The Truce of God 3: “Illusions of Peace”

The "illusions of peace" Williams speaks of concern peace either as escape from engagement with the other, or as an equilibrium which fears real engagement lest war break out. The former is typified in the hippie movement of the sixties; the latter by the nuclear detente ensured by the Cold War. In both cases the casualty is language, which ceases to be communication woven into genuine human exchange (where those involved give and receive, thereby opening and expanding their horizons) and becomes slogan. When pursuing peace becomes repetition of catchphrases (“All we are saying, is give peace a chance”) or bureaucratic doublespeak ("destroying the village in order to save it"), discourse has shut down. We live in “unreality”, which for Williams means to live in privacy, in an “impregnable castle of cliche and repetition” (53).

The legacy of lost discourse remains with us in a post-Cold War world, perhaps captured in a common mistake my students make when they write "pacifism" as "passive-ism". Peace means maintaining the status quo, refusing to act with a decisiveness that challenges the grain of society, or that places the self at risk. And so Williams writes of “a miserable link between militarized politics, consumer society, the corruption and decline of the arts, and the cheapening and trivializing of language—in politics, journalism, advertising, and worship.” (55)

Against peace as "intensified withdrawal", Williams offers a surprising counter: the cloister. Not the romanticized cloister of popular fiction and singing nuns, but rather the cloister that “abandons privacy for a solitude which forces people to confront their fear and evasiveness and so equips them for involvement by a stripping down of the will.… having shed the impulses to self-protection and self-gratification which limit and distort its horizon.” (63) Williams recounts a story from Dom Hubert van Zeller: “a North Welsh convent where the garden gate had at some point in its chequered career been reversed—so that the side facing inwards now read ‘Private’ in large letters. The cloister was being warned to keep its distance from the privacy of the world.” (63) The point is that the world is a place of “isolated existence, fear of facing the cost of decision and involvement—haunted by the fantasy of ‘peace’.

The church faces its own temptations to withdrawal. Even the self-consciously prophetic church, can become “an impregnable castle” when its social engagement manifests a fondness for generalized denunciations”, launching missives from a comfortable distance (64). It will take distance from the world, but from “the tight huddle of fear, where people cling together to feed each other’s fantasies”, from “the decayed and corrupting language of self-justifying and self-perpetuating cliques”, and from “the manipulations and distortions of a self incapable of opening up to others.” (64)

Returning to the cloister, the three classic monastic practices: solitude, silence, and contemplation are necessary to create space for new patterns of community, speech, and action (65). This is indeed a kind of death, but one that “redraws the boundaries” of what a genuinely human life is: a life conformed to the pattern revealed in Jesus (65).

I’m put in mind of two rather extreme figures: Paul Tillich, who once said that the best thing the church of his day [1950s America] could do would be to renounce speech for a time, and Sting, who penned the immortal lines

poets, priests and politicians / have words to thank for their positions / words that scream for your submission / no-one’s jamming their transmission / when their eloquence escapes you / their logic ties you up and rapes you / da do do do, de da da da / is all I want to say to you.

OK, so repeating nonsense syllables to the powers that be is not exactly responsible protest politics, and the line

[words] are only cheques I’ve left unsigned / from the banks of chaos in my mind

is a little two nihlistic for my tastes. (Williams has an interesting paragraph in which he, via Thomas Merton, speculates on the pervasiveness of “speaking in tongues” amongst conservatives at times of social crisis that may well echo Sting’s sentiments here (54–55).) What is one to do “when language takes a holiday”? Perhaps silence is better than speaking. And silence can be its own eloquent protest—I’m thinking of the refusal of Bishop Barnabas Legkanyane at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997—interrupting discourses that are so “word heavy” that they risk falling into the kind of ideology Williams warns against.

Silence as a way of non-violent protest, and as clearing space for the renewal of discourse, is an interesting idea. What kind of liturgical shape would such silence take? How would we worship without words? And what then would be the shape of "the peace of Christ" that we'd exchange? For that, we have to wait for the next chapter, entitled "Not as the World Gives."

The Truce of God 2: “The Truce of God”

“The truce of God” was instituted by the Cluny monastery in medieval times. It sought to restrict the fighting amongst Christians to three days per week. Sound ridiculous? Well, that’s the point: Christians taking communion and then turning and fighting each other is ridiculous (25). “When King Henry II refused to give the kiss of peace at Mass to Thomas Beckett, he was a better theologian than he knew. He recognized that giving the kiss would not only suggest he was at peace with Thomas (which he was not), but would also commit him to seeking peace (which he did not want to do).” (26)

