Charles Williams

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886–1945)

Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born on September 20, 1886, in London, the son of Walter Williams, a poorly paid clerk and foreign correspondent for a stationery firm, and Mary Wall Williams, a former milliner. The family lived in St Albans, in modest circumstances, and the religious atmosphere of the household was Anglican, quietly devout, and nourished by his father's love of poetry. He won a scholarship to St Albans Grammar School and in 1904 entered University College London, but the family's money gave out after two years and he left without a degree. There would be no Oxford or Cambridge for him, a fact that shadowed his self-regard for the rest of his life, though in the end it did not diminish his reach.

In 1908 he took a post as a proofreader at Oxford University Press, in the London branch at Amen House, and the press became his working home for nearly four decades. He rose to become an editor of real influence, shaping the Press's poetry list and overseeing, among other things, the first wide English readership of Kierkegaard. He taught evening classes for the London County Council and lectured on literature to working adults, and these lectures eventually brought him wide recognition. In 1917 he married Florence Conway, whom he called Michal; their son Michael was born in 1922. The marriage was one of real tenderness, though it contained complications that belong in any honest account. Williams was a man of charismatic intensity for whom friendship, and particularly the devotion of younger women, could become a kind of spiritual discipline, and some of his relationships crossed lines that a more conventional churchman would have refused to approach. His wife bore this with a patience that Williams himself regarded as a gift he scarcely deserved.

His formation was not scholastic. In the years after leaving university he joined, for a time, the Order of the Golden Dawn offshoot led by A. E. Waite, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and he did not hide this. He explored ritual magic and occult symbolism with the curiosity of a poet, and it left lasting marks on his imagery. Yet he remained, by his own account, an orthodox Anglican, attending church and receiving communion, a man who regarded the occult as a counterfeit and the Incarnation as the true pattern. Dante was the decisive influence on his thought, and he approached the Florentine poet not as an antiquarian but as a living guide. From Dante he drew what he came to call the Way of Affirmation: the conviction that the created order, human love, and bodily existence are not obstacles to God but channels of His glory, to be received as such and then offered back.

When the Press relocated to Oxford in 1939 because of the war, Williams moved with it, and the city that had refused him as a student took him in as a teacher. He joined the Inklings, the circle gathered around C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and his presence electrified it. Lewis said that Williams was the one man who made him feel dull by comparison. Lewis arranged for him to lecture to the university, and his course on Milton drew a crowd large enough to surprise the faculty; the university awarded him an honorary master's degree in 1943. The wartime years were hard, with bombing, separation from his wife for long stretches, and a gnawing sense of exile from London. He died on May 15, 1945, in Oxford, after emergency surgery, only days after the end of the war in Europe. Lewis wrote that the news was like a blow in the face, and that afterward the whole world seemed a little less solid.

His Writing and Its Influence

Williams began writing in earnest before the First World War, and his earliest published work was verse. The Silver Stair appeared in 1912, a sequence of devotional sonnets, and the poetry never stopped; it remained, by his own estimate, the center of his vocation. The great project of his poetic life was the Arthurian cycle, Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), dense, allusive, and demanding poems in which the Matter of Britain becomes a map of the Christian soul and of the City of God breaking into history. Lewis thought them among the finest poems of the century. Most readers have found them forbidding, and Williams did little to ease the way. The poems assume a reader willing to work.

His reputation, however, rests more widely on the seven supernatural novels he wrote between 1930 and 1945, which his publisher described, with some bafflement, as "spiritual thrillers." War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion, The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, Descent into Hell, and All Hallows' Eve place the Holy Grail, the Tarot, Platonic archetypes, and the dead among ordinary people in London drawing rooms and suburban streets. The supernatural in Williams does not arrive from elsewhere; it presses upon the everyday and tests whether the people in it will choose love or the self. His villains are rarely monsters. They are men and women who have refused, step by small step, to bear the exchange of burdens that he held to be the structure of Christian life.

That idea, which he called co-inherence, is his chief theological contribution. Drawing on the Trinitarian life, the Incarnation, and Paul's instruction to bear one another's burdens, he argued that Christians are bound into a web of mutual substitution and exchange, in which one person may carry another's fear or pain in a real and not merely sentimental way. He practiced this, and in 1939 he founded a small Order of the Co-inherence, which outlived him in modest form. His theological prose carries the same intensity. He Came Down from Heaven (1938) and The Descent of the Dove (1939), a history of the Holy Spirit in the Church, are idiosyncratic, brilliant, and occasionally careless of the historian's usual cautions. The Figure of Beatrice (1943) is his most sustained account of Dante and of the romantic love he believed could image the divine.

Such work drew criticism from several directions. The occult furniture of his fiction unsettled many churchmen, and his unusual relationships raised questions that scholars still debate. His prose can be willfully obscure, and he was an unreliable guide to any author he admired, since he read everyone through the lens of his own convictions. But his admirers were formidable. W. H. Auden called The Descent of the Dove a decisive influence and spoke of Williams in near-devotional terms, T. S. Eliot wrote the introduction to the posthumous All Hallows' Eve, and Lewis spent years championing the work, editing the essay collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams and completing his friend's unfinished study of Arthur.

After his death the work slipped from view, and for decades it was kept alive chiefly by a devoted circle of readers. Interest has revived in the last generation, and much of his writing has returned to print. His reception remains divided between those who find in him an exceptional theologian of embodiment and love, and those who find his system too strange to trust.

Who should read Williams: Readers who suspect that the physical world, human love, and the ordinary encounters of a day are more charged with God than most piety allows, and who are patient enough to meet a difficult writer on his own terms. He is especially suited to those already at home in Dante, Lewis, or the Anglican sacramental tradition and curious about its stranger edges. He is not for readers who want clear doctrinal exposition, who are made uneasy by occult imagery in the service of orthodoxy, or who need a guide whose life was free of complication.