The Pattern of Glory - Pt I

WHEN CHARLES Williams said that “if one is anxious to write about God, one ought to be anxious to write well,” he might have been stating his own aspirations. Writing was both his trade and his vocation, and he was always writing about God. Not that everything he wrote is theology. Most of it, in fact, is not. He wrote fiction, seven novels in all; he wrote non-fiction, chiefly history and literary criticism; he wrote, above all, poetry—“whether that is or is not fiction,” as he put it. He wrote nearly forty books, all told, three or four of which a librarian would catalog under “theology.” But the conventional classifications are too clumsy to describe what Williams wrote. “All his books,” Dorothy Sayers rightly observed, “illuminate one another, for the same master-themes govern them all, so that it is impossible to confine any one of them to a single book.” Nor can any of the books be assigned to a single category.

T. S. Eliot, who like Sayers knew him personally, thought Williams used such a variety of literary forms because “what he had to say was beyond his resources, and probably beyond the resources of language, to say once for all through any one medium of expression.” That is not to suggest that what he had to say is elaborate or obscure. It is blazingly simple. As a character remarks in one of the novels, once you have said “Good God!” there is not much else to say. But the ways of saying “Good God!” are endless, and if exploring them is “doing theology” then there is very little in Williams’s writing that is not theological.

During his life the writing for which he was best known was his literary criticism. Poetry was his special field as a critic, English poetry in particular but also Dante, as we shall see. His own verse, however, is what he would have wished to be remembered for, and “CHARLES WILLIAMS: POET” is inscribed on his tombstone. C. S. Lewis ranked Williams’s mature poetry among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the twentieth century, although he added, presciently perhaps, that its extreme difficulty might kill it. The novels, on the other hand, are alive and well. They have never been out of print for long, and it is through All Hallows’ Eve or The Greater Trumps, Descent into Hell or War in Heaven, to name my own favorites, that readers today are most likely to have encountered Williams saying “Good God!”

As a novelist Williams is often named in one breath with Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and not without reason. He belonged for a time to the Inklings, the now famous circle of writers of which Tolkien and Lewis were the most famous members. He shared their conviction that a story is sometimes the best way of saying what there is to say, he wrote “fantastic” fiction, as they did, and his tales, like theirs, reflect a Christian outlook. But the comparison only goes so far. Lewis never seems to leave the lecturer’s podium; writing fiction is a species of teaching. Tolkien is just the opposite in that narrative, for him, needs no other purpose. Telling a story is an end in itself, and the reason he gives for writing The Lord of the Rings is that he wanted to try his hand at telling a really long one. Williams does not fit either mold. Certainly his stories, like Lewis’s, are about something, other than themselves; but they are not about Christianity in the sense that they translate Christian tenets into imaginative prose. A better way to put it would be that Williams’s fiction is about the same things Christianity is about—where we come from, where we are going, and how we get there. In other words, it is about God. But the purpose of the novels is not so much to instruct as to indicate—to call attention to what things are like in fact, by redescribing them in fiction.

In effect, then, though not in form, Williams’s novels are poetry, which helps to explain why they are at once more ordinary and more extraordinary—or better, they are more natural and at the same time more supernatural—than The Lord of the Rings or Lewis’s outer-space trilogy. The plot of a Williams novel turns on events that are as uncanny as anything in Lewis or Tolkien. But where do they happen? Not in the exotic world of a distant age or a distant planet, but in the matter-of-fact, middle-class world of a publishing house, a London suburb, or a sleepy village. And they do not happen to characters who are more or other than human, but to rather unremarkable people—a secretary, a minor civil servant, a butterfly-collector. When the uncanniness begins, it is all the more sublime—or all the more terrible—because of the contrast with the ordinariness that surrounds it. A pterodactyl is much the sort of thing you might expect to see in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is not what a graduate student writing a dry research thesis on a medieval philosopher expects to see outside her window, as a character does in The Place of the Lion.

Someone has called Williams’s novels “supernatural thrillers,” which fits them well enough, but they are no less serious on that account. As Lewis himself pointed out, “the frank supernaturalism and the frankly blood-curdling episodes” are not there for their shock-value. Although Williams was not an allegorist like Bunyan or a preacher like Milton, his stories do put fiction to use for truthful purposes. Quite often the best commentary on some theological point he makes will be found not elsewhere in his theology but in the novels. Because they make their appeal to imagination, to “the feeling intellect” rather than emotion alone, they can convince the reader as perhaps nothing else could that what they depict is objectively real—that the routine stream of sights and sounds which meets us every day runs deeper than we suppose, and that an intangible dimension exists in, with, and under every moment of our experience. Call this further reality spiritual, if you like, or metaphysical or transcendental. By whatever name it can, if Williams is to be believed, make its presence known and felt at any moment—and it does.

People knew him personally and observed the same coexistence of the mundane and the otherworldly in Williams himself. “I have never met any human being,” one of them wrote, “in whom the divisions between body and spirit, natural and supernatural, temporal and eternal were so non-existent, nor any writer who so consistently took their non-existence for granted.” Eliot puts a similar impression on record in his introduction to All Hallows’ Eve, arguably the best of Williams’s novels. “To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural. And this peculiarity gave him that profound insight into Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill and the permanent message of his novels.”

The writings collected here display the same insight and perhaps also, in their own less dramatic way, the same thrill. None of them is fiction, although some discuss fiction. All of them are about facts, and all of them are about God, which for Williams amounts to the same thing. Every fact is a theological fact, simply because it is a fact. “The glory of God,” Williams declares, “is in facts. The almost incredible nature of things is that there is no fact which is not in His glory.” In those two sentences he lays the foundation on which everything in this volume is built. The rest of my introduction will be an attempt to explain what they mean.

“Glory” is the place to begin. It is one of Williams’s favorite words, and he uses it in a sense of his own. The “mazy bright blur” that people commonly associate with glory is not exactly what he has in mind. Amazement, yes; brightness, yes; but not blurry indistinctness. “The maze should be…exact, and the brightness should be that of a geometrical pattern.” Glory is like what you see through a kaleidoscope rather than what you see through a fog. It is precise and regular, like a solemn liturgy or an intricate dance, which are two of the images Williams uses in his novels for the all-inclusive orderliness that bespeaks the divine. Another, which appears in his non-fictional writing as well, is the image of a city. Places and buildings, each distinct yet connected with the others by a network of paths, and a multitude of persons with different roles to play and jobs to do, all coordinated with the others in a vastly complex web of interdependence—that, for Williams, is an earthly counterpart of heaven.

As though to emphasize that glory is not just splendor but orderly splendor, Williams often speaks of “the pattern of the glory.” It is one of his most characteristic phrases, and I have made it the title of this introduction. The web of relationships that he means by pattern is intelligible, but the intelligence needed to grasp it is not the kind computers imitate. Perceiving in facts the glory of God is as much a matter of aesthetic intuition as of logical reasoning. Perhaps the best analogy would be understanding poetry: facts are the words, God is the poet, and the world, past and present, is the poem. If this universal poem is to be rightly construed, all the words—every fact—must be accounted for. Each has a place in the whole and none may be overlooked. And if it is to be construed in terms of its author’s intention, as a poem should be, the terms must be God’s rather than ours, “the terms He deigns to apply, not the terms we force on Him. And this, it seems, is the use of all science—to discover His own terms.” Far from thinking of the “secular” sciences as opposed to theology, Williams held their pursuit of accurate, factual knowledge in high esteem as an exploration of divine glory.

That “the glory of God is in facts” is the theme on which the essays in this volume are variations. Some of the facts Williams writes about are historical facts; some, the second World War for example, were occurring even as he wrote. Some are permanent, and some are always occurring. Spiritual facts are included, of course. Nobody had a stronger sense than he of the reality of forgiveness, charity, and redemption, sin, and damnation, “the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell.” At the same time, nobody was more vividly aware, either, of the divine glory of material facts, not least the facts of sensuality and sex. The body, he insists, “was holily created, is holily redeemed, and is to be holily raised from the dead. It is, in fact, for all our difficulties with it, less fallen, merely in itself, than the soul.”

That is why he found D. H. Lawrence, that “convinced and rhetorical heretic” as he called him, worth paying attention to. Lawrence exaggerated, as heretics always do; it is what makes them heretical. But he erred on the right side. The body in general, and sexuality in particular, have generally been given low grades by religious and philosophical teachers. Plato is a prime example, but even Christians, who ought to know better, have too often regarded the flesh as at best a nuisance and a distraction. For the most part they have said the right things, officially at least, but in the wrong tone, so that the youngster Williams quotes can be excused for asking, “Isn’t marriage rather a wicked sacrament?” Williams did not think so. Merely in itself, the body is less fallen than the soul, and merely in itself he calls it, following Woodsworth, an “index.” The words in a printed index are meaningful in themselves while at the same time they also point beyond themselves to the meaning of the whole book. Likewise, the material existence of “the holy and glorious flesh” has a significance of its own, which also indicates the corresponding significance of the whole material world. That is what Lawrence was able to see, even though he had not much understanding of the reasons why it is there to be seen.

The first essay in this volume is about those reasons. “Natural Goodness” is Williams in a nutshell, or as close to it as anything he wrote. It draws an outline to which the rest of this collection adds depth and detail, and I put it at the beginning on that account. It has the defects of its virtues, however. Because it is so compact, readers who are unfamiliar with the way Williams thinks and writes may find it a little daunting. If so, I recommend beginning with one of the more specific items instead—with “Sensuality and Substance,” for example, where the discussion of Lawrence appears; or with the book review “Augustine and Athanasius,” which like many of the reviews Williams wrote tells as much about his own ideas as about the books reviewed; or with “The Cross,” probably the most personal essay in this collection. But almost any of the others will serve. What Sayers said of Williams’s books is equally true of his shorter writings [contained in this book]: the same master-themes govern them all.

One of those themes is the main point in “Natural Goodness”: natural, material things are expressive in their own right. In making this point, however, Williams also gives its theological explanation. Matter is a creature, a created reality. But to be created involves having, and so referring to, a creator; and Williams argues that the physical creature called matter refers no less surely than does the immaterial creature called spirit. The sheer fact of existing, physically or spiritually, is meaningful. There is more than an echo here of the protest raised by nineteenth-century romanticism against the idea that matter is good for nothing except to be manipulated for economic ends by technological means. But it would be equally true to say that Williams was ahead of his time. He would have found much to approve of in the creation spirituality that is flourishing at the end of the twentieth century.

*Introductory essay to be continued

**Originally published in Charles Williams: Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, edited by Charles Hefling (Cambridge & Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), pp. 1-30.