Screwtape on the death of Death

The first thing he did was to lower himself and be born as one of "them." We almost got him killed when he was a baby. But he eluded us then. He grew up to be a man. He taught those poor humans about himself, all the while not really spreading around who he was. Then one day he gave himself up to be killed by a bunch of jealous religious leaders. We figured it was a big bluff. Just an excuse to perform a public miracle and escape at the last minute. But he actually went through with it. He let them nail him to a cross and he died. We all thought, "Aha, you're beaten now! You've just made your big mistake!"

All of us were feeling, for a few hours, a big relief from that constant fear we had always felt toward the Enemy. Maybe all those prophecies about our last judgement would never happen after all. Death had claimed the Creator of life. Finally our Lord Satan would be undisputed ruler of all.

Then Sunday morning came. The Enemy reappeared. Suddenly, he was alive. Death could not hold him. But it was even worse than that. He had become an innocent sacrifice for the sins of all those humans. He had paid their penalty. He had died in their place. Now death could not hold them either. They could be forgiven and reunited with the Enemy. They can now live forever. For all practical purposes, death has died. There has never been a more disastrous day in the history of the universe.

That, my dear Wormwood, is the whole sad truth.

The Screwtape Letters 

After Prayers, Lie Cold

Arise my body, my small body, we have striven
Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven.
Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go,
White as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow,
Undress with small, cold fingers and put out the light,
And be alone, hush'd mortal, in the sacred night,
A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup
Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up,
Faded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness
By dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness.
Be not too quickly warm again. Lie cold; consent
To weariness' and pardon's watery element.
Drink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death;
Soon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.

C.S. Lewis, Poems (1964) 

Walking with God

"Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of a cliff where we are, in space, very near it because it is just below us. We could drop a stone onto it. But as we are no cragsmen we can't get down. We must go a long way round; five miles, maybe. At many points during that detour we shall, statically, be farther from the village than we were when we sat above the cliff. But only statically. In terms of progress we shall be far 'nearer' our baths and teas.

Since God is blessed, omnipotent, sovereign and creative, there is obviously a sense in which happiness, strength, freedom and fertility (whether of mind or body), wherever they appear in human life, constitute likenesses, and in that way proximities, to God. But no one supposes that the possession of these gifts has any necessary connection with our sanctification. No kind of riches is a passport to the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the cliff's top we are near the village, but however long we sit there we shall never be any nearer to our bath and our tea. So here; the likeness, and in that sense nearness, to Himself which God has conferred upon certain creatures and certain states of those creatures is something finished, built in. What is near Him by likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is, by definition, increasing nearness. And whereas the likeness is given to us-and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused - the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do."

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960) 

The Gest of Beren and Lúthien

Such lissom limbs no more shall run
on the green earth beneath the sun;
so fair a maid no more shall be
from dawn to dusk, from sun to sea.
Her robe was blue as summer skies,
but grey as evening were her eyes;
'twas sewn with golden lilies fair,
but dark as shadow was her hair
Her feet were light as bird on wing,
her laughter lighter than the spring;
the slender willow, the bowing reed,
the fragrance of a flowering mead,
the light upon the leaves of trees,
the voice of water, more than these
her beauty was and blissfulness,
her glory and loveliness;
and her the king more dear did prize
than hand or heart or light of eyes.
(Lines 23-41 - J.R.R. Tolkien) 

Lewis and Salvation by Grace...

What did Lewis have to say on salvation by grace? In the 'tome' English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, he opined:

"On the Protestant view one could not, and by God's mercy, expiate one's sins. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything to deserve such astonishing happiness. All the initiative has been on God's side, all has been free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned, "Works" have no "merit," though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love; he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him; faith bestowed by sheer gift."
 

Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, Oxford

In the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry, Oxford, lies buried a professor of Medieval and Renaissance English. As befits a scholar of literature, the epitaph on his tombstone (chosen by his brother, who was later buried beside him) is taken from Shakespeare; "Men must endure their going hence." Spoken by Edgar in the final act of King Lear, these words strike a tone of stoic resignation in the face of death, and some might be surprised to find them engraved on the tombstone of this professor, C.S. Lewis, who is best known as a defender of full-blooded Christian orthodoxy. What, it may be asked, of his Christian hope?

