2 R. Williams, ‘The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras’, Sobernost: The Journal of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius 6.6 (1972), pp. 415–30.

3 See R. Green’s ‘Kenosis and Ascent: The Trajectory of the Self in the Writings of John Milbank and Rowan Williams’, PhD thesis, Charles Sturt University, 2017; K.M. Delport, ‘Interior intimo meo: Rowan Williams on the Self’, Stellenbosch Theological Journal 4.2 (2018), pp. 471–504.

4 M. Higton, Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams (New York: Church Publishing, 2004), p. 36.

5 B. Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (London and New York: T& T Clark: 2012), p. 116.

6 Myers, Christ the Stranger, p. 124.

7 J. Milbank, ‘Christianity and Platonism in East and West’, in Constantinos Athanasopoulos and Christoph Schneider (eds.), Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013), pp. 158–209 (161, n. 2).

8 See K. Delport, ‘Towards a Visionary and Historical Consciousness: Rowan Williams’s Four Quartets Lectures (1974–1975)’, Studia Historia Ecclesiasticae 43.3 (2017), pp. 1–26.

9 See, for example, his early homily found in R. Williams, ‘To Give and Not to Count the Cost: A Sermon Preached at Mirfield in February 1976’, Sobernost: The Journal of the Fellowship and St. Alban and St. Sergius 7.5 (1977), pp. 401–403, and also ‘The Dark Night’, which can be found in R. Williams, A Ray of Darkness: Sermons and Reflections (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1995), pp. 80–84.

10 His interest in this topic can be gleaned from R. Williams, ‘Freudian Psychology’, in A. Richardson and J. Bowden (eds.), The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1983), pp. 219–22. Also see Myers, Christ the Stranger, pp. 108–12.

11 George Steiner, ‘Tribute to Donald MacKinnon’, Theology 98.781 (1995), pp. 2–9 (2).

12 R. Williams, The Tragic Imagination (The Literary Agenda; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

13 See Giles Waller, ‘Freedom, Fate and Sin in Donald MacKinnon’s Use of Tragedy’, in Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller (eds.), Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature, and Tragic Theory (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 101–18 and Williams, The Tragic Imagination, pp. 108–36.

14 This debate is most famously encapsulated in G.E. Moore, ‘External and Internal Relations’, in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), pp. 276–309. Moore was profoundly influential on MacKinnon; as MacKinnon says, ‘Moore made it possible for me to be a realist … for the logical atomist, there were things with which men [sic] were coming to terms; the world was not simply an expression of their immanent rationality, but something given’ (D. MacKinnon, ‘Philosophy and Christology’, in G.W. Roberts and D.E. Smucker [eds.], Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011 (1968)], pp. 55–81 [63]).

15 See D. MacKinnon, ‘Some Notes on the Irreversibility of Time’, in Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), pp. 90–98.

16 MacKinnon, ‘Some Notes on the Irreversibility of Time’, p. 96.

17 MacKinnon, ‘Some Notes on the Irreversibility of Time’, p. 92.

18 MacKinnon, ‘Some Notes on the Irreversibility of Time’, p. 93.

19 MacKinnon, ‘Some Notes on the Irreversibility of Time’, pp. 96–98.

20 Williams, The Tragic Imagination, p. 112.

21 See R. Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2000), pp. 13–63.

22 G. Ward, ‘Suffering and Incarnation’, in Graham Ward (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 192–208.

23 See G. Ward, ‘Theology and Cultural Sadomasochism’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 78 (2002), pp. 2–10.

24 Williams’s most sustained critique of Lacan can be found in R. Williams, ‘Nature, Passion and Desire: Maximus’ Ontology of Excess’, in M. Vinzent (ed.), Studia Patristica LXVIII (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), pp. 267–72.

25 On this aspect, see G. Ward, ‘Transcendence and Representation’ and J. Milbank, ‘Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent’, in Regina Schwartz (ed.), Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 127-47 and pp. 211–34 respectively.

26 The most recent restatement of the continental and ‘immanentised’ reception of kenosis can be found in Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

27 R. Williams, ‘Author’s Introduction’, in M. Higton (ed.), Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. xiii–xix (xvi).

28 See R. Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Catherine Pickstock, ‘Matter and Mattering: The Metaphysics of Rowan Williams’, Modern Theology 31.4 (2015), pp. 599–617.

29 R. Williams, ‘On Being a Human Body’, Sewanee Theological Review 42.4 (1998), pp. 403–13 (406).

30 Williams, ‘On Being a Human Body’, p. 406. For more on this account of the soul, see R. Williams, Lost Icons, pp. 171–228. Also see R. Williams, ‘Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited: Gregory of Nyssa on Mind and Passion’, in L.R. Wickham and Catherine P. Bammel (eds.), Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity: Essays in Tribute to Christopher Stead (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1993), pp. 227–46 for a discussion on the relation between reason, animality, the body as well as the passions.

31 Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer’, in Wrestling with Angels, pp. 186–202 (186).

