Any Chalice of consecrated wine
Charles Williams’s epic account of the supernatural struggle between good and evil reminds us of the real stakes of our everyday lives.
Review by Sara Holston
Charles Williams’s strange and eclectic 1930 novel War in Heaven opens as a murder mystery before developing into a metaphysical thriller with supernatural and occult elements, all centered around a modern-day quest for the Holy Grail. If this seems like an example of a book attempting to do too much, Williams manages to weave together these disparate threads into a coherent story. In fact, the layering of an epic clash of good and evil over what we might initially expect to be a mundane procedural genre provokes an awareness that extraordinary—if harrowing—possibilities may be lurking just behind the veil of our everyday lives, and that we might want to wake up and have a look.
At the beginning of War in Heaven, the Graal, as Williams calls the Holy Grail, turns up in the twentieth century in the small English village of Fardles. One of the primary heroes in the story is the archdeacon of the Fardles church, Julian Davenant, who seeks to protect the chalice from those who would turn its power to evil. Chief among these is Gregory Persimmons, who hopes to use it in a black magic ritual that involves corrupting a child.
On the one hand, Williams renders the Graal as an artifact of immense spiritual power. It is the linchpin of Persimmons’ ritual, without which he cannot tap into greater occult forces to increase his own strength. The Archdeacon, who has the closest connection to the Graal, experiences it as a conduit for the divine, sensing a Presence through or around it that is strongly implied to be Christ. It even appears to have a will of its own, and often physically gravitates towards the Archdeacon in scenes where characters struggle for control over it.
But despite its potency, the Graal’s power still manifests in a fairly subtle way, acting through the people and situations around it, rather than directly on them. Though it may twitch towards the Archdeacon, it never leaps from the hands of the villains and flies itself directly to him. It doesn’t appear to have magical abilities to bestow eternal life or destroy those who touch or drink from it, as it might in Arthurian legend or an Indiana Jones movie. Instead, the artifact’s power is more of a revelatory one, and in their endeavors to steal or defend it, the characters’ true natures come to light. Persimmons, already described as a greedy and grasping businessman, is revealed to be an evil sorcerer, willing to destroy others—physically and spiritually—in his pursuit of power. The seemingly meek Archdeacon, on the other hand, finds new reserves of strength that allow him to go toe to toe with occult forces.
Where the fate of the One Ring ultimately determines the fate of the world, War in Heaven seems to say that the Graal is not quite so significant.
For today’s readers, a close analog to the Graal and its power might be the One Ring from the works of Williams’s better-known friend J. R. R. Tolkien. Though the Ring is as evil as the Graal is good, it similarly has a will on its own and attempts always to manipulate circumstances to ensure that it falls into the hands that have the best chance of getting it where it wants to go. In the process, it takes advantage of fears, weaknesses, and selfish desires in the hearts of those characters—good and bad—who encounter it. Tom Shippey argues in his analysis of Tolkien’s life and work, J.R.R Tolkien: Author of the Century, that in a culture in which we tend towards the belief that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the One Ring actually embodies an older Anglo-Saxon adage: “man does as he is when he can do as he likes.” The Ring doesn’t take inherently good characters and corrupt them to evil; like the Graal, it reveals what was already there under the surface—whether they are selfish and covet the Ring for themselves, misguided and hoping to use its power to augment their own, or good-hearted and intent on protecting innocents by keeping it from falling into the wrong hands.
Also like in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the narrative of War in Heaven revolves around the central artifact and the attempts of the characters to get ahold of it (and keep others from having it). But where the fate of the One Ring ultimately determines the fate of the world, War in Heaven seems to say that the Graal is not quite so significant. In one moment the book is creepy and intense, describing a pitched supernatural battle in which the Archdeacon and his allies pray fervently to defend the artifact from an onslaught of black magic wielded by Persimmons. In the next breath, the story is almost farcical, with the Archdeacon faking bouts of absurdly dramatic nausea to escape watch and search Persimmons’ home for the chalice, only to conveniently find it lying behind the door of the very bathroom to which he is ushered. The back and forth between these tones leaves the reader uncertain of the Graal’s importance—or, perhaps, lack thereof.
The Archdeacon is able to be so cavalier with the Graal because he recognizes that it is ultimately just a conduit for the greater treasure.
Ultimately, the Archdeacon is able to be so cavalier with the Graal because he recognizes that it is ultimately just a conduit for the greater treasure. He senses the true Presence behind the artifact, and he doesn’t ever pay reverence directly to the object itself. While determined to keep it safe if he can, the Archdeacon will also hand it willingly to Persimmons to save the life of one innocent woman, saying, “In one sense, of course, the Graal is unimportant—it is a symbol less near Reality now than any chalice of consecrated wine. But it is conceivable that the Graal absorbed, as material things will, something of the high intensity of the moment when it was used, and of its adventures through the centuries.” To the Archdeacon, the Graal is a cup with a storied history and divine connection, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a cup.
In War in Heaven, Williams reminds us that the symbols of our faith are just that—symbols. They can be simultaneously, paradoxically, sacred relics deserving some degree of reverence, and also insignificant objects in light of the greater power toward which they point, and which ought always to receive our great respect. In the same stroke, the intensity of the clash over the Graal directs our focus towards the supernatural conflict that does merit our full and serious attention. The novel, after all, is called “war in heaven,” a reference to the pitched battle between Satan and God in Revelation 12 that resulted in the expulsion of Satan and his allies from heaven. While the fight for the Holy Grail provides a frame on which to tell the story, the driving force of Williams’s tale is the supernatural clash of good and evil happening just beyond the surface of our everyday world.
Sara Holston is an editor on an interactive story game in San Francisco, CA.
War in Heaven was first published on January 1, 1930 by Victor Gollancz. It is currently available from Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., and you can purchase it on their website here.
