do this afternoon is to try to spell out the implications of conceiving divine power certain way in relation to what might be the marks of a religiously shaped human maturity if divine power is the absolute freedom to bring the other into being without fear without rivalry without anxiety then it would make no sense if human flourishing could only be achieved at the expense of God it would make no sense if to be human well somehow to take some territory some meaning away from the meanings of God that would only be the case if God were competing with us with him the territory of the universe think of power in another sense and that doesn't follow so there must be some way of spelling out a religious idea of maturity and flourishing and I'm going to suggest four lines of development here four themes which might suggest some of the things that are around as we seek to offer a definition of human maturity religiously informed the themes of these first of all how we handle dependence and autonomy how we handle dependence and autonomy secondly the education of passion I'll expect that more time even at the education of passion thirdly the taking of time and fourthly the acceptance of mortality handling dependence and autonomy educating the passions taking time accepting mortal mortality so to the first dependence and autonomy autonomy is very much an accepted ideal of modern and late modern culture and it's perhaps a little bit too much of a cliche though you often hear it from some religious people that regarding autonomy as a supreme value is somehow mistaken I don't want to overdo that but I do think that there are issues in how we talk about how we understand autonomy dependence is after all a condition of human life in certain senses importantly inescapable the long latency period of the human young the phenomenon of language the relative physical vulnerability of the human organism in its environment all of these things build in to our distinctive human experience a character of inescapable receiving formation by to suppose that we are our own authors is to try and escape from some of these dimensions of our humanity negotiating what it means to be dependent is part of being human the moral problem that has always surrounded this has been that very often when people talk about the need to accept dependence they mean you need to accept your dependence on me or some equivalent of that that's to say it's about inequality imbalance within the human world but that doesn't absolve us from trying to make sense of what it is for us to be receivers as well as creators and what some have called the illusion of self creation is a serious and vexing problem in how we understand the development of the human psyche that remarkable and rather controversial writer Ernest Becker in an earlier generation wrote extensively about what he calls the project of self creation and how prolonged beyond a certain developmental stage it becomes the source of all kinds of pathologies and he quotes Kierkegaard's definition of demoniac rage an attack on all of life for what it has dared to do to one as a manifestation of defiant self creation the anger of the would be self creator when the world the self proved not after all to be under the control of the will now the position of religious faith is to generalize of course that all of us share one fundamental form of dependence which is our dependence on divine Liberty we are here because there is an act which we echo participate in reflect however you want to put it an act of divine initiative in virtue of which we are here at all and so for us to be ourselves the acknowledgment of that level of dependence is very importantly part of what sets us free because it acquaints us with what is true about us we depend on an act that is not ours that is not us in its Christian version this has some very specific coloring we are as Christians encouraged to think of ourselves as growing into not simply the divine life in general terms but that particular form of divine life represented by the word son the offspring of the eternal source we are adopted into a relationship of dependence to the one that Jesus calls other father our human identity therefore becomes one in which we both acknowledge in prayer our dependence on the gift that sets up not only our being but our renewed being in Christ and in acknowledging that dependence we are empowered to do the work of God to be in Christ however you might want to phrase it in various idioms and metaphors that the New Testament provides for us it's about an authority which emerges from yielding not to an alien will but to an affirming source yielding not to an alien will but to an affirming source recognizing that I am here because there is an act which wills me to be and affirms my being so I do not have to be my own origin I do not have to try to be a self creator there is a level of affirmation bringing me into and holding the in existence which I do not have to work for and that relates back once again to some of the observations I was making last week about divine power and how a robust sense of what that means could deliver us from the anxiety of trying to keep God happy that's another story so in this first area of handling dependence and autonomy one of the proposals of religious faith in religious language is that we are empowered emancipated to exercise the transforming energy we can exercise by acknowledging our dependence on a unconditional source of affirmation I've given the version of that which is particularly associated with Christian language and Christian doctrine we could spend longer on what that means in other religious contexts but the theme in various guises runs across