Some temptations are to eat chocolate during Lent: bad but not sinful. Other siren calls are to mock small kittens which is always wicked and where even the thought should lead to immediate pastoral help. But there are a few temptations that are merely calls to amusement that will, almost certainly lead to your embarrassment, but also potentially to your intellectual growth.
Some folly is illuminating.
It is tempting to quibble with the assessment of Charles Williams in Fred Sanders’ post.
This quibbling is, in one way, regrettable since I agree with almost all of what he says, but at worst the quibble seems a temptation of the third sort. It may lead to my embarrassment, but it will also lead to further illumination!
(Who is Charles Williams? Here is my list of the essential Williams.)
What of Charles Williams? Sanders is certainly right about one thing: Williams is a writer so eccentric, that like the taste of anchovies on pizza, he is only tasty for some. For almost everyone else, any Williams is too much and much of it bleeds off into anything it gets near (like some of Lewis) spoiling it.
Sanders is also right to worry about him taken in large quantities.
To carry the food analogy even further too far:
Some writers, like certain foods, are best enjoyed in small amounts. Too much Charles Williams is the mental equivalent of gorging on cheese cake. Sanders is right, especially as a teacher, to point this out. A steady diet of Williams without the sunny and more rigorous Lewis will lead to a tendency toward sugar shock.
A dash of Lewis’ logic would help the entire confection.
My quibble then with Sanders is not with his general worry about Williams, but that he has missed what made Williams go wrong.
Sanders views Williams as “spooky” while I think him a failed romantic. Williams meant to introduce his new Beloved, but described his old love better than his new. This leaves a fair number of readers wanting to meet the old girl instead of his wife.
Sanders thinks (semi-seriously) that the key to reading Williams is this question: “What if Christianity were a bizarre secret cult?”
That works pretty well for the novels, but (unlike his questions for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien) does not cover the rest of Williams’ writings or interests. Most readers (unlike Sanders) do not read the rest of Williams, so perhaps practically it is a useful warning about the limits of the popular fiction.
But the question is of limited usefulness even there, as (in my opinion) the strangeness is often merely a prop designed to pull the reader into the story. However seductive to the reader, the occult is not the theme, since the psychology of the personal relationships is the core of the book. Sanders’ question (which was surely partly tongue in cheek!) is also of limited usefulness in other Williams books. For example, it does not easily account for Dante or the matter of Britain where occult and secrecy themes are lacking. His poetry might be mystical, but often reads more as alternate history to me.
In fact, given what Lewis says about Williams, I think the better “key question” to understand the entire Williams’ project would be, “What if Christianity were a modern Romance?”
Here “romance” is understood in the sense Dante might be viewed as “romance” (whatever Lewis’ objections might be) and Arthur tales certainly were. This is the writing of someone who grew up in the age of Tennyson and knew Oxford primarily through visions of dreaming spires or as an adult with an in but not of relationship to the University. Williams lacked the draining and enriching experience Lewis’ had as a student of the ugliness and rigor of an actual modern Oxford education.
Lewis had some of the Tennyson knocked out of him, but Williams never did.
Here the focus is on the love for the Beloved and this is where the privacy (less secrecy than privacy) of the novels arises.
Everything in Williams makes sense if you think of them as a romance.
In Williams’ the occult forms the seduction of Evil to a less wholesome love. In Williams’ novels, Good is the wholesome beloved, the Beatrice, and Evil is the low and magical seducer. Williams skill as a writer is often not up to his project, so that the “evil” or the “other” ends up the overwhelming flavor of the book instead of the love of the Beloved.
This can happen to much greater writers. Some readers have even been more attracted to Milton’s Satan than his Christ (either through their error or Milton’s).
His project is to contract the healthy allure of Wisdom of Proverbs 8 with the dangerous spiritual adultery pictured in Proverbs 7.
If Williams attempted to argue in his novels for the call of Beatrice against that of “the other woman“, then he often failed to communicate his message clearly enough for the contemporary reader to get it. His is a sad failure of art.
I think Williams is asking, “What if history, Christianity, and reality is a romance?” but that in his novels in particular he is unable to execute the idea well. If I am right, then Williams operates for some misguided readers (who read only for atmosphere and not for meaning), to seduce them to the other and not to his beloved Christ.
(Of course a real expert make claim both Sanders and Reynolds are mad for attempting to reduce Williams to a single question or project. Perhaps, but then the experts cannot seem to reduce Williams to anything like coherence. A sane and scholarly overview of Williams, dirt and all, is here.)