Apparently, T.S. Eliot had a similar impression of Williams. In his introduction to All Hallow's Eve, Eliot wrote:

"For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. Had I ever to spend a night in a haunted house, I should have felt secure with Williams in my company; he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection... To him the supernatural was natural, and the natural was also supernatural...Williams' understanding of Evil was profound... He is concerned, not with the Evil of conventional morality and the ordinary manifestations by which we recognize it, but with the essence of Evil; it is therefore Evil which has no power to attract us, for we see it as the repulsive thing it is, and as the despair of the damned from which we recoil."

Because Williams was so comfortable with the unseen world, because he truly served the good, he knew evil for what it is. Through Williams' eyes, or the words of his stories, we are enabled to see evil in contradistinction to good. Next to transcendent good, evil is a petty, boring sham, bent on destruction because it is unable to achieve creation.

Williams and Lewis shared a similar view of evil. In fact, Ransom's perception of the possessed Weston in Book Two of Lewis's science-fiction trilogy, Perelandra, is as good an introduction to Williams' own perception as any:

"He had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with a red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a somber tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child."

Ransom found that though evil was certainly as terrifying, as grotesque, as he had always imagined, it was also dull and senseless.

In All Hallow's Eve, we find another clearly horrifying, but essentially idiotic figure of evil. Simon the Clerk, the gaunt practicioner of necromancy who contrives to use his own daughter as a channel between the living and the dead, is shown for what he really is quite early in the book. We are given a picture, a painting as a matter of fact, of Simon before we even meet him as a character. Jonathan Drayton paints a portrait of this Simon and his followers. Because he is unsettled both by Simon and his own work, he asks a friend to look at the painting before he shows it to the woman who commissioned it. The friend remarks that the painting is dark and dull; it captures "a sort of massive dullness." Jonathan himself observes, "This man looks as if he were being frightfully definite and completely indefinate at the same moment -- an absolute master and a lost loony at once."

Lady Wallingford, not only the woman who commissioned the painting, but also the mother of Simon's only child, is furious with Jonathon. Though he was inspired by God or truth to paint Simon and his followers as they really are, Jonathon cannot convince Lady Wallingford that he has not meant to be insulting. He does not even recognize how unflattering his work is until the lady demands of him, "[W]hy have you painted our Father as an imbecile?" Jonathon has no answer; he did not intend to paint beetles and their beetle-faced master. He painted what he saw, and what he saw happened to be the truth.

This revelation, for it is surely more than foreshadowing, makes the rest of the book much easier to read for someone like me who is far less comfortable than was Williams with the finitude and ultimate impotence of evil. I accept these as facts intellectually, but emotionally I imagine I give the devil more than his due. The Clerk is the sort of character who would have given me nightmares in my younger days. His impotence does not catch up with him until the very end of the book, until which time he and his black magic are unusually potent. On a smaller scale, the revelation affects me as the book of Revelation does those who are persecuted. However terrifying the events of human history become, and Revelation paints its own bleak picture, we know who wins in the end. Good will win over evil; however much it may appear to the contrary, we can be certain of the final outcome of world history. So, however blood-chillingly scary and temporarily powerful Simon may be, and certainly would be in a felicitous film, he is finally as his portrait -- an imbecile followed by insects. He can be no other, his only powers are death and destruction which finally destroy him. Those who serve death and destruction meet the same end, but that end is not annihilation, rather the beginning of something I imagine as far worse -- ongoing destruction.

In Williams' universe, and God's, evil is finite, good infinite. He had no notion of good and evil as equal opposites. Though evil may enslave, torture, and kill, it cannot create even a hell. In the language of Perelandra, it can unmake, and that not toally, but never make. Simon with his black arts does "make" a "physical habitation" for the two dead women whose destinies form the center of the novel. But this "habitation," or body, is merely a spiritless shell, and not particularly true to the human form at that with dust and spit, rather than breath, when he makes his deformed and dwarfed body, but there the analogy to the creation of Adam ceases. "The face, as far as it emerged, had no character; the whole thing was more like a living India-rubber doll than anything else..." Simon can copy what God does, rather badly at that (but certainly better than I suspect any nonfictional character could do by black or any other art), but he can do nothing original. Nor, does it seem, can he do anything lasting; his "creation" dissolves in the rain.

"Under the deluge the doll on the chair at once melted; it ran over the woman's hand and wholly disappeared, except for a thin film of liquid putrescence which covered them, pullulating as if with unspermed life."

