Locally and globally, our shared sense of the common good has become increasingly fractured. Can we recover a common commitment to care—for one another and the created world as a whole? Archbishop Rowan Williams’s new book Solidarity: The Work of Recognition explores this question extensively, and draws upon a wide array of contemporary thinkers to do so.
Consider one issue: Our communities see a rising number of refugees fleeing climate change, war, persecution and economic despair. How can we recognize, respect and assist the strangers in our midst? Williams, the retired archbishop of Canterbury, offers one imperative that reverberates through his book: If we are to recover a sustainable spirit of solidarity, we must work, both interpersonally and politically, to go beyond too-easy, sometimes performative declarations like “I feel for you and stand with you.”
The work of solidarity may be summarized in a series of imperatives. We must listen to others as they articulate their experiences of threat and oppression; we must acknowledge that quick appeals to “universals” may hide structures of oppressive power; and we must refuse the assertion of atomistic selfhood by accepting our inherent interrelatedness. This labor of attention may alert us to the solidarity we already share, spur us to rectify injustice and alleviate suffering. It may even foster a sense of inter-creatural “communion”—a word that, as Pope Leo XIV insists in “Magnifica Humanitas,” does not mean “uniformity” or “homogenization.”
“Communion” is literally Solidarity’s final word, and its religious connotations reverberate throughout. In my reading, Williams poses the most vital question halfway through, in a rich chapter on Catholic social teaching (much indebted to Anna Rowlands’s splendid 2021 book Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times). Williams cites Pope St. John Paul II’s definition of “the ‘virtue’ of solidarity as the ‘correlative response’ to the recognition of basic interdependence.”
He then asks the crucial question: “In what sense does the idea of solidarity require a sense of the ‘sacred’?” In the title of a recent, complementary essay honoring the memory of the British philosopher Gillian Rose, he poses that question even more starkly: “Solidarity: Necessary Fiction or Metaphysical Given?” Secular partners in dialogue may seek solidarity yet suspect any religious language that grounds it as divinely “given.” But can simple, consensual pragmatism truly sustain the ties that bind?
In the Catholic social tradition, “solidarity” is both descriptive and aspirational or, as Pope Leo puts it in his encyclical, “both a principle and a virtue.” Solidarity describes our reality as always already present: We are created in God’s image, called to love our neighbor and serve as stewards of creation. As Pope Leo puts it, “the future of each individual is connected to the future of all.” But solidarity is also a virtue we must choose to practice if we are to cooperate in the recovery of our divine likeness.
Williams is one of our most learned and articulate expositors of such theological givens. But he is drawn to the model of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work stands “in the difficult space of being willing to hold back from what could be prematurely explicit use of Christian language for the sake of…an appropriate solidarity with the stranger.” Realistic yet hopeful, Williams argues that patient dialogue will, with time, strengthen solidarity.
Solidarity’s first three chapters pose a series of fundamental questions. In the first, he asks, “Who counts as human?” He argues that lazy habits of projection have “led people to construct elaborate arguments designed to undermine the humanity of the other.” Centuries of institutional racism provide ample proof of this, but so too “the depressing levels of ignorance and negativity around people with Down syndrome, evidenced in the uncritical readiness of so many to treat the condition as automatic grounds for abortion.”
Like Leo, Williams also addresses pressing questions about artificial intelligence. Emphasizing embodiment, he doubts that “our ordinary physical vulnerability” will be “somehow in ‘solidarity’ with the condition of machine intelligence”—despite the seemingly empathic voice of Siri.
The second chapter explores “the paradoxes of empathy.” How, Williams asks, can we understand strangers? He interrogates many assumptions. For example, we all know that a lack of empathy can result in objectifying others. But given the irreducible opacity of other persons, “absolute transparency between speakers” is impossible. Nevertheless, as the parable of the good Samaritan shows, the “strangeness” of the other is not insurmountable.
Williams gleans from the phenomenological insights of Edith Stein, who sees “the imaginative standing ‘at’ the point of another’s perspective on the world [as] far more fundamental than any kind of supposed identification with the emotion of another.” Yes, of course, we feel for the other. But the real work begins through an “imaginative sharing” of the embodied stranger’s “field of perception.” Indeed, such imaginative work, imperfect as it may be, proves integral to our own self-knowledge.
