CHARLES WILLIAMS' CONCEPT OF IMAGING APPLIED TO
"THE SONG OF SONGS"

by

Dennis: F Kinlaw

One of the remarkable and delightful developments in the twentieth century has been the theological role of some non-theologians. I speak of C. S. Lewis and his friends.

It should not be lost on those who think of themselves as systematicians and apologists that it has not been the professionals who have caught the theological imagination of the masses in the latter part of this century and who have best communicated classical Christian orthodoxy to our day. Rather, it has been the novelists, the poets, the playwrights, and the literature professors. It should be humbling for many of us that those for whom theology is an avocation can often make it more exciting than those of us for whom it is a main business.

How does one explain their attraction for our day? Their literary genius and their style cannot be ignored. The Oxford ambient adds its own appeal. The conviction lingers though that there is more, that there is a shade of theological difference that gives them an advantage. Their approach to life and the human experience is such that they seem to be able to establish a point of contact, to find a bridge from the world of the pagan to their own that catches the imagination of the unsuspecting believer and enables him to see realities within his own experience that challenge his doubt and suggest that orthodox Christian doctrine may be more compatible with his own amorphous desires than he had suspected. Suddenly Christianity becomes neither banal nor anachronistic. It has charm if not relevance.

Perhaps this should not surprise us. They may have an advantage in their medium. The poem, the novel, and the drama have limitations but they also contain a power that the lecture, the treatise, and the sermon duplicate only rarely and with difficulty. Suggestion on occasion, as Eve learned, can arouse the curiosity where direct proposition may create its own opposition or only opiate. Inference and implication may kindle interest when affirmation would quench. It is evident that the imagination is not always best reached by linear logic.

The reality is that the Lewises, the Tolkiens, the Sayerses, and the Williamses have been able to speak the evangelical word with a sharpness and an appeal that some of us, with what we may consider better "evangelical" credentials, have not achieved. I remember a moving moment with a mathematician who was recalling the impact of Lewis on him in his journey from agnosticism to faith. His comment: "It was just too good to be true. Then I decided it was too good not to be true."

Does their medium in itself account for their effectiveness? I hardly think so. As we have said, their genius and their place do not hurt. But, the persuasion remains that it is more, that it is, at least in part, and a big art, theological. They seem to have an approach to life and human experience that creates a different climate. They seem to be able to find a point with which the pagan can identify, a bridge previously unnoticed by the unbeliever that suddenly not only is there but invites crossing. In their hands orthodox Christian doctrine does not seem so incompatible with sanity and the nature of things. It begins to exhibit allures undreamed before. Note Sayers' captivating title, "The Dogma Is the Drama." It sounds interesting (which theology is not supposed to be) if not even plausible.

That is one of the reasons why Charles Williams has intrigued this reader. At the heart of that appeal is his use of understanding of images.

A couple of years ago while recovering from surgery, I discovered Williams. I was enamored with his use of images. I found myself with that provocative feeling that I was reading more than I was seeing. Initially I looked upon it as a literary device that Williams had perfected in novel and poem that owed its effectiveness to his literary genius and discipline, but that had its origin in the arbitrariness of his own imagination. As I continued to read Williams, I began to realize that he would have been unhappy with my compliments. His insistence would have been that his imagery was not invented but discovered, that its basis lay not in his imagination but in the nature of reality. In other words, his imagery was rooted in ontology, not in the mind of the writer. That ontological base, if Williams is correct in his perception, meant that his imagery was not idiosyncratic with him. Rather, it had a universal character that gave it universal appeal. And, the ontological base made possible that "bridge" or "point of contact" to which earlier reference was made.

Here Williams was at one with Coleridge in his definition of symbols (though, as we will see, he preferred the term "image" to that of "symbol"). Coleridge's definition is given by Williams in the introduction to his study of Dante.

Coleridge said that a symbol must have three characteristics. (i) it must exist in itself, (ii) it must derive from something greater than itself, (iii) it must represent in itself that greatness from which it derives.1

Coleridge may have meant this to be literary analysis. The person with theological sensitiveness will read in it more. The symbol, whatever it may be, has its own existence but that existence speaks of a "beyond," "something greater." The symbol does not subsist in itself. It existence is derived. The source is greater than the symbol. And, that "greater" has left some evidence of the symbol's origin in the symbol itself. Discrete as the symbol may be, its discreteness demands something further. Coleridge says it. The symbol represents in itself something of the character of the Source.

This provides the key to William's use of image. His work on Dante begins with Coleridge's quote. One could almost say that the rest of William's work is a development of this thesis.

Shideler has put the students of Williams in her debt with her analysis of symbols in her work, The Theology of Romantic Love: A Study in the Writings of Charles Williams. In her introduction she differentiates between arbitrary and natural symbols.2

The arbitrary symbol receives its meaning from an arbitrary human decision. Its meaning is assigned. The symbol carries in itself nothing that corresponds to or suggests the meaning of the symbol. Mathematical symbols are examples of these (the plus, the minus, the symbols for division and multiplication).

Natural symbols are symbols whose bases are not in the decisions of men. They instance in themselves the things symbolized. By simply being what they are they speak of more. The plus sign, like the minus sign or that for division, is arbitrary. The person unacquainted with mathematics would find nothing in the symbols to suggest their meaning. The plus sign (+) in another context though would serve as a natural symbol It could symbolize an intersection, a crossroads, a place of decision. That meaning is reflected in the nature of the symbol. Williams' primary interest is in natural symbols.

These natural symbols are divisible into two categories: allegories and images. Allegories are symbols that are suggestively similar to their bases. Thus Bunyan in his classic allegory symbolizes despair by a giant and doubt by a castle. Here the symbol is constructed to make the basis or referent more clearly or more engagingly grasped. The movement intellectually is originally from the referent to the symbol, to explain the referent the symbol is developed. And the symbol has no existence apart from its allegorical function.

The image is quite different. It is not constructed but discovered as a part of the viewer's world. It exists independently of its imaging function. It is actually there before its larger significance is known. Its imaging value lies in its power to point by itself beyond itself to its basis. It is not there to be modified by the imagist as the allegory can be. It is there to be enjoyed for what it is in itself and to be read in what it speaks of more.

The allegory has a capacity for precision that the image never equals. It can be crafted by the allegorist to fine definition. There is often ambiguity about images that tantalizes and may seem to obscure. The amount that can be seen is determined both by the nature of the image and the nature of the viewer. Allegory partakes more of the nature of the deduction while imaging is more inductive with all the dangers attendant.

In 1943 Williams delivered a lecture at Oxford on five great images which occur in poetry. John Heath-Stubbs was there and has recorded for us the five.3 They are:

(1) Religious Experience

(2) The Image of Woman

(3) The Image of Nature

(4) The Image of the City

(5) The Experience of Great Art

Two of these captured most of Williams' attention, and find substantial development in his work, the image of the woman and the image of the city. Here he found himself at one with Dante. Whether Williams first found these in Dante or simply found Dante echoing his own discoveries may be debated. The fact is that Williams found in Dante the classical expression of what he himself believes about images of woman (Beatrice) and the city (Florence). Take the experience of Dante and Beatrice.

Dante was nine and Beatrice was eight when Dante first beheld her. The poet was smitten. They saw each other on occasion, but he was eighteen before she spoke to him. By this time he was deeply in love with her. At twenty-four Beatrice was dead. The impact of her person upon Dante's life was such that his literary work was the tribute to her inspiration. The occasion for the quickening of love, she became its image. His La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy tell the story.

His work La Vita Nuova (The New Life) tells us what we know about her and her impact upon the poet. She is presented, as George Holmes says, in a manner hardly known in literature previously, as

She evokes in Dante an adoration that produces poetry of near religious character. The climax of that relationship, begun so early, is found in the Paradiso where Beatrice leads the poet in an ascent through the ethereal spheres to the Sum of all Grace, to God. She is his conductor from good to God. Hear the poet as he describes it.

Yet was I no more

Conscious of climbing than is a man conscious,

Before the first thought comes, of its coming.

Beatrice it is who conducts us so

From good to better....5

The impact is beatitude.

No mortal heart was ever so disposed to piety and

Rendering itself up to God with such willingness

As was I when I heard those words, and so

Completely did I put my love in him,

That Beatrice was forgotten and eclipsed.

But this did not displease her, but she smiled, and

The splendor of her laughing eyes divided

My united mind . . .6

Beatrice, the original provocation of love in the poet, has now led Dante beyond herself to Love Itself, that Love of which all other loves are but images. The creature, instead of being the substitute for, or the enemy of, the Creator has become a means to the Greater from which it is derived. Williams' work is an attempt to explicate this theme. His designation of this is the Way of the Affirmation of Images.7 If this sounds familiar to the theologian, he will understand why Williams may aptly be called "the poet of the analogia entis." Williams believed that Brunner was right.

Whatever the Creator makes bears the imprint of His Creator-Spirit in itself; hence it is to some extent "similar" to Him and is therefore a "parable" or "analogy."8

This was an inescapable corollary for Williams of the doctrine of creation. Our world comes from the hand of the loving Father. It is good. It retains, in spite of the Fall, its power to image its Maker. It is permissible for, yes, incumbent upon the Christian to affirm the original goodness of these images.

This does not mean that Williams was unaware of the dangers of this Way. He recognized the power of an image by its very goodness to distract. He knew the danger of the image's becoming an end in itself. So, he felt that the Way of an Affirmation of Images should always be kept in tension with the Way of the Rejection of Images. The image originally was never the Imaged. Nor did it in itself ever exhaust the Imaged. The affirmation in the image was therefore never complete. A further problem has been introduced by the Fall. A lack of intellectual clarity has been produced that adds to the ambiguities. In spite of all though, the images remain and they remain for our good.

The power in the image and the limitation in the image brought Williams to an oft-repeated maxim about every image, a maxim familiar to all who have read Williams:

This also is thou;

neither is this Thou.9

Williams' concern was not to displace the Way of Negation. The Way of Affirmation and the Way of Negation are both valid. In fact, both are necessary. The same person will walk both paths. Isaac was at one time in Abraham's life an alternative to God and at another a very image of the Eternal Son.

Williams' concern was that the goodness of the creation and its power to image its Creator has not received in our post-Reformation world, nor even in the longer history of the Church, the development that it merits. Our concern to give proper attention to Christ's death and resurrection, to our sin which made the passion necessary for our justification and redemption, may have caused us unwillingly to miss or play down the goodness of the world and the flesh, the larger question of the Incarnation that made Christ's death redemptive and His resurrection the vindication of God's creation. It must ever be remembered that Christian soteriology finds an essential part of its basis in creation. It was the Creator who became "the first-born of all creation" that He might redeem us.

This emphasis upon Incarnation and the goodness of the creation is at the heart of that theological stance to which reference was made in the beginning of this article. It is Williams' conviction that in every man's natural life there is a witness to the Way. That seems to give special power to his writing. Life is not as discrete, nor as discontinuous as our individuation might lead us to believe. The world of human experience is rather a web that has a unity so basic and so all-inclusive, so interrelated that the seemingly ungermane on closer scrutiny is seen to be a part of one's own larger existence. So, the particular is ever capable of leading to the universal. The image is capable of becoming the occasion for beholding the Imaged.

Beatrice was not the only image of Dante's life. There were people, places, poems, philosophies, but Dante saw in Beatrice the clearest example of them all. He brought that figure, Williams says, so far as he could express it, as near to the Final Image, God, as he could. Williams concludes of Dante's work:

The way of affirmation was in a special way Charles Williams' way. He knew the goodness of the creation and was determined to sing about it. He sang not just because of its goodness in itself but also because it imaged more. It is that concept of "imaging more" that may be a key to help us with some of the biblical material. I speak especially now of The Song of Songs.

Few portions of Scripture have enamored its readers more than this canticle. The beauty of the poetry and the tenderness of the sentiment have endeared the work to many but have never removed the tantalizing questions. The absence of a clear reference to God, the lack of the universal Old Testament themes of election, covenant, worship, sin and salvation force the question as to why it is here. Tucked away in the midst of the sacred canon it demands explanation.

The traditional answer is to see in it an allegory. The fact that the Old Testament sees the relationship of Yahweh to Israel as that of lover and beloved is patent. So a long history has developed of allegorical interpretation that includes some of the most eminent names in better than two millennia of biblical commentary. To dismiss this out of hand smacks a bit of modern arrogance.

The fact remains that there is not a suggestion in the text of the wide variety of spiritual insights that the commentators of all types have drawn from this little volume through the centuries. One hardly gets the feeling that the original participants in this drama of human love had in the forefront of their consciousnesses all of the exalted themes which the commentators find so evident. It makes one wonder how much of the comment has had its origin in the mind of the commentator rather than in the text itself. The result has been what is spoken of as the literal approach. The poems are seen for what they purport to be, beautiful and lyric pieces expressing the attractions, the delights, and the emotions accompanying human love between the sexes. So it is suggested that they are secular and are here simply as part of the national literature of Israel."

The justification for the modern "secular" approach is clear. Most readers who have experienced human love have found in it a good of such worth that the allegorical explanations of the text seem unnecessary efforts to justify a human good which should stand on its own as a gift from God.

Here Williams helps. For him faithful married love has the nature of Coleridge's symbol. It has its own existence. It is good in itself. It does not need to be spiritualized to have human worth. It should be enjoyed for what it is in itself. Yet it cannot but speak of more.

Human love like all other created good derives from something greater than itself. It carries within itself overtones of that Greater from which it originates. As Coleridge says, it represents in itself that greatness from which it comes. It has a basis, a referent. That basis is in the creative will of God which enables God to use it as an illustration of His love for His people. But there is more. The basis lies ultimately in the very Being of that God who lives with an eternal love and can be called Love itself (Himself). There is then a divine ontological referent for this earthly reality which brings such joy to human life.

Human love is thus not first a human experience that helps us understand God. It is a personal experience that helps us relate joyously to one another. It is a joy we know because we are human. But it is not an earthly category that just happens to illustrate a divine reality. It is an human experience that images something eternal. It is part of what Scripture means by the imago Dei.

When this is realized, we see that it is a divine category with a human counterpart (image) which helps us understand ourselves. He who is love made us like Himself. He calls us to a relationship to Himself of an exclusive (monogamous) and an unending love. He has made us to relate to Him in that fashion and to find our ultimate fulfilment in that perfection of love. He has built into us a human need and a human experience that in counterpart symbolizes in a human relationship this ultimate personal experience with God. Thus a sanctity derives to human love from the sacredness of the reality which it images.

This is, to this writer, a bit different than the usual allegorical interpretation or even the typically religious literal one. Whether the allegorist intends it or not, the allegorizing tends to concentrate so upon the spiritual realities symbolized that the goodness and the richness of the gift is eclipsed. God gave His gifts for our joy because He loves us. To enjoy them less even for spiritual reasons is no tribute to Him. To rejoice in their goodness does not displease Him. To let them replace or obscure Him is the ultimate deprivation for us and the supreme offense to Him. Here the two Ways should meet. As Williams can say without irreverence, "When you play, play, and when you pray, pray.

For,

This is Thou,

The gifts of God must not be slighted for a pseudospirituality. Nor dare we let them receive the ultimate thinning which inevitably comes when they are separated from the larger realities that they image.

The Song of Songs thus is a valid part of the canon of sacred Scripture not because Solomon and the Shulamite (or whoever the participants may have been) are allegorical representations of Yahweh and Israel or Christ and the Church. It is there because of the sacredness of human love itself, a sacredness that has its source in the nature of the One whom all loves image. We de-allegorize the book not to secularize the relationship of Solomon and the Shulamite (or whoever the described participants may have been) but rather to sanctify all human loves by seeing them in that larger context which every love represents in itself.

Notes

l. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Octagon Books, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), p. 7.

2. Mary McDermott Shideler, The Theology of Romantic Love: A Study in the Writings of Charles Williams (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1962), pp. 11-17.

3. John Heath-Stubbs, Charles Wiliams (New York: The British Book Center, Inc., by Longmans, Green & Co., 1973), pp. 18-19.

4. George Holmes, Dante (New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 6.

5. Alighieri Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, trans. by Louis Bian colli (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), p. 353.

6. Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, p. 353.

7. An illustrative passage is found in Williams' Descent of the Dove (New York: Living Age Books, published by Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 56-64.

8. Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952), 2:22.

9. Williams, The Descent of the Dove, p. 57.

10. Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, p. 8.

1l. Robert Gordis, The Song of Songs and Lamentations(New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1974), p. 5.