Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Ford, David F

Lost Icons:

Reflections on Cultural Bereavement

By Rowan Williams

Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 2000. 190 pp. $24.95.

How rare to find someone who, simultaneously, is thoughtfully and constructively involved both with the main teachings of Christian theology (from the Bible through its formative periods to the present) and also with contemporary culture, politics, education, and spirituality. Rowan Williams, who was a professor of theology at Oxford University before he became an Anglican bishop and now Archbishop of Wales, published in 2000 a rich collection of writings on key Christian doctrinal and ethical topics, On Christian Theology. In Lost Icons, he engages deeply and sharply with four themes through which he reflects on contemporary western culture. He only very lightly traces how he would make connections between this and his explicitly theological work, but the two are clearly from the same mind and call for each other. Readers of Lost Icons, for whom the big theological questions are opened up by its provocative (and sometimes elusively complex) probing of fundamental areas of our lives, could very profitably read the other as a companion volume.

The first theme is childhood and choice. Williams analyzes our impatience with childhood. Instead of its being a period with its own integrity, free of pressure to take on the responsibilities of adult or pseudo-adult roles and decisions, children are increasingly seen as consumers, choosers, achievers, even as sexual subjects and objects in ways that undermine their nurture. He exposes the hollowness of much rhetoric of "choice," especially how it discourages us from looking at how we learn to choose well, or how our choices have long-term costs and effects for ourselves and others. Abortion is one of his examples.

Williams's second theme is "charity," seen as the "social miracle" of bonding outside the family structure. He looks at how exchanges of recognition and the "social joy" of "greeting, meeting and eating" have fared in recent centuries. There has been a dangerous disruption of the complementarity between charity and the negotiating, competitive, and conflictual world. Williams imagines a "more-than-liberal" society, where conversation, the arts, and civil institutions help to create charitable space in the transactions of life.

The third focus is on remorse and its accompaniment, shame. They are rooted in realizing that one's failures or betrayals can damage one's moral substance, part of which is a proper honor in the eyes of others. How are we morally answerable to others? Are we losing a sense of injury to moral identity? Ranging over South Africa, the Holocaust, and other situations of conflict and oppression, he asks illuminating questions about what effects the language of rights, claims, and blame has on moral discourse and, especially, on the decline of remorse. One striking notion is of the victim not as a competitor but as a partner in the labor of restoring "the exchange of conversational presence." A core concern is for "civic vitality," based on active common labor and language. But the radical challenge to this by the Holocaust is recognized, and Gillian Rose's idea of a "mourning that does not assume despair" is developed.

Running through all the chapters are four interrelated themes, which also point to the deep connections between these cultural reflections and Williams's theology. They are time, language, learning, and self or soul. He repeatedly returns to these, with many variations and considerable subtlety. The soul is best formed through learning language, sustained conversation, the negotiation of differences and difficulties over time, patience with frustrations, and living consciously in a history that requires disciplines of self-examination, dispossession, trust, gratitude, and hope. By contrast, much in our culture encourages us to think and act in ways dangerous to that sort of soul. The self is seen as consumer and chooser; as timeless bearer of rights, needs, and desires; as not responsible for long-term consequences; and as rightly impatient with the frustrations of learning over time and negotiating amidst the ambiguities of history.

The final chapter intensifies these themes around reflections on "lost souls." Much "religious experience" sadly conspires with soul-destroying expectations of immediate, timeless satisfaction. There is embarrassment about soul-making as a matter of learning over time, involving conflict and frustration, expressed in a narrative that is constantly revised and renegotiated. He quotes Walter Davis: "Inwardness develops not by escaping or resolving but by deepening the conflicts that define it." Psychoanalysis is seen as an example of learning through frustrated desire. The analyst's refusal to be the other who fulfills desire opens the way for a complex exploration of the reality of otherness, including that of God. Williams joins this with a discussion of the experience of otherness through being in love. Finally, there is a meditation on trust, gratitude, and the meaning of Byzantine icons.