confessional boundaries to a significant degree I'm not I should add in brackets suggesting that all religions are saying the same thing but attempting to note tease out some of those things which characterize a religious form of identity or self understanding answer to my second overarching theme the education of passion now passion in both Christian and Buddhist usage has some very specific associations it's not simply a matter of emotion or instinct the passions as analyzed and discussed particularly in the ascetical literature say of the fourth to the eighth century in the Christian world and indeed much longer in the Eastern Christian world the passions are those disturbances of the proper or fruitful condition of the self associated with inappropriate response to outside stimuli prodded and stimulated into life by the environment wherein we can says the great Evagrius at the end of the fourth century we can respond in a variety of ways some human some diabolical and some divine a human response pragmatic and exploratory a diabolical response which seeks to master environment and turn it solely to the purposes of the ego a divinized response which regards what is around us in its own right in its own dignity not seeking to make it serve our private ends so passion is the diabolical response it is that response to an environment which is concerned simply to own and absorb which is incapable of seeing what is in its own right in its own dimensionality and there are a number of ways in which uneducated passion can confirm our unfreedom our moral and spiritual slavery it's quite tempting to lift from our shoulders the burden of intelligent choice by naturalizing our motivations by saying these are the impulses I have and therefore they need to be fulfilled I don't need to reflect on them assess them discern them choose between them there they are and lifting the burden of choice by appeal to an unexamined instinctual life is one of the obvious temptations we face there and it can find its more contemporary forms in various versions of neurological determinism I don't really choose this is what happens in me I don't act things happen but along with that we can assume with unexamined on criticized passion we can assume there's absolute givenness of our needs and desires gives us selves solid agenda which potentially has to be defended against others and so buys back into that system of rivalry zero-sum gaming and so forth which we talked a little about last week so that if I had to try and sum up what the word passion means in the classical Christian tradition it seems to me to designate two things the uncritical affirmation of the ego and the positioning of that ego in a state of struggle and rivalry the uncritical affirmation of the ego the positioning of the ego in a state of rivalry contest major religious traditions and I mentioned particularly Buddhism and Christianity here offer both a diagnosis of passion and a pedagogy a way of educating passion not eradicating but understanding and that understanding has a lot to do with discerning what this life of passion serves what its goals and products are so by putting our reflex passionate responses to the world under scrutiny we may find better what it is that those reflexes are aiming at and perhaps understand better how to reroute some of their energy away from the world of contest struggle and rivalry when Christians in that Classical period of spiritual reflection between the 4th and the 8th century talked about apatheia as the Christian ideal I don't need I'm sure to underline for you that that does not mean apathy it doesn't even mean the total absence of this instinctual life it means rather that state in which you are aware of your reflexes and your responses in such a way that you can think through them sense your way towards a goal that is not purely self protective or acquisitive and there's a good deal in the tradition about the proper use of passion sometimes to undercut other sorts of passion you can find there are some responses whose false energy or even relative violence can be deployed to knock other selfish instinctual behaviors of course but that's to go into more detail than I want to discuss here the point is there is a diagnosis there is a pedagogy there is the possibility of being aware of how one responds and the possibility of intelligently reshaping that response turn to the Buddhist thought world and of course the categories are dramatically different and yet some of the issues are still around for the Buddhist release comes when you recognize the totally conditioned character not only of your responses but of every act mental and physical in which you are involved the beginning of wisdom is to dissolve the solidity of self feeling speech and thought in order to create a different kind of space within the world which in at least some traditions of Buddhism shows itself in what we call compassion so the scrutiny of the passions and the education of the passions becomes a second area in which religious identity has something distinct to say about human identity appears as a distinct form of human identity characterized by practices and images which rooted in specific narratives nonetheless have some parallels in the way that they work now my third area may be rather less obvious taking time but want to suggest that attitudes to time and the passage of time are deeply characteristic of distinctively religious behavior people of faith do things with the calendar as you know one of the easiest default settings if in doubt as to what to teach in religious education in schools is to teach children about festivals and although that can occasionally be anecdotal and unhelpful behind it is a lot completely faulty instinct that how religious communities spend their time is a serious and central theme time is not undifferentiated it's passing is marked in ways that are thought to be symbolically significant so the passage of time becomes not just a trajectory of acquisition acquiring property acquiring power acquiring security the passage of time comes to be about the repeated accumulation as you might say of meaning returning to symbolic resources to rediscover aspects of the universe you inhabit aspects of yourself to reconnect specific ongoing experience with steady regular rhythmical patterns laid out in the language and the practice of a religious community you keep going back to the practices the stories the celebrations the commemorations and time therefore becomes neither simply cyclical nor simply linear it moves you change at the same time there is something to which you return to rediscover and enlarge the understanding acquired in the passage of time but all of that adds up of course to dissolving any idea that time is a limited commodity or need any kind of commodity which has to be squeezed as hard as possible in order to keep the trajectory of acquisition going time becomes a complex and rich gift it becomes the medium in which we not only grow and move forward but also constructively return the resource literally resource ourselves and there are deep implications within that for how we approach human work and human wellbeing and how we understand and how we cultivate a fruitful rhythm in action and human engagement increasingly one of the marks of a fully and uncompromising Lee secular environment is of course the notion of undifferentiated time there are four mature late capitalism no such things as weekends the problem with that kind of secularism is not so much that in our the existence of God of the denial of the possibility of leisure that's to say for a particular mindset acquisitive and purpose driven in a specific way the passage of time is precisely the slipping away of a scarce valuable commodity every moment of which has to be made to yield its maximum possible result so you can't afford to stop that kind of good I shall mark a little that card secular understanding of the passage of time is perhaps one of those areas where there is most open collision between a fundamentally religious and a fundamentally anti religious mindset and I think that's one of the untold stories of our time we imagine quite often that we that the really fundamental collisions are around metaphysics or ethics perhaps there's another area at least as important which is how we approach the time we are in the time we spend and Adid the time we waste and these three themes so far autonomy passion time the theme of the struggle for autonomy the self creation project the seduction of unexamined or on criticizing and our desperation about time all those of course converge with anxiety about death and reluctance to accept mortality our mortality tells us that every project we have is limited there is something non-negotiable about that absolute limit there is an ultimate challenge in that any fantasy or fiction of the all-powerful ego and it is resistance to mortality the denial of death in the title of Ernest Becker's best-known book the denial of death that takes us back towards the pathologies of Para which we looked at last week power as the effort to deny not only limit but the ultimate limit of death that's Ernest Becker so the knowledge of mortality runs through all those other themes in one way or another because the denial of that knowledge of our mortality returns us to the false the destructive models of power which we were looking at last week and the characteristically religious response includes at least it's not the whole of it but includes a balance of attention to the immediate and resignation to the long-term redeemed I miss spent time that's past live each day as if twere thy lust says the Anglican him that's to say the attention to what is immediately to be done along with acceptance of long-term limit and long term ending is what were asked to do what were asked to engage in it's not about a wavering level of attention to the present for the sake of an imagined future though that's the way it's sometimes been treated we're going to die so we'd better have a plan it's not quite what it's about well those are my four areas proposed as some of the characteristics of a religious human identity a flourishing human identity shaped by religious considerations shaped by a conviction about a Liberty on which we depend convictions about the possibility of clarification by honesty and discipline of our instinctual life shaped by a readiness to see the passage of time as symbolic and complex not just an undifferentiated continuum which has to be filled and shaped by an acceptance of the limit of mortality non disabling dependence a freedom for self-critique patience and literacy in ritual and lack of anxiety in the face of death the absence of any or all of these is one of the contributory factors in dysfunctional human communities and dysfunctional human individuals those who are rebelling against any form of dependence those who cannot cope with the notion of self question or self critique those who wish to treat time as I say as something which has to be filled up those who are in denial of their mortality but of course having said all that those four crucial what should I call them seasons of the life of the Spirit are all of them capable of being distorted and misrepresented within the religious idiom within religious rhetoric and system building and if we're going to talk about those four as positive things it's