Charles Williams

have you read any Charles Williams? One of the Inklings--you know, "the C.S. Lewis group." I guess it could just as well be called the Charles Williams group. Anyway. His book "War in Heaven" has been an answer to prayer for me. Continues to be. Challenging and terrifying and wakening. Now I'm reading his "The Place of the Lion," which is more excerptable, so I want to share bits.

There is a character called Damaris; she's a scholar working for a Doctorate in Philosophy who plays around with ideas endlessly, writing papers and making diagrams and having discussions...but with no sense of the Reality behind those ideas. Until the Truth begins to break in on the visible world in a whole new way. Amazingly, there is someone who sees into the innocent, ignorant heart of this woman and loves her, even as she treats him very callously, as an 'idea'... These are his (Anthony's) thoughts on her at this time of incredible change in the universe:

“But she wouldn’t, she would go on thoughtfully playing with the dead pictures of ideas, with names and philosophies, Plato and Pythagoras and Anselm and Abelard, Athens and Alexandria and Paris, not knowing that the living existences to which seers and saints had looked were already in movement to avenge themselves on her. “O you sweet blasphemer!” Anthony moaned, “can’t you wake?” Gnostic traditions, medieval rituals, Aeons and Archangels—they were cards she was playing in her own game. But she didn’t know, she didn’t understand. It wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of her time, her culture, her education—the pseudo-knowledge that affected all the learned, the pseudo-skepticism that infected all the unlearned, in an age of pretence, and she was only pretending as everybody else did in this lost and imbecile century. Well, it was up to him to do something.”

from p.73 of The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams