Rowan Williams: tech has ‘disabled us intellectually – we’re forgetting how to learn’

When I meet Rowan Williams at the Southbank Centre in late October, there is much going on. The Church of England, of which he was once Archbishop of Canterbury, stands accused of trying to close churches to save cash; a famous bishop has converted to Rome; and Williams is waiting for his daughter to give birth (the boy, his first grandchild, will arrive a few days later).

Although he’s been lampooned for being wishy-washy, I find Williams’s language to be economical and exact, and though he is thoroughly loyal to his successors in the clerical hierarchy, buried beneath his metaphors is a cutting critique of where we’re at. “There was a loss of nerve in the 1960s,” he says of Anglicanism. “Like St Peter walking on the water”, the Church seemed to “look down at the wrong moment” and lose its footing.

Now, Williams believes, we are seeing the legacy of that “pervasive and paralysing anxiety about the role of the Church in society”. Amid “a general cultural tide flowing away” from Christianity, we have to ask: what if the Church “is no longer a given”?

At 71, Williams looks almost exactly as he did when he became Archbishop in 2002 – “like a druid”, said the critics, though I think that’s a good thing. With those wild eyebrows and quiet, intense voice, one can imagine him performing an exotic rite at Stonehenge. He is also a celebrated poet – we’re here principally to discuss the publication this month of his Collected Poems – a passion that began at secondary school in Swansea, where he attempted to emulate Dylan Thomas, George Herbert or the “technically forbidding” style of classical Welsh. He and his classmates “came from Welsh speaking families where Welsh hadn’t been the language of the home” because it had fallen out of fashion – but through poetry, he says, they discovered there was more to their native tongue “than meets the ear”.

For Williams, writing poetry is more than a technical exercise. “There’s something about the attention you have to give,” he says, “the sheer attempt to listen to what’s emerging.” If one tries to sit down and “write a poem about X... you’d end up staring at the wall”. Instead, a “phrase or a line arrives, and you have to listen around it, [to ask] where did this come from? And see where it unfolds.” He acknowledges the risk that people raised in the 21st century “with no sense of depth or transcendence won’t write poetry,” but he is optimistic. “If the individual is made in the image of God”, as Christians believe, then “the desire to express the infinite will wriggle through,” he tells me.

Williams is perceived as a man of the Left; as Archbishop, he was critical of untrammelled free markets and the Iraq War. But on many subjects, such as the cultivation of civilisation, he sounds conservative.

Information has become abundant, he says, yet “the process of acquiring that information” – ie scrolling through one’s phone – “has disabled us intellectually... We are increasingly forgetting how to learn. We assume that knowledge can be distilled and communicated and transferred just like that… a tick box approach which is found in clergy training.” What knowledge we inherit, we take for granted, yet “the absolutism of some modern social morality” – the idea that right and wrong are obvious – “did not drop from heaven. We learnt to see things this way.”

When I raise his tenure as Archbishop (which ended in 2012), it feels as if we’re treading carefully around a difficult memory. At the time, the Church of England was divided, particularly over sexuality and female ordination, and Williams struggled to provide plain answers to simplistic questions. “I remember getting the invitation to go and speak with [Richard] Dawkins at the Sheldonian at Oxford and thinking ‘Oh God, do I really want to do this?’ Of course, no I really don’t. But someone’s got to.”

I put it to him that many will have appreciated not only his participation in such debates but his patient style, and later, in an email exchange, he confides that he did sometimes get letters from people saying he helped them stay in the Church or persuaded them to take faith “more seriously”. The number of ordinands ticked upwards on his watch; their average age fell.

“I knew when I became Archbishop that I wasn’t a temperamentally decisive person (I can hear some of your readers muttering, ‘Understatement of the year’) and that other people might well have brought more direction and clearer leadership” – he suggests Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop who went to Rome – but “maybe there was something to be said for a style that... wanted to keep as many at the table as possible”.

What would the history books say if Nazir-Ali had been chosen instead? “I would’ve been relieved,” he laughs. Williams was not surprised by Nazir-Ali’s conversion, though he wonders what he makes of the papacy “in the light of the theology... I have heard him arguing in the past”. Nazir-Ali concluded that the Anglican Church lacked clear moral teaching or the authority to impose it, that the Church of England, rather than challenging our culture, is dissolving into it.

Williams, by contrast, thinks Anglicanism endures. There might be the odd cleric who doesn’t believe in God, but regarding the theology of the ordinands he meets, “I’m less worried than I might have been 20 years ago.” A basic creed remains: “Of course it’s patchy in practice, to put it mildly, but that isn’t a problem for us alone, and it doesn’t alter my conviction that the sacraments are truly administered here.” He would only reconsider his position as an Anglican, he says, “if there were some open and official abandonment of the classical creeds” – an intriguing stance which doesn’t imply “never”, just “highly unlikely”.

