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    Outlines of Romantic Theology
    Outlines of Romantic Theology
    Outlines of Romantic Theology
    Ebook175 pages2 hours

    Outlines of Romantic Theology

    By Charles Williams

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    Romantic theology is the working out of ways in which an ordinary relationship between two people can become one that is extraordinary, one that grants us glimpses, visions of perfection. In experiencing romantic love, we experience God: He has been in the experience from the beginning, and the more we learn about it, the more we learn also about Him. -adapted from the Introduction and the Sequel Charles Williams was one of the finest-not to mention one of the most unusual-theologians of the twentieth century. His mysticism is palpable-the unseen world interpenetrates ours at every point, and spiritual exchange occurs all the time, unseen and largely unlooked for. His novels are legend, and as a member of the Inklings, he contributed to the mythopoetic revival in contemporary culture.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn R. Mabry
    Release dateMar 29, 2016
    ISBN9781937002961
    Outlines of Romantic Theology
    Author

    Charles Williams

    Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 1945) was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian and literary critic. Most of his life was spent in London, where he was born, but in 1939 he moved to Oxford with the university press for which he worked and was buried there following his early death.Charles Williams was born in London in 1886, the only son of (Richard) Walter Stansby Williams (18481929) and Mary (née Wall). His father Walter was a journalist and foreign business correspondent for an importing firm, writing in French and German, who was a 'regular and valued' contributor of verse, stories and articles to many popular magazines. His mother Mary, the sister of the ecclesiologist and historian J. Charles Wall, was a former milliner (hatmaker),[4] of Islington. He had one sister, Edith, born in 1889. The Williams family lived in 'shabby-genteel' circumstances, owing to Walter's increasing blindness and the decline of the firm by which he was employed, in Holloway. In 1894 the family moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire, where Williams lived until his marriage in 1917.

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      Book preview

      Outlines of Romantic Theology - Charles Williams

      OUTLINES OF ROMANTIC THEOLOGY

      with which is reprinted

      Religion and Love in Dante:

      The Theology of Romantic Love

      by Charles Williams

      Edited and introduced by

      ALICE MARY HADFIELD

      apocryphile press

      BERKELEY, CA

      www.apocryphile.org

      Contents

      Editor’s Acknowledgments

      Introduction: The Writing of Outlines of Romantic Theology

      OUTLINE OF ROMANTIC THEOLOGY

      Sequel

      Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology Romantic Love

      Principal Works of Charles Williams

      Apocryphile Press

      1700 Shattuck Ave #81

      Berkeley, CA 94709

      www.apocryphile.org

      First Apocryphile edition, 2005.

      For sale in the USA only.

      Sales prohibited in the UK.

      Printed in the United States of America.

      OCR conversion by Francesco Tosi.

      ISBN 0-9764025-8-0

      eISBN 978-1-937002-95-4 (Kindle)

      eISBN 978-1-937002-96-1 (ePub)

      Ebook version 1.5

      Editor’s Acknowledgments

      My principal acknowledgment goes, of course, to that early friend of Charles Williams, the late John Pellow, who lent me his typescript of Outlines of Romantic Theology and allowed me to copy it. Short extracts from his diary have been made available to me by Mr. David Dodds, who is carrying out extensive research upon Charles Williams, and by the diary’s owner, Dr. R. J. W. Pellow. I am also greatly indebted to Dr. Lyle Dorsett, curator of the Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton College, Illinois, who kindly had the original pencilled version of the text copied for me.

      I have throughout been greatly encouraged by Mr. Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates of London, agents for Mr. Michael Williams, owner of the Williams copyrights.

      Generous help has also been given me by many members of the Charles Williams Society (c/o The Royal Bank of Scotland, Holt’s Branch, Whitehall, London S.W.l, England), especially Dr. Brian Horne, Mr. Martin Moynihan, Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Mrs. Anne Ridler, Mrs. Thelma Shuttleworth, and Mrs. Joan and Mr. Richard Wallis, and also by Mrs. Gillian Stone of Oxford.

      Mrs. Susan Cadwallader, my secretary, has been as patient with my disability as she has been efficient with my work. Finally, my husband Charles, who himself once worked with Charles Williams and who later has shared with me a personal exploration of romantic theology, has kindly helped me prepare this book at a time when I had an eyesight problem.

