cover good. pages yellowing. dustjacket faded with rub marks, scratches, edge curl and small edge tear.

An intense, imaginative, magnetic person, Charles Williams was a member of the Inklings, the group of creative Oxford Christians of the 1930s and 1940s that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Though he excelled in many literary genres, Williams is best remembered for his poetry and his original fiction - contemporary religious novels filled with suspense, mystery, and supernatural conflict. Though less well-known, Williams's nonfiction is essential for understanding his thought and useful for appreciating his poetry and fiction. One such piece of nonfiction prose  is Outlines of Romantic Theology, a hitherto unpublished work that Williams wrote in 1924, relatively early in his career. In it Williams explains his theory - already expressed implicitly in his poetry and grounded in his own experience - that human romantic love can enhance our appreciation of the divine.  Williams points out that theology has traditionally used common phenomena to help unfold our understanding of God - for example, experiences of nature, human reasoning in dogmatic theology. But the one experience most common and universal to humans - the romantic love of two people - is rarely and inadequately used as a vehicle for deriving theological insights. An orthodox Anglican, Williams carefully defines true romantic love, distinguishing it from its counterfeit manifestations, and outlines precisely the theological insights that flow from understanding romantic love as an emblem of God's love. This volume includes Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love - a brief work published in 1941 but long out of print - which represents the later development of the ideas that William originally expressed in Outlines of Theology