Feature Article

So far and yet so near

Understanding Benedict – 11

One is the ruler of a global congregation recently put at nearly 1.2 billion, the other a nominal head of a worldwide communion of some 80 million. Next week, Joseph Ratzinger and Rowan Williams will meet during the papal visit to Britain. There is much to unite these seemingly disparate figures

It is common to describe Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, as the two most distinguished thinkers to hold their respective posts for several centuries. Both are former professors steeped in the classical Christian tradition, but share a gift for recasting apparently dusty or arcane material in up-to-date language. Both are excellent preachers, lucid as well as learned.

It is equally common to point up big differences between the two leaders, starting with the most divisive internal questions of our times: women bishops and homosexuality. The Pope’s conservatism on both matters is implacable. The archbishop thinks that all levels of ordained ministry should be open to candidates of both sexes; and he made several weighty pro-gay statements before his translation to Canterbury – even though he now feels bound to defer to the conservative majority in worldwide Anglicanism on this subject.

What is more, the two operate in massively different contexts. Benedict is a monarch standing at the apex of the world’s largest organisation. He is urbane, polite (if occasionally tetchy), and a better listener than many other senior clerics of high intelligence. His encyclicals are well constructed. But his message on disputed issues is usually uncompromising, and packaged with the sublime self-assurance that is uniquely the Vatican’s. The archbishop speaks softly, yet without wielding any kind of stick – let alone a big one. He has little or no executive power, and leads a flock so fractious that many of its members do not even acknowledge him as senior primate. Both men can, without wishful thinking, claim a gospel mandate for their attitudes, though their proof texts are different. Benedict has often appealed to the hard-edged Christ – the sower of division who tells the disciples to let the dead bury their own dead. Rowan Williams is solaced by Jesus’ strength in weakness. Conversation, collegiality, brokerage and forbearance towards the unreconciled brother or sister: these are the (disarming) weapons in the archbishop’s armoury.

Look a bit closer, though, and an apparently ill-matched pair seem a lot less different than at first sight. It is not only the archbishop who has moved in a conservative direction. Both men are poachers turned gamekeepers to some degree. Did Benedict not also start out as a liberal – in his case over church government – who played an important role in rally­ing the forces of reform during the Second Vatican Council? And did not the man later to become the Vatican’s avid doctrinal watchdog once famously declare that “what the Church needs today as always are not adulators to extol the status quo, but men whose humility and obedience are not less than their passion for the truth”? Rowan Williams may represent a fairly uncommon amalgam of liberal and conservative impulses, but that is no less true of Joseph Ratzinger.

To understand them better, we must look above all to the sources of the reformist instincts that they have jointly displayed. Ratzinger made an apparently sharp break with his progressive past during the late 1960s, deciding that the opening up of the Church to the world ushered in by the Second Vatican Council had occurred just as secular society was heading in a very different direction. It was time to rebel against rebellion – to re-emphasise the gap separating Catholics from non-Catholics, and to warn against what struck the then professor at Tübingen University as Western society’s lapse into neo-paganism.

Many liberal Christians viewed such trends as sexual freedom and falling levels of deference with relief. The conservative mindset was widely seen as terminally enfeebled. But the worry felt by Ratzinger was hardly a flash in the pan. It was echoed by the future John Paul II. Their shared instinct, allied to their concern that Vatican II had let a genie out of the bottle, would grow sharply during the 1970s, and explains much about Rome’s centralising agenda during the past three decades. Ratzinger has long been recognised as the chief intellectual architect of this process.

The background to Catholic divisions after Vatican II is not hard to explain. The forces for change during the council had always consisted of a tactical alliance between those whose liberalism was influenced by the contemporary world – the devotees of aggiornamento, or modernisation – and others whose reformist vision was more inspired by an urge to recover an ancient and strongly sacramental model of the Church – known as the ressourcement party.
As an avant-garde theologian needing to cover his flank (the post-doctoral thesis he wrote during the 1950s drew heavy criticism from conservatives), Ratzinger had felt a constant need to stress that his apparently novel notions were rooted in Catholic tradition. Although these ideas derived from what was called the nouvelle théologie, all the main figures in this movement – Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar in France, Hans Urs von Balthasar in the German-speaking world – also emphasised its venerable background.

