A Note on The Aeneid and Two Upcoming Posts

I've been reflecting a lot about The Aeneid this past year, especially in relation to the great spiritual and cultural darkening currently descending on the West. Three aspects in particular stand out - (1) The collapse of a civilisation - Troy for Aeneas, Christendom/Europe/America/The West for us, (2) The need to recognise what's of value in that civilisation, salvage it from the flames, and bring it with us into the future,  the old finding new expression in a new and Divinely-appointed dispensation (Rome in Aeneas's case), and (3) - a corollary of (2) - the need to have faith in the future and to trust in the promptings of the gods.

Those are the master themes of Virgil's poem for me, with reference, as I say, to the civilisational car crash playing out around us. So with this in mind, I intend to post two retellings from this foundational text over the next month. The first, due on Sunday 28th all being well, is my take on the end of Book Two - Aeneas's flight from Troy. The second, which will hopefully appear towards the end of March, is a retelling of Book Six - Aeneas's encounter with the Cumean Sybil and his trip to Hades and the Elysian Fields. 

There may be one or two shorter posts in the interim but this is where my imaginative focus will be between now and Holy Week. These acts of piety to a writer I and many others consider a prophet of Christ will, I hope, in their own small way, serve as a statement of intent in this dark time - an act of ressourcement - a return to the source and wellspring of European tradition, the aboriginal calamity of the fall of Troy, which yet bore fruit, according to legend, not only in the foundation of Rome but of Britain too. But that's another story!

So a nice way, perhaps, to mark (I won't say celebrate!) the one year anniversary of Covidworld's dismal eruption into our lives.

Private Eyes

I like to listen to music on YouTube while doing the dishes in the evening. Last night a song popped up on my playlist which I hadn't 'cued up' or expected - 'Private Eyes' (Disco Purrfection Mix) by Hall and Oates. I was glad to hear it. It's been a while. It's a smashing tune. Have a listen here.

I last heard this song in May 2018 in The Circus Tavern on Portland Street in Manchester. I remember walking in one evening and hearing it on the jukebox. Then I noticed a man standing at the bar. He looked a bit like the older Yeats but reminded me instantly of Alfred the Great (above). He had the same air of Kingship, you see - natural, inherent, unforced - the type that people are drawn to and follow. In palaces or in marshes. It makes no difference.

We didn't make eye contact. I saw him; he didn't see me. But I knew straightaway, without a shadow of a doubt, that he would one day rule this island, as King or Emperor or possibly both. It's only a matter of time before I see his face again, first in the media, I expect, and then once more in person.

He's gathering his forces right now, I believe, regardless of this silly lockdown. On Salisbury Plain maybe, or at the back of a retail outlet on the outskirts of Leeds. It makes no difference. 

The King is on his way again, make no mistake. All we have to do is know him when he comes. As the old song has it -

Yes, this I can tell

That all will be well
When the King enjoys his own again.

Walking Through Fire - The Byzantine Poems of Charles Williams and W.B. Yeats

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Apocalypse  21: 2

*

For both Charles Williams (1886-1945) and W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) the city of Byzantium was a key poetic symbol. Two of Yeats's most evocative poems, Sailing to Byzantium (1927) and Byzantium (1930) are devoted to it, while for Williams the city acts as the centre and focal point of a restored, expanded Roman Empire. His two collections of Arthurian poems, Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), though primarily set in Britain (or Logres, as Williams calls it) are infused with the spirit of Byzantium throughout. Its presence is palpable from first word to last.

For Williams, Byzantium is an active city. It as a motor - a dynamo - which propels events, makes things happen, and builds and maintains the Empire in its own sacred image. As Taliessin, Williams's poetic alter-ego, observes on his pilgrimage there:

... the logothetes run down the porphyry stair

bearing the missives through the area of empire ...

And ...

Chariots and galleys sprang from the shores;

the messengers were borne over sea and land.

(The Vision of the Empire)

It is in one of these galleys that Taliessin returns home to begin his vocation as Poet (and also Captain of Horse) to the new king, Arthur. His voyage to Byzantium has shown him the greater reality, which, as a raw, unformed youth, he had dimly sensed but not yet experienced:

... for the Lord God had not yet set him at liberty,

nor shown him the doctrine of largesse in the land of the Trinity.

(The Calling of Taliessin)

We are not told what happens to Taliessin in Byzantium. Was there an initiation he had to pass through to arrive at the wisdom he brought back to Logres? Did he have a vision? A flash of transformative insight exposing the nature and essence of the Empire's various realms and how they all, in their own unique way, reflect and embody the glory of the centre - Byzantium itself?

This metropolis is no remote abstraction - bloodless and aloof. It is a living presence, symbolised by its Emperor, who represents, and in a way incarnates, not just the Empire, but Christ Himself - Christos Pantokrator - the Master of the Universe. This Emperor looks after his own. In Taliessin's Return to Logres, he seems to watch over the young poet from on high, like a guardian angel or tutelary spirit, protecting both his servant and his servant's homeland from malign influences:

The seas were left behind;

In a harbour of Logres

lightly, I came to land

under a roaring wind.

Strained were the golden sails,

the masts of the galley creaked

as it rode for the Golden Horn

and I for the hills of Wales.

In a train of golden cars

the Emperor went above,

for over me in my riding

shot seven golden stars,

as if while the great oaks stood,

straining, creaking, around,

seven times the golden sickle

flashed in the Druid wood ...

Byzantium, for Williams, is an incarnational city, imprinting itself on the minds and imaginations of lands both near and far. It touches the provinces of the Empire and makes them holy, drawing them up into its own archetypal pattern. In Yeats, the emphasis is different. In both his Byzantium poems the city has nothing to do with the material world around it. It stands apart, above and beyond that which the poet, in Byzantium, dismisses as the 'fury and the mire of human veins.'

Byzantium, for Yeats, does not go forth into the world. The seeker goes in search of it, and this is the theme of Sailing to Byzantium. The poet has become dead to the world - this world, that is - the world of what he calls 'those dying generations,' where:

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long 

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies,

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

The poet has reached the end of the road. The round of daily life - getting, spending, building, striving - has nothing more to offer him. He needs to step off the wheel, escape 'that sensual music' and be born anew - transfigured and remade - in the crucible of God's salvific fire. So he sails the seas to the 'holy city of Byzantium' and prays to those who have come this way before him:

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.

In the sequel to this poem, Byzantium, we see where this invocation leads. Sailing to Byzantium focuses on the Lesser Mysteries - finding one's way to the sacred city - but Byzantium is concerned the transformation wrought when one is there - the Greater Mysteries. 'The unpurged images of day recede,' declares the poet in the first line. The great dome of Hagia Sophia stands out clear and distinct in the night air, far removed in its solemn majesty from the 'complexities' of worldly life:

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

It is worth noting here that these 'human veins' are, for Williams, made participants in the Divine life by the blessing of the Emperor and what he calls the 'acts of the Empire.' Contrary to secularist misconceptions, there is nothing in orthodox Christianity which makes it despise or disdain the suffering and pain inherent in human life. Quite the contrary. It rolls up its sleeves, 'gets its hands dirty,' and drinks like all of us from the mixed chalice of quotidian life. In doing so, it makes itself vulnerable, as both the crucifixion of Christ and the fall of Byzantium in 1453 show. It acts on, in and through our earthly joys and sorrows. As with the gifts of bread and wine in the Mass, it sanctifies them and makes them holy. This is the whole raison d'être of Williams's Byzantium. It is the more purely Platonic city of Yeats's imagination which keeps us at one remove (at least) from the hurly burly of the everyday.

When we reflect, however, on what Yeats is doing in these poems we see how essential a degree of distance from the world is. To die to self and be reborn is no easy thing. In fear and trembling one realises that the world is not enough. Something deeper calls and pulls us out of our habitual orbit. Mount Purgatory, in Dante's Purgatorio, for instance, is situated on an island in the Southern Hemisphere far from the known world. This allows time and space for reflection and repentance as souls are prepared the hard way for the ever-brightening, ever-deepening light of Paradise  And this is exactly what Byzantium is - a burning purgatorial experience of shattering intensity:

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Not storm disturbs, flame 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.

Is this the purgation that Taliessin went through on his pilgrimage to Byzantium? Was this the transmutative fire that he walked through? Is this behind his change from callow teenager to Bard of Britain, Herald of the Grail, and poetic bridge between those two Italian champions of Empire, Virgil and Dante?

It is unlikely that we will ever find out. Such information is not contained in Grevel Lindop's recent exhaustive biography (Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, 2015), probably because  there isn't any. Williams and Yeats certainly knew of each other, and Williams wrote a favourable review of Yeats's symbolic masterpiece, A Vision (1937), which was appreciated by the Irish poet. But they never physically met and were in no sense collaborators. They arrived at their differing yet complementary understandings of Byzantium independently. Like the twin-headed eagle of the Byzantine flag (see below) they look in opposite directions - Yeats inward, Williams outward - yet they fit together like a pair of gloves on the hands of the same master.

Is it at all significant, I wonder, that these poems were written at roughly the same time - the years leading up to and including the Second World War? Was Byzantium in some sense speaking through these two men or did their ritualistic, pattern-seeking minds conjure it into poetic being?

What, after all, is Byzantium? Where do we find it? Is it a hidden archetype, like the Grail, which our materialistic worldview has occluded from our vision? The city 'fell', remember, at the dawn of the Early Modern era when the West's attention was shifting from the eternal realm to the temporal. Or is it rather the case that the flat historical record is true and that Byzantium, like any other city, had its day in the sun and was then conquered by a rival civilisation and assimilated into its narrative? Maybe it is a wholly fictional construction - one of Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' - created and maintained by the myth-making faculties of the endlessly fecund human mind? Or could it indeed be the 'bride of God' referred to by St. John in his Apocalypse, coming in the clouds with glory alongside Christ the King on the day of the Parousia?

I ask these questions because we need Byzantium and what it stands for more than ever at this time. We are adrift on a sea of relativism, tossed around by surging emotion, wide open to manipulation and frankly ripe for conquest. We are hemmed in by darkness, and it is the wrong kind of darkness too. It is the fertile darkness of Yeats's Byzantium we are desperate for right now, where those 'unpurged images of day recede.'

It is from such darkness - this 'dessication of the world of sense,' as T.S. Eliot has it in Burnt Norton - that all great works of the spirit proceed, and that applies to cities as much as to religion, literature and art. In Byzantium a civilisation of the inner worlds came into being for the first time in Europe, a 'sinking in upon supernatural splendour,' in Yeats's memorable words. And the soul of this city was the vision of the Christos, the power of the Imagination to call forth the miraculous fire.

The time has come, I feel, to acknowledge as a society - as a civilisation - that we have come to the end of the road. We cannot go on as we are. Let us therefore don our Lenten clothes, put on sackcloth and ashes, and sail the seas to the holy city of Byzantium. There, on the Emperor's pavement, we will be burned clean, so that next morning those 'golden smithies' - laboratories and oratories of the spirit - can get to work on us, guiding us to the throne room of the Emperor. On the marble mosaic of his dancing floor are inscribed the ancient patterns that transform chaos and disintegration into the rhythms and structures of the Great Dance:

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.

Yes. This is how it is. This is how it will be. The gong sounds. Spirit calls unto spirit. We rise up like the phoenix, restored and renewed, ready to return, à la Taliessin, to Logres. We will find our Arthur waiting for us there, and we will work beside him, like the 'golden builders' of Blake's imagination, building up the New Jerusalem, that 'fresh image', of which Byzantium itself is but a copy and reflection, on the hallowed turf of our very own green and pleasant land.

The best essay I've read on 'That Hideous Strength' ...

 ... is this one by Mihai Marinescu on the Kali Tribune website - www.kalitribune.com. It was written in September 2017 but it's so relevant to the world of January 2021 that it could have been written this morning. I'm thinking here about what it says about the demonic intelligences ('Macrobes' as Lewis calls them) who dictate so much of the agenda in That Hideous Strength. I don't really need to emphasise the extent to which these dark powers are active in today's world. But the Devil plays all sides, and the writer is also astute in his (her?) exposure of the limitations of 'conspiratorial' thinking, as well as the lies purveyed by the mainstream media, of course. 

