He Came Down from Heaven

Charles Williams

Description

“He Came Down from Heaven” is a 1938 treatise by Charles Williams. Within it, Williams uses his skills as a literary critic to delineate the biblical themes of exchange and substitution from the Fall, through the history of Israel, to the inauguration of the kingdom by Jesus Christ. He also explores how these themes defined Christian culture during Middle Ages with reference to Dante's ideal of romantic love. Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945) was a British theologian, novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic. He was also a member of the “The Inklings”, a literary discussion group connected to the University of Oxford, England. They were exclusively literary enthusiasts who championed the merit of narrative in fiction and concentrated on writing fantasy. Contents include: “Divorce”, “In Time of War”, “Praise of Death”, “Lovers to Lovers”, “On the Way to Somerset”, “In Absence”, “Reunion”, “For a Pieta”, “Ballade of a Country Day”, “Ballade of Travellers”, “Ghosts”, etc. Other notable works by this author include: “The Greater Trumps” (1932), “War in Heaven” (1930), and “The Place of the Lion” (1931). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Israel
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religion
• Faith
• Jésus de Nazareth
• Jesus
• Jesús de Nazaret

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528768979
• Langue: English

Extrait

HE CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN
BY
CHARLES WILLIAMS
Copyright 2018 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
CHARLES WILLIAMS
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born in London in 1886. He dropped out of University College London in 1904, and was hired by Oxford University Press as a proof-reader, quickly rising to the position of editor. While there, arguably his greatest editorial achievement was the publication of the first major English-language edition of the works of the Danish philosopher S ren Kierkegaard.
Williams began writing in the twenties and went on to publish seven novels. Of these, the best-known are probably War in Heaven (1930), Descent into Hell (1937), and All Hallows Eve (1945) - all fantasies set in the contemporary world. He also published a vast body of well-received scholarship, including a study of Dante entitled The Figure of Beatrice (1944) which remains a standard reference text for academics today, and a highly unconventional history of the church, Descent of the Dove (1939). Williams garnered a number of well-known admirers, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis. Towards the end of his life, he gave lectures at Oxford University on John Milton, and received an honorary MA degree. Williams died almost exactly at the close of World War II, aged 58.
I BELIEVE
A SERIES OF PERSONAL STATEMENTS

