The Archbishop of Canterbury is in Jamaica and I am in London. Soon he will be back in London and I will be back in North America. I am on study leave at the moment, writing an essay entitled "Dostoevsky and the Future of the Anglican Communion." My essay has at its heart the question: What does Rowan Williams' recent book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction have to teach us about how the archbishop approaches questions of conflict and community? My thesis is that Williams' approach to the crisis in the Anglican Communion has been greatly influenced by the fiction of Dostoevsky, and that it was no coincidence that he chose to meditate upon this author on the eve of the Lambeth Conference during his sabbatical at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Far from being a diverting academic exercise, I see this book as powerfully practical. It is an extended theological reflection on how one imagines the life of faith within a fallen world and a church that does not live up to one's hopes and dreams for it. The very first page of the book indicates as much when Williams writes, "The novels [of Dostoevsky] ask us, in effect, whether we can imagine a human community of language and feeling in which, even if we were incapable of fully realizing it, we knew what was due to each other; whether we could imagine living in the consciousness of a solidity or depth in each other which no amount of failure, suffering, or desolation could eradicate." Practically every page is pregnant with implications for the future of Anglicanism--though the book is at the same time simply about Dostoevsky.

On one level, the book is an insicive piece of literary criticism that can be read as just that: one careful scholar's well-researched thoughts on Dostoevsky and an important contribution to Russian studies in general. Nevertheless, I am deeply aware that the context out of which this book has come into being is bound up with the role that Rowan Williams plays as an archbishop in a church in conflict. The questions that Dostoevsky asks intrigue Williams not simply on their own terms, I believe, but because they are important questions to address within his own context as a church leader.

I hope that it is not overstating my case to say, therefore, that the future of the Anglican Communion will depend to some extent on whether the archbishop is able to apply his insights gained from his study of Dostoevsky to our current struggles. If the archbishop succeeds in his project, we may one day say that the Anglican Communion owes much of its shape not just to Hooker, but to Dostoevsky, via the thought and Christian discipleship of Rowan Williams.

Much of the above was written as a precis of my project in an email to an Anglican bishop who expressed interest in the undertaking. I am now in the thick of it, and while the essay itself is not ready for prime time just yet, it struck me how incredibly, eerily relevant it was to the proceedings (some would say debacle) of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in Jamaica this past week.

A.S. Haley, better known to readers as the Anglican Curmudgeon, wrote an insightful analysis of the political goings-on at the ACC, and my seminary classmate George Conger posted a more first-hand journalistic account on his website. I commend both pieces to political junkies who want the blow-by-blow. Conger's piece maps pretty closely to Haley's analysis, and there appears to be a consensus among conservatives that the archbishop fumbled the ball (to use a sporting analogy) during the proceedings. The Anglican Communion Institute certainly thought so, and urged the archbishop to take corrective action. Stephen Noll, for his part, came up with his own game plan for the archbishop to follow.

Having just slogged my way through 243 pages of brilliant and dense prose by Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky, however, I was pretty well convinced he would not take the approach urged upon him by either the ACI or by Stephen Noll, but would respond in a typically Rowanesque mode. This he proceeded to do in his Presidential Address last night (you can listen to the audio or read a transcript of it), in which he spoke of "glorious failure" and "miserable failure," and what distinguished the two from each other. He appeared to admit, in effect, that he (and, by extension, the ACC) had indeed "failed," but rather than doing anything to "fix" that failure, he took a tack best called, I think, the Dostoevskian-Hegelian Kenotic Approach.

A.S. Haley (our favorite Curmudgeon) reminded readers of the Hegelian dimension of Rowan Williams' approach to conflict by linking to a previous post wherein he shares Giles Fraser's insights into the method behind Rowan Williams' madness. This piece is well worth reading, because it exegetes the archbishop's approach to conflict from the philosophical (Hegelian) side, whereas at the moment I am attempting to exegete it from the literary (Dostoevskian) side.

Rowan Williams consistently resists "fixing" things--and in so doing, paradoxically, opens himself up to the charge of trying to "fix" the process itself, that is "fixing" not in the sense of correcting, but in the sense of manipulating it. Conservative bloggers interpreted his actions as an indication that "the fix was in," so to speak. Williams is "known" to be sympathetic to the "revisionist" agenda, and is therefore a tool of TEC, and concluded that anyone who continues to show up to play the game is a tool, as well. But Williams' goal is not simply to keep people talking to each other, but to keep people talking until they recognize what it is they owe each other. And even if this never happens, the "failure" can still be redeemed by God so that it is a "glorious failure" rather than a "miserable one."

Truly, Dostoevsky was in Jamaica.

In my next post, I will share the rough draft of the first section of my essay, "Dostoevsky and the Future of the Anglican Communion."