There's a better way to be taken, and that is the path chosen by Ransom and the Company he gathers around him at St. Anne's-on-the-Hill. We don't know the how and the why behind the facade of surface phenomena. We can guess and surmise but our points of view are always partial and we'll never be able to 'join the dots' in the coherent, comprehensive manner we often crave. Tuning into the Divine Will is what it's all about and then making ourselves receptacles for that Will to act in the world. When it comes to current events, we need to move beyond our obsession with facts - 'What are the facts behind the smokescreen presented to us? What's really going on? - and look for the archetype which is expressing itself through the event. Only then do we start to look the right way through the lens and begin to get a sense of where God is in all this and what He might be asking us to do.

The World We Have Lost

When I think of what we have lost as a society this past year, two buildings spring immediately to mind - a pub and a church - symbols of a world which seems sadly to have vanished. The church is the Holy Name on Oxford Rd, Manchester (above), c.1995 when I used to go every day - a midweek Solemn Mass, Palestrina in the choir loft, candles glowing, incense billowing, kneeling before the Logos with three hundred others as the bells ring out at the Consecration, a feeling of unity and connection - not just with my peers, but with the Communion of Saints and the whole angelic host.

The pub is The Briton's Protection (below), just up the road in town - warm, intimate surroundings, the buzz of conversation, the give and take of banter and debate as ideas (on a good night) fizz back and forth across the table. This is the heart and soul of the City, that Civitas Dei which St. Augustine and Charles Williams championed and of which our earthly cities are a reflection and a stepping stone.

Both church and pub should, on paper, return as before, but the game's not played on paper, it's played on grass, and my sense is that the micro-managerial forces which have gained so much ground in 2020 will be reluctant to let such spontaneous, untrammelled, unmediated collective access to the Divine and the best of the human happen so easily and naturally again. Too unpredictable. Too unruly. Not at all 'safe.' 

Ersatz, largely online solutions will be peddled and accepted out of necessity, but these will come to nothing in the long-run. They will founder on the rocks of reality because they have no anchor in human nature and are tethered to an unstable morass of shifting, free-floating illusion. True connection, with both God and man, is hard-wired into us, and the church and pub represent those deep, eternal European archetypes - the sacred and the secular, the Pope and the Emperor, the crown and mitre, crook and flail, etc - the twin pillars on which our civilisation is built.

These two poles cannot be easily or lightly dismissed. They cannot be dismissed at all, in fact, unles this is what the Great Reset is really all about - changing us at a deep and fundamental level so that these primal, archaic symbols can never return. It would be interesting, would it not, if this was the actual, unspoken aim of the restrictions we are currently enduring. Even then, failure would still be its portion, just as it was for the NICE in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength and their anti-natural, anti-Divine machinations. 

Truth alone is real and truth alone will win. Falsehood withers in its gaze. Like the Balrog faced down by Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, it cannot pass. No matter how tarnished that mark of truth becomes inside us, it cannot be obliterated or cancelled out. It is the Secret Fire, the Flame Imperishable that Iluvatar, to stay with Tolkien, planted at the core of the universe on the morning of creation. He made men and women partakers in that mystery, and the pub and the church, despite their seeming incongruity and even insignificance, are outgrowths and expressions of that holy gift. They are always present because they are always true and they will come into our lives again without a doubt, resurgent like the phoenix. 

The future is unwritten, as Joe Strummer of The Clash once said. Have faith in God, therefore, faith in those around you, faith in yourself, and faith in the indelible stamp of truth inscribed by Iluvatar upon your heart.

The Singing Head

Summer Solstice by Rob Floyd - www.robfloyd.co.uk

Many centuries ago, a thousand years and more before Julius Ceasar came to this isle, a dire and dreadful war broke out between the princes of Britain and Ireland, a clash of arms which lasted ten bloody years, beginning and ending on the same day as the start and finish of the siege of Troy. Victory came at last to the invading British forces, but it was a bitter, barren triumph. They had sailed to Ireland in a fleet of a thousand ships, yet only one was needed to take the survivors back home, and that, like all their ships, had been designed to hold a hundred warriors. Just eight men and one woman now remained out of all that mighty host: King Bran the Blessed, Manawydan his brother, Pryderi son of Pwyll and Rhiannon, Glifiau son of Taran, Taliesin the Poet, Ynawg the Tall, Heilyn son of Gwyn, and Branwen daughter of Llyr, over whom the war had been fought.

