The poetics of the human in the work of Rowan Williams

Abstract

In this thesis, I advance Rowan Williams as a significant analogical theologian and sophisticated hermeneut of the Christian tradition on the human. He is a figure unusually sensitive to the poetic valences of theologia and the theological valences of human poesis. Over the course of this analysis, I defend what I term the poetics of the human in his work which I argue constitutes a fertile mode of approach to the doctrine of theological anthropology. This is pursued via six constellated themes on poesis, analogia, hamartia, kenosis, hagios and eschaton. I contend that this mode of theology, and its plurivocal orchestration in Williams’s work, is particularly fitted to the context of philosophical and aesthetic modernity on the basis of its organic unity, negativity, paradox and irenicism.