Abstract
While previous scholarship has cautioned against a reductive tendency in the analysis of Charles Williams’s work, this paper offers an analysis that explores the importantly multiplicable nature of meaning used in one of Williams’s most bizarre novels, The Place of the Lion. A close reading of a remark from the novel’s heroine that “salvation must be communicated” provides a lens by which the entire novel can be read, revealing how Williams presents a specific, culture-centered version of Christianity where communication leads to a salvation that is more cultural than doctrinal, more than the erasure of sins, but an experience of unity by participation in the Eternal. Drawing on the teachings of Italian theologian Luigi Giussani to highlight the ecumenical quality of this reading, as well as its social application as modeled by Giussani’s international movement, Communion and Liberation, we see how the intentional layering of meaning in Williams’s novel can continue to speak to our current moment. In a time of cultural division, this paper offers an interpretation of The Place of the Lion where Williams’s examples of communication, not only between characters but between ideas and perspectives at work in the novel itself, can be salvation in present-day society.
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