For William Hendel

 

Of the trinity of Inklings who wrote fantasy novels, namely J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, I would like to think of Tolkien as the Father, C.S. Lewis as the Son, and Charles Williams as the Holy Spirit. Not only because he, like the third Person of the Holy Trinity, is the least known among the three, but also because Williams became the “biographer,” so to speak, of "our Lord the Spirit" as he likes to write repeatedly in The Descent of the Dove, a book that W. H. Auden read once every year.1 The Descent of the Dove is a theological essay; Williams takes the reader through every stage and period in the history of Christianity, only each major development is now recast in the language and understanding of co-inherence, his own theological principle. It is written in a staccato style: it covers huge expanses of history with rhythm and nerve.

Approached from this vantage point, Charles Williams is a theologian who wrote novels (or a “poet of theology”2). Most of the theologians we know, ancient or modern, have been capable only of writing about their thoughts, which is another way of writing about themselves. And yet, come to think about it, it is more appropriate for a theologian, one would expect, to forget himself and make room for others. (Yet even when they do so, there is no guarantee that they would succeed; Kierkegaard, for example, effaced himself under the mask of his pseudonyms, but he never became as good a storyteller as his compatriot Hans Christian Andersen). Charles Williams was a different kind of a theologian, not by virtue of a university degree in the sacred arts—he had none—but by virtue of an experience that we, who don’t share it and don’t understand it, might call it “mystical.”

Theologians, like philosophers, are trained to explain; the task of a writer, however, is to create what is in need of an explanation. I know many philosophers who have nursed desperate aspirations of becoming writers and they have failed miserably. They have failed precisely where, in their academic books, they have succeeded. Their attempts at literature cannot get rid of what is otherwise their skill and their novels become didactic. There is no wonder in that. They are teachers and they teach even when they try to tell a story. What they forget is that one can walk from mystery to explanation but you cannot, beginning with the explanation (with the moral of the story) walk back and capture the mystery—it won’t be a mystery anymore and it won’t fool your readers. Even Chesterton at times is weak against the temptation of didacticism, at those moments when the story becomes too diaphanous and allows you to see what the implied meaning is.

Not having known him [i.e. Williams] in his earlier years, I do not know what literary influences were strongest upon him at the beginning. I suspect some influence from Chesterton, and especially, in connection with the novels, an influence of The Man Who Was Thursday. If this influence is present, it is most present in the first novel, War in Heaven, and becomes fainter in the later work. (…) But I suggest a derivation only to point a difference. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday is an allegory; it has a meaning which is meant to be discovered at the end; while we can enjoy it in reading, simply because of the swiftly moving plot and the periodic surprises, it is intended to convey a definite moral and religious point expressible in intellectual terms. It gives you ideas, rather than feelings, of another world. Williams has no such “palpable design” upon his reader. His aim is to make you partake of a kind of experience that he has had, rather than to make you accept some dogmatic belief. This gives him an affinity with writers of an entirely different type of supernatural thriller from Chesterton’s: with writers as different as Poe, Walter de la Mare, Montague James, Le Fanu and Arthur Machen.3

Williams, even when he writes about his own ideas, his ideas become submerged into the story (there is a whole chapter in Descent into Hell called “The Doctrine of Substituted Love” in which one character explains to another the outline of Williams own theological trinity of exchange, substitution, and co-inherence).   

For someone who has an interest in theology and philosophy, or on the principal themes and leitmotifs of Christianity, Williams’ novels are magic indeed: it is as if the author took a pen in his hands instead of a magic wand and made, out of scholarship, literature—so that those obscure topics and forgotten characters that have lied dead and dry in academic volumes have been quickened and come to life. Perhaps one always suspected that they were alive, or one had always harbored the secret desire to see them when they were alive, before they became names on an index, before the intervening centuries of academic commentary and textual exegesis had fixed them and immobilized them in the pages of monographs. Now, thanks to the magic that is literature, one can see them move and act and read about them in Williams’ novels.

Who hasn’t read about Plato’s Ideas? Yet who did expect to meet them or read about their unexpected intrusion upon the residents of a quiet English village, as we do in The Place of the Lion? The legends of the Holy Grail have been the stuff of legends for centuries, yet they come alive in War in Heaven. We meet Döppelgangers and succubi in Descent into Hell, ghosts and homunculi in All Hallow’s Eve, and the mysteries of the Tarot in The Greater Trumps.

In one tale you find a chase for the Holy Grail across the fields of Hertfordshire, and in another a blizzard stirred up by a pack of fortune-telling cards, and in another the great Platonic archetypes in the shape of lions and butterflies appearing in the countryside. There are satanists and doppelgängers and succubi and wizards all rubbing shoulders with clerks and publishers and housewives. The picture may switch with no apology at all from a policeman at a crossroad to the Byzantine Emperor, the assumption being that in the end they come to the same thing, says Williams, since they all hint at the final pattern of all blissful order and harmony, namely, the City of God.4

These things, however, lie on the surface, because there is always a different topic embedded in these stories. War in Heaven is also a meditation on the Eucharist; All Hallow’s Eve provides, among other things, a reflection on art and in particular painting; The Greater Trumps is, like Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, a description of History’s movements through counterpoint; in Many Dimensions the reader is presented with a philosophy of time and the problems of free-will and predestination; Descent in Hell is a presentation in literary form of Williams’ own doctrine of co-inherence and how forgiveness can extend to the past (or rather, how forgiveness must forgive the past, ours and that of others, for the sake of the future).

For all these reasons, Williams is a scholar’s author and his novels a scholar’s literature. There is no wonder that people like C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot loved to read them. Books themselves in Williams’ stories are not merely bibliographical embellishments but rather fulcrums in the development of the plot. Such is, in War in Heaven, the book of the notorious Sir Giles Tumulty, Historical Vestiges of Sacred Vessels in Folklore. And, in Many Dimensions, the Survey of Organic Law by Lord Arglay. Or, in The Place of the Lion, Damaris Tighe’s doctoral thesis on Pythagorean Influences on Abelard—not forgetting, of course, the incomplete De Angeles by Marcellus Victorinus of Bologna (perhaps a later literary reincarnation of Marius Victorinus who plays an important role in Augustine’s Confessions). In the last novel, the function that, in earlier novels, is performed by books is transferred to the two paintings of Jonathan Drayton.

