Speaking Forth

Here's a little interview I did with LuAnn Jennings of the Church and Art Network. I encourage you to check out C & A's resources; you might find something there to help your own vision for artistic excellence in the Church.

Batman and violence

As I'm sure every sane person is, I'm kind of reeling from news of the tragic shooting in Colorado this morning. I've been praying, in a sort of almost subconscious murmur, for -- what? Healing for the wounded, comfort for the grieving, sanity in the collective response, justice for the criminal, probably?

I want to reflect a little bit on the film context of this horror, without -- of course -- assuming or suggesting that I have all the facts or any kind of particular insight into the event. And most of all without losing one ounce of my sympathy with the real human pain. But since this blog is on art and faith, it seems appropriate to reflect on a real-life incident in which art  and violence have been flung together into a meaningless partnership that just screams for faith to make sense out of it. 

First, I wonder what the right response is, as an empathetic human, to the tragedy. Put simply, should everybody go see the movie now, right away, tonight, as planned? Is it better to deny ourselves that one little pleasure, in order to reflect on the terrible losses? Or is it better to go out, to honor those people by not allowing a psychopath to interfere with art, with the reputation and profits of those who made the art, with a "normal" weekend life? Why should the movie-makers suffer as a result of one madman's evil?

But of course, it isn't nearly that simple. My going out or staying home doesn't make a difference to those who died. It doesn't make a difference to their families, or to those who are wounded. And if everyone stays home, or everyone goes out? It doesn't bring back or heal anyone. 

Any statement made by any particular moviegoer is ambiguous. The statement made by collective movie-goers is ambiguous. Neither a boycott nor a box-office record would make a simple statement. Actions are texts, and texts are subject to multiple interpretations. 

Textual actions as response are scattered over all the usual venues: social media, news channels, print media, public conversations. And how do we read those textual actions? There are calls for vengeance. Expressions of sympathy. Politically-slanted protest slogans.

Next, there is the movie itself. 

I do not know whether the particular movie played into whatever twisted noise-feed served in place of rational thought in the brain of the killer. I doubt that anyone knows, yet. And it really doesn't matter. If it did, if he chose that movie because he loved it, or hated it, or wanted to be in it, or simply because it has loud shoot-out scenes, what difference does that make?

It could make several kinds of difference, again, depending how we read it.

Here is one consideration. The Daily Beast writes that "descriptions of what happened—a deranged man in a gas mask opening fire on innocent victims—eerily mirrors a scene in the movie, where the evil, masked Bane (Tom Hardy) aims a machine gun at a crowd of people in Gotham City, massacring bystanders left and right." Other news articles reported that the killer was wearing "full black assault gear," like Batman? Or like the antagonists? 

Does that mean the movie bears even the tiniest bit of blame? Is Tom Hardy, or Christopher Nolan, or Warner Brothers, even the littlest bit responsible for, if not the killer's actions, at least his choice of staging, costume, casting, blocking, and narrative? 

Yes, maybe: If the killer had gone crazy in a previous blockbuster season, maybe he would have dressed up as an orc, or a stormtrooper, or a Sith lord. That hardly matters. Those are "accidental" characteristics of this crime, in the philosophical sense, not "essential" characteristics. The essentials resided in the evil imagination of the killer. The fact that he sought out accidentals and opportunity in Dark Knight Rises by no means implicates the movie in his crime, because....

No, absolutely not. The movie is not to blame...Because the point of the Batman movies is that crime is evil. Batman is fighting crime. The very purpose of the fictional world of these films is to create a scenario in which the hero can stop men just like this morning's madman. He missed the point. The point is not that shooting and death and mayhem are glorious. The point is precisely that they are not. 

The point is that the bad guys lose. 

If even one miniscule good thing comes out of this universe of horror, there is a chance that it might remove some of our unhealthy voyeurism-of-violence. I find that I can't even watch the trailers right now; they are too sickeningly like reality. I want to see the movie. I'm sure it's a brilliant piece of cinematic art; the first two were. I was going to see it tonight. But it's just to hard, humanly speaking, to watch a terrorist take off a black hood, revealing a gas mask and “full assault gear,” then walk into a football stadium and start blowing things up. It's too hard to watch bodies falling and hear people screaming. And that's good. I shouldn't enjoy violence. Even though I know (without actually knowing the ending) that the good guys win, in some sense or other, I should not enjoy watching the little people die. Every little person matters. Nobody in that theatre was Batman; nobody was the epic hero of our times. But there were heroes in there. There were members of the military, for starters. And each person who died took with him or her an entire universe of thoughts, feelings, and dreams. I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. There's a line in that book, when the man and the boy are walking along among burnt bodies. The man thinks something like, “So many thousands of unnumbered, unrealized dreams.” That's a huge part of the horror of death, from an earthly point of view. Each unfulfilled dream is now permanently unfulfilled. That is part of why we feel worse over the death of a young person; more dreams unfulfilled. For that reason, I hate our cultural insensitivity to the “expendability” of minor characters. Nameless deaths. Crowds wiped out. And we enjoy this as backdrop for our hero's dramatic rescue of the named characters, played by top-billed stars. We shouldn't enjoy that.

So I think it's probably OK to go see the movie. Maybe not right away. And certainly not with the usual callous attitude towards crowd violence. We should learn that lesson, at least.

5th Review of CADUCEUS

Anne M. Doe Overstreet, author of the poetry collection Delicate Machinery Suspended, has written a detailed, careful, thoughtful review of Caduceus that bears testimony to her own close reading skills as much as to anything I may have done. You can read her review over on Barnes & Noble, and I have also reprinted the review here. Many thanks, Anne!

Read it. Read it again. And then again.

The title—Caduceus, that heraldic staff most often associated with Greek mythology and Hermes—sets us up to expect the stuff of legends, the large, the heroic. Sørina Higgins’ latest collection surprises the reader with more: an apostolic presence kneels alongside a contemporary woman attentive to communion in proximity with bitter Mordred, the doomed son, each encountering or aware of “Someone in this empty room”, each striving to give shape to that encounter. There is a psalmic quality to the telling that rings true, inviting the reader to witness the wider scope of faith, that complicated pairing of ecstasy and doubt. There is much here to savor and to reconsider; the reader will benefit from repeated visits. Consider Demeter’s account of the conception of Persephone with an ordinary man who “smoothed the blighted / parts of me, and made us one, then made us into three”, which echoes the triune nature of time that Christ inhabits, “before and after, in the Trinity, / He surpassed the (how many?) there are”. There are countless such reverberations. The first mother, Eve, is separated only by the breath of a page from Mary, mother of the second Adam. One rivulet braids into another creek and the individual piece becomes a deeper thing, tasting of God. A pivotal poem, “Natal Astronomy”, articulates the suspicion or experience of the divine that courses through the human story, for, as the poet says, while the old gods “have no similitude… in this Advent night” yet their “thousand pages… make thin the mystery” and “every figurine foreshadows the truth”. Certain themes run clear in each section, but throughout the collection as a whole, a subtle current of connection also flows. Higgins’ ability to tease out themes and imagery inhabiting the larger narrative of history, to present and bind them in unexpected ways, is one of her strengths. The result is subtle and pleasing. The poet’s diction and lyric lines lure the reader into realms of classic mythology and early saints without pretense. Her language ranges from formal—Higgins possesses an enviable competence with form, particularly the sonnet—to a looser free verse that propel the reader, much like the Dramatis Personae of the Epilogue, through the intimacies of lovers, skeptics, preachers, believers, metaphors, the voice of God. In the opening piece, the speaker, who bears the caduceus, strides onto the stage, restless, strung out on language and at the mercy of those who speak or tell their quotidian tales. The accumulated voices drive the godlet messenger a little mad. And so they should. The voice of their experience is immense. But the poet herself makes deft use of the only form that can hold the entirety of what she encounters and gives voice to: poetry. "The pattern, somehow, the star-field dance, / was like a text. Was less than words, / and therefore more: was poetry. / Was story, and had characters."

Charles Williams Summary #3: "Poems of Conformity" (1917)

Poems of Conformity is Williams's second volume of poems.

It contains more variety of forms than his first book, The Silver Stair, which was a sequence of 84 sonnets. He still uses fairly conventional meters in this second volume, but handles them deftly. In fact, the more I read these early works, the more I like them simply as poems. (The less I like some of their content, but that's a different story). Anyway, until now I have agreed with scholars who have pretty much dismissed these early books. In fact, I wrote in a paper recently:

His early volumes (beginning with The Silver Stair in 1912 and culminating with Heroes and Kings in 1930) are frequently called “pastiche” (see, for instance, Dunning 113), and employ rigid, archaic, juvenile rhyme schemes and metrical patterns. 

 Well, now I'm not so sure. These are fairly skillful poems. They are not wildly original, and when one compares them with what T. S. Eliot was writing at the time—this is the year “Prufrock” was published—Williams does not come out looking very good. Sure, there are hints of Shelley, Herbert, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, but there is a fine line between imitation and allusion. I think this collection is more on the side of allusion.

It was published in the same year that he got married and that he joined the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. However, I do not have the exact chronology of these events precisely mastered. Here is what I know:

• February 1915: CW tells Alice Meynell that he can't write poetry 
• May 1915: Harold Eyers killed in action 
• 20 May 1915: CW writes a poem memorializing Eyers 
• 12 April 1917: CW marries Florence “Michal” Sarah Conway 
• June 1917: Ernest Nottingham killed in action in France 
• July 1917: Poems of Conformity published 
• 21 September 1917: CW joins A. E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross 

But what's missing is the chronology of the writing, compilation, and revision of Poems of Conformity. Hadfield tells us that he submitted the MS to the publisher Elkin Matthews, who had turned it down. (Hadfield narrates, interestingly, that “In a temper, Charles threw it aside and marched out of the office at five-thirty”—but neglects to say on what day this particular 5:30 tantrum occurred; Hadfield 25). Then Fred Page (CW's office mate) sent it to OUP, who took it up. But Hadfield does not tell us when this happened.

Nowadays, publishing takes a long time. I finished a first draft of Caduceus in October of 2009; it was rejected all that spring, then I resubmitted it in the fall of 2010, it was accepted in March of 2011, and the book was finally published in February of 2012. But I don't know if a similar schedule applied in the 19-teens—or, quite probably, that since CW worked for OUP, they may have rushed his book through on a fast track. And I also don't know how much revision he may have done between rejection and acceptance, and then again after acceptance.

Why does it matter when he wrote the poems, when the book was first rejected, then accepted? Well, because of the relationship of the interpretation of these poems to the date of deaths and a wedding.

There are several major themes in this book: War, Romantic Theology, the City, and True Myth.

Williams had to write about war: World War One was raging at the time, and Harold Eyers and Ernest Nottingham, mentioned above as killed in action, were two of his closest friends. The poem entitled “20 May 1915” is clearly meant to memorialize Harold. But the chronology of the writing of the book would also determine whether he had time to memorialize Ernest as well. I'd like to know that.

ROMANTIC THEOLOGY 

The concept of Romantic Theology is very highly developed in this volume, which is dedicated to “Michal.” What's more, there are poems that clearly describe sex, especially the series of Sonnets on pp. 36-41. How about these powerful lines:

What Love indeed doth us inspire,
What doth our shrinking bodies fire
Till half a sacrifice and half
A triumph, all a sobbing laugh
Teaches how sacrifice may be
It own exceeding ecstasy;
How shall achieve the final Deed?
(“Churches,” p. 69). 

And yet he occasionally calls her a “virgin” (p. 47) or a “maid” (sorry, didn't note the page number). This suggests that the book contains poems written both before and after their wedding—I remember coming across something somewhere in Hadfield that Williams was a “self-described virgin at 30” when he got married.

Well, who cares about the private sexual life of this author? Really, I agree—except that Williams made a religion out of his private sexual life, and it is impossible to interpret his writings correctly without an understanding of that religion, which he called “Romantic Theology.” We'll soon be hearing about his book Outlines of Romantic Theology (published only posthumously) and later about one of his final masterpieces, The Figure of Beatrice. These are the two works in which he explicitly laid out the early and late forms of this system, although it is implicitly present, arguably, in all his works.

What is this Romantic Theology, and by what logic does it work? I have attempted to chart its progress in The Chapel of the Thorn, The Silver Stair, and Poems of Conformity, and hope to continue tracking its later developments. Here is what I have put together, speculatively:

• In his 20s, Williams seems to have gone through a crisis of faith. Specifically, he seems to have questioned the exclusive claims of Christianity. I put forward this suggestion based on the syncretism of Chapel of the Thorn, while I fully realize the dangers of biographical criticism based on a reading of poetry. 
• Somewhere, sometime around 1912, it appears that he decided “No one can do more than choose what to believe,” and chose to believe in Christianity. 
• Then he faced another dilemma. Given the exclusive truth of Christianity and its moral injunctions for how to live, he had to choose between the two traditional Ways of honoring God: the Way of the Affirmation of Images and the Way of the Negation of Images. Williams was much more naturally and temperamentally suited, it seems, for the Negative Way. He was “born under Virgo” and thought at times that maybe he had the gift of celibacy and should remain single (according to Hadfield). Thus, the theme of The Silver Stair is renunciation. 
• However, he got married. So at some point between 1912 and 1917 he chose the Way of Affirmation. He then committed himself to being a kind of prophet of this Way, although he really strove to balance the two Ways all his life. 
• The essence of the Way of Affirmation is that created objects and pleasures—and people—legitimately reveal something about God, and can be used not as objects of worship, but as objects of joy and pleasure such that our worship kind of passes through the object up to the Creator of that object. People are, indeed, the best “objects,” or icons, of this sort, because only humans are specifically said to be made “in the image of God.” 
• Well, then, the best way to get to know Someone invisible is to look at an image of Him. Based on this, Williams went on to say that the absolute best earthly object of this kind of “secondary worship” (that's what he calls it later, secondary worship) is the Beloved Woman. 
• Side note: how obnoxiously phallocentric of him. One assumes that women can do the same via using the Beloved Man as icon, but I haven't come across anything where he says that. Humph. 
• So, then, specifically in 1917, Williams was using Florence “Michal” Sarah Conway Williams as his Object of Secondary Worship, as the icon of his Romantic Theology. By affirming—praising, enjoying, delighting in—her excellences, he was taking steps up the ladder towards God, he believed. 

That, so far as I can make out, is the logic of Romantic Theology. I would be glad of corrections, additions, disagreements, etc.

This kind of iconic use of Michal, then, comprises the largest portion of Poems of Conformity. Here are lines that could be taken up as an epigraph of Romantic Theology:

How, though I know him full of grace,
Should I before the God's young face
Dare kneel or gifts unfurl?
Only I bring them all to thee
Who still, Adored! hast need of me,
Being but a mortal girl!
(“Epilogue,” p. 126). 

I wonder if even Dante was ever so explicit! At moments in this volume, the narrative voice seems shocked by how powerful sex is, by how much her physical presence changes him. And yet the longing, the sense of loss even during possession, is also present—as I believe it must be with every thoughtful pair of lovers. Who has not felt, during a kiss or an embrace, the heartbreak and horror of the future time when you will be torn apart? Who does not gird oneself for future grief even in the moment of first vows? As Williams puts it, in the context of remembering Christ's sufferings even while enjoying the delights of love, “Dear, / Livelong be our entreaty this, / To feel the sword in every kiss” (“Presentation,” p. 46).

It is also in this book that Williams starts to move from from a narrative microcosm to a diagrammatic microcosm—which requires quite some explanation. Let me pause to explicate what I believe are the two central poems, and what I mean by this use of “narrative” and “diagrammatic” should then become clear[er].

The most important poem in this book for the concept of Romantic Theology is “The Christian Year” (pp. 72-77). In this poem, Williams develops even more clearly an idea that he first put forward in The Silver Stair. This is the idea that each human marriage follows the narrative pattern of Christ's life on earth. In “The Christian Year,” Williams goes through the following incidents:

• Annunciation 
• Conception 
• Mary's Pregnancy 
• Nativity 
• Adoration of the Shepherds 
• Adoration of the Magi 
• Flight to Egypt 
• Return to Nazareth 
• Presentation in the Temple and Simon's Prophecy 
• Crucifixion 
• Burial 
• Resurrection 
• Road to Emmaus 

...and in each description, he makes clear that this event is being re-enacted in the lives of the lovers. For instance, in the Crucifixion and Burial sections, two voices converse, thus:

“Surely his death had end when once he died?”
“Always, in all men, is he crucified!”
“Of old he rose: shall he not rise in us?” 

and later:

“Estrangèd grow our hearts; cold, cold our will.”
“Aramathean Joseph felt that chill.” 

Perhaps most beautifully, here are the lines about marriage vows matching up to the Nativity:

...the Child brought forth within
This silver-lanterned shelter of our skin,
Where whispers rustle like heaped straw; our hands,
Serving that Innocence for swaddling-bands,
Clasp the invisible Immanuel thus:
Lo, the Lord's glory is come in to us! 

Whew. This seems crazy.

I mean, who thinks that Jesus gets born in them when they fall in love? And what if you fall in love more than once? (Williams had to face that problem later). And what about if you fall out of love—not just in the normal way, when every marriage has to transition from an erotic power to serious companionship and mutual labor, but in a fatal, divorcing kind of way? These are serious problems. Of course, the potential charge of idolatry is also a serious problem. But I've written enough (for now) about that elsewhere.

Another place Williams may have gotten this idea of Romantic Theology as Way of Affirmation was, possibly, from his reading in the Occult. There is a Hermetic principle, formulated in the “Emerald Tablet” that was not written by Hermes Trismagistus, called the principle of Correspondence. In Madame Blavatsky's translation, this principle is: “What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of the one thing.” In short, “as above, so below.” As in Heaven, so on earth. Or, vice-versa, then, what is on earth reveals what is in heaven. Especially one's girlfriend.

It seems likely that Williams would have encountered this principle already, because he had certainly been reading books by A. E. Waite at this point. Indeed, only two months after the publication of Poems of Conformity, Williams joined the FRC.

OK, so what did I mean by moving from a narrative microcosm to a diagrammatic one? Well, the narrative microcosm is the idea that each pair of lovers re-enacts Christ's life. The diagrammatic idea is just in its infant form in in The Chapel of the Thorn, The Silver Stair, and Poems of Conformity. It's the concept he would develop later, in which each part of the human body matches up to a country on the map of Europe, and all of those match up to certain virtues or qualities of God's kingdom on earth.

