Charles Williams Quotes
The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.
Williams, Charles. The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Longmans, Green, 1939.
John Ilyitch Sergieff. The power of the leadership of organizations, religious and secular, has long been in contention. There are those who advocate the strong, very powerful executive such as Russia under the Czars and the Roman Catholic Church and those who prefer a weaker leader with very limited power such as the United States and the Russian Orthodox Church.
His positions presaged some of those of Protestants in the Reformation. In the great struggle of the time between the Pope and the Emperor, Marsilius was the leading advocate for the emperor’s superiority of authority. The Pope wrote a condemnation of these ideas.
Carroll was writing to Troy during the time of the question of Catholic emancipation in England. Here he is clearly alluding to the British form of government. Carroll never missed the opportunity to champion religious freedom as manifested in the U.S. Constitution. For an earlier example of his praise for religious freedom, see {596933}.
There was a continuing power struggle between the more powerful kings of Europe and the Roman Catholic Pope. This struggle however was not one of church and state. Neither the kings nor the clergy viewed the two as separate domains. Instead they saw the two in much the same way as the ancient Jews and many contemporary Muslims view relationship—as an inseparable amalgam. However there was much debate over who could best protect and manage the amalgamated entity. In this case Alcuin was arguing that Charlemagne could ensure the well-being of the church better than the Pope. The power struggle went on for centuries between more or less able, powerful, and corrupt kings and popes.
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian, literary critic, and member of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group associated with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at the University of Oxford.
