Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language

by Rowan Williams

"The Edge of Words" is Rowan Williams? first book since standing down as Archbishop of Canterbury. Invited to give the prestigious 2014 Gifford Lectures, Dr Williams has produced a scholarly but eminently accessible account of the possibilities of speaking about God ? taking as his point of departure the project of natural theology. Dr Williams enters into dialogue with thinkers as diverse as Augustine and Simone Weil and authors such as Joyce, Hardy, Burgess and Hoban in what is a compelling essay about the possibility of language about God.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Language, Christianity, Faith

219 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is an Anglican bishop, poet, and theologian. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002-2012, and is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Chancellor of the University of South Wales.

Reviews

[Shaun Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book stems from Williams' 2013 Gifford Lectures. Williams demonstrates an amazing capability to bring together voices that are ancient and (post-)modern, analytic and continental, popular level and academic into a beautiful picture of how human language "represents." While "representation" has been criticized in some circles, Williams defines it more broadly so that he can avoid many of the criticisms: "I'm conscious of the wide variety of ways in which it can be and has been deployed by philosophers, but my own use of it is meant to draw attention to the interesting fact that we can claim to be speaking truthfully about many aspects of our environment without actually trying on every occasion to reproduce or imitate it. To say that a form of words or images 'represents' reality is to leave ourselves free to recognize that language may be truthful even when it is not description in the strict sense" (xi).

Williams has a nuanced picture that sympathizes with criticisms of natural theology seen in some previous Gifford lectures (e.g., Barth and Hauerwas), while offering a perspective of natural theology that does not overstate what natural theology is capable of doing, while still prioritizing the revealed Christian faith. He says, "A 'natural' theology need not be an exercise in trying to replace revelation, to forestall the action of God. It may be a way of tracking that action through the impress left upon our speech and action, as upon other aspects of our world; and thus, it may be, as Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures proposed, a form of faithful witness" (180).

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the lectures online when Williams delivered them, as well as reading Edge of Words. As a fan of Wittgenstein and discussions of language and how it functions in human community, and particularly in the church and in theology, I highly recommend *Edge of Words* to interested readers.

[Matt Moser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a bonafide masterpiece

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

By about the fourth page of this book I felt like an innocent bystander in the midst of a very abstract conversation; decidedly one of the hardest books I've journeyed through in a long time. This is a philosophy book and would be more aptly named in my opinion The Edge of Words: Lots About the Habits of Language with some Brief Remarks on God.

Don't misunderstand me in my remarks though. This was a fascinating book, and I am happy that I picked it up. Regardless my exposure to philology and its link to metaphysical conclusions was beyond inadequate to fully understand what Dr. Rowan Williams was discussing. I was always under the impression that I was hanging by a thread to his arguments and if he made too sudden of a turn or jump or jolt in his thinking I would be severed from the conversation. I think my only true complaint was the fact that in a discussion of the nature, complexities, absurdities, and paradoxes of language,examples can go a very long way. Too often he remain abstract in his discussion which I think made it very hard to follow without a formal education. Granted, this book might not have been written for the layperson and I was over-ambitious in my reading of it.

This was my first book by Dr. Williams, and his breadth of knowledge and ability to discuss the complexities of human experience are impressive to say the least. I look forward to reading more from the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

[Guenevera]

Wow. What a beautiful mind.

MQ: What might the ways we speak and things tell us about what kind of universe this is? "What is it to be a linguistic being in a world whose currency is intelligence and intelligibility?"

[WIP]

Terminology and definitions:
- convergence: coming closer and closer to the same meaning
-'the grammar of the unrepresentable' (81)
- Representation: "presupposes . . . some FORM OF ACTION that can be activated in different matter" (21). [This is why names are thought to have power and words to be unarbitrarily related to their nominata.]
- distinction between description and representation, which are each ways of speaking about what we encounter: description is like making a map: 'we assume the task is to produce a certain traceable structural parallel between what we say and what we perceive.' Representation is different. It is remaking the same thing in a different medium: 'embody, translate, make present, or re-form what is perceived.' (22)
-'schematic perceiving/knowledge' (26)

