Sages Standing in God's Holy Fire - Jean Parvulesco and Charles Williams

‘A policeman’s hand stopped the traffic. Henry gestured towards it. “Behold the Emperor!” he said to Nancy. “You’re making fun of me,” she half-protested. “Never less,” he said seriously. “Look at him” … She saw in that heavy official barring their way the Emperor of the Trumps, helmed, in a white cloak, stretching out one sceptred arm, as if Charlemagne or one like him stretched out his controlling sword over the tribes of Europe pouring from the forest … The noise of all the passing street came upon her as the roar of many peoples; the white cloak held them by a gesture: law and order were there.’

Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps

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In this essay, I want to explore the Arthurian poems of the novelist, poet, playwright, and theologian Charles Williams (1886-1945) in the light of the visionary oeuvre of Jean Parvulesco (1929-2010), a Romanian ‘romancier’, essayist and esotericist who wrote primarily in French. Nothing, as far as I know, has been written about how these two intense and prophetic Christian authors relate, feed into, and complement each other. None of Parvulesco’s works have been translated into English and very little has been written about him in this language. The late Philip Coppens published two penetrating essays in the Australian magazine New Dawn here and here in 2008, and the Eurasianist philosopher and political scientist Alexander Dugin also wrote this reflection on Parvulesco’s novel, L’étoile de l’Empire invisible in 1994. Much of what little commentary there is about Parvulesco tends to focus on the influence he has had on Dugin’s thought and the geopolitical aspects of his work, particularly concerning Russia and Vladimir Putin. This is relevant and true, but not enough has been said, in my view, about Parvulesco as an imaginative writer and as a specifically Christian imaginative writer – a herald of the New Jerusalem, in short. It is here, I feel, that his work ties in with that of Charles Williams in a revealing, exciting, and even startling fashion.

Williams (above) is altogether better known in the English-speaking world, but not nearly so much as his friends C.S Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien formed the centre of a circle of Christian writers known as the Inklings, who were particularly active in Oxford during the Second World War. In the decades of secularisation and disenchantment which followed, their works have played a pivotal role in keeping the sacred alive at a time when the general thrust of culture and academia has been to minimise and undercut any meaningful sense of the holy. Where would we be without Tolkien’s masterworks The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion? How much more impoverished and spiritually benighted would the lives of generations of children have been without Lewis’s Narnia stories? The imaginative impact of his adult fiction, especially his ‘Space Trilogy’ (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) plus his reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth Till We Have Faces should also not be understated.

Williams did not write in such a clear style as Lewis and Tolkien, however, and his works have not made the same impact on popular culture as theirs have. But he was a deep and original thinker, who had a profound influence on practically everyone he encountered. He had, one might say, an aura about him, a spiritual presence and intensity, which, though he hailed from a humble, lower middle-class background, gave him a real air of distinction and made meeting him a memorable, sometimes life-changing, experience. As W.H. Auden recalled:

‘For the first time in my life, I felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity … I had met many good people before who made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings but in the presence of this man I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving.’ (1)

I was in my early-twenties (c.1992), a History student at The University of Leeds, when I discovered Williams. I started with the only two novels of his they had in the University bookshop, All Hallows’ Eve (1945) and The Greater Trumps (1932). His novels – seven in all – have been called ‘supernatural shockers’ and ‘spiritual thrillers’. They are not literary masterworks in terms of quality of writing or felicity of expression but their impact is deeper and far more penetrating than many so-called masterpieces. Where does this power come from? I can only reply in the words of Christ Himself – ‘Come and see.’ Once you read these books you will not forget them. They are packed with meaning – fictional meditations on what reality is like at a more central level than we habitually perceive, yet rooted firmly at the same time in the everyday world.

In the shop’s poetry section was a one-volume edition of Williams’s Arthurian verse – his two published collections Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944) plus fragments from an uncompleted third sequence, tentatively titled Jupiter Over Carbonek. I bought it at once and began reading enthusiastically. But the style was denser and more complex than that of the novels and I found it off-putting and quite bewildering. I put the book down, yet there was something there – some indefinable quality or essence – that kept drawing me back as the 1990s and 2000s unfolded. There was something compelling, essential even, about the Byzantine and Arthurian ambience evoked by Williams that chimed on a deep level with my own gut instincts, known and felt since childhood, of what Christian Europe was, and is (despite current appearances), and one day will openly become again. As Lewis puts it:

‘There is a youthfulness in all Williams’s work which has nothing to do with immaturity. Nor is this the only respect in which his world offers the very qualities for which our age is starved. Another such quality is splendour: his world is one of pomp and ritual, of strong, roaring, and resonant music … His colours are opaque: not like stained glass but like enamel. Hence his admirable hardness; by which I do not here mean difficulty, but hardness as of metals, jewels, logic, duty, vocation …. We meet celibacy, fasts, vigils, contrition, tragedy, and all but despair.’ (2)

Here are some lines, as an example of this ‘resonant music’, from The Last Voyage, the penultimate poem in Taliessin Through Logres:

Fierce in the prow the alchemical Infant burned,

red by celerity now conceiving the white;

behind him the folded silver column of Percivale,

hands on the royal shoulders, closed wings of flight,

inhaled the fine air of philosophical amazement;

Bors, mailed in black, completing the trine,

their action in Logres, kneeling on the deck to their right,

the flesh of fatherhood, unique as they in the Will,

prayed still for the need and bliss of the household.

By three ways of exchange the City sped to the City;

against the off-shore wind that blew from Sarras

the ship and the song flew.

Over the course of three decades and after much reading, reflection, and discussion, I began to feel the reality and truth of these poems from the inside, as it were. Lines and phrases continually popped up in my mind. I turned their themes – spiritual, intellectual, political, romantic, artistic – over and over in my head. The images conjured up by Williams came alive in full and glorious colour. His poetic milieu – his vision of the Empire and Britain’s place in it – became for me a living, breathing topography and started to drive and propel my own creative writing. While I continue to read and enjoy his novels it is his poetry which, over time, has risen above surface issues of complexity and has shown itself imbued with an incantatory and, I believe, an authentically magical power.

This has only become clear though since I began to map the singular spiritual and political vision of Jean Parvulesco onto Williams’s Arthurian world. It has taken a long time – all things of value do – but I can see now that the Kingdom of Logres posited by Williams and the Byzantine Roman Empire of which it forms a part is more than a skilful reworking of history or one recasting among many of the Arthurian Mythos. It is an invocation and an exposition of what Empire is in its essence and a prefiguration of a Europe to come, with its Western and Eastern poles acting in concert again, a foreshadowing of what Parvulesco called the Great Eurasian Empire of the End, ‘the final re-integration of Catholicism and Orthodoxy into a single Imperial religion’, as he wrote in his novel Dans la forêt de Fontainebleau. (3)

It was precisely this trans-continental, pan-European quality that drew me, in 2002, to Jean Parvulesco (above). It seemed obvious to me, in the wake of 9/11, that the West should forge an alliance with Russia to counter the threat of radical Sunni Islam. President Putin appeared keen on this for a while, but the US and Britain gave him little encouragement and chose instead the ruinous road of invading and occupying Iraq. A different path had been taken, but Parvulesco’s vision of a renewed and re-united Europe gave me hope and a sense of long-term possibility. Something to pray for; something to work towards.

Parvulesco was born in Romania in 1929. He escaped from a Communist prison in the former Yugoslavia in 1948 and made his way to Paris, where he became involved with the cutting-edge political and artistic currents active in the city. He had a keen interest in the cinema and maintained life-long friendships with many of the leading lights of the French Nouvelle Vague, such as Eric Rohmer and Jean-Pierre Melville. Parvulesco was a Traditionalist Roman Catholic and an enemy of both liberalism and democracy. But he did not support the totalitarian far-right and his condemnations of both National Socialism and Italian Fascism were quite severe. He saw them as products and consequences of modernism – atavistic and anti-traditional betrayals of Europe’s Christian and Imperial destiny. The vacuum they created led to the post-war subjugation of Europe by the USA and the USSR, two seemingly opposed, but in reality complementary and mutually reinforcing materialist superpowers. Here, for example, Parvulesco outlines the ‘four terrible errors’ made by the Nazis, which destroyed both themselves and much of Europe: 

‘(1) The inconceivable criminal imbecility of the Shoah …

(2) The paranoid contempt they held all the Slavic peoples in, the Russians in particular …

(3) Needless and self-defeating hostility towards the Catholic Church …

 4) The inability to recognise, and still less utilise, thinkers of the calibre of Martin Heidegger   and Karl Haushofer … and a preference for third-rate cretins such as Alfred Rosenberg …‘(4)

