A sermon given by the Most Reverend Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of

Canterbury, at the Patronal Eucharist of the Catholic University of Leuven in

Saint Peter's Church, Grote Markt, Leuven, 2 February 2011
Lectionary: Malachi 3.14; Luke 2.2240

The two scriptural readings for this eucharist present dramatically different
pictures. For Malachi, the coming of the Lord and his messenger is a matter of
terror cleansing fire, before which no-one can stand their ground, a whirlwind, a
crucible in which everything is melted down to test its authenticity. It is the
sweeping away of a certain kind of religion, one that offers to God only what is left
over from human use, and which has no interest in the offering to God of justice or
compassion in the human world.
And for Luke, very typically, the scene of Gods visitation of his temple is a modest,
prosaic one. Its central figures are a not very prosperous family from the North
country (they are offering the sacrifice prescribed for the poorer classes who cannot
afford to offer a lamb), and a peculiar pair of shabby old eccentrics, of the kind who
still haunt great religious shrines today. Symeon announces that now he is ready to
die, because he has seen the Lord manifesting himself in his temple the Lord,
whose glory, as so many psalms and prophecies say, shines forth from the
sanctuary in Jerusalem. And he predicts that this manifestation will be the great
life-or-death test for many among Gods people, and that Marys soul will be
pierced through with suffering.

So how is this odd little episode in the temple a manifestation of God? How does
this connect with the terrifying purge that the prophet depicts? What the
evangelist is saying is that the judgement of God happens not in grand spectacle,
not in the literal blazing of fire and the fracturing and dissolving of all things in the
crucible. It is to be seen in a more profound meltdown as God burns up and
melts away our fantasies of divine power and ultimate victory. What shines out,
what is made manifest, in the gospel story is a promise that is just as terrifying in its
way as the prophets picture the promise that what will heal the world is not force
but stillness, the divine renunciation of compulsion and control.
God will redeem the world by being God, not by fulfilling our dreams of glorious,
bloodstained triumph and cleansing. The holy territory, the sanctuary that has to
be purged, is my own spirit and imagination, so readily seduced by dreams of
control or success. This message is indeed a crucible in which our hopes are melted
down. It will bring to light what peoples real beliefs and priorities are, what their
religion truly is. And the closer we are to Jesus, the more acutely shall we feel the
inner tearing apart that this can mean, as we let go of the false faith assaulted by the
prophet a faith that gives God only the leftovers of our lives, the spare time and
the things whose absence we shant notice.
And this speaks a word to the life of the mind, the life of this University and every
place of learning; a word especially to the Christian mind and the Christian
university. The health of any intellectual community lies in its willingness to place
truth above ease or self-pleasing. It seeks to live from the deepest level of human
desire a strange word to use, perhaps, in relation to the intellectual life, but a
necessary one. The mind is a place where eros happens, the sense of lack and
urgency, hunger for joy. Stifle that in the name of skill and efficiency and
satisfactory contributions to the nations economy or whatever, and something of
the essence of the intellect is buried.
All universities have the vocation of challenging again and again the various ways
in which cultures can trivialise or ignore the desires of the mind not least of
challenging the consoling images offered by the pressures of marketing and
consuming, by self-interested politics seeking for scapegoats, by all the different
displacements of the critical intellect that modernity and postmodernity indulge so
generously, the second-bests and the casual spare areas of human energy. The
university is and should be, not a community that is iconoclastic for its own sake,
but one that tests and scrutinises the images of a society or an era. It is bound to be,
in the title of a significant collection of essays by Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the
Self-Images of the Age, a necessary aspect of how societies keep themselves selfaware and free to grow and develop.

But for the Christian university, this has an added dimension. The Christian
intellectual community is an environment which honours the belief that the most
basic level of human eros is the desire for communion with God. And that means
that the Christian university is more, not less, passionate about the critique of
idolatry and fantasy. At its heart, whatever the diverse individual convictions of its
members, lies a set of convictions about what is due to the full dignity of human
beings made in the divine image. And to be faithful to this requires a persistent
and constantly renewed questioning of all that diminishes and distorts or trivialises
humanity at every stage of its existence, from womb to grave. If it is true that any
university has the task of speaking for liberty and dignity in human affairs, a
Christian community will insist that speaking for this liberty and dignity involves
speaking in some way about God within the life of the intellectual institution:
theology, when it is doing its proper work, is an active and potentially unsettling
conversational partner for any and every other voice in the community.
And part of theologys own central task is to make space for the stillness of God to
be manifest in the midst of the prosaic world; to explore how the manifestation of
glory, the light that will enlighten the nations, depends upon leaving behind the
fantasies that seek to associate God with force or control. What God shows us is
that he transforms all our hopes and thoughts through the sheer fact of his own
incarnate humility. And in that connection, theology is also there to prepare us to
take the risks that this entails, the swords in the soul, and, quite simply, to face our
death. Theology recalls us to the fact that we stand before God as limited and
mortal beings, and that we shall only enter into the fullness of life that God intends
for us if we can let go of the dream of being invulnerable. We become immortal
with God only when we have accepted mortality; it is then that resurrection can
happen.
The intellectual community, and especially the Christian intellectual community,
needs always to be engaged in the critique of triumphalism of any kind. That is
why it is so significant a disaster when universities become mouthpieces for
governments. The theologian may remember the shock felt by the twentieth
centurys greatest Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, on reading the manifesto in
support of German policy in the First World War signed by most of the leading
German academics of the day. And given that the vocation and destiny of Europe
is part of the focus of these celebrations there is here a clue about what the
university, Christian or otherwise, has to say to our continent.

We have inherited a long record of European triumphalism; and while this may no
longer be a political reality, its cultural echoes are still very clear not least in the
bland assumption often made that European secularism is the destined future of
the rest of the world. Universities like this have the responsibility to say to our
culture that the light which enlightens the human world is not the product of
European civilisation indeed, the opposite is more true, that European
civilisation, with its high valuation of dialogue and critique and its suspicion of
absolutism, is the product of the light that Symeon speaks of in the Nunc Dimittis.
Our specific European legacy is precious, but precious as a gift among others.
Freeze it into a self-image of finality and decisive authority for the rest of human
culture, and it becomes an idol and a danger to the truth.
The paradox of Europes intellectual history at its best is the belief that a relentless
self-questioning can be sustained by the human spirit as an essential dimension of
travelling into fuller life and light, and that this questioning is not ultimately
destructive. But such confidence rests not on a self-evident secular rationality, but
on the message of the gospel itself. The awareness of the gospel is often deeply
buried in the European psyche, yet it is still profoundly active; it remains alive in
the intuition that the truth is indeed light and joy, that the truth is somehow
already flowing towards us for our life and fulfilment.
Our calling, then, is to hold the connection between that conviction, grounded in
the revealed humbleness and stillness of God in Christ, and the restlessness of
European cultural history, so that we have a true (and a truthful) gift for the whole
world a vision of the transfiguring energy of the God who will never consent to
be anything but himself, who will never give way to violence and coercion, who
moves by loving. As the prophet reminded us, that is anything but an easy vision,
because it tells us a good deal about what has to die in us before the truth can
become manifest, about the wounds we may feel in our spirit and imagination. Yet
this is glory, for Gods people and for the whole world; this is salvation, healing.
When we see this, we can, like Symeon, let go, and entrust the world, the life of
mind and body and imagination, to the hands of God, so that the offerings that the
world makes to its creator may be the authentic reflections of his own active love.
Rowan Williams 2011