CHARLES WILLIAMS: ANOTHER INKLING

The famous group called the Inklings had as its most famous members J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. But there was also the lesser known Charles Williams, sometimes called the Third, or Oddest, Inkling. All three of them made contributions to the field of theology and biblical studies. (Tolkien was actually on the translation team for The Jerusalem Bible.) But they are probably even better known for their fictional writings.

This brings up the subject, which I will not really pursue, as to what exactly constitutes Christian fiction. In the case of Lewis, almost all of his fictional works are firmly grounded in themes and events portrayed in the Bible to the point where they could almost be called biblical allegories or parables. By contrast, Tolkien may have wonderfully described the eternal battle between the forces of good and evil in his novels, but they could only be loosely called Christian fiction in the same way that Lewis' books are.

Whereas C.S. Lewis was highly influenced by the Bible, mythological stories and folk tales in the composition of his works, Tolkien approached his writings as a trained philologist, especially expert in Old and Middle English languages. As for Charles Williams, as Sorina Higgins explains:

“He was a member of A.E. Waite’s occult secret society, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, for ten formative years. He rose high in the ranks, leading initiates in practicing alchemy, astrology, Cabalism, conjuration, divination with tarot cards, and meditation on the Sephirotic Tree. Yet he remained a committed Anglican all his life, writing works of lay theology. For the last six years of his life, he was a member of the Inklings.”

Such a strange combination is not unique; I had a Sunday school teacher decades ago in a very conservative church who was quite a devotee of astrology.

With that sort of background, it is no wonder that his seven novels have not exactly gained him much of an audience. They each are an unusual mixture of biblical allusions, somewhat humorous depictions of everyday life in England, exciting adventures, and a heavy dose of the occult with whole plots drawn from a pack of tarot cards, the twelve symbols of the zodiac, etc. This sort of writing goes way beyond allegory in which one can simply look for the parallelism between a character in the book and his biblical counterpart. And it takes even more contemplation than a parable to bring out whatever underlying message may be found there.

Just to give you a small flavor of his writings, here is a brief description of his book Many Dimensions, which I recently re-read. It takes place in modern (i.e. late 1940's) England and concerns the clandestine purchase of the closely guarded crown of King Solomon by a completely amoral scientist who wishes to discover all the secrets of the mystical stone in the center of which is written the Tetragrammaton YHWH. In the first place, he discovers that the stone can be cut into pieces with each piece regenerating into an exact duplicate, or Type, of the original and having the same powers. He gives one to his brother-in-law, the Chief Justice. And another is entrusted to his nephew, who promptly sells it to an American millionaire who gives it to his wife, who accidentally loses it after which another man finds it and uses it to heal a number of ailments in a small town. From there, the various Types of the stone become the concern of the Ministry of Travel and the Foreign Secretary of the British government since it turns out that they can also be used to travel from one point to another.

Then the story becomes a tangle of intrigue in which fanatic members of the Persian Embassy resort to murder in attempts to retrieve the Types; the boyfriend of the Chief Justice's secretary steals one of the stones, the mayor of the town in which people are being healed demands that something be done to prevent all the rioting which has broken out as word of the healing powers of the stone grows; the British government fabricates a cover-up story to discredit the stone; and the scientist begins using human guinea pigs to investigate whether the stone can save people from dying, control people's minds, and travel in time. Mixed in with all of these complications is a romance story of sorts with the conventional love triangle.

And if that weren't enough, there are some wonderful descriptions of mystical events taking place on a supernatural plane, such as: “As he spoke the Stone seemed to open in his hand. He found himself looking into it, down coils of moving and alternated splendor and darkness. Startled, he dropped it on the table, or would have done, but that, as he loosed it, instead of falling, it hung in the air, dilating and deepening...it was as if the room itself and he with it were being sucked into the convolutions of the Stone. Its darkness and its light were no more merely before him but expanding upwards and downwards till they rose to his head and descended to his feet; he felt himself drawn against all his efforts into some unnaturally curved posture – he knew of pain somewhere but could not keep his mind on it...etc.”

It goes on in this vein for over three pages, and there are similar descriptions of heaven or hell in many of his other books.

In looking at the various ways the characters in the book react to the Stone or its Types, one can clearly see echoes of the ways people in the New Testament react to Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit:

The Chief Justice, his secretary, and a sincere Muslim are the only three characters in the book who respect the Stone so much that although on rare occasions they use its power to rescue someone else, they never resort to using it for self-defense. Instead, even when the secretary is about to be killed, she only asks that the Stone do its own thing. I am reminded of Jesus' use of His power only to cure others, but not to save his own life from the cross (“not my will, but Thine”).

The millionaire's rather spoiled wife is happy to get a Type as a gift from her husband since she feels that she deserves it just for being herself. But when she finds out that there are other copies out there, it suddenly loses all worth in her eyes and she demands that her poor husband buy up all the other Types. This is the sort of attitude shown by Jesus' disciples on the occasion when they demand that Jesus stop another person who is healing in His name since he is “not one of us.” It is the tendency to think that we deserve all the good God can give us, as long as He doesn't given any of those undeserving people the same thing.

The scientist could be compared to those cold-blooded sorts who only see in God and His gifts something that can be bent to their own will. This is an echo of the stories in Acts of the magician Simon who thought he could purchase the ability to impart the gift of the Holy Spirit to others (9:8-24) and the seven exorcists who tried to appropriate the names of Jesus and Paul to add to their bag of tricks in healing others of demon possession (19:13-16). In both cases, their attempts end poorly for them, as also happens in Williams' novel.

Both the millionaire (who owns an airline company) and the Minister of Travel have only financial considerations in mind since disastrous consequences would ensue if people could just travel for free anywhere they wished to go. Again, this sort of economic opposition to the word of God is illustrated in the Book of Acts in which Paul runs afoul of the owner of a slave girl who uses her to make money fortune-telling (16:16-24) and Demetrius the silversmith who is afraid Paul's teachings will reduce the demand for his silver shrines to Artemis (19:23-41).

The fanatical Muslims who will stop at nothing to prevent the stone from falling into the hands of infidels are no different from the religious leaders who killed Jesus or Paul's Jewish opponents who attempt to do the same to Paul. And going just a little bit further into the history of Christianity, we can see numerous examples, even up to the present time, in which various branches of Christianity turned viciously against one another to defend the true faith. We are always on shaky ground when we start to think that it is up to us puny humans to bail the Master of the Universe out of trouble.

None of the above adds up to a rigid allegory pointing back to specific biblical examples, but it does illustrate how Williams' Christian beliefs inform all of his writings, no matter how bizarre they may seem on the surface.