A PROBLEM OF MORALITY: SACRAMENTALISM IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

The very outside of a book has a charm to me. It is a kind of sacrament - an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; as, indeed, what on God's earth is not? (George MacDonald)

IN the tradition of other writers like Dante and George MacDonald, Charles Williams liked to think of himself as a writer and poet of images. And, like these, he truly did display an astonishing capacity for clothing some of Christianity's most abstract principles in the flesh of absorbing narratives and arresting images. Although he published seven novels before his untimely death in 1945, his first five serve as particularly interesting examples of this approach. Events in each revolve around one or several objects of unique physical and spiritual power. As both matter and spirit, these objects function sacramentally and serve to introduce antagonisms central to the development of each novel's plot. Their redemptive qualities, as well as their capacity to do harm, form a coherent image or backdrop against which the moral natures of the central characters either develop or degrade. Among these five novels, however, Shadows of Ecstasy stands apart. Although its narrative is also built around a sacramental image, the place of that image is held not by an object but by Nigel Considine, a person of enigmatic and ambiguous moral nature. Shadows of Ecstasy is also unique in that most critics have condemned both it and its central character as at best morally inchoate, at worst simply corrupt (see Kollmann 7, Urang 52, Shideler 114, 131$;). But while Considine's moral failings may strike many as obvious, it is no less obvious that Williams makes a serious and sustained effort to portray Considine as a wise, disciplined, and strangely compelling force. Even when Considine is eventually killed at the end of the novel, he leaves us "looking back over our shoulders" (Howard 50). So why would Williams, whose moral sense in every other work is clearly informed by Christianity, attempt to glorify this character who seems driven by pride, lust for power, and a profound disregard for others?

Because Williams presents such a consistent picture of good and evil in every one of his other novels, poems, and plays, it is extremely difficult to believe, and would require extraordinarily compelling evidence, that he simply set aside his Christian convictions for the purpose of writing this particular novel. Indeed, rather than adopt such a position, most critics have been content to side step the problem by dismissing Shadows of Ecstasy as immature work.1 And, although Shadows of Ecstasy is the first novel he wrote, it did not appear until Williams already had four other novels to his credit, and then only after it had been substantially revised between 1925 and 1932 (see Hadfield 92-3). This leaves as little evidence to support the view that Shadows of Ecstasy is apprentice work as there is to suppose that Williams suspended his faith while writing the novel.2 Regardless of whether critics receive the novel as an example of his mature work or not, however, what every other examination of Considine has in common is an inexorable movement toward one conclusion: that Considine is an antihero who shares a closer kinship with Satan than he does with Christ. But if we consider Considine, at least provisionally, as a metaphysical and sacramental catalyst, akin to the Stone of Sulieman in Many Dimensions or the Holy Graal in War in Heaven, and not primarily as a personal moral agent in his own right, his prima facie enigmatic nature gives way to the vision of a potent force for spiritual emancipation, a protagonist for good, and even a type of Christ. Although such an interpretation may leave Shadows of Ecstasy with few candidates for the role of antagonist, it seems clear that Williams goes to great lengths to stress that Considine lives and functions as a Christian saint in everything but name. It may be that the ultimate difficulty with Shadows of Ecstasy is not moral at all but narrational: to find a strong antagonist, one must look beyond this book to Williams's second novel, War in Heaven. In doing so, a sharp and obvious contrast emerges between Considine's own nature and the natures of the antagonists in this second novel.

Before examining the characters themselves, it will help to pause and consider Williams's own understanding of sacramentalism as an independent theological concept. he writes that, "the word 'Sacramental' has perhaps served us a little less than well; it has, in popular usage, suggested rather the spiritual using the physical than a common - say a single - operation" ("The Index of the Body" 85). The importance of the physical dimension flows from Williams's own understanding of Christ's Incarnation as the primordial sacrament. John's gospel furnishes us with the archetype: and the Word became flesh (John 1:14).3 With specific reference to the Incarnation, Williams writes:

even now, in spite of the Athanasian Creed, the single existence of the Incarnate Word is too often almost Gnostically contemplated as an inhabitation of the flesh by the Word. But it is not so; what he is, he is wholly and absolutely, and even in His death and in the separation of body and soul he remains wholly and absolutely one. ("Natural Goodness" 76)