Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (review)

Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement. By Rowan Williams. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000. 190pp. $24.95.

Filling out yet another form for my children's school, I suddenly discovered I was being invited to make some choices about my own direct involvement, not theirs. In which part of the all-school "winter immersion week" was I going to participate? There was volunteer work at a local animal shelter, a prairie restoration project, arts and crafts at the neighboring nursing home. . .? I saw myself tensely squeezing out glitter-glue while a patient kindergartner held the appropriate popsicle sticks in just the right position. I already felt nervous. There was something highly unnerving, and yet admittedly exhilarating, about the idea of being "successful" not by virtue of being a proficient adult, but by virtue of doing something simply good together.

For a week at least, my children's school was going to create an environment in which a miracle of charity could flesh itself out, where all the usual roles and rivalries, competencies and deficiencies would wash out and pale before the sheer vibrant hues of a common life forgetful of itself--or, rather, learning itself anew as a kindly body. For as the Archbishop of Wales remarks in this trenchant new book (in a chapter titled "Charity"), charity is like a game in which "winning" turns out simply to be the joyful establishment of attentive mutual relationship. Since we normally think of winning as acquiring "goods" that are in short supply, a festival of charity entails a startling redefinition of goods: "The material world appears as a world of scarcity--at least in the sense that no material acquisitions can be infinitely divided out. The game of 'charity' is based on the implied proposal that there are goods to be worked for that are completely different in kind to material goods" (56-7).

Many readers will be familiar with Rowan Williams's excellent earlier works, ranging from a history of Christian spirituality to a monograph on the Arian controversy, from a study of Teresa of Avila to the recent On Christian Theology, to name only a few (and a reflection on September 11th is about to appear). The present work should reach his broadest audience yet. While far from being journalistic in tone, it offers a coherent and incisive cultural intelligence that is rigorous and accessible at the same time. Often grave but never grim, Lost Icons insightfully analyzes in distinct chapters three tenuous and disappearing ways of being in the world--childhood, charity, and remorse. Rowan Williams limns these spiritual phenomena most profoundly and shows how so many of our contemporary cultural impasses and griefs are themselves the result of having lost touch with these vanishing "languages," which made possible most valuable, intricate, and delicate ways of relating to one another, of being a society.

Among the considerable strengths of the work is its irreducibly social and political vision. From beginning to end, Williams teases apart the myth of primordially individualistic selves, existing only to the extent that they assert their wills over those of others. Instead he steeps the reader in pungent reflections that convey the real savor of selves friendly and communal from the roots, grown in the patient affection but also the sometimes devastating inadequacies of others. This is a penitent book, remarking honestly on our lost willingness to give time and care to this growing of each other's life-time for our children to be children, time for the apparently unproductive festivities of charity, time for painful but light-shedding remorse for the damage we have done each other, time fundamentally (as the final and fourth chapter explores) for the unfolding of real soul.

In an earlier era, I suppose the phenomena that Williams examines in each chapter would have been likened to moral dispositions, basic patternings of our ways of being that make most other things possible. Williams introduces...