Bran gave a last set of instructions to his followers as they boarded the ship: 'Cut off my head,' he said, 'and carry it with you to the Island of the Mighty. Take it first to Harlech and remain with it there for seven years. You will find the head an endless fount of song and story, more so than it has ever been while fastened to my shoulders. You must travel then to Gwales in Penfro, and you can stay there for as long as you wish. In the upper room, behind the High Table, you will behold three doors. Two of them will be open - the door on the left that looks out onto Gaul and the door on the right that looks out at the Northern Lights. But the door in the middle will be shut, and that is the door that looks out onto Aber Henfelen in Cornwall. You do not have to open that door, but as soon as you do open it - if you open it - then you must leave straightaway and head south to London and bury my head there, my face turned towards Europe, five fathoms deep beneath the White Tower. The head will guard this land from that day on, ensuring that men of ill will, be they outside the island or within its sacred precincts, do not succeed in making captives of ourselves or our descendants.'

At this, Bran's followers were aghast. He had led them so well in war and in peace, and they all held a fierce loyalty to his person and his crown. But they knew better than to disobey him - for Bran was said to be a prophet who had walked and talked with God Himself - and at length it was Manawydan, his brother and successor, who drew his sword and severed his head from his shoulders.

Sorrowfully they sailed across the Irish Sea, wondering if they had fallen prey to a collective delirium brought on by the trauma of war. For the head made no sound during the three hours of the voyage and its eyes remained glazed and vacant throughout.

They came into harbour at Aber Alaw in Tal Ebolion. Once there, Branwen looked back across the sea and saw in the distance the smoke still rising from the ruined Irish towns and villages. 'Alas,' she cried, 'that all this destruction should have been wrought on my account.' But Taliesin put his arms around her and comforted her, and they all set out after a short rest towards Harlech.

After half an hour they passed a group of peasants in a field. 'What news?' Manawydan asked. 'Is Caradog, the King's regent, still seated in power in Westminster?'

'My lord,' replied the chief peasant. 'He is not. The land has been wracked with civil strife since 'ere you left. Caswallon, son of Beli, Bran's ancient enemy, rebelled against Caradog, made himself invisible and slew the regent and his men. Now he reigns as tyrant in London and every man, woman and child in Britain suffers for it.'

Branwen wept. 'Not just one land wasted,' she wailed, 'but two.' And she died there and then of a broken heart. The seven men left buried her in a high, square grave, then pushed on mournfully for Harlech.

When they arrived, however, they found a lordly castle waiting for them on the cliffs. Everything was there that they could have hoped for. The gardens were fertile and the hunting runs excellent. But it was the birdsong that softened their hearts with its poignant beauty and moistened their eyes with tears. Far out to sea, they could dimly discern three birds wheeling and circling above the ocean. No other bird did they see all the time they were there, yet the birdsong seemed to be coming from much closer than that - from above, beside, and all around them. 

The tears that flowed were tears of grief and mourning for all those who had perished so senselessly in the Irish War. Now the head began to sing too - psalms of lamentation and supplication, invoking the High God to welcome the souls of the departed into the light of his heavenly dwelling. And gradually their spirits started to rise, and they spent those seven years at Harlech in a state of calm, peaceful rest and recollection.

After that they moved on to Gwales in Penfro, and it was the same for them there as at Harlech except even better. Here there was no need to hunt or forage as three times a day - breakfast, dinner and supper - a wonderful meal was provided by invisible hands in the castle's upper room. As they ate and drank on their first night they saw the three doors at the far end of the room - the one looking out onto Gaul, the one looking out at the Northern Lights, and the one in the middle which was shut. 'That is the door we must not open,' said Manawydan. 'The one that looks out onto Cornwall.'

The seven stayed there for eighty years, and it was the happiest, most blissful time any of them had ever known, each year richer and more fulfilling than the one before. They did not age at all throughout this time. On the contrary, the longer they stayed the more youthful and radiant their faces and bodies became. They had forgotten all about the war and everything they had suffered in Ireland. The head sang to them continually, prophecies of extraordinary events to take place in the far-off future. They were astonished, and as there was little need for sleep in that enchanted place they gathered around the High Table as often as they could, day and night, and deeply imbibed the vision and insight pouring forth from King Bran's head.