Ideas
- defining "understanding" an utterance/performance as ' a matter of knowing what to do or say next. Rather than being a matter of gaining insight into a timless mental content "behind" or "within" what is said, it is being able to exhibit the next step in a continuing pattern." (68). See Wittgenstein, Philosophical INvestigations (Anscombe 151). 'Understanding is not in that sense a "mental process," the summoning up of a key principle by conscious thought, it is the skill or confidence to go on, to follow the series through; a skill in the eercise of a habit, if you like . . . like the experience of reading. We don't apply a procedure in our minds, a series of operations that allows us to move from seeing a sign to making a noise . . . we simply exercise a skill, closer to knowing how to ride a bicycle than performing a calculation. . . . Understanding is knowing how to "go on."

- On Hegelian dialectics: "Our perceiving has been shown to be historical and metaphysical: we see how the passage of time has enabled us to see differently, and what we see is a reality that is inextricably bound up with our linguistic response and our linguistic partners." (70)

-Speech as a type of craft, into which can be read Richard Sennet's taxonomy of craft-parts.

- There is something I don't fully get about self-knowing c. p. 79 ff.

- Evil as attempting to name the nameless, but also of holding silence (as a way of concealing, misleading, etc) with the excuse that words are not sufficient for the 'exact truth' (c.164)

- Language as always generative, never final

- A communicating god? What if it is not only I who am searching for God but [he] is also looking for me?

- Vispassana

- [Most evil comes from people thinking they are doing well - unable to see themselves or integrate the parts that they see with their context and continuum.]

- Most current phil sees language as a system of stimulus and response.

- Language is fundamentally temporal.

- On Perception: 1: we don't perceive "raw material"; 2: we perceive a continuum of analogical relations; 3: in this, there is not only horizontal participation between subject and object in the world, but also between object in the world and representing subject (eg language); 4: "to represent anything presupposes that some level/aspect of what is perceived can in fact come to be in another medium;" 5: the notion of "intelligible form" does not capture the fact that there is a convergence between object and subject when an object is understood/spoken of ("what is understood and spoken of is present as modifying the subject's activity, both limiting its options in certain ways and expanding its capacity in others").

Quotes
- "There is an irreversible trajectory in language: what has been said cannot be unsaid." (69)

- "What is real is what is available for speech -- not in the sense that we should be able to find adequate verbal tokens or logical pictures for all there is in the world, but (almost th econtrary) that the encountered environment is "real" for us as and only as it insist on establishing itself in our language." (70)

"What follows if everyone agrees with you?" The answer has to be literally "nothing": the very idea of "following" means that what has just been said is not final and that there is no agreement about how we speak of whatever is before us. (71)

Speech/language by nature requires innovation, building, revision, change: "Saying what has just been said, doing what has just been done, is not a good index of understanding. A craftsman who does nothing but imitate step by step what has been done will not yet necessarily have grasped the logic of the process, which emerges only when the principles of the process are deployed to produce something different, even if only slightly." (75)

It is not -- to labour the point again -- that there are unrepresentable realities that would ground what we say if only we could get at them; it is that the way we know and understand is by representing, and then risking the form of our representation in shared discourse as time unfolds. (80)

Matter and meaning do not necessarily belong in different universes (x).

What we need is a metaphysics that thinks of matter itself as unvariably and necessarily communicative (xi)

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I’ve read. Not easy but well worth the effort. A masterpiece.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is important to note from the outset two aspects of The Edge of Words, mostly the product of Gifford lectures Rowan Williams delivered over two weeks in 2014: first, that these chapters are, indeed, the product of lectures; one will not find here a systematic metaphysics nor even a comprehensive philosophy of God-talk; second, that in Williams’s own words, he does not offer a knockdown “proof of God’s existence” in the way some readers may expect. To the contrary, Williams tries to “map the territory of human speech” in an attempt to explore whether the way we talk as humans can illuminate aspects of the divine. In short, Williams asks: what can human discourse tell us about God, if it can at all? Williams pursues this question over the course of six chapters and ultimately defends the view that certain aspects of human communication, far more complex and textured than some thinkers claim, discloses fundamental elements of human subjectivity, material reality, and God. Moreover, as part of an effort to reconcile his naturalistic analysis with the claims of Christian revelation, Williams points, if somewhat allusively, to what we could expect “to encounter if the universe were as the believer claims”—in other words, that a close examination of human speech implies that the universe is imbued with the sort of intellect that certain theists call God, and that this analysis particularly affirms some aspects of Christian revelation. In what follows, I will briefly touch upon some notable lines of enquiry and will concisely sketch why I believe this book is so important, despite its interpretive difficulties.

