Charles Williams Quote

Sunday I will be driving back home, and next week I plan to write one or two new posts and to continue some old conversations. To keep things moving here, I decided to give a rather interesting quote from Charles Williams:

There is, in especial, one law of literary criticism which is of use -- the law of emptying the words. Everyone who has studied great verse knows how necessary is the effort to clear the mind of our own second-hand attribution of meanings to words in order that the poet may fill them with his meanings. No less care is needed in reading the Bible. Some form of course, each word must retain, some shape and general direction. But its general colour is, naturally, only learnt from its use throughout. This has to be discovered. As a fact words such as 'faith', 'pardon', or 'glory' are taken with meanings borrowed from the common-place of everyday; comparatively few readers set to work to find out what the Bible means by them. The word 'love' has suffered even more heavily. The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, and not that our meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.

--- Charles Williams. He Came Down From Heaven (Berkeley, California: The Apocryphile Press, 2005), p.15.