Healing Our Divisions
We would do well to read Rowan Williams alongside Robin Wall Kimmerer, just as we should read Maximos the Confessor alongside Thomas Aquinas.
Review by Tessa Carman
The fifth-century theologian Diadochos of Photike pictured the postlapsarian soul as a man looking towards the sun in the cold of winter, the warmth of God’s grace steadily healing him of his divided state. Each of us is that man who faces East, warmed by the sun’s rays, while still feeling the chill of winter at his back.
Rowan Williams—the Welsh theologian, poet, playwright, literary critic, and former Archbishop of Canterbury—takes Diadochos’s image as title and theme of a new essay collection. Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition weaves together a series of edited lectures and essays that explore the Eastern Christian tradition—from the Philokalia and the Patristic era to twentieth-century figures such as Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky and Saint Maria Skobtsova of Paris—and the light it can give the contemporary West.
Eastern Christianity has long been a focus for Williams; his doctoral work focused on Lossky, and he has cultivated friendships and collegiality with the likes of Olivier Clément (d. 2009), John Behr, Kallistos Ware, and other contemporary luminaries of the Eastern Orthodox world.
One great service Williams provides in the present collection is to demonstrate the intellectual seriousness of a tradition that too often is treated like the baptized cousin of a misty New Ageism, rather than a rich, grounded lode of Christian thought and spirituality.
The first chapter, “Theologizing the Life of the Spirit,” elaborates the theological anthropology of the Philokalia and lays the foundation for the rest of the essays. Originally collected for the benefit of monks, the Philokalia serves as a guide to a “contemplative practice,” that, says Williams, “both presupposes and reinforces a set of beliefs about God and creation”: namely, that “revelation was essentially the gift of a wisdom . . . that restored possibilities lost by human sin and ignorance.” It is a guide to living “truthfully in the world as it really is; and such truthful living is not possible without both the self-manifestation of God and the self-giving of God into human activity.” The point of monastic practice, and indeed of the Christian life, is to align ourselves with reality. Hence, for these writers, “There is no ‘spirituality’ free of doctrine, and the fashionable modern opposition between spirituality and religion is meaningless in the context of the Philokalia.”
Accordingly, the practice or virtue of “watchfulness,” nepsis, is “the key concept of the Philokalia, and such awareness is necessarily a matter of being alert to false and imprisoning accounts of who and what the human subject is—and of who and what God is.”
Knowing must be relational because of the very nature of the Trinitarian Being in whom all else has its being.
Given these “false and imprisoning accounts,” and given the theology of creation, for a thing to be “natural” in the Philokalia means “to be as God intends, to be in the state in and for which God created it.” In his treatise On Watchfulness and Holiness, St. Hesychios the Priest puts it like this: “the natural state of human beings is the ‘beauty, loveliness and integrity’ of the first creation.”
But this is not our state post-fall; we are imprisoned, in a “state of bondage to images that are seen or sensed as objects for the mind’s satisfaction.” The goal then is to attain an “angelic awareness, seeing the things of the world in their true—that is, symbolic, significance and using them accordingly.” To be “natural” means “to perceive the world as comprehensively significant; and because the world is significant in relation to God, it cannot take its significance from its potential for self-directed or self-serving human use.”
To recover wholeness means both seeing aright and desiring aright. This includes seeing the material world, creation itself, “as communicating the intelligence and generosity of the creator.” For the self to be whole, notes Williams, is not to be “self-actualized” or to be metaphysically self-sufficient in the modern idea of autonomy, but rather for each human self to “move in the mode for which it was created . . . in alignment with the purpose of God, habitually echoing in finite form the infinite ‘desire’ of God for God, of love for love.”
We must aim for “dispassionate” love, then, “passions” being those things that distort our vision and that pull us from the proper mode and object of desire. In Williams’s terms, passion is “self-serving self-referential desire,” which prevents us from seeing “things as they are, in their nature.” Crucially, nothing “is by nature evil or unlovable, because all things come from the loving will of God, embodying particular reflections of the one Logos in their diverse logoi, and thus have the potential for mutuality or reconciliation.”
Having established an anthropology based in the Trinity, Williams moves toward an exploration of theosis. To his credit, Williams points out the overlap between Eastern and Western Christian metaphysics as he articulates “a metaphysic that proposes incarnation and kenosis [self-emptying] to finite subjects as the ground of truthfulness—just as they are the form taken by divine truthfulness,” that is, by Christ, the Word, “God’s enfleshed speech to us.” Williams attempts to show how a “trinitarian ontology mandates a particular approach to epistemology.” Knowing must be relational because of the very nature of the Trinitarian Being in whom all else has its being. We ought challenge and present an alternative to “reductive models of knowing that assume the normative status of non-relational, descriptive and external modes of understanding the environment and fail to deal with the mutual ‘implication’ of knower and known.”
A more satisfying anthropology than Kimmerer’s would be based on a trinitarian ontology articulated by Williams, with the help of the Eastern (and Western) fathers and saints.
This challenge resembles that of Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. A scientist with a penchant for poetic prose, Kimmerer eloquently argues for the necessity of “indigenous ways of knowing” to complement, and correct, Western scientific methods. She articulates a relational way of knowing the world—giving thanks to the maple tree, asking a plant for permission before harvesting—that understands every creature as part of a living whole.
Where Kimmerer diverges from Eastern Christianity begins in her account of creation. Early in the book, she tells two stories of two women: in the first, Sky-Woman falls to earth, and the creatures give their lives for her. The second story is Kimmerer’s version of Eve and the fruit: Kimmerer focuses on how Eve is cursed through eating from a tree, contrasting what she sees as the world-as-gift theme of the Sky-Woman myth. For Kimmerer, the first story pictures the earth as nurturing, welcoming; the second, as a site of everlasting toil and division, a creation story that pits humans against creation.
The curious thing about this interpretation is, though it may certainly be held by some professed Christians and non-Christians, it is not the story told in Genesis, and neither is it the one told by the writers of the Philokalia—nor of any Church Father, mystic, or saint.
Told right, Genesis’s creation story—in which the world indeed created as entirely good, as entire gift, followed by the invasion of sin and death—holds far more explanatory power for our, and the world’s, brokenness: infant death, tribal and world warfare, betrayal of friends and family, demonic possession, and corrosive avarice. Understanding that human beings are fragmented and fallen makes sense of not only the great evils inflicted on the Native American tribes by the U.S. government, but also of Aztec human sacrifices, Nazi concentration camps, and Herod’s massacre of the innocents.
A more satisfying anthropology than Kimmerer’s hazy “democracy of living things”—wherein flies and lakes are counted as “persons” indiscriminately—would be based on a trinitarian ontology articulated by Williams, with the help of the Eastern (and Western) fathers and saints (and also, we might add, the plenitude of the medieval view of the cosmos, in which the world is indeed alive, but which also gives us more precise terms for living things, beyond merely “person” and “nonperson,” or “animate” and “inanimate”). We need to see truly, and we must be transformed and reconciled to right relationship with God and His creation. Ironically, then, the Eastern Church Fathers provide better theological (and practical) grounding for recovering a proper respect for the goodness of the world than Kimmerer’s new animism.
We would do well to read Williams alongside Robin Wall Kimmerer, just as we should read Maximos the Confessor alongside Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps then we could begin telling better, truer stories, and also put our hands anew to the plow, to the sink, to the soil, to wood and words, as with God’s grace we work to heal the division between God and the soul that is the root of the divide between land and people, and between neighbor and neighbor. Perhaps, too, we may rediscover true harmony among the Church, East and West.
Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.
