Just Williams - Observer article

Sunday 11th July 2004

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, possesses personal modesty and moral certainty in equal measure. Combined with the scholarly precision of his language and his unqualified belief in the message of the Gospels, those qualities make him reluctant to give glib answers to simplistic questions.

They also enable him to express strong views in gentle language. It is a technique which allowed Downing Street to describe his criticisms of government ('manipulating the media ... habitually repressing criticism') as 'elliptical'. He could hardly have been more direct in his condemnation of the war in Iraq. At a time when mistakes are being admitted and errors of judgment exposed, didn't he think an apology was necessary. He does not.

'Those who took the decision [to go to war] were acting in good faith.' I suggested that 'acting in good faith' understated the conviction of a Prime Minister who 'has no doubt that he is doing God's work'. The Archbishop described the Blair conscience in more theologically acceptable terms. 'He believes that he's answerable for what he does, and I respect that.'

Answerable? Rowan Williams had already spoken of the instigators of the war being 'called to account'. Unsure what that meant, I asked him to explain.

'Two levels. At the simplest level, the public - nations, electorates - watch for the results. Politicians take large risks. I think they know that and the Prime Minister acknowledged it_ Anyone making decisions involving the lives and welfare of other people must answer to God.'

I asked, in the language of the Victorian Church, if the answer would be required 'at the Judgment Seat'. To my astonishment, the Archbishop of Canterbury replied - carefully enunciating each word - 'at the Judgement Seat'. That raised the question of what the penalty would be for an inadequate reply.

I understood that, in life, Tony Blair and George W Bush might have to live with the knowledge that the death and destruction in the Iraq war could not morally be justified. But was the Archbishop talking about punishment after death? The penalty for those 'found wanting' at the Judgment Seat is, or used to be, Eternal Damnation.

The Archbishop of Canterbury worships a more merciful and a more subtle God. 'Not damnation. But you know the scale of the mistakes you've made ...' I interrupted him to make sure I understood that he meant more than the regrets of old age. Was he, I asked, talking about 'the life to be, God's reckoning?' The Archbishop's reply - expanding the general to the particular - could not have been more categoric.

'You only see the clear perspectives of the situation when some of the ordinary muddles and selfishness of what life now involves have somehow slipped away. I'm talking about judgment and punishment. I've always thought that the essence of judgment is simply to be face to face with the truth - and no escape.' Was he really saying George W Bush and Tony Blair - and the rest of us - would, after death, still be able to feel guilt and remorse? Again, there was no doubt about the Archbishop's certainty. In the next life we will all be 'cognisant and conscious' beings, capable of suffering the torment of the truth about ourselves.

Putting aside the implication of that doctrine for the Prime Minister and the President, it seemed - in my atheist ignorance - astonishing that a man of such obvious intellectual sophistication should speak in such fundamentalist language. The time had come to advance into the remote recesses of faith. 'Is it possible,' I asked, 'to be simply an ethical Christian or must I believe in the mysteries and miracles?'

The answer - hedged about with a description of how a moral commitment usually evolves into 'something pretty indistinguishable from those doctrines' - seemed to be 'No'. I moved on to another one of the great intangibles. Are human beings redeemed, that is to say 'saved', by good works or by faith?

The Archbishop answered that 'big classical question' with the explanation that 'neither good works (the way you act) nor faith (a state of mind) can guarantee a place in heaven. What brings you into eternal life is a relationship with God' - an answer which did not help me fumble my way towards my intended inquiry about 'the good life' (pace Thomas Aquinas rather than Tony Bennett). So I just asked, 'Is it the Church's job - your job as its head - to guide the nation's morals?'

'It is the duty of a religious community, part of its job, to say to the rest of society: "This is what matters about human beings, these are non-negotiable things about human beings" ... There are a range of matters where the Church says this far and no further - the image of God requires more than this.'

So how does the Church decide what those issues are? 'There is always a range of possible issues and there is a danger of them becoming issues of the week. I think ecclesiastical spokesmen are prone to this ... A lot depends on being a bit reactive - what comes up at a particular moment.'

It was the Archbishop of Canterbury's misfortune to have the issue of gay clergy - the nomination of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading - 'come up' at the very start of his archiepiscopate. I wondered if the wounds, endured as a result of his reaction to that proposal, had healed. Is he 'anxious not to be quite as controversial as it was assumed he would be when first appointed?'

'A lot of people helped to build up the picture of the controversial, turbulent priest. I have to be as honest as I can within the framework of the responsibilities I have to a large range of people. I have never thought there is any virtue in being controversial for its own sake.'

