How God adds up

Andrew Brown grapples with the divine and the creative urge

The good bits first: Rowan Williams is an excellent literary critic. He makes you want to read, or reread, everything that Dostoevsky wrote. The books that he describes are spacious enough to contain a whole world, and beautiful enough to serve as icons that illuminate ours. For Williams, the activity of the novelist - at least of Dostoevsky - is pretty close to the divine: "Dostoevsky works on the basis that the novelist is able to show in some degree what divine creation might be like." Novelists, he says, work by disappearing towards their characters. The less the characters seem constrained by anything except the workings of their own inner necessities, and those of other characters, the greater is the novelist's skill; and the more closely, Williams believes, does the novelist's creative work resemble that of God.

  1. Doestoevsky
  2. : Language, Faith and Fiction
  3. by Rowan Williams
  4. Find this on the Guardian bookshop

If we take this reasoning on a little further, the fact that we, as characters in God's creation, are free - indeed, compelled - to doubt his existence must be the ultimate proof of his skill as a creator. This is not proof as the world understands it.

But then there is much here that defies the understanding of the world; and here we come to the bad bit. The archbishop's mind is one of eternal fractal elaboration. Each thought produces its opposite; each qualification must be qualified; each pool of sense must be adulterated with a dash of nonsense. There were times when I wondered whether I was struggling through the worst prose ever written by a poet. Sometimes the thought disintegrates entirely, like a jellyfish dropped in a jacuzzi: "The absolute necessity for recognition in the exchanges of dialogue means that, while we can indeed at one level say what we please (that two and two are not four), the construction of a life requires that we discover how we can speak in a way that does not just repeat or reproduce what is given, yet is at the same time occupying the same world of thought and perception that others in their speech inhabit. Speech may be free but it needs to be bearable - otherwise it fails finally to be language at all." The irony of a man writing so badly about the necessity of writing well is hardly to be borne.

None of this would matter if Williams had nothing to say. But he does have worthwhile things to say, and not just about Dostoevsky. He appears to be arguing that God is neither an explanation for anything in the world, nor a fact about the world: "The difference between the self-aware believer ... and the conscious and deliberate atheists is not a disagreement over whether or not to add one item [God] to the sum total of really existing things. It is a conflict about the policies and possibilities for a human life: between someone who accepts the dependence of everything on divine gratuity and attempts to respond with some image of that gratuity ... and someone who denies the dependence and is consequently faced with the unanswerable question of why any one policy for living is preferable to any other."

You can disagree that an atheist cannot answer the question of why any policy for living should be better than any other - we answer it by living - but it is surely important that the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks that God's existence is one of the less important things about Him and gives reasons for this. I don't mean that he is halfway to atheism, but that his position is some distance from the one that atheists normally attack.

His discussion of icons is a wonderful fusion of literary criticism and theological exposition, which makes more sense of the Christian understanding of the incarnation than almost anything I have ever read on the subject: "What makes images sacred is not some magical invulnerability or supernatural protection but their capacity to retain in themselves the real energy of another world, transmitted into the world of isolated and death-bound agents. The icon is in this sense a 'powerless' image, in that it is not safe from what history may do to it; the crucifixion of the fully incarnate image of God lets us know that. But a vulnerable image is not an empty one."

It will surprise some people to find what a large role he ascribes to the devil. The modern, global market, now crashing round our ears, seems to Williams diabolical because it reduces people to instruments, when to God we are all ends in ourselves: "The point at which the activity of nursing the sick can be expressed in terms of a producer supplying a customer is the point at which the culture of nursing the sick begins to disappear. It is replaced by contractual negotiations of power between the two interests represented, producer or supplier and consumer: whose will is going to be secured and protected? What do I need to concede in negotiation so as to secure the maximum amount of liberty for my future choices? And when such contracts cease to be satisfactory, there is no relation left; the other has ceased to be properly instrumental to my will and can be safely discarded."

Reviewing the work of such a subtle and energetic mind, there is always the danger of making a fool of oneself, rather like the general reporter sent along to cover a piano recital, who got a knowledgeable friend to write the whole review, full of searching and subtle criticism, but feeling he ought to add something of his own, wrote at the end: "Mr Rubinstein was observed to play with equal facility on the black keys as on the white ones." Nonetheless, I do wish that Williams had mastered the use of the backspace and delete keys. He'd have said a lot more if he had, and a book which argues that the fundamental activity of the divine is dialogue might find more readers if he paid them a little attention.

• Andrew Brown's Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared is published by Granta

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