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But Christianity, of course, is related to real life. Seen from the Christian perspective, romantic love is far from a chronic and threatening problem. It can, in fact, enhance all relationships—teaching us to treat all persons with the dignity they deserve. Romantic love and dignity? The two have a lot to do with one another. And that leads us to the dignified, if eccentric, world of a man named Charles Williams.

Charles Williams's Theology
Most Christians have done one of two things with romantic love: condemn it out of hand, or sloppily paste it to marriage and then inadequately say no more about it. Charles Williams was one twentieth-century Christian who thought there was more to it than that, and he took the trouble to construct what he called a "theology of romantic love."

As a personal friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Williams was among those Oxford Christians we know as the Inklings. He had a slight build and was, according to Lewis, "ugly as a chimpanzee." His hands, due to a mild nervous affliction, trembled enough that a barber had to shave him. Despite Williams's appearance, Lewis wrote, "he emanates more love than any man I have ever known," and talked in such a way "that he is transfigured and looks like an angel." Lewis observed that "women find him so attractive that if he were a bad man he could do what he liked either as a Don Juan or a charlatan." Not a bad man, Williams was married 28 years until his death at the age of 58.

To understand romantic love, Williams began with the doctrines of the Incarnation and Creation. Since God was flesh in Christ, the body was not and is not intrinsically evil. The body, Williams said, has not fallen "farther than the soul." Second, each person is created in the image of God and thus uniquely reflects some aspect of God's glory. Human beings are not mere mortals. As Lewis said, "the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare."

How does this apply to romantic love? Let me appeal to my experience, which is a common one. I have noticed that romantic love is a sort of vision. Conventional wisdom regards it as a vision, as a way of seeing. We often hear the phrase, "I don't know what she sees in him." Parents frequently cannot understand how sons fall in love with ordinary Janes, or daughters with workaholics. Friends are baffled when someone they care about falls in love with a freeloader, even a criminal. The parents and friends are looking rationally, but only rationally. They see how ordinary our lover is, or how flawed she is. When I am in love, though, I see something different. In the words of an old George and Ira Gershwin song, "She may not be the girl some men think of as pretty, but to my heart she carries the key." I see not how ordinary or how worthless she is, but how extraordinary and priceless she really is. This, of course, accords with the Christian faith. To God, no woman or man is worthless or ordinary.

For Williams, then, the romantic vision was not confused, but illuminated. The lover sees through the beloved's flaws to the image of God. The lover is not blind to pigeon toes and ill manners but, caught up in love, discerns the true creature, the one who, when perfected in heaven, "you would be strongly tempted to worship." It is this truest and deepest self of the person—the person as created and potentially redeemed by God—that Williams called that person's "eternal identity."

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February (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45