However, the Lewis' epitaph had more significance than is at first evident. In the room where Lewis' mother died there was a Shakespearean calendar hanging on the wall. His father kept the leaf from that day, and "Men must endure their going hence" was the quotation. Warnie thus paid tribute both to Jack and to Albert and Florence (Flora) his parents in this 'less-than-obvious' quote.
 

From Evil's Ultimate Impotence... [Click for full article]

Because Williams was so comfortable with the unseen world, because he truly served the good, he knew evil for what it is. Through Williams' eyes, or the words of his stories, we are enabled to see evil in contradistinction to good. Next to transcendent good, evil is a petty, boring sham, bent on destruction because it is unable to achieve creation.

Williams and Lewis shared a similar view of evil. In fact, Ransom's perception of the possessed Weston in Book Two of Lewis's science-fiction trilogy, Perelandra, is as good an introduction to Williams' own perception as any:

"He had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with a red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a somber tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child."

Ransom found that though evil was certainly as terrifying, as grotesque, as he had always imagined, it was also dull and senseless.

The Triumph of Good in Charles Williams' Writings
By Elodie Ballantine
 

Gollum's Song in the Dead Marshes

The cold hard lands
they bites our hands,
they gnaws our feet.
The rocks and stones
are like old bones
all bare of meat.
But stream and pool
is wet and cool:
so nice for feet!
And now we wish -

Alive without breath;
as cold as death;
never thirsting, ever drinking
clad in mail, never clinking.
Drowns on dry land,
thinks an island
is a mountain;
thinks a fountain
is a puff of air.
So sleek, so fair!
What a joy to meet!
We only wish
to catch a fish,
so juicy-sweet!

J.R.R. Tolkien
 

Oxford Poetry 1947

Unique among Blackwell's editions in having a biographical index, revealing that of the 23 contributors 12 had served as officers in the war, and 2 as sergeants. Showing its mixed blood, so to speak, in being the old Blackwell's-style volume allied with the two OP pamphlets of 1946, this volume bears a heraldic cover device divided as the Oxford University crest on the left and a hand and star of David on the right. Whatever this signified, it did not appear again.

Lord David Cecil, who seldom missed an opportunity to pose as an aesthete, praised the earlier look of OP in terms reminiscent of the celebrated blue lily vase which was the only adornment of Oscar Wilde's undergraduate rooms at Magdalen: "Within its elegant blue and white covers the successive literary fashions lie enshrined, ready for the future historian to examine." (It was for examining and failing the graduate degree of Kingsley Amis, editor two years later, that he was much maligned in the latter's Memoirs.)

Introduction by Lord David Cecil

20 Northmoor Rd, Oxford

Suburban House Where JRR Tolkien Wrote the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings is listed by Heritage Minister Andrew Mcintosh

DEPARTMENT FOR CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT News Release -- issued by the Government News Network on 23 November 2004

A comfortable 1920s eight bedroom house in the suburbs of Oxford is to become a Grade II listed building, Heritage Minister Andrew McIntosh announced today.

Despite having no special architectural qualities, the house is to get the extra protection from alteration or demolition that listed building status confers, because of its historical importance.

For it was there – between 1930 and 1947 – that Prof. JRR Tolkien wrote 'The Hobbit' and virtually all of 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, recently voted the 'most popular book in Britain' in a BBC survey.

Andrew McIntosh said:

"Buildings are usually listed because of their fine architecture or unique design. But we can also give protection to buildings that have historical association with nationally important people or events. Professor Tolkien’s house in Oxford is a fine example of this.

The house is largely unaltered since Tolkien’s time, with original doors, doorhandles and ornate window catches. As such it is an important part of our national heritage, and worthy of the additional layer of protection that listing brings."

Notes to Editors

1. The house – at 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford – was built in 1924 by Fred Openshaw, a local architect, for Basil Blackwell, the owner of Oxford’s famours bookshop. JRR Tolkien lived in the house from 1930 to 1947 and is known to have written The Hobbit and most of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the drawing room. The interior plan, as well as numerous features, survives unaltered except for the removal of a wall between the former study and drawing room (by Prof. Tolkien) in order to increase the size of his study, presumably to accommodate the increasing number of reference books required to write his work. The main purpose of listing a building is to ensure that care will be taken over decisions affecting its future, that any alterations respect the particular character and interest of the building, and that the case for its preservation is taken fully into account in considering the merits of any redevelopment proposals. The listing covers the whole of the building. Any significant changes to exterior, interior or within the curtilage of the building would require listed building consent. The listing is not restricted to features mentioned in the list description.