In order to appreciate what Williams seeks to achieve with this essay, one must understand what he deliberately avoids. While Williams mostly sidesteps the specific claims of Christian revelation in pursuit of his questions—that is, while one need not accept Christian assumptions about the Trinity, the Incarnation, or even the existence of God to accede to the implications he draws—his analysis eschews some notion of God as the supreme item in a chain of items, better than all the rest. More simply, the God to which Williams infrequently alludes is not “another objective item within reality which will passively endure our active search to isolate its nature,” as Catherine Pickstock writes on Williams’s approach. “With considerable reserve,” Pickstock continues, Williams nods toward God as that, or who, which conditions the fundamental structures of finite reality. In such an account, the evolution of human speech is not some material accident, not the product of some swerve amidst atoms and the void; our discourse is, rather, an inevitable material process that allows us to make sense of a sensible universe, that without which there could not, in fact, be a material world at all (in case that sounds absurd, Williams asks us to consider that “we cannot abstract the object we examine from the means we [use] to examine it,” that thus “material objects and the material world as such are always already ‘saturated’” with our mental processes; the notion of a material world depends upon, is inextricably intertwined with, the speech we use to make sense of the environment). That evolution, itself a material process, should eventually “come up with” a species which sees, represents, and reinvents itself in material noises and movements shared and understood amidst other members of that species is, for Williams, disclosive of an intellectual force at the center of the universe which orders it from a perspective which, ultimately, we can never comprehend. It is in view of such a universe that the claims of Christian revelation start to make sense.

Williams’s approach toward human consciousness and the material world, considerably informed by neuroscientific observations of how the mind operates and how humans communicate with other humans (one chapter opens with some extraordinary reflections on the implications of recent ASD research) leads him to reject the intuitive (and well-worn) dualism of incorporeal human intellect that acts upon and unilaterally orders “mindless stuff . . . random materiality, a sort of residue of impenetrable [physicality].” Rather unintuitively (thanks to how dominant reductionist materialism is in our discourse), Williams pursues “a metaphysics that thinks of matter itself as invariably and necessarily communicative.” As per this metaphysics, the material world we inhabit produces makers that represent its own structures in non-literal, non-descriptive ways, just as it produces makers of alternative worlds: matter, far from “dead or passive,” Williams explains, “’proposes’ its own transformation. For the bare fact is that the material world speaks.” This speech, he continues, is so much more than “a chance decorative addition to mechanical process”; it is part and parcel of an interconnected nexus of ceaseless discourse wherein the environment shapes us just as much as we shape it, wherein we interpret and reinterpret ourselves and nature in a metaphysical dialectic of sorts. Nature speaks, and “human speech continues as corporeal inter-articulation, in such a way that the psychic, which rides upon or is wrapped around the bodily vehicle, is a constitutively inter-psychic sphere,” Catherine Pickstock writes. The influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Williams is obvious; he quotes the French philosopher liberally in connection with “bodily intentionality” and the embodied “situations” we each inhabit.