      Alice M. Hadfield

      Introduction: The Writing of Outlines of Romantic Theology

      Alice M. Hadfield

      Charles Williams was born in London on 20 September 1886 of deeply religious lower-middle-class parents. A sister, Edith, followed him. Charles’ quick mind was encouraged by his book-loving father, and when the family moved to St. Albans, a small city twenty miles north of London, Charles was accepted by the best school and did well there.¹

      In 1908 Charles began work at the London office of the Oxford University Press. He was twenty-two and a convinced member of the Anglican Church. Soon afterwards, at a children’s party, he met Florence Conway, a dark, good-looking, intelligent teacher. The result was volcanic.

      It was perhaps a year later, on a cold January night, that Charles handed Florence the sequence of eighty-four sonnets that was later to be published as The Silver Stair.² Sonnet 38 is entitled, That We Know Not Yet What It Is Indeed To Love, and begins:

      I love her. O! what other word could keep

      In many tongues one clear immutable sound,

      Having so many meanings? It is bound,

      First, to religion, signifying: "The steep

      Whence I see God," translated into sleep

      It is: Glad waking, into thought: "Fixed ground;

      A measuring-rod, and for the body: Found."

      These know I, with one more, which is: To weep.

      When the sonnets were published in 1912, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University commented that their author wrote as if he had not suspected there was such a thing as love, and almost before any touch of familiarity had fallen upon it. Charles had indeed never loved before. Now he felt that he stood on the edge of all possibilities, ready to find out the truth about love for himself and follow where it led. He prefaced the printed book with a quotation from William Butler Yeats’ The Shadowy Waters:

      It is love that I am seeking for,

      But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind

      That is not in the world.

      So began what was to grow into a life-long study, the working out, through his own experience and that of the poets, of a theory of romantic theology.

      He meant, I think, by romance what John Buchan once called strangeness flowering from the commonplace, or, if you like, making the ordinary extraordinary. For sex, love, and marriage are commonplace and ordinary; they can also and at the same time be strange and extraordinary. Romance, he felt, does not stand by itself; it is an aspect of the multiform relationship of men, women, and God, the study of which is theology’s business. Romantic theology is, therefore, the working out of ways in which an ordinary relationship between two people can become one that is extraordinary, one that grants us glimpses, visions of perfection.

      Here it is, in his own words, written in pre-marriage days:

      Where did you meet your love, young man?

      Where did you meet your love?

      ‘I met my love in a noisy room With a carven roof above.’

      What did you say to your love, young man,

      With all your mother wit?

      ‘How hot it is! or How do you do?

      And there was an end of it!’

      Who was beside you then, young man?

      Who was beside you then?

      ‘Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar,

      And a crowd of shepherd-men!’

      What did you say to them, young man,

      Silently, through the din?

      ‘"Princes, when ye come in to her,

      I pray you, lead me in."’

      In the Land of Juda,

      in Poems of Conformity, 1917

      He and Florence were married quietly in 1917 in St. Albans Abbey. He had thought nervously of this necessary step, but he took it, moving into a second stage of development — love in marriage and fatherhood. Three volumes of poetry followed: Poems of Conformity (1917), Divorce (1920),³ and Windows of Night (early 1925, but written earlier). All three were published by Humphrey Milford, head of the Oxford University Press’s London branch.

      Two influences may have suggested a book on romantic love: Dante and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Charles Williams discovered Dante, both in The New Life and in The Divine Comedy, and thus found another soul upon whom love had wrought powerfully; he had also since his youth been concerned with finding new meanings and insights within the Arthurian stories told by Malory. Yet the efficient cause of his writing Outlines of Romantic Theology may well have been Coventry Patmore, the religiously-minded and enthusiastic Victorian poet of married love. Williams’s own marriage, the insights he had been trying to work out in his volumes of poetry, and the stimulus of the Oxford University Press’s move in 1924 to beautiful, spacious offices in eighteenth-century Amen House, formed the background. Could the idea of writing down what he had discovered have come from the Prologue to Patmore’s The Angel in the House?

      The poet, looking for a theme in green and undiscover’d ground, tells his wife

      "I have the very well-head found

      Whence gushes the Pierian Spring."

      She asks what the subject is to be,

                                        "The Life

      Of Arthur, or Jerusalem’s Fall?"

      and is told

      "Neither: your gentle self, my Wife,

      And love, that grows from one to all."

      Indeed Williams could well have chosen Arthur, as he did later in other books, though he never followed Tasso to Jerusalem. Instead, like Patmore, he began to write down what he had discovered about love and marriage. So, probably in a few weeks, he wrote Outlines of Romantic Theology, his first prose book — he himself describes it as a pamphlet.

      His friend John Pellow — a learned and lively fellow poet — wrote of Williams in his diary on 21 August 1924: "he is writing Outlines of Romantic Theology, a prose version of Divorce, and Conformity." Pellow had not, of course, then seen Windows of Night, which was to be published a few months later.

      I have chosen a quotation from each book to illustrate Pellow’s remark:

      Hands, bound but to a simple pledge,

      Discover new vocation;

      Instincts, our bodies’ depths that dredge,

      Grow teachers of salvation.

      O who can doubt the perfect Whole

      In his eternal trysting,—

      Love, of the reasonable soul

      And human flesh subsisting!

      From Commentaries V,

      in Poems of Conformity

      Then surging from those portals the mind of Wordsworth drew

      Immortal strength from woods and hills, and undefeated flew

      The Burning Heart of Dante, and all of matter strove

      To aid the arms of Mansoul⁴ in nature and in love.

      From Ballad of Material Things,

      in Divorce

      Once in a glory

      To my heart he came,

      Born of a maiden,

      With love for his name;

      But what bitter passion

      On myself for tree

      Hath his bounty suffered!

      Now deep in me,

      Silent, unmanifest,

      Hiding his power,

      During a time and times,

      Waits he his hour.

      From Saint Mary Magdalene,

      in Windows of Night

      The prefatory quotation to Outlines of Romantic Theology, Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? (John 14:9), gives us a clue to its theme. In experiencing romantic love, we experience God: He has been in the experience from the beginning, and the more we learn about it, the more we learn also about Him. Charles writes as a Christian and his book is firmly placed within the Christian tradition, but it need not be; for is not some experience of the supernatural part of any deeply-felt love, especially one that leads to marriage and family?

      The book, I think, is Charles stating his position. Perhaps he felt obscurely that his love for, and marriage to, Florence was not widening and deepening as it should. He was quite right. Maybe he was, to use his own phrase, keeping back something of the price (see p. 51); maybe Florence was over-concentrating on their one child and under-participating in Charles’ quickly opening life at the Press. Be that as it may, turmoil lay close ahead.

      The stages of the book’s writing are difficult to understand. I think that it was written in longhand early in 1924, and then typed, probably by his sister Edith. In that form it was shown to his friend John Pellow, and probably also to those whose initials are given in the dedication. I have a copy of Pellow’s comments and Williams’s notes upon them, which refer to page numbers that run continuously and suggest a finished text rather shorter than we now have. He was probably pulling together such comments from his friends when he wrote wryly to Pellow on 5 September 1924: "I scribble away at Romantic Theology, a book which will probably affect profoundly the whole thought of the Universal Church."

      This same typescript must have been submitted to Humphrey Milford at about the same time that Williams sent it to his friends, for on 6 September he writes again to Pellow: "T. B. Ripon has reported but secretly — at least, Caesar⁵ hides the document: which infuriates me. I have hinted at openness, without effect. Caesar, in a private note to me, says (most charmingly): ‘I fear this is not for us. It may be for all time and I may be like the poor Indian,⁶ but I am afraid of it and of you.’ So the unfortunate Romantic Theology shall cuddle the equally unfortunate Chapel of the Thorn⁷ in a private seclusion…. Well, actually they shall be in a public seclusion — since whoever wants to read them may. If T. B. Ripon stands for The Bishop of Ripon," it seems that Milford asked him for a report on Williams’s typescript, after which Milford wrote his note to Williams.

      With my own publishing background, I find it very odd that Williams did not wait to submit a finished manuscript to such a key figure as his own employer, so that he in turn could have sent it to an outside reader. It is even odder, perhaps, that Williams could expect to see such a reader’s report, which in my experience would always be treated as at any rate partly confidential.

      However, he continued to write. On 16 September 1924 he wrote Pellow, thanking him for some theological references and saying: The book, with several lacunae, is now finished. But the lacunae will take some filling up. Oddly, at this point he seems to have rewritten the whole book in longhand, in pencil, on small sheets about eight inches by five inches in size, adding several new paragraphs while doing so. This manuscript survives in the Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton College, Illinois.

      On October 3 he told Pellow that "Romantic Theology is temporarily finished, but it is only in pencil and I don’t know when I shall have it typed. However, it shall be yours when I do. It was indeed re-typed, probably again by his sister, for by June 1925 a colleague, Fred Page, had sent it to the Nonesuch Press, by whom it was rejected. Pellow then asked Williams to be allowed to borrow it, and he noted in his diary on June 22: A rare and wonderful book (I read the first 2 or 3 chapters in the evening)." At the end of that

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