Another noticeable feature in Williams’ novels is his use of texts, usually one or two lines, that a character would repeat and, by doing so,  the complexion of the story is transformed: Milton’s “Thus the Filial Godhead answering spake,” for example, in Shadows of Ecstasy; or a couple of lines from Shelley as in Descent into Hell

“The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden”;

or a few verses from the Psalm 136, which the Archdeacon repeats at various points in War in Heaven. Like Borges, with whom Williams shares more than one affinity (indeed, one could claim that Williams is an English Borges), he is excellent in using and mocking books and bibliographies especially in those novels when a character has literary or academic aspirations as, for example, in The Place of the Lion. Special consideration (and a separate study very much worth undertaking) deserves Williams’ employment of the Scriptures which illuminates his understanding of those Biblical passages that he weaves into his prose. There are other voices that break in through his narrative: we catch sudden echoes coming from Abelard—O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata!—from St. Augustine—tam antiqua, tam nova—from Dante quoting Revelation—ecce omnia nova facio—from St. Paul and even from Plato.

Williams’ novels, if judged merely as novels, must be found lacking if compared to the prose of a Proust or the character development of a Dostoyevsky. His first novel, Shades of Ecstasy, published only after he had the confidence of having four other novels in print, is “the weakest of the novels”5 that reads “like a masque.”6 That’s because there are not merely novels but novels who aspire to the simplicity of a fable and the allegory of a parable. They are as much parables as they are paradoxes. If their characters seem a little more than sketches, that’s because they only need to fulfil the function of a character. The reader should not focus on them but on the story. Williams’ characters are auxiliary to the story and all his stories are fairy tales (Faërie): learn to enjoy them like a child does, for the thrill of the fantasy. A child does not complain that the character of the evil queen is underdeveloped; it is enough that she be portrayed with the vanity and the jealousy of an evil queen, as it is enough for a knight who challenges the dragon of the dark forest to be young and brave—to give him a fully developed character, with existential crises and agonies of doubts would add nothing to the story and take everything away from it. The point and pleasure of fantasy is to present us with the fantastical. When the development of a character becomes part of the story (as in the later novels Descent into Hell and All Hallow’s Eve) then Williams gives us characters that are fully fleshed-out. In fact, more than any other novelist that I know, Williams follows and tends to those unperceived subtle changes in the way that some of his characters think, especially those selfish characters who prefer things over beings, like Lester Furnival in All Hallow’s Eve, or those whose only demand from life is to be left alone, like Lothair Coningsby in The Greater Trumps or Lawrence Wentworth in Descent into Hell—changes that ever so slowly transform them before the reader’s eyes. Williams’s novels are stories of imperceptible metamorphoses and micro-epiphanies.

If Williams’ novels are different from fairy tales, that’s to the extent that the story is conveyed in a prose that is poetical and by that, I mean incantatory. Take, for example, the following passage from Descent into Hell:

...under trees and leaves, leaves—leaves and eaves—eaves and eves; a word with two meanings, and again a word with two meanings, eves and Eves. Many Eves to many Adams; one Eve to one Adam; one Eve to each, one Eve to all...7  

Or this one, from the chapter "The Doctrine of Substituted Love" from the same novel:

Perjury, on her soul and in her blood, if now she slipped to buy sweets with money that was not hers; never, till it was hers in all love and princely good, by gift and gift and gift beyond excelling gift, in no secrecy of greed but all glory of public exchange, law of the universe and herself a child of the universe. Never till he--not Pascal nor the Jesuits nor the old chattering pattering woman but he; not moonlight or mist or clouding dust but he; not any power in earth or heaven but he or the peace she had been made bold to bid him--till they bade her take with all her heart what nothing could then forbid.8

Thomas Howard in his book-length study of Williams’ novels calls our attention to another aspect of Williams’ prose:

There is an interesting sample of what we might call ‘typically Williamsian’ prose at the start of chapter five [of War in Heaven], in which we see something of the irrepressibility of Williams’ imagination. Indeed, it is this quality which will doubtless keep Williams’ prose forever in the category of ‘special’ or ‘peculiar’ and never allow it to take its place comfortably on the shelves of twentieth-century novels. It is too much like poetry, not in the sense of rhythm and rhyme but rather in the sense that it flashes in all directions with virtually every word or phrase, obliging the reader to scamper hither and yon, all over psychology, theology, legend, and domestic ordinariness all at once in the attempt to stay with Williams’ meaning. Like the poets, Williams sees similarities and correspondences where the rest of us miss them. Hence this discordia concors, where he packs together items and suggestions that would seem on the surface to have little to do with each other.9

What Howard describes here is not only a formal aspect of Williams’ prose, or rather, if it is a formal aspect of Williams’ prose, that is because it is first and foremost an essential structure of Williams’ poetic vision which he himself summarizes, by alluding to the themes of his own novels, in the following passage from The Greater Trumps:

There was to be a time, the legends said, when one should arise who should understand the mystery of the cards and the images, and by due subjection in victory and victory in subjection should come to a secret beyond all, which secret—it had always been supposed by those few who had looked on the shapes, and few they had been even over the centuries—had itself to do with the rigid figure of the Fool. But the dark fate that falls on all mystical presentations, perhaps because they are not presentations only, had fallen on this; the doom which struck Osiris in the secular memory of Egypt, and hushed the holy, sweet, and terrible Tetragrammaton in the ritual of Judah [allusion to Many Dimensions], and wounded the Keeper of the Grail in the Castle of the Grail [allusion to War in Heaven], and by the hand of the blind Hoder pierced the loveliest of all the Northern gods, and after all those still everywhere smote and divided and wounded and overthrew and destroyed; by the sin of man and yet by more and other than the sin of man, for the myth of gods and rebellious angels had been invoked—by reason to frame the sense of a dreadful necessity in things: the need that was and yet must not be allowed to be, the inevitability that must be denied, the fate that must be rejected, so only and only by such contradictions of mortal thought did the nature of the universe make itself felt by man.10

Howard offers another example of the poetic function of Williams’ prose, a passage taken from Williams’ Descent into Hell where he interpolates his own rendition of the Nicene Creed in order to explain the futile effort of a man who by committing suicide hopes to separate himself from his body and therefore from his connection to the Republic of men. This is how Williams puts it:

No dichotomy of flesh and spirit distressed or delighted him, nor did he know anything of the denial of that dichotomy by the creed of Christendom. The unity of that creed has proclaimed, against experience, against intelligence, that for the achievement of man’s unity the body of his knowledge is to be raised; no other fairer stuff, no alien matter, but this—to be impregnated with holiness and transmuted by lovely passion perhaps, but still this. Scars and prints may disseminate splendour, but the body is to be the same, the very body of the very soul that are both names of the single man.11

Howard spends a long paragraph unpacking Williams’ emblematic language, as he has aptly called it earlier, at the end of which he rightly observes:

The fact that it takes some such expanding as this to say in plain expository prose all that is contained in a given sentence of a Williams narrative shows something of how tightly packed his prose is. It is almost poetry.12

Indeed, it is poetry but it is more. It is good theology. I have in mind at least a couple of Church fathers (Methodius of Olympus, for example, or Eutychius of Constantinople) who would have been jealous, if jealousy were permitted in their saintly hearts, of such a beautiful articulation of the resurrection of the dead as Williams’.

Considine, in Shadows of Ecstasy, promises the world “the conquest of death”—but that, as the priest, Ian Caithness observes, has already been done. The unconditional obedience that the Stone in Many Dimensions necessitates is, at the end, offered only by a woman, Chloe Burnett, as, in history, it was accomplished by another woman, the Virgin Mary.13 The outlandish and the occult in Williams’ stories serve as a way for recapturing something of Christianity’s central mysteries—the resurrection and incarnation—that our familiarity with them or indifference to them has prevented us from seeing in them that, which Goethe in the last lines of Faust calls, “the fulfilment of the insufficiency and the accomplishment of the ineffable.” Others have called Williams’ novels pageants or masques; I think it would be more fitting to compare them to the medieval mystery plays or to oratorios in prose.

The question we need to ask about fiction is how well it does the job of startling our imaginations so that we rub our eyes and see, for the first time or the thousandth, what has been staring at us all along. If it takes flying carpets, or the god Pan, or giants named Despair, or Platonic lions, so much the better.14

It was the task and mission of all the Inklings to give us back the myths that the rationality of Enlightenment and the disenchantment of positivism had taken away from us, “to reclaim for contemporary life what Lewis called the ‘discarded image’ of a universe created, ordered, and shot through with meaning.”15 Williams’ seven novels are seven stories of modern mythology that burn, to borrow an image from Revelation, like seven lamps of literature.

I believe that Williams wrote his novels motivated by a desire analogous to that which led him, in his personal life, to his preoccupation with the occult, namely the need to provide our modern lives with the rhythm of the ritual and the sacramental imagery of liturgy.16 Howard says that we don’t have a good category to describe the uniqueness (or oddity) of Williams’ novels and that perhaps “literary criticism may someday supply us with a more exact category.”17 My proposal is to think of them as literature of the liturgical kind and such a designation is befitting not only the rituals that so often are the subject matter of these novels,18 but it also describes the form and style of his prose that I called above incantatory. To call them a revival of the Gothic novels would be, I think, accurate, although I would like to go a step further and coin a new term that suits them even better, “the more exact category” which Howard was missing, a novel that is, in the best sense of the word, premodern after modernity and Byzantine after Byzantium.

~*~*~

Having made these general comments, I will now say a few words for each of these seven remarkable novels. These are not summaries but the briefest of comments, underscoring one or another of their multifaceted characteristics. For a detail summary of each of Williams’ novels I refer the reader to the excellent study by Thomas Howard. The chronological order of Williams’ novels is as follows:

1. Shadows of Ecstasy (published in 1933 but writing began before 1930)
2. War in Heaven (1930)
3. Many Dimensions (1931)
4. The Place of the Lion (1931)
5. The Greater Trumps (1932)
6. Descent into Hell (1937)
7. All Hallows' Eve (1945)

Together with them, we need to take into consideration four axioms, four cardinal points of orientation that demarcate Williams’ universe. These are:

1. Exchange and Substitution, the lived practices of co-inherence.
2. Analogia entis, the unity and hierarchy of all created beings; the great chain of being.
3. The key and end to knowledge is love, not power.
4. “This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.”

a) Exchange and Substitution, the lived practices of co-inherence. This is nothing else than the ancient doctrine of perichoresis (circumincessio). Perichoresis was for the Church Fathers, as it is for Williams, first of all, Christological19 before it becomes Trinitarian or, in Williams’ hands, cosmological, as he refuses to restrict it to the inner life of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity but it becomes the all-encompassing idea of the unity of every human being to every other human being and, in Williams’ fiction, even the unity of different temporal and spatial planes. It was first announced to the world by the cries of the martyrs on their way to their martyrdom; thus, Felicitas replies “Now I suffer what I suffer; then [in her martyrdom] another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him.”20 And Ignatius of Antioch declares “My Eros is crucified” to which Williams offers the following gloss:

“My love is crucified”; “My Love is crucified”: “My love for my Love is crucified”; “My Love in my love is crucified.” (…) The Eros that is crucified lives again and the Eros lives after a new style: this was the discovery of the operation of faith. The Eros of five hundred years of Greece and Rome was to live after a new style; unexpected as yet, the great Romantic vision approached. “My” Eros is crucified; incredible as yet, the great doctrines of interchange, of the City, approached.21

Lastly, Nicaea came along and inscribed the great doctrine of co-inherence back into the Holy Trinity from which all love emanates. Again, in the particular terminology of Williams:

The Emperor summoned Nicaea; the Fathers got to work. The result is known. The question there asked was capable of translation into all categories, including the category of exchange. Was there, in the most Secret, in the only Adored—was there that which can be described only by such infelicitous mortal words as an equal relation, an equal goodwill, an equal love? Was this in its very essence? Was the Son co-eternal with the Father? If there had been no creation, would Love have practiced love? And would Love have had an adequate object to love? Nicaea answered yes. It confirmed, beyond all creation, in the incomprehensible Alone, the cry of Felicitas: “Another is in Me.” The Godhead itself was in Co-inherence.22

Perichoresis is literally the divine circular movement, a round dance (choreia, hora) that finds its most clear image in the perpetual dance of the magical figurines that correspond to The Greater Trumps of the tarot. Although, in a profound sense, all of Williams’ magical objects embody in some way his idea of co-inherence. If the Stone of Suleiman in Many Dimensions has the properties of teleportation in space and time, that is thanks to the interpenetration (perichoresis) of all times and all spaces. If the Holy Grail is ultimately every Eucharistic chalice, that is because of the liturgical unity of sacraments thereby every Mass is both the Last Supper and the eschatological banquet. If the archetypes of creation become visible in The Place of the Lion, that is because of the indwelling of the invisible in the visible. Nevertheless, co-inherence is not a theoretical abstraction but becomes embodied in one’s readiness to practice daily the art of exchange and substitution and it is by virtue of that readiness (or lack thereof) that all of Williams’ characters move towards their salvation or towards their damnation.  

b) Analogia entis, the unity and hierarchy of all created beings; the great chain of being. If Williams’ magic is to work, the interconnectedness of every being to every other being is to be assumed whereby each thing, however small or insignificant, is placed within a vast nexus of relations that stretches, to quote Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” from the worm to the Cherub. Such a relational and ordered understanding of the reality was the universe of the saint and the scholastic and it is this that allows both exchange and substitution to work. In the words of Henry Lee:

All things are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement. Without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth. It is our business—especially yours and mine—to take up the power of relation.23

c) The key and end to knowledge is love, not power. This axiom finds its emblematic expression in the saying from Many Dimensions: “the way to the Stone is in the Stone.”

“I do not know what he meant,” Arglay answered, “though certainly the way to any end is in that end itself. For as you cannot know any study but by learning it, or gain any virtue but by practicing it, so you cannot be anything but by becoming it.”24

No knowledge can be achieved without the knower becoming in some sense like the thing known. It was this epistemological similitude (homoiosis) between the knower and the known that led Aristotle to compare the soul, as the faculty of understanding, to the human hand. “The soul is like the hand,” Aristotle writes in De Anima. And it is like the hand, which is able to grasp its objects by conforming to their shapes, to the extent that the soul can become like the objects of our knowledge in order to know them. A hand that remains stubbornly in its own inflexible shape would not be able to grasp anything (and please note that we use the language of “grasping” in talking about understanding and we speak of “concepts”—literally, things grasped—by which we understand). Furthermore: everything we are capable of knowing— ourselves, our world around us and within us, and others like and unlike ourselves—were created by Love and out of love. How else, then, do you expect to know them except in love? “He who doesn’t love, he doesn’t know (1 John 4:8) not only God, who is Love, but even himself, who was created out of love.

You cannot know something by observing it (Sir Giles Tumulty), or by studying it (Damaris Tighe), or by possessing it (Gregory Persimmons) or by controlling it (Henry Lee)—but by becoming it. This is an Augustinian doctrine: “Do you want to find the good people? Be one yourself, and you will find them.”25 “You start doing what is charitable, and things begin to make sense. The riddles will not yield themselves to the ransacking of the occultist or the mulling of the philosopher.”26

d) “This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.” This expression, particular to Williams, is his own way of articulating epigrammatically what we know since the corpus Dionysiacum as the two ways of theology, the polyonymous via affirmativa, where every name can be applied to God (“this also is Thou”) and the way of apophatic theology, or via negativa, where no name can be properly applied to God (“neither is this Thou”).

This fourfold of ideas forms, as it should be expected, a unified picture where the exchange and substitution of co-inherence (perichoresis) is made possible and intensified by the relational and ordered view of the universe (analogia entis); in such a universe our knowledge of ourselves and others must follow the path of love—that is, of the ecstatic movement towards the other—rather than of our desire to possess or control things. Lastly, in the underlying unity of analogia entis, “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17), so confronted with the beauty of the creation and the grace of our humanity one can say affirmatively “this also is Thou,” while averting the danger of either idolatry or pantheism by the complimentary negation “neither is this Thou.”

Seen through this kaleidoscopic fourfold, one could venture assigning a theme to each of the seven novels. It is always a bad idea to reduce novels into doctrines, and therefore the following is to be taken very tentatively and only to the extent that it is helpful in suggesting to the reader to look behind the surface of these odd narratives. Thus, Shadows of Ecstasy is, among other things, a meditation on the mystery of transiency and the temptation of immortality; War in Heaven is about the use and abuse of everyday sacraments; Many Dimensions has something to say about redemption by obedience; as The Place of the Lion reflects on creation and its restoration; in The Greater Trumps we find a parable of analogia entis; in Descent into Hell  we read about the implications of exchange and substitution—and their denial—among the living; whereas in All Hallows' Eve we read about the implications of exchange and substitution—and their denial—among the dead.

One way to classify Williams’ novels is the tripartite scheme proposed by Glen Cavaliero according to which the first novel, Shadows of Ecstasy, stands alone (“it is a philosophical thriller rather than a metaphysical one, and is characterised by a prevailing scepticism”27), while the final two, namely Descent into Hell and All Hallow’s Eve, mark Williams’ transition from the metaphysical thriller of the middle period, so to speak, that contains War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion and The Greater Trumps, to a visionary (or mystical) kind of novel “with a greater stress on human relationships than one finds in the earlier books.”28 Of those four novels of the middle period, War in Heaven, according to Cavaliero, “examines the distinction between magic and religion, while the remaining three,  “use specifically mythological material to explore the nature of power, and the relation between human freedom and divine providence.”29 Apart from these distinctions, the very theme that informs Williams’ universe—namely the unity underlying the trinity of co-inherence, exchange, and substitution—is reflected in his novels in their relation to each other. That is to say, one should read all seven novels as one, in a similar way perhaps that the seven “novels” that comprise In Search of Lost Time are one work. That way, one cannot but begin to notice that, for example, Simon the Clerk of the last novel is, as a character, the extension of Nigel Considine from the first novel and, at the same time, the antithesis to Peter Stanhope from Descent into Hell. As, in turn, we recognize in him a family resemblance, both in manners and in spirit, with Sibyl from The Greater Trumps and with the Archdeacon from War in Heaven. There are certain threads among his characters and his storylines in Williams’ novels that bind them together and reading them together, one in light of the other, reveals that each is only a candle in a seven-lamp candelabra.