not unimportant to be aware of the negativity that can also be triggered so just to run through them briefly what I call mom disabling dependence can be replaced by infantilism by love of dependence for its own sake divorced from any notion that dependence enables or liberates institutions and authorities religious institutions and authorities are in case you haven't noticed capable of very high degrees of infantilization of communities and sometimes that is welcome to those for whom non disabling dependence is rather hard work as of course it is instead of the critical and constructive approach to passion suggested by some aspects of the classical tradition we can of course take refuge in emotional repression we can elevate the will over the feelings which is not at all what the classical discussion of passion is about we can elevate the will over the feelings in the hope that somehow dangerous or uncontrollable or unpredictable instincts can be controlled by our decision we can turn the again creative and constructive use of the rituals of time into ritualism and the fear of change instead of a sense of the sacredness of a time that has given us for constant cumulative rediscovery and of course religious language is more than capable of renewing and intensifying anxiety in the face of death partly by certain kinds of talk about divine judgment you have every reason to be afraid of death because of what's coming after or of course it can encourage you to ignore the present for the sake of a heavenly future in a conservatory and dishonest frame so all of those aspects of religiously shaped human flourishing are capable of being in effect turned on their head and distorted in ways like those and if we are to avoid that kind of distortion that kind of turning upside down of the what I believe to be the essentially constructive and flourishing models have been trying to outline we know we need I think to go back to some of the fundamental points that I was hinting at in the first leg points about power divine power and about the difference of God that is the fact that God is not a competing item inside the universe if that is anything like clear it will become for example a goodly easier to see that dependence on God is radically unlike yielding to someone else who is like you depending on God is radically unlike losing a struggle for power losing your control losing your autonomy to be dependent in a radical sense on another human subject is to be a deep danger of repressive dehumanizing patterns of relation to depend on God I believe in the context I've suggested is something unlike that likewise freedom from passion apatheia is not giving up what is natural for the sake of the supernatural but learning a perspective on oneself learning the right and wrong exercises of the will in this identifying some of the ways in which self oriented responses to the world prevent us seeing what is there and so allowing our vision in some sense to be cleansed imagery which is as potent in the Buddhist as in the Christian world had in media many other contexts also so that getting our perspectives a little clearer on the grammar of God how we talk about God as God that is not only to do with clarifying purifying what we say about God it is also crucially a purifying of what we find to say about to ourselves to see oneself afresh in this light and to learn the grammar of talk about God belong absolutely and inseparably together which is why I've offered in these lectures a pairing of reflections on the power and transcendence of God and reflections on what it means for human beings to flourish and so if we are to recover any sense of religious commitment being more than just having a set of mental positions usually seen as irrational mental positions we need to refocus a bit on how we are as religious people speaking of human flourishing what is the human face that has been uncovered in the practices of faith what's the human face it's being uncovered in the practices of faith it's a question increasingly posed about the habits of our contemporary world Richards Senate's important work on the human and psychological effects of capitalism has posed the question what kind of human being does current global market practice presuppose and what kind of human being does it nurture adding of course is that the kind of human being we want to be caught in a train carriage with but the question is the same for any religious practice habit system what kind of human face is being uncovered what sort of humanity is being educated nourished developed in this context by this language and that is where of course the criticism of religion by those who don't share its commitments is of such a central importance it is very important for people of any faith to put it very simply to know what they look like in the eyes of others that may not be a fair or reasonable or comprehensive picture but it is important to see what face is actually being uncovered in the practices of faith rather than simply hoping for the best so that exercise that challenge of trying to see what a mature human subject might look like who's been shaped by this style of living thinking and imagining that becomes both for the well-being of religious communities and for the well-being of the human community a real focus I think for energy and reflection I suspect that we by we I mean people of faith don't often enough ask with seriousness the question what does our humanity look like and even if we do perhaps don't wait long enough for the answer but this afternoon what I've been trying to do quite simply is to put before you some of those things which I believe make for human flourishing in the fullest sense which