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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "He Came Down from Heaven," Charles Williams intricately weaves a tale that transcends the boundaries of the mundane, inviting readers into a realm where the spiritual and the earthly coexist. Through an ethereal narrative laden with symbolic imagery, Williams explores themes of redemption, love, and the divine intervention in human lives. His lyrical prose and innovative use of metaphysical concepts not only align with the literary traditions of the Inklings but also evoke the romanticism of earlier figures, positioning Williams as a pivotal voice in 20th-century English literature. Williams, a founding member of the Inklings along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, draws on his extensive background in theology and poetry to craft narratives that challenge readers' perceptions of reality. His devotion to the exploration of mystical dimensions and personal sacrifice reflects his own deep engagement with spiritual philosophy and Christian mysticism, particularly noticeable in the nuanced characterizations throughout the novel. Recommended for readers seeking a profound and contemplative experience, "He Came Down from Heaven" invites exploration of the profound connection between the divine and the human experience. This work is essential for fans of allegorical narratives and those intrigued by the intersection of faith and literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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He Came Down from Heaven
Table of Contents
Introduction
This book turns on the daring claim that the Highest descends into the lowest so that human life may be remade from within. Charles Williams’s He Came Down from Heaven considers the meaning of the Incarnation for ordinary existence, not as an abstract thesis but as a pattern that reshapes love, duty, and hope. With characteristic audacity, Williams asks how divine self-giving discloses the true form of human community and personal transformation. The result is a work that presses readers to imagine faith as participation rather than mere assent, tracing the contours of a life ordered by descent, gift, and shared responsibility.
He Came Down from Heaven is a work of Christian theology written in the late 1930s by the British poet, novelist, and critic Charles Williams. It belongs to the genre of devotional-theological essay, composed not as a systematic treatise but as a sustained meditation. Its setting is neither fictional nor historical in the narrative sense; instead, it unfolds within the field of doctrinal reflection shaped by Scripture and the living practice of the Church. Composed on the eve of global upheaval, it bears the urgency of its era while addressing concerns that do not expire with particular political or cultural circumstances.
The book’s premise is straightforward yet profound: God’s descent changes the conditions under which human beings understand love, justice, and identity. Williams explores how the Incarnation reframes human relations, inviting readers to consider divine nearness not as metaphor but as the decisive truth of existence. The voice is measured and devotional, yet argumentative; the style is compressed, image-rich, and occasionally paradoxical, requiring deliberate, attentive reading. The tone is reverent without being sentimental, philosophical without becoming remote. Readers encounter a series of unfolding insights rather than a linear syllabus, each illuminating the last without foreclosing mystery.
Williams writes as a poet of doctrine, and his prose rewards patience. He uses concrete examples from common life to show how belief inhabits practice, and how practice, in turn, clarifies belief. Instead of dwelling on technical disputes, he emphasizes imagination’s role in apprehending truth: seeing rightly, he suggests, is an act of participation. Scriptural patterns supply his governing images, while the wider Christian tradition provides resonance and ballast. The argumentative movement is cumulative, building a vision in which intellectual precision and contemplative devotion support each other and in which ethical demand follows naturally from theological insight.
Several themes recur with force. The Incarnation discloses a law of exchange, in which self-giving love becomes the medium of real community. What Williams elsewhere terms co-inherence—mutual indwelling and shared burden—appears here as both a description of divine action and a summons for human life. The book insists that love is neither private feeling nor vague benevolence, but a costly participation in another’s good. It also contends that doctrine is not an optional ornament to ethics; rather, right belief shapes the possibilities of mercy, fidelity, and courage in the most practical, embodied ways.
For contemporary readers, the work matters because it resists two persistent distortions: reducing faith to interior sentiment and reducing it to external rule. Williams offers a third way in which imagination and obedience interpenetrate, grounding personal transformation in the reality of God’s self-gift. In an age marked by fragmentation, his vision of shared life confronts isolation with a theology of belonging; in a culture tempted by performative virtue, it recalls the hidden, patient labor of love. The book’s insistence on participation speaks to families, congregations, and institutions seeking a durable account of responsibility and hope.
Approached slowly, He Came Down from Heaven becomes less a set of claims to memorize than a pattern to inhabit. Its pages invite reflection, prayer, and practice: reading gives way to an examined life in which descent, service, and joy belong together. The work neither flatters the reader with easy comfort nor intimidates with obscurity; instead, it models a clarity earned by attention. By joining doctrinal conviction to humane insight, Williams offers a guide to believing with the whole person—mind, heart, and will—and to discovering, within the givens of daily duty, the surprising nearness of the One who came down.
Synopsis
He Came Down from Heaven is a theological study by Charles Williams that examines what the Christian confession of the Incarnation means for belief and practice. Williams approaches the subject by interweaving scriptural reflection, creedal affirmation, and imaginative reasoning, asking what it implies that God entered human history in concrete form. Rather than offering a historical survey, he traces a doctrinal thread: the descent of the divine into the ordinary, and the human ascent through that descent. Throughout, he seeks coherence between thought and life, proposing that the central Christian mystery orders personal devotion, social relations, and the pattern of hope itself.
Williams begins with the creedal claim that the eternal Son assumed human nature without ceasing to be divine, and he explores the paradox this entails. The movement “down” is not defeat but sovereign generosity, setting the archetype for humility and obedience. He considers how the Incarnation reframes the narrative of alienation and return: the divine chooses to dwell with humanity, restoring what was disordered. By insisting on unity rather than fusion or separation, he safeguards both God’s transcendence and human integrity, arguing that salvation is neither external imposition nor private escape but a shared life offered and received.
From this center he develops a language of coinherence—mutual indwelling—as the signature of redeemed existence. Persons are not isolated units but belong to one another, and this belonging reflects the life Christians confess in God. Williams links this to what he calls exchange: the bearing of one another’s burdens as a concrete mode of charity. The Cross stands as the decisive act of such exchange, and the community formed by it is tasked to continue that pattern. Sacramental and communal practices figure as visible signs of participation, training desire and action to move with, rather than against, the current of divine gift.
He then turns to ordinary affections and vocations, arguing that the Incarnation dignifies them while purifying their tendencies to possessiveness or fantasy. Love of friends, spouses, family, and neighbors becomes a school in coinherence, in which the self is discovered by giving itself away. Williams stresses that devotion is not flight from material reality but faithful attention to it, for the divine descent reaches the bodily and the temporal. The challenge is to resist idolatry—treating finite goods as ultimate—while allowing them to become channels of service, patience, and courage under the governance of charity.
Society, for Williams, is the broader field where these truths must act. He contrasts a culture of isolation with a community shaped by exchange, in which authority, responsibility, and liberty are interpreted through service. While he does not prescribe programs, he sketches the moral horizon of a city ordered by shared life rather than rivalry, and by promise-keeping rather than coercion. Justice, on this view, is sustained by mutual bearing and forgiveness, not merely by balancing claims. The Incarnation becomes the key to public order: the pattern of descent and gift demystifies domination and calls institutions to accountability before the common good.
Prayer and sanctity receive careful treatment as the disciplines that sustain coinherence. Intercession exemplifies exchange: one person deliberately stands for another before God, consenting to cost for another’s good. Williams addresses the reality of suffering and the scandal of evil without offering simplifications, insisting that hope rests in the divine initiative rather than human strategy. He explores obedience, repentance, and perseverance as the way this initiative is welcomed, and he presents forgiveness as the continual reopening of community. The result is a spirituality that is at once austere and consoling, demanding and deeply practical.
The book closes by reaffirming that Christian faith coheres around the descent that makes ascent possible, pressing readers to live that pattern rather than merely admire it. Williams’s synthesis—at once doctrinally attentive and imaginatively vivid—seeks to hold intellect, affection, and action in a single vision. Without reducing mystery to system, he offers a framework by which worship, ethics, and communal life can be mutually interpreting. He Came Down from Heaven endures as a distinctive modern statement of classical belief, inviting ongoing reflection on how divine generosity refashions human bonds and how shared life makes the promise of redemption credible.
Historical Context
He Came Down from Heaven, a collection of theological essays by the British writer and editor Charles Williams, appeared in 1938, in late‑interwar London. Williams (1886–1945) worked for the Oxford University Press in its London office, shaping lists while producing poetry, fiction, and theology. The book concentrates on the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and its ethical and imaginative consequences. Its immediate setting was the English literary and ecclesial scene, where Anglican institutions and university circles provided a framework for debate. Williams wrote for educated lay readers as well as clergy, aiming to clarify orthodox claims amid turbulent public discourse.
