The Doctrine of Substituted Love

Hopefully, my co-author will forgive me for putting a break in her stream of sonnets.

The phrase causes an instant doubletake. "What on earth does that doctrine mean? Is it a variation on works-based salvation? A spin-off of the whole Eucharist debate? Or maybe it is just another term for Christ’s death. Yes, that's it!" The confusing doctrine is well in keeping with its author or identifier, Charles Williams.

Charles Williams was once quoted as saying that his novels always went better after he had dispensed with space and time. Descent Into Hell, widely considered his best novel, is a striking proof of this claim. I won't try and explain the novel: two reasons, first, it would rob you of all the fun of figuring it out for yourself, and two, after three re-reads, I am quite positive I don't understand it all.

But, I do want to take a few minutes to dwell on the doctrine of substituted love that he presents in the novel. It stems from the daring idea of taking Christ's words literally. Specifically, His command to "bear one another's burdens." The crux of the problem is our heroine, Pauline, who lives in the grip of debilitating fear. Peter Stanhope, a poet and the leading man of the piece, explains the doctrine of substituted love and offers to bear her burden of fear:

"'but you'll [to Pauline] be free of all distress because you can pass it on to me. Haven't you heard it said we ought to bear one another’s burdens?'

'But that means--she began, and stopped.

'I know,' Stanhope said. 'It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of something else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of, if you're still carrying yours, I’m not carrying it for you--however sympathetic I may be."

Pauline is skeptical, but she accepts the offer in the end, and in the freedom of growth she experiences, she is able to bear the burden of others and free them as she has been freed.

There is room to exploit this theory as a way to justify excessively clingy human relationships. You know the one's of which I speak--where one party simply cannot live without the other and they become an amorphous blob of characteristics surpassed only by their "togetherness" For a visual representation, see richandamy.

That is the negative extreme: an extreme that has been re-enacted before our eyes so often that there is now a tendency to resist any dependence or interaction on another human being. But that that idea also leads to dreadful consequences. This also is illustrated in Descent Into Hell as one of the characters locks himself away from the world and chooses his delusions of a preferred reality over Reality. In the end, he becomes so isolated that he cannot bear people at all, and is self-damned.

Man can never be all for another man, no man can atone for another’s sin, or give him salvation. But, I think in this Doctrine of Substituted love, that Williams gives us another powerful picture of how much man needs, and is required to join, the "Body of Christ." A Body that is not merely a metaphor for our happy-togetherness as believers, but is a very real picture of just how much each believer relies upon another to live, to grow, and to function. We cannot rely fully on our fellow man--he is a fallen creature and will break under the strain, and/or let you down. But God, in his blessing and wisdom, gave us the Church, to help bear our burdens, so, in turn, we can bear anothers.