Charles Williams was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and in the words of my esteemed colleague (and close friend) Fred Sanders “preternaturally eerie.” My goal is eventually to become the preternaturally eerie friend of Fred Sanders so here is my personal list of the essential Charles Williams.
Charles Williams is an uneven writer. Often he is nearly great and other times he is just odd. In that way, he is a taste. You either love him for his nearly-greatness (as I do) or find his theological and literary oddities too overwhelming.
I am no William’s scholar and I am only slowly reading everything he wrote, no small task for an author who attempted every genre that came into his capacious head to enjoy, but over the years these are the works of Charles Williams I re-read.
Anything Williams wrote is difficult, so a description of the work deserves a book or might as well be summed up in a sentence or two describing a personal reaction to the particular text. For the sake of my readers, I have opted for the shorter option.
First, and most important is his poetry, which is found in Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. Both can be purchased in one volume, a copy sits on my desk right now along with C.S. Lewis explanation of William’s poetry: Arthurian Torso. I read something from Taliessin nearly every week . . . it is a profound vision of Christian love.
Second, is the Lewis’s favorite mentioned in Sander’s post: Descent Into Hell.
A good rule for reading Williams is to pay attention when he uses any word related to “descent.” That is when he is going blend Dante, Plato, and Jesus into fascinating genius.
Descent into Hell is the fiction that Plato would have written if he had lived at the time of the Second World War and was a Christian. I have owned multiple copies and worn out at least one.
Third, is my second favorite of his weirdly religious and mystical novels The Place of the Lion.
This books makes charity exciting. Imagine if Sunday School lessons had been staged by Spielberg in book form with more than a dash of Stoker . . . Go further and pretend that Dracula was actually scary. Assume it been written the way everyone imagines it was and not in the circumspect and precious Victorian prose Stoker actually used!
There you have The Place of the Lion.
Fourth, is the William’s “short history of the Holy Spirit in the Church” The Descent of the Dove.
Everything Williams pops up in this book which has only a little value as a history, is often speculative (to be charitable) when it comes to theology, and is more a reflection of William’s own intellectual journey than that of the Church Universal. Of course, given that Williams is very, very interesting that makes it worth reading.
When it is good, it is so original that it reshapes your thinking.
Imagine a Francis-Schaeffer-speed-read of cultural history by an Anglo-Catholic who had read all the right books. Williams, like Schaeffer, has a gift of using small details to get a big picture right that more “careful” scholarship often gets wrong.
Finally, everybody should read his Figure of Beatrice who has any interest in the continued relevance of the Comedy to modern life. Whatever its merits as an interpretation of the figure of Beatrice or Dante’s work in general, Williams has been inspired to deeply Christian levels of thought by his reflections on both. It is a good example of a reflective, personal essay that takes a great author and carefully attempts to apply the perceived lessons of his work to daily life.
In that sense, it demonstrates that Williams was one of the most liberally educated of men.
Near misses for this list were the novel All Hallow’s Eve (bad religion is very bad) and Witchcraft (which shows Williams taking a properly skeptical and Christian view of the occult and peoples over interest in it).
I suspect Charles Williams will be read in one hundred years, because of his works terrific ability to present the romantic and Christian vision of reality as appealing and possible in a soulless modern world. He is a psychological writer in the old sense of caring most about the immortal soul.
If you liked Harry Potter for light reading, he is the next step up in difficulty with roughly the same literary skill as Rowling.
Give Williams a try.