Faith, Poetry and the University: An Interview with Rowan Williams

October 22, 2024 | By Zeki Tan MY ‘25

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Rowan Williams is the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He taught theology at Oxford and Cambridge and served as the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 2013 to 2020. Dr. Williams is also a poet and translator of poetry; he published his most recent edition of Collected Poems in 2022. In February 2024 he delivered the Taylor Lectures at the Yale Divinity School. I interviewed Dr. Williams while he was in New Haven to discuss his reflections on writing poetry, intellectual life, and how both enrich and are enriched by religious belief. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Zeki Tan: Thank you for agreeing to take the time to be interviewed. I’d just like to ask, first of all, when did you first feel called to be an academic? And how did you end up becoming ordained in the church as well?

Rowan Williams: The calling in respect to the church came first, certainly when I was quite young. I was brought up as a Presbyterian, and only became an Anglican when I was about 11 or 12, I think, when my parents moved house and things changed, but I was already quite keen at that point, exploring being an ordained minister of some sort, and that was partly to do with the fact that I was very excited by the world that the church's worship opened up to me. We had an extremely good pastor in the Presbyterian congregation, who preached with great vigor and intelligence so that I got absolutely fascinated with biblical history and thinking. And then when we became Anglicans, we were fortunate to have a very similar personality–another very intellectually, spiritually resourceful, energetic, strong teacher. So I grew up with that sense that Christianity was a very large landscape to explore and very exciting and invigorating to inhabit. And it's out of that, really, I became interested in theology for its own sake. And so I decided to study theology at university, and the rest is history.

ZT: How do you try to bridge these two worlds together in your career? Because it seems that in popular culture, or at least in popular understanding, these two are separate, like matters of faith and matters of the intellect.

RW: Well, of course, the mainstream Christian tradition has always said that intellect at its fullest is a matter of opening up your whole mental and imaginative life, to the real—ultimately, to God. So there ought not to be a big gulf between faith and intellect. The difficulty comes, I think, when intellectual activity, especially in religious affairs, becomes a kind of arm's length, third-person exercise detached from the actual business of growing in faith. And I suppose because I had some good examples, it seemed to me that there wasn't any inherent contradiction. I've said we had wonderfully intelligent pastors when I was growing up, who never ever gave the impression that they hung up their minds at the vestry door. And when I went to Cambridge to study theology, I had at least some teachers who were manifestly people doing it because they wanted to inhabit their faith more fully. One particular person was a New Testament scholar— extraordinarily saintly personality, and later on he took our wedding, in fact—but he would always begin his lectures with prayer. Difficult to imagine that in the modern university, but this was fifty plus years ago. And he modeled that for many of us, I think, that you could be a first rate, internationally reputed scholar who was completely unfazed and unfussed about saying, ‘Well, I'm in this because I believe it.’ So I didn't feel it was that. The risk is always of objectifying faith, saying that's an interesting phenomenon, and I will walk around it and scrutinize it through a microscope. And God forbid that I should ever inhabit it. But I have often used the analogy, that if you're studying music, it actually really helps to have an ear for music, and some experience of singing. Because if you just studied music as patterns on page, you wouldn't get very far. And I think religious practice is like that. You don't focus on religious ideas so much as asking, ‘What is it the people do? What's the energy at work in them?’ just as you might with music.

ZT: That's a really interesting connection—a high school English teacher of mine told me once that poetry is not dead because there's so much music being written, and he liked to think about even contemporary pop songs as being lyrical poetry. To ask about your career as a poet, was there any formative experience in your life that led you to take up writing poetry? 

RW: In my secondary school years, or high school years as you say, I was, again, very fortunate in my teachers who encouraged us to experiment creatively. I'd always been enthusiastic about poetry, since I was quite, quite little. And if you're growing up in Wales, as I did, then there's a very strong poetic tradition in the Welsh language and the Welsh culture more generally. And so, as a teenager, I found myself sort of tuning into that aspect of the culture. I started writing unbelievably bad poems as a teenager, like you do. Most people who write poetry write terrible poetry in the early stages, but you just have to get your hand in. And I don't think I really wrote much of any worth at all until I was in my middle 20s. But I was trying a bit, trying things out. And I don't think there's any one experience except that, as you develop with this, you realize that poetry comes from those moments when there's an urge to frame and explore something that's happened, in ways that are not just patterns of ideas and so forth, where you need to find images and metaphors that open up the depth of what's been happening to you a bit more fully. And, of course, the fact is that until you're at least in your late teens, you're probably not going to have that many experiences of significance, that kind of significance anyway, so you won’t write good poetry until you’ve had some more experience.

ZT: I think that ties in quite well with what you said earlier about how, you know, faith isn't just this very detached object of interest, right? It has to be lived and experienced and something that you are very much involved with. What do you think of poetry as a spiritual exercise or as a means by which you come to know God?

