Book Reviews
ROWAN WILLIAMS Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology
Edited by Mike Highton, SCM Press, 2007, ISBN 9780334040958, pp 305, rrp $76.95
Reviewed by Maggie Helass
‘Conversations’ is a bit of a misnomer in this title. I spent a year wrestling with Rowan Williams’ dense prose, chewing small bites with my Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers to hand (‘76 edition and not really up to the job). I also found 50 Key Concepts in Theology handy and Foyle’s Philavery helped with such additions to my vocabulary as ‘sublated aporia’ and ‘agonic’. The editor would have been advised to include a glossary in this book, and translations to help those readers without a working knowledge of French and Greek. Rowan Williams apologises in his introduction for “any unnecessary obscurity or compression,” as the essays were written mostly for a specialist readership.
I found reading this book a humbling experience. Having tossed it petulantly aside because it was such hard graft, I later repented and applied myself to the text a paragraph at a time.This devotional-style reading gradually, surprisingly, revealed a splendid intellectual landscape through which I had unwittingly travelled since childhood (having grown up with a philosopher/theologian father).
Existentialism was my philosophy of choice during the 1960s, absorbed by osmosis as a teenager and shaping a preference for the apophatic way during adult spiritual formation.
History is, of necessity, only experienced in retrospect. This collection of fourteen essays spans the period from 1979 to 1998, effectively Rowan Williams’ academic career as an Oxford don.
It is of course published in the context of his current position as Archbishop of Canterbury. It is now the day job of this Welsh prince to combat the heresies of his day and he makes forensically searching examinations of his subjects.
Essays include ‘Lossky, the via negativa and the foundations of theology’; ‘Hegel and the gods of postmodernity’; ‘Balthasar, Rahner and the apprehension of being’;‘Barth,war and the state’;‘Girard on violence,society and the sacred’;‘The suspicion of suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer’; ‘Simone Weil and the necessary non-existence of god’;‘Religious realism: on not quite agreeing with Don Cupitt’.
Together they constitute a précis of important developments in theology and moral philosophyin-the-making by a writer who clearly takes sober joy in the intellectual process.
His own take on this collection is that “the point of all of these pieces is to understand a little better what other theologians want to say about the simplest yet most inexhaustible of all subjects, the life upon which all life depends and the embodiment among us of that life in a human life and human words, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth”.