2. The criteria for listing are set out in Section 6 of Planning Policy Guidance Note 15: Planning and the Historic Environment (PPG15). This can be found on this web page: http://www.odpm.gov.uk/stellent/groups/odpm–planning/documents/page/odpm–plan–606900.hcsp

Department for Culture, Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London SW1Y 5DH

Perelandra

Click on the link to listen to the BBC's 'Perelandra' in 18 episodes

"Perelandra" continues the sometimes thrilling, sometimes mystical, but always sublimely evocative adventures of Dr.Ransom first explored in “Out of the Silent Planet”. In this second volume of C.S.Lewis’ acclaimed Cosmic Trilogy, Ransom is called to the beautiful paradise planet of Perelandra, or Venus, which is in grave peril from his old adversary Dr.Weston. Ransom encounters floating islands and bubble trees as well as an all-powerful female ruler, an Eve figure who undergoes temptation at the hands of a Satan figure in the form of Weston. Ransom must engage with Weston in a desperate struggle to save the purity of Perelandra.

“Perelandra” was first published in 1943, and again demonstrates the matchless imagination of the man who was later to create the Narnia books in delivering an exhilarating adventure which also attempts to answer some of life’s great mysteries. Lewis’ evocation of alien landscapes is rich and brilliantly imagined, demonstrating his flair as a craftsman of classic science fiction. The Cosmic Trilogy was inspired by Lewis’, then in his late thirties, involvement with an informal writing group known as the Inklings, which included his lifelong friend and fellow Oxford academic J.R.R.Tolkien. Not only are these books where Lewis first explored many styles to which he would return in his later, better-known fiction – from religious allegory, to the similarities between certain Venutian aliens and Narnian characters – but it is arguable that a cross-pollenation of ideas took place between Lewis and Tolkien: for example, the eldils could be said to be cousins to the elves of “The Lord of the Rings”.

“Out of the Silent Planet” received high praise on its publication in 1938. Hugh Walpole said in his review: "Here is a very good book; it is of thrilling interest as a story, but it is more than that; it is a kind of poem, and it has the great virtue of improving as it goes on. It is a unique thing, full of stars, cold and heat, flowers of the planets and a sharp sardonic humour." Of “Perelandra” Edwin Muir said: “Brilliantly managed … the description of Venus, in its endless age of innocence, is delightful”. With his Cosmic Trilogy, Lewis showed he was a pioneer in science- as well as children's fiction. For example, its influence can be seen on Ray Bradbury's better-known "The Martian Chronicles" and arguably Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy.

The Secret of the Enigmatic Inkling Revealed (Final)

Life & Legacy

What about Williams’s own life? He was a very odd man, from all that one can gather. Tolkien claimed he never knew what Williams was talking about. Eliot said that when Williams lectured, he hopped all over the place, crossing and uncrossing his legs as he perched on the desk, jingling coins in his pocket, and so forth. Eliot also said that Williams looked like a monkey.

But by far the most perplexing thing about Williams to people who did not know him personally (and maybe to them too) was his excessively odd relationships with women. They seemed to fall all over themselves over him, although there was nothing of glamour about his person. And, if we read Letters to Lalage, we might conclude that Williams had all sorts of "behaviors," as they say now, that Freud would have loved to get at.

But — and I say this after many decades of studying everything I can about Williams — I firmly believe that he went to his grave absolutely faithful to his wife Florence, even though they lived apart for the whole of World War II, when the Oxford University Press, for which Williams worked, moved its offices from London, where the Williamses lived, to Oxford.

There are some ironies about Williams’s legacy. His followers—they might almost be called worshippers, both men and women, and I have met some of them—fell into the most vicious fighting over his manuscripts after his death. But these were the people who were supposed to have been tutored in the Way of Substitution and Exchange, in the Law of The City. What went wrong? I do not know.

I found myself caught in the middle of some of the fighting and had to make my escape (literally) on an airplane back to the United States, holding a huge canvas zipper-bag full of manuscripts that one Raymond Hunt had received from Williams, and that he (Hunt) wanted to give to Wheaton College. For all I know, I might have had my throat cut by some of Williams’s other votaries who detested Hunt, and who felt that he had made off with the material. But all of the personae in that drama are dead now, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Williams’ "What the Cross Means to Me" can be found in Charles Williams: Selected Writings, edited by Anne Ridler.

Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John’s Seminary College, the seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).

The Secret of the Enigmatic Inkling Revealed (IV)

Elusive Williams

So far, we have spoken cautiously about Williams’s work. It is only fair that we go on to speak of his splendid vision. “Vision” is a better word here than “ideas,” since, as Eliot pointed out, what Williams had to say eluded any conceivable literary form—essay, novel, poetry, or whatever we might wish to adduce.

It is not quite possible to organize any very logical sequence when we are speaking of Williams’s ideas (permit the word once, I beg). But anyone familiar with his work will not get very far in speaking of it all before he brings up “Substitution and Exchange.” Any Christian, of course, is on home turf here. In the mystery of the Atonement, the Son of God in some sense “stood in” for the rest of us, bearing our sins in his own body on the tree (cf. Isaiah 53, and Sts. Peter, Paul, and John).

This mystery is itself an epiphany of the blissful exchanges that obtain amongst the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. The Son “gives” himself to the Father, and vice-versa, and the Holy Ghost is, in a mystery, the “agent” of those exchanges. My life for yours: Somehow that maxim, raised to the nth degree, may be said to touch, remotely, to be sure, on at least one aspect of the Godhead. Calvary is the epiphany in our world of that same principle. The Son gave himself for us.

And here we come into Williams country. Every one of his seven novels has this mystery for its animating energy.

Standing In

In every novel, we start out with ordinary life in the England of the 1930s and 1940s. The characters are going about their business. And then some thing crops up—the Holy Grail, the Tarot pack, a cube of the primordial matter with the Tetragrammaton inscribed on it, the Platonic archetypes, death—and we are off and running.

The characters divide themselves, unbeknownst to themselves, into those who wish to make a grab for the thing in the interest of knowledge, power, or ecstasy, and those who, like Simeon and Anna, or, supremely, the Blessed Virgin in our own story, place themselves obediently and humbly at the disposal of whatever The Mercy (Williams never says “God”) might wish to ask of them in the situation. And in each case, one or more of the characters is asked by The Mercy to “stand in” for someone under attack, and, by some self-offering, to fend off the evil afoot and thereby protect (“save”) that victim.

Williams’s stories reach bizarre lengths. We find archetypal lions and butterflies and snakes appearing in English gardens and lanes. Or an ancient pack of Tarot cards conjuring up a blizzard. Or the Holy Grail in the sacristy of a country parish church, with the potentiality of being used either by wicked men or by good men. In Williams’s next-best novel, All Hallows’ Eve, the thing is death. Two women are dawdling on Westminster Bridge, and after about three pages, we say to ourselves, “But these women are dead!” They are.

Their experience through the course of the story is Purgatorial, the one opting for her own ego (Hell), and the other for substitution and exchange. She has been something of a vixen in her life with her husband, but has the chance to learn the Divine Charity, first by acknowledging her need for her husband—she needs a Kleenex—and finally by throwing herself into the breach between a girl whom she had persecuted at school years before and a magician who is trying to gain power over that girl’s life and death. Very bizarre. Which is what stumps most readers.

Williams’s best novel is entitled Descent into Hell. Here we watch a perfectly unnoticeable and respectable historian damn himself to Hell by an unremitting sequence of very small petulant choices. Nothing big. But again and again and again he will not have the Way of Exchange—My Life for Yours. At one point, it comes down to his merely having to say yes or no to some folks who are putting on a play, and who need his historical acumen to tell them whether they’ve got the costumes right. But he refuses out of sheer testiness.

Well, says Williams, if I will have it that way, then I will have it that way—forever. Naturally we all say in chorus, “George Macdonald! The Great Divorce!” And we are right, of course: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” Williams likes to call Hell Gomorrah: the place beyond the city where I seek the mirror image of myself (Sodom), where I may be altogether alone with no one to get in my hair.

