Charles Williams, Poet of Theology

by Glen Cavaliero

Book Overview

Charles Williams (1886-1945), the friend of T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, was both a writer with many gifts and a religious thinker of an unusual kind. Poet, playwright, novelist,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802835791
• ISBN13: 9780802835796
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Length: 199 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Neither is This Thou

Critics of Charles Williams tend to be either summarily dismissive or gushingly laudatory. Here's a book that's neither. There are much easier books on Williams; they are easier because they take Williams' unique vocabulary, use his definitions, and introduce the reader to his ideas. Two of the best are Mary McDermot Shideler's Theology of Romantic Love and a short pamphlet by John Heath Stubbs. This book braves dangerous waters, by dragging Williams into mainstream criticism, where he's often not welcome. To do so, the author must make certain concessions, as the ideas and vocabulary of Williams and those of mainstream criticism mostly clash. What he does is almost make up his own vocabulary with which to talk about both streams, although some of it is drawn from Williams, mostly the word and his idea of "co-inherence". In a simple definition, that's a deconstructed version of "incoherence", although it also has an ancient theological meaning. Cavaliero, however, sees it as related to Williams' ideas of exchange and substitution, and uses it as a unifying theme throughout the book. Nearly all critics have seen this in a theological way in Williams' writing, but Cavaliero also applies it to Williams' style and form. In many ways I couldn't connect to this book. I don't think anyone who was not widely read in Williams would want to read it, with certain exceptions. Since he mentions so many other authors, many also not currently popular, including John Buchan, Sax Rohmer, LeFanu, T.F. Powys, Arthur Machen, and Evelyn Underhill, one can also read the book the other way, from a familiarity with those authors. I found these parts dazzling, since I once read Lord of the World by R.H. Benson merely because a review suggested the writing was similar to Williams'. The only novels I've found, for the most part, that go on from Williams, as it were, are Chesterton's. Even though many of these authors are not currently well known, it's yet interesting for the author to compare them with Williams in various strengths and weaknesses, as well as style. Williams, Cavaliero shows, infused his point of view into everything he wrote. So does Cavaliero, with the interesting result that he identifies connections between Williams' writing and life that are unique to his viewpoint. One he calls the Impossibility. I didn't get a very good handle on this, but it's an extremely engaging discussion, which crops up all through the book, and refers to the harmony or conflict between nature and fortune, the words again used in a specific way. More interestingly, Cavaliero traces this theme in Williams' critical writings, The English Poetic Mind, and Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind. The other dazzling idea is that of absolute relativity. This doesn't mean that everything is morally relative. What it does mean I am not equal to explaining. But the effect of it traced in the novels and plays is that one has the choice to either accept the facts of the universe or rebel