The other central poem, “The Repose of Our Lady: A Dirge” (pp. 106-110) is not so much about Romantic Theology. Instead, it is about that other fascinating topic, True Myth. But Williams (characteristically) goes about the whole True Myth thing in an odd way. He makes Mary into a fertility goddess.

I kid you not:

To her more made than to Demeter suit;
In the ploughed field the busy corn struck root
By Her; with great fish seas grew populous,
And little ponds with stickleback and newt.
. . .
...barnfowl and herd she blessed
With chick and calf, and the wild beast with cubs.
. . .
She is the mother of flocks and corn heaped high,
She is the mother of all fertility...
. . .
Sunshine her smile, her spread hand rainfall gives:
But on her deep breasts Love that ever lives,
Refreshing all worlds, making all things new,
Throve, who eternally and ever thrives. 

Seriously. Charles, will you never cease to surprise and amaze?

Charles Williams Summary #1: The Silver Stair (1912)

The Silver Stair was Charles Williams's first published book. It was published in London by Herbert & Daniel in 1912. It is a collection of 84 Petrarchan sonnets on the theme Renunciation of Love. He presented it to his girlfriend, Florence Conway, in January between 1909 and 1911. Hadfield, CW's biographer (until a better biographer be found—that is, until Grevel Lindop produces his magnum opus) suspects it was 1910. Florence read the poems and, perspicacious girl, wondered if they meant he was going to join a monastery. Instead, they became engaged and remained engaged for nine (9!) years while Charles wrestled with the competing claims of the Way of Affirmation and the Way of Negation.

That is the overarching theme of this volume: the relative merits and pains of the Via Affirmativa and the Via Negativa. Williams naturally connected the Way of the Rejection of Images with asceticism. It suggests that his bent was towards Rejection until he met Florence, and that she guided him (consciously or not—perhaps just by her presence? or perhaps by conversation?—we will never know in this life) into Affirmation, which is partly if not wholly why he saw in her his Way to God.

This volume is full of the Negative Way. There is some sense that the Affirmative Way is the Garden of Eden, while the Negative Way is the Garden of Gethsemane; the Affirmative Way is Golden, while the Negative Way is Silver (hence the title—a sacrificial, ascetic stairway to Heaven). Here are the clearest lines about the Gold/Silver dichotomy: 

But if thou choose love, wilt thou have this gift
Fashioned in work of silver or of gold?--
Aureate, bought with toil and holy thrift, 
With filling and with emptying horn and cruse?
Argent, with tears, sad hours, and frustrate hold?--
Or wilt thou enter empty-handed? Choose. 
(from Sonnet XLV, "The two Offerings of Love")

The narrator thinks of the end of love before it even begins. He talks about Convents, Brotherhood, a Monastic Chapel, and abstinence. He claims that the cross rebukes us and makes us turn from earthly love, saying that any who have “put off love for Love’s sake” do the “greater thing.” Throughout the series, the narrator is trying to decide “If I should seek her or should stand aloof,” asking whether God desires marriages or celibacy. He asks, “Shall we reject…Fruition?” And seems to answer Yes when he states that if we chose to enjoy “corporal pleasaunce” we are fools! He desires her, but he also desires “Never to seek her eyes with mine, to touch / Never,” and thinks perhaps it is best if “The Lover will choose locusts & wild honey rather than Dead Sea fruit.” In his most extreme moments, he believes that love must be renounced if Christ is to enter. He believes that “love can be consummated and so grow old and die”—or it can be consecrated to perpetual virginity, which is its true telos. And in the end, the consummation of the love appears to be a commitment to perpetual virginity.

In short, The Silver Stair contains a startlingly clear Via Negativa that contrasts with his later wide-spread use of the Via Affirmativa, but also helps explain lots of the imagery and language of Rejection in the later works.

And yet Charles married Florence in 1917. Of course, biographical criticism is suspect, and I am entirely guilty here of trying to read the Life from the Verse. It's really the Verse that matters. 

The Silver Stair is a gorgeously well-structured volume of verse whose strengths of organization and narrative power have been overlooked due to the derivative pastiche of its rhymes and prosody—but even those have been overstated. It is not the work of a child prodigy, but it is surprisingly mature poetry for a 23-to-26-year-old. CW handles the iambic pentameter deftly, if not with absolute consistency. There are very strong enjambments that work well against the near-regularity of the lines. The tone is almost precisely that of Edna St. Vincent Millay, so I'll need to think about whether that's just how youthful love sonnets in the early 20^th century always sound, or if they read one another! The rhymes are skillful, if a little too chimey for my 21st-century ear, and occasionally forced. The images are exact and suited to his subject—quite Dantean, too. There are some poignantly memorable lines:

“How shall he know, how shall his heart be sure

That even unto her his love endure?”—Sonnet XXXI

Or:

“I love her. O! what other word could keep

In many tongues one clear immutable sound,

Having so many meanings? . . .

These know I, with one more, which is: 'To weep.'”—Sonnet XXXVIII

Or how about these lines, from Sonnet XXXIII, “Of Love's Enemies—The Cross”—oh, I have to share the whole sonnet!!

In sight of stretched hands and tormented brows

How should I dare to venture or to win

Love? how draw word from silence to begin

Tremulous utterance of the bridal vows?

Or, as the letter of the law allows,

If so I dared, how keep them without sin,

While through our goings out and comings in

That Sorrow fronts the doorway of our house?

It is the wont of lovers, who delight

In time of shadows and in secrecy,

To linger under summer trees by night.

But on our lips the words fail, and our eyes

Look not to one another: a man dies

In dusk of noon upon a barren tree.

That is a very good question. And not shabby poetry, either.

More interestingly still, for scholarship, this sonnet sequence contains the seeds of most of his Big Ideas.

First, these 82 sonnets follow the pattern that CW would later postulate in Outlines of Romantic Theology, in which he theorized that the stages of romantic/sexual love follow the stages of Christ's earthly life. The association is explicit in the sonnets' titles, especially a series near the end entitled “The Passion of Love.” There, “passion” makes reference to Christ's Passion—suffering, death, and resurrection—rather than to the common sense of “sexual ecstasy,” although that meaning is not out of view.

Second, they contain the importance of the City that would grow to enormous significance in his later work. Even little St. Albans, it appears, is microcosm for the Kingdom of Heaven—because Florence walks its streets.

Rather astonishingly, these poems also prefigure some of the ideas he later embraced in The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. CW uses the words “unmagicked,” “alchemy,” and “hierarchic,” and talks about rites, oaths, and a company. He also mentions “The earth, man’s body” in a foreshadowing of his later body geography.

How this is possible remains a mystery to me, because I do not know whether CW could have read any of the works of A.E. Waite yet at this time. This is partly complicated because I have not yet worked out exactly when CW wrote these poems. He met Florence at Christmastime in 1908; he may have handed her these sonnets only weeks later, in January of 1909. If so, very few of Waite's influential works had yet been published. A few had: An Ode to Astronomy and other Poems (1877); Lucifer; a dramatic Romance, and other Poems (1879); Israfel (1886); The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887); The Hermetic Museum Restored and Enlarged (1893); The Golden Stairs (1893); Strange Houses of Sleep (1906)--all poems and fairy stories, except for The Hermetic Museum. Obviously this is an area in which I need to do more research.

If CW wrote these poems over the course of the next few years, then he may well have read one of the most important of Waite's early works, and one that had a powerful impact on him: The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail (1909). I suspect, however, that what happened with Williams and Waite follow the same pattern that recurred throughout CW's life: Williams picked up on the merest hint that he encountered in literature, in the church fathers, in theology, or in his own imagination, ran with that idea, created an idiosyncratic doctrinal system out of it—and later discovered something very like in someone else's writings. I think this happened with Kierkegaard. Williams recognized Kierkegaard as a kindred thinker, rather than learning new ideas from him. It happened with the Inklings, especially Lewis. And I suspect it happened with A.E. Waite.

Finally, this sonnet sequence also carries strong hints of the way Williams would live his life according to a myth: he and she are special, above the ordinary common people; he wants to keep her away from his mundane work-a-day life, and yet she transforms that life; people play roles in the grand myth. Throughout his career, CW turned to Arthurian legends as sources for fiction and poetry. His three published collections of Arthurian poetry—Heroes and Kings (1930), Taliessin Through Logres (1938), and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944)—reveal a trajectory from lyric to narrative. He died while beginning to revise the poems into one narrative whole. This move towards narrative is also evident in his private correspondence and in his increasing trend to identify his life, the lives of his acquaintances, and the unfolding history of Europe with the storyline of his myth.

Williams peopled his mythopoetic world with characters modeled after an idealized version of himself. His internal life had been largely shaped by reading A. E. Waite’s occult books and by membership in the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Secret societies, rife with hermetic knowledge, teach that the universe develops according to a hidden story only its adepts can “read” and “retell.”

Williams eventually became unable to keep his fictional and work-a-day worlds apart. He nicknamed friends, assigning them roles as characters in his mythology. He compelled them to enact creative, religious, and sexual rituals as performative embodiments of his tale. Finding social interaction difficult, Williams interpreted others through his story, making them conform to his meaning.

Williams also mapped his Creation-Fall-Redemption arc onto European geography, using this linear narrative to interpret World War II. He made meaning inside his poetry that then re-made the world—both private and public—in its own image.