God’s City or Sodom

The images that Williams invokes in this connection are several. One of his favorites is “The City” (Augustine’s City of God), where the rule is My Life for Yours. In any earthly city we must acknowledge that rule anyway: Red lights say, “You must give way so that those people can go.” I may fume, but I must obey. In the City of God, it is a form of bliss.

Filthy lucre itself is an image, whether we will or no: The coin says, “Here is the fruit of my labor in exchange for the fruit of your labor, which I need” (for groceries, or whatever). It is all adulterated with cupidity down here: but in the City of God these exchanges are modes of joy. I can give you a hand with your luggage (Heaven) or refuse to do so (Hell). It is on every corner.

Another favorite image for Williams is Romantic Love. He wrote a whole book on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice. The point is, Dante saw the young girl Beatrice Portinari in Florence when he was a boy, fell in love with her (he never really knew her), and, for the rest of his life, the image of Beatrice furnished him with an image—a dim, earthly case-in-point—of the Divine Beauty.

The rest of us are mercifully blinded to this radiance, since we would all go mad if we saw the effulgence crowning every mortal God ever made. Furthermore, for the lover, giving himself for his beloved, far from being drudgery, is a mode of joy. He cannot do enough for her. Romantic love, apparently, transubstantiates work and service, and makes them into joy.

Of course, all forms of love do this—maternal, paternal, fraternal, filial, patriotic. For Williams, it is all so obvious that he never winces over plou ghing it all into every line of his prose and poetry. The eyes of the lover, says Williams, far from having had star-dust blown into them, are the only eyes that see The Other truly, since the lover sees all the glory of Heaven radiating from his beloved.

(tbc)

The Secret of the Enigmatic Inkling Revealed (III)

Williams’s Vision

But we must turn to his work. What is the vision that flares over everything he wrote? It cannot be boiled down. In his preface to All Hallows’ Eve, T. S. Eliot remarked that what Williams had to say was beyond his grasp, and perhaps beyond the grasp of any known genre of literature. Williams had to dart at it like a hummingbird. But what is this It?

For a start, we may say that Williams thought of himself as a wholly orthodox Anglican. He exulted in the dogmas and creeds of the ancient Church (although the fact that he never made his peace with either Rome or Constantinople, with both of which he was enamored, is quite typical of Williams’s elusiveness). Readers may notice that I said he “thought of himself” as wholly orthodox. I think we may say that he was: but the following paragraph may throw light on this seeming quibble.

He was asked in 1943 to contribute to a symposium on "What the Cross Means to Me." Here are his opening lines:
"Any personal statement on such a subject as the present is bound to be inaccurate. It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time, especially when that belief refers not to the objective fact but to subjective interpretation. A rhetorical adjective will create a false stress; a misplaced adverb confuse an emotion. All that can be hoped is that a not too incorrect approximation may eventually appear. And anything that does appear is, of course, to be read subject to the judgement of the Christian Church, by whom all individual statements must be corrected.”

Now all of that is inexpugnable. But besides the entirely legitimate matter of Williams’s pointing out that he has been asked to address the question of what the Cross means to him, the attentive reader may descry in Williams’s syntax and phraseology a very agile sort of what I can only call demurral. He stays on the orthodox shore: but he seems to dance on it. For more light on this delicate business, we may go on to what he undertakes to say in the essay itself.

He is speaking of God’s having created the world, and of the credibility of that notion. He then mentions human freedom, with its corollary that we may choose not to obey God. "But it is not credible that a finite choice ought to result in an infinite distress. . . ." Here we have the problem of eternal punishment for human (finite) sin. Flat orthodoxy would, of course, have to hold that both Sacred Scripture and the Church have always taught the doctrine of Hell. And, to be fair to Williams, he never actually calls this into question.

The Theologian

In fact, he goes on to treat of the Cross, not only in an orthodox way, but with an agility that most readers would find quite astonishing. Speaking of Caiaphas and Pilate, he says that they were "each of them doing his best in the duty presented to them. The high priest was condemning a blasphemer. The Roman governor was attempting to maintain the peace. . . . They chose the least imperfect good that they could see. And their choice crucified the Good."

Williams’s ruminations on the Cross take the form of his stressing that God subjected himself to his own law. To crucify him — "This was the best law, the clearest justice, man could find, and He did well to accept it. If they had known it was He, they could have done no less and no better. They crucified Him; let it be said, they did well. But then let it be said also, that the Sublimity itself had done well: adorable He might be by awful definition of His Nature, but at least He had shown Himself honourable in His choice."

