Charles Williams and the Compa Ions of the Coin Here Nce

&KDUOHV:LOOLDPVDQGWKH&RPSDQLRQVRIWKH&RLQKHUHQFHBarbara Newman

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring2009, pp. 1-26 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/scs.0.0043

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Newman | Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence

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Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence

Barbara Newman

ESSAYS

Spiritus 9 (2009): 126 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

If you were going up the High in a bus and saw Charles Williams walk-ing along the pavement among a crowd of people, said his friend, C. S. Lewis, you would immediately single him out because he looked godlike; rather, like an angel.1 To T. S. Eliot, one of his publishers, Williams seemed . . . to approximate, more nearly than any man I have ever known. . . , to the saint.2 Meeting him at one of Lady Ottoline Morrells salons, Eliot found Williams to be modest and unassuming yet felt he had conferred a favourmore than a favour, a kind of benediction, by coming.3 In the same vein, W. H. Auden commented shortly after their first encounter that for the first time in my life [I] felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity.4

Women felt the writers magnetism even more keenly. Soon after the young poet Anne Ridler had met the much older Williams, she addressed him in the hyperbolic style he often elicited: You are the most penetrating, loving, gracious and marvellous master, the most admirable poet; your letter is more necessary than bread, your poem more inebriating than Lacrima Christi.5 A few months later she wrote that Alice Mary [Hadfield], another member of the Williams circle, should have said adoration and not love when she remarked how soon everyone felt it for you.6 Even Lois Lang-Sims, a disciple who broke with Williams over what she later saw as a quasi-magical abuse of her love, recalled his indelible charisma more than forty years after his death: his was a dignity that outsoared absurdity; as his was an attractiveness so potent that it turned the ugliness of his voice and features to no account. . . . [I]n him there burned a flame of pure sanctity that redeemed not only his eccentricities but even the seeming ruthlessness of his methods and his experiments.7

Who was this man that evoked such veneration from so manyand what were the methods and experiments that Lang-Sims found so ruth-less? Charles Williams may deservedly be called one of the most original and profound of Britains Christian intellectuals in the early twentieth century. He was not only a versatile writer, but a spiritual master and founder of something like a religious order, albeit an informal onethe Companions of the Co-inherence.8 As a member in his late years of the Inklings, a Christian literary club in Oxford, Williams often figures in scholarship as the third eminence

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(not just alphabetically) after his more famous colleagues, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The three had much in commonall of them took religion seri-ously, lectured on medieval literature, and wrote fantasy novelsyet Williams, the oldest, was in many ways the odd man out. For, while Lewis and Tolkien invented mythical worlds and used magic in their fiction, Williams practiced it for a decade or more. From 1917 until at least 1927, he was an initiate and active member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross (F.R.C.), an esoteric order founded by A. E. Waite.9 A lifelong student of the occult, during and after his involvement with the Rosicrucians, Williams integrated esotericism with Christian spiritual practice in a way that his Oxford friends were not aware of and would hardly have approved. Moreover, while Lewis and Tolkien had little to do with women, Williams cultivated a large circle of female friends and disciples, and it was chiefly these women that he counted as his Companions. In 1944, a year before Williams death, Lewis wrote to a friend, women find him so attractive that if he were a bad man he could do what he liked either as a Don Juan or a charlatan.10 Although he was neither, his relations with women were considerably less innocent than Lewis suspected.

In this essay I want to consider Charles Williams not as the third Inkling but as an esoteric Christian teacher. So I will look at his writings as well as his practice as a spiritual director, asking how his ideas and methods were influ-enced both positively and negatively by his familiarity with ritual magic. My inquiry will focus on his central doctrine of coinherence and the correspond-ing method of prayer known as substituted love, which Williams portrayed in his novels and taught his disciples to practice. Both doctrine and prayer technique are more distantly linked to what he called romantic theology or the Dantesque way of love. This was a spiritual and erotic discipline that Williams pursued throughout his life, often to his cost and that of others. The intimate relationship between theory and practice will require me to touch, with trepidation, on some unnerving questions: How far is saintliness, or per-ceived spiritual authority, a function of charisma, or sheer force of personality? What toll does such sanctity take on the saints intimates? And if the esoteric disciplines that Williams taught and practiced were genuine, where can we draw the line between intercessory prayer and magic?

Charles Williams as an esoteriC teaCher

Born to working-class London parents in 1886, under the sign of Virgo, Wil-liams was an autodidact of wide and catholic tastes. Forced to leave University College, London at eighteen for want of funds, he secured a lowly post as proofreader at Oxford University Press, but rose to become a member of its editorial staff, remaining with the Press until his death in 1945, a few days after the armistice. Publishing, however, was only Williams day job. At the


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height of his career in the 1930s, he seemed to be everywhere, producing a madly prolific if uneven corpus of poetry, fiction, drama, popular history, biography, criticism, and theology. Poetry was his first and greatest passion, but, to his chagrin, his mature verse on the Arthurian legend proved so esoteric that even close friends bewailed its obscurity.11 Williams verse drama, rang-ing from masques for the amusement of colleagues to plays for the Canterbury Festival, enjoyed a modest success in his lifetime. His seven novels never sold especially well, yet these supernatural thrillers have remained steadily in print, mesmerizing an audience fit though few with their strange blend of pulp fiction and metaphysics.12 Perpetually in need of money, Williams churned out a series of biographies, a history of magic,13 and other works on commis-sion (he always boiled an honest pot, as Eliot wrote).14 Closer to his heart were his essays in criticism, growing out of the night classes he taught at such venues as the City Lit and the London Evening Institute, where he attracted an ardent, largely female following. His book on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice, stands in a class apart, for in it Williams offered his most compelling account of romantic theology.15 He also produced several more orthodox theological works, including his masterpiece, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church. By the late 30s, Charles Williams had become widely known as a lay spiritual writer and director.16 In all, he published some twenty-three books in the course of that decade, excluding many more that he edited or introduced for the Press.17

Where did Williams find the energy for this astonishing output? Never physically robust, he fathered only one child and died at fifty-eight. But he burned his candle at both ends. Incandescent, he blazed with an intensity that startled his acquaintances and ignited volume after volume. His was no mere exuberance, but a power of heightened concentration and inner presence, won the only way it can bethrough the ascetic discipline of a lifetime. I use the word ascetic advisedly, for it is not one Williams would have applied to him-self. On the contrary, he fancied himself a poet of marriage and embraced his vocation as a teacher of the Affirmative Waythat is, the sacramental affirma-tion of images, as opposed to their ascetic renunciation. By images he meant romantic love, art, poetry, laughter, daily work, urban life, and all that follows from the sacredness of matter and the body. Much as he admired C. S. Lewis, though, Williams was no bon vivant of the bluff Chestertonian type.18 Many who knew him remarked on his indifference to food and drink, clothing, mu-sic, art, scenery, and other sensual pleasures. Poetry was his sole indulgencealong with ceremony, for which he had a rare gift and affection.

During his London years, Williams and his wife belonged to the parish of St. Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town, an Anglo-Catholic church so high that it staged its own mystery plays on Epiphany and Good Friday.19 Liturgical

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episodes enjoy a striking prominence in his novels, from the Grail mass in War in Heaven, to Christmas morning in The Greater Trumps, to Bettys baptism in All Hallows Eve.20 But high churchmanship alone did not satisfy Williams love of ritual. He had met the hermetic scholar A. E. Waite in 1915, and at the autumn equinox of 1917, he was initiated into Waites newly founded Fellow-ship of the Rosy Cross under the name of Frater Qui Sitit, Veniat (Let him who thirsts, come), a motto chosen from the last chapter of the Bible (Rev. 22:17).21 The F.R.C. was one of several offshoots of the more famous Order of the Golden Dawn, which had splintered after a public scandal and a series of clashes among its leaders. Waite had broken with MacGregor Mathers chiefly over the goals of the order: Mathers wanted to perform actual magic, while Waite and his Rosicrucians were more interested in mysticism and esoteric Christianity. Williams remained active for at least a decade, attaining a high level of initiation and frequently serving the fellowship as an officer. It was from Waites writings, especially The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (1909) and The Secret Doctrine in Israel (1913), that he gained most of his knowl-edge about the transmutation of energies, kabbalah, alchemy, the tarots, and other esoteric systems that figure in his writings.22 According to R. A. Gilbert, Williams was among those faithful Rosicrucians who followed the Orders Temple as it lurched from one damp Kensington flat to another, fetching up at last in a room above the Yarker Library in Maida Vale.23 Though the mate-rial settings may have been unimpressive, the rites (still unpublished) were evidently not. Before officiating at any ritual, Williams, unlike many initiates, took care to memorize the rite so as to enter into it more fully, undistracted by a script.24

Critics have been confused by Williams involvement in the F.R.C. because he himself claimed membership in the original Golden Dawn, although it had dissolved while he was still in his teens. He may have viewed the F.R.C. as its sole legitimate descendant, or, as Gavin Ashenden speculates, he could have been using the more glamorous Golden Dawn to enhance his social and liter-ary prestige.25 It was through occult circles, for example, that he met W. B. Yeats, who was imperator of a London temple from 1914 to 1922.26 But for our purpose, more important than the precise lineage of Williams initiation is the mastery of esoteric techniques he acquired in the fellowship. Although occult scholars emphasize Waites rejection of the magic practiced by Mathers and, later, Aleister Crowley, he preserved the Golden Dawns essential struc-ture of graded initiations based on the ascent of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, or Sephirotic Tree. Alex Owen describes the goal of such initiation as an experi-ence of oneness with God . . . achieved through a series of complex and intense meditation exercises in which the magician visualized [himself] traveling up the Tree of Life in order to meet and become suffused with Divine Light as it


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streamed down from the uppermost First Sephiroth known as the Crown.27 Members crafted elaborate vestments and magical equipment, including a lotus wand symbolizing the magicians will, a magic sword signifying reason, and four elemental weapons (wand, cup, dagger, and pentacle) correlated with the four suits of the tarots. Armed with such weapons, initiates embarked on voy-ages of self-discovery and divine communion in the astral realm, where they might encounter angels, planetary spirits, and other supernatural beings. The fully initiated magus, or adept, was one who had attained a mastery of occult knowledge, perfect self-discipline, absolute precision of execution, and Purity of aspiration and of life.28 Because the F.R.C. was a secret society, we have little knowledge of the precise rituals in which Williams participated. But it is certain that, in his many years of practice, he honed his will to a high degree of self-discipline and mastered the core skills of visualization and concentration, which are as central to the practice of his saintly characters as they are to the dark magicians in his novels. This focused intensity accounted, at least in part, for the powerful impact of his personality.

Even after he ceased to attend Rosicrucian rituals, Williams kept a cer-emonial sword in his office, using it for private rites of transmutation with his disciples. Alice Mary Hadfield gives an unnerving account of such a ritual, identifying the disciple only as a young woman student from the Balham Commercial Institute at Tooting Bec, who worked in the City and was en-gaged to be married. Asking her to visit his office before their evening class, Williams taught her to bend over, in silence, and in silence he took the sword and made smooth strokes with it over her buttocks. He did not hit, nor touch with his hand. She was fully clothed. All was in silence.29 At other times he wrote on her arm or drew patterns with the tip of a needle, without drawing blood, and justified his actions by saying, This is necessary for the poem. Al-though the woman told Williams she did not like the experience and behaved as a victim, with eyes shut, she collaborated for years. To many, this episode will seem like an exercise in sadomasochism. Williams, however, was almost certainly cultivating a form of ritual self-mastery, probably using sublimated sexual energy to heighten his visual imagination. Asked fifty years later why she continued to put up with these rituals, the disciple, Joan Wallis, loyally told Gavin Ashenden that Williams remains the most remarkable and good man Ive ever met.30

For Williams, the fundamental difference between adepts of love, such as he aspired to be, and dark or goetic magicians was simple: the sacred practitioner aims only to transform himself, the dark magus to transform the world by manipulating the wills of others. This is a key point to which I shall return. But for the reader of Williams fiction, it requires no great acumen to discern the centrality of magic in his world-view. In each novel he contem-

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plates the divine order under a different metaphor, for example, sacrifice and communion in War in Heaven, universal justice in Many Dimensions, the cosmic dance in The Greater Trumps, and the City of God in All Hallows Eve. The plots always revolve around the damage that occurs when a bar-rier between the material world and the inner or astral plane is breached.31 Whether through malice or accident, the veil between worlds is torn, enabling supernatural powers to invade mundane reality and wreak havoc until they can be contained by characters who willingly surrender to the Divine, resolv-ing the crisis through acts of substitution and exchange. In War in Heaven the breach occurs through the discovery and activation of the Holy Graal; in Many Dimensions, through the magical Stone of Suleiman; in The Place of the Lion, through the Platonic archetypes manifesting in the form of beasts. Each novel features at least one adept who attempts to manipulate supernatural forces for his own gain. Williams calls this the Way of Perversion of Images, a dark parody of his Affirmative Way.32 Other stock character types include a well-meaning skeptic; a pair of lovers, engaged or newly married, embarking on the Way of Affirmation; a saintly contemplative or mystic; and a spiritual ingenuethat is, a young, open-hearted woman for whom the supernatural plot becomes a kind of initiation. Williams is famous for his extraordinarily convincing portraits of radical goodness, as well as evil, and it is through his saintly charactersadepts in lovethat he presents his memorable teaching on coinherence. Through the dialogue and actions of these characters, in fact, the novels offer direct spiritual guidance to the willing reader.

CoinherenCe and substituted love

The golden thread that binds virtually all of Williams fiction, poetry, theology, and spiritual practice into one whole is his idea of coinherence, an unusual term that he adopted from patristic theology. In this section I will explore that doctrine, first as Williams developed it in his theoretical writings and his prac-tice as a spiritual director, then as he portrayed it in his fiction.

In the works of the church fathers, the three Persons of the Trinity are said not only to share a common essence, but to indwell one another recipro-cally, a doctrine known by the technical name of perichoresis in Greek, or in English, coinherence.33 The principle holds true across the full range of Chris-tian doctrinethe Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the communion of saints. In the Incarnation, Christ dwells in Marys womb even as Mary dwells in Christs heart; and the divine and human natures of the God-man coinhere so completely that divine attributes can be ascribed to the man Jesus and hu-man traits to the Godhead. This reciprocity of being, this abiding of every self not in itself but in another, is what Williams means by coinherence. The idea pervades the New Testament: Jesus in the Fourth Gospel declares, I am in the

Trinity Straight. Tomasz Mazur.

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Father and the Father in me (John 14:11), and again, You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you (John 14:20). The apostle Paul proclaims, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Gal. 2:20). You are the body of Christ, he says, and individually members of it (1 Cor. 12:27). What is more, if Christians are one body in Christ, they are also members, one of another (Rom. 12:5). To become members, one of another, not just in theory but in practice, was the goal Williams set for his Companions of the Co-inherence.

The Companys aims and practices are set forth explicitly in three texts: the postscript to Williams Descent of the Dove (1939); a private document circulated around the same time; and a slightly later poem, The Founding of the Company. In The Descent of the Dove, Williams notes that every human life begins with an act of natural coinherencefor what else is pregnancy? If baptism follows birth, the newborn proceeds directly from the material coinherence of the womb, through invocation of the Triune God, into the supernatural coinherence of the Church. The pattern is everywhere, Williams claimswe see it in love and friendship, even in the dreams of nationality and communismbut in the dark days of 1939, as Europe careened yet again toward war, the pattern might be stressed, the image affirmed, through the creation of a religious order whose sole duty would be to meditate and practise coinherence. The principle is one of the open secrets of the saints, he adds, and we might draw the smallest step nearer sanctity if we used it. Substitutions in love, exchanges in love, are a part of it; oneself and oth-ers are only the specialized terms of its technique. The technique needs much discovery; the Order would have no easy labour.34

According to Hadfield, the idea of a formal Company came not from Williams himself but from his Companions. After resisting their entreaties for three years, he yielded and issued a Promulgation to those he already consid-ered members of his household. It consists of seven theological principles, each buttressed with a scriptural or patristic formula, which I omit in this summary.

The Order has no constitution except in its members. . . . It recommends neverthe-less that its members shall make a formal act of union with it and of recognition of their own nature. . . . Its concern is the practice of the apprehension of the Co-inherence both as a natural and a supernatural principle. . . . It recommends therefore the study, on the contemplative side, of the Co-inherence of the Holy and Blessed Trinity, of the Two Natures in the Single Person, of the Mother and Son, of the communicated Eucharist, and of the whole Catholic Church. . . . And on the active side, of methods of exchange, in the State, in all forms of love, and in all natural things, such as childbirth. As it was said: Bear ye one anothers burdens. It concludes in the Divine Substitution of Messias all forms of exchange and substitu-tion, and it invokes this Act as the root of all.35


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In other words, coinherence is not just a theological fact to be observed, but a spiritual imperative to be practiced. For this purpose Williams created his own order, about twelve years after he ceased to be an active Rosicrucian. As a committed Anglican, he meant to submit a revised draft of his Promulgation for episcopal review. Among his papers at the Bodleian Library is the text of a service he composed for celebration at St. Pauls, by request of the bishop of Chichester. Its closing prayers constitute an Act of Adoration designed as a formal blessing of the new Order: Blessed be He that He has made us mem-bers one of another and all members of Him. . . . Blessed be He that He has quickened among men the unity, exchange and substitution of love which is the pattern of Himself. . . . Blessed be He that He continually makes all things new.36

A few years later, Williams incorporated these principles in mythic form in The Founding of the Company. This poem compares the new company of Arthurs court at Camelot to the first monastic communities, for like them it is rooted in Catholic doctrine. But this one is a lay company,

of the commons and the whole manner of love, when love was fate to minds adult in love. What says the creed of the Trinity? quicunque vult;37 therefore its cult was the Trinity and the Flesh-taking, and its rule as the making of man in the doctrine of largesse, and its vow as the telling, the singular and mutual confession of the indwelling, of the mansion and session of each in each.38

Unlike a monastery, the Company is not an enclosed order but a church-within-the-church; Anne Ridler and Edward Gauntlett note parallels with Waites hidden church of the Holy Graal.39 As in the real-life Promulgation, the mythic Company has both active and contemplative dimensions. The ac-tives live by a frankness of honourable exchange, / labour in the kingdom, devotion in the Church, the need / each had of other, in this way creating a mutual beauty in exchange, / be the exchange dutiful or freely debonair; / . . . taking and giving being the living of largesse, / and in less than this the king-dom having no saving. In short, they fulfill the ordinary exchanges of social and economic life with an awareness of their profound meaning. The contem-platives practice is deeper, more deliberate: they exchanged the proper self / and wherever need was drew breath daily / in anothers place, according to the grace of the Spirit / dying each others life, living each others death.40 The poet Taliessin, from whose household the Company spreads, initially resists any title of leadership. But Dinadan, the court fool, persuades him to accept the role of lieutenant as an excellent absurditya phrase Williams also used of himself.

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Did the poet teach his disciples in person how to exchange the proper self? Clearly he did. Hadfield recalls that, during the darkest days of the war, he used the Companions in their proper service of exchange, asking each one to help another when he or she heard of trouble, once mobilizing Anne Ridler to offer herself on behalf of another womans ailing husband.41 A let-ter to Lang-Sims records a similar incident. In the winter of 1944, Hadfield, identified by Williams as one of Our people, was sailing back from Bermuda to England with her child across mined seas. Needless to say she dreaded the voyage. Hence Williams directed Lang-Sims, who did not know Hadfield at the time, to bear her burden by present[ing] yourself shyly to Almighty God in exchange for her. If nothing whatever happens you will not be surprised; if you are, one way or another, suddenly inconvenienced, you will not be surprised. This is a real thing, and you will do it handsomely and even gailywithout fancy or inventionfor the Company and the Doctrine. Williams goes so far as to say that in this matter, you were pre-designed by Almighty God to be of use to God, to Us, and to Our household.42 Lang-Sims duly applied herself to the task, though she admits to wondering with some resentment if she were seriously being asked to suffer all that daily fear, including perhaps the terror of an actual disaster, . . . just because Charles said so. She also recalls not knowing exactly how she was meant to present herself to Almighty God in exchange for Hadfield. Evidently Williams did not teach his prayer techniques directly, or at least not in this case; but he did so explicitly in his novels.

Throughout his career, Williams taught coinherence and substituted love through fiction. Examples are legion, but I will limit myself to two. In The Greater Trumps, the repository of occult forces is a uniquely powerful tarot deck, coveted by a gypsy who conjures a magical blizzard to kill its rightful owner, Lothair. But the victims sister, aptly named Sybil, foils this scheme through her intelligent adoration of Love. When she ventures into the lethal storm to save her brother, at first she succeeds only in rescuing a stray kitten, which claws at her arm in fright and hampers her movements once she does find Lothair. Nevertheless, Sybil knows that the Power that governed her would be quite capable of dragging her out of the house to save a kitten from cold. She adored It again: perhaps the kitten belonged to some child in the vil-lage, and she was taking a four-mile walk in a snowstorm to make a child and a kitten happy. Finding herself unable either to release the kitten or to lift her fallen brother with one arm, Sybil stilled herselfeither Love would lift him or Love would in some other way sufficiently and entirely resolve the crisis that held them. The practised reference possessed her.43 Williams is here teaching contemplative prayer. Entirely surrendered to Love, Sybil calmly accepts Its substitution of a kitten for her brother, whom she finally manages to save by another substitution: she lets him think it is she who needs rescuing, and this


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sense of urgency gives him strength to rise from the snow. Thus man and beast are savedand the cat, of course, plays its own magical role.

Toward the end of the novel, Sybil is allowed to heal the gypsy patriarch, Aaron, who has sprained his ankle in the tumult. The passage is a tour de force on coinherence:

Her hand closed round the ankle; her mind went inwards into the consciousness of the Power which contained them both; she loved it and adored it: with her own thought of Aaron in his immediate need, his fear, his pain, she adored. Her own ankle ached and throbbed in sympathy, not the sympathy of an easy proffer of mild regret, but that of a life habituated to such intercession. She interceded; she in him and he in her, they grew acquainted; the republican element of all created things welled up in them both. Their eyes exchanged news. She throbbed for an instant not with pain but with fear as his own fear passed through her being. It did but pass through; it was dispelled within her, dying away in the unnourishing atmosphere of her soul, and with the fear went the pain.44

The point is not just that Sybil performs a miraculous healing, or even that she does so for an erstwhile enemy. Rather, such passages invite the reader: go thou and do likewise! All Christians practice intercessory prayer, yet Williams method is esoteric, requiring a degree of concentration, skill, and courage that few attain. Sybil is an adept, practised and habituated to such actions, much like a practitioner of spiritual healing today. In a commentary on this novel Gareth Knight, a Christian esotericist, remarks that Sybil is engaged upon a mighty act of redemptive magic.45 Although her actions rely wholly on God, they are nonetheless magical in technique and intention, he insists. What Williams teaches through such episodes is a divine magic opposed to the devil-ish magic of the gypsies. To join the Companions of the Co-inherence meant to embark on such practices with deliberate intent. For Williams, a seamless continuum linked ordinary prayer with Sibyls magical healing of Aaron and led as far as her ability to still the diabolical storm.

The adept in Williams penultimate novel, Descent into Hell, is a poet-playwright named Peter Stanhope, another stand-in for the author.46 Stanhope has come to the town of Battle Hill to supervise a production of his new play in which Pauline, the ingenue, has a part. In a chapter titled The Doctrine of Substituted Love, she discloses to him her secret terror: from time to time she meets her doppelgnger walking toward her in the street, and she is certain that when they at last come face to face, she will die or go mad. Stanhope asks why Pauline has not asked any friend to carry [her] fear, and when she ex-presses puzzlement, he offers to do so himself, quoting the injunction to bear one anothers burdens. As she begins to protest, Stanhope acknowledges the watered-down version of that command: It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I dont

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say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of.47 Pauline is dubious, but Stanhope insistsfirst with explanation, then with tender mockery, finally by holding her at command with his eyes until she consents. In three full pages, Williams shows Stanhope fulfilling his promise through an act of trained imagination and will. This is described with great precision as a directive for readers to follow:

He recollected Pauline; he visualized her going along a road, any road; he visual-ized another Pauline coming to meet her. And as he did so his mind contemplated not the first but the second Pauline; he took trouble to apprehend the vision, he summoned through all his sensations an approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself to that fear, laying aside for awhile every thought of why he was doing it, forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the strangeness and the terror of that separate spiritual identity. His more active mind reflected it in an imagination of himself going into his house and seeing himself, but he dismissed that, for he desired to subdue himself not to his own natural sensations, but to hers first, and then to let hers, if so it should happen, be drawn back into his own. . . . The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of her world.48

Stanhope is soon interrupted, for he is watching a rehearsal and has kept back a certain superficial attention, alert and effective in its degree, for anyone who needs him. After the interruption he will resume his task, but rather for the sake of his own integrity of spirit than that more was needed, the narrator says. His act of substitution is already accomplished in full, for such things are not measured by time but by will.49

The outcome is remarkable. Pauline eventually does meet her double with-out fear because Stanhope has carried it for her. The double turns out to be her Platonic or ideal self, such as she has existed eternally in the mind of Goda doctrine Williams could have learned from medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich, whom he greatly admired.50 By merging with her own beatitude, Pauline acquires spiritual strength in turn to carry the fear of her distant ances-tor, martyred four hundred years earlier under Mary Tudor.51 As a result, the martyr, who had been praying for faith and courage in his prison cell, receives Paulines proffer of grace from beyond as an angelic benediction and goes to the flames with joy, singing I have seen the salvation of my God. This exchange, or mighty act of redemptive magic in Knights terms, saves loving souls even against the flow of time, spanning the great divide between living and departedexcept that in the communion of saints, as Williams conceived it, there is no divide. The victory of coinherence over time occurs even more dramatically in his last novel, All Hallows Eve, where two of the protagonists


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are deadand active beyond deathfrom the very first page.52 Spectacular magical climaxes give all these novels their suspense and excitement. But a dif-ference only of degree, not of kind, distinguishes the grand, cosmic events from the daily practice of such adepts as Sybil Coningsby and Peter Stanhope.

romantiC theology: theory and praCtiCe

Like any writer, Williams possessed the novelists godlike power of total con-trol over the outcome of his plots. In real life, however, transactions of substi-tution and exchange are far messier, in part because the practice of substituted love borders so confusingly on erotic love. Williams acknowledges this link in several of his books by letting the process of redemption unfold within mar-riage or courtship. For example, in Shadows of Ecstasy, the saintly wife Isabel frees her husband Roger from a magical temptation, and in Place of the Lion, the lover Anthony effects the conversion of his fiance, a self-centered medi-evalist. All Hallows Eve represents a saving exchange of a more mutual and plausible kind as two couples, one soon to be married, the other prematurely

Snow on the Fence. Tomasz Mazur.

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divided by death, work out their salvation together. In other novels, the adepts of love are committed celibates, like the Archdeacon of Fardles in War in Heaven or Aunt Sybil in Greater Trumps. But the more difficult cases involve an erotically tinged master-disciple relationship outside of marriage. In Many Dimensions, the selfless ingenue Chloe is on the verge of falling in love with her employer, Lord Arglay, who is also her teacherbut this potential compli-cation is precluded by her martyrdom. Peter Stanhope, the most fully devel-oped of Williams fictional alter egos, gracefully accepts Paulines adoration as a stage in her spiritual growth, yet the novel ends without suggesting an erotic future for their relationship. In Williams personal life, however, the practices of substituted love and romantic theology were more painfully intertwined, with consequences that, to some readers, come close to vitiating his integrity as a spiritual master. Because his interpretation of erotic love stands at the heart of Williams teaching, it will be useful here to present a sketch of his own love life insofar as it spurred his thought.

Rather surprisingly, his theology of romantic love turns out, on further scrutiny, to have been an ascesis as radical as it was exceptional. The most passionate of the many poems he wrote for his wife Michal date from their nine-year engagement, the length of which cannot be fully explained by either poverty or the Great War.53 Most likely, Williams deliberately postponed their marriage in order to practice courtly love, the sublime medieval discipline of love-at-a-distance that was more congenial to his poetic temperament. In fact, when he presented his first sonnet sequence to his future wife, he told her its theme was Renunciation, leading her to wonder if he planned to enter a mon-astery.54 He and Michal finally married in 1917, but their domestic life proved turbulent because, after years of idealizing his fiance, Williams found the workaday trials of marriage a disappointment. A few years later, he fell pas-sionately in love with Phyllis Jones, a colleague at the Press. His Christian faith precluded divorce and adultery, so neither occurred.55 Yet, because Williams found himself either unwilling or unable to overcome this passion, his fifteen-year obsession with Phillida, or Celia as he later called her, brought unre-mitting pain to all parties. Partly to escape from his attentions and those of a second married lover, Gerard Hopkins (nephew of the poet), Jones married the oil executive Billie Somervaille in 1934 and moved to Java, but divorced him and returned to London in 1938. Soon afterward she married a British naval officer and became Phyllis McDougall. Yet Williams continued to follow his Dantean way of love, maintaining his emotional affair with Celia in a copi-ous stream of poems and letters that continued from 1926 through her two marriages until 1942, three years before he died.

In this respect, Williams saw his personal life as echoing his favorite poets. In The Figure of Beatrice and elsewhere, he assimilated his love for Michal to Dantes Beatrician moment, that first vision of transcendence through


15

the beloved that leads ultimately to the face of God. Williams compared his later, still more overwhelming love for Phyllis Jones, his Celian moment, to Dantes experience with the Lady in the window who consoled him after Beatrices death. Falling in love a second time can fling heavens windows open again, but with this difference: if the first love points to the affirmation of marriage, the second must be fulfilled through the Negative Way of renuncia-tion.56 Yet the analogy does not altogether hold. Although Williams represents marriage as the supreme instance of the Affirmative Way, he glosses quickly over the familiar fact that Dante was married, but not to Beatrice. Michal Wil-liams, unlike Dantes beloved, was not destined to die young, beckoning her poet-lover beyond earthly passion to seek her in Paradise. Instead, she suffered the fate of the unremembered Signora Alighieri, prosaically knowing that her husband loved another.57 Williams, meanwhile, practiced a threefold erotic ascesis: adoring his Celia without hope of union; agonizing when she cast him off and married another; and treating the pained Michal with all the kindness he could muster, knowing that mere kindness could never compensate for his loss of ardor.58 This particular version of substituted love is hard to reconcile with a theology of marriage.

Moreover, Williams could let his erotic and esoteric needs interfere with his practice of spiritual direction in ways that, by todays standards, would constitute a gross violation of boundaries. Women fell in love with him on a regular basis, as C. S. Lewis observed, sometimes even making a nuisance of themselves at the offices of the Oxford University Press. Some of these dis-ciples, such as Ridler and Hadfield, became lifelong friends in relationships of true reciprocity. But Williams did not tidily distinguish the categories of friends, students, directees, and esoteric companions. I have already cited the strange ritual he practiced with (or on) Joan Wallis, using a ceremonial sword from his Rosicrucian days. Sometime later, in 1943, he embarked on a similar relationship with Lois Lang-Sims, who had written to him after reading The Figure of Beatrice. In response, Williams invited her to join the Companions of the Co-inherence. Upon their first meeting in Oxford, Lang-Sims responded to Williams with utmost astonishment, as she later recalled, for his manner seemed at once deferential and authoritarian, his conversation riveting yet difficult to follow, his face and body in constant motion while his gaze held intensely still. On parting, Lang-Sims felt that love and veneration had been aroused in me without my knowing how or why. . . . At the same time I was aware of being enspelled.59 The spell remained in force for eight months as the two exchanged letters and discussed literature and theology over lunch. But Williams made it clear from the start that their exchange would also involve obedience. While treating Lang-Sims as his disciple in a context of spiritual direction, he also lifted her into a mythic framework where she became by turns his princess, schoolgirl, and slave. In fact, he renamed her Lalage after

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a slave girl in his Arthurian myth, himself taking the role of Taliessin. Within the household of the kings poet, Lalages discipleship included prayers and other spiritual exercises, assigned readings, literary essays, and tasks of memo-rization, but a disconcertingly large role was played by punishment. Whenever she deemed herself to have failed in some degree, Williams required Lang-Sims to perform childish penances like copying out lines, standing in a corner, or ty-ing a string around her ankle. In time these punishments intensified to the level of beatings with a ruler.

The esoteric, rather than purely sadistic, nature of this ritual is suggested by Lang-Sims account of one such occasion: she knelt to kiss the masters hand; he kissed hers in return; asked her to bend over for a single hard blow on the buttocks; then paused and embraced her in deep stillness, without showing any sign of sexual arousal.60 Long afterward, Lang-Sims compared Williams exercises with Tantric yoga on the one hand and medieval fin amor on the other, typified by such examples of sublimation as Tristan and Yseult sleeping with a naked sword between them. The immediate effect, however, was that Lang-Sims became seriously ill for weeks. An Occultist, writes Edward Gauntlett, would see this as straightforward vampirism on Williamss part. . . . Consciously or otherwise he seems to have drawn off more of Loiss energy than she could comfortably do without.61 Gauntlett notes parallels with Dion Fortunes practice of raising etheric energies through sexual polar-ity, and he points out that Aleister Crowleys sex magick, like Williams practice, had as its goal the invocation of the Muse. On this occasion, Williams promptly turned Lang-Sims punishment into a sonnet, which he sent her, but the incident also inspired one of the most brilliant passages in his last book of verse, The Region of the Summer Stars.

In a poem called The Queens Servant, Taliessin frees a slave at Arthurs court, first asking her to strip naked, then reclothing her in a dress of roses that he creates through art-magic spiritual. He follows this rite with a slap on the face, evoking the old Roman gesture of manumission or confirmation. But in Williams mythology this act is transmuted into a profound spiritual union between the poet and his former slave, now a free companion in Christ. The lines vividly convey Williams self-projection as adept or spiritual master:

Her eyes were set upon him, companion to companion, peer to peer. He sent his energy wholly into hers. Nay, he said, henceforth, in the queens house, be but the nothing We made you, making you something.Lightly he struck her face; at once the blast of union struck her heart, the art-magic blended fast with herself, while all she burned before him, colour of cloak and kirtle


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surpassed by colour of flesh and blood and soul whole and organic in the divined redemption after the kind of Christ and the order of Logres. He said: Till death and after, and she: Till death, and so long as the whole creation has any being, the derivation is certain, and the doom accomplished.62

On rereading this and related poems, Lang-Sims avows a decidedly mixed response. On the one hand, she writes, never was there a more outrageous ego-trip in verse, nor a clearer example of the games people play for their own consolation and encouragement. On the other hand, she admits that this harsh judgment is a half-truth, and the other half is the more importantthe other half is what made it possible for Charles to win the allegiance of his household not only in fantasy but in fact. . . . For who should know better than I do, that Charles was a man who immolated mind and body in the cause of achieving an infinitely delicate and accurate balance of the opposites, not in theory, not in the abstract, but in himself? In this fearful tension he chose, con-tinuously, to liveand . . . that is what made himas he wasa great human being and something akin to a saint.63

a dangerous sanCtity

How, finally, should we assess Charles Williams as a Christian spiritual teach-er? Close friends and casual acquaintances alike, even those who had cause to rue his experiments, have spoken with one voice of his personal goodness and saintliness. Yet, despite the distinguished company he kept and the firm orthodoxy he maintained, his teaching has remained distinctly esoteric. Both the spiritual practices I have described, romantic theology and substituted love, have their attractions as well as their dangers.

The exchanges of Williams own erotic life are most vulnerable to criti-cism. From the standpoint of common-sense ethics, it is sinful for a husband to send hundreds of love poems to a woman other than his wife, no mat-ter how chastely. But Williams penchant for mythologizing his life enabled him to justify and even glorify his forbidden passion, so long as he refrained from physical consummation. As noted above, his substitution of Celia for Beatrice as his Muse, that is, of Phyllis Jones for his wife, and later of more pliable women such as Lang-Sims for Jones, is paralleled in his verse by the symbolic exchange of a slave girl for Taliessins beloved Princess Dindrane, who leaves him to enter a convent.64 Two recent interpreters, Candice Fre-drick and Sam McBride, find the relationships with both Jones and Lang-Sims inexcusable and argue that Williams preference for mythic over mundane reality prevented his own personal development and growth. In their view, what he called romantic theology was only an elaborate justification for moral

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adultery, which cannot stand up to either Christian or feminist critique.65 Yet, far from casting stones, Michal and others who had reason to feel ill-used ultimately forgave Williams and remembered him with deep affection.

Even apart from these troubling relationships, however, romantic theol-ogy poses problems. Like another brilliantly esoteric poet, William Blake, Williams was determined to rescue Christian theology from its unwholesome habit of divorcing spirit and flesh. But in this regard, his temperament betrayed his impeccably orthodox aims. Or one could say the same qualities that made

Cemetery. Tomasz Mazur.


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him a uniquely subtle interpreter of Dante hindered him as a theologian of marriageand a husband. At bottom, romantic theology is a heterosexual Pla-tonism. It strives consciously to adore God in the beloved and the beloved in God, ascending from the beauty of the beloved to the contemplation of Love in itself.66 But this practice all but demands the death, absence, or renunciation of the beloved: Dante followed the dead Beatrice to Paradise, not his living wife.67 Romantic sublimation can never furnish a theology of marriage, such as Wil-liams tried to outline, for two reasons. First, its transcendent idealism cannot withstand the practice of everyday life, or at least not without a severe diminu-tion of the beloveds personhood, such as Williams was forced to confess in the end. Three months before he died, he wrote to his wife of a growing remote-ness in him, a sense of being more than ever a prophet? priest? . . . more of a Voice and less of a man . . . I always was pretty much of a slightly non-personal figure, and all my interests rather in figures than in people. Perhaps the people in my novels grow more real as my consciousness of actual people decreases.68 The literary celebration of marriage requires not a poetics but a prosaics, to use Saul Morsons felicitous termthe aesthetics of a Tolstoy, with moral and stylistic demands as profoundly opposite to Williams as one can imagine.69

In the second place, desire exalts, but sex humbles.70 To maintain the level of transmuted energy he needed for his creative and spiritual practice, Wil-liams had to avoid consummation as far as possible, first by prolonging his engagement to absurd lengths, then by adoring the unattainable Celia, finally by separating from his wife during wartime. Ironically, this enforced separation gave him the moral courage he needed to end his correspondence with Celia and renew his emotional intimacy with the long-suffering Michal, giving them a few years of fragile reconciliation before his untimely death.71 So Williams Affirmative Way turns out to have been an ascetic way after all. His brave but doomed attempt to combine it with marriage exacted a heavy toll in suffer-ingfor himself, for his wife, for Celia, and for women such as Lang-Sims who stumbled into his ken.

Williams designation of his distinctive prayer technique as substituted love owes something to the peculiar substitutions of his erotic life. But the method in itself does not depend on these, and his disciples have continued to practice it. To assess his legacy as a Christian esotericist, we can ask: Is this practice orthodox? Does it work? And if so, how? The theory and practice of coinherence have commended themselves to many Christians of unimpeach-able orthodoxy, aside from those already mentionedamong them the An-glican theologian Austin Farrer, the Roman Catholic priest Gervase Mathew, the Benedictine Dom Bede Griffiths, and the novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers.72 Anthony Bloom, the great Russian Orthodox archbishop of London

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(d. 2003), gave Williams books to his disciples and encouraged them to prac-tice coinherence.73 On the other hand, J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic who was personally close to Williams, detested many of his ideas. The two had met through Lewis, who remained blissfully unaware of any rift between them.74 Most of the Inklings Christian fans today have little knowledge of Williams, who has never attracted the mass following of Lewis and Tolkienalthough his character provided the model for Ransom, the charismatic hero of Lewiss novel That Hideous Strength.75 Even in the age of the internet, the esoteric remains esoteric.

No one can doubt that Williams based his narratives of substitution and exchange on personal experience. In 1933, as he was drafting Descent into Hell, he told Anne Ridler that he had first discovered the practice as an experiential fact, by chance, as it were; and Im terrified out of my senses at the idea of going further. Yet further he boldly went, in the conviction that proclaiming and practicing this discovery might almost make us justified in our existence.76 Williams exceptional sensitivity to the spiritual worldor in magical terms, to the occult forces that enable such exchangewas the most salient fact of his character. In a perceptive introduction to All Hallows Eve, T. S. Eliot describes him as one for whom the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural. After noting his friends ease among every sort and condition of men, he adds, I have always believed that he would have been equally at ease in every kind of supernatural company; that he would never have been surprised or disconcerted by the intrusion of any visitor from another world, whether kindly or malevolent; and that he would have shown exactly the same natural ease and courtesy, with an exact awareness of how one should behave, to an angel, a demon, a human ghost, or an elemental.77 Eliots remark only seems to contradict Lang-Simss contrary judgment that Charles was incapable of behaving naturally in any context.78 Splitting the difference, he may have felt more at home with angels, demons, and ghosts than with ordinary, unidealized mortals. In this respect he again resembled Blake, another visionary of towering imagination, unfettered by convention. Both poets genuinely sawto their perilrealities that eluded the common run of men.

According to Humphrey Carpenter, the practice of coinherence is in spirit entirely Christian, yet, like so much of Williamss thought, it did have an air of the magical.79 Gauntlett agrees, arguing that when Williams asked Lang-Sims to bear the burden of Hadfields fear as she crossed the ocean, he asked her to perform a Magical act, one that would cause changes to occur in the consciousnesses of both women.80 If we follow modern occultists under-standing of magic, this cannot be denied. As Gauntlett notes, Aleister Crowley defined Magick as The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in con-


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formity with Will and Dion Fortune modified this by inserting in conscious-ness after Change. Gauntlett believes that the first definition is perhaps too broad and the second too narrow,81 but Charles Williams novels ac-commodate both. Magical change is effected both in consciousness and in the material world, with the caveat that only his dark magicians attempt to create material change. The practice of substitution aims neither to manipulate occult forces nor to procure any specific outcome. Williams firmly insisted that the practice worked but never presumed to say how, referring all such questions to the dispensations of Organic Law, the Acts of the City, that Fate which was Love, or the glorious condescension of the Omnipotence.82 His saintly characters differ from his evil magicians by the open-endedness of their efforts.

While the imagination must be fully engaged in an act of substitution, the will should not be directed to any goal more specific than fulfilling the inten-tions of Love. Stanhope, for example, undertakes to absorb Paulines fear, but not to dictate any possible outcome of her encounter with the double. Williams directs Lang-Sims to offer herself in exchange for Hadfield without praying for anything so concrete as her safe return to England. Sybil stills herself in the midst of the storm rather than seeking a way to control it. This open-ended-ness makes the prayer of coinherence much harder than ordinary intercession, in which one merely lists names or tells God what ought to be done. If it is a magical practice, it is also a contemplative one, requiring the same balance of focused attention and unlimited surrender that characterizes mystical prayer. In working out his theology of coinherence and substitution as a universal law, Williams may have underestimated the degree of esoteric training, as well as the gifts of will and imagination, required for its conscious practice. In princi-ple, anyone can perform an act of substitution, but in reality, it is a method for the few. The difficulty of the act is one reason Williams can refer to characters like Stanhope as adepts, and as with adepts in any occult art, there is always a temptation to powerto ascribe success to ones own efforts and not to another. A further difficulty lies on the receiving end. It is extraordinarily hard in fact to relinquish ones burden of pain or fear to a fellow creature, and many would find it harder to be helped than to help in this vein.83 In the end, coin-herence is probably the sort of ideaand practicethat one either likes or one does not. That is why Williams says in The Founding of the Company that the Order lived only by conceded recollection, / having no decision, no vote or admission, / but for the single note that any soul / took of its own election of the Way.84 In the Fathers house are many mansions: no method of prayer is mandatory nor, one hopes, is any forbidden.

Williams exercise of authority over his Companions is more problem-atic. Clearly he did not always direct them with the shyness, the joyous and high-restrained obeisance of laughter, that marks Taliessin and his other

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fictional doubles.85 As he well knew, there was an element of sadism in his treatment of Jones, Lang-Sims, and others. Many interpreters have remarked that he could not have portrayed evilespecially cruelty, self-absorption, and the will to poweras chillingly as he did, had he not been sorely tempted by those sins.86 In 1930, he confessed to Phyllis Jones, I am sadistic towards you, but within the sadism is mastery, and within the mastery is government, within the government is instruction, within the instruction, service, and within the service? Answer that. The expected answer is love, but one could hardly blame Jones if she rejected this tortured self-justification. In another letter he professed, I wouldnt hurt a fly unless it made perfectly clear that it liked it. And then only a little.87 This may be true, but Williams was perfectly capable of taking silence for consent and imagining that his disciples liked it when they merely endured, as his poems on the punishment of Lang-Sims suggest. Finally, turning from psychology to theology, we might wonder if Williams spiritual direction did not presume a little too far on what he would have called the courtesy of the Omnipotence. Could not his Companions have been trusted to choose for themselves when and with whom to practice exchange? Williams strong desire for obedience aligns him with the stricter abbots and spiritual fathers in Christian history, testifying more to a sublimated will for power than to his professed valuation of the disciples freedom.

In short, Williams as a spiritual master had his flaws. But, as I have re-marked elsewhere, if by saintliness we mean moral perfection, then saints by definition do not exist.88 Over against his temptations, not always resisted, we may set Anne Ridlers remark that in Williams company people often felt themselves to be better people than they really wereand not only better, but more intelligent.89 That in itself is the mark of a rare holiness. The attraction Williams exercised, and continues to exercise, stems finally from his ability to make the world he saw so vividlythe web of interchanged adoration, inter-dispersed prayer90as visible to the minds eye as it was to his own visionary spirit. Those who glimpse the vision will be perennially drawn to the practice.

In any case, biographical criticism can go only so far. For a man who lived his myths and mythologized his life so absolutely as Williams, he was surpris-ingly aware of those limits. A character in Descent into Hell wonders whether Stanhopes personal life could move to the sound of his own lucid exaltation of verse, but does not try to find out, and in The Figure of Beatrice Williams observes, We do not know if, or how far, Dante himself in his own personal life cared or was able to follow the Way he defined, nor is it our business.91 With such skeptical charity we may leave the matter. Late in his life, Williams wrote to a friend: My own muddles are written over the earth and heaven, but I take refuge in God and the Order, and hope, under the Mercy, to smile a them all in the end.92


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notes

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Harriet Gilliam and Carlo Maria Giulini, under the Mercy. I thank Claire Fanger for many useful suggestions.

1. C. S. Lewis to Peter Bayley, cited in Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 120. Bayley did not agree, responding that To my eyes, he looked like a clerk or crafts-man in a small line of businessperhaps a joiner or carpenter.

2. Memorial broadcast, 1946; cited in Carpenter, Inklings, 107, and in Anne Ridler, introduction to The Image of the City and Other Essays, by Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), xxviii.

3. T. S. Eliot, introduction to All Hallows Eve, by Charles Williams (1948; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), ixx. The meeting took place in 1934: Carpenter, Inklings, 97.

4. Cited in Alice Mary Hadfield, Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 141.

5. Anne Ridler, ne Bradby, to Charles Williams, April 1935. She was the niece of Sir Humphrey Milford, Williams employer qua director of the Oxford University Press. I thank the late Anne Ridlers son-in-law, Richard Wilson, for permitting me to read her letters.

6. Bradby to Williams, letter, December 27, 1935. 7. Lois Lang-Sims, in Letters to Lalage: The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims

(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), 32. 8. Throughout this essay I will use Williams distinctive spelling, Co-inherence, only

when referring to his Order, which still exists in attenuated form on the internet. There is also a Charles Williams Society whose president is Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.

9. R. A. Gilbert, A. E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts (Wellingborough, Northants: Cru-cible, 1987), 149.

10. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Arthur Greeves, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 501.

11. Fortunately, some of these friends have published studies based on Williams own notes, letters, and oral comments. See Charles Williams, Arthurian Torso, which contains his unfinished prose work, The Figure of Arthur, along with C. S. Lewiss commentary on the Taliessin poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1948); and more recently, Notes on the Taliessin Poems of Charles Williams, by various hands (Oxford: Charles Williams Society, 1991). A fine critical study is Roma A. King, Jr., The Pattern in the Web: The Mythical Poetry of Charles Williams (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990).

12. Criticism on the novels is extensive. Studies include Thomas Howard, The Novels of Charles Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Glen Cavaliero, Charles Williams: Poet of Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983); and Charles Huttar and Peter Schakel, eds., The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996). The journal, Mythlore (1969 ), is devoted exclusively to the Inklings.

13. Charles Williams, Witchcraft (London: Faber & Faber, 1941) is more broadly a history of magic, esotericism, and the Churchs attitudes toward them. It is of considerable interest for sketching Williams own complex view of esoteric practice.

14. Eliot, Introduction to All Hallows Eve, xii. 15. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (London: Faber & Faber,

1943). It was this book that inspired Dorothy Sayers to her first reading of Dante, whom she eventually translated: Carpenter, Inklings, 189. See also Williams early work, Outlines of Romantic Theology, published posthumously with an introduction

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by Alice Mary Hadfield (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), and Charles Williams, He Came Down From Heaven (London: Heinemann, 1938), chap. 5.

16. During the war, Williams was often invited to preach, to speak in convents and to ad-dress conferences of clergy, ordinands and laity. Hadfield, Charles Williams, 199.

17. See the Bibliography in Hadfield, Charles Williams, 25153.18. Many critics note Chestertons influence on Williams fiction and early verse, only to

insist on their radical difference in sensibility. 19. These plays by Benjamin Boulter were performed intermittently from 1918 to 1930,

making St Silas the first English church since the Reformation to stage mystery plays. According to the parish website, T. S. Eliot is also believed to have attended St Silas, probably in the late 1920s. http://www.saintsilas.org.uk/.

20. C. N. Manlove, The Liturgical Novels of Charles Williams, Mosaic 12 (1979): 16181.

21. R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians (Wellingborough, Northants: Aquarian Press, 1983), 7677. Initiates always addressed one another by their magical names. Waite himself was Sacramentum Regis, while Dion Fortune took her pen-name from her motto, Deo Non Fortuna (by God, not by fortune).

22. The best sources on Williams esotericism are Gavin Ashenden, Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008), and Edward Gauntlett, Charles Williams and Magic, Newsletter of the Charles Williams Society 25 (2008). Online at www.geocities.com/charles_wms_soc/article.html?200825, ac-cessed Jan. 25, 2008.

23. Gilbert, Golden Dawn, 77.24. Ridler, introduction to Image, xxivxxv. 25. Ashenden, Charles Williams, 4. See also Ridler, Introduction to Image, xxiv. Hadfield

misleadingly identifies the order as the Golden Dawn and minimizes the extent of Wil-liams involvement: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 2931.

26. Gauntlett, Charles Williams and Magic; Gilbert, A. E. Waite, 149; R. A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn (Slough: Quantum, 1997), 179. Hadfields biography includes an undated photo of Williams with Yeats (after p. 52), but little is known of the two mens relationship.

27. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Mod-ern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77.

28. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 74.29. Hadfield, Charles Williams, 106.30. Ashenden, Charles Williams, 26465, n. 69. 31. From an esoteric perspective, the best account of the novels is Gareth Knight, The Magi-

cal World of the Inklings (Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1990), 15397. 32. Williams, Witchcraft, 311. A good example is Gregory Persimmons in War in Heaven,

whose devotion to Satan is deeply religious in character. 33. G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: S.P.C.K., 1952), 282301.34. Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the

Church (1939; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 23436.35. This text has been published twice: Hadfield, Charles Williams, 174, and Lang-Sims,

Letters to Lalage, 30.36. Charles Williams papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. I have been unable to learn whether

this rite was actually celebrated and the Order thus given episcopal sanction. 37. Whosoever will, the first words of the Athanasian Creed, which precisely expounds

the doctrine of the Trinity. Williams once called it a great humanist Ode. He com-ments on the text as performed at a Christmas service in The Greater Trumps (1932; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 10910.

38. Charles Williams, The Founding of the Company, in Arthurian Poets: Charles Wil-liams, ed. David Llewellyn Dodds (Bury St Edmunds: Boydell Press, 1991), 125.


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39. Ridler, Introduction to Image, l; Gauntlett, Charles Williams and Magic; A. E. Waite, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Its Legends and Symbolism Considered in Their Affinity with Certain Mysteries of Initiation and Other Traces of a Secret Tradition in Christian Times (London: Rebman, 1909).

40. Williams, Founding of the Company, Arthurian Poets, 126. The quotation is from Heraclitus.

41. Hadfield, Charles Williams, 217. 42. Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 5354.43. Williams, Greater Trumps, 12627.44. Williams, Greater Trumps, 219. 45. Knight, Magical World, 185.46. Williams actually used Peter Stanhope as a pseudonym on the title page of his play

Judgement at Chelmsford. Ashenden, Charles Williams, 156. 47. Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (1937; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 98.48. Williams, Descent into Hell, 100101.49. Williams, Descent into Hell, 102. 50. See for example Charles Williams, War in Heaven (1930; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerd-

mans, 1980), 239; Williams, Descent of the Dove, 137, 14344; Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 228; and especially Charles Williams 1939 essay Sensuality and Substance, in Ridler, ed., Image of the City, 6875.

51. Williams, Descent into Hell, 16873. The reference to Mary Tudor implies that the martyr is Protestant. Though Williams himself was Anglo-Catholic, his fictional saints show his ecumenical sensibility. He wrote a play on Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury for the Festival of 1936.

52. Fittingly, the novel itself was published posthumously in 1945. 53. Her baptismal name was Florence Conway, but Williams renamed her after King

Davids first wife, who mocked him for dancing naked before the Ark, because of her embarrassment at his reciting poetry in public. Williams assigned mythic sobriquets to most of his friends.

54. Michal Williams, As I Remember Charles Williams, appendix, To Michal from Serge: Letters from Charles Williams to His Wife, Florence, 19391945, ed. Roma A. King, Jr. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002), 261. The sonnet sequence would become Williams first book of poetry, The Silver Stair (1912).

55. Carpenter, Inklings, 89; Ashenden, Charles Williams, 68. For Williams absolute rejec-tion of divorce see his Outlines of Romantic Theology, 47.

56. On the Celian moment in love and poetry, see Williams 1931 play The Chaste Wanton, in Collected Plays, ed. John Heath-Stubbs (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); the Introduction to his New Book of English Verse (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), 1215; and Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 4951.

57. Dantes wife, Gemma Donati, remained in Florence when he went into exile, just as Michal Williams remained in London during World War II when the Press, and Wil-liams with it, moved to Oxford. For Williams view of Dantes marriage see his Figure of Beatrice, 41, 4647.

58. In Williams last novel, the bereaved Richard admits with remorse that he had never loved his dead wife, Lester, as fully as she loved him: Kindness, patience, forbearance, were not enough; he had had them, but she had had love. Williams, All Hallows Eve, 215.

59. Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 3132. 60. Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 6770. 61. Gauntlett, Charles Williams and Magic. 62. Williams, The Queens Servant, in Arthurian Poets, 13233.63. Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 38. 64. Williams, The Departure of Dindrane, in Arthurian Poets, 12024.

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65. Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride, Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 43.

66. From a different perspective, Williams Romantic Theology as an intellectual product of the 1920s and 30s has much in common with the nearly forgotten theologies of the Feminine developed in the same period by such writers as Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Flo-rensky, and Paul Evdokimov in Russia, Teilhard de Chardin and Paul Claudel in France, and Gertrud von le Fort and Edith Stein in Germany.

67. For a deeply moving contemporary testament to this Way, see Cynthia Bourgeault, Love Is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls (New York: Bell Tower, 1997). Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest and contemplative; her beloved, Brother Raphael Robin, was a much older Trappist monk and hermit. The two met a few years before Brother Raphael died and continued their celibate, mystical relationship till death and after.

68. Letter to Michal Williams, February 17, 1945, in To Michal from Serge, 249. 69. Gary Saul Morson, Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2007); Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

70. Saint Thomas Aquinas long ago stated that physical intercourse caused a submergence of the rational faculty, which was an evil though no sin. The two climaxes of power seem to be a little opposed. The clear serenity of the intellectual adoration . . . is hidden and pent by the night of desire. The night of desire is thinned and (in a sense) impover-ished by the intellectual lucidity. Our virtues are not at ease together. The habitselfish or generous or bothof physical intercourse, once established, is apt permanently to cloud the intellectual and to make the memory of it weaker. Williams, Figure of Bea-trice, 37.

71. See Gavenden, Charles Williams, chap. 10, and Williams last letters, To Michal from Serge. Michal Williams burned Charles pre-war letters and all of her own.

72. Carpenter, Inklings, 18889; letter from Bede Griffiths, Williams papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

73. He published under his monastic name, Anthony Bloom, though his ecclesiastical title was Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. Information based on personal acquaintance.

74. See Carpenter, Inklings, 12026, including an affectionate and hilarious parody by Tolkien of Williams Arthurian verse.

75. Carpenter, Inklings, 198. 76. Letter to Anne Ridler, August 1933, cited in introduction to Image, xlviii.77. Eliot, introduction to All Hallows Eve, xiiixiv. 78. Lang-Sims, Letters to Lalage, 85. 79. Carpenter, Inklings, 105. 80. Gauntlett, Charles Williams and Magic.81. Gauntlett, Charles Williams and Magic. 82. Williams, Many Dimensions, passim; Williams, All Hallows Eve, 259; Williams, The

Greater Trumps, 125; Williams, Descent into Hell, 219. 83. Cf. Ridler, introduction to Image, xlix.84. Williams, The Founding of the Company, Arthurian Poets, 125.85. Williams, The Founding of the Company, Arthurian Poets, 12829.86. Ridler, introduction to Image, xxxii; Carpenter, Inklings, 8384; King, To Michal from

Serge, 7. See also Glen Cavalieros introduction to Letters to Lalage, by Lang-Sims. 87. Hadfield, Charles Williams, 10405.88. Barbara Newman, review of Gillian Crow, This Holy Man: Impressions of Metro-

politan Anthony, in Spiritus 6 (2006), 26063. 89. Ridler, introduction to Image, x. 90. Williams, Taliessin at Lancelots Mass, in Arthurian Poets, 91.91. Williams, Descent into Hell, 66; Williams, Figure of Beatrice, 11; Carpenter, Inklings, 107.92. Hadfield, Charles Williams, 226.

Documents

Charles Williams and the Compa Ions of the Coin Here Nce