In the penultimate chapter, Williams explores what he calls “’extreme’ forms of utterance” or “excessive speech,” moments when speech is pushed to its absolute limits in order to speak truthfully when mere description will not suffice. Paradox, metaphor, hyperbole, irony—these are the vehicles of such excessive speech, and we employ such rhetorical devices in a myriad of complex ways. When I use paradox, for instance, “what is said becomes more and more expansive in one way,” Williams writes. “It reckons with more than just this set of perceptions in this moment, and summons up material distant in time and in space” to represent the here and now more fully, even more precisely. I start with a claim such as “this is like that” and end with the claim that, somewhat, “this is that.” And when I push speech to its limits in order to make sense, even to the point that x is patently not x, that it is in fact y, speech (“paradoxically!” Williams wryly notes) comes closer to the immediate object I seek to represent. We frequently “put pressure on what we say in order that we may come to see more than our initial account delivers,” Williams explains, and we are thus “steadily shifted away from a world of discrete substances in the void, which we talk about in a calculus of propositions.” Rhetorical excess—when we say more than we have to—discloses aspects of finite reality that our “habitual and pre-reflective” (and, I would add, culturally inflected) assumptions about what constitutes true speech fail to nurture. With respect to the divine, Williams notes the commonplace that no speech—especially not subject-predicate propositions—can fully represent the divine perspective, let alone the divine nature, yet proceeds to explain how more eccentric, sometimes less coherent God-talk is, “odd as it sounds . . . least off the mark.” This, Williams insists, “is not an excuse for slackness, but an implicit plea for our words about God to be—as it were—carefully calculated shocks.” He then comments that in such a plea he echoes a point made by Thomas Aquinas: that “the ‘crudest’ metaphors for God are often the most successful, just because no-one could mistake them for accurate depictions.”

In the final chapter, Williams moves away from excessive speech to explore the importance of silence, both to human speech more broadly and to God-talk specifically. He undermines a problematic idealization of silence and rejects its reductionist characterization as “timeless quiet or non-sound.” Counter to some contemporary writers who insist that silence undercuts representation—that those who are silenced are cut off from important modes of discourse—and contra those who reinforce a romantic notion of silence which, perhaps, motivates imprecise talk of “mystery” when certain lines of enquiry become too difficult, Williams explains that each moment of silence has a history that we must attend to—that silence is, in this sense, a polyvalent concept. Silence “does not simply cancel what has been said”; it invites us to see what led to this specific silence, that there are elements of its context we have not captured, “whether in the excess of atrocity ([like] the Holocaust) or the excess of joy or beauty ([like] the end of [a] concert [before the applause]).” Silence has helped people of “various minorities, ethnic, credal and sexual” survive, people “whose lives or security would be at risk if they spoke truthfully about themselves”; it has been utilized as a tool “for denial in respect of the memories and the reality of child abuse, slavery, anti-Semitism, and other kinds of violence towards those silenced . . . minorities”; and institutions fearful of truthful representations of their past or present practices rely on silence to cover over pernicious evils. More positively, silence can be emancipatory, as it is in the Buddhist koan, wherein “mental stillness” is not “numbness or ‘absence of mind’ but enhanced awareness,” or in Christian asceticism, wherein silence frees the self from its “compulsion to mastery of the environment.”

For Williams, silence is so important because, contrary to what one may think, silence invites further response—it discloses new possibilities of utterance and representation that improve upon and enrich our discourse. When our descriptive powers run dry, when our futile attempts at literal correspondence in speech fall short, silence suspends our habitual words and thus elicits our turn to metaphor, irony, or paradox; it dispossesses us of concepts we think we have mastered and reorients our approach to a certain line of discourse. With Christianity in mind, Williams notes that the sacred manifests in such difficult moments of silence, when “the believer at some point meets the most intractable frustration, the ‘non-experience’ that moves us out of our usual expectations, ideas and pictures of ourselves as well as of God.” And in particular relation to Christian revelation, Williams draws a parallel between this kind of dispossession and the dispossession endured by Christ, “silence and immobilized” in the ultimate reconciliation of the divine and the human on the cross.

To be sure, The Edge of Words is a difficult text. Yet it is a mistake to confuse the complexity of Williams’s analyses with obfuscation for its own sake; Williams himself warns readers of the temptation to retreat to the security of mystery when faced with unanswerable questions. Difficulty, in fact, is one of Williams’s major themes, and while there are certainly writers who needlessly mire their claims in dense prose behind which they can comfortably hide, Williams is not one of them. Instead, Williams demonstrates what it means to think differently about our speech, the metaphysical implications of its relationship with the environment, and how speech discloses, to whatever limited extent, the divine. The substance of his claims and their form—that is, the difficult way in which he writes—offer readers the chance to start to understand what it means to apprehend the world from a reoriented metaphysical perspective. As Catherine Pickstock writes, “This performance is a part of his proof.” Williams takes us to one possible set of limits with respect to discourse on human speech and the divine, and thus invites us to take up this discourse in another context, from another “situation,” to cite Merleau-Ponty, in which we continue to better comprehend ourselves and, hopefully, some aspects of God. And this, in the end, is why The Edge of Words is so important. When we learn how to think with Williams, we learn how to continue the conversation, how to push it in ever more fruitful directions. Moreover, we start to realize the massive implications of Williams’s conclusions, which can and should inflect our politics, our ethics, and our worship. The Edge of Words thus transcends the modest limits in which Williams situates his own book—it is, in short, a momentous achievement. If we take it seriously, we may have to reconsider so much of what we think we know; we must take it upon ourselves to continue our often-frustrated human effort to represent the truth.

