Image of the City

The Image of the City and Other Essays is a posthumous collection of Charles Williams's critical and theological prose, selected and introduced by Anne Ridler and published by Oxford University Press in 1958, thirteen years after his death in 1945. Williams spent his working life as an editor at Oxford University Press, wrote novels, plays, poetry and theology, and belonged to the Inklings circle in wartime Oxford. This volume gathers pieces that had been scattered in periodicals and lectures, mostly on poets and on the shape of the Christian imagination. Ridler's introduction places them within the whole of his work, and the essays are best read as the working notes of a writer who never separated literary criticism from devotion.

The title essay takes its governing image from Williams's reading of Dante, Milton, Wordsworth and others: the city as the form of redeemed human life, a web of mutual dependence in which people live in and through one another. Around this image Williams develops the ideas that mark his whole thought. One is the Way of Affirmation, the conviction that created things, and above all the human beloved, can be received as true images of divine glory rather than rivals to it. Another is what he calls coinherence, the pattern of exchange and substitution in which persons bear one another's burdens and which he saw as the shape of the Trinity and of the Church. A third is the claim that poetry is a form of theology, so that reading a poet carefully is a way of learning what Christians believe about love, judgment and glory. The essays move between poets and doctrine without strain, treating Dante's Beatrice, Milton's Eden or Wordsworth's Prelude as occasions to ask what it means to love another person truly and what the Incarnation implies for ordinary life.

The collection has endured because it shows Williams's distinctive vision in a shorter and more accessible form than his difficult longer books such as The Figure of Beatrice or He Came Down from Heaven. It offers a model of spiritual formation through attention: to poetry, to other people, to the physical world, and to the idea that the glory of God may be met in each. C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot both acknowledged his influence, and readers interested in the Inklings, in the theology of the body and of romantic love, or in the relation of literature to faith will find here a deep and original source.

Who should read this: readers who already enjoy literary criticism and are curious how a poet-theologian reads Dante, Milton and Wordsworth with doctrine in view, and those who want a first encounter with Williams before attempting his larger works. It is not for readers seeking a devotional handbook or a systematic account of his thought, and it assumes some familiarity with the poets it discusses.