Then one morning Heilyn son of Gwyn found himself alone in the upper room. The head was silent and the King's eyes shone with a strange light, which puzzled and unsettled Heilyn. He looked up at the middle door and an irresistible compulsion surged up within him to open it wide, bring an end to this episode, and move the story forward.

So Heilyn flung the door open and looked out onto the Cornish coast. For a long time afterwards he hated himself, for the castle straightaway lost its mystic sheen and was now a shabby, run-down semi-ruin. And all the pain and loss of a decade's worth of war and woe came crashing down upon them so that it felt like no time at all had elapsed between the burial of Branwen and the opening of the door. It was all too real and raw once more.

They left that place immediately and took the head with them to London as Bran had instructed. It made no sound now, though they eyes were still open and did not have the glazed, vacant look they had on the voyage back from Ireland. The head was alive, but silent.

So they buried it five fathoms deep beneath the White Tower and came sorrowfully away. Not long afterwards, Caswallon died unexpectedly and the Great Council asked Manawydan to become King in his place. He accepted gladly and began the arduous task of rebuilding the shattered country. When he himself went to God three years later Pryderi was chosen to succeed him, and he reigned for three-score years and transformed Britain into a strong, stable realm and a beacon of prayer, learning and the arts - 'a jewel set in a silver sea,' as Taliesin wrote on the occasion of the King's golden jubilee.

Manawydan and Pryderi had great confidence in what they set out to achieve because they knew the head of Bran the Blessed was guiding and protecting them from deep below. Things stayed this way for a millennium and a half until Arthur, in his pride and hybris, had the head dug up, thinking that he and he alone should have the honour of defending the land from its foes. 

Taliesin, who had lived through all these centuries, was there to see this happen, but no-one, himself included, had any idea what Arthur did with the head - whether he tried to destroy it or hid it away somewhere. And Taliesin will be there again when - as Bran prophecied at Gwales in Penfro - the head will reappear at a time when Britain is threatened and almost overcome by a foul, unprecedented darkness. It will carry out the same salvific work then as it did after the ravages of the Irish War - that deep, eternal labour of healing, redemption, restoration, and national transfiguration. 

The Marble of Exchange

I remember how struck I was as a boy when I read about the fate of the Roman Emperor, Valerian (253-260, pictured above). According to the early Christian historian Lactanctius he was captured by the Persians after the Battle of Edessa and used for years afterwards as a footstool for the Persian Emperor, Shapur I. When Valerian offered the Emperor a ransom for his release, he had molten gold poured down his throat and was then killed and had his skin flayed off. Lactantius' account does not make clear whether the killing or the flaying took place first. No time was wasted anyway in hanging the skin up as a trophy in Shapur's Great Hall.

There are any number of tragic cases closer to home - both in time and space - which should have affected me at least as much but did not do so. After all, I did not know Valerian - how could I? - and I also had no idea whether he was a good man or not. But deep down none of that mattered. What trumped everything was the strong conviction that a Roman Emperor should never have had to suffer such indignities. It seemed to me then - and still does now - profoundly against the natural order. There was the personal element too, as in the title of Graham Greene's book, The Human Factor - the feelings, emotions, and propensity for suffering common to men and women of all eras - and I could imagine only too clearly the terrifying blend of humiliation, dread, isolation, hopelessness and despair that Valerian must have felt.

Not every historian, I hasten to add, shares Lactanctius' view. Other accounts claim that Valerian and the men seized with him were treated honourably and were in fact set to useful work, building dams and bridges and so forth, the type of engineering enterprises Romans traditionally excelled at. So that's a comforting hope. But it is the first version that has stuck in my mind and which somehow - viscerally, I mean - seems more likely to me and certainly more realistic.

This unfortunate Emperor, as I say, has often been in my prayers these past four decades. For fifteen years or so I would simply ask God to look after him in eternity and grant him a place of 'happiness, refreshment and peace' as Eucharistic Prayer Two of the RC Church expresses it. But when I discovered Charles Williams in 1994 a whole different mode of prayer opened up before me. Nowhere is this better articulated and embodied than in the poem appended below, Taliessin on the Death of Virgil, taken from Williams' Taliessin Through Logres collection (1938).

