In The Place of the Lion

For my birthday, one of my gifts was Charles William's The Place of the Lion. Thanks, Phillip!

Charles Williams is not as well known as Tolkien or Lewis, but like them he was a member of the Inklings, an informal literary group of authors and critics that met in Oxford. He was a Christian, like Lewis and Tolkien, and wrote books that were full of atypical but Christian themes. The Place of the Lion is no exception.

The setting of the novel is a little country town. But for the novel, the address might be: Smetham, England, UK, Physical Earth. The point being that the plot of the novel revolves around the collapse of the heirarchical ideological immaterial realities of unchanging universals (personalized via ideas contained in Medieval thinkers) into the physical world. Kind of confusing, right? That's pretty typical of Williams' fiction.

Basically, some people in Smetham were fooling around with some kind of Neo-Platonism. The leader of this outfit is attacked by an earthly lioness escaped from a local circus. But when the lion contacts this Berringer fellow, the archetypical lion springs from the intersection and begins roaming the countryside, subsuming its lesser daughter into itself. But a lion to Williams is not only a giant predatory cat, it is also a spiritual reality. It is aggression and rage, also, such as you and I feel.

Soon other archetypes start popping up. The perfect serpent, eagle, butterfly, horse, and unicorn all appear. As they appear they subsume their earthly emanations. So the countryside is emptied of animals (except for sheep), but also, those humans who most closely serve each spiritual significance. A man becomes a ferocious lion, a woman a snake. A man who collects butterflies sees the idea of butterfly and is so consumed with its vision he eventually neglects life and dies. Buildings start falling down, the weather turns unbearably hot, and the end of the world appears nigh.

Pretty crazy, right?

Anyway, I really liked it. There are a couple of Dante-esque moments that would make any fan of the Comedy smile, and the ending was a pleasant surprise. The book was encouraging in its commitment to the way things really are, and the necessity of spending ourselves for the sake of truth, and not vice-versa. That's especially nice during the political season, when knowledge and opinion are bartered for votes, popularity and power.

I recommend the book, especially to those who have a bit of Classical education. It's fun to see the connections and to find someone who reveres the Medievals.