The suspension of hostilities is something that goes beyond governing Christians’ relations with Christians, however. For the call of God is extended to all humanity, and thus the church doesn’t know where its ultimate boundaries will lie. “The Church proclaims that there is one human destiny and that is found in relation to one focal figure, Jesus; but also that what this human destiny means cannot be worked out without ‘communion’, a relation of costly and profound involvement with each other and receiving from each other.” (27) Hence the church lives to unsettle [by its very nature], living in “creative dissatisfaction” as “a compelling symbol of a humanity able to live by sharing and by loving, reverent mutual attention” (29). And hence the church, as sacrament of common human destiny, is catholic. “It strives to show and interpret and share the gifts of one person or group or nation, offering them to all; and to each, it offers the resources of all.” (31) The church represents that future “given coherence by Jesus, in which each human partner in communion has a distinct and unrepeatable gift to share, and cannot therefore be ignored or discounted.” (39)

It is this which opposes, in political policy, any situation of “balance of terror”, that “the welfare of some may rightly be secured by the dispensability of others.” (38) Williams develops this by looking at the price paid by the world (especially Africa and Latin America, for the “peace” brought to the West through nuclear détente, the MADness of mutually assured destruction. The sixties and seventies should have been the decades of development and responsible government for newly de-colonized Africa, for instance. Instead, Africa became a site where the conflict of East and West was displaced in endless, bloody local conflicts (37).

How does the church bear witness to this future? Through [a good Williams word] “attentiveness”, [be]holding the other in contemplation. This is a theologically rooted and ethically directed contemplation. Contemplation is what is owed to God, and to other creatures: to God “because he is inexhaustibly what he is, resisting capture and analysis, always more, always further” (39); to creatures [which bear witness to God] which take us beyond the power of the ego to control through “rendering”, and which cannot be reduced to “our plans, projects and expectations” (39). That which is not reducible to human control bears witness to the Transcendent.

But contemplation is also God’s way with creation. “Creation is there because of the limitless capacity of God for contemplation—allowing the other to be, and engaging with the other, shaping a common story of God and the world, a shared ‘drama’.” (40) But God does not engage with creation out of need, for God’s love (contemplation) is his nature. And what for God “is nature, for us is destiny, vocation.” We are the image of God the creator, in time, while at the same time we have to grow into this image by living in a creation which “delights and assaults” us in its mystery, and by living in “a world of persons in which we can be invited to love by finding ourselves the objects of love, where we learn contemplative attention as we ourselves are attended to.” (41)

We can, however, also deny creatureliness in “a struggle to remake the world around [the] self”, to refuse the network of mutually supporting relationships (42). Beyond this stands “the privacy of Satan”, “diabolic detachment” (43), and at the limit “the Luciferian impulse to destroy reality for my sake” (42)—or suicide. This satanic “freedom” is actually bondage [a freedom to violate]. God’s freedom “is seen in the creation of bonds and networks of sharing, making a world which he wills, in Jesus and in his Church, to be engaged.” (43) To learn this kind of freedom and to refuse the other requires “the patience of attentive love.” (43)

This is quite a powerful chapter. It reminds me of what attracts me most to Williams: his ability to take essentially Augustinian themes [e.g. the complex relation between contemplatio, caritas and eros] and to present them in [nearly?] un-Platonized ways, but ways also profound for understand the church and the world. He also refuses recourse to political pragmatism or Niebuhrian realism [and if ever there was a case to prove that Reinhold Niebuhr misreads Augustine, it’s in this chapter], choosing instead to interpret the world in the light of its destiny in Christ. “Nuclear peace” [the peace of Mutually Assured Destruction] is wrong because it violates our destiny given in Christ, and makes impossible the kind of life the church is called to bear witness to.

I think one can also read the struggles of the Anglican communion here, as Christians particularly from the global South anathematize their brothers and sisters from the global North, and vice versa. In his response to our Anglican “wars of religion” Williams’ strategy has been to try to do two things [arguably neither particularly well]: (1) hold the different parts of the church together, compelling them to listen to each other (because the catholic vision says each has a gift that the other needs); (2) acknowledge the giftedness of all individual members of the church, especially those silenced (gays in particular). He's been accused of "selling out the cause" by liberals in not pushing through the progressive agenda he championed in the 1990s. I don't think this criticism is fair. His critics also complain that (2) is being sacrificed for the sake of (1). And in this criticism they’re not wrong, in my opinion. Learning “the patience of attentive love” is a [life]long and excruciating [and note well the etymology of that word!] at times difficult process. Is it also exclusionary? Can we learn "the patience of attentive love" in a covenant where an inner, conservative circle is separated from an outer, liberal circle?

That’s the question we can only answer in hindsight as a communion. Living in media res can be a bummer.

The Truce of God 1: Fears and Fantasies

This is the first in a series of summary reflections on Rowan Williams' classic The Truce of God. This work was originally written as The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book, 1983 (when Robert Runcie held the See), and was revised in 2005 during +Rowan's early tenure. I'm essentially posting my own notes on each chapter, along with reflections on how the book seems fresh and relevant now, and for the church in South Africa.

The book begins with myriad examples of pop culture's obsession with the “monster” which unleashes violence and chaos on an otherwise innocent world. This monster can take many forms. So we have nature being itself, and humans tempting it (e.g. Jaws), and nature being out-of-control and invading human space (e.g. King Kong). And we have humans: sometimes in the grips of the supernatural (e.g. The Exorcist) or otherwise out-of-control or irrational (e.g. terrorists--both in the news and in the movies), and other times victims of their own technological creativity.

