A Severe Mercy

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken is primarily an autobiographical love story. He recounts how he meets and marries Davy and the adventures they have together. He describes how they were determined to protect their love; they called it "The Shining Barrier". He tells of their conversion to Christianity while at Oxford and how C.S.  Lewis's books were instrumental in it. Vanauken corresponds with and then meets Lewis during their time in Oxford. After one lunch together, Lewis is waving as he leaves, then stops, turns, and bellows across the street, "Christians NEVER say goodbye!" They continues to write after Van moved from Oxford and his wife becomes sick and then dies. A Severe Mercy is C. S. Lewis's own turn of phrase that he used in a letter to Van meaning "a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love" in describing Davy's death.

Entering Vanauken's world, especially that of Oxford, England where he met Lewis is entrancing. I was there with their little group discussing and enjoying T.S. Eliot, The Wind and the Willows, and the mystery and wonder of Charles Williams. This alone made the book a worthwhile quick read for me even if I was initially disappointed in the book. (This was probably due to me expecting a C.S. Lewis writer, and, in all fairness, he wasn't the author of this book.)

Seeing on the pages the mutual love and marital bliss Vanauken shared with his wife made me thankful of the same. I smiled at their finishing each others poems, being in tune with the others mood, sharing the love of a symphony, and was reminded not to let those early dreams that you share together die just because now you are distracted by the busyness of the world. I needed to be made aware if that again. What could be worse that me taking a perfect love like that for granted for even a moment? I'm trying to hold onto that wisdom, lest I get distracted by the busy nothings. Vanauken talks of his and Davey's "Shining Barrier" - their shield of love, their walled garden -  and how it is eventually breached by God. I think I disagree, at least in some way. I understand his meaning, but wasn't his breach (in his feelings for Jane) a breach that would in no way bring a greater joy and fullness to their "inloveness" whereas worshiping God in your marriage could only make it better, stronger, and the other person dearer in a way you knew nothing of before? Thankfully we get to witness his realization and changed heart. The book does lag in parts, and I felt like I was waiting for something to happen - good or bad. The most meaningful parts of the book for me are some of Lewis's own words in his return letters to Vanauken.

Vanauken writes to Lewis after their move from Oxford, telling him, "No doubt Christ was in the churches, somewhere, but He was not easy to find." To him and his wife, who "had accepted the ancient Christian faith" coming back from Oxford and finding it so watered down was depressing. He remembers that "it was about as far from the strong red wine of the faith as grape juice. The Faith was too strong: the wine must be turned to water in an anti-miracle."

After Davy dies, Lewis and Vanauken correspond, and Lewis writes to comfort his friend. In one of Lewis's letters, I found myself agreeing most emphatically with him (who called Van's reasoning "very unsound") on Vanauken's agreement with his wife to have no children. "You spared her (v. wrongly) the pains of childbirth: do not evade your own, the travail you must undergo while Christ is being born in you." What a perfect reminder in any grief or trial.

Go under the Mercy.

The Place of the Lion

It's difficult to choose which of Charles Williams's works of fiction is my favorite- although, I think it may be Descent into Hell- but The Place of the Lion is also high on the list. There was one particular scene in the latter that impressed me. Richardson is standing outside of a church when the people are beginning to come out. One elderly lady approaches him and asks, "Are you saved?" Richardson contemplating the question, thinks to himself, "She had reduced indescribable complexities of experience to an epigram." I like that phrasing, but his answer is also memorable. "I believe salvation is for all who will have it, and I will have it by the only possible means."

Heaven's War

This graphic novel, Heaven's War, is written by Micah Harris and illustrated by Michael Gaydos, and is very Charles Williams-ian. The story's characters include the Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. If you are hoping for fuzzy talking beavers of Narnia, this is not for you. If, however, you are weird enough to be a Charles Williams fan (as I am), you will not be disappointed by the angelic battles and travels through space and time. The endnotes are very helpful for understanding the history behind the story (for me, at least). Overall, a really cool idea.

'This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.'

C.S. Lewis writes in ‘Williams and the Arthuriad’, Taliessin Through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, and Arthurian Torso, by Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 335:

Two spiritual maxims were constantly present to the mind of Charles Williams: ‘This also is Thou’ and ‘Neither is this Thou’. Holding the first we see that every created thing is, in its degree, an image of God, and the ordinate and faithful appreciation of that thing a clue which, truly followed, will lead back to Him. Holding the second we see that every created thing, the highest devotion to moral duty, the purest conjugal love, the saint and the seraph, is no more than an image, that every one of them, followed for its own sake and isolated from its source, becomes an idol whose service is damnation. The first maxim is the formula of the Romantic Way, the ‘affirmation of images’: the second is that of the Ascetic Way, the ‘rejection of images’. Every soul must in some sense follow both. The Ascetic must honour marriage and poetry and wine and the face of nature even while he rejects them; the Romantic must remember even in his Beatrician moment ‘Neither is this Thou’.