RW: I'd say it works as a spiritual exercise at several levels. There's the very basic level at which when you write poetry; you are relinquishing a bit of your control. That is, you’re saying, ‘I'm not writing a message, an essay, a manifesto. I'm trying to suspend some kinds of habitual intellectual judgment so that things can come up from, I won't say the subconscious, but from other levels of the imagination, where suddenly a connection suggests itself.’ And that element of letting go of control and trying to listen in, tune in, even for a very secular poet, or supposedly very secular poet, that's not a million miles away from the experience of prayer. So that's one level at which I think it's a spiritual exercise. And more fully, I think, as the connections emerge, you begin to see, I think, the kind of excitement, how things join up. Now, in Scripture, the whole idea of the wisdom of God, is that this is something, as it were, buzzing away beneath the surface of things. It's like the neurons firing. There's a sort of to and fro, rapid to and fro between all the elements of creation, which in the hand of God and in the work of God mysteriously hangs together. And when, it's an ambitious thing to say, but I think when a really unusual, compelling metaphor comes up in poetry, you have a sense of that whizzing to and fro of connectedness ‘Ah, that connects with that.’ And so it's a movement into what the Eastern Orthodox call a Sophianic understanding—Sophia, the wisdom of God—you have just a little bit, a little touch of how that wisdom works.

ZT: Looking at it from the other, the other side, as someone reading poetry—as you said, poetry isn't like a manifesto. It's not something that gets straight to the point and tries to express itself to you directly. And it's like something you need to cut through many layers to really understand and engage with.

RW: It takes time, and with a good poem you never say, ‘Okay, so I've read that and I’ll go and file it.’ A good poem brings you back, because you think, ‘Oh, there must be more. I need to hear that again. I need to absorb it again.’ And that's one of the great things about any great work of art. You don't just tick it off and say, ‘Okay, now I've heard Mozart's Magic Flute and I've heard Beethoven's Final Quartets, and I've heard Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, so I need never listen to them again. Phew!’ On the contrary, they go on opening up.

ZT: In speaking of faith as a vantage point from which you try to make sense of things, can you talk a bit more about the role of spiritual habits in making a good poet and a good artist?

RW: I'd go back to what I was saying earlier about this, what I call a contemplative dimension to art. You have to learn to still your ego and park your private agendas a bit so that what's there can make the impact it needs to make on you. And so anyone, anyone, of any conviction or any confession, setting up to be some sort of an artist, above all has to learn attention. This is where I sometimes go back to the great French philosopher Simone Weil. Reading her as a student was one of those kinds of scales falling from the eyes moments. About that notion of attente, which is both attention and waiting, I thought, ‘Yes, that is absolutely how to bridge between the artistic endeavor and the spiritual endeavor—you attend, and you wait.’ And you wait with expectation as you look out in the world. The other side of it is something which keeps coming back to me in great force: how this attentive attitude affects our ethics as well, and how we approach another person with attention and expectation in the same way. I don't know if you're aware of the great French figure Madeleine Delbrêl, who was a French social worker and contemplative, lived in a little lay community near Paris, and worked with very poor and homeless people. And she writes about how you approach people in the street with expectation, not that you've got the solution to their problems. So, you don’t bear down on them, brandishing your solution, saying, ‘Hey, look, I've got a solution!’ But first of all, you watch, you listen, you wait, you expect, and something begins to emerge from that.

ZT: This is really interesting. Because it ties back to this idea of the slowness that comes with reading poetry. 

RW: Yes, we're a very impatient culture. And we don't much like the idea that some things simply take the time that they take. You can't rush the processes of growth and discovery. And how we get back to understanding that, I don't know. But I know it's a completely different, almost trivial comparison, but you have the slow food movement. It’s an international, informal network of people who are resisting the fast food culture, who are saying, well, this is a restaurant where we will serve your food very, very slowly, so you can actually taste it. And it occurs to me sometimes, looking back over the last few decades, in the 1960s, [when] there was a great deal of fuss and controversy, of course, about the drugs that were coming on the market at the time, like LSD. Well, this can give you the experience that the mystics had, without all the annoying sidelines of having to fast and pray. That's it, isn't it? That's the ultimate objectification, commercializing of an experience, which in fact, only happens as you grow.

ZT: I want us to talk a bit more about the importance of rest in this. At least in my context, people are trying to rush to move from one activity to the next in pursuit of this end, whether it be a career goal or some other vocational aspiration. But where does rest, and particularly holy rest, if there's a way to rest properly–where does that fit into this?

RW: It’s the Sabbath principle, isn’t it? It's the profound insight in Judaism that the rhythm of your life has to be punctuated by a time of non-achievement. A time when you're not driven. And all those very complicated rules about keeping Shabbat for an Orthodox Jew–not kindling a flame, not carrying a burden. And there's not much for you to do except sit and absorb the reality. Now, the Sabbath principle is one that we have largely lost. And when, a couple of decades ago, the old regulations about closing shops on Sundays in the UK disappeared, I was one of those who was very unhappy about it, not so much because well, not because I'm a fundamentalist about the Sabbath, and God says you've got to do it politically, but because it seems to be the abandoning of any notion that there is a natural flow here. So we're not good at it. And people are more and more aware of what they're losing and what they're denying in not giving themselves that space. And I have to put my hand up and say, I'm as guilty as anybody. The arrival of electronic communication in its present form means we're all accessible to each other online 24 hours a day. If somebody wants to get a message, they don't have to put a stamp on an envelope and put it in the post box. They can do it instantly. And I noticed how people instantly want a response, and if you haven't replied within 24 hours you get a worried or irritated email saying, did you get my message. And of course, I've been part of that. I am as guilty as anybody and so have to work at the times of letting go, the times of non achieving. But if we were to put to ourselves the paradoxical goal of achieving a state of not achieving, one of the things you need to work for and work out is protecting the time when you're not achieving, when you're not struggling to keep on top of things. If we can do that a bit more, we'd be, I suspect, a slightly less manic, neurotic, perhaps even less violent society. 