are nourished and encouraged and enabled by certain assumptions in faith I said earlier that I didn't want to go down the road of saying all faiths are saying the same thing there are in a radical doctrinal disagreements which can't be glossed over there are cultural forms of embeddedness which we can't ignore and yet I do believe there is something to be said for a dialogue among the faiths which looks very hard at the processes of human formation which asks together about the kind of human face that the habits of faith uncover and that is the exercise the possibility that I'm trying to sketch for you today in the hope that it might make some sense of how in the work we are bound to do for a common humanity us how we shall go forward and find some creativity for ourselves as people of faith in a world which is notably characterized by some of those pathologies that Beca sums up as the denial of death well thank you so very much indeed for your lecture there's plenty of time for questions and comments so please make yourself known I do hope we have my oh yes there they come okay well the first one from the gentleman in the fourth row relationship I'm tempted to begin the answer by saying well I'll tell you and I've grown up because I have to guess a bit about what it's like I can speculate I'm I'm fortunate enough to have seen some people who seem to to have grown into it and the speculation I think would go a bit like this the relationship with God as it develops becomes less and less a relationship with a simply imagined of a like like myself more and more a sense of communions the only word we have which is not absorption but the sense of the other who resides in in oneself something to do with what Christian contemplatives often talk about which is oneself becoming the place where the second person of the Trinity happens you are that Lucas for the prayer of Jesus in the spirit to to rise up and that the intimacy that belongs with that is that isn't like the intimacy we have in human communion it's it's a hint or something further which our vocabulary is not very good at handling but as that evolves I'm thinking here especially if somebody like st. Teresa of ávila who in her account of the seven stages of contemplative growth makes it very plain that somewhere near the end of the story mmm you are really losing a lot of orientation because the sense of a God is simply there to be talked to becomes much harder to get out and the sense of energy or pressure within but stronger which means as she says you you become both Mary and Martha there isn't a gulf between the time you spend opening up to God the time you spend in practical prosaic service that they're not easily pulled apart and that doesn't mean you go around in a sort of cloud of mystical ecstasy it means that a lot of the boundaries you've taken for granted begin to get much more problematic and yet the sense that emerges is of a set of human relations and human services which which would be unthinkable without the relatedness to God that lay at their root and yet those things aren't in in contest or competition Teresa helps me guess thank you roughly that's and that is a massive question obviously which I shan't be able to answer adequately in a short response but let me try and think aloud on this for a moment given that Thomas Aquinas did believe in revelation and somehow managed to put it together and as some others al-ghazali or Maimonides likewise I think it goes something like this some Thomas like other Aristotelian believes that what we know we know because of the kind of world were in we don't detach our minds and send them in search of transcendent truth elsewhere we know because of the relations that develop within this world nothing is then in the internet that isn't first in the sense says Thomas and I think that has something to do with this issue for Thomas when he talks about revelation of the very beginning of the summer he speaks I think quite significantly about how holy teaching is about those persons by whom divine revelation comes to us meaning that the narratives of this case the narratives of the biblical characters now the way in which therefore God is believed by Thomas to reveal God self is not by the intervention of a person outside the universe but by a chillier action by someone a bit like ice only bigger but by the way in which particularly human lives by opening up at a uniquely radical level to the root of all things and the Trinitarian God become carriers of a challenging and transformative insight a divine act so I don't think one has to be as much doomed to anthropomorphism within the Abrahamic traditions as you might suggest but to elaborate that would take long but that's where I'd begin at least in the response question I think yes over there on the right there where you want Sarah the gentleman in black behind the gentleman in black as well thanks I'm I'm glad you raised the question of judgment because I was aware of not doing justice to that in a passing remark done while I think that there would be areas in which I take some issue with what the way you've just put it over got the freedom to end I wouldn't dispute the centrality of judgment indeed I assume throughout that the judgment of God that is the uncomfortable effect of our exposure to the truth of God is one of those non-negotiable things we as spiritual subjects have to come to terms with to be before the the naked judgment of God the truth of God is to have one's own evasions and failures exposed without well I would say without mercy but without qualification we are shown in the light of God for what we are that's the judgment which all of us are I believe summoned to how one hooks that on with any precision to notions of the end of all things has never been straightforward even in Christian scripture you can see just how complicated it is and I take great comfort from the fact that Jesus says of that day and that are no news so trying to make amends for a conscious overstatement what I said I think I'd approach to term something like this the anxiety surrounding death understood as an anxiety about the limit to my projects and my proposals understood as an anxiety about the ultimate loss of control that is an anxiety which people of faith ought to be growing beyond but the anxiety of anxiety they say the proper apprehension of what it might be like to be confronted with the truth without defense is a proper apprehension and that sense the strand with in Christian tradition of reflecting on death as an aesthetic of exercise makes perfect sense to me I just want to pull that apart from the self-defensive anxiety of death is deficit nuisance as in King Lear when hassel doesn't it is killed by Edgar just the moment when he's going to become rich and famous and he says death death untimely death damn it he was just going to become alright and now he dies and the anxiety about death which is about is that the brick wall we meet imagination that's something we drop the whatever you want to call it the solar apprehension they the godly fear of what it might be to be exposed to the truth that we should be cut of it interestingly enough that very question was one that Becca addresses some length in the denial of death and he's less confident about Freud's ability to handle it than I think you might but but Freud that frightened interesting case in point because Freud's deeply tragic sense of the human which to me is one of the greatest things about Freud as a as a thinker does at times Becker and others suggest make the the non disabling dependence side of it very quite difficult for him and I think the two the two areas of distinctiveness that I would want to look like up first what I was saying about the non-disabled defendants think that it is for the person of faith it's rooted in an act that is not ours decisively not ours that is the sense of being as bestowed as given something gratuitous on which we rest which is the free act of month Christian and Abrahamic context and then you're quite right the the management of time is something which is not quite the same in these wells though I think a good therapist no no don't say the proper handling of your rituals is part of the healing so for me it's in that first characteristic that they the distinctive thing comes in and in a sense of the other things flow from that there's a sense of giftedness in existence that's very interesting I wouldn't at all my I'm talking about the education of rationality because I do think we're we're stuck with a particularly bloodless and mechanical view of rationality very often up until I suppose about the twelfth century in Europe reason was not so much a method of arguing as a capacity to attune to the order of things so in famous dispute between subverted and Peter Abelard in the 12th century Bernhard's objection to a Balad is not so much that Abelard is exhorting reason over faith as that Abelard is using a model of Reason which Bernhard doesn't recognize Bernhard wants to say well to be reasonable is to have this capacity to to know where you belong in the world to you know the sense your connectedness with the world and the orderliness of God's creation and there is a debarred talking about levels of probability and argument and this is that steps not what it's about not a bolide is of course a hugely important figure in the development of scholastic theology and I'm not suggesting that I would backburn it against Abelard but Berners making their a very interesting point about the ways in which concepts of reason get finished as the centuries go on so I think if I were talking about the education of reason that that's one of the points I might want to pick up but it's the language of the diagnosis and reshaping of passion that is probably rather more deeply entrenched in the Christian world what's interesting there I think is that the opposition you touched on between reason and passion is not the opposition that that's at work in let's say an evangelist passion is not opposed to reason passion is opposed to peace even to nature sometimes our natural function is when the passions are not putting us this way at that and driving us to dominant and exploitive patterns of relation with the world so it's always worth asking with words like reason or passion what are people not saying when they're using them and the reason passion thing is we've inherited on the whole from the 18th century doesn't work very well with with the earlier religious framework and of course that vocabulary would be different again in a Muslim or Buddhist environment I think if you looked at some of the ways in which at least some Muslim philosophy and jurisprudence evolves in the Middle Ages you would see there again a concept of reason which is not at all eighteenth-century unsurprisingly perhaps has more in common with the Burnet yes well you you touch on something that um that I really believe is absolutely crucial in our understanding of what suddenly the Christian faith has to say about social relation about the nature of human belonging together in Christian scripture the governing metaphor for the the reassembled community around Jesus of renewed humanity the governing metaphor is the body that's to say a metaphor in which you take for granted that every participant in this community has a distinctive and irreplaceable combination a contribution to make to the welfare