BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Shadows of Ecstasy and Rumours of Glory: The Influence of Charles Williams on the Songwriting of Bruce Cockburn by John Mabry. Apocryphile Press, 2026. Paperback, 148 pages.

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 –1945) was called many things. Biographer Grevel Lindop calls him “the third Inkling” because Williams joined the Oxford writing group during World War II. C.S. Lewis called Williams a potential claimant to the title “the great English poet of this age.” J.R.R. Tolkien called Williams a “witch-doctor” for the way Williams’ supernatural thrillers suggested a fascination with esoteric ideas he found less than healthy. Still, letters indicate that Tolkien and Williams were good friends, and Aren Roukema suggests that Williams’ thrillers (most featuring relic hunts) influenced The Lord of the Rings. Williams’ influence on Lewis was more obvious: the combined supernatural stakes and personal drama in his novel That Hideous Strength, in which a marriage’s fate could spell the world’s end, owes much to War in Heaven and other Williams novels.

While Williams most famously influenced the Inklings, he inspired many others. Dorothy L. Sayers credited him as a key inspiration for her Dante scholarship, and W.H. Auden treasured his meetings with Williams as an encounter with “holiness.” Today, novelists like Tim Powers have cited Williams’ influence on their fiction. However, the artist most clearly inspired by Williams today is Bruce Cockburn. One of his generation’s most beloved folk musicians, Cockburn has regularly cited Williams’ influence on his albums Further Adventures Of and Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws. Various writers have cited this Cockburn comment, but detailed explorations of Williams’ influence on Cockburn have been scarce. John Mabry makes a compelling case in Shadows of Ecstasy and Rumours of Glory (named after a book by each artist) that there is more to the story. He offers readers a comparison of six ideas and five images across Cockburn’s discography that parallel Williams’ works, including:

  • The potential for supernatural events (true reality) to appear in the physical world at any moment.
  • The power of poetic images (what Williams called “the Way of Affirmation”) to promote spiritual growth.
  • The Christian’s involvement in a radical spiritual community (what Williams called coinherence) because all church members participate in the trinity.
  • The universe’s components working together in a coordinated, eternal dance.
  • Cities as an imperfect image of the New Jerusalem, the holy city in which all citizens are part of the body of Christ.

Mabry does an excellent job of showing how Williams’ ideas connect with Cockburn’s work, quoting lyrics to support each point. It is clear Mabry is a fan of both artists, but not a fan who will fudge his research. Readers familiar with a certain kind of pop-culture-meets-theology book will remember books that connected every Bob Dylan lyric after his Christian period to a Bible verse. Mabry admits that Cockburn and Williams were very different people. As he writes in the introduction, Cockburn was born twelve days after Williams’ death, making them “part of very different generational cultures, and the worlds they grew up in were very different places, both in terms of geography and the world events that shaped them.”

Mabry points out substantial areas where Cockburn and Williams diverge, most notably their different views of cities. Williams saw his home city of London as the universe in miniature, where Cockburn sees urban landscapes as dehumanizing. However, Cockburn is a traveling musician, making his attitude toward cities complicated (living close enough to urban centers to check in with music producers, playing in concert arenas). As Mabry discusses, albums like Inner City Front and The Trouble with Normal show Cockburn leaning into the ambiguity, showing how grace and light can be found even amid cold concrete.

For all their differences, there do turn out to be more commonalities than appearances suggest. Perhaps the most surprising commonality between Williams and Cockburn is their willingness to see spiritual truth in many traditions. The novel Many Dimensions follows a hunt for an Islamic relic (the stone of Sulieman, not the Christian spelling Solomon) and devout Islamic characters giving intelligent perspectives about what makes an object holy and to what extent a holy object can be used for sinful ends. Mabry highlights how Cockburn affords a similar dignity to indigenous beliefs in songs like “Twelve Gates to the City” or “To Raise the Morning Air.” Readers familiar with Roukema’s study, Esotericism and Narrative, will remember ideas about the cosmic Christ above all traditions that permeated Williams’ theology, making his interfaith attitude still closer to Cockburn.

While the book is short, Mabry carefully and tactfully explores the controversial as well as the inspiring sides of Williams and Cockburn. Both men have been criticized for meandering outside orthodox Christianity. Readers familiar with recent scholarship by Roukema and Sørina Higgins will know that Williams, like Arthur Machen and other British Christians of the period, sought “the true heart of Christianity” in exclusive groups that sought mystical experiences through rituals cobbled together from Catholic liturgy, alchemical imagery, and other sources. Cockburn discusses his spiritual-seeking phase in his memoir Rumours of Glory, reading the books that many spiritual freethinkers explored in the 1960s–1970s (Gurdjief, I Ching, etc.), before his first wife led him in a more orthodox direction. As Mabry points out, Cockburn later called the occult “cocaine for the soul” that he tired of. Williams spent his life trying to synthesize his outré ideas with Anglo-Catholicism, and Mabry takes a more generous view of this project than some scholars do. Where Paul S. Fiddes writes in Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis: Friends in Coinherence that coinherence is Christological but misses some trinitarian elements, Mabry emphasizes that one of Williams’ applications has a longer history than modern readers may think. Believing that all members of the church participate in the trinity leads to the Way of Exchange, Williams’ belief that all members of the church can carry each other’s spiritual (and even physical) burdens. The concept sounds radical but “is not unique to Williams, of course; it has a long (if often hidden) history in the Christian Church…” Mabry cites a story about Egyptian monk Abba Lot of the Desert Fathers carrying half the blame for a fellow Christian’s sin for two days as an example. Williams was not always orthodox, but he could be more old-fashioned than he seemed.

If Mabry offers a more generous view of Williams’ ventures into esotericism than some critics, he does not shy away from pointing out that the ventures had serious consequences. Lindop documents how Williams’ esoteric friends introduced him to the idea of redirecting romantic passion into creative projects, and how Williams used his disciple-mentor relationships with young women to build up frustration that he redirected into writing an Arthurian epic. As Mabry notes, these relationships never led to infidelity, but Williams’ behavior had an illicit nature that students like Lois Lang-Sims challenged him on. I have discussed in articles for Higgins’ blog The Oddest Inkling and Mere Orthodoxy how readers and scholars may respond to Williams’ complicated legacy. Mabry affirms the damage Williams caused while offering a more pastoral response, summing up the problems while calling readers to humility. He compares Williams’ flaws to Cockburn’s less scandalous behavior (a divorce, a courtly infatuation with a married woman that inspired Dart to the Heart), concluding the chapter saying that both men were “flawed, messy, complicated people—just like the rest of us… It is in their brokenness, their humanness, that we see ourselves most powerfully, poignantly, and clearly. Like all of us, their love is imperfect. And like all of us, it is enough for Love to work with.”

There may be a few passages in this section that could have drawn out the “art and women” conversation further in interesting ways. For example, Mabry does not delve much into Cockburn’s regrets in Rumours of Glory about struggling to be emotionally open during his first marriage, a problem not dissimilar from Williams’ struggles with his wife, Florence (a nine-year engagement, giving her the biblical nickname “Michal”). But it would be difficult to delve into the relationship drama without making things salacious, and Mabry writes a study of these men’s ideas, not their lives. A study of two artists can probably never avoid “the personal heresy” entirely, discussing their work without discussing their lives. But Mabry avoids taking that route for the wrong reasons.

The introduction notes that this book limits its discussion to a few examples of how Cockburn’s music parallels Williams’ ideas. It will prove interesting to see if later scholarship carries these ideas forward. Websites like The Oddest Inkling and the Cockburn Project offer plenty of material for further discussions, and Cockburn has become a more acceptable figure in art and faith discussions since he returned to regular church attendance in the 2010s. Whatever comes next in the literature, Shadows of Ecstasy and Rumours of Glory offers an excellent guide to the common ground between Williams and Cockburn, summarizing their interesting ideas without flattening either artist’s life to serve its thesis.

Shadows of Ecstasy and Rumours of Glory is available in ebook and physical formats from all major book retailers.