When I encountered my first Charles Williams novel in an undergraduate class fifteen years ago, I wasn’t sure what I had just read but knew I wanted more. So I went to the campus library and checked out his other six novels. A week later I had read them all, and while I didn’t know then that I would go on to spend almost a decade working on a PhD involving Williams’s writing, I knew that something about his view of the world had changed mine.
Williams writes as if what he calls the “co-inherence” of all created beings is simply a given: that all of us, everywhere, share in the divine interrelationships of the Trinitarian life, and so what one of us experiences is, necessarily, caught up in what the other lives. Williams envisioned a web of radical connectivity in which our status as finite beings means we are incapable of self-sufficiency; we are entirely dependent upon the lives of others, both human and nonhuman, not only for our flourishing but for our very existence. Something distinctive to Williams’s way of thinking is a tendency to take a Christian teaching – such as St. Paul’s injunction to “bear one another’s burdens” – and to push it far past where most of us would ordinarily take it. Williams interprets Paul’s statement as a literal, very serious command to practice “exchange,” where we offer our labour, our physical health, our money, or our emotional resources on behalf of the other. This can mean taking on someone else’s fear or anxiety so that they do not have to bear it, as one character does for another in his novel Descent into Hell. Or it can mean giving up some of your bone density for someone with a calcium deficit, as C.S. Lewis believed he had done for his wife Joy while she suffered from cancer. For Williams, the mystery of how this exchange works – why Christ was able to die for us; why every day we only eat as a result of the labor of others; why any real relationship means sharing in both the sufferings and joys of another person – is the mystery that lies at the heart of the Church.
Throughout his body of writing, including his fiction but also his essays, literary scholarship, poetry, and theological work, Williams explores the different ways in which co-inherence manifests. One of the ideas he returns to, over and over, beginning from his first work of published poetry to one of his last scholarly studies, titled The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (1943), is what he calls Romantic Theology – that is, theology as applied to romantic experience. Williams was convinced that the Christian church had completely failed to reckon seriously with eros, or what he described as the falling-in-love experience. Because of the mystery of co-inherence that links us all, our lives are bound up with Christ’s. What happens when we fall in love, Williams believed, is that Christ is incarnated, or his life is sacramentally re-enacted, in the experience of the couple as their relationship progresses through the same stages of ecstasy, rejection, agony, despair, and resurrection or renewal that he lived through.
Probably the most important literary influence upon Williams’s thinking was Dante, the Italian poet whom Williams believed was among the only writers in the Christian literary tradition who gave proper weight to the transformative experience of romantic love. Especially in La Vita Nuova (1294), where Dante speaks most candidly about the way his love for Beatrice was the catalyst for his spiritual journey towards the divine, Williams sensed that Dante was approaching a great truth about human life. While Williams had close friendships with many women during his life, it is arguably his relationship to this woman – one whom he encountered through his reading of poetry – that had the greatest impact on his life and thought.
Most people would agree that when we fall in love with another human being, the experience is among the most profound we can have on this earth. Williams follows Dante in taking it further, and suggesting that the reason this experience is so profound is because what in fact happens when we fall in love is that we access a visionary state that is otherwise closed off to us: to see with the eyes of eros is to see truly, or to see someone as they really are – their divinized self, in other words, or what Williams liked to call the “inGodded” self. According to Williams, when Dante writes about seeing the glory of Beatrice as she is “in heaven,” or as God sees her – “unfallen, original,” or “redeemed [and] celestial,” what he is seeing is something just as real as the ordinary, fallen Beatrice.[i]
For Williams, only the lover is given this vision. In a contemporary landscape where crises of identity cause so many of us to reach for Myers-Briggs-style personality tests, or to discover our Enneagram, or to take the latest Buzzfeed quiz about what flavor ice cream we are, Williams would likely tell us that, if we want to know who we are, the only person who can tell us is the person who sees us with the eyes of love, who sees a flash of our “eternal identity.”[ii] This is an unusual, and fairly radical, point of view for a few reasons. First, it challenges the assumptions of those church-goers who see eros as a distraction from the process of sanctification, or even an obstacle that gets in the way of our journey towards God. Second, it flies in the face of the commonly assumed idea that “love is blind” – that when we fall in love, we see things through rose-colored glasses, which is to say we see only a partial or an illusory vision of the person with whom we’re in love. Williams emphatically says no to this. Instead, he insists, it’s precisely when we fall in love that the romantic vision lifts the illusion that ordinarily hides the true nature of the human soul, the illusion that veils us during most of everyday, mundane life.
Williams is not, in believing all of this, being naïve; he was (painfully) aware that the original romantic vision cannot last, that it burns itself out quickly, often already in the early days of a relationship. But he continued to hold to his conviction that once a lover has had a vision of the beloved as their complete, glorified self, this vision takes hold in the soul, lingers in the memory, and can be continually remembered and reawakened. He says “[w]here Love has once been, it does not – except in hell – refuse to return.”[iii] Williams’s affirmation of romantic love is animated by his incarnational theology, where, in becoming human, Christ lifts all humanity up into the divine life, and so our truest identity is to be found in our divinized selves, or our inGodded selves. This, to Williams, is the “Dantean Way,” which was a way he tried to follow.
Did he succeed? It’s impossible to be sure, but I would guess probably not. Or at least, not all of the time. Williams’s personal relationships with real-life women were complicated, and fraught with the kind of hurts and misunderstandings that are inevitable in all of our relationships, romantic or otherwise. Various biographers have explored Williams’s troubled marriage and his occasionally exploitative relationships with some of the young women in his life. But the words Williams wrote about Dante, I think, apply to him too: “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.”[iv] Regardless of whether or not he lived up to the ideal he admired, Williams’s conviction that the falling-in-love experience means something remains a compelling idea, and one that too few Christian thinkers have spoken about.
Williams says that by neglecting to talk seriously about what really happens when we fall in love, the Church has left romantic love to the world and abdicated its claim on this sacred experience. Marriage is a sacrament in much of Christendom for a good reason, and Williams fought hard to have it seen as such. The union of lovers is where we become most like God, and where we most understand God, and most resemble God. So he would have approved of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s often-quoted affirmation, “Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.”[v]
Laura N. Van Dyke teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Trinity Western University, in Langley, B.C. She is one of the co-editors of the recently published The Inklings and Culture: A Harvest of Scholarship, which is the first essay collection to treat all seven of the Inklings-related authors.
[i] Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Octagon, 1972), 27.
[ii] Charles Williams, “One Way of Love,” in The Image of the City, edited by Anne Ridler (Berkeley: Apocryphile, 2007),161.
[iii] The Figure of Beatrice, 52.
[iv] The Figure of Beatrice, 11.
[v] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 12.