I’m reading (again) Charles Williams’ final novel, All Hallows Eve. I’m not quite half way through it. Williams is not the easiest read, but I keep coming back to his books. Just a few thoughts tonight about my ongoing impressions.

A recurring theme in Williams’ novels is the city – properly spelled with a capital “C” when he deals with it. J. R. R. Tolkien was always a little leery of Williams, and I’d imagine attitudes towards cities had something to do with it. Tolkien was a countryman, reveling in woods and meadows, trees and flowers and butterflies. Williams was London-born, and felt best at home there, amid the noise, the crowds, the bustle.

I’ve never (yet) read St. Augustine’s City of God, but I understand it to be a meditation on the societal catastrophe of the fall of Rome. Augustine told Christians that they mustn’t identify the City of God with any city of man, however great its pretensions. Christianity could do without Rome – we look to the City with foundations, eternal in the Heavens.

Nevertheless, Williams saw something of eternity in London, and in any great metropolis. A city has a being of its own; a body, a pulse, and a spirit. Many members work together to support a common life. The man of God can find an image of Heaven in the city, if he looks for it. London is itself an active character in All Hallows’ Eve.

Another thing that always strikes me – bothers me, really – in this book is that the villain is a Jew, and his Jewishness is an important element. There is no hint here of Jewish inferiority – rather the opposite. The villain here, Father Simon, is, we are made to understand, the Antichrist. And as the true Antichrist, he has to correspond to Jesus Christ, but in an inverted way. The Jewish capacities that in part made Jesus Messiah are aped and parodied in Father Simon.

This is my personal opinion – we need to be careful, when reading, to understand that people didn’t view antisemitism the same way back then (Williams died in 1945, as the war was ending, but before most people knew the true extent of Hitler’s Holocaust). The old antisemitism was bad enough, but Hitler improvised a new kind. The persecutors of Jews before that time – Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox – had never considered annihilating the Jews. They wanted to convert them. Hitler cared nothing for the Jews’ souls. He was all about “pure” blood, and regarded the Jews as an infection to be removed.

I don’t think we can ever treat Jews the same way in literature again. And that’s a good thing.