In the third chapter, Williams turns to rights: What kind of claims does the stranger make upon me? Contemporary rights talk can often take the form of a zero-sum game. We may overcome such stalemates by “look[ing] to something very like a metaphysical commitment…a model of ‘right’ as something that precedes our own individual subjectivity.” Williams argues that the roots of our modern conception of human dignity can be found in St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas posited justice as “the supreme cardinal virtue because it is directed towards something other than the individual self.” Traditionalists and progressives may thus “overcome overdramatic binaries”; they may “discover continuity and mutuality in relation to what is strange.” Common ground remains possible.
In the chapters that follow, Williams elucidates the work of an array of thinkers who can help us refine what we mean when we speak of solidarity. The voluminous work of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., forged “a middle way between collectivism and free market absolutism.” Pesch emphasized the integral relation between solidarity and subsidiarity: a respect for local, from-the-ground-up organizations (beginning with the family, then extending to labor unions and beyond) and a rejection of “uniform centralization of authority.” Through widening levels of association, we begin to see our “fundamental connectedness [as] necessarily an ‘analogical’ affair.”’ By 1961, Pope John XXIII’s “Mater et Magistra” would affirm the reality and “common good of a global community.”
Substantial chapters are devoted to four thinkers, the stories of whom are often closely bound up with the history of their particular nations. Jan Patocka, a leader of Czechoslovakia’s “Charter 77” movement, sacrificed his life resisting Soviet domination. His thought envisions a “solidarity of the shaken,” fostered by “acknowledged dependence, reciprocal gift, and shared meaning-making.” Although Williams affirms the “deep fellow-feeling between those who have embraced the imperative of self-sacrifice,” he also perceives in Patocka the dangers of Romantic tragic heroism.
In the following chapter, he summarizes (and seems to prefer) the thought of Poland’s Jozef Tischner, who imagined a “solidarity without enemies,” but not “a universalism without conflict.” Tischner’s emphasis upon “conscience, faithfulness and work” laid the intellectual groundwork of Poland’s transformative Solidarity movement.
Williams turns next to the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Committed to nonviolence but recognizing the evil around him, Bonhoeffer joined the failed assassination plot against Hitler, for which he was executed. In Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, solidarity embraces guilt as a given reality and spur to action. Acutely, Williams hears the echo of Dostoevsky: In The Brothers Karamazov, the Elder Zosima insists that each of us is “guilty for all.” Given my “already existing complicity in the continuing turmoil and dysfunction of the world,” I must “leave behind the aspiration for a moral purity that has no connection with the reality of the needy, guilty, compromised, helpless other.”
At the root of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, Williams argues, is “the connection between persons in the Body of Christ.” Each of us is called with the specific gifts given to us to act—and are, paradoxically, liberated by our readiness to bear the other’s burden. But “it is finally God through Christ and the Spirit who is acting.” Grace undergirds the common vocation of solidarity.
Williams’ next chapter, on the English novelist and theologian Charles Williams, develops this discussion of divine love with “the language of co-inherence.” For him, in the life of the divine Trinity, each divine person “exists only in and through the lives of the others.” But Charles Williams’s idiosyncratic Christianity, Rowan Williams notes, also “brings into focus both positive and negative aspects of the religious approach to solidarity.” Divine co-inherence provides a warrant for the obligations that follow from our creaturely interconnectedness, but his vision of substitutionary suffering may inspire one to rush in and play the role of “savior,” thus ignoring the wishes and responsibility of other persons. Here too we may recall Elder Zosima’s wisdom in The Brothers Karamazov: his clear distinction between the slow work of “active love” and the all-too-hasty deeds of “love in dreams.”
In his conclusion, Williams explicitly addresses the global environmental crisis, which “ultimately equalizes our human fates” and makes collaborative solidarity so urgent. This final chapter brilliantly integrates the threads of a complex, critical dialogue. In itself, Solidarity exemplifies the complex work of identifying an interlocutor’s “point of orientation” and articulating common ground.
Rowan Williams is a bridge-builder. His book complicates the either/or binaries and competing absolutisms upon which we all too quickly fall. Solidarity beautifully complements “Magnifica Humanitas” and will, I hope, draw all of us a bit closer toward communion.
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