Et in sempiternum pereant

by Charles Williams
read Aug 30-31, 2021
reviewed Aug 31 2021
*****

Disturbing follow-up to Many Dimensions. The English genius for intensity through a glass.

By itself, the story of a man nearing the end of his life, afforded a glimpse of hell and an opportunity to experience self-sacrifice and service.

As a sequel to Many Dimensions, Lord Arglay has a limited experience of the submission and self-sacrifice that Chloe fulfilled in the earlier novel.

Arglay, tempted to anger and rage and vengeance - the last most anathema to one who had devoted his life and shaped himself to the service of Justice - offers us his formula “there is entire clarity in the Omnipotence” for recalling oneself into peace from tumultuous and negative emotions. “It operated; the temptation passed into the benediction of the Omnipotence and disappeared.”

But for the Personalization this could as well be a Taoist or Buddhist approach, perhaps. But Williams is a Christian, and I think he wants us, through Arglay, to come to something closer to Christian faith. Arglay came late in life to belief: he chose belief in the novel as a carefully reasoned response to his enemy’s actions, chose it as an intellectual posture, chose to give himself over to acting out of belief, without, I think ever understanding what it means to believe. Chloe demonstrated that submission to the will of God is belief, that sacrifice is belief. Lord Arglay understood what she had done; I think in this short story he is given the opportunity to do so himself.

The second half of the piece is a ghost story, a very disturbing ghost story, largely atmospheric tho' with one intensely unforgettable image (borrowed I think, like the last line of the story, from Dante.)

The best part of the story are Lord Arglay’s observations on aging and the acceptance of aging in the first half.

fantasy religion