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good, but also very difficult (as any reader of RW comes to expect). On this occasion I'm not going to moan about Williams' difficult prose style - when you are essentially trying to say the unsayable, and exploring why the unsayable is unsayable and yet still requires attempts to say it, you're not going to be writing in the style of Enid Blyton.

So reading this book is a little like trekking though a thick forest, at times seeing nothing ahead but then every now and then, the forest clears a bit and you can see something ahead. I'm not a natural philosopher and so I would struggle more than others, but I did find his essential thesis - that the universe is intelligible and communicative intriguing. He is too subtle a theologian to stray into the territory of Paley's natural theology or Anselm's ontological argument, although there are shades of both here - except that instead of God being the greatest thing that can be conceived, God is here the greatest thing that cannot be conceived and yet somehow becomes approachable, and is capable of being revealed through language, provided that we understand that the meaning precedes the words, the words do not create the meaning. T.S. Eliot seems to have said something similar, though rather more concisely.

[Kwan Qi Xiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if i totally understood him. Linguistics and lit theory aren't my strong suits. But seems like an imaginative and creative work that makes Christian theology understandable to linguists, and linguistics understandable for theologians. a book that builds bridges between how we speak daily, and how we speak about that which is beyond our words. Not sure how convincing a natural theology this is, but it bent my brain into some weird shapes.

[Joni · Rating 3 out of 5]

dry and laudable

[Michael W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most important book on language, poetics, and metaphysics of the present century. Williams seeks to identify the point at which our attempts to provide "descriptive" accounts of the the human environment must shift into a different register which he calls "representational" (i.e., metaphorical, poetic, or "pressurized."). He does this by a few essays of reconnaissance on the assumed modes of speech available to "natural theology", on the material determinations of speech, on the embodied aspects of speech, on poetic diction, and on silence.

The point, writes Williams, is not to present a "knockdown argument for the existence of God," but to point out how the "normal" linguistic behavior is consonant with theological forms of speech that attempt to say the unsayable.

I find this book foundational for anyone trying to think through the "hinterland" or the implicit underside of language in the study of philosophy and theology.

[Michael King · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still processing this extremely dense and insightful work. Lord Williams eloquently lays out the complexities and difficulties of language and touches on topics such as the difficulties of understanding the nature of linguistic representation, the problem of excess language and irony as well as the essential role of silence in demarcating potentiality in speaking and how both paradox and silence both take us to the edge of language in science, the humanities and every day life. A valuable tool for understanding the philosophy of language for theists and secular folks alike.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely fantastic book. I began this about 4 years ago and only finished it now because I was so entranced by every page. I also found the Gifford lectures that were the original setting for this book, and listened to the lectures while reading along for the last couple of chapters. The chapter on silence is the best, but every page of this is wonderful. It helps that Williams is my favourite living theologian!

[Elijah]

Dense, but progressively more lucid as it goes along. I’m apt to recommend conversations about it more than I am to recommend it itself.

[Roy Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a brilliant, though often difficult, exploration of the possibility of natural theology through an exploration of our patterns of language. Rowan Williams has a rare capacity to draw upon many fields - linguistics, neuroscience, Biblical studies, analytical philosophy, theology and post-modern criticism - to argue for a way of experiencing life that is open to the possibility of God. He pays close attention to language patterns, particularly the way our words "represent' reality. Representation becomes a way toward natural theology that is more akin to revelation than most arguments. This is a great book; yes, I'm also reading it again so that I get it better on the next round.

[Felipe Muller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro extraordinariamente teórico para ser tan abiertamente británico.