Charles Williams, theologian

"It is not, of course, possible to deny that heaven—in the sense of salvation, bliss, or the presence of God—can exist in space; that would be to deny the Incarnation. But heaven, as such, only exists because of the nature of God, and to his existence alone all bliss is related. In a Jewish tradition God was called “the Place” because all places were referred to him, but not he to any place. With this in mind it might be well that private meditation should sometimes vary the original clause by “Our Father in whom is heaven”. The change is for discipline of the mind, for though it is incapable of the apparent superficiality yet it is also incapable of the greater profundity of the original. That depth prevents another error as easy as the first and perhaps more dangerous. It is comparatively easy to train the mind to remember that the nature of God is not primarily spatial; it is not quite so easy to remember that it is not primarily paternal—that is, that he does not exist primarily for us."
He Came Down From Heaven, Charles Williams

I cannot call this a book review because too much time has passed since I first read Charles Williams's book, He Came Down From Heaven. It is more of a meandering, and as the ideas of this Inkling roll over and over in my head I begin to comprehend their significance. I have to read him slower than most writers, endeavoring to absorb. The way he writes, George Eliot calls “a severe mental scamper.” If one attempts to define every line of his poetry or to quickly grasp the ideas of his books, they will go one way and miss him coming from the other direction. One must withhold judgment, in a sense, keep reading,and join him in the mental scamper to understand what he seeks. Perhaps reading Williams is like eating lobster tail or some such dish that you must work to get at but is more than worth all of the effort.

Williams's idea of Love- the theology of Romantic Love,and the practice of Substituted Love are explored in He Came Down From Heaven. In talking of Jesus's Incarnation,

Man having got himself into a state when he was capable of willingly shedding blood, the shedding of blood could no longer be neglected.

And,

What mankind could not do, manhood (the Son of Man) did, and a manhood which was at the disposal of all men and women.

On prayer,

Prayer, like everything else, was meant for a means of joy; but, in our knowledge of the good as evil, we have to recover it so, and it is not an easy thing. Prayer is thought of as a means to an end, but the end itself is sometimes only the means to the means, as with all love.

On repentance,

...repentance is no more than a passionate intention to know all things after the mode of heaven...

Williams is primarily thought of as a writer of novels, of supernatural stories- not as a theologian. In fact Thomas Howard asserted that he only knew of one theologian, Urs von Balthasar, who was interested in Williams as a theologian.

Henry Carpenter, in The Inklings, wrote that Williams

seemed in fact to be able to express his own thoughts best by taking phrases from the great poets, seemed to think largely in poetry...

Perhaps this is why so many are unable to understand the mental scamper. His writing reveals an intensity and emotion. Williams's father taught him that there were many sides to every argument, taught him that he must understand the reasoning too, taught him to absorb doubt and disbelief into his own beliefs.

When reading him, I am repeatedly struck with his reflections on Love. The influence of George MacDonald is obvious. Charles Williams considered that love towards another human being might be a step towards God. He also wrote that "Self-sacrifice (even Martyrdom) by itself (without love) is as remote from the way of salvation as self-indulgence."

Williams believed that

Hell has made three principal attacks on the Way of Romantic Love. The dangerous assumptions produced are: (1) the assumption that it will naturally be everlasting; (2) the assumption that it is personal; (3) the assumption that it is sufficient.

In a poem to Williams after his death, C.S.Lewis wrote

Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard
To see plainly or record truly. The new light imposes change,
Re-adjusts all a life-landscape as it thrusts down its probe from the sky,
To create shadows, to reveal waters, to erect hills and deepen glens.
The slant alters. I can't see the old contours. It's a larger world
Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on
the ridge.
Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of
spring?

A hard question and worth talking a whole night on.
But with whom? Of whom now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death
Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless—oh unless it were you?

We can no longer ask guidance or exchange thoughts with Charles Williams, but we can (if we can exert ourselves) join in the mental scamper.

substituted love

Charles Williams on The Practice of Substituted Love:

The denial of the self has become metaphysical. He (Christ) came to turn the world upside-down, and no one's self-respect will stand for that. It is habitual to us therefore to prefer to be miserable rather than to give, and to believe that we can give, our miseries up.

(from his book, He Came Down From Heaven)