What’s needed, he suggests, is some of that pre-1960s spirit, an Anglicanism that rolls up its sleeves and gets on with it. “I felt unbelievably fortunate to have a parish priest as a teenager who just embodied this confidence – unfussy, intellectually sharp and a deeply contemplative identity that gave the message, ‘Alright, there’s a bit of surface tension, but don’t panic.’ ”

He points to the sitcom Rev as an example of living Anglicanism. In one episode, the hero, a priest in an inner-city parish (played by Tom Hollander), faced with mad congregants and a crisis of vocation, is near breaking-point – until he is called to a flat to give the Last Rites to a dying woman, and rediscovers the meaning of the sacraments. It’s funny that Williams should bring this up given the recent controversy over the police refusing to allow a Roman Catholic priest to give the Last Rites to Sir David Amess, the murdered MP – and because when I saw that episode of Rev, it affirmed my own conversion to Rome. I would want the Last Rites when I’m dying, and if the hospital sent for the local Anglican cleric, I might not get it, because not every Anglican does it – a gamble I’m unwilling to take.

But, says Williams – a touch of steel entering his voice – the Last Rites are a part of Anglicanism. “It’s there in the Prayer Book... That’s what you’re told to do when you’re ordained.” Is he saying every Anglican cleric would happily do it? “They’d happily be there to give assurance,” he says. “Whether they’d all take the [bread and wine of communion], probably not. I wish they would.”

I tell him that, on my death bed, I would want to know what I’m going to get. “You’re going to get the mercy of God,” he says. What if I don’t deserve it? “Of course you don’t deserve it!” he jokes. “Do any of us?”

After stepping down from Canterbury in 2012, Williams served as master of Magdalene College, Cambridge – as an undergraduate, he’d read theology down the road at Christ’s – and a member of the House of Lords; in 2020, he retired to Cardiff, to become, as he puts it, a “part-time non-stipendiary curate”.

Were he still Archbishop, would he have closed the churches as Justin Welby ordered during the first lockdown? “I don’t do hypotheticals.” Fair enough, but did he miss his own church during those difficult weeks? “Oh heavens, yes. Why, wouldn’t you?!”

Above all, he yearned for “the singing, the physical sense of being embraced in prayer... Prayers sound different when you’re saying them in that place” and where “you know in your being that it’s not just you”. But, he insists, the Church itself did not close completely: in Cardiff, “the chaplain and I live-streamed various things”, sometimes from the garden. I infer from our conversation his profound conviction that, where there is belief and practice, the Church persists against the odds.

Williams recalls the pleasure of conducting this year’s Easter morning Eucharist, outdoors “as the dawn was coming up, a swan behind us just coming down the river. And I thought ‘thanks to the management!’” – compliments to God.

Exclusive extract from Rowan Williams's Collected Poems

This brand-new piece by Rowan Williams is the second of two poetic sketches of a busy tube carriage. On a hot day, “heat peels back clothes” to reveal tattoos, hinting at the dreams of the travellers who have them, their lives, their deaths (think of all those clichéd designs: “skulls”, “a stabbed heart”), and what might come after. If the body is a temple, here the tattooed body becomes a mysterious cathedral, one where “guidebooks aren’t on sale”. Tristram Fane Saunders

Underground Neighbours (Northern Line), II

Heat peels back clothes and unembarrassed skin
faces the air, the secret messages laid out
for browsing; skulls, serpents, butterflies,
names in badly spelled Gothic, flowers,
crucifixions, hearts; flesh wrapped
in a cathedral’s worth of signage.
The doors are open for the interested tourist,
though guidebooks aren’t on sale. What moves
in skin (it seems) is older than you thought,
a long procession of the dreams that you’re
supposed to leave behind, the crypts, the cryptograms
leaving their punctured trail, joining the dots
where blood has dried quietly: the skulls,
the butterflies, the names that say
there is a story somewhere telling you
why the blood runs away, why the skin
loses its blush and dries, and you
have to guess if what is left is bone
or flower, someone else’s name or
someone else’s death, a stabbed heart leaking,
drop by fat drop, to join up wounds
or wash the buried dreams, puncture
locked cellars with a needle light.
Heat peels the covers, lays them neatly back:
Read me, you say, like a book, that is,
Slowly, uncertainly, turning back often.

Rowan Williams’s Collected Poems are published by Carcanet at ￡15.99. To order your copy for ￡13.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books