Where Poetry and Theology meet

Title: A Sparkle from the Coal: Rowan Williams’ Theology of Imagination

Author: Barbara Howard

Publisher: SCM Press, 2024

ISBN: 9780334066293

Price: £35

This book reveals academic communities and their insights that I had hardly imagined existed. Who would have thought that there was a field of Imagination Studies sufficient to equip a Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination or a Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought?

This appears to be the constituency for which the author is writing. She assumes familiarity with key terms used by key thinkers in the field of Imagination Studies and the philosophy of language. Her laudable aim is to locate Rowan Williams within this field and so make links between theology, spirituality, poetry and imagination, hence the book’s subtitle.

Part two of the book concentrates on theological ideas and particularly what the author sees as, “the heart of Williams’ theology of imagination. It is our human desire for God, the ‘sparkle from the coal,’ ‘that sharp dart of longing love’ that draws us onwards towards the magnet of all out hearts’,” (page 99).

She examines Williams’ response to the theologies of, among others, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and St John of the Cross to conclude that “divine desire may be described as the excess of ecstatic kenotic love overflowing into creation,” (page 95). She describes Williams’ vision of the Church as a “workshop for the refocusing of desire and imagination,” (page 119).

Within the general thesis there are some interesting analyses of particular poems by Rowan Williams. I learned especially from her take on the poems Deathship, which reflects on the last years of the poet R. S. Thomas (page 46f), and Rublev, which reflects on the famous icon (page 87).

This is not a book for the general reader, nor one that seeks to simplify (as if such a thing were possible) the complex thought structures of our former Archbishop. Rather, it reads like a doctoral thesis. Nonetheless, the author’s passion for seeking intersection between theology and poetry is evident and to be applauded. After all, much of what we might call Anglican spirituality is conveyed through poetry (of people like George Herbert for example), and there is something elusive perhaps but worth considering about the Welsh dimension of theological imagination.

John Holdsworth, Canon Theologian