Despite being 23 years younger than Ratzinger, Rowan Williams had a theological formation in some ways similar. This is surprising: the liberal Anglican world that the future Archbishop of Canterbury entered at Cambridge in 1968 was intellectually insular. Little was known of Continental Catholic thought by most of his teachers. The main exception was Donald MacKinnon, the renowned Anglo-Catholic lay theologian, who also stood out through the depth of his engagement with European philosophy. Thanks both to the influence of MacKinnon and to his own talents, Williams’ mind was nourished by the nouvelle théologie, as well as by even broader currents extending from Welsh revivalism to Russian Orthodoxy.

Ressourcement also supplies the most important key to understanding the archbishop’s thought. Like their Roman Catholic counterparts, many liberal Anglicans base their attitudes on a well-intentioned but soggy impulse to be “inclusive”, rather than on firm theological foundations. By contrast, Rowan Williams has laid constant stress on the idea that fresh conclusions can be reached via orthodox paths, rather than by borrowing from secular categories.
Herein, for example, lies the interest of the pro-gay arguments first voiced by the then Professor Williams during the 1980s. Until that time, conservatives and liberals had broadly agreed on what the Bible says about physical love, but parted company over whether it should be accepted. Williams recast the terms of the debate by arguing that Scripture condemns corrupt forms of same-sex activity, but does not reckon with stable, monogamous partnerships. Church teaching might therefore be adjusted in accordance with the Bible’s underlying emphasis on the connection between sex and commitment rather than in defiance of it.

This argument would naturally be disavowed by the Pope. Whether one supports it or not, however, Williams’ case is carefully crafted and commands widespread assent: publicly from many Anglican theologians, and privately from a good number of thoughtful Catholics with pastoral experience at the sharp end. It also shows, of course, that ressourcement-style arguments do not all point in the same direction.

Ratzinger’s move to the theological Right was not only prompted by his changing attitudes to church government. By the late 1960s, the erstwhile allies among the ranks of Catholic reformists were talking more about how to understand human nature than about church government as such; and they tended to divide along what might in shorthand be called “Augustinian” and “Thomist” lines – that is, between those with more and less sombre estimates of human capacities.

Rowan Williams, like Joseph Ratzinger, is a deep-dyed Augustinian, which explains among other things his very developed social conscience, and the prophetic though sometimes unduly anguished tone of his pronouncements on politics and society.

In his book Difficult Gospel, a study of the archbishop’s ideas, Mike Higton raises a query about this element in his subject’s outlook: “It sometimes seems that Williams is willing to risk muting the note of joy, of thankfulness, of release and rescue, appropriate to the news that God has stepped over all the barriers which separate us from him, and has accepted us despite ourselves ... I suspect that the tenor ...  of his writings is too unrelentingly agonised – too aware of the possibilities of self-deceit, too aware of the dangers of cheap consolation, ever to relax in the Sabbath rest of God’s love, feasting at table with the Son, despite all the dangers that attend such relaxation.”
 
Allied reservations have been expressed about Ratzinger. Doesn’t his claim in the Vatican document Dominus Iesus (2000) that non-Christians and even non-Catholics are in “grave spiritual peril” rest on an excessively restricted view of the Holy Spirit’s mission? Yes. But several important points in defence of both men could also be made. At least Williams avoids any hint of the banality and complacency of much preaching, both Anglican and Catholic. What’s more, Jesus himself, through his call for radical repentance and self-sacrifice, regularly talks in an “Augustinian” idiom. And simple verdicts on complex figures can easily look superficial. Viewed in the round, the archbishop’s sermons and writings do not stint on emphasising the rewards, as well as the costs, of discipleship.
 
Ratzinger also employs different registers at different times. Just before the turn of the millennium, he gave an extended interview to Peter Seewald, a German journalist and lapsed Catholic who later returned to the faith under the then cardinal’s influence. When asked by Seewald how many paths to God there are, Ratzinger replied unhesitatingly that there are as many paths as human beings. If he were only allowed to take one book to a desert island besides the Bible and Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions, he said that he would choose Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist-inspired novella Siddhartha – an old hippy favourite.

To speak of the Augustinian influence on Ratzinger and Williams in terms of pessimism about human nature is to short-change Augustine, as well as his two admirers. Archbishop and Pope are in different ways associated with a recovery of nerve in Christian thought over recent decades, and here, too, Augustine has supplied both men with some of the themes on which their writings are variations.

A stripped-down account of the saint’s legacy might draw out the emphasis he gives to heart, as well as mind, in human understanding, and his conviction that faith and reason are complementary elements in our mental make-ups. Frustrated in different ways by perceived shortcomings in their theological education, both men absorbed the Confessions in their youth, later describing the experience as seismic. The influence of Augustine is clear throughout Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, which contains many a put-down to the unexamined assumptions behind “empiricist” attacks on the coherence of religion. Early on, for example, we read that “knowledge of the functional aspect of the world, as procured for us so splendidly by present-day technical and scientific thinking, brings with it no understanding of the world and of being. Understanding grows only out of belief.” Richard Dawkins take note.

The similarities between Joseph Ratzinger and Rowan Williams extend beyond their theological formations. “I have two things in common with the Holy Father,” quipped the archbishop in a recent speech. “One is a love of cats; the other a hospitable instinct towards Anglican clergy” – the second of these being the mildest of digs at Rome’s recent proposal on so-called ordinariates for Anglican trad­itionalists considering a change of church allegiance. To this might be added a shared depth of spirituality, and a mutual love of good liturgy and ceremonial.

As the comment just quoted indicates, the archbishop also has a sense of humour – as does the Pope. In his days as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger would sometimes tell visitors to his office that “we shall shortly be seeing what the Holy Father has to say” on this or that topic. He was speaking with a twinkle in his eye. The statement concerned would invariably have been written by himself.

Do the intellectual formations of the two men tell us more about their policies as leaders? Yes and no. Williams’ recent trajectory has more to do with his instincts as an Anglo-Catholic, than his devotion to Augustine. But for all he has suffered in recent years, especially through the threats of schism orchestrated by conservatives in the United States and Africa, Rowan Williams still prizes the distinctive witness of Anglicanism, including its far more open forms of government, and has a very direct answer – “Because I don’t believe the Pope is infallible” – to the question of why he didn’t become a Catholic in his youth.

After an acutely difficult early period at Lambeth, he won respect from both the liberal and conservative wings of his Communion and went on to make a success of the 2008 Lambeth Conference. His record compares favourably with that of Benedict, who began his reign five years ago with some bridge-building gestures (particularly through meeting Hans Küng, one of his most dogged liberal critics), but has gone on to display pro-conservative partisanship in other respects, and an unwillingness to face up to what the child-abuse scandal implies about the need for greater transparency in church life.

What of the personal chemistry between the pair? Observers agree that their relationship is unusually good, extending well beyond the staple courtesies shown by John Paul II towards Robert Runcie and George Carey. Dr Williams read several of the Pope’s books in German before meeting Benedict for the first time in 2005. The following year, the archbishop was extended the unusual honour of being invited to lunch with the Pope. This encounter was scheduled to last for an hour: in the event it went on for three times that long. Dr Williams has never revealed what was discussed, other than that the Pope asked about the effect of women’s ordin­ation on the Church of England. We can safely assume that the table talk was also heavily theological.

Later on the same day, the archbishop gave a meaty lecture entitled “Secularism, Faith and Freedom” at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which defended the legitimacy of public expressions of religion. The address was released on DVD shortly afterwards. I am told by a reliable source that the Pope watched it four times. Then, when the two met in Naples in 2008, the Pope said “now I’m going to see my friend, Rowan” in the hearing of Bishop John Flack, at that time director of the Anglican Centre in Rome.

The warmth betokened by these anecdotes has not yet paid large dividends. Formal ecumenical progress has been glacial over the past two decades, even though the theological quality of debate between the two Churches has risen steadily, and relations between the archbishop and Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, are especially close. As indicated, Rowan Williams has endured the searing effects of what are seen by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches as unilateral reforms introduced by some parts of the Anglican Communion without a critical mass of broader support.

But can the Pope, insistent as he is on his role as custodian of the faith, also give due weight to the notion that doctrine develops? He remains nervous about the subject – but paradoxically so, since development is a characteristically Catholic idea. What is more, the beatification of Cardinal Newman forms one of the chief objects of Benedict’s forthcoming visit to Britain.

An obvious inference to be drawn from this article is that the Pope could learn a good deal from the archbishop about negotiating the Christian presence in societies much more diverse than Bavaria and Rome. As biographer of both men, I’d go further. It seems to me that Benedict’s understanding of Catholicism itself might be enlarged through further engagement with a figure of Rowan Williams’ stature. The journey could at the same time reconnect Joseph Ratzinger with his younger, pre-conciliar self.