All of this incipient narrative mythologization is inherent in The Silver Stair. Even in 1909-1912 CW was already developing a myth of chivalry. In “He appoints Time and Place for Meeting with his Lady,” the rendezvous does not occur anywhere associated with his everyday life. It seems to be in church. He is already making a myth that lifts her (and himself) above “common” life and people into a mythic existence where everything has a lofty significance. No stranger should contemplate their love, for it is the stuff of legends, of myths, of a romantic theology. No wonder he couldn't renounce it in the end.

A pessimistic—or, rather, critical—interpretation of CW at this point is to say that he believed his religious calling was to the Way of Negation: that he felt called to celibacy, singleness, dedication to poetry, not family. But then the vision rose in him of himself as the center of a great Myth: making great verse, shaping his life into narrative, influencing historical events, remaking everything he touched by the power of his poetry.

And what's a Myth without a beautiful Woman? So he subjected them both to a nine-years' torment of unconsummated love, turning the tension into literature. Then they married, and he could mythologize the whole Bride of Christ story, the father-son story, the family story.

But he didn't. Instead, he fell in love again, with somebody else, and spent pretty much the rest of his life centering the Myth on “Celia” and on their unrequited love. He found a way to make Rejection work, even when he was married: Reject the second Image (or suffer her Rejection), the Other Woman, and turn that tension into literature.

That is a very critical picture, indeed. I am afraid it may be true. Yet there is another possibility.

CW may have believed that, given his high-flying temperament, he needed to submit to the small domestic restrictions of family life and to take of the little cross of bearing Romantic Theology through all its stages: the triumphant joys of courtship, the ecstasy of consummation, the Olivet of daily accommodation and marital strife, the Golgoltha of extramarital affection and a painful fidelity, the comfortable revival of later-life affection and commitment. That is probably what he believed he was doing.

From a literary point of view, it hardly matters what his autobiographical motivations were. Who cares why he married Florence? Yet an examination of the psychology is intrinsic to an analysis of the verse, and vice-versa. I suspect the truth is: both.

CW and the FRC

This is the fifth post in a series about Charles Williams and the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. You can access the others via this index. 

Charles Williams, devout Anglican, began reading the works of A.E. Waite when he was in his 20s, probably around 1909. I'm trying to find out if there is more precise information than that. It is known that a fairly early work of Waite's, The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail (1909) had a big impact on Williams. Anyway, Williams and Waite began corresponding in 1915 (Williams sent Waite a copy of The Silver Stair [1912], which I can imagine Waite liking very much, and “getting” more than most readers), then Williams visited Waite at his home twice.

Williams was initiated into the Fellowship on 21 September 1917. He took the ceremonial name “Frater Qui Sitit Veniat,” which seems to mean, in context, “Let he who is thirsty come.” [Well, the “Frater” bit just means “Brother”; everyone in the Fellowship was Frater or Sorore].

While the length and extent of Williams's involvement are still under investigation, it is clear that he attended meetings regularly for ten years, memorized the rituals, and climbed rapidly up the grades. He served as Master of the Temple for two six-month periods. He read many of A.E. Waite's books, even after leaving the F.R.C., and continued to cite from Waite in writings all his life.

He also founded (with some reluctance, or show of reluctance) his own fellowship: the Companions of the Co-Inherence, later on, in 1939. It has many surprisingly Rosicrucian elements about, but was not nearly so formalized as Waite's—at least, as far as we know. Willard claims that Williams's Order survives to this day (276).

The influence of the occult generally and the F.R.C. specifically can be seen in all of Williams's writing in one way or another. Some are obvious: The Great Trumps, for instance, is all about the Tarot cards. There is a Black Mass in War in Heaven. There is a rather Waitean, or perhaps anti-Waitean, sorcerer in All Hallow's Eve who engages in all kinds of nasty supernatural practices, including fashioning an eidolon or false body in which he brings back the souls of two dead women. Portals, grades, sacral objects, pentagrams, hidden meanings, powerful words, and ceremonial rituals abound throughout his works.

Even in the highly theological Arthurian poetry, mysteries, magic, secrets, and operative words aboud. Taliessin practices magic in “The Queen’s Servant.” Saying, “Know by Our sight the Rite that invokes Sarras” (l. 40), he makes roses and golden wool appear in the air, then weaves them into a garment for a freed slave. In this poem, the magic spell is a “blessing” (l. 56), an act of holy “Art-magic spiritual” (l. 62).

