Rowan Williams

I met Andrew when I arrived as a member of staff at Westcott House in 1977. It was a rather remarkable generation of students, including John Milbank and Alister McGrath, along with quite a few others who had significant work ahead of them in the Church of England. But Andrew stood out for so many reasons, for all his native quietness and self-deprecating style. There was the sheer intellectual energy. A supervision with Andrew was always an education, not only in relation to his vast reading but because of the intensity with which topics would be thought through – and some topics would be gently dismissed as arising from a deep confusion on the part of various writers (including the supervisor…). I have vivid memories of Andrew in characteristic mode, eyebrows raised and with an expression of benign suppressed mirth, saying, ‘Yes….yes….Why is that a problem?’

Equally vivid, though, a memory of a trial sermon preached in Westcott Chapel as part of the sermon class, a sermon on prayer which came as near as I suspect one could get to the absolute heart of Andrew. He spoke very simply but with great controlled passion about the experience of prayer as sheer poverty, coming with empty hands to an uncontrollable mystery. I was – as others were – deeply moved and challenged. No dutiful platitudes, no polite little jokes, no condescension, a kind of naked and focused integrity.

Which is what I think of always where Andrew was concerned. He had no interest in a ‘career’, academic or clerical. He simply gave himself to work, to a dedicated pastoral ministry in challenging parishes and a no less dedicated ministry of thinking, arguing, enlightening, by any means possible. When he began to publish his series of brilliantly unconventional books on theology and philosophy, they were the products of long an demanding and often solitary thought, untouched by ambition to make a name and free from scholarly jargon, despite their huge learning and sophistication. Once again, I found immense challenge and nourishment in these, and still do; and the memory of how Andrew, in Leeds, in Manchester, in North Yorkshire, wove together the imperatives of clear and radical thinking with the immediate call of witness, service and reconciliation is an inspiration and reproach to me.

Inspiration and reproach. It was hard in Andrew’s company to avoid feeling at some points compromised, confused, evasive in the face of the truth, such was his glowing honesty and courage. Yet he was always the gentlest of interlocutors, never setting out to make anyone feel inferior or inadequate, receiving whatever anyone offered with generosity, sometimes responding with just enough quiet teasing to make you recognise that you might be talking nonsense. It’s been said that in the presence of holiness you will feel both terminally inadequate and at the same time released from anxiety. If you think of Andrew as a holy person – and I do – this was exactly how he came across.

He coped calmly with uncertain health in middle and later years. He continued to radiate the same quite warmth – and his marriage to Dian seemed in many ways to deepen so much that calm and kindness. He never lost the astonishing mental energy that went on producing books of depth and learning and vast originality up to the end. He was a treasure to his friends. He was never going to be a ‘mainstream’ clergyman, and , while he had clear convictions about what the Church of England ought to do, he did not want to spend time on the politics and faction of the Church. He was in that sense ‘his own man’; but only because he was so consistently and deeply ‘God’s man.’v I find it difficult to think of any priest in my own generation that I have admired as much as I admired Andrew. He was a gift to my thinking and imagining and praying. His questions live on in my head and heart, and I thank God for him and all he gave us.

Rowan Williams