ZT: A lot of it seems to be driven in part by the advent of electronics and social media, in preventing us from taking the time to sit quietly and to reflect. But is there a middle way between, you know, abandoning these devices altogether, and maybe moving to a more snail mail-paced way of life? Is there a way to live with these devices?

RW: I suspect there is. And happily, I know enough young people who do seem to be able to use it responsibly, but I think it does mean again, making a point of some people, say, fasting, from time to time, from the use of these devices. Giving up what's happening, or your Tiktok for Lent, seems to be a perfectly sensible thing to do. And to state the obvious and to use an old cliche, it's a good servant and a bad master.

ZT: I want to change subjects a little bit and talk about the Taylor lectures, which you are here at Yale for. What do you hope to achieve in giving these lectures?

RW: Getting through without breaking down? (laughter.) Well, one reason I said yes to the invitation was that I've been thinking for quite a few years actually about an interconnected set of questions to do with the nature of our relation with each other, which involves what I hope might be a better or less uncritical understanding of the word empathy. I’ll be talking a bit about that in the second lecture, which allows us to think through what the language of solidarity, so often used in Catholic social teaching, might mean in practice. And also to rethink some of our language about human rights in a way that might get us away from the excessively individualist and very forensic patterns we sometimes use when we’re talking about human rights, to think about human right, human right, more in terms of human dignity. So I did the Tanner Lectures at Harvard about 10 years ago, and explored some of these themes a little bit, but I haven't had time to write those up properly. Did some other lectures, about six, seven years ago. And I've been working more on the background of solidarity as an idea. So I thought, what I'd like to do is use this as an opportunity to distill some of that, get my ideas in order, and say something about, about how we actually cannot, really, really cannot, have any kind of sustainable social vision, without an understanding of solidarity and solidarity, not just this fellow feeling but the recognition that our destinies are linked as human beings, that there really is no possibility of one individual or one bit of humanity flourishing at the expense of the rest. It's just–it doesn't happen, it won't happen. That refusal of the Other is finally suicidal. So that's, that's all in the background of what I'm trying to tease out.

ZT: You also talk about the importance of work, especially of collective labor, in constructing this habitable world and not just a society where people kind of uneasily get along. How does this apply to the university context in which you have these very specialized, compartmentalized departments in which knowledge is produced, but they don’t always talk to each other? How can we perhaps try to increase that dialogue?

RW: Yes, I'm glad you flagged that, because, again, that's been an interest of mine for a long time. The idea that the university is a place where even very distinct and very different disciplines learn to take one another seriously. And to some extent are able to talk to each other. That means creating the kind of academic culture in which there are different kinds of forum where these things can be exchanged. I sometimes put it in these terms that when you're studying alongside somebody who's studying something totally different, you realize that the questions that matter to you are not the only ones that matter. Somebody else is asking questions that matter to them which are not the same. Now to understand why those questions matter to them, for them to understand why your questions matter to you, to find the questions that matter to both of you, and how to talk about those, all that seems to be very much part of a good intellectual culture. Overspecialism and functionalism that simply says, Well, all I need to do is learn the skills to deliver without any real curiosity or criticism, that really pulls against this. And I know this is a slightly slanted perspective, but at best, I won’t say it always happens by any means. But at best, something of the old collegiate system, which I've been used to in Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, where you are quite likely to find yourself sitting at lunch with somebody working in a completely different field, and you have to talk to them. There’s something to be said for that. Now, the Oxford and Cambridge model is stigmatized, not entirely wrongly, as elitist and culturally specific in all kinds of ways, but I still would say that a university that knows its job will be looking for creating those sorts of forum where something like that can happen to save people from one dimensional approaches to their work and their thinking.

ZT: What is the role of us as university students in trying to push back against that culture of trying to specialize and separate things?

RW: Well, I think what you're trying to do with this is important, with Logos. That is to say, look, there are connections, connections, again, there are connections you may not have noticed, there are resonances between different people's concerns. Let's get them on the table. Let's look at them. Let's have the events in which these things can be exchanged. Let's create–to use another cliché, safe spaces–where people can bring their concerns, intellectual and otherwise, with the expectation that they will be heard intelligently. And intelligent listening is absolutely crucial for our intellectual health. Intelligent listening. So, university students, I suppose, could ask herself or himself, how do I encourage and practice intelligent listening across some of the boundaries that might seem obvious?

ZT: I think that's all we have time left for questions. Thank you so much again for taking the time to be interviewed. 

RW: You’re very welcome.