Although Rowan Williams is a man whose word it is impossible to doubt, it did seem - during his early months in Lambeth Palace - that he was attracted to trouble. In February 2003, he announced that it was 'perfectly reasonable for those hoping to stay in Britain to be kept in secure accommodation while their cases are considered'. He appears genuinely surprised that his statement was interpreted as a support for imprisoning asylum seekers. That was not his intention. He meant 'security in a wider sense' - a concept difficult to define.

Thirteen months later, he again demonstrated the wisdom of not commenting on the event of the week. He criticised Footballers' Wives for exhibiting 'different sorts of selfish behaviour'. The programme's executive producer said the Archbishop had missed the point. He disagrees. 'I knew it was ironic. I knew it was self-parody. Like a good moral comedy, it drew out an extreme version of human behaviour.'

But it was the peg on which he hung two fundamental criticisms of modern society which television epitomises and encourages. The first is 'emotional voyeurism' - not just observing sex and suffering, but wanting to see 'other people going through extremes of feeling - anger and misery'. Both television drama and reality TV pander to a taste which the Archbishop finds baffling as well as distasteful. That is not, in itself, unworldly, but a surprise that expressing such opinions makes tabloid headlines is.

The question which now hangs over Rowan Williams is whether or not the bruising experience of those early months - the abuse from the homophobic wing of the Church and the threat by the African bishops to break up the Anglican Communion - had driven him back from his own convictions that gay clergy, homosexual in inclination but celibate in life, should not be victimised.

I suggested a preoccupation with unity was the reaction to be expected from a 'Prince of the Church' while the refusal to be driven off principle was the response of a 'Man of God' and that the accusation that he had chosen to occupy the wrong role was a 'very severe criticism'.

He accepted the severity of the criticism but refuted it with the insistence that 'unity is a principle ... it is all to do with a calculation that goes something like this. The decision was one which severely ruptured a whole set of relationships which are not about structural harmony but about mutual learning and mutual giving - relationships, let's say, between churches in the developing world and the Church here or the Church in the States. To rupture those relations would be bad for the Church not as an institution but as a community ... making people feel they have not been taken seriously.' He then added, with admirable humility, 'I recognise the argument of unity versus principle and it stings. It goes deep.'

No one can doubt that it does. But, integrity being beyond question, his decision may have been an error of judgment. I suggested that men and women of every sort are longing for people who speak out, who say 'it is wrong to discriminate against gays and I do not care what the consequences are of my saying so. It is a matter of principle.' Wouldn't it do the Church a world of good if people said that sort of thing?

The Archbishop got very near to agreeing and perilously close to exhibiting regret that the inhibitions which are imposed upon him require discretion. 'I have had it borne in on me - I do not mean by weighty figures but borne in by the office - that, as Archbishop, I have to keep as many voices in play as possible ... The voices in the developing world, people who regularly feel marginal in pretty well every respect, this is another turn of the screw for them. I'm serious about the international dimension here. That is probably what weighs with me most, personally and emotionally.'

Concern for the developing world - in the argument about the acceptability of gay clergy, normally a euphemism for Nigerian obduracy - leaves a palpably principled Archbishop with a dilemma. Some of his brother bishops openly speak of homosexuals in the pure language of prejudice. How does he deal with them?

'When our conference had a discussion in '98 about this, one of the things that the famous resolution said was that we had a commitment to listen to the voices of gay people. When I hear what I do regard as deeply prejudiced voices coming out of the Church I say "look, we have that commitment as well" ... There are some things which should not be said in the Church or anywhere else.'

The hope of renewed harmony lies, the Archbishop believes, in the 'difficult and quite recent principle that orientation and sexual behaviour can be distinguished'. Jeffrey John is celibate.

But that has not prevented the Reverend David Holloway, leader of Reform within the Church of England, excoriating him. That, the Archbishop says, is why the 'discipline making a disjunction between orientation and behaviour is important. The Church is committed to it, whatever any individual cleric may say.'

The Church of England exists on compromise. But Islam seems to flourish on the refusal to yield. If a young Muslim, working in a Birmingham car factory, says that it is absurd that during Ramadan he must not eat between dawn and dusk, he is told by his priest that the Koran brooks no amendment. I wondered if the Archbishop thought people responded more enthusiastically to an absolute view of belief and faith.

'Some clearly do. Some are clearly appalled by it. If you look, second- and third-generation Muslim families have a lot of the same problems with teenagers that other families do.'

My suggestion that they may be just as prone to steal motor cars, but probably still believe that the sky is God's canopy provoked the response that an 'older generation of Muslims would have regarded seeing the sky as God's canopy and not stealing motor cars was a part of the same ethical tradition'.

The Archbishop is all of a piece. He never tries to divide virtue between faith and good works.

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