Outlines of Romantic Theology

Outlines of Romantic Theology is an early theological treatise by Charles Williams, written in the late 1920s while he was working as an editor at Oxford University Press, and published for the first time in 1990, long after his death in 1945. Williams had already begun writing poetry and fiction shaped by his conviction that romantic love was no mere distraction from the Christian life. He also belonged to the Anglican tradition and to a circle of readers in which Dante loomed large. The manuscript was a private attempt to say, in the plain terms of doctrine, what he believed the experience of falling in love had shown him. It was never prepared for the press in his lifetime and circulated only among a few friends.

The treatise's central claim is that the experience of romantic love is a genuine way into the knowledge of God and not a rival to it. Williams takes the lover's vision of the beloved, in which an ordinary person appears charged with glory, and treats it as a real perception of what every human being is in the sight of God. He argues that this vision belongs to the same pattern as the Incarnation, in which the divine is known in and through the flesh. For that reason the way of affirmation, the path that finds God in created things and not apart from them, deserves to stand beside the better-known way of rejecting images. Williams works from the Dante of the Vita Nuova and the Commedia, drawing out the idea that Beatrice mediates something of Christ to the poet. From there he turns to the discipline this requires: love must be tested, purified of possessiveness, and disciplined by fidelity if the glimpse is to become a habit of seeing. Marriage, on this account, is a school for that seeing and not a mere social arrangement. The work is a sketch, and it reads like one. Its arguments are compressed, and several of its ideas are only beginning to take shape.

Its value today lies partly in what it reveals about Williams's later work, since the themes of this treatise recur in his novels, his Arthurian poetry, and The Figure of Beatrice. It also remains a rare attempt to take erotic love seriously within orthodox Christian categories without either sentimentalizing it or treating it as a danger to be managed.

Who should read this: Readers of Williams, Dante, or the Inklings who want to see where his distinctive theology began will find it indispensable, as will anyone puzzling over how Christians might think theologically about desire and marriage. It is not an introduction to Williams, and newcomers will do better to start with The Figure of Beatrice or one of the novels. Readers looking for a finished, systematic theology of love, or practical guidance for relationships, will find a thinker still working out his first principles.