John & Alison Millbank
It is a great honour to have been asked to give this tribute to Andrew, and at the same time something that I feel utterly unworthy of being able to do with any adequacy. As Rowan Williams has so well put it: Andrew left one feeling with a sense of both ‘inspiration and reproach’.
A totally silent reproach because he was the most gentle and non-judgemental of men. But the sort of reproach one feels not just in the face of a saint, but also of a saint-hero. Andrew’s sanctity was in a sense obvious: with total indifference to any sort of promotion or advancement, Andrew seemed simply to accept wherever God might place him and to give of his all in that place without stint. At first God placed him in the privileged positions of being the child of a distinguished family and a scholar of an ancient and distinguished school: Winchester College. But even in that setting Andrew’s response was an ascetic one and the later places to which he sent himself or was elected to be sent were more obviously challenging ones: Ethiopia, Upper Egypt, the urban dereliction of Chapeltown in Leeds, the remoteness of a Benefice in the North York Moors dominated by a farming community so closed and intense that its gift-exchanging members rarely resorted to shops. Even in his more apparently comfortable posting at Manchester Cathedral he continued to engage with the marginal and the wretched, offering just the unsentimental assistance that they most needed.
As a saint, Andrew was also and crucially a saint-scholar. Very few priest-writers in the Anglican tradition have managed to equal his writing output either for bulk or for quality. Apart from a stint as the Christendom Trust Fellow at Lancaster, where he followed me in that role, Andrew had by necessity to fit incredibly searching reading and deeply-engaged writing into a continuous schedule of pastoral and liturgical duties. He seems to have acted rather like the great Italian Catholic thinker Antonio Rosmini who vowed to be in continuous contemplation of the divine unless he was interrupted by a call upon his charity. Then he would immediately lay down both pen and missal, returning to his intellectual labours without complaint. I imagine Andrew doing the same with not even a Coleridgean curse for the tiresome ‘person from Porlock’.
I cite a poet here deliberately, for not the least of Andrew’s achievements are the brilliant translations of the important modern German poet Nelly Sachs. As Andrew tells us, they are quite loose translations and what that means is that Andrew had to be himself a fine poet in order to achieve this. The same poetic gifts were manifest in his crucial contribution to the astonishing RedCrosse project which he also coordinated with the flair of a true impresario, linking it to his social concerns by getting homeless people involved in making giant puppets. This venture was a dramatic rethinking of the first Canto of Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene, critically commenting on what it might mean to be English today, that was performed successively in Manchester and Coventry cathedrals – in the latter case by the RSC. Who else but Andrew could have dreamt such a thing up and then brought it off so triumphantly?
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A saint-scholar-poet therefore, and even a man of a revived and rethought Christian liturgical theatre. But when I say scholar, someone with an utter contempt for mere scholarship and reflection without serious relevance to human existential and practical, including, crucially, political concerns. None of Andrew’s books follows any fashions either past or present, and if he was famously drawn to Hegel, this was partly because Hegel was only interested in the biggest possible philosophical and historical questions. Yet even in relation to the German sage, Andrew’s own sense of what mattered there was apparently idiosyncratic and even quirky, but in a way that challenged lazy academic habits and biases. Like Rowan Williams, when we were all at Westcott House, I would often be the object of Andrew’s quizzically sceptical gaze as to why I was interested in some supposed philosophical problem or nuance or other. One was always left with the uncomfortable feeling that maybe that was just because other people were, that one was merely following fashion.
Was there ever anyone who less followed fashion than Andrew – and likely as to dress also! But this was not just because he was a saint, it was also because he was always stepping forth from family, school and college (however he may have been driven) in search of adventure. We would do him no justice if we did not allow that he relished adventure as such – whether in going where few Europeans ventured even back in the Seventies, or where few Christians dare to go even now, as with his remarkable interaction with the Jewish Kabbalists of Manchester. This adventurous streak, surely as much Scottish as English, is all the more remarkable (though not unique in this regard) in view of his considerable physical frailty, which gradually turned into outright continuous illness. Surviving that for decades was of course also an act of courage, but crucially assisted by the love of Dian whom he was so lucky to meet and who must know him in a way that perhaps no one else does – for Andrew was also a man of that saintly ‘discretion’ and extreme reserve, variously celebrated by Baltasar Gracian in the Seventeenth Century and Isaac Williams in the Nineteenth.
Even before Andrew embarked on his pastoral career of teaching the Copts of Africa in two countries, he had set forth on a pure exploration of Persia and Turkey, with two schoolmates, one of whom early on developed a psychosis and had to be nursed by Andrew and the now famous Iain McGilchirst (for it was he) through hostile territory for months to come. Once again, I feel here as sense of woeful inadequacy: it is Andrew who should have been a member of the Travellers Club and not myself!
But of course, Andrew had seen enough of the British establishment at Winchester. Instead, besides being saint, scholar, poet and heroic adventurer he was also and from his schooldays a political activist. But once more not for the sake of gaining power, even power to do good. I do wonder what Hegel might have thought of this, but Andrew was as removed from state socialism as he was from the capitalist order. Instead, all his actions of resistance to war, to racism, to sexism and to poverty were calls away from power, a claim to refuse it. entirely. Andrew, like another great contemporary Christian theologian, David Bentley Hart, was at core a Christian anarchist and in Andrew’s case also largely a pacifist. His final posthumous book promises to make these stances clearer to us all.
They are not exactly my stances, but Andrew was a total and utter Idealist, both in his philosophy and his politics. And he was able to swat away all scepticism and cynicism in relation to these stances with a kind of higher and holy contempt. Looking at the unprecedented mess the world and Britain is in at present, I can’t help thinking to myself, along with dear Andrew up in heaven: don’t we see now where all our realism and claimed ‘good’ use of power has got us? Perhaps Utopia, the kingdom of Heaven anticipated here on earth is our last hope, a reality more realistic than our ‘realistic’ excuses? Perhaps, instead of making new political plans, we more need simply to realise and enact our human solidarity, as being all of us indeed damaged and ‘shaken’ by the weight of history, public and private. Should we then today not just celebrate Andrew’s life and mourn his loss, but start to listen to his lone and eccentric voice a bit more attentively?
John & Alison Milbank