February 5, 2006
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Catholic Schools Sermon
For those who might be tempted today, following yesterday’s conclusion of Catholic
Schools Week, to sing (for whatever reason) “Ding Dong, the Witch is
Dead”–Here, from his classic Witchcraft (first published by Faber and Faber, London, 1941, reprinted by Apocryphile Press, Berkeley, CA, Oct. 1, 2005) is Charles Williams on the strong resemblance between witchcraft and the rituals of the Church:
Charles Williams on
Witchcraft and the ChurchFrom Witchcraft, 2005 Apocryphile edition, pages 77-80–
[77] … The predisposition towards the idea of magic might be said to begin
with a moment which seems to be of fairly common experience– the
moment when it seems that anything might turn into anything else.
We have grown used– and properly used– to regarding this sensation
invalid because, on the whole, things do not turn into other things
except by processes which we realize, or else at least so frequently
that we appreciate the probability. But the occasional sensation
remains. A room, a street, a field becomes unsure. The edge
of a possibility of utter alteration intrudes. A door, untouched,
might close; a picture might walk; a tree might speak; an animal might
not be an animal; a man might not be a man. One may be with a
friend, and a terror will take one even while his admirable voice is
speaking; one will be with a lover and the hand will become a different
and terrifying thing, moving in one’s own like a malicious intruder,
too real for anything but fear. All this may be due to racial
memories or to any other cause; the point is that it exists. It
exists and can be communicated; it can even be shared. There is,
in our human centre, a heart-gripping fear of irrational change, of
perilous and malevolent change.
Secondly, there is the human body, and the movements
of the human body. Even now, when, as a general rule, the human
body is not supposed to mean [78] anything, there are moments when it seems, in spite of ourselves,
packed with significance. This sensation is almost exactly the
opposite of the last. There, one was aware that any phenomenon
might alter into another and truer self. Here, one is aware that
a phenomenon, being wholly itself, is laden with universal
meaning. A hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of
everything; a foot stepping from a train is the rock of all
existence. If the first group of sensations are due to racial
fear, I do not know to what the second group are due– unless indeed to
the Mercy of God, who has not left us without a cloud of
witnesses. But intellectually they are both as valid or invalid as
each other; any distinction must be a matter of choice. And they
justify each other, at least to this extent, that (although the first
suggests irrationality and the second rationality) they both at first
overthrow a simple trust that phenomena are what phenomena seem.
But if the human body is capable of seeming so, so
are the controlled movements of the human body– ritual movements, or
rather movements that seem like ritual. A finger pointing is
quite capable of seeming not only a significant finger, but a ritual
finger; an evocative finger; not only a finger of meaning, but a finger
of magic. Two light dancing steps by a girl may (if one is in
that state) appear to be what all the Schoolmen were trying to express;
they are (only one cannot quite catch it) an intellectual statement of
beatitude. But two quiet steps by an old man may seem like the
very speech of hell. Or the other way round. Youth and age
have nothing to do with it, nor did the ages that defined and [79]
denounced witchcraft think so. The youngest witch, it is said,
that was ever burned was a girl of eleven years old.
Ordered movement, ritual, is natural to men.
But some ages are better at it, are more used to it, and more sensitive
to it, than others. The Middle Ages liked great spectacle, and
therefore (if for no other reasons– but there were many) they liked
ritual. They were nourished by ritual– the Eucharist exhibited
it. They made love by ritual– the convention of courtly love
preserved it. Certainly also they did all these things without
ritual– but ritual (outside the inner experience) was the norm.
And ritual maintains and increases that natural sense of the
significance of movement. And, of course, of formulae, of words.
The value of formulae was asserted to be very
high. The whole religious life ‘as generally necessary to
salvation’ depended on formulae. The High God had submitted
himself to formulae. He sent his graces. He came Himself,
according to ritual movements and ritual formulae. Words
controlled the God. All generations who have believed in God have
believed that He will come on interior prayer; not all that He
will come, if not visibly yet in visible sacraments, on exterior
incantation. But so it was. Water and a Triune formula
concentrated grace; so did oil and other formulae; so– supremely– did
bread and wine and yet other formulae. Invocations of
saints were assumed, if less explicitly guaranteed, to be
effective. The corollaries of the Incarnation had spread, in word
and gesture, very far.
The sense of alteration, the sense of meaning, the
[80] evocation of power, the expectation of the God, lay all about the
world. The whole movement of the Church had, in its rituals, a
remarkable similarity to the other rites it denounced. But the
other rites had been there first, both in the Empire and outside the
Empire. In many cases the Church turned them to its own
purposes. But also in many cases it entirely failed to turn them
to its own purposes. In many cases it adopted statues and
shrines. But in others it was adopted by, at least, the less
serious spells and incantations. Wells and trees were dedicated
to saints. But the offerings at many wells and trees were to
something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have
been, as we find they often were, forbidden. Within this double
and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know
more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance,
clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.
