Outlines of Romantic Theology Quotes

“But again He is equally present in sudden unexpected moments, and it is the neglect of these moments that is the most fruitful source of disbelief in Him.”
― Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology

“And since Love and Christ are one, and the work of redemption, formation, and union is one with his dealings with man in whatever state He is known, it may even be that the operation of this work takes place for some by means of their marriage. There are souls to whom religion is not much more than a mere formal duty, if that, who are yet capable of heroic achievements in love, of temptation and crucifixion in marriage if not in the Church. Vigil and fast, devotion and self-surrender, are aimed in the end at one sole End, and holiness may be reached by the obvious ways as well as by the more secret. The years of marriage may even have removed almost all memory of the high genesis of marriage, and the altar may be 'to an unknown God', for the name of his deity is forgotten. In the devotion of many a wife and many a husband, when the evils of the world are upon them, Christ redeems them and draws them to himself; they are upon the cross none the less because they offer it in churches but a merely casual knee.”
― Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology

“Love is Holiness and Divine Indignation; the placidity of an ordinary married life is the veil of a spiritual passage into profound things. Nor is this all; the lover knows himself also to be the cross upon which the Beloved is to be stretched, and so she also of her lover. A suggestion of this — probably no more — is to be found merely in the fact of her existence the sense of being for ever intimately bound to another which when it is not repose is agony, the state of suspension upon a substance alien and unavoidable for which, though from a more dreadful distance, crucifixion is the only comparison. There is no middle state into which this issues — either it is continued into an anguish of entire repulsion and hate, or, by the grace of that Crucifixion which includes it but is so much more than it alone, it becomes itself a purgation and a redemption. This is — in its degree, and who shall say how terrific that degree may become? — the annihilation of the selfhood which the saints have sought, and the end of it is union.”
― Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology