The exhange of love

- intrigue, magical powers, the courage of the embattled, and more, the struggle for the peace of souls, carries the story along with shuddering reality!

Williams was a strongly convinced Christian but who could also accept the sceptical views of others and the many doubts which faith has to bear with. At the heart of his thinking was the aphorism of Paul in Galations, Bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2) Williams enlarges on this in his novel, Descent into Hell. One of the main characters, Pauline, a young woman, has carried a burden of fear all her life. A friend, in the novel, offers to share this fear -

"Haven't you heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens?"

"But that means -----" she began, and stopped.

"I know", Stanhope said. "It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious ... no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St Paul, or whoever said bear ... he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. ... If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you - however sympathetic I may be." ...
[They agree that she will allow him to carry her burden of fear - and so it turns out for good in the book.]
At the conclusion of the novel one of the main characters, who has renounced all reality of relationships, descends down a rope into the abyss while journeying in a taxi he took from Marylebone Station in London! -

'The world, which Wentworth had continuously and persistently denied in favour of himself, now poured itself over him, and as if in a deluge from heaven drove him into the depths.'
(Charles Williams, Descent into Hell, A Charles Williams Reader, Eerdmans, Michigan, pages 98-99 & 219.)

Two world wars and the traditional, seemingly concrete realities of heaven and hell, not to mention purgatory, in Christian thought, were the matrix for Williams' literary genius in his novels. But he was also widely read in Christian history and Dante and wrote books about both. That is now nearly 60 years ago and the traditional metaphysics of Christian thought has been changed for ever today by New Testament scholarship and the dramatic increase of scientific exploration on many levels. Humanly - and from the point of view of the divine - we are one world, one universe. If God IS, then he is the divine in whom, as Paul quotes, 'we live and move and have our being.' Heaven is here, God is here - and the opposite is here, among us. Today the supernatural is not a helpful understanding of the reality that is God. But the graphic descriptions of Williams' novels were, in the 1940s, the only way in which what we experience, here and now, could be described. Today, Wentworth, or his modern equivalent among us, can still be known to be losing out, atrociously, while living among us, rather than descending a rope to the bottomless pit in a taxi taken from St Marylebone station in London!

What Charles Williams called the doctrine of substituted love is what I have interpreted as the exchange of Love. Today, as well as in Williams' own time and mind, the divine love manifested in Jesus is, from the Christian point of view, the universal requirement of us all. Jesus revealed in his life the character of God who is love. Christian history has unfortunately often turned the tables on that and taken pre-historic and mythical ideas of the divine, and our own projections of anger and hatred, as the character of God. This explains the continuing ideas that God is, apparently, more interested in sin than in his creation! We have often found it hard to accept that we are loved by the God whom Jesus revealed.

I suppose that this embracing love of God for us all is the vital element to be brought to mind when we consider what 'happens' at death. The New Testament authors showed no sign that they regarded this as important. Their writings show no real curiosity apart from a conviction that Jesus seemed to have signalled that the 'end time' was possibly near at hand. But when that didn't happen, by the fourth and fifth centuries, Greek mythology entered into Christian thinking about the future after death. Heaven, hell and all the ramifications of entering into the divine presence either at death or through a system of purgatorial cleansing of the soul became the 'facts' of the mediaeval construct of the after life. Remnants of these ideas - such as that we shall be re-united with our loved ones - remain in the subconscious perhaps, naturally, when there is no real knowledge of what life after death could mean. Except: the conviction of the New Testament writers was that, in the end time, we too shall be raised, as Jesus was raised. Meanwhile we shall die, as Jesus died and be kept in the mind and love of God. In a final extract from Charles Williams' Descent into Hell this love is the essential ingredient of life lived to the full - -

'As if in a last communion with the natural terrors of man, Margaret Anstruther endured a recurrent shock of fear. She recalled herself ... It was not possible for man to know himself and the world, except after some mode of knowledge, some art of discovery. The most perfect, since the most intimate and intelligent, art was pure love. The approach by love was the approach to fact; to know anything but fact was not love. Love was even more mathematical than poetry; it was the pure mathematics of the spirit. It was applied also and active, it was the means as it was the end. The end lived everlastingly in the means; the means eternally in the end.' (pages 68-69)

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5: 46-48)