Although his later wartime residence in Oxford deepened his ties to the Inklings, Williams was already, in the 1930s, in correspondence with C. S. Lewis and admired by T. S. Eliot. He remained based in London with the Oxford University Press until 1939–40, when wartime evacuation relocated the Press to Oxford. Eliot, an influential editor and a recent Anglican convert (1927), promoted serious Christian letters in Britain, and Dorothy L. Sayers pursued theological and Dantean projects. That network fostered a receptive audience for Williams’s theological prose, which drew on patristic sources and medieval poets while engaging contemporary literary debate.
The theological setting included vigorous Anglican debates shaped by the Oxford Movement’s legacy and the failed 1928 Prayer Book revision, which had highlighted tensions between Parliament and the Church of England. Anglo‑Catholic parishes and societies sponsored retreats, missionary work, and liturgical renewal, while liberal and evangelical voices also contended for influence. Renewed study of the Church Fathers and medieval theology flourished in universities and seminaries, making sources like Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante readily available to educated readers. Williams, a committed Anglican with sacramental sympathies, framed the Incarnation as doctrinally central and pastorally practical, presenting themes—such as mutual obligation—that resonated within interwar Anglican discourse.
Britain in 1938 stood under the shadow of intensifying European crisis. The Spanish Civil War raged, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss, and the Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland that autumn amid heated public argument over appeasement and rearmament. The Great Depression’s aftershocks continued to unsettle employment and social policy. In this context, British periodicals and pulpits discussed authority, personhood, and the meaning of community. He Came Down from Heaven’s insistence on the Incarnation’s implications for human solidarity and responsibility met readers who were weighing rival political loyalties and searching for durable moral language beyond ideology.
The book also emerged amid renewed attention to Christocentric theology across Europe. Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics volumes in the 1930s reasserted the primacy of revelation against cultural accommodation, influencing English‑language discussions. In Britain, public intellectuals debated secular humanism, psychoanalytic accounts of religion, and the social role of the churches. T. S. Eliot advocated a consciously Christian culture, and theologians such as William Temple emphasized social ethics grounded in doctrine. Williams’s essays align with this moment by treating Incarnation not as abstraction but as the organizing principle of imagination, morality, and community, expressed through his distinctive language of “co‑inherence.”
Interwar publishing in Britain supported serious theological prose for general readers. The Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and commercial houses like Faber & Faber issued accessible studies, sermons, and essays alongside academic monographs. Periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement and Theology reviewed religious books for a wide audience. Williams’s professional editorial experience shaped his clear yet allusive style, and his lectures to church groups and literary societies honed a lay‑facing voice. He Came Down from Heaven thus entered a market prepared to receive reflective Christian argument that drew on Scripture, the fathers, and medieval poetry without heavy technical apparatus.
Williams’s ideas in the book connect with themes he explored elsewhere. His novel Descent into Hell (1937) had dramatized “substituted love” and co‑inherence in a contemporary setting, and The Descent of the Dove (1939) would survey the history of the Church with an emphasis on corporate life. He was a noted reader of Dante and Arthurian legend, interests that informed his theological vocabulary of ordered love and hierarchy. He Came Down from Heaven articulates the Incarnation’s reach into personal and communal relations, while keeping narrative detail minimal, a stance consistent with his aim to expound doctrine rather than fiction.
As Europe neared war, British writers increasingly asked how spiritual convictions could sustain public life. He Came Down from Heaven mirrors that preoccupation by restating classical Christian teaching on the Word made flesh and drawing social implications in Williams’s characteristic idiom of exchange and co‑inherence. Without addressing contemporary events directly, it offers a framework in which persons bear one another’s burdens within an ordered charity, a vision consonant with Anglican sacramentalism and with interwar calls for responsible community. In form and argument, the work exemplifies the interwar revival of serious Christian prose and critiques reductive accounts of human nature.
He Came Down from Heaven
CHAPTER IHeaven and the Bible★
The word Heaven occurs in the Lord’s Prayer twice and in the Nicene Creed[1] three times[1q]. The clauses which contain it are: ‘Our Father which art in heaven’; ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’; ‘Maker of heaven and earth’; ‘Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven’; ‘He ascended into heaven’. A single sentence, recurrent in the Gospels, is as familiar as these: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’, or more briefly, ‘The kingdom of heaven’.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives various definitions of the word. It is derived from the old English hefen. Its earliest meaning is the sky or firmament, the space above the world. It was applied afterwards to the various concentric circles into which that space was supposed to be divided, and presently to the same space considered as ‘the habitation of God and his angels’. Hence, as early as Chaucer, it came to mean a state of spiritual being equivalent to the habitation of divine things, a state of bliss consonant with union with God. Its common meaning to-day, as a religious term, sways between the spiritual and the spatial, with the stress in general slightly, though unintentionally, more upon the second than the first.
