Heaven and Hell under Every Bush

Every action is born of good or ill. There is nothing neutral.

All readers will have heard of C. S. Lewis; not all wil have heard of his good friend Charles Williams. Williams was an editor at Oxford University Press. He wrote novels, poetry, drama, criticism, biography, and theological essays, besides a torrent of reviews.

As an orthodox Anglican, he was, of course, a sacramentalist. This had its effect on what he wrote. More than that, it determined his whole vision. A sacramentalist believes that the greater may be perceived in the lesser (e.g., water bespeaks more than H2O when it appears in the rite of baptism).

On this accounting, of course, every Christian is in some sense a “sacramentalist.” Nature itself speaks of more than zoology, meteorology, or astronomy to him: running through his imagination he has language about dragons and great deeps praising God, black clouds being God’s chariot, and the morning stars singing together; and however he may attempt to chalk all of this up to mere “poetry,” he does not thereby mean that it is all nonsense, as his secularist friend would. It means something, and probably something that reaches into regions that the textbooks cannot quite concern themselves with.

But that is to use the word somewhat loosely. For many Christians, the word sacrament sails too near the wind of magic.

There is one aspect of Williams’s vision, however, that no Christian can quarrel with, and it shows up in his fiction and poetry in a stark and unsettling way. It certainly suggests that the greater may well be both cloaked and revealed in the lesser. We might call it “heaven and hell under every bush.”

It would run something like this: the small nuances of our day-to-day attitudes, acts, and words, brought to their final fruition, turn out to be the stuff that heaven and hell are made of. For example, the sarcastic lift of an eyebrow carries the seed of murder since it bespeaks my wish to diminish someone else’s existence. To open a door for a man carrying luggage recalls the Cross since it is a small case in point of putting the other person first. The policeman on the corner and the Emperor of Byzantium are of one cloth, since both are cases in point of uniformed, vested authority. A cup of cold water unfurls, just for a moment, the kingdom of heaven, since, like the Cross, it means “my life for yours.”

Every attitude, act, and word of ours partakes, alas, of either charity or egoism. Nothing is quite neutral. (We cannot read the prophets or the Sermon on the Mount without becoming alarmed over this.) Charity is what heaven is made of, and egoism is what hell is made of. One way or another, I am becoming more and more at home in the one or the other. Everything keeps rising toward heaven or plummeting toward hell. The whole conflict of heaven and hell crops up at our elbow a thousand times a day. Everything in our experience seems to carry an enormous weight or significance.

To recognize this is to glimpse, perhaps, what C. S. Lewis intimated in a maxim he used more than once in his fiction: “Everything is always thickening and hardening and coming to a point.” We can see this, for example, in the boy Adolf, whose early attitudes, however amorphous, thickened and hardened and came to the point we call Hitler. We can see it again in the way early and rather tentative discussions on population planning and biogenetics thickened and hardened and came to the point of the abortion phenomenon. We can see it supremely in the drama of redemption, where “sundry times and divers manners” thickened and hardened and came to the point of the Annunciation and the Nativity. Or again, where pharasaical attitudes came to the point of the Crucifixion.

We can see it in the soul in bliss, where all the bumbling and intermittent acts of charity, apparently so random and unsubstantial, have turned out to be what Saint Paul calls gold, silver, and precious stones. (Only a metaphor? The word “only” is a dangerous one: do we think the heavenly reality is less than, or thinner than, what we mortals call gold? We may well have it exactly backwards.)

The ghastly obverse of that picture, of course, is the damned soul, where the “thickening and hardening” has turned out to be of a piece with what evil always does to the good creation, namely undoes it. Certainly one way of picturing the damned soul is to see it in some fashion as the detritus left after egoism and parsimony and indulgence and pusillanimity have leeched and leeched away almost the whole of what God made when he made that soul. A wraith. A specter. (“Hitler” is not what God had in mind when he made Adolf Schicklgruber. What traces of that boy, or of God’s idea of that boy, were left in the man at Berchtesgaden?)

The whole thing is exhilarating and alarming. But it all seems to press through the scrim of Scripture, at every point. Otherwise why bother piercing even unto the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, or looking into the thoughts and intents of the heart?

Dr. Howard, professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, is the author of numerous books. Portions of this column are adapted from his latest, The Novels of Charles Williams (Oxford, 1983).

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