DISH, CUP OR WOMAN?

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Since The Da Vinci Code the Holy Grail, for some readers and viewers, has come to mean Mary Magdalene.  To me, for whom Arthurian legend was one of the great experiences of my childhood, this feels like a betrayal.   To use Dan Brown’s image of the bloodline, it seems as if the birthright of the Grail has been stolen; as if some minor cousin has usurped the estate belonging to the rightful heir.   In what follows, I am painting with very broad strokes to show general trends: for the Arthurian story is like a great coral reef to which polyps of many different nationalities have added their distinctive contributions.

          Scholarly consensus is that Arthur was probably a Roman-trained British general when Britain suffered the fate of the rest of the collapsing Roman Empire: an influx of marauding tribes.  Arthur led a resistance movement against the invaders, rather as Alfred was later to do against the Danes.  Britons fleeing across the channel to Armorica (now Brittany) took their memories of Arthur with them.

          There is thus a home-grown British version of Arthurian legend, which starts in earnest with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and continues through Wace and Layamon and Gawain and the Green Knight.  In this sequence, Sir Gawain is the greatest of Arthur’s knights.  But the intrinsic interest of the Arthurian story meant that it was also taken up in France, where there was a natural audience rooted in folk memory and fertilized with Anglo-Norman cross-cultural influences.  The French strain is underpinned by the Provençal Troubadours, for whom the focus of relationships was courtly – that is to say, adulterous - love.   This theme is developed by Chrétien de Troyes, for whom Sir Lancelot now becomes the greatest knight; and Lancelot’s illicit relationship with Queen Guinevere becomes the main source of interest.  If all this seems irrelevant to the topic, I mention it of necessity to show how both the British-inspired Gawain and the French-inspired Lancelot are superseded in the development of the Grail story.

          The Grail is a relatively late invention: it is not present in the earliest versions of Arthurian legend.  It is mentioned in Perceval the last, unfinished poem of Chrétien de Troyes, where it is “a grail” rather than “ the Grail”, but its full religious significance can be traced to the Burgundian knight, Robert de Boron, at the start of the Thirteenth Century.  Robert takes a pagan story about a vessel with magical properties, and adds it to the Arthurian corpus by Christianizing it.  The vessel becomes the Grail, the dish – de Troyes - or the cup – de Boron – used at the Last Supper, and later – without any Biblical foundation whatever – used by Joseph of Arimathea at the Crucifixion to catch drops of Christ’s blood. 

          From there, the Grail has somehow to be got across to England to be incorporated into the Arthurian story.  Robert solves this by creating a brother-in-law – Bron – for Joseph.   Bron takes the Grail with him into “the far west” to the suitably-vague Avalon.  This invention then took on a momentum of its own, beyond Robert’s imagination.  The bones of Arthur and Guenivere were supposedly found at Glastonbury.  ‘Avalon’ thus became Glastonbury, and Joseph of Arimathea was duly deemed to have founded the church there.  However, let us give Robert the last word.  For his new material, he introduces the new knight, Perceval: greater – because more spiritual – than Gawain or Lancelot. 

          The addition of the Holy Grail made the Arthurian story of interest to French Cistercian monks, who – in their turn – added the next layer to the legend.   For them, given to an existence of chastity and contemplation, the life of knightly action and worldly success meant spiritual failure.   They disdained even the – for them too secular – spiritual Perceval.  Gawain and Lancelot – both sinful – fail to achieve the Grail.  Perceval retains an identity, but his qualities merge into the new knight Galahad, the sinless and virginal son of Lancelot, the one who finds the Grail – Sir Perceval and Sir Bors are around in the background – because,  as Tennyson later puts it, his “heart is pure”.        

          From the Cistercians, the Arthurian impetus moves back to England in the form in which most of us know it: that of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.  Malory, in prison, set himself the impossible task of trying to collate all the diverse materials of the Arthuriad.  If he failed, he nevertheless gave the overall story far more coherence than it had had before. 

          But the Grail story gives Malory a problem.  On the one hand, he is trying to be faithful to his sources. On the other hand, he believes in the code of knightly chivalry in a way that the Cistercian monks do not.  For Malory, salvation can be achieved by participating, with due repentance, in the rough and tumble of the world, rather than in retreating from it; so that Lancelot, rather than Galahad, always remains Malory’s real hero. 

          Thus, Malory deals with the Grail narrative because he has to; but the most vivid part of his work is the Lancelot/Guinevere section that follows it.  As a Lancastrian, Malory had experienced directly the ruinous effects of civil war.  Lancelot’s failure, for him, is not some abstract lack of spiritual purity à la Grail.  Lancelot’s adultery is a betrayal of trust: involving him in a conflict with Gawain that deprives Arthur of his two best knights, gives Mordred the upper hand, and leads to the final destruction that tears the fellowship of The Round Table apart.   But even when he disagrees with it, Malory is quite clear that the Grail is a symbol of spiritual perfection.  Dan Brown territory would have been alien to him.

 

The Enlightenment, with its anti-Gothic emphasis, suppressed Arthurian legend, but could not kill it.   With the Victorian Gothic revival, it sprang back to life in the new treatment it received from Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.  Perhaps its finest re-flowering was in Germany, with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and, for Grail purposes, his Parsifal: de Boron’s Perceval, via Wolfram von Eschenbach,  having finally received his due.   It was at this stage that the Grail legend received a new addition:  that the vessel periodically dripped blood.  That suggested menstruation, and in turn gave rise for the first time to the idea that the Grail was actually a woman: reinforced by the tendency of the time to spiritualise human passion into an alternative to divine love.  It is from this nineteenth-century invention, I think, that Brown’s version of the Grail story is primarily derived. 

          Given that the Grail was a literary invention in the first place, and given all the permutations through which the narrative has gone, Brown is as entitled as anyone else to add his own take on the story.   But dabbling with Arthurian legend – something known by all to be simply legend - is one thing; dabbling with the New Testament is quite another.   It is where Brown starts blending fiction with what are, for believers, life-and-death facts about salvation that he becomes so problematic.

 

If people are content to take The Da Vinci Code at face value, then I think Brown’s influence has been misleading and malign.  But if we treat him as a sort of modern-day Socrates –whether he intended this role or not -  then his effect has been much more beneficial.  Socrates put forward opinions he did not really believe in, in order to stimulate discussion.  And Brown has certainly done that.  For there is no doubt at all that he has touched a significant modern nerve.  His work has given rich fare to the spiritual and imaginative hunger that is a reaction against the restricted diet allowed by The Enlightenment.   With him, the Grail quest lives again.

Brown, in a way that the Church could not, has sent seekers for truth back to biblical sources to find out more about Mary Magdalene.  And about Christ.   Those are, arguably, the most important of the possible lines of exploration.  But important, too - in terms of understanding our history and our culture - is to find out about the Grail.  The real one: the Saint Grail rather than the Sang Real.  And if a new generation is introduced in the process to the imaginative riches of the Arthuriad, then Brown will have played a valuable part in opening for modern audiences what might have otherwise been – like The Bible - another closed book.