This placing of the stress is no doubt due chiefly to the first clause of the Lord’s Prayer. That Prayer is more widely known than any of the Creeds, and more habitually used than the phrase from the Gospels. Its opening words undoubtedly imply a place in which ‘Our Father’ exists, a spatial locality inhabited by God. Against this continual suggestion so easily insinuated into minds already too much disposed to it, the great theological 10 definitions of God which forbid men to attribute to him any nature inhabiting place are less frequently found and less effectively imagined. They have to be remembered. But ‘which art in heaven’ is already remembered. Its easy implications have to be refused by attention.
It is not, of course, possible to deny that heaven—in the sense of salvation, bliss, or the presence of God—can exist in space; that would be to deny the Incarnation. But heaven, as such, only exists because of the nature of God, and to his existence alone all bliss is related. In a Jewish tradition God was called ‘the Place’ because all places were referred to him, but he not to any place. With this in mind it might be well that private meditation should sometimes vary the original clause by ‘Our Father in whom is heaven’. The change is for discipline of the mind, for though it is incapable of the apparent superficiality yet it is also incapable of the greater profundity of the original. That depth prevents another error as easy as the first and perhaps more dangerous. It is comparatively easy to train the mind to remember that the nature of God is not primarily spatial; it is not quite so easy to remember that it is not primarily paternal—that is, that he does not exist primarily for us. No doubt we are, and can only be, concerned with the way in which he exists for us. The metaphorical use of the word way, in its ordinary sense, contains the other. ‘I am the way’ is no less ‘I am the way in which God exists in relation to men’ than ‘I am the way by which men exist in relation to God’. But there is a distinction between the idea that God exists primarily for us, and the idea that God exists primarily for himself. The original opening of the Lord’s Prayer implies that the paternity of the first two words exists only in the beatitude of the sixth—‘Our Father which art in heaven’. The distinction is not merely pedantic; it encourages in adoration a style of intelligence and humility. It restores again the lucid contemplation which is epigrammatized in such a phrase as (Izaak Walton tells us) was loved and used by John Donne ‘in a kind of sacred extasie—Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself’.
This heaven which is beatitude is further defined by the 11 second clause in which the word occurs in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ It is habitually assumed that the second part of the clause refers to the beings—angels or other—who possess heaven as a place or are possessed by it as a state. The will that is to be fulfilled on earth is regarded as relating to other events and possibilities than those which are covered in heaven by the will already fulfilled. But in fact there is another possible meaning. The fulfilment of the will in heaven may grammatically relate to us as well as to angels. The events for which we sincerely implore that fulfilment upon earth are already perfectly concluded by it in heaven. Their conclusions have to be known by us on earth, but they already exist as events in heaven. Heaven, that is to say, possesses timelessness; it has the quality of eternity, of (in the definition which Boethius passed on to Aquinas) ‘the perfect and simultaneous possession of everlasting life’. In that simultaneity the passion of the prayer is already granted; all that is left for us to do is to discover in the process of time the conclusion that we have implored in time. ‘Let us’, the clause demands, in this understanding, ‘know thy will being done upon earth as, in this very event, it is already perfectly done and perfectly known in heaven—in the beatitude which is of thee.’ This is the consummation of act in belief—in ‘faith’.
Heaven then is beatitude and the eternal fulfilment of the Will, the contemporaneousness of perfection. As a state (or a place) in possible relation with us it was created by the Will: ‘Maker of heaven and earth.’ But the Creeds which declare this declare also something of the relation. They declare a process, though (it is true) in spatial metaphors: ‘who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven. . . . He ascended into heaven.’ There emerges and returns from that state of eternal beatitude something or someone charged with a particular intention towards men. It is obvious that this must be related to the doing of the Will, because (on the general definition) there is nothing else that can emerge from and return to that state. Of the possibility of that emergence and return, this is not the immediate place to speak. It is obvious that, however we define 12 heaven—spiritually or spatially—the word earth does in fact mean both. Earth is to us inevitably a place, but it is, also inevitably, the only state which we know, our spiritual state within that place. The identification of the two as earth has no doubt assisted us to see both spatial and spiritual meanings in the word heaven. But heaven is distinguished from earth, and earth at the moment may be taken to mean that place and state which have not the eternity of heaven. If it has a perfection, it is a temporal perfection, a perfection known in sequence. The Will emerges from the heaven of its beatitude (and the beatitude of all creatures existing in their mode of perfect relation to it) and returns thither. Of that Will, so emerging and returning, it is said: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’; it is called ‘the kingdom of heaven’ in that activity.
