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Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement
Why does our contemporary culture find it so hard to handle certain concepts and images? What aspects of the range of human possibilities have been lost in modernity and postmodernity? Rowan Williams argues that we have let go of a number of crucial imaginative patterns - 'icons' - for thinking about ourselves. He considers areas such as images of childhood, our awkwardness at speaking about community, our unwillingness to think seriously about remorse, and our devastating lack of vocabulary for the growth and nurture of the self through time. This timely book by a master of contemporary Christian thought sketches out a renewed language for the soul.
231 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2000
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About the author
Rowan Williams
119 books338 followersRowan 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.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 24, 2021
1. The first chapter, Childhood and Choice seeks to define the difference between childhood and adulthood by focusing on the nature of choice. A child chooses in an exploratory, creative mode. She fantasises, imagines, tries out, pretends to inhabit a world that is interestingly different from the habitual one. An adult chooses more carefully because her choices are interwoven within the world of interlocked agencies, have far-reaching consequences, engage in various kinds of contests. What is dangerous is to put a child in the situation where she has to make adult, consequential choices that involve her to be a (handicapped) contestor for the scarce resources. The child’s creativity is denied, made fun of, mocked. The child ‘gets real’ because ‘this is what the world is like — a dark and hostile place’. But what it means is that she will stay a child, will compensate for her damaged creative freedom by various sorts of coercion, inner and outer.
2. Charity deals with the question of what it means for a society to provide conditions for non-rivalrous identity. 'It is only something outside the world of negotiation – as we saw in chapter two – that makes possible the festal abrogation of rivalry, the social miracle' [Page 161]. We are educated choice if now and then we are reminded of the non-competitive basis of our solidarity.
3. Remorse seeks to establish one of the reasons why the North-Atlantic society became enmeshed in the deeply reactive and passive lifeform that divorces us from conversational continuity that should have nurtured us into being truthful persons. This life form is reactive because it made to think in terms of the freedom to choose and therefore always enmeshed in the satisfaction of transient whims; it feels threatened choice seems to be constrained and reacts in defending its territory, defending its right to choose, to be ignorant, to avoid the conversation about the better choices, choices that are more rational privately or for the common good.
4. Lost Souls looks at how frustration and love can be the wake-up calls into more mature self-awareness.
The Introduction.
Rowan Williams defines the ‘icon’ as a ‘window into an alien frame of reference that is at the same time the structure that will make definitive sense of the world we inhabit’ [Page 2].
By offering the context in which I can see myself as strange, as relative to the immense web of relationships, the icon allows me to see myself and the world more objectively. What is this context? It has to allow us to see and think from the ‘heavenly’ hinterland, ‘innocent’ from the contests for space and power that corrupt the perception of the ‘earthlings’.
But what if we begin to suspect that the conventions that seemed to alleviate the weight of rivalry are exactly that, mere conventions, results of arbitrary choice programmed to serve the interest of the choice-maker? If we begin to think that these conventions infringe on our freedom of choice we lose the ability to make sense of the world in a way that does justice to it –– that locates us as participants in the vast order of things, as fellow-travellers to the shared future, as beneficiaries of the common wealth. We lose our coordination. If this ‘iconic’ coordinate system is absent, people’s choices lose the measure that could have judged them from the perspective of the common good, that these choices they become arbitrary in the strict sense, ‘based on random choice or private whim, rather than any reason or system’, authorised by the self-serving perspective, autocratic freedom of will.
At this point Rowan offers a very tantalising argument: “we cannot choose just any course of action in respect of our human or non-human environment and still expect to ‘make sense’ –– that is, to be part of a serious human conversation in which our actions can be evaluated and thought through and drawn into some sort of rough coherence, by ourselves and by other speakers” [Page 3].
It is impossible to reconcile unlimited freedom of will that makes one’s choices arbitrary with the shared enterprise of thinking.
‘‘Icons’ are the ‘structures for seeing and connecting in the light of something other than our decisions, individual or corporate’ [Page 4]. Thus the icon is a ‘convention’ that is by definition not a matter of private or collective choice. One can tell an icon from an idol by the fact that icons ‘take time’, are revealed regardless of anyone’s choice.
And to see how this happens we have to pay attention to how the truth-seeking conversations are defined by exactly that absence of choice, by a shared discovery, by the time taken, by the sides of the argument not trying to persuade each other regardless of the truth, but willing to disown own choices and propositions so as to align themselves with the truth. These conversations are defined by speakers who do not choose, but continue to think, to exchange perspectives, to put one’s perspective on trial.