Williams extrapolates from all this the idea that "we" (and he means "we in the west") feel or fear ourselves deeply bereft of agency. We sense we are passive victims of our own power (you just had to go into that water, didn't you?), and that the world "outside" has responded to our power with threat—threat which has forced us against our better nature [because we really do see ourselves as basically peaceful and good] to arm ourselves to the teeth. As Williams comments, “… we are deeply determined to imagine violence as something whose origins lie outside ourselves, so that we can maintain some belief in our innocence. But the price of this is a real uneasiness and confusion about what we can and cannot do, about the nature of our power and freedom.” (Williams:17–18) Hence our fear... and our security gates, razor wire, and "Pasop!" signs.

Behind our fear lies what Williams terms a “sickness of the spirit”. The Gospel diagnoses such sickness, and gives hope through the possibility of repentance and conversion, which means “retriev[ing] the vision of one’s own responsibility, and [learning] to look with critical openness at one’s life and the shared life of society” (Williams:21). The embodiment of this possibility is the church: “the rationale of the Church’s life is irreducibly a matter of showing the results of an act of divine reconciliation in terms of a distinctive kind of community.” (Williams:23) Of course, the church fails at this, and “its own internal life is regularly the site of bitter and divisive conflict”, while “its interventions in the public square … are readily characterized (and written off) as both abstract and amateur.” (Williams:23) But since the existence of the church is itself a challenge to “fatalism and false claims to power”, so Williams will undertake in the rest of the book to show why this is, and what it asks of believers (Williams:24).

I think 'sickness of the spirit' is a good diagnosis of the passivity I've observed (and listened to) amongst many South Africans. Granting some significant exceptions, whites have yet to come to see their responsibility for the past. In a strange way, the mirror of their fears is the "bling culture" they disparage among the new elite (and the bulletproof Mercedes' that whisk the President to and from state occasions in high speed, "blue light" convoys). All the while they can see the legacy of apartheid continue to ring the suburbs with shacks. What you hear from whites is a deep sense of powerlessness in opulence (economist Sampie Terreblanche at a conference here in Stellenbosch a couple of weeks argued that things have never been better for white South Africans economically, and that they have benefited enormously from the settlement of 1990-94).

I think the churches here (but not only here) have failed to embody the kind of community that challenges fatalism. In a society where still most people seem to live in what theologian Dirkie Smit once called "different symbolic universes", the church is called to provide the means to encounter others in truth--even if that truth is disturbing. Or as another theologian, Nico Koopman, said a couple of days ago, the church should be a space where “proximity” to the other challenges reigning social constructions. Alas the churches I've visited during this trip (black and white) remain monolithic in terms of class or colour. So how does one "re-boot" the church?

The challenge to genuine encounter with the other is more than simply an intellectual call. I feel the paradox in myself: I occupy a place not untypical of whites here, safely ensconced behind a security gate in a flat with a wonderful view of the mountains. Yet with all that, I experience a greater sense of anxiety than I do in living in Edmonton (you just had to go out last night, didn't you?). This is a sick society, and I also am sick. What remedy will Williams offer?

Prayer and Politics

In his new book, The Politics of Discipleship, Graham Ward gives an interesting reflection on prayer and politics. A bit of background first. There are two important things about the church for Ward: (1) it is deeply implicated (“hardwired into”) in the world. “Whatever action the church undertakes, whatever proclamations it makes, is located in the world’s time and spaces, its histories, its societies, its cultures, its languages, and its ideologies.” (24) (2) It participates in the trinitarian life of God, “in God’s own self-expression, rooted in the economy of God’s grace toward creation.” (276) It is this participation, rather than its conformity to an institutional "type", that makes it what it is.

Both these assumption make prayer the most profoundly political act. Our implicatedness means that in prayer we lay before God “all the concerns and connections we have with the contemporary world.... All these events [of the world] pass through us and change us. And as we dwell in Christ and Christ in us, then they pass through Christ also.” Far from an escape, prayer is “deep inhabitation of the world, its flesh and its spirit, that stirs a contemplation and a reading of the signs of the times that is more than we can ever apprehend or appreciate.” Prayer is “the Urgrund of Christian discipleship; we live and act as transistors for the transformation of the world through Christ.” (281–282)

But prayer mediates the other way as well. As Maximus the Confessor wrote, we should listen to our yearning in prayer, which is a “reaching out of our desire for communion with Christ.” For in this yearning, we hear the yearning of the church, the body of Christ across space and time, and “the yearning in the heart of Christ to heal and transform.” This yearning will make us restless with the status quo. But the fact that we remain implicated in the world will also remind us that we too will be subject to the judgement that signals transformation (282).

In all this, prayer is the “primordial participation” in the Kingdom yet to come, and the action that flows from prayer is “the condition of the possibility of ... hope.” (283)