Religion is the definition of that relationship. The records of it, as it has been understood by Christendom, are contained formally in two sets of documents: (i) the Canonical Scriptures, that is, the Bible; (ii) the Rituals of the Church. Neither is complete alone, nor can be understood alone. So far as they can be separated, it might be said that the Bible, up to and including the Acts of the Apostles, is concerned rather with what happened, the Rituals with what is happening. The Epistles belong to both. It is true that all that did happen is a presentation of what is happening; all the historical events, especially of this category, are a pageant of the events of the human soul. But it is true also that Christendom has always held that the two are indissolubly connected; that the events in the human soul could not exist unless the historical events had existed. If, per impossible, it could be divinely certain that the historical events upon which Christendom reposes had not yet happened, all that could be said would be that they had not yet happened. If time and place are wrong, they are at least all that can be wrong. If, by a wild fantasy, the foundations of Christendom are not yet dug, then we have only the architect’s plan. But those foundations can never be dug on any other plan. The passion—often the too-angry passion—with which the orthodox have defended a doctrine such as the Virgin Birth has (apart from mystical interpretation 13 and vicious obstinacy) this consummation of the historical sense as its chief cause. The union of history and the individual is, like that of so many other opposites, in the coming of the kingdom of heaven, historic and contemporary at once. It was historic in order that it might always be contemporary; it is contemporary because it was certainly historic.
It is the Bible which describes and defines for us the coming of the kingdom, and by the Bible is meant for this book the English version, the Authorized supplemented by the Revised. It is, whether fortunately or unfortunately, that source from which the English imagination has for centuries received the communication of Christendom, and from which the Christian imagination in England still, commonly and habitually, derives. No doubt this derivation is, to a large extent, governed by the doctrines of the Catholic Church. But it is a fact that most English minds still interested in Christendom regard the Bible and the Church rather as allied and intermingled organisms than the Church as the single organism producing the Bible as a part of its inspired activity. That is why it will be convenient here to follow the complex imagination contained in the phrase ‘came down from heaven’ as it is derived from the Bible. It is the habit nowadays to talk of the Bible as great literature; the Bible-worship of our forefathers has been succeeded by a more misguided and more offensive solemnity of conditioned respect, as accidentally uncritical as deliberately irreligious. Uncritical, because too often that literary respect is oddly conditioned by an ignoring of the book’s main theme.
It has certainly many minor themes. Like all the rest of English literature, it consists of a multitude of arrangements of English words expressing, with very great poignancy, various states of being. They are expressed in many different conventions—in narrative, in dialogue, in lyric; in histories, in letters, in schedules and codes of law; in fantasies of apocalypse and myths of creation. Many are familiar enough—the devotion of Ruth, the impatience of Job, the distress of David, the passion of the Shulamite; others are less familiar. The whole of the Bible is a nexus of states of being; a pattern developed in a 14 proper sequence from its bare opening through all its enlarging theme. It even involves states of being more than individual; it concerns itself with corporations and companies. Setting aside supernatural beings, the central figure of the Old Testament is Israel; the central figure of the New is the Church. Those companies dominate their members, except when some peculiarly poignant state of individual being emerges, and by sheer power momentarily dominates the mass. Even then the moment of individuality illuminates and returns to the mass; it is never forgotten that the Israelites are members of the nation as the believers are of the Church, and it is the greater organism which is the full subject, at whatever time. Through those greater organisms, as through the many lesser, there arises a sense of corporate mankind. Individuals and companies, and mankind itself, are all finally set in relation to that non-human cause and centre which is called God.
For the central theme is made up of the lesser themes and of something more, and as in all great literature the lesser themes are there to help compose the greater. The whole Canon signifies a particular thing—the original nature of man, the entrance of contradiction into his nature, and the manner of his restoration. If this theme is ignored the Bible as a whole cannot be understood as literature. By a deprivation of the central idea, and of the personification of that idea, the Bible does not cease to be metaphysics and become literature; it ceases to be anything at all but little bits of literature rather oddly collated. But without that deprivation it is literature related to the greatest of human themes—the nature of man and his destiny. Its doctrine may be wrong, but without its doctrine it is, as a book, nothing. It deals no longer with mankind, as is pretended, only with a number of men. To alter it so may be a moral virtue, but it certainly is not good literary criticism.