And one more sentence: "Our justice condemned the innocent, but the innocent it condemned was the one who was fundamentally responsible for the existence of all injustice—its existence in the mere, but necessary, sense of time, which His will created and prolonged."

We cannot reach a fair conclusion on Charles Williams’s theological orthodoxy on the basis of a few fragments of a single essay. He wrote many essays, and two whole books (He Came Down From Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins) on "theology." I put the word in quotes since no theologian I know of, except Hans Urs von Balthasar, has ever registered much interest in Williams as a theologian. And I mention von Balthasar only because he sought me out, not because of any eminence of mine, but because he heard that I had studied Williams, and he wanted to talk about him. (He—von B., that is—in the course of the evening gave me a snapshot of himself with Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. He said it was his favorite photo of himself, if that throws any light on anything.)

Readers may just barely taste, in the quotations above, the "flavor," if we will, of all of Williams’s writings. By his agile syntax, and his carefully chosen vocabulary, and his (mostly subtly implied) demurrals, he hops along just in front of the Inquisition. In Williams’s case, it would be the Genevan, not the Dominican, inquisition that would find itself apoplectic. Williams always sails very near the Catholic wind. But—typically—he never would submit to Rome.

(tbc)

The Secret of the Enigmatic Inkling Revealed (II)

Good or Great?

But what about Williams? Was he a good novelist (he wrote seven)? Poet (he wrote two slender volumes that make up an Arthurian cycle of lyrics)? Critic (endless articles)? Dramatist (several plays)? Theologian? Ah. It is this last category that interests us here. But let it be said about the other four categories that Williams’s work is problematical. It may be great. After 45 years of reading his stuff, I am still turning that question over in my mind.

Certainly he leads us all out into titanic vistas, and startles us over and over and over by pointing out features in that vista which to him are obvious, but which in a thousand years we might never have noticed. Like all good poets, he sees the fear in a handful of dust. Or shall we say, the glory in a handful of dust (Eliot meant that anyway). But what checks us, every time we approach the point of concluding that Williams is one of the greats, is his—what is the word? Quirkiness.

The difficulty here is that that word may be applied to any number of writers who are firmly lodged in the canon. John Skelton, for example. What a lark his work is "The Tunning of Elinour Rumming," for example, or "Philip Sparrow." But you can’t talk about Elizabethan literature without reckoning with Skelton. Or Donne. Now there is a truly great poet. But he positively capers through his metaphors, leaving us gasping: gasping, but deeply, deeply moved (see his "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward"). Pepys: what possible excuse can we offer for that stuff? And yet there it is, somehow immortal.

And William Blake: impossible to categorize. Wildly heretical, if we are attempting his "theology," and quirky in the extreme, no matter what we are attempting. But again, we can’t canvass English Lit. without keeping Blake on the list. And has any of us heard of James Joyce? Try Finnegan’s Wake. Or Faulkner? As I recall, the first sentence of one of his novels is forty pages long. So when it comes to the quirkiness sweepstakes, we can scarcely fault Williams.

Nevertheless. The mystery ingredient that stops Williams just short of the Greatness category may be revealed in a comment Lewis made about him. Williams was self-educated. His mind had never had that experience of sustained, given discourse that comes in the lecture room and the seminar. He had had to drop out of school and go to work, since his father never was able quite to bring in enough money to keep the family going.

In the light of this, Williams’s sheer knowledge, and the sweep of his imagination, are breathtaking. He may have been self-educated, but he was self- educated. The great tribute to this is the fact that Lewis and Tolkien managed to secure a lectureship at Oxford for Williams, in some semi-official way.

(tbc)

The Secret of the Enigmatic Inkling Revealed (I)

Charles Williams’s name always seems to flit about the edges of the Tolkien/Lewis world. Everyone who knows anything about these gentlemen beyond Middle-earth and Narnia knows that they met regularly at The Bird and Baby to drink beer, smoke, talk, and read their "work in progress" to each other, and that Charles Williams was perhaps the most animated (or agitated) one of the group. Others were there — Hugo Dyson, Lord David Cecil, Dr. Havard, and so on—but the Three were the core of the thing.

An Insider’s Name
Nevertheless, Williams’s name is strictly a name for insiders, so to speak. Lots of people vaguely know the name, and many have had a go at reading one or more of his novels. But the testimony here is frequently, "I couldn’t make head or tail of it all." The testimony becomes a wail of despair when Williams’s poetry is attempted. Even W. H. Auden found himself stumped by it at first, although he came, like T. S. Eliot, to be a great admirer of Williams’s work.

Even Williams’s essays (I was going to say "straightforward essays," but they aren’t) set one to tugging one’s beard. Here, by way of illustrating the point — and this is typical — are the first two sentences of Williams’s short church history, The Descent of the Dove: "The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two Heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete."

Where are we with this sort of vocabulary and syntax? We are in Williams territory, that’s where we are. For everyone’s consolation, it may be said that it is not only beginning readers of Williams who find themselves stumped. I myself wrote a doctoral thesis on Williams 35 years ago, and to this day I cannot pick up a single one of his books without at some point muttering to myself, "Yo! Williams, old boy—how on earth do you expect anyone to have the faintest clue as to what you are on about here?"

The thing is, Williams unfailingly leads us all on what George Eliot called "a severe mental scamper." His mind was so packed with images, and so curious about every cranny of the universe, and so regaled by ideas—especially dogma — and so overcharged with what one can only call high-voltage restlessness, that it is a wonder his prose is accessible at all. Ironically, we find that we must give him a palm for clarity. His prose — and, it must be said, his poetry — says precisely what he means.

He means nothing more, and nothing less, than what we find on the page. And, as endless critics, with Eliot in the van, have pointed out over and over, every poetic line must be just as we find it. The disjuncture between words — both the vocabulary and the word order — and meaning has been closed by the poet. And we may, with a certain justice, call Williams a poet, even though most of what he wrote appears on the page as "prose." The thing is, everything that he writes has the density, economy, pace, and exactitude, of poetry.

(Thomas Howard)

Oxford Centenary Stone

'Magdalen College Chapel was packed to overflowing for a special Evensong on May 13th 1998, prior to the unveiling of the Lewis stone in Addison's Walk. The Magdalen Choir sang as an introit 'Veni Sancte Spiritus', the opening music of Richard Attenborough's 'Shadowlands'. (The composer, George Fenton, happened, by a fortunate coincidence, to be present to hear it. He was at Magdalen to supervise the Choir's recording of some new music for his most recent soundtrack.) During the service, lessons were read by Lewis's godson, Laurence Harwood, and by Lady Freud, who was an evacuee at The Kilns during the war. The Dean of Divinity, the Revd. Dr. Michael Piret, in his prayers quoted from Lewis's works and gave thanks for Lewis's life. He also prayed for peace in Lewis's native Northern Ireland. (Dr Piret is a former President of the Oxford Lewis Society.) After the service was over, the congregation adjourned to Addison's Walk, which was looking especially beautiful in the evening sunlight, - though only a few weeks previously it had been completely under water in the April floods.

The commemorative tablet is a circle of Westmorland green slate about three feet in diameter, designed by stonemason Alec Peever, and erected a stone's throw from Lewis's rooms in the New Building. Michael Ward, the Centenary Secretary of the Oxford Lewis Society, welcomed everyone and spoke for a few minutes about the place Addison's Walk held in Lewis's life and about the poem, 'What the Bird Said Early in the Year', which has been inscribed on the tablet.

The President of Magdalen, Mr Anthony Smith, then unveiled the stone, and Walter Hooper, Lewis's biographer, recited the poem to the gathering. Among the eighty or so invited guests were former pupils of Lewis such as Francis Warner (now a don at St Peter's College, Oxford) and Martin Moynihan (editor of Lewis's Latin letters). A drinks reception in the President's Lodgings brought the evening's events to their conclusion.'

Michael Ward (Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society)

The inaccuracy of Shadowlands

On Saturday 3 October 1997 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new adaption of Shadowlands for radio with Michael Williams as Jack and Zoe Wanamaker as Joy. Radio 4 broadcast separately a discussion on the adaption, with Humphrey Carpenter(producer), William Nicolson(writer), Douglas Gresham(CSL’s step-son) and A. N. Wilson(biographer).

