Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way by Rowan Williams (review)

Rowan Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is best known for his tenure as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, from 2002 to 2012. Many Dickensians were greatly impressed by his speech at the Dickens bicentenary ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 7 February 2012. It seemed considerably longer – in a good way – than its c. 1,200 words, and gave us a bit more to think about than Prince Charles’s silent wreath-laying. Lord Williams kindly agreed to the publication of the speech in Dickens Quarterly (vol. 29, no. 2, June 2012). It is reprinted, with only very minor changes, in the collection that is the subject of this review.

Dickens is one of Williams’s twenty “luminaries,” a company whose other members include eight actual saints, starting with St. Paul (c. 5–67 ce) and ending with St. Óscar Romero (1917–80), as well as uncanonized theologians and martyrs ranging from Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) to Etty Hillesum (1914–43). The only other literary author to be included is John Milton.

Dickens’s appearance in such company is to some extent accidental: Williams explains that he could have chosen other individuals, and that most of those included were the subjects of sermons or addresses that he was invited to give (xi). However, there are strong themes running through this book that show why Dickens is a central figure for Williams, who is perhaps unique in our time for his polyglot immersion and scholarship in both theology and secular literature.

The main focus of the Dickens speech was on Bleak House, especially the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock. But there is no doubt that Williams knows the whole novel (and Dickens’s work in general) intimately. Dickens “portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly”; he “portrays human beings in hell; and yet, when we read him, it does not read like bad news” (92). There “is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved, happy ending and an immense burden of recognized, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering” (93). Williams relates this split to the double narrative of Bleak House, which he sees as dividing finished from unfinished business. This is also the way Christianity works, for Williams, in a paradoxical balance between ongoing suffering and perpetual redemption. The “theological” significance of Dickens’s work, in other words, isn’t just a matter of portraying the human predicament in individual characters, it also has to do with literary form. Not only that, but specific linguistic constructions play their part, as in Williams’s reading of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s “appallingly stiff phrase” which nevertheless holds “the hope of mercy” (for himself, as well as his wife): “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour” (93, very slightly misquoting Bleak House, ch. 58). Here and in many other places in this book, it is possible to discover unexpected parallels, and assemble them into a broader picture of Williams’s thought. Sir Leicester’s “stiff phrase,” for example, rises in significance by comparison with the description of Thomas Cranmer’s final achievement of clarity and freedom (as Williams movingly and almost believably imagines it) in 1556, as he “held out his right hand, his writing hand” to the flames, “for a final composition, a final liturgy” (52). Williams does not suggest that Sir Leicester, or indeed Dickens (in any simple sense) is a man of God, but Sir Leicester’s utterance, Dickens’s placement of that utterance, and indeed Williams’s celebration of what Dickens has done, all come to seem liturgical – part of a sense-making process, against the odds.

Sir Leicester’s finally breached stiffness is bodily as much as mental or linguistic. Mind and body work together throughout Williams’s thinking. The hagiographic method of this book, describing the vicissitudes of its subjects’ lives alongside their thought, greatly enriches Williams’s understanding of writing as a kind of action, or as a...