Shadows of Ecstasy

The protagonist in Shadows of Ecstasy is Nigel Considine, also known as the Deathless One. His own teaching, which he practices himself and teaches others, consists in the “transmutation of the energy” of sex (as well food, sleep, and any other pleasure of life) by a strict abstinence whereby the energy of life is directed back to himself, thus managing to delay his death by two centuries. His attempted arrest by the police, described in the chapter “Passing through the Midst of Them,” is strongly reminiscent of Dionysus in front of Pentheus from Euripides’ Bacchae, in spite of Roger Ingram’s exclamation “Phoebus, Phoebus, Python-destroyer, hear and save” with which the chapter ends. Or perhaps Mr. Ingram is correct in his evocation of Phoebus, for Considine is a sober Dionysus, thus closer to Apollo; as he is also a Christ-like figure (the scene of his attempted arrest draws on that other arrest in the garden of Olives) and, at the same time, as further away as possible from Christ.30

In this passage Nigel Considine explains his mission in terms of Plato’s Symposium (the dialogue is not explicitly mentioned, of course, but the language is unmistakably):

It is a long work, and many have waited for it. My father longed for it and did not see it, though he knew the beginning and taught it to me. This was the beginning of sex when far away in the ages the world divided itself in its primal dark instinct to destroy death which seemed its doom. And when man came he desired immortality, and deceived himself with begetting children and with religion and with art. All these are not ecstasy, but the shadow of ecstasy. Kingship and dynasties he created and cities and monuments and science, and nothing satisfied that hungry desire. And then he created love, and knew that that which existed between a man and a woman was mysterious and powerful, but what to do with he has not known. Only a few have known, Caesar and a few others, and they have been struck down.31

The heroine of the novel is Rosamond whose indecisiveness, which is rather something deeper and more sinister than that, namely the oscillation between fighting and fleeting from one’s own desires: “like all men and all women who are not masters of life, she swayed to and from in her intention and even in her desire”—gives Williams the opportunity to write the following:

She would run there and then run away, till the strait-jacket of time and place imprisoned her as it imprisons in the end all who suffer from a like madness. It is perhaps why the asylum of material creation was created, and we sit in our separate cells, strapped and comparatively harmless, merely foaming a little and twitching our fingers, while the steps and voices of unknown warders come to us from the infinite corridors. But Rosamond was only beginning to hurl herself against the walls of her cell, and the invisible warders had not yet had occasion to take much notice of her. The jacket waited her; when the paroxysm was done she would no doubt come to regard it as becoming wear and in the latest fashion. Whether such a belief is desirable is a question men have not yet been able to decide. 32

War in Heaven

I have already made several comments on this novel above that I would not like to repeat here. From all of Williams’ novels, War in Heaven is the most entertaining and the one that is closer to a proper murder mystery. It develops into becoming more than that. Here we meet not the fellowship of a ring, but the guardians of the Holy Grail (or as Williams prefers to spell it, Graal):

So through the English roads the Graal was borne away in the care of a Duke, an Archdeacon, and a publisher’s clerk, pursued by a country householder, the Chief Constable of a county, and a perplexed policeman. And these things also perhaps the angels desired to look into.33

Even though one is led to believe that the main storyline is a whimsical revival of the folklore surrounding the Holy Grail, at the end the reader discovers that it was that but also more: the book culminates, appropriately perhaps, in the celebration of the Eucharist. The same Eucharist that takes place in our little parishes, even in Fardles, as the Grail is every chalice.

Many Dimensions

The stone of Suleiman (i.e., Solomon) possesses some unique properties that defy much of our physics and even more of our metaphysics. First of all, as the characters find out by experimentation in the first chapters of the book, it can be endlessly divided without being the least diminished. The original stone can produce as many stones identical to itself (called “types”) without diminution or alteration. Each of these types has all the properties of the original—the center of all derivation—including the ability to infinite self-multiplication. If the stone is desired, however, that is on account of two other remarkable properties: first, it can transport instantly the one who holds it in any place in space, by a mere act of the will and secondly, it can heal whoever holds it of any illness immediately and completely. These two properties create conflicting interests for any society. For to use the stone to heal the sick must mean that it will starve the healthy—that is, the workers who are engaged in all forms of shipment, commerce, and transportation, whom the stone’s powers of instantaneous transportation would render superfluous—while, on the other hand, to protect the working masses who depend on our need for locomotion could only mean to doom the sick to their suffering.

It is right that the stone that has the power of instantaneous transportation through thought, space, and time should be called by the ambiguous phrase “the end of desire.” For desire depends, as Levinas has shown, on the traversing of distances. Should distances be eliminated, as if by magic, desire cannot be sustained anymore and comes to an end.

One should connect the magical objects that populate Williams’ novels and their occult powers to technology. Distances have been almost entirely eliminated thanks to our tele-technologies, we have achieved an instantaneous omnipresence and omniscience, and we already feel the results of our deflating desire. We can manipulate weather without the Tarots. And in place of a succubus, we have computers gifted with artificial intelligence and programmed to fulfil our pornographic desires.

The Place of the Lion

Something happens that tears the fabric of the universe, as if it were, and the patterns and paradigms of the particular things of our world that lie behind and beyond this world—to wit, Plato's ideas—begin to enter our world and by doing so they absorbed back into themselves the things that they cause. It is, in other words, as if the unfolding of creation is momentarily folded again back into its origins. Thus, a lioness that has escaped from some zoo disappears when the Form of the Lion begins to stroll around a small English town. Next, the Butterfly Itself appears and so it absorbs into itself all the surrounding butterflies. The assumption of the novel is that of a neo-Platonic medieval Christian scholar, namely that these Universals or Archetypes correspond to the angelic orders—the correspondence is never made explicit.

The protagonist, a certain Anthony, is the assistant editor of a scholarly journal called The Two Camps in which his cousin, lover, and Ph.D. candidate, Ms. Damaris Tighe, is also a contributor. (Damaris, says the Acts, was one of the first converts of St. Paul when he gave his famous speech at the Areopagus, the other one being a certain Dionysius, called the Areopagite). Now this Damaris works on Dionysius who, for her, is pseudo-. Her dissertation is on the Pythagorean Influences on Abelard but occasionally she gives a more popularized paper like the "Eidola and the Angeli" which happened to be the talk that was interrupted when one of these paradigms, as to disprove Ms. Tighe, made an appearance in Mr. Berringer's house.

C.S. Lewis, in a letter to Arthur Greeves dating from February 26, 1936, writes the following:

I have just read what I think a really great book [i.e., The Place of the Lion].… It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience.34

It is easy for a scholar and an academic, and even for a doctoral student, to recognize the sins of their desire (even if only a desire for knowledge), in that ambition represented by the character of Damaris Tighe. But they may also want to take a look at Nigel Considine and his adepts. They despise sex and tea and even wine (both secular and eucharistic) as bothersome distractions, and they can’t feel even the cold (“The House by the Sea”), very much like another character in Plato’s novels who was called Socrates. In fact, all the characters Williams casts under a critical light have one thing in common: the pursuit of power. It might not be the same kind of power, but power comes in many forms and shapes, disguised under many lofty names, so that each of us can have one that suits his tastes.

The Greater Trumps

The Greater Trumps is a Christmas story and I have always had a partiality to a good Christmas story. It is, therefore, my favorite of all Williams’ novels and in competition with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for the first place. It tells the story of how the world was saved (for a second time) on a Christmas night. And as the people who lived around the world that first Christmas took no notice of the fact that the world has changed forever, so too no-one had any idea that the powers that Henry had unleashed by beating the Tarot cards on this Christmas night threatened to destroy the world (as an ancestor of his had done centuries ago by destroying the Spanish Armada). The cards, at least one set of them that seemed to be the original set of the arcana, have the power to control the elements and he who can control the elements can control the weather. 

The Carols of Christmas, wherever they were sung that night, were sung in ignorance of the salvation which endured among them, or in ignorance at least of the temporal salvation which the maiden-mother of Love preserved.35

There is a double stroke of genius to be noticed in this novel. First, Williams’ own invention of the dancing figurines that correspond to the figures of the tarot and, in particular the function of the figure of the Fool which, once brought together with the original deck of tarots unlock both the secrets and the awful powers hidden within and, secondly, the way that Williams portrays Aaron Lee’s house and the action that happens in its various rooms as to mirror the evolution of human history; a Phenomenology of Spirit of sorts translated into architecture (for examples see “The Wanderers in the Beginning”). The first words of the novel are “…perfect Babel” and this image is developed all the way through the falling tower at the end of the book.

The most noticeable characteristic of this novel, however, must be its sustained meditations on hands. Of course, writing about hands and even reading hands in a novel populated with gypsies and tarot cards might be expected. Yet, the kind of reading in which Williams is interested here is not that of palmistry.  There is much to be said about the hand, since we owe our humanity to it. Only a human has a hand (a point that Heidegger was fond of making36) and it is thanks to the hand that we were able to have language. It is worth, therefore, quoting at some length part of Williams’ visions of hands that occur in three parts, each time involving a different character.

First, we have Aaron Lee’s vision of a cloud of hands:

His gaze swept the gathering cloud; everywhere it was made up of hands, whose shape was formed by it, and yet it was not the mist that formed them, for they were the mist. Everywhere those restless hands billowed forward of all sizes, in all manner of movement, clasping, holding, striking, fighting, smoothing, climbing, thrusting out, drawing back, joining and disjoining, heaving upward, dragging down, appearing and disappearing, a curtain of activity falling over other activity, hands, and everywhere hands.37

Then we have Nancy’s phenomenology of hands:

She kept her hands very still, wondering at them. They had been so busy, with one thing and another, in the world, continually shaping something. What many objects had rested against those palms—chair-backs, cups, tennis-rackets, the hands of her friends, birds, books, bag-handles, umbrellas, clothes, bed-clothes, door-handles, ropes, straps, knives and forks, bowls, pictures, shoes, cushions—O, everything! And always she had had some purpose, her hands had been doing something, making something, that had never been before—not just so. They were always advancing on the void of the future, shaping her future. In Henry’s—exchanging beauty and truth; in her father’s—exchanging…the warm blood took her cheeks as she thought ashamedly of him. In Sybil’s not long since, receiving strength, imparting the tidings of her own feebleness. Full of the earth of the Tarots; holding on to Henry’s to stay the winds and waters of the Tarots. She stretched them out to either side of her; what could she do now to redeem the misfortune that threatened? What in this moment were her hands meant to shape by the mystical power which was hidden in them? She remembered the old woman’s hands waving above Sybil’s head; she remembered the priest’s hands that very morning raised for the ritual blessing; she remembered hands that she had seen in painting, the Praying Hands of Dürer, the hands of Christ on the cross or holding off Saint Mary in some drawing of the garden tryst, the hands of the Divine Mother lifting the Child, the small hand of the Child Himself raised in benediction; she remembered the stretched hand of the Emperor directing the tumults of the world; the hands of the juggler who tossed the balls, the hand of the Fool as she summoned the last danger from its tomb, the lifted hands of the juggler and of the Fool as they came together, before the rain of gold had hidden them that evening from her sight.

It was no doubt a thing to wonder at, the significant power of man’s hands.  She thought of the unknown philosopher who had wrought the Tarot images; his hands had been filled with spiritual knowledge; they perhaps had guided his mind as much as his mind his hands.38

And finally, Sibyl’s reflection on hands:

…Miss Goningsby held out a gold hand towards the staircase down which Joanna was beginning to creep. The hand which had helped Lothair and comforted Nancy and healed Aaron, which had picked up the kitten and closed the door and controlled the storm, was stretched to gather in this last reverted madness of man. It lay there, very still, the centre of all things, the power and the glory, the palm glowing with a ruddy passion veiled by the aureate flesh—the hand of all martyrs, enduring; of all lovers, welcoming; of all rulers, summoning. And, as if indeed it summoned, the cloud of gold rushed down towards it, but it moved in shapes and figures, the hands of all the symbols stretched towards the hand that, being human, was so much more than symbol. Nancy and Henry from above beheld them, hands imperial and sacerdotal, single and joined, the working hands that bult the Tower, the helpless hands that formed the Wheel, white hands stretching, from the snow, fiery hands thrusting from between Joanna’s that burned downwards and vanished, all activities rushing towards that repose through which activity beat in the blood that infused it. So the hand of the juggler had been stretched to cast and catch the tossed balls of existence; so that hand of the Fool had at last fulfilled the everlasting promise and yielded its secrets to the expected hour.39

Descent into Hell

In this and the next novel the reader might best admire Williams’ ability to build his narrative in layers of superimposing times and places. It is a feature in all of his works perhaps, but in the last two novels it becomes more explicit, that co-inherence extends even to place and time. Places have memories. There is no surprise in hearing this. The fact that we visit historical places confirms it. Yet, a memory is an aspect of the past and the past is a category of time; place, on the other hand, is a category of space, thus saying that places have memories is to unite space and time and the layers of intervening times in a particular locale. In this story this particular locale is Battle Hill.

