3 January 2009
Book Review27 November 2008, Review by Anthony Howard Prodigy, poet, pastor Rowan’s Rule: the biography of the archbishop
Rupert Shortt Rupert Shortt, who in the year of his subject's appointment produced a brief study entitled Rowan Williams: an introduction, is exceptionally qualified for the task he has taken on. A former member of the staff of both The Tablet and the Church Times, he is now Religion Editor of The Times Literary Supplement and, as such, is well able to cope with the more abstruse points of theology as reflected in his subject's writings (the general reader may find these passages a bit daunting). Nevertheless, the author has clearly set out to write an accessible book and, on the whole, he succeeds. If there is a shortcoming, it lies in the way he is forced to tell his subject's life-story. The Archbishop has been generous in supplying photographs but he does not appear to have been anything like as forthcoming in producing documents. Thus we look in vain for that staple of Anglican episcopal biographies - the terms in which the job offer of the throne of St Augustine was first made by the prime minister - and there is a notable lack of contemporary personal documentation throughout. When Shortt is able, very occasionally, to come up with a first-hand piece of direct personal evidence (as in the letter of tactical advice sent to Williams by a former Oxford academic colleague just over a couple of weeks before the formal announcement of the appointment to Canterbury was made), it is amazing the difference it makes in bringing the narrative to life. For the most part, however, we are reduced to living off a diet of external sources - press cuttings, academic lectures, theological texts, all that sort of thing. Given the limitations apparently imposed upon him - Shortt even thanks the Archbishop (to whom the copyright certainly does not belong) for "permission to reproduce" the single personal letter mentioned above - it is remarkable how well the author has managed to do. This book is particularly strong in its account of Williams' early years. From the moment he first went to school he, as an only child, seems to have been regarded as something of an infant prodigy - quite useless at, and uninterested in, games but already, as well as being a poet and a bit of an actor, a star in the classroom. It was the young Williams who led his parents away from Nonconformity and into the Church in Wales, in one of whose local churches he was confirmed as a teenager. He appears to have resolved to read theology even before he was offered a place at Cambridge. He was the sole theological student of his year at Christ's College (St John's, to its subsequent chagrin, having turned him down). With a short intermission at Oxford, where he took his DPhil in 1975, and at Mirfield, where he lectured in theology 1975-77, the next decade in Williams' life was dominated by Cambridge. He became chaplain of the Anglican theological college, Westcott House, in 1977, a post he combined with being a university lecturer in divinity from 1980, and then from 1984 to 1986 was fellow and dean of Clare College. Shortt is at his best on these years, relating how his subject embarked on a broken engagement with a German woman student at Westcott (thereby in recent days mightily exciting the tabloids, one of whom even tracked her down to her present home in Dublin where she works alongside her husband as a German Lutheran minister), and also managing to deal tactfully with what may have been another romantic attachment (in the brief period he spent at Oxford) which ended tragically with the young woman concerned taking her own life. But as Williams, who was ordained deacon in 1977 and priest in 1978, was only too aware, the one thing lacking in his background was parochial experience, a gap possibly to be explained by the period when he thought he would end up in a monastery (conceivably even a Catholic or Russian Orthodox one). But while still at Cambridge he took steps to rectify this, attaching himself to a local parish, where he was joined in his pastoral efforts by a young female undergraduate (herself the daughter of a bishop) whom he was to marry in 1981. His marriage, no doubt, had something to do with the decision, taken in 1986, to move back to Oxford, after a bare two years as dean of Clare, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and a canon of Christ Church. Shortt is decidedly downbeat about this second Oxford phase in Williams' career, claiming that he never really felt at home and arguing that he signally failed, as he could have done from his new senior position, to reform the entire structure of the theological faculty. In any event, release from Oxford was not long in coming. This biography is singularly uninformative about the episode in which the Diocese of Southwark is thought to have lain within its subject's grasp (only to be snatched away by the man he was ultimately to succeed at Canterbury, George Carey) but it deals fully and frankly with the process that led to Williams' election as Bishop of Monmouth in 1986. For an Oxford professor, it was by no means a dramatic promotion - the disestablished Church of Wales having traditionally been regarded as something of a poor relation of the C of E - but there were aspects of a bishop's life that appealed to Williams, and he certainly took to it without undue stress (even if he retained his humility by refusing to wear a purple stock or shirt and by insisting on wearing an ordinary clerical black one instead). The author is fair and dispassionate about what was achieved, and what was not achieved, in the six years his subject spent living in Newport (the last two as Archbishop of Wales as well as being Bishop of Monmouth). It is a reasonable judgement that he was strong on the pastoral side while at the same time displaying clear weaknesses in administration. Enough, it might have been thought, to disqualify him from the far more administrative job at Lambeth. Why, then, in 2002, did Rowan Williams inherit it? The answer has to be that he was - as Churchill said of William Temple in 1942 - "the one half-crown article in a sixpenny bazaar". Whether, after a sticky start (originating with his loss of nerve over the already announced appointment of the gay Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading), that by itself will prove sufficient to translate a scholar and teacher into a leader and prophet only the next half-dozen years will tell us. But meanwhile this eminently fair-minded biography deserves to stand as an indispensable interim report. Anthony Howard |
