Place of the Lion

The Place of the Lion is the first of the seven supernatural novels Charles Williams published between 1930 and 1945, the so-called spiritual thrillers. Williams was then a working editor at Oxford University Press in London, a lay Anglican steeped in Dante, Plato, and the Christian mystical tradition, and he wrote the book as fiction because he wanted to dramatize what the ancient philosophers and the church's theologians had meant by the reality of the Ideas. The novel appeared in 1931, in the interwar years when materialism and a fashionable interest in the occult were both pressing on English intellectual life.

The story begins in a quiet English village, where a lion appears on the loose and a butterfly of extraordinary size is seen near a house. These are the first signs that the Platonic archetypes, the eternal Forms from which earthly things take their being, have broken into the world and are drawing living creatures toward their own natures. Strength, beauty, fear, and wisdom take on a terrible presence. Williams then asks how different people meet them. A scholar of medieval thought who has studied the Ideas as abstractions finds that they are no longer abstract. Others are devoured, hollowed out, or driven mad because they have lived by one passion or one appetite alone. Only Anthony Durrant, who has refused to make an idol of any single power, is able to stand before them. The book's central move is a moral one. The powers of creation are good, but approached with pride, possession, or fear they become destroyers, and right relation to them comes only through humility and an ordered love. Adam's naming of the animals, restored in the novel's closing scenes, becomes the pattern of that right relation. Williams does not preach this. He lets it unfold as plot, so that metaphysics arrives as event.

The novel has lasted because it makes a doctrine felt: that the world is shot through with realities greater than the things that reflect them, and that holiness lies in loving the Source rather than grasping the reflection. C. S. Lewis read it with delight and wrote of its effect on him, and Williams's later friendship with Lewis and Tolkien and the Inklings began from that admiration. It anticipates ideas Williams developed in his theological writing, including coinherence and the way of affirmation, and it remains one of the few novels in which Christian Platonism is not merely illustrated but enacted.

Who should read this: Readers who enjoy Lewis's Perelandra or the visionary fiction of the Inklings will find here its stranger and more demanding forerunner, and anyone curious how Christian Platonism looks in narrative form will profit from it. It is not for readers who want brisk plotting or psychological realism; Williams's prose is dense, his characters often serve as ideas, and the book asks patience before it rewards it.