Tolkien plus something-else made me a Romantic

Before reading JRR Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at age 13, my attitude was that of a mainstream, down to earth, science and adventure orientated kid. I was very much a "materialist", and externally focused and driven. My favourite reading was Biggles and war memoirs of fighter pilots

Post Tolkien I became - although I did not know the term - a Romantic. 

Although I did not for some decades set aside the scientistic, rationalistic side to my character; my deepest hopes and fears were romantic. From then onwards, compared with nearly everybody I knew or met, I seemed to have stronger ecstasies and hopes, and also a stronger tendency to existential angst and melancholy - in general a tendency to brood on The Human Condition (but especially as it applied to me). 

Just on the cusp of my adolescence; Tolkien's work gave me strong and sustained glimpses of "higher things"; and it was my experience of a world of engagement in a living and conscious reality, where there were depths of purpose and meaning not just among human beings but other sentient beings, and all through nature and beyond (e.g. in mountains, rivers, the sea...)... A world and state of mind where both beauty and evil were sharper and realer.

It seems to me that part of being and staying "a romantic" is ecstatic experience of in inner and imaginative nature. 

It is this experience of heightened consciousness that - by its contrast with the mundane quality of everyday life; and also by its unsustainability, its brevity - apparently creates the typically "romantic" mind-set and life. 

However; it soon dawned upon me that nearly everybody I met seemed to lack either the capacity or desire (or both) to have ecstatic romantic experiences. 

Some lived life, apparently, always behind a transparent wall of exclusion of such experiences, self-control exerted against such loss of control. This would include "Normans" and those who emulated them or wished to ally with them. It would also include the classic respectable middle classes, and the (self-consciously, ostentatiously) down-to-earth working classes. 

Their appreciations seemed at second-hand, "as if", undercut by a safety-net of irony and facetiousness; consequently, although such people got miserable, that misery had a mundane not existential quality.

The mass of other-people whom I encountered either could-not, or (for some kind of defensive reason, perhaps regarding it as childish, ignorant, a sign of weakness, or low status) would-not allow themselves to have these experiences. 

In conclusion: two things at least were required for the unique life-transforming effect that Tolkien had upon me: one was the special quality of Tolkien's work; and the second was my (partly innate, partly chosen) latent romantic nature - which was probably enhanced by my stage of psychological development. 

 

Charles Williams's false ideal of the mathematical impersonality of love

Mrs. Anstruther opened her eyes and met Pauline's. She smiled. "My dear," she said, "I've been meaning to ask you something for the last day or two." Pauline thought it might be the hot afternoon that gave the voice that effect of distance; it was clear, but small and from afar. The words, the tone, were affectionate with an impersonal love. Pauline thought: "She might be talking to Phoebe"—Phoebe being the maid—and at the same time realized that Mrs. Anstruther did so talk to Phoebe, and to everyone. Her good will diffused itself in all directions. Her granddaughter lay in its way, with all things besides, and it mingled with the warm sun in a general benediction.

**

As if in a last communion with the natural terrors of man, Margaret Anstruther endured a recurrent shock of fear. She recalled herself. To tolerate such knowledge with a joyous welcome was meant, as the holy Doctors had taught her, to be the best privilege of man, and so remained. The best maxim towards that knowledge was yet not the Know thyself of the Greek so much as the Know Love of the Christian, though both in the end were one. It was not possible for man to know himself and the world, except first 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 love 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.

From Descent into Hell, by Charles Williams, 1937.  

Love is regarded as the primary value of Christianity; yet that statement leaves it unclear what is meant by love, and indeed by Christianity. 

Speaking from my personal understanding; I regard it as a profound error when Christians strive to assert of love that it is ideally impersonal, universal, unconditional, impartial... I mean the error that love is best to be understood by abstract metaphors drawn from mathematics, physics, astronomy, and the like. 

Charles Williams was certainly very prone to asserting this perspective - as illustrated above by descriptions relating to Mrs Margaret Anstruther; a character in the novel Descent into Hell, who is pretty-clearly intended to represent Williams's idea of a modern saint: a genuinely wise and good person. 