Edited by R. Ellis Roberts
WHAT I BELIEVE , by J. D. Beresford
PROBLEMS OF RELIGION , by Gerald Bullett
PAN, C SAR AND GOD , by Ren e Haynes
AND HE SHALL COME AGAIN , by Kenneth Ingram
HE CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN , by Charles Williams
PREFACE
T HE AIMS of this series are set out in the Argument which follows this Preface. My responsibilities as Editor are restricted to the selection of the contributors and occasionally to the suggestion of a subject. I must not be supposed to agree with any particular author s point of view, any more than one contributor can be assumed to agree with another-except on this, which gives the series its unity.
We are all agreed in believing that materialism is not enough. That is the lowest statement of our convictions. The belief in freedom, in human responsibility, in the authority of reason, in the duty of argument, in the claims of the individual, which arises from these convictions will be expressed in different ways and from different religious, philosophical and political standpoints.
For myself, I hold firmly that the great danger to civilization to-day comes from the tyranny of fear, the worship of power and from man s refusal to endure the burden of spiritual liberty. Men seek to be free from their selves, not through a passion of self-abnegation, but from a suspicion that the self is not worth while. They value security above safety, convenience above conviction; and would submerge themselves in the mass, not in a fellowship of free men seeking a fuller life, but in obedience to some dark sub-human impulse towards the domination of death.
Against that, all of us, Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, mystics, rationalists, orthodox, heretics, are agreed to make our protest.
R. ELLIS ROBERTS
THE ARGUMENT
T HE two outstanding characteristics of our age are the revival of violence, of conflict, and the revival of religion. The revival of conflict is obvious enough-conflict between classes, between parties, between races, between nations. The revival of religion is not so generally recognized. The reason for this is that for most Europeans and Americans-and it is their philosophers who are foremost in formulating and describing the clash of ideas-religion still means Christianity: and the religions of the new conflicting forces are at the antipodes to Christianity.
There is to-day no more important conflict than the conflict of ideas. It was possible for intelligent men in the nineteenth century to think that conduct could be divorced from belief. Indeed it was a common opinion: and it was as wrong as it was common. We see all over the world the disastrous consequences of the attempt to separate conduct from creed.
The most extreme conflict is that between those who believe in the world of freedom and those who believe in the world of fate. Between the disciples of reason and the instruments of the unconscious. Between the children of the spirit and the servants of the machine.
The Editor of this series is a Christian; but he would not put forward the arrogant and ridiculous claim that no religion but Christianity is opposed to the worship of the mass and of a mechanical determinism, which are our peculiar foes. Those who adhere to other religions or to none contribute to this series; in the present conflict those who are not against the spirit are for it; all those who believe that there is a world other than the sensuous, phenomenal world are on the same side. This is a series of books by those who are opposed to the forces in life which seek to destroy the dignity of the individual soul and to exalt the machine: who are opposed to the attempt to exalt violence above justice; and to the tendency to substitute persecution for argument.
The contributors will include historians, philosophers, men of science and theologians; but the chief aim of the series is to form a focus for the creative artists.
Each volume might be called I Believe. The books, that is, will not be essays in opinion or conjecture, not experiments in speculation or desire, but adventures in faith. They will express the authors innermost convictions. Some of the books will deal at large with the world of reality; others with certain aspects of it. Some of the authors have taken, as a starting-point and motto as it were, a clause or a phrase from the historic creeds of Christendom; others write from the standpoint of their own individual interpretation of philosophic, religious or historical subjects.
TO
MICHAL
BY WHOM I BEGAN TO STUDY
THE DOCTRINE OF GLORY
CONTENTS
I
Heaven and the Bible
II
The Myth of the Alteration in Knowledge
III
The Mystery of Pardon and the Paradox of Vanity
IV
The Precursor and the Incarnation of the Kingdom
V
The Theology of Romantic Love
VI
The Practice of Substituted Love
VII
The City
C HAPTER I
Heaven and the Bible
T HE word Heaven occurs in the Lord s Prayer twice and in the Nicene Creed three times. The clauses which contain it are: Our Father which art in heaven ; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven ; Maker of heaven and earth ; Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven ; He ascended into heaven . A single sentence, recurrent in the Gospels, is as familiar as these: The kingdom of heaven is at hand , or more briefly, The kingdom of heaven.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives various definitions of the word. It is derived from the old English hefen . Its earliest meaning is the sky or firmament, the space above the world. It was applied afterwards to the various concentric circles into which that space was supposed to be divided, and presently to the same space considered as the habitation of God and his angels. Hence, as early as Chaucer, it came to mean a state of spiritual being equivalent to the habitation of divine things, a state of bliss consonant with union with God. Its common meaning to-day, as a religious term, sways between the spiritual and the spatial, with the stress in general slightly, though unintentionally, more upon the second than the first.
This placing of the stress is no doubt due chiefly to the first clause of the Lord s Prayer. That Prayer is more widely known than any of the Creeds, and more habitually used than the phrase from the Gospels. Its opening words undoubtedly imply a place in which Our Father exists, a spatial locality inhabited by God. Against this continual suggestion so easily insinuated into minds already too much disposed to it, the great theological definitions of God which forbid men to attribute to him any nature inhabiting place are less frequently found and less effectively imagined. They have to be remembered. But which art in heaven is already remembered. Its easy implications have to be refused by attention.
It is not, of course, possible to deny that heaven-in the sense of salvation, bliss, or the presence of God-can exist in space; that would be to deny the Incarnation. But heaven, as such, only exists because of the nature of God, and to his existence alone all bliss is related. In a Jewish tradition God was called the Place because all places were referred to him, but he not to any place. With this in mind it might be well that private meditation should sometimes vary the original clause by Our Father in whom is heaven . The change is for discipline of the mind, for though it is incapable of the apparent superficiality yet it is also incapable of the greater profundity of the original. That depth prevents another error as easy as the first and perhaps more dangerous. It is comparatively easy to train the mind to remember that the nature of God is not primarily spatial; it is not quite so easy to remember that it is not primarily paternal-that is, that he does not exist primarily for us. No doubt we are, and can only be, concerned with the way in which he exists for us. The metaphorical use of the word way, in its ordinary sense, contains the other. I am the way is no less I am the way in which God exists in relation to men than I am the way by which men exist in relation to God . But there is a distinction between the idea