of every other and of the hill and it's that sense of an irreplaceable gift in each that to me is one of the Keystone's of a proper Christian ethic to respect the dignity or the liberty or the right of another human subject is not as or just to Accord them a status it is to say there is some level at which I and others need the irreplaceable gift that is that is there in this particular person I think that's one of the implications of the way the metaphor of the body is developed and so that that particular way of coming it interdependence is for me certainly one of the distinctive Subhadra a Christian ethic and again I I leave the question open as to how it works in other religious for capillaries but that's that's where I stand and where I where I find the the uniqueness yes the uniqueness of the Christian picture as against second illusions of togetherness or rights or dignity something is given once again it's a reflection or a facet of the fundamental they're stole but that the believer is committed to behind within all things so it's one of the ways I think in which we said we can re-educate ourselves in understanding dependence when we understand interdependence and when we move rather away from question do I depend on somebody else or don't I well I'd ever to depend on anyone yes not they depend on you in some important senses the whole and what's going to pass the parcel the gifts of the Spirit comes into play there so thank you for raising that because the word is important I think and I'm distinctive the next question comes right from the back and then there's one at the other side of thank you really important point that I'm once again I'd my initial panicked responses as I will have been an awful lot of quite serious Christian writers who don't seem to find it a problem so why do I but trying to address it when we talk of the personal character of the Christian or Jewish or Muslim God we are a think saying what was expressed by some modern writers saying that there is that about God which is at least first of all that is that we cannot imagine imagine come back to the word we cannot imagine all of this making sense unless something like intelligence and something like love are what we're talking about and the only models we have for talking about love and intelligence are personal you know they're related to our life is finite persons that God is a person in the sense of being a member of the class of persons that alone that God is three persons in a sense of being three members of the class of persons Christmas theologians have always been very very wary of but the personal qualities of Liberty or larvae origins can't be pulled away from how we talk to think about God that's been axiomatic all the way through and I think remains um remains axiomatic if you want to hold on to that notion of be still or creation and that being said oh then I think back with the traditional and familiar language of a Dionysius or an Aquinas or a polymath saying the yes but we can only say something like intelligence but we can't say exactly what we mean by that we can say we can't think it without that being in the mix somewhere but not projecting the get a clear picture of an intelligent individual we use these adjectives as models we qualify them Ian Ramsey's language back 63 models we qualify them we qualify them on qualify them hope they don't completely lose their content and alongside that the exposure to the image lessness of God is simply a matter of constant practice self questioning again clearing out the projections the self-serving models that we repeatedly draw in there so a complex business and always has been and that's not gonna get any easier I think but the two things the two points where you is it worth nail down the cloth on the one hand there is no accurate image of God as God we talk of Christ as the image of the Father meaning that's that's the particular bit of mystery where certain thing has come alive we don't talk about reproductions or annotations so you know if we can't have an adequate picture at the other end knowing we can't avoid returning again and again to the language of love and intelligence to make sense of what they're talking about we shuttled back and forth between those I think all the time it was somebody yeah I mean you're right there is the sort of prima facie contradiction there isn't there doesn't say flourishing includes suffering um I suppose I'd want to come about by saying depends whether you do miss anaesthetic you want to be about it um if you want to talk about as Buddhist or Hindu and many Christians don't want to talk about bliss as what we are made for then I think bluntly that is a condition in which we are utterly at home with the reality of ourselves and our God thank you that's it what flourishing as we use it about actual human lives lived in time and I think this perhaps is the the edge of your question surely we would have to say that the sheer unevenness of human experience the inevitability of discovering certain things by failure rather than by success means that a life which overall we judged have been a flourishing human life doesn't have to be devoid of negativity or suffering otherwise we'd have a bit of a problem with the life of Jesus of Nazareth or Paul of Tarsus or Gautama or you know so maybe it's static and narrative that that helps a bit with that that makes some sort of sense it's the lady in the penultimate role right in the middle happily yes I do find myself quite often if I'm say talking to secondary school students trying to say it could be quite important for you to now to waste time now you may think you don't need to say about teenagers but actually do in a very driven