Charles Williams was a member of the Inklings, the literary circle in England that included C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. Since his death in 1945, he has been best known for his novels such as All Hallows' Eve and Descent Into Hell, but he also wrote church history (The Descent of the Dove), literary criticism (The Figure of Beatrice), verse play, epic poetry, and the theological writings from which this volume is drawn.

"You are the only writer since Dante who has found a way to make poetry out of theology . . ."
--W. H. Auden to Charles Williams

"To have known the man would have been enough, to know his books is enough, but no one who has known both the man and his works would have willingly forgone either experience."
--T. S. Eliot

"Here is Christianity in a new key, dogma without dogmatism, at once deeply traditional and luminously new."
--Mary McDermott Shideler

"Williams's insights work on our intellects and spirits, as though restoring broken pieces of a mirror to create a more exquisite detailed reflection of divine reality."
--Isabel Anders

"Charles Hefling has assembled eighteen essays and reviews by Charles Williams that will be a feast for any Williams enthusiast, and should be irresistible enough to hook anyone not yet addicted."
--Charles Price, Virginia Theological Seminary


Author and scholar Charles Williams (1886-1945) joined, in 1908, the staff of the Oxford University Press, the publishing house in which he worked for the rest of his life. Throughout these years, poetry, novels, plays, biographies, history, literary criticism, and theology poured from his pen. At the beginning of the Second World War the publishing house was evacuated to Oxford where, in addition to his own writing and his editorial work for the Press, he taught in the University.

Charles Hefling has been editor-in-chief of the Anglican Theological Review, and served as the academic editor of the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer. He taught systematic theology for thirty years as a professor at Boston College, and is now an instructor in the Diaconal Formation Program of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and an adjunct member of the faculty at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.