32 Williams, ‘On Being a Human Body’, p. 408.

33 Williams, A Ray of Darkness, p. 35.

34 R. Williams, ‘Good for Nothing? Augustine on Creation’, Augustinian Studies 25 (1994), pp. 9–24 (18).

35 R. Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, rev. edn, 1990), p. 61.

36 R. Williams, ‘Troubled Breasts: The Holy Body in Hagiography’, in J.W. Drijvers and J.W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 77.

37 R. Williams, ‘ “Tempted as We Are”: Christology and the Analysis of the Passions’, in J. Baun, A. Cameron, M. Edward and M. Vinzent (eds.), Studia Patristica XLIV (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), pp. 391–404 (400–401).

38 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 127–42.

39 R. Williams, ‘The Paradoxes of Self-knowledge in De trinitate’, in J.T. Lienhard, E.C. Muller and R.J. Teske (eds.), Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum. Collectanea Augustiniana (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 121–34 (127).

40 R. Williams, ‘Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate’, in B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, and J. van Houtem (eds.), Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T. J. Van Bavel, vol. 1 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), pp. 317–32 (317).

41 Williams, ‘Sapientia and the Trinity’, p. 318.

42 Williams, ‘Sapientia and the Trinity’, p. 331. Williams considers the trinity itself to involve a movement of desirous relation within the immanent relations of triune being, which is in turn the ontological foundation of our own created longing towards God and other-directed desire. For this, see R. Williams, ‘The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure’, Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (eds.), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 115–35.

43 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 71.

44 R. Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980), p. 23.

45 Cf. Williams, Resurrection, p. 24.

46 In his homilies on the Canticles, Gregory reflects several times on the ‘wound of love’. For instance, in his sermon on Song of Songs 1.15–2.7, he says: ‘See, then, the soul that has been exalted through the divine ascents sees in herself the | sweet arrow of love by which she is wounded and makes boast of such a blow by saying, I have been wounded by love’. For this translation, see Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs (trans. R.A. Norris, Jr; Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), p. 141.

47 The poetry of John of the Cross is replete with this imagery: in his own rendition of the Canticles he says ‘In solitude she bided, / And in solitude her nest she made: In solitude he guided / His loved–one through the shade / Whose solitude the wound of love has made (También en soledad de amor herido)’. The translation is taken from one of the Canciones in The Poems of St. John of the Cross (trans. R. Campbell; New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967), p. 27.

48 For some reflections on the connections between distentio and ‘woundedness’, see Ward, ‘Suffering and Incarnation’, p. 203.

49 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 72.

50 Williams, ‘The Paradoxes of Self-knowledge in De trinitate’, p. 131.

51 R. Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De doctrina’, Journal of Literature & Theology 3.2 (1989), pp. 138–50.

52 Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire’, p. 145.

53 Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire’, p. 140.

54 R. Williams, ‘“Know Thyself”: What Kind of an Injunction?’ in Michael McGhee (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 211–27 (223–24).

55 Williams, ‘Know Thyself’, p. 222.

56 See R. Williams, ‘Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading of New Testament Ethics’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 239–64 (240).

57 Overall, Williams would be critical of the language of ‘self-authenticity’. He would probably affirm the comments of Theodor Adorno that ‘no one can say the word “genuineness” without becoming ideological’ (in T.W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity [trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973], p. 70). Adorno speaks of how some popular existentialists (in the post-Heideggerian era) see to ‘cleanse inwardness of that element which contains its truth, by eliminating self-reflection, in which the ego becomes transparent to itself as a piece of the world. Instead, the ego posits itself as higher than the world and becomes subjected to the world precisely because of this. The hardened inwardness of today idolizes its own purity, which has supposedly been blemished by ontic elements. At least in this regard the outset of contemporary ontology coincides with the cult of inwardness. The retreat of ontology from the course of the world is also a retreat from the empirical content of subjectivity’ (The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 73-74). The following is also enlightening: ‘In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally preformed. Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it. But fundamental ontology gladly spares itself that, by pretending it has a starting point somewhere outside. In that way such ontology succumbs to cultural mediations all the more; they recur as social aspects of that ontology’s own purity’ (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 99).

58 Williams, ‘Interiority and Epiphany’, p. 241.

59 J.-L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence (trans. B. Holmes et al.; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 204.

60 Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire’, p. 144.

61 See J. McCurry, ‘Towards a Poetics of Theological Creativity: Rowan Williams Reads Augustine De Doctrina after Derrida’, Modern Theology 23.3 (2007), pp. 415–33.

62 Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire’, p. 148.

63 R. Williams, ‘Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision’, New Blackfriars 73.861 (1992), pp. 319–26 (322).

64 R. Williams, ‘Insubstantial Evil’, in George Lawless and Robert Dodaro (eds.), Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 105–23 (119).

65 Gray, Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 127–28.

66 Gray, Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 134.

67 Gray, Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 136.

68 Williams, ‘Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision’, pp. 321–22.

69 Williams, ‘Insubstantial Evil’, pp. 118–19.

70 Gray, Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams, p. 140.

71 R. Williams, ‘Twelfth Night’, in The Poems of Rowan Williams (Oxford: Perpetua Press, 2002), p. 25.

72 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, in Wrestling with Angels, pp. 25–34.

73 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, p. 27.

74 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, p. 27.

75 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, pp. 29–30.

76 This is the argument that can be found in Hegel’s reflections on ‘consciousness’. For this, see G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. T. Pinkard; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §§90–165/63–102. Cf. Z. Kobe, ‘True Sacrifice on Hegel’s Presentation of Self-Consciousness’, Filozofija I Društvo 26.4 (2015), pp. 830–51, who speaks of a ‘progressive departicularisation’, in which we come to ‘abandon our fixation to any particular in order to gain access to the true universal of thinking’ (p. 849).

77 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §788/422. Or as Hegel says in §789/423, that ‘the object’ is to be conceived as ‘in part a shape of consciousness per se and in part a number of such shapes that we gather together, in which the totality of the moments of the object and of the conduct of consciousness can be pointed out only as having been dissolved in the totality’s moments’.

78 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, p. 30.

79 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, p. 31.

80 Williams, ‘Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity’, p. 31.

81 R. Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, in Wrestling with Angels, pp. 35–50.

82 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, p. 35.

83 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, p. 36.

84 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel,’ p. 38.

85 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, p. 41.

86 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §178/109. For more on this, R. Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s Claim that Self-Consciousness is “Desire Itself” (“Begierde überhaupt”)’, in Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology (Social and Critical Theory, 11; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 53–83.

87 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, pp. 43–44.

88 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, p. 45.

89 Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, p. 48. On sacrifice, kenosis and recognition in Hegel, see P.D. Bubbio, Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition (New York: SUNY Press, 2014), pp. 61-85. On the Lutheran background to Entaüßerung, see C. O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 189–234.

90 R. Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose’, in Wrestling with Angels, pp. 53–76 (53).

91 See Simone Weil, Waiting on God (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).

92 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 54.

93 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 57.

94 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 57.

95 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 61.

96 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 55.

97 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 56.

98 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 57.

99 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 73.

100 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 59.

101 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 69.

102 Williams, ‘Between Politics and Metaphysics’, p. 59.

103 G. Rose, Mourning Becomes Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), pp. 63–76. In distinction from ‘comedy’, Hegel understood ‘tragedy’ (especially in its Attic variety) to be concerned with the dramatization of conflict between agents of ‘fixed character’ who assert their ‘one-sidedness’ in destructive ways. For his discussion of this distinction, see G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts (2 vols.; trans. T.M. Knox; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II, pp. 1192–237. For a discussion of Hegel’s understanding of tragedy, see S. Houlgate, ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’, in S. Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 146–78.

104 R. Williams, ‘“The Sadness of the King”: Gillian Rose, Hegel, and the Pathos of Reason’, Telos 173 (Winter 2015), pp. 21–36 (22). For more on Hegel and comedy, see W. Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult and Comedy (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 251–342.

105 See Hegel’s claim in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, I, p. 607 that ‘the Divine is the absolute subject-matter of art’, but the way in which divinity becomes manifest through its ‘cancelling’ of resolute individuality ‘by [a] humour which could make every determinacy waver and dissolve’.

106 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 22.

107 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 28.

108 E. Vodolazkin, Laurus (trans. Lisa C. Hayden; Great Britain: Oneworld Publications, 2015). For more, see R. Williams, ‘A Curious Novel: Postmodernism and Holy Madness’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MCB9JuLFzo (accessed 15 November 2019). For more on the figure of the iurodstvo and salotes, and Vodolazkin’s novel, see R. Williams, ‘Holy Folly and the Problem of Representing Holiness: Some Literary Perspectives’, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 1.1 (2018), pp. 3–15.

109 See Hegel’s distinction between ‘the comic’ and ‘the ironic’ in Aesthetics, I, pp. 67–68.

110 Hegel, Aesthetics, I, p. 592.

111 Speaking of Aristophanes, Hegel writes: ‘There is, in what is humorous, a self-security which, though with all seriousness it strives after some particular thing, while the opposite of what it aims at always comes to pass, never has for that reason any doubts nor any reflection about itself, since it remains perfectly certain of itself and of what concerns it. We enjoy in Aristophanes this side of the free Athenic spirit, the pure enjoyment of itself in loss, this untroubled certainty of itself in all miscarriage of the result in real life, and this is the height of humour’ (in G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume One (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/New York: The Humanities Press, 1892), p. 428.

112 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 23.

113 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 33.

114 This point has been emphasized well by Brett Gray in Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams, pp. 136–44.

115 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 25.

116 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 27.

117 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 31.

118 Rose, Mourning Becomes Law, p. 65.

119 Williams, ‘The Sadness of the King’, p. 32.