Most books about an Archbishop of Canterbury are about a dead man, who existed at the heart of the English Establishment, and whose life was bound up with the English Church. As a subject, Rowan Williams does not fall into any of these categories. He is alive, and still comparatively young. Until he became Archbishop he knew few people in the Establishment, having been brought up in Wales, and spent his adult life as an academic.

On the church side of life, there are huge differences from his predecessors. The major controversy within the Church during Williams’s archiepiscopate has not been, specifically, about doctrine, but about homosexuality. As for the other major dramas of his life as Archbishop, they have included his coming close to death during the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Of his utterances on the public stage in Britain, the one which provoked the strongest sense of outrage (“WHAT A BURKHA” was the headline in the Sun) was the lecture in which he suggested that Sharia law should be adopted as a sort of parallel to the laws of England. I use the phrase “sort of” advisedly since his lecture was densely worded, and, like many of his public utterances, it was followed by a clarification which seemed to say the precise opposite of the words which had caused the original offence. Oliver O’Donovan, an Evangelical theologian, has noted Williams’s use of “carefully judged unclarity”, a quality which anyone who grew up in Wales will recognize.

Some might question whether a book about an incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury is necessary. Inevitably it is a story without an ending, and it cannot have the measured perspective of, for example, F. A. Iremonger’s classic biography of William Temple (1948). Rupert Shortt’s book, however, is a slightly different exercise, and it triumphantly justifies itself. This is not just an instant biography of someone who happens to be in the news. It is a serious and learned book with a specific theme. That theme is the survival of Christianity in our midst. The life of Rowan Williams, who is perhaps the most highly esteemed Christian theologian alive in Britain, is the prism through which the wider story is told.

Williams began as a Welsh Presbyterian. His father worked for the South Wales Electricity Board at the level of middle management. Williams, who suffered from meningitis as an infant, was an only child. It reads like a happy childhood. His mother and father became aware that they had given birth to someone unusual. Shortt (the Religion Editor of the TLS) is understandably “surprised” that Aneuran and Del Williams accepted, when the boy was only eleven, that they should stop being Presbyterians, and worship at the local high church, All Saints’, Oystermouth, in Swansea. Quite what a career move this turned out to be they could not have guessed at the time. When he was consecrated as Bishop of Monmouth his mother quipped that with a brain like his, Rowan could have become a high-flying lawyer.

From Welsh grammar school, Williams went to a Cambridge fermenting with the theological debate of John Robinson’s Honest to God (1962) and Alec Vidler’s Soundings (1963). Under the influence of the lay philosopher-theologian Donald MacKinnon, he appears to have resisted this modernist orthodoxy from the beginning. Shortt writes as if all “liberals” were what he calls liberal Protestants. But Vidler was a Catholic modernist, which is rather different. And Dennis Nineham, whose commentary on Mark’s Gospel is here dismissed as an expression of Liberal Protestantism, is a modernist in the tradition of Alfred Loisy and Newman. That is, they believed in the ever-unfolding, ever-changing communal witness of the Church. They were attracted to the Church because it radically adapts the message in each generation. It is fascinating that Williams appears never to have been tempted by modernism of this kind. Had he done so, he might have been bolder, as an Archbishop, about promoting a new attitude towards homosexuality within the Church. From the beginning of Williams’s academic career, Shortt stresses the conservatism. “He never really doubted that the Synoptic Gospels provide . . . a historically reliable record of Jesus’ mission." Never? In the case of a mind as subtle as Williams’s, one wonders in what sense this can be possible.

Brilliant careers do not happen by accident, and Shortt is deft in his depiction, not only of Williams’s personal likeableness, but also of his astute ambition. Having written a much admired doctoral thesis on the Russian Orthodox thinker Vladimir Lossky, Williams was ordained, and moved with rapid speed from theological lecturer at Mirfield College in West Yorkshire to Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, to his appointment, when aged thirty-five, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford. (He had applied unsuccessfully for the Chair at King’s College London two years before). After a brief engagement to an unsuitable German girl, unkindly dubbed “Brünnhilde” by some of Williams’s not so saintly contemplative nun friends, he married Jane Paul, a bishop’s daughter and herself a theologian. The book evokes their happy partnership, though it would have been interesting to have more investigation of what part, if any, Jane Williams, from her Evangelical background, played in her husband’s volte-face over the question of same-sex partnerships.

Shortt does not pull his punches over this matter. One of the more painful episodes in the book is the Jeffrey John debacle – in which Williams first endorsed the appointment of his Oxford friend and colleague to the bishopric of Reading, and then backtracked under emotional blackmail from Evangelicals. “A good man”, writes Shortt, “was being sacrificed on the altar of church unity.” Libby Purves, in The Times, expressed the disappointment of many kindly disposed observers at this early stage of Williams’s pontificate when she wrote that when the Welsh poet-thinker had been appointed, “Rowan Williams seemed like a wild card, a holy man from the West come to revive the Faith”. “Alas”, she wrote, “the dreadful suspicion grows that he is just another Archbishop of Canterbury.”

If the dreadful suspicion had been true, then it would not have been worth Shortt’s writing this book. But he persuades the reader that his subject was indeed something rather more than just another production-line senior cleric. We see here Rowan Williams as the very lovable pastor, who – contrary to his image as a framer of impenetrable academic sentences – is actually good at speaking to congregations directly. We see his brave composure during the nightmare of September 11 in New York. We see a doting father and husband, and a poet whose work is much better than that of the enthusiastic amateur. But above all, we see this new figure in our midst, the Archbishop of Canterbury who is no longer an Establishment figure. Shortt cites Williams’s friend Angela Tilby who says that his politics have “always come out of a different and less sophisticated part of him”. That has certainly been true. The Church is still established in law but it is not really part of “the Establishment”. Williams's clumsier remarks, about Sharia law, or about Darfur, would have been gaffes if he had been a political figure. But he isn’t.

Rowan Williams is more the nation’s poet-in-residence than he is a Pontiff. Most of his recent publications have been poems and literary criticism. His intelligence and decency are there for all to see. Given the viciousness of the attacks on him by the Evangelicals, we can see why Shortt views Williams’s career as a crucifixion, and why he ends his book by wittily applying to the Archbishop W. H. Auden’s description of Oscar Wilde: “He had a private even secret generosity, to match the public generosity”. But it is the public generosity which is palpable. In public discussions with Philip Pullman, for example, he has initiated an intelligent discussion about the nature of religion, such as we have not heard since William Temple was Archbishop. The voice of Rowan Williams is, for many of us, a very attractive one, and Rupert Shortt has explained why.

Rupert Shortt
ROWAN’S RULE
The biography of the Archbishop
466pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £20.
978 0 340 95425 6

A. N. Wilson’s most recent book, Our Times: The age of Elizabeth II, was published earlier this year.

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