and unmerciful environment where more and more we pile requirements of performance onto young people I think it's it's important to say there are moments where you don't have to account for the time you're standing where you can in the old image invite your soul I wouldn't quite put it like that too sick for us but seriously moments when they can even be constructive boredom in the sense that it's important to stop trying to get on top of every moment and because this is a bit counterintuitive for all of us anxious people then either obsessional work patterns or hectic leisure patterns want to make up a bit to grab everything and I think hectic feverish leisure as such a contradiction is as much of a problem in our culture as obsessional unrelieved achievement-oriented work and somewhere in between as isn't there a kind of human time humane time wasting which we ought to be working on in some ways so I think that there is a row wasting time and it's a pity really that we've inherited quite so much of that sub Puritan mindset which while rightly saying you have to give an account for every moment you spend of your life interprets that to mean you have to show your results for every moment of time that you spend I think it's perfectly imaginable to say to God on the day of judgment exactly that means yes that was the day I consciously and prayerfully wasted let's not let this be the last question so there is the lady in the second second row vulnerability yes um I touched on this a little bit last week I suppose in talking about I get the right of wrong sorts of defenselessness and I think what I want to say is that I don't want to absolute eyes or romanticize vulnerability in the sense that what should I say but the only all the best thing we can offer is our woundedness that's true at one level but it can also be an uncomfortably self-focus ting the vulnerability we offer I think in in same ministry or whatever it's not to say look at my wounds or look at my weakness it's to say I am setting aside the consideration of my anxiety my fear and my my hurt I'm setting that aside not denying it or a man to sizing it but for this purpose insofar as my woundedness could become an obstacle to listening to engaging I deliberately put it on one side late letting it inform my listening but not dominate my speaking this time for one last question it's the gentleman here I think it's absolutely right that um the attitude that says it doesn't matter what happens here because it's the off life because I think that is a very dangerous approach and it's certainly not one that some shared by the most serious Christian commentators over the centuries but let's just pause for a moment on your first point I think the notion that we are judged not on our keeping of the rules but on something else is one that's already there in the Gospels in a sense and just as Jesus and the Gospels is not saying ignore rules but understand that rules are about the kind of person you are becoming then I think you know that does run right through its and John of the Cross in the 16th century who says in the evening of our life it will be on love that we are examined so the conviction that there is beyond death however we express that that moment of confrontation with the truth I think ought to make us as I hinted deeply conscious of the significance of every moment that passes because becoming more or less attuned to the truth is what happens moment by moment in every encounter it's possible for me to get a little bit further towards a little bit further away from that fundamental all defining honesty and it's only in that way that I become the person who finally sees God in the face so I think proper attitude to death and judgment it's one that quite simply says and the next 30 seconds are decisive and the 30 seconds off of that and the 30 seconds after that don't take your eye off the ball look at what's in front of your eyes that's where it starts if I could be so monic for a moment if I haven't already I sometimes said that what's going on in the Temptation stories in the Gospels is at least in part the devil saying to Jesus take your eye off the present for the sake of your future take your eye off the real world in favor of the imagined world where I can give you all you want and the refusal of the temptation is the affirmation that it's here and now but the presence of God has encountered the will of God is discovered and our own humanity has shaped the next 30 seconds more 30 seconds after right we've come to the end of our time and the end of this serious so it's time for me to say a few think use thank you first of all to all of you for coming and participating especially those who've asked questions thank you in particular to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Research Center and the humanities whose colleagues putted a lot of the groundwork to make these events possible I should also mention again in particular the Garen Thomas foundation for peace and the Susan Steen Shiva Foundation whose generous donations made these serious only possible but most of all and I'm sure you'll agree with me we need to thank our speaker dr. Williams who shared with us so many ideas in his lectures but I think also in the way he responded to so many and such a wide range of questions and I think he's given us all much to take home and to reflect further about and so I'm sure you'll join me in thanking you

Channel: Institute for Strategic Dialogue

Views: 13,105

Rating: 4.7692308 out of 5

Keywords: Rowan Williams (Religious Leader), University Of Oxford (College/University)

Id: vcgSM3P06ls

Length: 85min 52sec (5152 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2014