HERE is classic Rowan Williams. This is a significant work of compassion and wisdom, one that — I dare to guess — will stand out even among the great range of writings that he has produced. It brings together the fruits of engagement with philosophers of many languages, lectures prepared for many different settings, and conversations and experiences in different and challenging contexts. It is also a tough read, uncompromising in the demands that it makes in complex sentences and page-long paragraphs requiring reading and re-reading. “Work”, in the subtitle, is accurate in more senses than one.
None of this will surprise experienced Williams readers, who will also remember well the tedious and repeated complaints of detractors, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury, that he was unintelligible. His readers will also know, however, how far such comments are from grasping two features of his immense theological legacy.
So, first, you struggle your way through a long chapter, convinced that much of the erudition and complexity has eluded you (and even allowing yourself to wonder whehter it was all necessary); but then, at the end, you know that something really important has been said and has cut through. So, this is classic Williams: he makes you struggle with the theme, but it is clear that the struggle is his, too.
Second, it is a feature of Williams’s theological style that he can take a word that you are sure you understand, have heard thousands of times, and used and commended yourself, so that you can let it trip off the tongue — or, in this instance, even shouted out — and taking that word can demonstrate conclusively that you have not grasped anywhere near the complexity of the issues that it raises or the richness that close examination of it has to offer.
Such are “solidarity” and the work of recognition which is involved if we are to relearn how to be discriminating when we hear it, and how to speak of our own solidarity, or lack of it, more aware of what that implies.
Nor do you have to wait long before you are claimed by the pressing need to be clear about what it means. The prologue begins in South Africa, and the introduction begins with the murders at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo. The world over, in arena after arena, Williams identifies the rhetoric of solidarity as a “potent imaginative vehicle”, as much used as subject to critique from either side of situations of conflict.
Right at the start, the reader is alerted to the ambiguity of what are intended as gestures of solidarity: wearing the T-shirt or shouting a slogan doesn’t alter the fact that those manifestations may be undertaken thousands of miles from the people whom they are intended to support, and by people who are a long way from experiencing the oppression against which they are taking sides.
Williams delves into the nature of that ambiguity in three chapters that constitute the first part of the book: an examination of what it is that makes solidarity with the “stranger” possible and yet complicated. There are many pressures that make for difficulty in recognising the likeness of the stranger enough to be in solidarity — but there are also reasons for being sceptical of those obstacles (his response to the purported challenges of AI is particularly interesting). That means that recognition of “the other” is work (sometimes he refers to it as “labour”) that must be done if solidarity is to be real.
A word that describes that work and the possibility of solidarity is “empathy”, but that, too, is not a simple matter of being sure that you share another’s feelings, and there is some particularly powerful exploration of the thinking of Edith Stein, the Jewish-born Carmelite Sister, canonised victim of Auschwitz. This is but one person among a number into whose thinking we are taken as the work of understanding the stranger is examined and we are challenged to a more reflective view of how solidarity can be possible.
All this, then, has implications for the debate about human rights; and that needs closer examination, since it is too easy for talk about rights, like talk about solidarity, to presuppose a self who dispenses recognition, understanding, and rights but is not also formed and altered in the interaction.
The second part of the book is an immensely wide-ranging historical, philosophical, and theological progression. This, though, is not complication for complication’s sake, but, rather, a pathway leading to a vision. We are guided towards that vision by examination of some of the thinkers who in different ways can be companions in that progression: Stein, who has been mentioned already; the Czech Jan Patocka (“the Solidarity of the Shaken”), the Polish Józef Tischner (“Solidarity without Enemies”), and the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer (“Solidarity, Responsibility, Guilt”). It is of course no coincidence that these are thinkers whose experience is of the costliness of national and personal histories that raise the issue of solidarity at every point.
Then — and is this where we have been headed all along? — comes “Solidarity, Co-inherence, Communion”. The poet-theologian Charles Williams is our principal companion in a vision of solidarity that “opens out on to communion . . . that opens up a reciprocal engagement and — potentially — enrichment in which neither subject remains unchanged, and in which each acquires a history in which the other is constitutive”.
Such is solidarity become communion. Unsurprisingly, the “Conclusion” of this book, while it summarises and brings together much of the preceding argument, ends with the sharpest of questions: if solidarity, no longer seen as what I offer to another from an essentially unchanged self-understanding, involves a disruptive cost to my own self, there is reason to be fearful of it. But is not the refusal of that level of communion something more to fear, in the “erosion and shrinkage of the world” which that involves?
Having arrived at that conclusion, the reader may well understand that what has been said all along is that solidarity is a labour and as such supremely worth while.
The Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby is an Honorary Visiting Professor in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He is a former Bishop of Worcester, Bishop to HM Prisons, and President of the National Council for Independent Monitoring Boards.
Solidarity: The work of recognition
Rowan Williams
Bloomsbury £20
(978-1-3994-3151-4)
Church Times Bookshop £16
