Passions of the Soul: a book review

A good friend of mine, who is both a priest and a poet, says that Rowan Williams is the best spiritual writer in the English language since St John Henry Newman, who died in 1891. Happily, Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, is still very much with us, and as he moves through his eighth decade, his writing only becomes more vibrant, challenging and real. His most recent book, Passions of the Soul, is a case in point.

Williams is Welsh and has a superb ear for language. He knows exactly how far to push a metaphor and how much a single sentence can support without breaking under the load. This distinguishes him from many other contemporary theological writers who fail to communicate with an audience because they don’t really understand the instrument they are using to do so, namely language. The result is often didactic or gushy or overly earnest or predictable or stale or self-regarding. Much religious writing tends to fall between one of two stools: arid academic gobbledygook and innocuous heartfelt blancmange. Williams does none of these things.

If you feel the need for a little oil on your spiritual joints, you might invest in a book Williams edited called A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for searching the heart. This collection introduces religious poetry from a wide range of cultures and experiences, most of it Christian and all of it extraordinary. Williams comments on each poem and leaves us in its company, allowing the poet to beguile his or her way past our religious defences, inviting us into a fresh, surprising and sometimes devastating encounter with God.

They wanted to be lost. In their lostness, they learnt to ‘live in welcoming stillness’.

Passions of the Soul returns to an area about which Williams has thought profoundly over many years, namely the Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries. In that time, tens of thousands of men and women headed into the desert in search of something that eluded them elsewhere. It is not easy to put into words what motivated the so-called desert mothers and fathers, nuns and monks who put deep roots into shallow soil all over the place between Egypt and Syria. Some are famous. St Simeon Stylites, for example, lived on a landing perched on top of a tower for decades. His supporters supplied his necessities, which he hauled up in a bucket; presumably his waste went down the same way. Pilgrims came from urban centres to yell out their most private dilemmas and he yelled back his advice.

It is a wonder that isolation from the world brought with it worldly wisdom, but this is an aspect of desert spirituality across many traditions. The renowned Antony of Egypt called the desert a ‘trackless place’. It drew people who wanted to live not only off the grid but off the map. They wanted to be lost. In their lostness, they learnt, in the words of Passions of the Soul, to ‘live in welcoming stillness’.

The desert ascetics were pilgrims on pause. They came to inhospitable places and created hospitality, most of all for themselves. The word ascetic comes from ascesis, which began its life as a description of the way sportspeople train and prepare. A form of bodily discipline. The nuns and monks certainly practised an ascetical frugality, sometimes to the point of extremity. But self-denial was a rung on the ladder to self-acceptance and then to self-awakening. Fully awake, the self was able to pay attention to reality in all its fullness. Williams explored some of the breadth of their experience in an earlier book, Silence and Honey Cakes (2003). There he writes:

what we have in the literature associated with the early generations of desert ascetics is their reporting back from the ‘laboratory of the spirit’ not only about how prayer is to be experienced but about how humanity is to be understood—about life, death and neighbours.

In other words, the desert was never a place of escape, only of encounter. In his new book, Williams goads us to be as real as those who chose, unlike most of us, to have nothing but reality:

What we most need is realism—a realism about the kind of beings we are, beings who grow in the love and service of God, in the very image of God, within the context of a world of movement and uncertainty in which we are not in charge.

Passions of the soul is structured around the imprisoning human obsessions described by writers as various as Evagrius of Pontus, who died around 399, and, a bit later, John Cassian. The following centuries would codify this thinking into lists of deadly sins, but Williams insists that the contemplatives of the desert were never in the business of creating any kind of ‘syllabus’. He prefers the beautifully nuanced expression ‘chains of thought’, ideas that lock us up. The desert writers were, for all I can see, more compassionate about sin than any subsequent Christian movement.

‘Sin costs us,’ writes Williams. ‘It costs us our human naturalness; it freezes up our liberty to say yes to what we are most deeply, naturally, oriented to.’

It is a beautiful thing, in Williams’ company, to feel so much at home in this band of eccentric and serious Christians:

What is really most significant about us creatures, finite beings who have been brought into existence, is what I have called the ‘worm under the soil’, the ‘magnetic quivering’, the capacity to share and reflect, to contemplate—which is a good deal more than just sitting and gazing. It is absorbing life, being drawn into life, communicating life.

The world often stands still in the pages of a book by Rowan Williams, and Passions of the Soul is no exception. It is a small oasis in the deserts of our own making.