After the broadcast, Douglas Gresham wrote: "Wilson once again spouted a whole lot of inaccuracies and twisted and exaggerated assumptions. I never heard my mother being ‘foul-mouthed’ at all, and she never smoked in her life. Jack never 'toiled' up and down to Oxford to find Kosher food for David, as we always had an account at "Palms of the Covered Market", a Jewish delicatessen. Jack much enjoyed the walk into Oxford when he did make it, but he never did the shopping in any case."

Unfortunately, the movie and TV play are just as inaccurate in their portrayal of both Jack and Joy.

“He restored substitution and co-inherence everywhere”

At the beginning of life in the natural order is an act of substitution and co-inherence. A man can have no child unless his seed is received and carried by a woman; a woman can have no child unless she receives and carries the seed of a man–literally bearing the burden. It is not only a mutual act; it is a mutual act of substitution. The child itself for nine months literally co-inheres in its mother; there is no human creature that has not sprung from such a period of such an interior growth.

In that natural co-inherence the Christian church has understood another; the about-to-be-born already co-inheres in an ancestral and contemporary guilt. It is shapen in wickedness, and in sin has its mother conceived it (Ps. 51:5). The fundamental fact of itself is already opposed to the principle of the universe; it knows that good as evil, and therefore it derives and desires its own good disorderly. It has been sown in corruption, and in corruption it emerges into separate life.

It has been the habit of the church to baptize it, as soon as it has emerged, by the formula of the Trinity-in-Unity. As it passes from the most material co-inherence it is received into the supernatural; and it is received by a deliberate act. The godparents present themselves as its substitutes; by their intentions and their belief (and they are there to present even for “those of riper years") the newborn is granted “that which by nature he cannot have,” he is “incorporated” into the church, he is made “partaker” of death and resurrection. It is this co-inherence which, at the confirmation, he himself confesses and ratifies.

The faith into which he is received has declared that principle to be the root and the pattern of the supernatural as of the natural world. And the faith is the only body to have done so. It has proclaimed that this is due to the deliberate choice and operation of the divine Word. Had he willed, he could presumably have raised for his Incarnation a body in some other way than he chose. But he preferred to shape himself within the womb, to become hereditary, to owe to humanity the flesh he divinitized by the same principle–"not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God.” By an act of substitution he reconciled the natural world with the world of the kingdom of heaven, sensuality with substance. He restored substitution and co-inherence everywhere; up and down the ladder of that great substitution all our lesser co-inherences cohere. And when the Christian Church desired to define the nature of the Alone, she found no other term; It mutually co-inheres by Its own nature. The triune formula by which the child is baptized is precisely the incomprehensible formula of this.

Charles Williams

A Review

The Novels of Charles Williams
(Thomas Howard, Ignatius Press, 1983)
Originally published by Oxford University Press

What Beatrice was to Dante Thomas Howard is to readers of Charles Williams, whose novels are not exactly hell to read, but some may yet find them somewhat tough going. It's a pity, because as with the Latin Mass, if we only knew what we were missing we would clamor for more. Thankfully Ignatius Press has reprinted this book by Thomas Howard so that we do have a guide through this marvelous world. In this book, originally published by Oxford University Press, Thomas Howard starts with the party line that Williams is a bad writer, and then shows us why he's a very good one (Thomas Howard can be very sneaky). He explains why CW can't be considered a “major” writer, and maybe not even a good candidate for a minor one, but by the end of the book one is convinced that the label “major” is too small to fit Charles Williams.

Howard is similarly dismissive of his own writing in this book, even though it stands as one of his best (his best to date, in my opinion, is On Being Catholic). He suggests the reader not even read the whole book, but just jump around to the relevant parts for the Williams novel he/she is interested in. Here again I must express a minority opinion: The Novels of Charles Williams reads seamlessly and grippingly start to finish.

Anyone venturing into a Williams novel for the first time might find the water, as it were, initially cold and uninviting, regardless how heartily the swimmers urge him or her to dive in. Howard is like a personal trainer, both preparing the reader and helping them stay in shape when, gripped with the strange madness that afflicts readers of Williams novels, they recklessly swim further and further from shore. Howard is obviously among the initiates, and the more dismissive he is of Williams' standing as a writer, the more you want to read him. ’Nuff said. Dive in. The water's fine.

Gord Wilson (Bellingham, WA USA)