Williams expands on this concept of prayer in many places, most notably in his novel Descent Into Hell (1937). He makes of prayer a more elastic, dynamic thing than I had thought possible. Not only can we pray for a person's post-mortem salvation but also that they might be given comfort, hope and strength here on Earth in the darkest moments of their most intense physical and mental pain. The implications of this are staggering. Through our prayers, for example, we can make a tangible difference to a martyr (of any denomination) enduring a brutal hanging in sixteenth-century London, or to a child forced to watch the slaughter of parents and siblings in the Rwandan civil war of the 1990s. 

I find it extraordinary that the Christian Churches have not picked this idea up and ran with it with gusto. What is the Church for if not deeply salvific deeds such as these? It shows to me just how far Christianity still has to go before it can become the religion it is truly capable of being. In a sense it hasn't done anything very much yet. So much of it is still latent, still in a state of potential, raw and undeveloped. And this should give us both cause for concern and grounds for real hope.

Charles Williams was a forerunner, I believe, of this coming Christianity - richer, deeper, more creative and three-dimensional than much of what we see in our churches today. In this poem, Virgil - the archetype of the virtuous pagan who never knew Christ - tumbles down to Hades at the moment of his death. Nothing can break his fall. The words and images which served him so well in life and came at his beck and call dissolve into a meaningless welter and babble. The underworld awaits. Then grace takes a hand. 'Unborn pieties lived,' as Williams succinctly puts it. Prayers of gratitude from his subsequent readers descend upon Virgil, rescue him from the pit, and bear him up towards that heavenly home where he truly belongs. He is 'set on the marble of exchange' - a fine, gratuitous act, like the 'deeper magic from before the dawn of time' in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, cutting through the iron laws of necessity and paying the poet back in justice and truth for the miracle of his oeuvre.

This is a work of real beauty and power. The French word for 'strength' - la force  - captures its spirit well. I didn't notice it much, I confess, when I first discovered Taliessin Through Logres twenty-six years ago. I was too fixated on the Grail at that time to pay much attention to anything else. More fool me. Maybe this is the poem where the Grail was to be found all along. This is the poem, perhaps, that reaches down most emphatically  to the heart of things, to the nub of what Dante so memorably calls 'the love that moves the sun and the other stars.' Every time I read it, it unfolds - unfurls even - more and more of its secret power. May it do so for you and for all who read this post. It is a poem to pray by, and a poem to live by:

Taliessin on the Death of Virgil

Virgil fell from the edge of the world,
hurled by the thrust of Augustus' back; the shape
he loved grew huge and black, loomed and pushed.
The air rushed up; he fell into despair, into air's other.
The hexameter's fullness now could find no ground;
his mind, dizzily replete with the meaningless sweet sound,
could found no Rome there on the joys of a noise.
He fell through his moment's infinity
(no man escapes), all the shapes of his labour,
his infinite images, dropping pell-mell; above,
loomed the gruesome great buttocks of Augustus his love,
his neighbour, infinitely large, infinitely small.
In the midst of his fall others came, none to save.
While he was dropping they put him in a grave.
Perpetual falling, perpetual burying,
this was the truth of his Charon's ferrying - 
everlastingly plucked from and sucked from and plucked to
    and sucked to a grave.

Unborn pieties lived.
Out of the infinity of time to that moment's infinity
they lived, they rushed, they dived below him, they rose
to close with his fall; all, while man is, that could 
live, and would, by his hexameters, found 
there the ground of their power, and their power's use.
Others he saved; himself he could not save.
In that hour they came; more and faster, they sped
to their dead master; they sought him to save
from the spectral grave and the endless falling,
who had heard, for their own instruction, the sound of his 
    calling.
There was intervention, suspension, the net of their loves,
all their throng's songs:
Virgil, master and friend,
holy poet, priest, president of priests,
prince long since of all our energies' end,
deign to accept adoration, and what salvation
may reign here by us, deign of goodwill to endure,
in this net of obedient loves, doves of your cote and wings,
Virgil, friend, lover, and lord.

Virgil was fathered of his friends.
He lived in their ends.

He was set on the marble of exchange.