So, what did Williams really believe about magic? Did he ever actually practice incantations, spells, and so forth, during his years in the F.R.C.? Well, remember that Waite split the Order over the question of magic: Waite desired to pursue the path of mysticism, not magic. Therefore, it is unlikely that anyone in the F.R.C. was performing a black Sabbath or other obviously “magical” rituals. However, there is an historical distinction between goetia or “black” magic and magia or “white” magic (thanks to Stephen Barber for a conversation about this), and many of the rituals and practices of the F.R.C. might look an awful lot like magic to the ordinary Christian. Fortune-telling, for instance, or at least some kind of divination with Tarot cards, continued in Waite's Fellowship.

And Williams? In his forward to Witchcraft, Williams explains that he “saw the magical dimension as not necessarily other than the world we already know” (Hadfield, “Charles Williams and his Arthurian Poetry” 65-66)—which suggests a possible real-life application of magic outside of the poetry. Yet he “came to regard magic as repulsive and corrupting [and consistently used] his extensive knowledge as a source of symbolic imagery for the evil in the mind of man” (Brewer 65). Magic is usually (although not always) a symbol for evil throughout his novels. All of this suggests that Williams did not recommend the actual practice of magic by Christians. Maybe.

Two questions remain. If Williams was never in the Order of the Golden Dawn, why have very good scholars and very close friends of his been confused on this point? Well, because Williams himself SAID he was in the Golden Dawn. Why on earth did he say that, if it wasn't true? There are [at least] three possible reasons:

• He was faithfully keeping his oath of secrecy to the F.R.C. He never spoke the name of the actual society he joined, thus maintaining fidelity to his vows even after he lft.
• The Golden Dawn was more prestigious than the F.R.C. and Williams wanted to overemphasize his connection with Yeats, Underhill, and others, to bolster the impression that he was a great magical poet among other great magical poets, sharing their secret knowledge, wielding with them great spiritual power.
• Williams hated schisms. He wrote the East-West schism of 1054 out of his poetic, mythologized church history in the Arthurian poems. Perhaps he wanted to emphasize continuity with the earlier Order, rather than the schismatic distinctives of the particular, localized Fellowship he actually joined.

All of this leads to the final question: Why did he leave? Willard writes that “No one knows why he stopped attending” (273). Well, no. But one may guess. I have my own theory, as I'm sure others have theirs (which I would love to hear).

My theory is that Williams learned all there was to learn in the F.R.C.—all the hidden knowledge, all the holy secrets, all the facts and fancies and systems of symbolic imagery—and discovered that this gnosticism had no substance. Or, to put it another way, that what lay at the deep root of all these supposed “secrets” was, quite simply, only—only!—public Christian doctrine after all.

Perhaps I'll post more on that another time. For now—your thoughts on CW & the FRC?

A.E. Waite's Occult Tradition

This is the fourth post in a series about Charles Williams and the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. You can access the others via this index. 

 

Arthur Edward Waite was a poet-scholar who dedicated his life to acquiring the liturgies of many secret societies. He probably joined more secret societies than any other individual person. His goal was to discover and/or reconstruct a “secret tradition” that he believed was a deeper form of Christianity than that practiced in churches or taught in the Bible. It would provide a higher enlightenment, a true knowledge, a kind of Gnostic (but embodied) path to “real” spirituality. This secret tradition, he thought, had been passed down verbally from one keeper of secrets to another, and had become dispersed among various occult/hermetic traditions, texts, and practices.

It appears that Waite thought he could master this “secret tradition” by learning all the words of all the secret societies. I find this fascinating: that secret spiritual knowledge and power should reside in the combination of just the right words. So he kept collecting the “Rites”—that is, the liturgies, the ceremonial words—of all the societies he joined: Masonic, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn.... His idea was to sift through these, then write his own ritual, which would be The One Rite that would express/contain/embody/reveal that Secret Tradition (I don't know what the right word is--so I'm obviously no occult Master--or else I hide it well).

As he went along, he also climbed up the power structures of the Orders, especially the Golden Dawn. Around the turn of the Twentieth century, the Order of the Golden Dawn went through a power struggle. This partly had to do with personality clashes, with power plays, and with corruption at the highest levels. But there is also some indication that the Golden Dawn was torn over Waite's emphasis on mysticism vs. Aleister Crowley's and Yeats's and others' insistence on practical magic. R. A. Gilbert, Waite's biographer, wrote that “The two offshoots—the one magical and the other mystical—of the old Golden Dawn continued in uneasy harmony for three years.” (Gilbert 120-121). These differences eventually led to a split.

On the 9th of July, 1915, Waite “consecrated the Salvator Mundi Temple of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross” (Gilbert 123). Waite's Order was supposed to be Christian and mystical, rather than pagan and magical, and it combined elements from Masonic, kabbalistic, alchemical, and Tarotic tradition in its rituals.

It was Waite's Rosicrucian society that Williams joined in 1917.

Tomorrow: tune in for a summary of Williams's involvement in the F.R.C.!