In this novel and elsewhere; Williams frequently referred to his ideal situation as mathematical, a geometric pattern; characterized alike by precision and abstraction. But in this respect, except for his emphatic and stark rhetoric, Williams was not at all unusual among the main-stream of theologians from very early in Christian history. 

Indeed; Williams's attitude seems to me the normal and mainstream Christian theologian's view that ideal love - i.e. the love of God for all of creation - is necessarily impersonal. 

This due to the assumption that God as Creator is of an utterly different nature and quality than any created thing; and because of God's attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and God's unchanging/ unemotional character (immutable and impassible); therefore it is supposed that love (like God) is best to be understood using impersonal metaphors such as mathematics, geometry, physics etc.

As I say; in contrast I regard love as necessarily personal; including ideal love, and God's love. 

I believe that such notions as universal, unconditional, impartial love are false importations from outwith Christianity - whether the pre-Christian Greek (e.g. Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian) and Roman (e.g. Neo-Platonic, Stoic) philosophy (in the case of ancient Christian theologians); or from oneness-belief/ aspirations of (Western understandings of) Hinduism and Buddhism in the case of theologians of the past century plus. 

I believe abstract ideas of love are harmful to Christianity here and now. However; I do not think that such false theology did much harm in the past, in the pre-modern era. 

The reason is to do with the development of human consciousness; and the rather gradual but progressive loss of what Barfield terms Original Participation. I mean, that Mankind began having a natural and spontaneous, and largely unconscious, immersion-in the world of the divine and of spirits. But that Men have gradually (over centuries, and millennia) become more self-conscious, and more separated from this divine-spirit world; until now the separation is very nearly complete (except in early childhood). 

(This modern separation from the spiritual and divine - and from participation in The World - is sometimes called alienation.)  

This separation is also a development of the potential for freedom. But separation means that Men now need to make a conscious and active choice of beliefs, and we cannot (do not) unconsciously benefit from an implicit knowledge of God and Creation (and God's Will). 

In different words; Men used to find-themselves automatically aligned with divine creation and God (to a significant degree); whereas now Men find themselves alienated from creation to the point of denying the reality of creation and God.

What this meant was that in the past Men could hold all kinds of false beliefs, including the falsehoods of mainstream Christian theology; without coming to significant harm - whereas nowadays, because our theology is actively and consciously chosen - false theology is harmful; and indeed nearly always leads out of Christianity. 

As for Charles Williams; he was regarded by several influential intellectual Christians (especially adult re-convert authors such as CS Lewis, TS Eliot, Dorothy L Sayers, WH Auden; but also a significant following of "disciples") as an exemplary and inspiring Christian writer - and indeed person.  

IMO: For all William's many flaws; this informed positive evaluation of CW as Christian and theologian deserves considerable weight.  

On the other side; a knowledge of CW's biography (including autobiographical writings) suggests that he found his own religious understanding to be deeply unsatisfactory - indeed tragic to a degree only a hairsbreadth away from despair (and apostasy)... Yet, a hairsbreadth away (i.e. CW remained Christian, and continued to hope).

 

William's religion was rigorously derived from his theological assumptions - far more rigorously so than for most theologians. 

Yet, even among the mass of not-rigorous Christians, assumptions have consequences; and I believe that the assumption that Christian love ought to be impersonal, mathematical, has taken a terrible toll on the faith of individual people... Causing variously disbelief, confusion, disgusted rejection, and opening the door to assimilation of "Christianity" with the abstractions of Satanic totalitarianism.   

Therefore, what was (only just) possible for Charles Williams - i.e. to have a false understanding of love and yet be Christian - is probably not possible for those born several generations later and in our grossly-corrupted civilization. 

We (here and now) must be clear and explicit that love is personal and inter-personal - and that God is a person, and of the same kind as ourselves - else we will (sooner or later, whether acknowledged or denied) not be Christians.