And the protagonist, whose descent into hell we follow, is appropriately a historian. Lawrence Wentworth, a military historian, embroiled in a long scholarly dispute with a colleague of whom he is jealous (one day, a crucial day for him, he has the bad luck of reading in the morning paper that his nemesis was knighted, while he was not) has a dream of sliding down a rope, the same rope perhaps that a worker had used to kill himself when the house was been built in what is now Wentworth's bedroom, only he, the dead man, does not immediately know he has been dead. Most authors of ghost stories can tell a good tale of people encountering a ghost. But only Williams has written as detailed an account, as in the chapter “Junction of Travellers,” of a dead man observing our lives and encountering the living. From that point on, the two worlds, the world of those who have died in Battle Hill and the world of those who currently live there keep intermingling and interfering with each other. The same Wentworth becomes attached to a succubus, in the form of the girl that he is in love with, Adela. Since he couldn’t have the real Adela, or since in order to have the real Adela he would have to put some effort to win her, it was more expedient for him, or so he thought, to find the satisfaction that he longed for in a fake image of his own fantasy.

It is only the ingenuity of a poet that can bestow new meaning on an old word and in Descent into Hell Williams does precisely this with “Gomorrah,” a name that names both the condition and the destination of Lawrence Wentworth who, in his growing aversion to other humans, to human relations of any kind, and to society at large (“…he would not have a City—no City, no circulars, no beggars. No; no; no. No people but his, no loves but his”40), he becomes a recluse, enfeebled in body and mind, unable to work, unable to love. This is the beginning of his journey to Gomorrah.

He wanted to pull the curtains, to lock the doors, to bar out what was in his brain by barring his house, to be with what was irreconcilably not the world. He wanted either to shut himself wholly away from the world in a sepulchre of desire and satiety and renewed desire…41

Proust, in his understanding of homosexuality as a racial category, had ventured the hypothesis that Gomorrah is the motherland of all female adherents of that race (as Sodom was for sodomites). Williams’ understanding of Gomorrah is, in my opinion, more interesting and far more original than Proust’s. We read about it at the end of “The Tryst of the Worlds”:

The Lord’s glory fell on the cities of the plain, of Sodom and another. We know all about Sodom nowadays, but perhaps we know the other even better. Men can be in love with men, and women with women, and still be in love and make sounds and speeches, but don’t you know how quiet the streets of Gomorrah are? Haven’t you seen the pools that everlastingly reflect the faces of those who walk with their own phantasms, but the phantasms aren’t reflected, and can’t be. The lovers of Gomorrah are quite contented, Periel; they don’t have to put up with our difficulties. They aren’t bothered by alteration, at least till the rain of the fire of the Glory at the end, for they lose the capacity for change, except for the fear of hell. They’re monogamous enough! And they’ve no children—no cherubim breaking into being or babies as tiresome as ours; there’s no birth there, and only the second death. There’s no distinction between lover and beloved; they beget themselves on their adoration of themselves, and they live and feed and starve on themselves, and by themselves too, for creation, as my predecessor said, is the mercy of God, and they won’t have the facts of creation. No, we don’t talk much of Gomorrah, and perhaps it’s as well and perhaps not.42

As the novel begins, we see a group of amateur theatricals planning the production of a pageant by the poet Peter Stanhope. As it is so often the case in Williams’ novels, a small thing grows to become a major, all-encompassing theme, so here too Stanhope’s pageant becomes the pattern of the story and then the interpretive key for the end of history (cf., the chapters “The Sound of the Trumpet” and “The Opening of Graves”). One of the amateur actors in Stanhope’s paly is Pauline Anstruther, the novel’s heroine, who has visions of her Doppelgänger following her, inspired by the verses of Shelley from Prometheus Unbound: 

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden

One night Pauline is sent by her grandmother, Mrs. Anstruther, (as Nancy in The Greater Trumps was sent by her aunt Sibyl) to do something that at the moment seems without purpose, something that eludes their understanding, or in fact, any person’s understanding, and it might even be contrary to their will. But it is precisely on this point, on their willingness and readiness to undergo this kenosis for the sake of the other, that the plot of both these novels depends and turns.

When Sibyl sends Nancy to Henry’s room, against all her wishes, even against her own understanding (and that’s the point), for she has seen Henry manipulating the Tarot cards in order to kill her father so that he can keep the very cards that he employs to that end—"go to Henry, go and live, go and love”—this sending, is it any different thanMargaret Anstruther’s asking Pauline, her granddaughter “to go out” in the darkest night over Battle Hill “to see if anyone wants you”?43 In that walk through the night she meets first the dead worker who committed suicide and whom she is able to direct to the City—that is, to his salvation—and then she helps, by assuming his fear, one of her ancestors, Struther, who was burned at the stakes on the same place over three centuries ago. It is the willingness, against one’s wishes, against one’s understanding, to become an obedient instrument to the Moment that turns every moment into a portal to either salvation or damnation. When Pauline is puzzled as to “how could one give backwards” and as far backwards as “four hundred years” her dying grandmother replies: “Child, I can touch Adam with my hand; you aren’t as far off.”44

In his theological essay on The Forgiveness of Sins Williams has explained that exchange by substitution is possible across different times on the basis of the co-inherence of every man with every man, from Adam to the New Adam. Writing of the Fall and how Adam’s sin, the original sin, is also our sin, he says:

But I have wondered if indeed we were not all there, if all mankind was not then simultaneous and co-inherent, and whether all mankind did not then choose amiss…. Adam may have been our name as well as our single father’s, we in him and he in us in a state other than sequence. We were in him for we were he. We were all there, and we were all greedy or proud or curious.45

“‘In the sight of God,” Williams quotes Lady Julian saying, “all man is one man and one man is all man.”46 Williams’ (and Lady Julian’s) position, eccentric as it might sound, is nevertheless witnessed by the language of the Scriptures themselves every time that the relation of man to man is most concerned. As, for example, when God, in speaking to Cain, says: “the voice of your brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10). The Hebrew text reads “bloods” (demei), in plural, for by Cain killing the first man to be killed, he had, in effect, killed all men and women whose blood was to be shed until the end of history, so whenever a man kills another man, he repeats Cain’s crime, for he is killing his brother. “At the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man” (Gen. 9:5-6). And when Christ asks Saul “why you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). Saul is right to ask “who are you?” for he doesn’t, strictly speaking, persecute him but the Christians. Yet, Christianus alter Christus. And so, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).

