The only thing better than reading good books is sharing the experience with others. In the summer of 2022, my colleague Nicholas Greco and I each purchased and read a lovely set of Charles Williams’ seven novels, published by the society that bears his name. This wasn’t an academic exercise. The rigor of our two-person book club consisted entirely of text messages traded back and forth with random observations about the latest pages read. I had no expectation these strange books would connect like they did.
His is a wild imagination. Strange stuff. Entertaining stuff. Williams, I mean. Though I suppose it’s true of said colleague as well. And yet one curious insight stayed with me long after putting those novels back on the shelves. I’d never read anything by him before but had come across others mentioning the Williamsian concept of substitution. C.S. Lewis, for one, does so in a letter addressed to Sheldon Vanauken, dated November 27, 1957:
I forget if I had begun my own bone disease (osteoporosis) when you were with us. Anyway, it is much better now and I am no longer in pain. . . . The intriguing thing is that while I (for no discoverable reason) was losing the chalcium [sic] from my bones, [my wife] Joy [Davidman Lewis], who needed it much more [owing to bone cancer], was gaining it in hers. One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! Well, never was a gift more gladly given: but one must not be fanciful.
He’s not fully persuaded, but Lewis still seems to appreciate his late friend’s inclination to allow theology to break free of the merely theoretical and abstract and enter the realm of the literal. Calcium lost, calcium gained. It’s measurable. It’s tangible.
Owing to his association with Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and others in the Oxford literary fellowship called the Inklings, many recognize the name Charles Williams (1886–1945), though fewer, I suspect, are familiar with his writings. He was a longtime editor with the Oxford University Press, and during World War II, when the press moved its offices from London to Oxford, Williams moved, too, and began his association with that famous circle of friends, gathering in Lewis’ rooms at Magdalen College or the Eagle and Child or Lamb and Flag pubs to read their scribblings over pipes and drinks.
Williams was not a formally trained or full-time academic by profession, but he was very much a scholar, often lecturing in London and Oxford in addition to his editorial duties. He was a poet, playwright, and novelist; an expert on the Arthurian legends, Dante, and Milton; and an amateur — but nonetheless for that a complex and insightful — theologian. He was also “a swirling mass of contradictions,” as one biography has it, and with respect to his religious views, “he was orthodox but heretical, a devout Anglican who practiced magic.” This may account for Williams’ declining popularity after his death, at least among Christian readers. Perhaps more significant is the strangeness of his books. His works defy simple genre classification; they jumble fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror. They often involve a gothic mingling of “the Probable and the Marvellous,” as Lewis observes.
Though I found these books challenging and weird, this notion of substitution struck a chord. The biographer Grevel Lindop suggests Williams offered the first hints of his theory to a London student named Thelma Mills in 1929. She later wrote about the conversation they had and an experiment Williams proposed to her: “An inspector, he said, was to visit his class, and he was worried about it: ‘The projected visit interferes; intrudes awkwardly; will not be dismissed; in fact, makes of the lecture a burden, which it is not, or certainly should not be.’ Would Thelma, he asked, be willing to take on the worry for him? If she would set herself to worry a little about the inspection, then he could get on with preparing the lecture, and giving it, without anxiety, knowing that she was taking care of it on his behalf.”
Williams builds this idea on Galatians 6:2: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” As Lindop explains it, one person “could voluntarily take over the suffering—mental or physical—of another, and so relieve it. He had long felt that everything—everyone—was connected. And he had wondered about the implications of such biblical passages as St. Paul’s ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ’ and ‘we, being many, are . . . every one members one of another’ (Rom 12:5). The ultimate example of the process was the Atonement, in which Christ had redeemed mankind from the burden of sin by taking it upon Himself.”
One imagines Williams wondering what such verses meant in practice. To bear another’s burdens is a nice sentiment, but how does it happen? What are the practical implications of being one in Christ?
Williams grapples with these questions in his fiction. In his 1937 novel Descent into Hell, in the chapter titled “The Doctrine of Substituted Love,” a character named Pauline is in conversation with the poet Peter Stanhope. She tells him of the fear and distress she experiences because of a recurring vision. He does not dismiss her anxieties but instead offers a very practical solution.
“Haven’t you heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s burdens?”
“But that means—” she began, and stopped.
“I know,” Stanhope said. “It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you’re still carrying yours, I’m not carrying it for you—however sympathetic I may be.”
Pauline is skeptical at first, but like the episode recalled by Thelma Mills, she puts it to the test. Sure enough, her outlook transforms, and she recognizes,
She wouldn’t worry; no … she couldn’t worry. That was the mere truth—she couldn’t worry. She was, then and there, whatever happened later, entirely free. She was, then and there, incapable of distress. … He had been quite right; he had simply picked up her parcel. God knew how he had done it, but he had.
This is not his only fictional work touching on the subject. In another:
Her hand closed round the [injured] ankle; her mind went inwards into the consciousness of the Power which contained them both; she loved it and adored it: with her own thought of Aaron in his immediate need, his fear, his pain, she adored. Her own ankle ached and throbbed in sympathy, not the sympathy of an easy proffer of mild regret, but that of a life habituated to such intercession.
It is more than physical pain Sybil carries for her brother Aaron in this 1932 Williams novel, The Greater Trumps: “She throbbed for an instant not with pain but with fear as his own fear passed through her being. It did but pass through; it was dispelled within her, dying away in the unnourishing atmosphere of her soul, and with the fear went the pain.”
Williams reads Galatians 6:2 literally, insisting sympathy alone falls short of carrying another’s burden. Instead, it is beyond mere listening, thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, as Stanhope puts it; it suggests rather something more akin to an actual encounter with another’s distress. Stanhope suffers with and for Pauline as “the body of his flesh received her alien terror, [as] his mind carried the burden of her world.” Sybil does the same for her brother Aaron. Empathy seems a better term. Williams finds in Paul’s remark a glimpse of Christ’s incarnation, of Christ participating in creation and carrying the burden of a broken world. Christians in turn are to be Christlike, following his lead in sacrificial service to others. When Stanhope carries Pauline’s burden, I think he approaches the heart of the gospel: “He endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never understood, nor can.”
The apostle’s charge in Galatians 6:2 is weighty, especially given the second clause about fulfilling the law of Christ in this way. There may well be something of the “fanciful” in Williams’ literalism, as Lewis suspects, but it’s his process of exploring the meaning of biblical teachings through storytelling I highlight here. Right or wrong, Williams gets us thinking about sacrificial service. He shows us what enacting Galatians 6:2 might look like. For my part, these encounters with fictional studies of Paul’s charge proved both moving and thought-provoking on first reading; a writer pushed me to think more deeply about what it means to love others as Christ loves me. Since reading these stories, I’ve even found myself praying on occasion — rather shyly, I confess, because unlike Sybil, mine is hardly a life habituated to such intercession — that God would allow me the privilege of carrying, literally carrying, the worries and pains of others. Fanciful? Maybe. But either way, we see here the capacity of works of fiction to inform and inspire Christian thought and praxis.
Content adapted from Reading the Margins: Encounters with the Bible in Literature by Michael J. Gilmour from Fortress Press. Shared with permission.
