The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams

First published: 1931

Edition(s) used:The Place of the Lion. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1965

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Fantasy; mystery and detective fiction

Core issue(s): The divine; friendship; good vs. evil; Incarnation; selfishness

Principal characters

• Anthony Durrant, the editor of a review of cultural criticism
• Quentin Sabot, Anthony’s friend and colleague
• Damaris Tighe, a doctoral student, with whom Anthony is in love
• Mr. Tighe, Damaris’s father, an entomologist
• Mr. Berringer, the leader of a mystical group, in a coma

Overview

Charles Williams was born in 1886 to a genteel but impoverished, devout Anglican family. He was able to spend two years at University College, London, before circumstances forced him to withdraw to find employment. From 1908 until his death in 1945, Williams was an editor at Oxford University Press. When Oxford University Press moved from London to Oxford in 1939, Williams moved as well, becoming part of a literary circle that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Among his editorial projects for Oxford University Press was the oversight of the first English-langauge editions of the work of Søren Kierkegaard. As a writer, Williams produced novels, poetry, drama, theology, biography, and literary studies. Williams’s novels were once described as “metaphysical thrillers,” playing out, to a certain degree, the principal themes of his theology: Incarnation, coinherence, and substitution. By Incarnation, he meant not only Christ’s incarnation but also the cloaking and revealing of divine realities in material forms. By coinherence, he meant the shared life of the Creation, human and nonhuman and supernatural, which is experienced and exchanged in a mystical dance. The exchange of one of those beings with another is substitution, supremely exemplified by Christ but expressed in daily life by sacrifices both great and small. Williams’s vision of the divine never lifts its gaze from the ordinary.

All of these themes are present in The Place of the Lion. In a quiet English village named Smetham, two friends, Anthony Durrant and Quentin Sabot, are rambling in the countryside when they encounter a group of villagers searching for a lioness said to have escaped from a traveling circus. Later in their ramble they see, or think they see, a lion bent over the inert form of a man. The man turns out to be a Mr. Berringer, the leader of a local, mystically inclined group. Berringer is unconscious, and the friends carry him into his house.

Damaris Tighe, whom Anthony loves, is approached by a member of the mystical group to give a paper for their meeting. Damaris, who writes about Plato and Aristotle and their influences in the Middle Ages, attends the group but finds her paper disrupted by a hysterical outburst by one of the members, who thinks she sees a snake. Meanwhile, Anthony is visiting Damaris’s father, who is an avid butterfly collector. Mr. Tighe has had a vision of a vortex of butterflies disappearing into one giant butterfly. Later, in a conversation with a bookstore clerk named Richardson, Anthony learns more about some members of the mystical group and the fact that they seek knowledge for self-advancement. Richardson tells Anthony about a book on angelic powers and principalities that Berringer has given to him. The book concerns, among other things, the apparitions of the Divine Universals. Anthony and Richardson assume that what is happening in the village may be related.

Quentin, who has become increasingly fearful, has disappeared into the hedgerows surrounding the village. The house where Berringer lies unconscious is enveloped by flames that cannot be quenched, much to the consternation of the local firemen. Ghastly unseasonal heat lays over the region; houses collapse for no reason. A unicorn appears in the center of the village, and the townspeople hide in their houses.

Damaris, who has taken no notice of these events except to the extent that they interfere with her studies, has her own confrontation with one of the Divine Universals, which appears in the form of a pterodactyl. She is rescued when Anthony calls her name, and she recognizes him and her own true self at last. She goes out to seek Quentin, while Anthony and Richardson each head out to confront the divine beings in their own ways.

Christian Themes

While it might be argued that in The Place of the Lion Williams is pursuing some kind of Neoplatonic worldview, with the notion of the Divine Universals (or perhaps one could say the Platonic Ideals) of the animals that spring into being, it is also accurate to say that Williams is making reference to the Christian conception of Creation, wherein all that is springs from one single source. Mr. Tighe’s vision of a vortex of butterflies seeking to form a single, giant butterfly is a mystical insight into the way that all creation seeks to return to its single source, the power of which leaves Mr. Tighe able to utter only a single word, “Glory!” Berringer, on the other hand, in his single-minded meditations on strength and power, calls to himself the lionness which has wandered from the traveling circus; in his meditation she is transformed into the archetypal Lion. In the contrast of these two occurrences is the underlying Christian theme of how one approaches things. Mr. Tighe’s vision is of beauty and “glory” because his love of butterflies is innocent and selfless; he sees beyond the material form to the source from which all form emerges: “glory,” a word Williams used to express the ecstasy that comes with whole and unselfish love. Berringer’s call to the Lion has nothing of love or selflessness in it: He and his group seek power through their mystical exercises. Berringer finds his source of power, or rather it finds him, but it leaves him unconscious and eventually consumes him.

Williams has a constant theme, namely, that Heaven and Hell are a choice, and that the choice is made in the minutiae of daily life. Damaris’s irritable and single-minded pursuit of her studies leads her to use other people to advance herself, notably Anthony, who loves her. When the pterodactyl, emblematic of her own selfishness, appears outside her window, it comes with a foul stench that sickens her. It is the voice of Anthony calling her, giving her her name in a voice of love, that rescues her. Williams called this ability to speak to and connect to other people in the work of love “coinherence.” In the end it is by naming that Anthony restores the world to its proper functioning. It is through this naming, or baptism—the most primal Christian sacramental act—that the Glory reveals itself as the source of unselfishness and the fount of love.

Sources for Further Study

Howard, Thomas. The Novels of Charles Williams. Reprint. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. Provides thorough readings of all seven of William’s novels with an afterword arguing for Williams’s place in literary studies.

Huttar, Charles A., and Peter J. Schakel, eds. The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. A collection of essays on every aspect of Williams’s work, including his unique theology, which informs The Place of the Lion.

Shullenberger, Bonnie. “Love, That Grows from One to All.” The Anglican 30, no. 1 (January, 2001). A brief but comprehensive introduction to the novels and theology of Charles Williams.

Williams, Charles. Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Reprint. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980. Williams’s eclectic history of the Church, which W. H. Auden was said to have regularly read every year.

Williams, Charles. He Came Down from Heaven. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984. Williams’s doctrine of the Incarnation, including a chapter on his “theology of romantic love.”