Richard Harries's Reading List

"First of all, outside the New Testament, St Augustine is the most influential person in Western Christianity by far. He is not so influential in the East but both Protestantism and Catholicism in the West owe almost everything to him, from outside the New Testament. Secondly, he was a wonderful, wonderful writer and a deeply passionate man. He was very sensual. Peter Brown in his biography of Augustine says that his works are filled with the sights and sounds of North Africa. This is St Augustine of Hippo in North Africa, which is now in Algeria. He lived from 354 to 430 so at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. He is not to be confused with St Augustine of Canterbury who is one of the first English Bishops. St Augustine of Hippo wrote a huge amount and he went on a great spiritual pilgrimage from Manichaeism to Platonism and eventually found his way into Christianity. Confessions is a wonderfully personal book, but not in a lurid sense like a modern confession. The whole thing is an almost agonised prayer to God on this kind of search. One of the great things about St Augustine, like so many Christians then, but less now, is that he had a great sense of God as the source of all beauty, as well the source of goodness and truth. There is this wonderful phrase, “Oh thou Beauty so ancient and so fresh”. I think that through The Confessions you get an insight into a passionate mind on a spiritual journey. It is because he was engaged in a lot of the controversies at the time. His position eventually became the received orthodox one, so he was influential from that point of view. And also he wrote a huge amount and he wrote very well and so that also explains why he was so influential and why his writings have survived."

"Yes, the 14th century was a remarkable century. It was characterised by the terrible Black Death but at the same time it produced the most amazing mystical writing. One of the writers was Julian of Norwich, who is absolutely wonderful, and then this anonymous author who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. The reason why I think it is so important is because many people think that we speak much too easily and glibly about God and the author of this book says that in order to truly know God we have to go into a cloud of unknowing. According to Christian theology there are two ways to know God. There is what’s called the positive way, where you try to say things about God, and then there is the negative way, where you have to unsay everything you have said about God and go into a kind of unknown. This is because everything we say about God can be somewhat misleading because we talk in metaphors all the time. And metaphors are always as untrue as they are true. They have to be broken and then remade and broken and remade. And therefore to know God as he truly is, instead of purely our projection, we need to go beyond all our metaphors into what he referred to as “the cloud of unknowing”, where you simply reach out to God himself, whom you can’t characterise or describe at all. So this book, for me, is very important because Christianity has this strong mystical tradition, which can often be neglected. And this is one of Christianity’s most important mystical writings. It could be so but it reads as a single text. Well, it was this theme of moving beyond words and trying to reach out to God in a very still, very silent, wordless way."

"This is a very different kind of book. St Augustine gives you a feel for the Christian belief and The Cloud of Unknowing gives you a feel for the life of prayer. Moral Man and Immoral Society is about how Christian faith impinges on the world. What is interesting about Reinhold Niebuhr is that he was hugely influential on the top swath of American political thinkers and politicians in the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter, for instance, kept a collection of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings by his bedside. He referred to them as his political bible. He has been one of the few Christian writers who have really been able to speak to two generations of political thinkers and he is beginning to come back into fashion again now. He has been a huge influence on President Obama, for example. Yes, they could. But they are also realists. I think if you had to sum up in a phrase what Niebuhr’s view would be – it would be a kind of hopeful realism. He has very often been claimed as the father of American Realism. He was brutally realistic but the Christian faith in him has always made him look for the possibility of progress and improvement. He was way on the left of American politics. He was one of the founders of the equivalent of a Labour or Socialist Party in America. For the first part of his life he was way to the left of the Democratic Party. He has a very good understanding of democracy. He wrote what I think is the best defence of democracy in a book called Children of Light and Children of Darkness . And in that book he said that “man’s capacity for good makes democracy possible, man’s inclination to evil makes democracy necessary”. The point he is making is that democracy holds together the balance between the possibilities for good within us which make democracy possible, but also because of our propensity to evil we need the checks and balances on potential tyranny which democracy does give. Yes, I do. And for me there are two reasons why. First of all the Christian faith does have a very particular view of what it is to be a human being in society, which I think was Niebuhr’s view. There is this idea of being realistic but avoiding cynicism on the one hand and hopeful and avoiding sentimentality on the other hand. It is holding together this kind of hopeful realism which one would hope is expressed through various forms of social commitment as well as a political philosophy. Of course it is. Interestingly, Reinhold Niebuhr said later on that he wished he had called the book Immoral Man and Even More Immoral Society ! He draws a contrast between the kind of idealism which is possible in individual life and the kind of brute reality of relationships between organised groups and states where power is an essential factor. He took power seriously and is one of the few theologians who has really grappled with the issue of power. A lot of his book is about how you curb and control power in a brutal world. Basically, because we think it is true. I certainly believe that all people by virtue of being human have a capacity for moral insight as part of what it is to be a human being. From my point of view it is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, and the church has always believed that. We all have some moral capacity, but if you believe in God, you believe that this capacity ultimately comes from God. It is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. Of course you can have a moral view of society without a religious view, but if you believe a religious view to be true then that also affects your view of society."