Strong words. Passages like this remind me very much of Dante and his fulminations in the Commedia against the corrupt clerics and petty sovereigns of his day, who through their small-mindedness and lack of vision undermined both Church and Empire. Like the Italian, Parvulesco was keenly aware of the evils of his time and the civilisational rot corroding our society and culture. ‘Black vomit’, as Tony d’Entremont, narrator and hero of the novel L’étoile de l’Empire invisible, vividly describes it in a top-class rant against the New Age movement and its ‘One World’ agenda, ‘where the shadow of the Beast of the Apocalypse makes itself both visible and transparent.’(5)

There is a grand battle unfolding in Parvulesco’s world between ‘agents of Being’ and ‘agents of non-Being.’ The latter are wedded to a progressivist, globalist, secularist worldview. Their goal – which some of them are conscious of, and some are not – is to abolish all traces of Divinity and sever humanity from knowledge and remembrance of true religious tradition. They work, as d’Entremont claims, for the ‘anti-world, the “mystery of iniquity”, which St. Paul speaks of in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians.’ (6) Set against this nefarious conspiracy are Parvuelsco’s counter-revolutionaries, the ‘agents of Being’, men and women of faith, prayer and tradition, who work in the shadows, alone or in small groups, to prepare for the inevitable systemic collapse and also – crucially – the new golden age or ‘age of being’ to follow.

There are strong resonances here with Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength and the demonic forces who secretly set the tone at the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE). Masquerading as a force for positive change in post-war Britain the Institute is in fact a focal point and node of power for a long-planned Satanic takeover of England, Europe, and the world. It is faced down by a small Company of good-hearted folk (plus a bear), whose Director, Elwin Ransom, was modelled to a large extent on Charles Williams. We think too of The Fellowship of the Ring and the little band that sets out from Rivendell – the last homely house – on the long and perilous journey south to destroy the ruling Ring and break the power of the Dark Lord. Good triumphs over evil in both works, and Parvulesco – a man of deep Christian conviction – was certain that the outcome would be the same in the non-fictional world we live and struggle in today.

There is a gap, however – a chasm even – between where we are now and where we will one day be. We live in an age of ‘liquid modernity’, where nothing is fixed or stable and all values have become relative and fluid. We often feel lost and disorientated, and contact with the Real can seem sometimes all but impossible. There is a dearth of meaning and positive direction. Parvulesco experienced this sense of alienation – bordering often on desolation – very sharply, both in his personal life and in the spiritual, political, and cultural marginalisation of Europe. But he had great faith in the latent redemptive power hidden like the pearl of great price in the souls of the ancient European peoples. He believed that when everything would appear lost a Great Monarch-type figure (as prophecied by Nostradamus and dramatised in Dans la foret de Fontainebleau) would rise up and inaugurate a new Divinely-appointed realm – the ‘Grand Eurasian Empire of the End’, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostock – ‘Regnum Sanctum’ – the incarnation and establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth: ‘Imperium Magnum or Roma Unltima, a world-wide work of the Holy Spirit, announcing and setting in motion the advent in history of Christ the King …’ (7)

This is where we turn full-circle back to Charles Williams. When we look at this drawing from the end-leaf of Taliessin Through Logres …

… we see the Empire envisioned by Williams, a united Christian Imperium, where the Emperor in Byzantium and the Pope in Rome have equal and complementary functions and the Empire’s various provinces play their unique, distinctive roles in the unfolding Theo-drama. The Empire, for Williams, is first and foremost a person – specifically a woman – not a political bloc or a militarised zone but a Marian, Sophiological space of relationship and connection, where the lines of communication the human and the Divine are open and alive. 

The woman in the drawing – the female personification of Empire – is Merlin’s sister, Brisen. The great centres of the Empire, as marked on the map, play their parts analogously with their positions on her body. Byzantium, for instance, is situated at the navel – the physical centre. Rome is placed at the level of the hands, reflecting the daily Mass offered by the Pope and the work of his hands (‘manual acts’, Williams calls them) in the consecration of bread and wine and the elevation of the Host. The breasts relate to Gaul. Williams is thinking here of the milk of learning which the University of Paris brought to Christendom in the High Middle Ages. His Arthuriad, as this shows us, is highly elastic in its conception of time. Though set ostensibly in the decades following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the poems are not a catalogue of empirical events – ‘this happened then and that happened after that,’ etc. They are rooted in eternity, not time. Parvulesco’s ‘archaeo-futurist’ hope for European Christendom – simultaneously brand-new and ancient – shared this timeless, trans-historical perspective. A return to the principle of Being after centuries of non-Being would, he believed, bring an end to the dominance of materialist, empiricist modes of thought, with the sacred once again taking precedence over the secular. As the Personalist philospher Emmanuel Mounier expressed it in the 1930s, ‘the spiritual first, and the economic and the political at its service.’ (8)

