Looking East in Winter
Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition
Rowan Williams
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Not really the book I thought it might be, certainly based on my interpretation of its title and blurb! Looking east in winter has nothing to do with Eastern thinking and challenging and comparing different approaches to religion and spirituality, it is more the geographical east of Christian theology and orthodoxy and how western Christianity has slowly taken on more of its thinking and approaches.
Still, I read it and sort of understood it and took its perspectives in, well, most of them as I skipped most of its third part(!) and then pretty much came to conclusion (pretty swiftly) that it seemed to me to be just an exercise in writing views and impressions to help self-justify and look suitably academic and intellectually weighty about some ideas that sit on top of a made-up concept anyway! Cynical, moi?!
A good passage
Natural awareness includes the knowledge that we may become unnatural in our intelligence, forgetting that our troubles arise from within (even if they are activated by the demonic forces) and projecting them on to others so that conflict and resentment arise. Self-awareness means that we become ready to receive what is ‘above nature’, the fruits of the Spirit. It is clear that any search here for a tightly consistent lexicon of nature and supernature is misplaced. Natural intelligence is simply truthful intelligence. In the unfallen state of ‘nature’ this would mean an openness to passion-free relation to the world, which would lead into the perception of the causes of things, the structure of divine wisdom embodied in creation. But the division of consciousness has made this state problematic: we have been lured into passionate perception. Natural awareness now is the awareness of inner dividedness, the coexistence of the possibility of passion-free, unselfish knowledge and acting with the possessive fantasising that enslaves intelligence and traps us in forgetfulness and unreality, and thus ultimately in death.