"This is a great novel of belief and unbelief. Dostoyevsky himself was a passionate Orthodox Christian, but of course he felt the flames of unbelief as much as anybody and the novel is about the relationship between Alyosha, who is one of the brothers who believes in God, and Ivan, who doesn’t. In particular it poses in acute form the problem of suffering. Ivan tells a story of most horrific cruelty to children and he turns to Alyosha and says, “It is not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.” In other words he could not believe in a God who allowed such things and he argued that no kind of future happiness could justify the cruelty we saw on human earth. Yes, and that is the heart of where the real difficulty is for a religious believer. All the usual moves are obvious – for example, if you have free will you must be free to choose wrong as well as right. It is not possible to have the kind of conscious life we know without the possibility of accident and mishap in terms of earthquakes and so on. Things like that belong to existence as such. But, given all this, the question to put it brutally is, “Was God justified in creating a world in which such things happen and which he presumably knew would happen?” That, I think, is how the problem ought to be posed and it is posed that way in Dostoyevsky’s great novel. And it is not only about that dialogue, of course. There are some wonderful characters in it. It is a great novel and the greatest novel of belief and unbelief that has ever been written. I think in all our experiences we have some idea of good coming out of evil. It is not that God wills the evil in order to bring the good, but all of us in our life know that sometimes you go through a very difficult patch and you manage to get some good out of it. Obviously the God in which we believe must think there is some ultimate good that can come out of what Keats called “this Vale of Soul Making”. Secondly there is a sort of feeling that a lot of people have, that life is more than a calculus of pain and pleasure and that something big is at stake. Why is it that most people in life don’t commit suicide when things are difficult? In my view it is because they feel that something big is at stake – it is more than a paltry happiness or unhappiness, however important those things are. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course, this is a very shorthand description of my point of view and only a little bit of what I would want to say. In my understanding of Christianity I can hold on to Christian belief on the basis of two fundamental Christian doctrines. One is that God himself and Christ himself shares in human anguish through the incarnation. Secondly, that through my belief in the resurrection and eternal life I believe that this life is not all there is. It is only on the basis of those two features that I think it is actually possible to believe there is a wise and loving power behind the universe."

"In my view, Rowan Williams is the biggest intellectual genius of our time by quite a long way. It is one of God’s ironies at a time when the church is meant to be declining he raises up two intellectuals as religious leaders – the Chief Rabbi [Lord Jonathan Sacks] for the Jews and Rowan Williams. Rowan translates from about 11 languages; anything you think you know about, he knows far more. It is really rather depressing! Some of his work is very easy – for example, some of his simple sermons. But some of his essays on theology need quite a lot of grappling with. I am assuming that my five books are for people who really want to grapple quite seriously, so there must be something of Rowan Williams. On Christian Theology is a collection of his essays from the 1980s and 90s and on a range of subjects. Just thinking about his intellect, one of the things he tossed off was a major scholarly book on Dostoyevsky when he took a month off! It is very difficult to sum it up, but he is acutely aware of all modern dilemmas. He understands the postmodern world. He understands all the major philosophical difficulties because he has read everything. Everything he writes is acutely aware of some of the searching aspects of modern philosophy and sociology and other disciplines and that is why some of his writing is so difficult because he can’t write a sentence without immediately getting thousands of qualifications in his mind. He can speak very simply and everything he writes comes across as extraordinarily authentic and real. And, of course, he is a published poet as well. Well, that is a very big question! I think if you have a religious upbringing you need to start by exploring your religion and seeing what it has to offer. I find with a lot of people, when they begin to look at other religions they find themselves finding truths about their own religion for the first time. They come to appreciate the other religion but also it uncovers things in their own religion that they hadn’t properly seen before. But there is no Archimedean point above all religions where you can just stand back and say this one is true and that one is untrue. So you have to bed down in your own place and start from there. Yes, I was chairman of the Council of Christians and Jews for many years. I don’t believe that all religions are saying the same thing. Some religions are saying very very different things. And there are Truth Claims in all religions. I think that what one can say is that whatever one thinks is true, it is equally clear that one does not grasp the fullness of truth and that lies beyond one. And I certainly think there is a huge amount of overlap and much in common between Judaism and Christianity, and a fair amount with Islam as well. There are some principles. But if people want to say they are a Christian they need to be able to define themselves in their own way. But for me being a Christian basically means adhering to the Christian creed, not in a literalistic way. Christian language is what I call symbolic symbolism – not mere symbolism as some people say, but it is metaphor which points to something which is ultimately real. I go along with the basic fundamental truths of the Christian faith, as does the Anglican Church, as do all the mainstream churches. There is not all that much which divides the mainstream churches these days. They have discovered that many of the issues that divided them at the Reformation, and earlier between East and West in the 11th century, have been got over. Not all of them, of course, but many of them have been got over."

"I found Tony Judt, who has just died, very honest and wise. All the obituaries said he was a wonderfully stimulating teacher, but I only know him through his writing. His thesis is that over the last 30 or 40 years life has been dominated by the pursuit of wealth, by an excessive individualism, and by the desire of people to express and fulfil themselves. He castigates the west for having that sort of philosophy, but then he gets interesting, because he admits honestly that now there is no persuasive left-wing narrative, and that what we’ve got to try and do now is to recover the moral framework within which we think about society. Given the society we have now, there will always be the question of how we balance the action of the state and the action of private individuals. Because there is no political ideology that is going to be persuasive, we’ve got to have this moral framework by which we seek to evaluate policies. The last part of his thesis is that we now seem to have reached a stage where the state is always regarded as the worst possible solution to any problem. What he tries to show through examples of the Roosevelt government, France under de Gaulle and various others, is that the state is not always the worst possible actor. He tries to elicit a sense of what the state achieved under those governments, and, although it sounds very minimalist, he says we should recover a sense of gratitude, for example, for what the post-World War II government in Britain achieved. We should not just take it for granted but recognise and learn from its approach. Well, a Marxist analysis has never been concerned with the moral dimension in itself; it’s been a political narrative based on a particular reading of economic history. A lot of people may have been Marxists because of strong moral convictions, but Marxism itself is really just a reading of history. That was different from, say, Christian Socialism, which was very dominant in Britain for some time, and indeed half the members of Tony Blair’s government claimed to be Christian Socialists. This is a morally based socialism rather than a Marxist one. Harold Wilson said of the Labour Party that it ‘owed more to Methodism than it did to Karl Marx’. In short, it owed more to a morally based sense of social justice than to a simple reading of economic history. So Judt is saying that we have to recover a moral framework to view politics, and this chimes with my own book Faith in Politics? Judt’s book reads very well, and his opening sentence sets the tone: ‘Something is profoundly wrong in the way we live today.’ But he’s not offering any easy or obvious solutions, which is where something of his honesty comes through. Yes, but it draws on history and his extensive knowledge of governments over the last 50 years, and how they tackled some of these problems. And one aspect of this history is the growing inequalities, not just in wealth but in health and life expectancy. It’s not quite so familiar as you might think, because, as I said, he thinks there is no persuasive left-wing narrative for people to latch on to, and politics as a whole is much less clear now. It’s much less satisfactory for those of us who like a clarion call for an unambiguous ideology. It’s a kind of centrist position, with a left-wing bias, one based on the recognition that very few are out-and-out statists and nobody with a sense of social justice is going to be an out-and-out free marketer. In deciding where to strike the balance we need a moral dimension. I didn’t know him. He’s not either religious or anti-religious in the book. I assume that he was a secular agnostic. He seems to be writing from that standpoint."

"Habermas is also writing from what I imagine is a secular agnostic background. But what is so interesting about this book is that he is quite unequivocal in his affirmation of what religion has given to western society: concepts like the value of the person and solidarity in society, for example. He thinks our society has derived these values from Christian faith. He believes that in the politics we have at the moment something is missing, hence the very intriguing title of his book, An Awareness of Something Missing. He says that none of the political nostrums we have on show at the moment can motivate people or bind people together in society with a sense of belonging together in a way that religion at its best is able to do. We need to recover a moral vision, which for Habermas draws very deeply on the wells of religion. And he has a very interesting approach to religion, because he thinks that while religion has been essential and is essential now, religion must translate its concepts into what the philosopher John Rawls would call ‘public reasoning’, concepts which the ordinary citizen can understand. He is very critical of so-called enlightenment thinkers who regard religion as irrational, and says that religion does have a rationality in its own terms and that there must be a recognition of that by secular non-believers. The interesting phrase he uses about religion is das Unabgegoltene – the unexhausted force of religious traditions in what they have to offer to society; there is more that society can draw from religion. But (and this is, I suppose, one of the reasons he regards himself as a secular thinker) religion has to make its treasures or its moral vision available in terms which can be grasped and assimilated by secular people. That’s not quite the phrase he uses; he says that religion always stands in an opaque relationship to society. It can’t be totally transmuted into secular terms and it can’t be totally assimilated. Religion has more to give, it has an opaque and mysterious quality, which means that it will always be juxtaposed with secular society. I’m not defending his position, I’m just saying that it is an unusual and an interesting one – on the one hand clearly to be so affirmative about what religion has to offer, and how much religion is needed now, but at the same time remaining firmly a secularist and insisting that religion has to translate its terms into terms which secular people can assimilate. He argues that secular and religious people mustn’t simply talk about each other, they must talk to and with each other in a new kind of dialogue, and one of the conditions he lays down is that ‘secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning the truth of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle, universally accessible discourses’."

"I am interested in de Gaulle because he was clearly a towering figure, and apparently the French regard him as the greatest Frenchman who has ever lived. Somebody said he conveyed the sense of being a ‘king in exile’, and with absolutely no authority at all he just declared: ‘I am France, I am France.’ Although he was totally dependent on the British for everything, nevertheless he stood up to Churchill and insisted on being treated as an equal partner in the fight against Nazism. He had a quite extraordinary sense of self-confidence, which, as we know, led to a lot of rows, and he was obviously a very difficult person to work with. And another amazing fact of his life is the way that he managed to save France from a civil war over Algeria by sheer political cunning. Another aspect this very well-written book brought home to me was how much suffering and violence the French have been through, for example in the Occupation, the Resistance, the Vichy government, the reprisals, all the killings that went on over Algerian independence, and the numerous assassination attempts on de Gaulle himself; an extraordinary period of violence which on the whole we escaped in Britain. No I don’t. I’m not defending or attacking the French. The reason I’m interested in this book is because de Gaulle offers a particular model of leadership – very autocratic, in a way that people today would not regard as acceptable, and yet a leadership that literally saved France on at least two occasions. What I think enabled him to get away with the huge risks he took in life, betting everything on extraordinary uncertainties, was because he was deeply rooted in his religious faith, and in a traditional family life, with a very supportive wife. He was a very good father, and in particular he had a Down’s Syndrome daughter to whom he was totally devoted, and he was reported as saying that everything he had done he had done for her, and without her he would not have done it. So it was his deep rooting in what you might call the very best of traditional values that enabled him to lead this high-profile life, taking extraordinary risks all the time. So de Gaulle was the conviction politician above all other conviction politicians. In fact, he despised all professional politicians, and of course he had a lot to despise in the kind of political manoeuvring that went on in the 1930s in France which eventually led to the Vichy government. He saw himself as standing above all politicians and refused to see himself as such, even though he was more astute, calculating and cunning that any of them. For a long time he refused to form a Gaullist political party and instead stood above the political fray. Tony Blair and Mrs Thatcher were conviction politicians, as we know. When right in their judgment then they can carry the country through to something wonderful, but if they are wrong, as many of us thought Tony Blair was over the Iraq war, then they can use all their power and conviction to lead us down a disastrous road. The point about de Gaulle was that he was clearly right on two absolutely crucial issues: first when people would have said he was mad to think that he could stand and represent France himself and get the French people to see that he did actually symbolise France, although the official government was in fact the Vichy one. Then, he recognised very quickly that independence for Algeria was inevitable, even though the Pieds Noirs, the French settlers in Algeria, who had helped him to come to power, looked to him to help Algeria remain part of France. Normally, yes, we think of these as opposites, but somehow he combined both. He was absolutely uncompromising in one way and yet extremely shrewd and politically calculating in another, which is something that enabled him to steer France through the Algerian crisis. Towards the end of his life he did get something wrong – he didn’t grasp the scale and extent of what was happening in France in 1968, though in the end he even pulled France through that. But he does pose a question about the kind of leadership we want. How wonderful it is to have strong leaders, and yet how dangerous. They’re great if they’re right and terrible if they’re wrong."

"That’s very interesting, because I think that there is a fascinating juxtaposition of the de Gaulle book with Shirley Williams’s book. Shirley Williams is also a person of very strong conviction, but, as she herself said, she perhaps lacked enough confidence and ruthlessness to aim for the top job. She is a woman who had to fight her way in what was then a very male-dominated world, and, although extremely able, clever and with very passionate convictions, did not have that extraordinary sense of destiny that de Gaulle appeared to have. She is not the kind of person who thinks that in every situation she is bound to be right and must therefore push ruthlessly to get her way, as de Gaulle did. So she does offer a different model of leadership, one which would be much more consultative. She was not the leader of the Labour party, but she has been the leader of the LibDems in the house of Lords, and she has occupied very senior positions in government. A good number of people would like to have seen her as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister instead of Mrs Thatcher. But she never really made a ruthless bid for the supreme position because she’s not that kind of person. Well, that’s another interesting dimension to the book. Shirley Williams, as I think everyone knows, is a serious Catholic, and she talks about her upbringing and her father who was a Catholic convert. Yet the religious dimension to her life is very low-key in the book, and she certainly doesn’t claim the high moral ground as a result of it. She mentions, just as an aside, that Anthony Crosland was as regular about watching Match of the Day as she was about going to the Mass, and that’s about the only clue as to how important her Catholic faith is to her! She does come on to it a little more at the end where she talks about her admiration for the Liberation Theologians and of Jesus as a liberator who stood alongside the poor and the vulnerable, so that gives us an indication of where she stands. She is a serious Catholic, but also a Liberal, so it is not surprising that she is strongly opposed to the Pope’s views on contraception and she would like to see a married priesthood. She is a left-wing Catholic but she’s still a loyal Catholic. Her father was an intellectual who thought his way into the church, and she had many intellectual conversations with him when she was a child, conversations which had a good element of religion in them. So it was a good start from her father and also, on the emotional side, from the people she was very fond of who often looked after her when she was a child. In the House of Lords she has voted in line with the Catholic position on some things such as embryo research, although on a number of issues she is very much opposed to the present teachings of the church. What we need is people to go into politics who want to serve society. Now this may sound a bit sentimental, but the fact of the matter is that in the history of politics in this country, over the last 150 years, people went into the Labour party with a sense of a crusade, wanting to change society for the better, and there were a lot of people in the traditional Conservative party who had a sense of noblesse oblige who wanted to do their duty to the country. Now I’m not being blinkered – selfish ambition and legitimate ambition is there in all of us – but there was often a very strong sense of service in people who went into politics, and it would be a terrible shame if people only went into politics to pursue their own careers and their own ambitions. Yes, the problem is that the press assume that all politicians are only pursuing their own interests. That is totally untrue and very unfair. The fact of the matter is that politicians are a mixture like all of us and there is still a lot of altruism around. I’d like to see this strengthened so that the concept of serving society through politics is regarded as a very worthwhile vocation and one that is recognised by society as a whole to be such and not regarded in a totally cynical way, which it is by the newspapers at the moment."

"Yes, she’s arguing for politics without religion, taking religion out of politics. It’s a very dramatic title, and I have a lot of sympathy with what she’s saying. She’s particularly irritated and indeed angry about the impression being given by some religious people that religion is the source of all morality and that it holds the high moral ground. For example, she is annoyed by the assumption of some that the bishops in the House of Lords are custodians of public morality, whereas of course the bishops are neither better nor worse than most other members in terms of their capacity for moral discernment. So I have a lot of sympathy with her for that and also for her plea that there is a basis for moral values that is not simply religious, but is rooted in our capacity for imaginative sympathy with other people and our sense that we are all human beings, frail and subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It is that which enables us to create a morality as well as an aesthetic, and also, she argues, religion, but this capacity she regards as rooted in our human nature. I entirely agree with all that, and my view is that we must recognise and celebrate values whoever puts them forward, whether people are believers or not. But where I think Mary Warnock goes badly wrong is the impression she gives that all religious morality is of the command variety – these are God’s commands, these are God’s laws. She seems to suggest that these are God’s laws only for believers. Indeed, she begins her book suggesting that’s the kind of religion she was brought up in. But, actually, traditional Christian thought contains what is called natural law, and the basic assumption behind this is that all human beings have a basic capacity, by virtue of being human, for moral insight and moral discernment; in short, however flawed, doing what is right, and discerning what this is belongs to our nature as such. And certainly St Paul argues for that, saying that people have the moral law written in their own hearts, so you don’t have to be religious to have a strong moral sense. I think that Mary Warnock is creating a wrong impression when she suggests that all religious morality is of the command and obedience sort and that this is just for religious believers. In fact, not all religiously-based morality is like that; it involves the use of reason reflecting on what it is the right thing to do as a human being in society, whether we have a religious belief or not. In the debate in the House of Lords on euthanasia, nobody appealed to specifically religious arguments – despite what Polly Toynbee continually says in The Guardian – that euthanasia bills are blocked by a cabal of bishops, rabbis and so on. There was no specific appeal to religious considerations. However, I think that religion does come into it in a much more subtle way, when you are evaluating suffering, and whether suffering is the worst evil. When you’re thinking of human beings and whether they are isolated individuals or whether it’s essential to our human nature that we are mutually interdependent, it seems to me that a religious perspective on existence will weight the argument in a particular way, a different way perhaps from someone who hasn’t got a religious faith. If we use John Rawls’s term of public reasoning, then everything that went on in this debate was public reasoning, something which Mary Warnock would approve of: morality without any ostensible appeal to religion. But a religious view of what it is to be a human being in society evaluated those arguments in slightly different ways. For instance, since the 17th century Britain has had an over-individualistic understanding of what it is to be a human being. But from a Christian point of view we are not isolated individuals, we are persons in community. Again, a secular point of view tends to think that being totally in control of one’s own life is what is fundamental to our human worth and dignity, and that if you lose control of it somehow all is lost, whereas the Christian faith would want to emphasise that life is a process of dependence and independence, it’s a mixture, and to be dependent and not in total control, which we all are for some of our lives, doesn’t mean to say that we in any way lose our human dignity or value. That’s a Christian consideration, which influences the argument in a rather more subtle way and which makes one understand a person who is in a terrible state in a somewhat different way from a person with a different view of what it is to be a human being in society. I very much feel for some of the people we read about who ask to die, and I do not know how I would behave in that situation. But I certainly do not see them as having lost all their value or dignity or worth as a human being because they are not in control of their life. Yes, I think they were, there was public reasoning in that anyone can grasp in non-religious terms what was being said, but actually a religious perspective has been fed into it in a particular way, a way that has been assimilated, and that, I suspect, is a good example of what Habermas might mean. Yes, religion has a very bad name in certain quarters at the moment, and very understandably so. When it is associated with violence, when it is associated with right-wing fundamentalism, when it is associated with an authoritarian approach to morality, when it’s associated with claims for the high moral ground, when there’s any insinuation that people who don’t have a religious view of life are by that very fact immoral, then there are powerful reasons for keeping it out of the political arena. My point would be that those are not the only forms of religion around and there are other forms of religion that can make a valuable contribution to politics."