Charles Williams : The New Christian Year

1st Monday in Advent (November 30th, 2009)

God is Love; and He cannot deny Himself.

Doctrine in the Church of England,
     Report of the Commission.

link to the anglican communion official website

When God was made man the innermost heart of the Godhead was put into man.

Eckhart: Sayings.

From all bodies together, we cannot obtain one little thought; this is impossible, and of another order.  From all bodies and minds, we cannot produce a feeling of true charity; this is impossible, and of another supernatural order.

Pascal: Pensées.

Preface by Charles Williams to The New Christian Year

                THE NEW CHRISTIAN YEAR

                                                   Chosen by

                       CHARLES WILLIAMS

                              PREFACE

This book has been arranged on the same principles as The Passion of Christ (published in 1939), but it covers every day of the Christian Year.  It is arranged, for convenience, according to the Sundays and chief Holy Days of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.  It was impossible to include more Holy Days without either making the book larger than was desirable or else selecting according to my own personal wish.  An effort has been made to ensure that all passages chosen shall have in them some particular greatness of phrasing.  The works of the teachers and saints of the Christian Church are full of such phrases, and it sometimes seems a pity that we should prefer the looser and less powerful exhortations of contemporary piety.  A recovery of a greater knowledge of the greater men is much to be wished.

  There are two or three names in the following passages which may seem to recur more often than others; this may be excused by the fact that they are probably the least known at present.  Kierkegaard has not yet become popular, nor has the wise master William Law, nor John Donne (as a teacher of souls).  Still less known is the curious collection of goodness and dreams, the account of the eastern hermits which is called The Paradise of the Fathers.  It is needless to say that many readers will complain of the omission of names, or of disproportion in choice.  That is inevitable in a book of this kind; there will always be room for other books like it, and the matter in the original writers is almost inexhaustible.  A very few modern writers have been included—not that there is nothing to be found in other moderns, but that the purpose of the book was rather to revive the unfamiliar than to repeat the more familiar.  Certain passages have been found in books other than their authors' own; these have, I think, always been referred to the original.  If I have omitted, in any case, to ask permission, is is due to the difficult conditions in which the book was compiled.

  My thanks are due to Messrs George Bell for permission to include the passages from Coventry Patmore; to Messrs Burns, Oates, & Washbourne for those from The Cloud of Unknowing and those from the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas (and for these last also to the English Dominican Fathers); to Messrs Methuen for those from Richard Tauler's The Inner Way; also for those from the lady Juian of Norwich; to Messrs Chatto & Windus for extracts from The Book of Divine Consolation and from The Paradise of the Fathers; to Mr. T.S. Eliot and Messrs Faber & Faber for the one extract from Idea of a Christian Society and passages from Murder in the Cathedral; to Messrs Sheed & Ward for those from St. John of the Cross and from Leon Bloy's Letters to his Fiancee; to Messrs J.M. Watkins for the extracts from Meister Eckhart; to the Right Reverend the Lady Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey for those from St. Teresa; to the S.P.C.K. for the one extract from The Ascetic Works of St. Basil and the three from St. Seraphim of Sarov.

                                                 C.W.

Commemoration
   of All Souls
      1940

First Sunday in Advent (November 29th, 2009)

God is intelligible light.

Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica.

God is that which demands absolute love.

Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling.

The beginning is faith, the end is love. And the two blending in unity are God, and all else follows on these, ending in perfect goodness.

St. Ignatius: Epistle to the Ephesians.

A noble lover does not rest in the gift, but in me above all gifts.

Thomas à Kempis: Imitation of Christ.

Console thyself, thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou hadst not found Me.

Pascal: Pensées.

How admirable is thy Justice, O thou First Mover! Thou hast not willed that any power should lack the processes or the qualities necessary for its results.

Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks.