Charles Williams

Most of them professors, but one of them was a doctor and another one was a lawyer.

The big names within that group are C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, Charles Williams, who wrote these really fantastical, weird, but fascinating novels about kind of the impingement of the supernatural world into the natural world.

Owen Barfield, who wrote both novels and nonfiction.

And they would meet together on a regular basis at the pub or in Lewis's offices as a professor at Oxford.

I was pointing out last time that the Christian life is simply a protest of having your natural self change into a Christ self.

All right, welcome to the Inklings Variety Hour, where fans and scholars of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and others discuss their works and lives.

I'm Chris Pipkin, a gentleman, sexton, and librarian.

And with me today, I have Sophie Davis back again to talk to me about the book Lilith by George MacDonald.

this encounter full of joy, unscheduled on the decent fan.

With here, an addict of 12 teens.

They're a Charles Williams fan.

Well, one of the, one of the reasons we're talking about this is because we both presented a paper on the list at a recent conference.

It is also involving me in some correspondence, as many people still regard me as one of his intimates.'" Alas, that ceased to be so some ten years ago.

We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage, of which he never even told me.

I learned of it long after the event.

Now, here the editor's at a footnote that changes, I think, how we hear or process that passage.

That's the last two full sentences of the paragraph.

They are struck through in the draft.

He wrote down the two reasons the friendship ended, the arrival of Charles Williams and the marriage that he wasn't told about, and then he crossed them out.

And that's such a human thing.

And then if we come zoom up to the book of Revelation, we're told about the son of man who's holding the seven stars in his right hand.

I'd like a lot of apocalyptic imagery that there are numerous proposed interpretations of what that means, but one interpretation which was advanced actually by C.S. Lewis's colleague and friend, Austin Farah, is that these seven stars that Christ, the Son of Man, is holding are indeed the seven planets from which we take the names of the days of the week.

And that this picture of the Son of Man holding them in his right hand is an indication that Christ is the Lord of time, that all our days are in his grasp.

There are, of course, alternative interpretations, All of that is just to say across the sweep of the Bible, there's this deep interest in and an attempt to understand the significance of what is going on above us in the sky.

In the Greek, the word is seleniazomenos, those who have been selenized, because selenia is another name for the Greek goddess, for the lunar goddess in Greek.

And it's unfortunate that modern translations of the gospel sometimes translate that as not lunatics, but epileptics.

There's a big difference between madness and epilepsy, as my epileptic friends would like to point out.

And it's clearly linked to lunar influence in the Greek language.

So there's Bruno Nardi, there's Etienne Gilson.

Interestingly, there's Charles Williams, uh, um-

Guardini

... there's Guardini.

And he has very interesting ideas about the origin of language and other things.

And then beyond that is Charles Williams, who in a certain sense was a bit of a latecomer, and he's the man who I think in, in a way had the deepest theological imagination with his, especially his so-called theological shockers.

Um, and tho- those novels sort of show how the invisible worlds are much, much closer to us than you might imagine.

Hmm.

Right.

It begins with the introduction of Charles Williams into the Inklings and and he becomes close friends with Lewis.

And I think Tolkien, it says in the book, like Tolkien wished he could kind of have Lewis all to himself and to have this like new person arrive into the friendship, into the dynamic, the dynamic of the Inklings changed.

Tolkien really wasn't a fan of Williams is kind of like I think he wrote mostly supernatural thrillers and he wasn't really a fan of that genre, I guess.

And here Tolkien includes a footnote of his own, and it's a generous one.

He says, Not that one should forget the wise words of Charles Williams, that would be his fellow inkling, but then it is our duty to tend the accredited and established altar, though the Holy Spirit may send the fire down somewhere else.

God cannot be limited, even by his own foundations, and may use any channel for his grace.

And then he closes the footnote with this image.