Overcoming the Great Divorce IV: Charles Williams

No knight could offer any love to any lady till he had proved his worth; then he might, ‘and his friend was the more chaste as he was brave.’ The phrase suggests - as we might from other sources suppose, and those not only Christian or doctrinal but imaginative and poetic - that chastity was more than a negation of lust; it was a growing, heightening, and expanding thing. It was a state of spiritual being, and its spiritual expression was not at all inconsistent with marriage. Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis. Taliessin through Logres. The Region of the Summer Stars. Arthurian Torso (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1974), 226. Tolkien was married for most of his life, and was able to reflect upon the needs and requirements of the married life in a way that Lewis, as an outsider to marriage for most of... [read full story]