In the end, there is nothing left for him but to kill.

"He forgot the theory of magic... Spells had failed and images had failed. He was more a common man than ever before, and h e forgot all but the immediate act. That remained: killing remained.

When evil is forced to face its own limitation, its response is to limit whatever else it can. Because it cannot annihilate -- the prerogative of infinite good, if it chooses -- evil settles for murder.

Where Williams shows evil to be finite, he in no way belittles it. That is, he does not rob it of its temporal power or eternal consequences; he does not make it less than what it really is. When Richard, Jonathan's friend, meets Simon for the first time, he thinks, "Jonathan's painting was quite ridiculously wrong. There was no bewilderment or imbecility about the face that looked at him; rather there was a highness, almost an arrogance, in it which abashed him." Later, when he reports on the visit to Jonathan, he remarks with horror, having almost fainted at the "vileness" of what went on at the meeting, "And all I can tell you is that I now know what blasphemy is. It's not attractive and it isn't thrilling. It's just blood-curdling -- literally." Simon has quite real power, but because it is destructive and self-centered, it comes to nothing in the end. Because evil refuses to acknowledge the good, the good, love and self-sacrifice, unmask his imbecility and finally undo him.

In his first published novel, War in Heaven, Williams was perhaps more content to tell about evil than to show it for what it is. And although showing might make for better stories, telling can obviously be instructive. Gregory Persimmons, a publisher of occult books and Satan worshipper, has gotten his hands on the Holy Graal. He wants to keep the Graal because it has power; he wants to use it in sacrifice to his god. Gregory is an evil man. He has driven his wife insane, tormented his son, committed a murder, and plotted to sacrifice the son of an employee to Satan. Williams also takes some pains to point out that Gregory has faith; he is capable of adoration, however vile its object. Presumably this is why he doesn't understand why two men, older and wiser in the ways of evil, want to destroy the cup. "One, Manasseh," assails Gregory with whispered ferocity, "Because it has power... it must be destroyed. Don't you understand yet? They build and we destroy. That's what levels us; that's what stops them. One day we shall destroy the world. What can you do with it that is so good as that?

The other man, known only as the Greek, has lost all personality. He is, I assume purposefully, left almost undefined by Williams. There is no character development because the Greek has no character left; his pursuit of power and destruction has left him expressionless tired and empty. "I have no tears and no desire... I am weary beyond all mortal weariness and my heart is sick and my eyes blind with the sight of the nothing through which we fall." His reaction to Gregory and Manasseh's quarrel is both resigned and authoritative:

"Let him that desires to posses seek to posses," the Greek commanded, "and him that desires to destroy seek to destroy. Let each of you work in his own way, until an end comes; and I who will help the one to posses will help the other to destroy, for possession and destruction are both evil and are one. But alas for the day when none shall posses your souls and they only of all things that you have known cannot be destroyed forever."

The Greek plays out the game of the Graal, but all things have lost meaning and significance for him. He has seen the end of his quest and finds it has no end; there will be for him nothingness, but conscious nothingness, forever.

Gregory's fate is less fearful. Because he was ardent in the service of his god, because he adored beyond himself, he is capable of redemption. John, the keeper of the Graal, confronts him at the end of the book, "Gregory Persimmons, ... they wait for you close at hand. Can a man sacrifice his brother or make agreement with any god for him? Die, then, as this other has died, and there shall be agreement with you also in the end, for you have sought me and no other." He is not let off the hook; he must suffer the consequences of the choices he has made, but he is not damned either. Sacrifice is due God not Satan; Gregory's final choice is to acknowledge the fact.

Whatever is intelligent, creative, in us, however bent or twisted, is of God. Whenever we seek beyond ourselves we express our participation in the imago Dei. Evil ultimately is senseless; as it cannot create, neither can it finally destroy. To choose evil, then, is to choose nonsense -- the promise of temporal power is but a curse in the light of eternity. If we will see evil for the dull, dead thing it really is, we can avoid its attraction. Williams never found evil compelling; perhaps that is why he could write compellingly about it.

Elodie Ballantine Emig currently teaches Greek and writing at Denver Seminary. While pursuing her B.A. at Drew University in New Jersey, she spent a year studying Dostoyevsky under Dr. Zernov in Oxford.

This article originally appeared in Inklings, Volume 3, Issue 4, Winter 1997-98, and is reprinted here by permission. Copyright 1997 Paradox publishing.