Yet it is precisely good literary criticism which is needed, for those of us who are neither theologians, higher critics, nor fundamentalists; that is, for most of us. We are concerned, if we are concerned at all, to know what the book is at, as much as to know what King Lear or the Prelude is at, and that can only be 15 done by the methods of literary criticism, by the contemplation of the states of being the book describes, by the relation of phrase to phrase and the illumination of phrase by phrase, by the discovery (without ingenuity) of complexity within complexity and simplicity within simplicity. There is simply no other way to go about it, because it consists of words. Bible-reading and meditation must be based on words; they are meant to extract the utmost possible meaning out of words. Certainly there are some books whose words, once we have studied them, seem to demand from us a moral, even a metaphysical, assent or dissent. Literary criticism, that is, may lead to or even be transmuted into something more intense even than itself. Such books are the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Divine Comedy and the De Natura Rerum and the Bible. They become something more in the same way that the crowd around Messias were suddenly exhibited in an office and authority unexpected when he looked on them and cried out ‘Behold my mother and my brethren.’ But that declaration of their maternity did not alter their original humanity, and so with the words of these books.
There is, in especial, one law of literary criticism which is of use—the law of emptying the words. Everyone who has studied great verse knows how necessary is the effort to clear the mind of our own second-hand attribution of meanings to words in order that the poet may fill them with his meanings. No less care is needed in reading the Bible. Some form, of course, each word must retain, some shape and general direction. But its general colour is, naturally, only learnt from its use throughout. This has to be discovered. As a fact words such as ‘faith’, ‘pardon’, or ‘glory’ are taken with meanings borrowed from the commonplace of everyday; comparatively few readers set to work to find out what the Bible means by them. The word ‘love’ has suffered even more heavily. The famous saying ‘God is love’, it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, and not that our meaning of love ought to have something of the ‘otherness’ and terror of God.
Acknowledging therefore the general meaning of a few words as they occur, and even charging (if desirable) the word heaven 16 when it occurs with all requisite power, it may be permissible to examine briefly a few other words and events contained in the Bible, in relation to the clause ‘who . . . came down from heaven’. At its beginning the Bible knows very little of the meaning of words. All great art creates, as it were, its own stillness about it, but by the nature of its subject the Bible does more. It opens with a single rift of light striking along the darkness which existed before words were: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’
CHAPTER IIThe Myth of the Alteration in Knowledge★
The word ‘God’ in the opening sentences of Genesis is practically characterless[2q]. It means only That which creates, and what it creates is good in its own eyes. The diagram of the six days develops with a geometrical precision, measured by the ambiguous word ‘Day’. To give that word the meaning merely of the passage of a myriad years is impossible, so much is it defined by its recurrent evenings and mornings; it is nearer our twenty-four hour day than anything else. Yet time is pressed into it; it has a double relationship of duration, divine and human; and it repeats itself as a refrain of mathematical incantation—the first calculation and the first ritual. Along that rift of light, according to the double pulsing sound—‘the evening and the morning were the Day’; ‘God saw that it was good’—the geometry of creation enlarges. The universe exists, and earth, and the seas, and all creatures. But there is no further explanation of the God.
The heavens are here, no doubt, spatial skies in relation to spatial earth, and the earth is the place of limited perfection in time. Man exists upon earth, and with his appearance the imagination finds that it has abandoned its standpoint at the beginning of that primal ray, and has removed itself to earth. It is the opening of the great myth of man’s origins. Earth exists and is good; the man and woman—the Adam—exist and are good; and their whole state is good.[1] It is not less good because 18 there exists a prohibition. But the myth makes use of the prohibition to proceed to its account of the Fall.
There are, roughly, two bases for the idea of the Fall. One is the general Judaeo-Christian tradition; the other is the facts of present human existence. Both bases will be rejected by those who have already rejected their fundamental hypotheses. The first depends upon the whole doctrine of the Christian Church, and is a corollary of that doctrine. The second depends upon the hypotheses of an omnipotent and benevolent God and of man’s free will. ‘Either there is no Creator (in that sense) or the living society of men is in a true sense discarded from his presence’, said Newman. Something must have gone wrong somewhere. If (on the hypothesis) it cannot have gone wrong with God, it must have gone wrong with us. If heaven is a name for a state of real perfection, we ourselves have most remarkably ‘come down from heaven’.