Conversation allows us to see truthfully, from the perspective of as many angles as one needs to get enough span to cover the subject, to do justice to it. Conversation gives us a chance to articulate anger; so that we do not through punches at each other, shouldering the other off from the contested territory; but learning to coexist and cooperate; thinking about the rules by which we both can live better; imagine the common good.
This means that the ‘iconic hinterland’, in virtue of its being impartial, that is, being free from the suspicion of supporting one side of the conflict, can make room for the conversation in which contestants rethink and reinvent their contest as cooperation. But ‘… to be able to ‘negotiate’ differences (rather than trying to resolve them by violence) entails an assumption that differences can be thought, not just thrown against each other; [...] conversation takes for granted a common world and that the interest of its inhabitants can never be intelligibly considered except by thinking of relations and interdependence, even if only at a very formal level’ [Williams, Rowan. Lost Icons. T&T Clark. A Continuum imprint. London; New York. 2000. Page 5-6].
The ‘iconic hinterland’ is a system of reference that allows contestants to rethink their interest by seeing it as interdependent with the interest of others, intricately woven into what is called the ‘common good’.
Faith in such ‘hinterland’ affords me a security to loosen the defense of my present identity by waking me up to the fact that my identity is not a fixed constant but a preference that is learned and evolved over time, that is, a matter of choice. And if this is so, it can be enriched or even reforged in cooperation with other ‘choosers’. Meeting the ‘other’ must be an occasion for learning.
Thus from the suspicion that my ‘pristine will’ might be betrayed by the conventions that might be the other’s ‘traps’ to limit my freedom of choice we come to the idea that my ‘pristine will’ is itself a matter of my own arbitrary choice, a ‘trap’, that can be educated through the shared enterprise of legislating the proper range of choices and developing the virtues that correspond to the un-self-conscious abidance by the legitimate choices.
This ‘shaping’ of the self as the essentially participatory reality is the result of a mode of action that is called the soul in the classical tradition. Soul is a matter of continuity and consistency in the history of the self which should not expect to take for granted its pre-given unity unsullied by ‘language and interchange’. Soul is that in us which is precisely not determined by the exercise of arbitrary (and supposedly free) choice, but is co-created within the intelligent cooperation with the outer world.
But Rowan grants us that ‘It is religious language that has borne most of the responsibility for keeping alive the story of a substantial soul that can live apart from the body and its history, and it may seem an odd ally to turn to in order to challenge just that model’ [Page 7]. For him it is one of the pervasive problems of Modern dualism that separates the material and the spiritual that inadvertently follows the voluntarism of certain scholastic philosophers.
But this discontinuity is compensated by the fact that ‘One of the really substantive philosophical insights of Marxism was to focus attention on the ways in which meaning is bound up with the processes by which we engage and transform material environment. It also alerts us to the fact that cultural questions can’t be separated ultimately from questions about power — about who has the freedom for what kinds of transformation of an environment’ [Page 8].
Humans are ‘educated’ to outgrow the arbitrary exercise of the freedom of choice within the shared enterprise of thinking on how to engage with the material reality, to outgrow the privatisation of the means of production (so that separate individuals get unlimited freedom of choice with regard to how to deal with the patches of material environment) by focusing on what should we legislate as the legitimate palette of choices that would be conducive to the achievement and sustainment of the common good, of the form of life that is agreed to be worthwhile by the participants of the political conversation.
2. Charity deals with the question of what it means for a society to provide conditions for non-rivalrous identity. 'It is only something outside the world of negotiation – as we saw in chapter two – that makes possible the festal abrogation of rivalry, the social miracle' [Page 161]. We are educated choice if now and then we are reminded of the non-competitive basis of our solidarity.
3. Remorse seeks to establish one of the reasons why the North-Atlantic society became enmeshed in the deeply reactive and passive lifeform that divorces us from conversational continuity that should have nurtured us into being truthful persons. This life form is reactive because it made to think in terms of the freedom to choose and therefore always enmeshed in the satisfaction of transient whims; it feels threatened choice seems to be constrained and reacts in defending its territory, defending its right to choose, to be ignorant, to avoid the conversation about the better choices, choices that are more rational privately or for the common good.
4. Lost Souls looks at how frustration and love can be the wake-up calls into more mature self-awareness.
The Introduction.
Rowan Williams defines the ‘icon’ as a ‘window into an alien frame of reference that is at the same time the structure that will make definitive sense of the world we inhabit’ [Page 2].
By offering the context in which I can see myself as strange, as relative to the immense web of relationships, the icon allows me to see myself and the world more objectively. What is this context? It has to allow us to see and think from the ‘heavenly’ hinterland, ‘innocent’ from the contests for space and power that corrupt the perception of the ‘earthlings’.
But what if we begin to suspect that the conventions that seemed to alleviate the weight of rivalry are exactly that, mere conventions, results of arbitrary choice programmed to serve the interest of the choice-maker? If we begin to think that these conventions infringe on our freedom of choice we lose the ability to make sense of the world in a way that does justice to it –– that locates us as participants in the vast order of things, as fellow-travellers to the shared future, as beneficiaries of the common wealth. We lose our coordination. If this ‘iconic’ coordinate system is absent, people’s choices lose the measure that could have judged them from the perspective of the common good, that these choices they become arbitrary in the strict sense, ‘based on random choice or private whim, rather than any reason or system’, authorised by the self-serving perspective, autocratic freedom of will.
At this point Rowan offers a very tantalising argument: “we cannot choose just any course of action in respect of our human or non-human environment and still expect to ‘make sense’ –– that is, to be part of a serious human conversation in which our actions can be evaluated and thought through and drawn into some sort of rough coherence, by ourselves and by other speakers” [Page 3].
It is impossible to reconcile unlimited freedom of will that makes one’s choices arbitrary with the shared enterprise of thinking.
‘‘Icons’ are the ‘structures for seeing and connecting in the light of something other than our decisions, individual or corporate’ [Page 4]. Thus the icon is a ‘convention’ that is by definition not a matter of private or collective choice. One can tell an icon from an idol by the fact that icons ‘take time’, are revealed regardless of anyone’s choice.
And to see how this happens we have to pay attention to how the truth-seeking conversations are defined by exactly that absence of choice, by a shared discovery, by the time taken, by the sides of the argument not trying to persuade each other regardless of the truth, but willing to disown own choices and propositions so as to align themselves with the truth. These conversations are defined by speakers who do not choose, but continue to think, to exchange perspectives, to put one’s perspective on trial.
Conversation allows us to see truthfully, from the perspective of as many angles as one needs to get enough span to cover the subject, to do justice to it. Conversation gives us a chance to articulate anger; so that we do not through punches at each other, shouldering the other off from the contested territory; but learning to coexist and cooperate; thinking about the rules by which we both can live better; imagine the common good.
This means that the ‘iconic hinterland’, in virtue of its being impartial, that is, being free from the suspicion of supporting one side of the conflict, can make room for the conversation in which contestants rethink and reinvent their contest as cooperation. But ‘… to be able to ‘negotiate’ differences (rather than trying to resolve them by violence) entails an assumption that differences can be thought, not just thrown against each other; [...] conversation takes for granted a common world and that the interest of its inhabitants can never be intelligibly considered except by thinking of relations and interdependence, even if only at a very formal level’ [Williams, Rowan. Lost Icons. T&T Clark. A Continuum imprint. London; New York. 2000. Page 5-6].
The ‘iconic hinterland’ is a system of reference that allows contestants to rethink their interest by seeing it as interdependent with the interest of others, intricately woven into what is called the ‘common good’.
Faith in such ‘hinterland’ affords me a security to loosen the defense of my present identity by waking me up to the fact that my identity is not a fixed constant but a preference that is learned and evolved over time, that is, a matter of choice. And if this is so, it can be enriched or even reforged in cooperation with other ‘choosers’. Meeting the ‘other’ must be an occasion for learning.
Thus from the suspicion that my ‘pristine will’ might be betrayed by the conventions that might be the other’s ‘traps’ to limit my freedom of choice we come to the idea that my ‘pristine will’ is itself a matter of my own arbitrary choice, a ‘trap’, that can be educated through the shared enterprise of legislating the proper range of choices and developing the virtues that correspond to the un-self-conscious abidance by the legitimate choices.
This ‘shaping’ of the self as the essentially participatory reality is the result of a mode of action that is called the soul in the classical tradition. Soul is a matter of continuity and consistency in the history of the self which should not expect to take for granted its pre-given unity unsullied by ‘language and interchange’. Soul is that in us which is precisely not determined by the exercise of arbitrary (and supposedly free) choice, but is co-created within the intelligent cooperation with the outer world.