We see the head of Brisen superimposed onto the British Isles, and this, in my view, is less about the intellect – that honour, as we have seen, belongs to Gaul – and more to do with the capacity for spiritual vision which Britannia was renowned for in the Roman world. The great stone circles of Avebury (above) and Stonehenge represent this inner dimension. So too, in a different key, does the legend of Joseph of Arimathea bringing the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. There are many other examples. ‘Albion’ was what William Blake called this hidden, mystical aspect. Williams and Lewis called it ‘Logres.’ It comes to the same thing. 

Logres, in Williams’s poems, has been chosen by God to act as a bridgehead between two holy cities – Byzantium, the seat of government, in the East, and Sarras, city of the Grail, in the West. Heaven and Earth are thereby balanced, and Arthur’s Kingdom is established as an earthly embodiment of Jacob’s ladder, with an easy and natural interchange and communion between lower and higher worlds, ‘ascending and descending’ like the angels in Jacob’s vision. The stage is set and the platform built not just for the Grail to return but also Our Lord Himself in His second coming. Sadly, due to a series of human failings, Logres only partially fulfils its potential and the Parousia has to be postponed. A frightening thought. Will Logres get another chance, or will the sacred torch be passed elsewhere?

As one brought up in this country, stories of King Arthur awakening from sleep and prophecies of Britain playing a role in future eschatological events have always struck a chord. I have long felt that what Parvulesco calls ‘le retour des grand temps’ will begin here. Parvulesco himself thought that it would start in France. A resident of another country might opt for his own land. Obviously, we cannot all be right. But there is a sense, I think, where if every country is true to its own essence – its own deep abiding archetype – then everyone will be doing God’s work and heading in the right direction in their own unique and irreplaceable way. Lewis makes this clear at the end of That Hideous Strength:

‘When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China — why, then it will be spring.’ (9)

The Emperor is the ultimate source of authority who underwrites all this. He brings a principle of unity to the separate, individual nations and also a wider sense of civilisational shape and direction. This is exactly the kind of ruler Dante wished to see in his own fractured and fragmented age. The pages of the Commedia and of De Monarchia, his treatise on government, are filled with this longing. If the poet felt such a need in his day how much more do we now? Parvuleso and Williams were both attuned to this missing element in our collective life, what the Catholic esotericist Valentin Tomberg called ‘the shadow of the Emperor.’ (10) What Dante wanted was what Parvulesco and Williams wanted – a civilisation permeated from top to bottom by a single ruling principle 100% rooted in and focused on the Divine. What W.B. Yeats says in A Vision about Byzantium applies with equal felicity to the renewed, regenerated Christian Empire which constantly sought to manifest itself through the imaginations of both men:

‘I think that if I could be given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato. I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since, in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architects and artificers … spoke to the multitude in gold and silver. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject matter of a whole people.’ (11)

In Williams’s poem The Calling of Taliessin Merlin tells the young Taliessin – who goes on to become the King’s Poet and Captain of Horse – that if Heaven’s design for Logres goes awry then Taliessin will be charged with keeping its spirit alive:

If in the end if anything should fail of all

purposed by our mother and the Emperor, …

it may be that this gathering of souls, that the King’s poet’s 

household

shall follow in Logres and Britain the spiritual roads …

Williams treated the Arthurian legend with high seriousness. He identified, to a very large extent, with the figure of Taliessin and saw himself, his friends, and his students as constituting a similar – maybe even identical – ‘household’. 'Something like the Company probably came into existence wherever Williams had lived and worked', as Lewis noted. (12) 

In his poetry, Williams drilled down to some very deep imaginative and spiritual places. The Mythos left its mark on him, but he left his stamp on it too, especially in his unique, idiosyncratic conception of the Empire. It is here, I feel, that perhaps without knowing it, Williams tuned in to what the future will one day look like. There is a unity, simplicity, and one-pointedness to his Byzantine Empire that, in my view, will give us precisely what we will need after any coming cataclysm – clarity and a sense of vertical momentum – looking up instead of down. So in some ways it’s very much a case of ‘back to basics' but this is no stripped-down, scorched-earth reaction to the excesses of our era. Williams’s world is coloured by two thousand years of Christian thought and art, the cultural and intellectual patrimony that has shaped and moulded our continent. It is, as Lewis noted (amongst other things), a place of 'splendour' and 'pomp and ritual', the opposite of a puritanical or survivalist wasteland.

