"From the desire of damnation, Good Lord deliver us": an insight from Charles Williams and T. S. Eliot

A reflection and resolution for the approaching New Year

Grevel Lindop, in his fascinating and somewhat disturbing 2015 biography of Charles Williams (Charles Williams: The Third Inkling), recounts a curious anecdote concerning a meeting that took place in 1944, at which Williams and T. S. Eliot were both present:

In April [Williams] was invited, with Eliot and Dorothy Sayers, ‘to get together and […] prepare a year’s cycle of [church] services for the Church in Country parts’. The project never reached completion, but it may have been during a preliminary meeting in London that an episode related by John Heath-Stubbs and Anne Ridler took place:

“Williams moved that the phrase ‘from the desire of damnation, Good Lord deliver us’, be inserted in the litany. The bishop who was presiding over the meeting pooh-poohed the idea, saying that he could not understand what the phrase could mean.”

According to Heath-Stubbs, Williams and Eliot stood up and ‘testified that they had both frequently been tempted to desire damnation’. In Anne Ridler’s version, Williams and Eliot merely exchanged significant glances, agreeing that they knew only too well what it meant. [1]

(Charles Williams)

One could, I suppose, interpret Williams’ proposed addition to the litany to mean a “desire of damnation” for others – a petulant or punitive wish, perhaps not wholly unprovoked, to see others suffer retribution for whatever evils they had perpetrated. It’s a sentiment I parodied many years ago (in my teens, in fact) in a doggerel “hymn” I wrote, a stanza of which went like this:

I bless Thee, Lord, for I heard tell

You sent that sinner straight to hell;

I thank Thee I am not like he,

An hypocrite and Pharisee. [2]

Many of us have succumbed to such thoughts, no doubt. I know I have, especially in the face of sheer malevolence, historical or contemporary, which cannot be described in lesser terms despite all extenuating circumstances that might have led to an individual’s degeneration. If we are honest (God help us), there are persons we cannot not regard as deserving of damnation.

(T. S. Eliot)

But I’m quite sure that that was not what Williams or Eliot meant by “the desire of damnation.” They meant that it’s possible to feel oneself unworthy of salvation and, in fact, to want one’s own exclusion from eternal life, which one’s deeply felt sense of personal degradation appears to them to warrant. It is something like that devastating moment in Newman’s poem when Gerontius’ “Soul,” who has died and is being borne into the divine presence, as he sees the face of Christ in majesty, cries out: “Take me away, and in the lowest deep / There let me be…” The Angel had forewarned Gerontius of the effect the sight would have on him:

When then—if such thy lot—thou seest thy Judge,

The sight of Him will kindle in thy heart

All tender, gracious, reverential thoughts.

Thou wilt be sick with love, and yearn for Him,

And feel as though thou couldst but pity Him,

That one so sweet should e'er have placed Himself

At disadvantage such, as to be used

So vilely by a being so vile as thee.

There is a pleading in His pensive eyes

Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee.

And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself; for, though

Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinn’d,

As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire

To slink away, and hide thee from His sight:

And yet wilt have a longing aye to dwell

Within the beauty of His countenance.

And these two pains, so counter and so keen,—

The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not;

The shame of self at thought of seeing Him,—

Will be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory. [3]

(John Henry Cardinal Newman)

These are sentiments that have become rather alien to us in our age. I’m sure that we’re not better off for it. It worries me, frankly, that so many who have adopted the “universalist” label of late have also displayed a tendency not to take damnation – the word means “loss” – as seriously as perhaps they ought. Certainly, those three great friends, George MacDonald, F. D. Maurice, and Charles Dodgson (better known as “Lewis Carroll”), who opposed the idea of endless torment because of the ultimate senselessness of the doctrine, nonetheless believed in “hell” — though as a state of remedial and not retributive punishment (and they unapologetically used the word “punishment”). Even my two brothers, who are “dogmatic” universalists (David having written a highly regarded — by some — and deeply disliked — by others — volume on the subject), don’t reject the notion of “hell” or “damnation”; but they assign a redemptive meaning to the categories. Be that as it may, Charles Williams and T. S. Eliot were profoundly aware of something integral to deepening prayer and self-awareness when they spoke of “the desire of damnation.”

I touched on this matter in my otherwise satirical short novel, Confessions of the Antichrist. The protagonist, when faced at a crucial moment in the narrative with the overwhelming evidence of his immense culpability – his many egregious actions and words that had adversely affected so many other lives, of which he had been hitherto heedless – is flattened by the realization:

But I could hear nothing more of what [my accuser] was saying. I was openly sobbing by this time, and repeating over and over, “God damn me, God damn me, God damn me…”

Then, utterly drained of what remained of my strength and willpower, I collapsed on my knees and vomited. I pitched forward and sank down, babbling… through choking, gagging moans – it was finally, crushingly all too much for me. I lay there, crumpled, half-conscious, my face pressed against the cold marble floor. [4]

As I said, it’s a crucial moment in the tale – emphasis on crucial – and certainly dramatic (and justified, in terms of the storyline). But something of the experience there described needn’t be so intense or psychologically devastating in actual life. It can be, as Eliot is said to have “testified” rather more sedately, that he had “frequently been tempted to desire damnation.” I believe that what he meant by that is the realization that strikes many of us unexpectedly at some point, probably at a later than an earlier stage in life. I assume that Eliot and Williams understood such a profound realization as something normal, a crisis certainly but not so unusual an occurrence as the bishop who presided at that meeting suggested. Both Williams and Eliot knew very well that one shouldn’t desire damnation for oneself; after all, they were proposing a plea to be delivered from it be added to the litany. But – they seemed to be saying – one will come to terms with the reality of what evil he or she has done in life, if one is a serious Christian: not just the evil done to oneself but also what one has done to others, as well – even to unknown others at a distance (“no man is an island” and all that). The longer we have lived, the truer that insight must become. The fact that we think, say, and do evil can only be denied by the immature or delusional. In many cases, the evil we have done, we did without our full comprehension; in other words, the fact that it was evil only occurred to us later, maybe much later, upon reflection or as a matter of sudden revelation. The young are more likely to be less cognizant of the extent and depth of the hurt they have caused, partly because they haven’t lived long enough to have recognized their besetting flaws or their worst patterns of behavior, or to have racked up enough evidence of their personal character’s undeniable guilt. It takes maturity – whether it comes early or late to one – to concede these things without trying to excuse them. What Eliot and Williams may have been implying is that this is both a blessing and a temptation.

It's a blessing because one cannot change or be transformed in the Christian spiritual life without such a realization. The first word inviting us to receive the message of Jesus is “repent” – metanoia – meaning literally, the transformation of one’s thoughts. When Christ proclaims it in the Gospels, the grammatical tense is a continuous present, meaning “repent and keep on repenting,” “change and keep on changing.” At the core of the life of faith, prayer, contemplation, and action is the command to be changed. It is not the case that Christ calls anyone to come after him and then remain “just as they are”; rather, he calls his followers to become what he will make of them, which is nothing less than the complete transfiguration into his likeness. The difficult part is that we will go through an interior crucifixion with him, as well as a resurrection, and that it will entail the bitter aspects of seeing ourselves as we are, not as our illusions and wishful thinking would have them be. There is no identity politics in Christ; we are not yet our true identities, which will only be truly revealed in their final perfection. And so, the blessing of transformation involves facing temptations – “tests” – that run deep down into the darkest places of our psyches. We will inevitably face our shadows, like it or not, because God’s Spirit must sweep over the chaos inside us to bring forth a new creation. But during the grimmest moments in this process, we may see our lives in such horrible light that we may want to run in the other direction, to escape what is – not to make too fine a point on it – the judgment of God. The temptation to despair of hope, as countless saints have said, is worse than any temptation to sin. It’s the temptation Judas couldn’t overcome, and suicide (which can have other causes, of course) is one of its outward and visible signs.

("We have gained the stairs . . ."; from Newman's The Dream of Gerontius; art by Stella Langdale, 1916)

Only those with a genuine inner awakening, then, can be tempted to “desire damnation.” I think this underlies St. Silouan’s justly famous, though rather enigmatic, advice: “Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.” This state of mind, we might say, is hell; it’s an inward crucifixion and it pains us. We know we can’t do anything about it; we can only endure it. We cannot go back and undo the now recognizably evil things we have done to ourselves and others, no more than Scrooge could alter what had been — though he could alter what would be. But we are forced to rely entirely on Christ – which is right where Christ would have us. We cannot be, nor should we be, sure of ourselves; our self-confidence must be eroded, and even our self-hatred reduced to ashes. We depend on him, who is both our merciful judge and our relentless redeemer. But, even in the hells we have insisted on putting ourselves in, we still mustn’t indulge in despair. “From the desire of damnation, Good Lord deliver us.”

Anyone familiar with the biographies of Williams and Eliot may glean from them why this invocation seemed so pertinent to these two seriously Christian souls. They had their baggage. It’s safe to say, however, that both were men of mystical prayer, which deepened throughout their lives. They understood intimately what it means to “repent” and “follow” Christ; the mystery of the cross was something they lived interiorly and daily. So, “saintly” or not, they were saints like ourselves, and I think some of us can understand them pretty well – even if the bishop on hand at the time “could not understand what the phrase could mean.”

Here we are, approaching another “New Year,” and if I were to suggest a resolution for it, it might be this: Whatever lies ahead, rely on Christ to change you from the inside out, come hell or high water, and – in those words of St. Silouan – “Keep thy mind in hell [if need be] and despair not.”

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[1] Grevel Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford, 2015), pp. 397 – 398.

[2] If you care to sing it, the tune is “Tallis’ Canon” – used for the hymn, “All praise to thee, my God, this night”; words by Thomas Ken; #165 in the Episcopal Church’s estimable Hymnal 1940; you can listen to the original here:

[3] John Henry Newman, The Dream of Gerontius. You can read the entire poem online here: https://www.newmanreader.org/works/verses/gerontius.html .

[4] Addison Hodges Hart, Confessions of the Antichrist: A Novel (New York, 2020), p. 149.