But Rowan grants us that ‘It is religious language that has borne most of the responsibility for keeping alive the story of a substantial soul that can live apart from the body and its history, and it may seem an odd ally to turn to in order to challenge just that model’ [Page 7]. For him it is one of the pervasive problems of Modern dualism that separates the material and the spiritual that inadvertently follows the voluntarism of certain scholastic philosophers.
But this discontinuity is compensated by the fact that ‘One of the really substantive philosophical insights of Marxism was to focus attention on the ways in which meaning is bound up with the processes by which we engage and transform material environment. It also alerts us to the fact that cultural questions can’t be separated ultimately from questions about power — about who has the freedom for what kinds of transformation of an environment’ [Page 8].
Humans are ‘educated’ to outgrow the arbitrary exercise of the freedom of choice within the shared enterprise of thinking on how to engage with the material reality, to outgrow the privatisation of the means of production (so that separate individuals get unlimited freedom of choice with regard to how to deal with the patches of material environment) by focusing on what should we legislate as the legitimate palette of choices that would be conducive to the achievement and sustainment of the common good, of the form of life that is agreed to be worthwhile by the participants of the political conversation.
February 17, 2012
I found this book quite hard going. I'm not an intellectual in the same bracket as Rowan Williams and find his thoughts very difficult to follow in what I thought was going to be a good read. I may return to it later (with a dictionary in the other hand!).
I think Rownan's pending return to the world of academia is probably going to be the right move, because he will be engaging with people at the same theological level (or aspiring to it)as himself. I think for an Archbishop in these days we need someone who can communicate clearly to ordinary people in our society who are disengaged from Church life and "religious" terminology, and make Christian culture relevant and meaningful to people at the point they have reached in their spiritual development.
I think Rownan's pending return to the world of academia is probably going to be the right move, because he will be engaging with people at the same theological level (or aspiring to it)as himself. I think for an Archbishop in these days we need someone who can communicate clearly to ordinary people in our society who are disengaged from Church life and "religious" terminology, and make Christian culture relevant and meaningful to people at the point they have reached in their spiritual development.
September 23, 2009
What a terrific surprise! Not at all the finger-wagging conservative nostalgia the title might indicate, "Lost Icons" turns out to be an extremely astute treatise on what Williams calls "the self," what other theologians might call "the soul," and what most of what I've been reading recently (Zizek) calls "the subject." Totally not the kind of philosophy you expect to hear from an archbishop - he doesn't even invoke the words "God" or "Christian" until the final chapter (much in the same way Zizek's "Puppet and the Dwarf" holds off on mentioning atheism until the end). And I'm equally eager for Williams to fess up to his Marxism as I am for Zizek to declare his Christianity. This is a difficult, difficult read, and I recommend it to anyone.
May 19, 2020
A difficult read and somewhat dated at times but worth persevering with. Traces what is lost from modern culture due to how we think about ourselves. This includes reflections on childhood and bereavement, sex and violence. Twenty years after it was written, some of the trends he identifies seem to have continued at an ever faster pace. His description of public discourse, and of people speaking past, rather than listening to, each other could have been written in 2020!
January 16, 2008
I read this for my book group--and I suggested it. I wouldn't blame them for hating me for recommending it. It was one of the most dense books I've read in many years. The crux of his argument-in very long sentences-is that the underlying problems that plague our world have to do with a lack of conversation between people which leads to violence.
January 9, 2022
This was a tough cookie to crack from Rowan.
Some proper dense argument/philosophy that I'm not sure I always followed but had some gems. Essentially a treatise into how a dualistic, narrow, free-to-choose-in-a-vacuum, thin conception of the self is a load of nonesense. He says it in a way that is more eloquent than that, but also probably harder to follow.
Chapters on childhood and the need for a shared non-competitive social space were particularly good.
Some proper dense argument/philosophy that I'm not sure I always followed but had some gems. Essentially a treatise into how a dualistic, narrow, free-to-choose-in-a-vacuum, thin conception of the self is a load of nonesense. He says it in a way that is more eloquent than that, but also probably harder to follow.
Chapters on childhood and the need for a shared non-competitive social space were particularly good.
October 7, 2023
The essay on Childhood was particularly good. A book to revisit - some of what Dr Williams was saying was way over my head!
May 19, 2024
This is probably one of the best and richest books by Williams. Do recommend to read, even those who are not religious. It still acts as a good analysis of contemporary society.
October 27, 2025
DNF. I heard him speak last year and got this book as a result of that fruitful experience. I have a master’s in theology and got little out of the wordy and sometimes unedited text. Frustrating.
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