It is almost as if, in his unification of Eastern and Western Christianity, Williams has called a new form of religion into being, one which relates to and expresses the essence of European spirituality while also building on and, one might say, baptising Europe’s pre-Christian heritage. We see this clearly in The Calling of Taliessin, where Merlin sends Taliessin – a young Druidic bard – to sit at the Emperor’s feet in Byzantium and learn from him the true Faith, what Merlin calls ‘the doctrine of largesse’, not to sever him from his pagan roots but rather to complete and fulfil them.

Jean Parvulesco would have been delighted by such a notion. His vision of the Empire was a much more conscious affair than it was for Williams. The Empire, for Parvulesco, was a symbol of reality – more than that, it was reality. It is the global, geo-political set-up we know now that is an illusion. The Empire is a fact. It is truth – a Platonic idea or Form – which was, and is, and is to be, and is right now waiting for its moment to burst through onto the material, visible level of existence. When it does, it will be here to stay. ‘Apollo will come again,’ Parvulesco often remarked, ‘and next time it will be forever.’ He was also fond of quoting this line from John Buchan’s novel The Dancing Floor, ‘Tomorrow night nothing will go out from this place, unless it be the Gods.’ Or as Heidegger, a key philosophical influence on Parvulesco, famously had it, ‘Only a god can save us now.’

For Parvulesco, this return to Being, this ‘retour des grands temps’, is first and foremost a return of the gods, with the barriers between the human and the Divine becoming porous, then dissolving, allowing us to experience the world as a re-enchanted, re-sacralised theatre of Being. The Divine principle will be re-established and every shrub will be seen for what it truly is – a burning bush. As he wrote in L’étoile de l’Empire invisible: ‘It is imperative that the gods return, that the Divine renews itself in history, appearing anew in the process of history, a Heavenly intervention bringing both salvation and a new foundation.’ (13) 

In my mind’s eye, I see Parvulesco and Williams as figures in a Byzantine mosaic standing either side of the Emperor, though they seem such kindred spirits that maybe they should be standing together on the same side. Whether that is the right or left is harder to say. They were orthodox believers but radically unconventional. They were forerunners and prophets, heralds of the Emperor, and by extension God Himself. Neither was a priest, yet for some reason I can imagine both men celebrating Holy Mass in Heaven. They are the ‘sages’ that Yeats’s pilgrim appeals to in Sailing to Byzantium:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.’

They lead us to the high places, those zones of transformation and renewal that Yeats in his sequel to this poem, Byzantium, calls up from the depths of the Platonic night:

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

 

Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

I pray to them both. I make no secret of it. I pray for their aid and assistance. I hope and trust that they pray for me too, and not just for me – not even mainly for me – but for European Christendom, that living symbol which Dante, Williams, Yeats and Parvulesco felt so much at home in, and for its slow and secret, but necessary and inevitable return.

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(1) Grevel Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.276.

(2) C.S. Lewis, Arthurian Torso (Oxford University Press, 1948), p.199.

(3) Jean Parvulesco, Dans la forêt de Fontainebleau (Alexiphamarque, 2007), p.320.

(4) Jean Parvulesco, Un retour en Colchide (Guy Trédaniel, 2010), p.218)

(5) Jean Parvulesco, L'étoile de l'Empire Invisible (Guy Trédaniel, 1993), p. 368.

(6) Ibid, p.374.

(7) Dans la forêt ... p.391.

(8) Jean-Marie Dommenach, Emmanuel Mounier, (Editions du Seuil, 1972), p.43.

(9) C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (The Bodley Head, 1945), p.345.

(10) Anonymous, Meditations on The Tarot (Element, 1985), Letter IV - The Emperor.

(11) W.B. Yeats, A Vision (Palgrave MacMillan, 1959), p.247.

(12) Arthurian Torso, p.143.

(13) L'étoile ... p.280.

Also - Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams, edited and introduced by David Llewellyn Dodds (The Boydell Press, 1991) and The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2000).

All translations from Parvulesco's French are mine - JF