And to me. And here, as Will Hendel has observed, a disturbing possibility opens up: “If we can share our burdens across the world and time, must it not also be true that we can (or rather, we do) shirk our burdens onto someone else?”47 Are we not responsible “for all the sins of men,”48 as Father Zosimas says? Is it not true that “those who will not suffer for the sins of others will make others suffer for their sins”?49 It is true, but on the condition that one remains within the walls of history. Which co-inherence does not. For co-inherence is principally anagogical (as it is analogical), it communicates with the City and with "the Lord Mayor" of that City and, thankfully for us, it becomes more the source of joy (in sharing in the bliss of the blessed ones whose joy is not complete until we joint them too) than the origin of the original sin.

All Hallow’s Eve

Most authors are interested in the lives of their characters, that is, they are interested in them as long as they are living and they abandon them once they are dead. That’s when Williams picks up his. Two of his characters in this novel are already dead before the novel has even begun. It is relatively easy for an author to write about living characters, he himself is after all alive and living among the living, but it must require an extraordinary talent (or else a rare experience) to be able to write about the lives of the dead after they have died.

In Descent to Hell Pauline helped a dead man to find his way to the City; in All Hallow’s Eve we see the other side of the exchange, a dead woman, Lester, is saving Betty from Simon the Clerk’s attempt to kill her. No need to tolerate such ideas as poetic license of an eccentric novelist. Saints, some of them dead for centuries, not only they intercede for our lives, they also intervene in our lives (and often uninvited). Their biographies, their acta and gesta, are several pages longer after their deaths than they were before they had died. This is what Williams calls, “the acts of the City.” To think of the dead as lost and gone, as if they had returned to a state of non-existence, to think that such a return is even possible, is perhaps the dullest moment of the human mind. We think not merely as a baby, who would think that his mother has disappeared because she left the room, but as a fetus might think, failing to understand how a doctor could help it from a world that is, from the perspective of the fetus, beyond the womb. So we disbelieve that any help might come from the world beyond the grave. We may call such disbelief “scientific” but it is only infantile thinking.

Yet Lester is not a saint. She is able to help Betty not because she has done much good in her life but because she was the recipient of a small act of kindness by her husband, Richard. A kindness that she was able to accept and recognize.

…but she remembered no action of her own, only how once or twice, when she had been thirsty in the night, Richard had brought her a glass of water and saved her getting up; and in her drowsiness a kind of vista of innumerable someones doing such things for innumerable someones stretched before her, but it was not as if they were being kind, for it was not water that they were bringing but their own joy, or perhaps it was water and joy at once; and everything was altered, for no one had to be unselfish any more, so free they all were now from the receding death-light of earth.50

Lester’s memory, as it happens, is an ancient one. It goes as far back as first-century Judea when a voice made this promise: “And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward” (Matthew 10:42). That reward saved both Lester and Betty and “innumerable someones.” Here it is how it works:

If, for example, I can just try getting this cup of water in the middle of the night for my spouse, who is thirsty, even though God knows I am too sleepy to budge, I will have gone through a very small lesson in Charity, which is the name given to the principle of exchange and co-inherence when we find it at work in an intelligent creature exercising his free will…. I may of course refuse, in which case I will have missed one lesson. The difficulty here is that this refusal turns out to be more serious than my merely having missed a lesson. I have lost ground. I am not where I was. I am a step back. Or, put another way, I am now less prepared to pass the next lesson since I have contributed by my refusal to an inclination, already too strong, to pass up the lessons. It is so much easier just to stay in bed here. It is much, much nicer. How comfortable and warm it is here. Let my spouse fend for herself. I’ll just doze a bit more…
…and wake up in hell, says Williams.51

Which is precisely what happened to Lawrence Wentworth.

Since I read Williams’ novels I can’t help but find myself very much mindful of the acts of co-inherence. Only the other day a request came, one of many such requests one receives after a certain age, to review an article submitted to some scholarly journal. Normally I would have written back to decline on some pretext, yet this time I saw in this inconvenience an opportunity to practice the art of exchange and substitution. I accepted it. If novels are meant to do a little more than help us pass the time, if they are perhaps to take us out of ourselves so that, having read them, we are to return to ourselves a little better, then Williams’ novels have done the trick for me. Call it a magic trick, if you wish, but one day it might save my life.

There is one point, however, on which I must part ways with Williams. The point in question is most succinctly made in a line of his early poetry that anticipates a major theme in his novels. Sonnet sixty-seven from The Silver Stair offers a poetic rendition of the Hermetic principle “as above so below” in the following words:

All lives of lovers are His song of love,
Now low and soft and holy as a kiss,
Now high and clear and holy as a star.

Slave in Man’s house, yet builder-up thereof,
The silver and the golden stairs are His,
The altar His—yea, His the lupanar.

I knew of a young scholar who not long ago claimed, as Williams does in this sonnet, that if I cannot fall on my knees before the other in sex (the lupanar), then I cannot fall on my knees before the Other in prayer (the altar).52 On that score, I am afraid, they were both very wrong.

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Fr. Manoussakis was born in Athens, Greece, and educated in the United States, earning a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College. He teaches philosophy at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester and lives as a recluse in Boston. The author of God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Indiana University Press, 2007, translated into Russian and Romanian); For The Unity of All (Cascade, 2015, translated into Italian); and The Ethics of Time (Bloomsbury, 2017), Fr. Manoussakis has edited several volumes including Heidegger and the Greeks, (Indiana University Press, 2006); Phenomenology and Eschatology, (Ashgate 2009); and translated Heidegger's Aufenthalte into English (SUNY, 2005). His published articles in English and in Greek have appeared translated into Italian, French, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Chinese.

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