Between the Squirrel and the Convenience Store: Williams Atonement

Dear reader, I am currently a little over halfway through Charles Williams's novel Descent into Hell, which means that I've just got past the chapter titled 'The Doctrine of Substituted Love'. This chapter, and the idea to which its title refers, are rightly among the most famous aspects of Williams's thought (though, as with all things that involve 'Charles Williams' and 'fame', this is a relative superlative).

In the book, the Doctrine of Substituted Love works like this (WARNING: Spoilers for a book published in the 1930s): Peter Stanhope, the author of a play in which young Pauline Anstruther is performing in the role of a tree, takes her aside and asks her what is always bothering her during rehearsals. She tells him about her doppelgänger, which she constantly lives in fear of meeting in the street and which she has seen many times since her childhood. Stanhope then tells Pauline that he will be afraid of her doppelgänger, and thus she need not be. Pauline doesn't understand what this means and so Stanhope invokes Galatians 6.2: Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. The scene reads, in part, as follows:

"It's so easy," he went on, "easy for both of us. It needs only the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to yourself that since I am there to be troubled instead of you, therefore you needn't be troubled? And what can be easier than for me to carry a little while a burden that isn't mine?"
   She said, still perplexed at a strange language: "But how can I cease to be troubled? will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?
   "It is not," he said, "and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet--never mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you heard it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens?"
   "But that means--" she began, and stopped.
   "I know," Stanhope said. "It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however sympathetic I may be."

(Charles Williams, Descent into Hell, Chapter VI, 'The Doctrine of Substituted Love').

Okay so far. In the book what happens is Pauline stops being afraid because she has a much more compelling reason not to be afraid: in addition to her fear merely affecting her, her fear now means that she is being an ungrateful jerk to the kind elderly man who is sweet enough to offer to be afraid instead. And so it just kind of shrivels up, because Pauline isn't an ungrateful jerk. Later on she meets Lilith and is able to slam her hand into a prickly hedge because of this (the Williamsverse is a strange place).

Fine. All right. But the one thing that confuses me about all this is the same thing that confuses me about the religion that Williams and I share (=Anglicanism) in general. Is this supposed to account for the Atonement or isn't it?
In Christianity, the Atonement is the part of theology that deals with the question of how sin can be forgiven. The orthodox Christian understanding is that sin is forgiven because Christ died on the Cross. But this leaves the question of whose sins are being forgiven, how thoroughly they're being forgiven, and come to that how Christ dying on the Cross should have any effect on people's sins whatsoever. There are many different theories to explain this.

One theory, popular in the Early Modern period, is called governmental Atonement. This theory was developed by Hugo Grotius, a Dutchman whose other contribution to intellectual history is the philosophical underpinning for most international law. Grotius was both an old-school Protestant preacher-man and a prominent legal executive. The governmental theory was inspired by its formulator's legal background and is thus considered relatively easy for lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, as opposed to scientists, priests, artists, or mystics, to understand. Governmental theory holds that 'Christ's suffering was a real and meaningful substitute for the punishment humans deserve, but it did not consist of Christ receiving the exact punishment due to sinful people. Instead, God publicly demonstrated his displeasure with sin through the suffering of his own sinless and obedient Son as a propitiation. Christ's suffering and death served as a substitute for the punishment humans might have received. On this basis, God is able to extend forgiveness while maintaining divine order, having demonstrated the seriousness of sin and thus allowing his wrath to 'pass over'.' This contrasts with penal Atonement, which holds that Christ Himself actually did become a sinner and suffer all the punishments of every sin in history on the Cross (penal Atonement was historically popular among Catholics and Presbyterians, for what it's worth).

Another theory is the Christus Victor or Ransom Atonement theory, which has been noted for its appeal to the outcasts and derelicts of society. This is the theory officially endorsed by most of the Eastern Churches but it is almost completely unknown in the Western Churches with the exception of some Lutherans and a few Anglicans who are personally more enamoured of the teachings of Constantinople than is the Communion as a whole (like me and Williams, for instance). And I'm going to be a little vulgar here: the Christus Victor theory is fucking awesome. Basically the idea is that the Devil (who I refuse to call Satan, by the way, because that term properly refers to a Divine tempter in the Book of Job and not to the pseudo-Manichean conception of Satan that many or most modern Christians have) had some sort of right to the souls of man before Christ died on the Cross, because the souls of man were sinful. But then he took Christ into Hell after He died on the Cross, which is kind of a stupid thing to do given that God can't stay dead, and also really nasty and uncalled-for. In fact, the Devil was such a jackass about the whole situation that he lost his right to human souls and sin itself lost its power over the human race!

The only problem with Christus Victor is that it involves the Devil, which is a whole other barrel of worms that I don't want to get into on the first day of my new blog. This problem can be solved by replacing 'the Devil took Jesus to Hell with him' with 'the domination system, the cruel power and strength of the world and of greed, killed Jesus for totally stupid reasons' and thus, as Marcus Borg writes, 'disclosed its moral bankruptcy and ultimate defeat'. In this form Christus Victor has lately been introduced into feminist, black, LGBT, and Third-World theologies of liberation.

Putting aside my fondness for Christus Victor and my ambivalence to the more (in my opinion) venal and myopic theories traditional in the West, what Williams appears to be trying to do is linking Stanhope to Jesus, Pauline to the human race, the fear of the doppelganger as the fear of sin, the 'shadow self' of humanity that always walks beside it (a bit of Jungian analysis here on Williams's part), and the lack of fear following the encounter with the author/Messiah to the ability to face sin head-on and fight the power following Christ's sacrifice.

None of this is revolutionary interpretation. It's the standard interpretation of what Williams wrote and fits in nicely with the central idea of Descent into Hell, which is that sin is caused partly by the fearful desire to avoid sin at all costs. We run from lesser into greater sin. Trying desperately not to hit a squirrel with our car, we run out of control and plough through a 7-Eleven. It's horrific. Dead bodies and mangled potato chip bags everywhere. And a lot of this comes from a pigheaded refusal to listen to the backseat driver (God) who's shouting in our ears to go between the squirrel and the convenience store.

To be honest, I don't remember exactly where I was going with this post. It certainly wasn't to say anything new about Williams, because my original question ('Is this supposed a theory of the Atonement?') has an obvious answer ('yes. Yes it is.'). I guess what I'm wondering is what kind of Atonement theory it's supposed to be. I like soteriology that doesn't hang itself too much on the specifics of what somebody has to believe in order to be saved, because I have a great deal of affection for a lot of non-Christian religions. Christus Victor isn't overly fideistic and neither is Williamsverse 'substituted love', but I can't help but feel that, for all of his avowed love for the Eastern Orthodox understanding of this, Williams was trying to go somewhere slightly different with his mystical theology before his early death.

Ah, well. Back to 'The Shinto of Higurashi'.