Looking for the King. David C. Downing

in the audience, Williams smiled again and continued. “Giving your effort, your labor, for someone else, perhaps a stranger. Courtesy, yes. But also substitution. Another step in your quest for the Grail.”

      “What is this Holy Grail we hear so much about?” asked Williams, pacing back and forth so rapidly that Tom could hear keys or coins clinking in his pocket. “Is the Grail the holy chalice used by Jesus on the night of the Last Supper? Is it a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught drops of Christ’s blood as he was stretched out on the cross?” Again, Williams peered into individual faces, speaking to over a hundred people, but giving each one the impression he was talking just to him or her. “Or perhaps you favor the Loomis school: the Grail is a bit of ‘faded mythology,’ a Celtic cauldron of plenty that somehow got lugged into Arthurian lore?”

      Williams paced back and forth some more, throwing his hands into the air, as if to say, Who can answer all these imponderable questions? Then he plunged in again: “There is no shortage of texts on the subject. Let’s start with Chrétien de Troyes: ‘Percival, or the Story of the Grail,’ written sometime in the 1180s. This is the first known account of the Grail. The young knight Percival sits at banquet at the castle Carbonek and sees an eerie procession—a young man carrying a bleeding lance, two boys with gold candelabras, then finally a fair maid with a jeweled grail, a platter bearing the wafer of the Holy Mass. Percival doesn’t ask what it all means and thereby brings a curse upon himself and on the land.” Williams surveyed the crowd again, as if waiting for someone to stand and explain all this to him. The room was silent as a church at midnight, so Williams went on, listing all the famous medieval texts and their retellings of the Grail legend, noting how their dates clustered around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

      “So much for the literary versions,” he continued. “But what is this Grail really? What lies behind the texts? Some describe it as a cup or bowl, some as a stone, some as a platter. The word Grail, by the way, comes from Latin gradalis, more like a shallow dish, or paten, than a chalice.” After another strategic pause, Williams exclaimed, almost in a shout, “How extraordinary! Here we have what some would call the holiest relic in Christendom and no one seems to know what it looks like.”

      Pacing some more, as if trying to work off an excess of agitation and intellectual energy, Williams went back to the lectern and leaned on it heavily, dangling a graceful, eloquent pair of hands over the edge. “And here’s another problem: why this sudden fascination with the Grail in the twelfth century when no one in Christendom seemed to give it a thought for the previous millennium? We hear a lot about relics in the first thousand years of the Church. Handkerchiefs from St. Paul with healing powers. Constantine’s mother in the fourth century going to Jerusalem and finding what she considered to be the true cross. Cities fighting over the cloak of St. Martin, patron saint of France. But where was the Grail all those years? And why was no one looking for it?”

      Williams pulled a handkerchief out of his coat sleeve, removed his gold-rimmed glasses and wiped them, and put them back on, as if to suggest he needed the clearest possible vision to try and answer these questions. Then he strode back out into the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that there was no real Grail, no relic from the life of Christ, and certainly no Celtic cauldron of plenty lying behind the medieval texts. The Grail exists only in the texts themselves. It is an imaginative response, not to Bible archaeology or Welsh mythology, but to Church theology.”

      Williams returned to the lectern, smoothed back his wavy hair that was becoming unruly, and surveyed the audience, as if expecting a rebuttal. Hearing none, he continued, speaking rapidly but never slurring his words. “What did I mean earlier when I talked about buying a newspaper or holding open a door? Exchange. Substitution. That is the way of community, the lifeblood of the city. But, more than that, in a Christian understanding, it is a part of the imago Dei within us, the image of God. It is Co-inherence.”

      “Co-inherence,” said Williams again, repeating a word Tom had certainly never heard before. “Christians believe it is built into the very fabric of the universe, a reflection of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one being, eternally expressing their natures in relation to the others. At the very foundation of being is a fellowship.”

      Tom wasn’t sure he followed, and he looked around the room to see if others looked as puzzled as he was. But those around him seem almost mesmerized by what they heard, so Tom turned to listen again. “Co-inherence leads to substitution,” Williams was explaining, “Christ’s dying for all humanity in order that they might be lifted up. The redeemed of the Lord co-inhere in their Maker, living in the Spirit, as he lives in them, joining in the Company of Co-inherence.”

      Tom was beginning to feel that he had indeed wandered into church and was listening to a priest, albeit an obscure one. He was wondering how all this fit into the Grail stories. As if hearing Tom’s thoughts, Williams continued: “At the same time all the great Grail stories were being written, there was a great stirring in the Western Church, a quest for clarity about the great sacrament of co-inherence—the Eucharist, ‘the great Thanksgiving,’ Holy Communion, ‘The With-oneness.’ In that sacrament lay all the mysteries and miracles of Co-inherence—the Arch-natural in the Natural, a symbol that is more than a symbol, Christ giving himself to the Church as the Church gives itself to Christ. As St. Augustine explained the sacrament, ‘If you have received well, you are that which you have received.’”

      Williams went on with his lecture, the audience rapt with attention, interweaving two terms, Logos and Logres. Logos was the Word made flesh. Logres was Arthur’s kingdom, the attempt by humans to embody the City of God in the city of men. Williams did not see the Grail as any kind of physical object or person. Rather it is symbol of the soul’s progress toward God. A carnal seeker like Lancelot was “the old self in the old way,” never progressing too far beyond worldly quests for bliss, such as the bed of Guinevere. Percival did a little better, “the old self in the new way,” someone who sought after the “Limitless Light,” but who only attempted self-improvement, not self-transformation. Only Galahad found the object of his quest, “the new self in the new way,” one whose quest had changed the very nature of who he was.

      Williams concluded that the Grail romancers were not unusually devout men. They were simply good story-tellers who recognized the imaginative power of the theological questions of their day, the miracle of the loaf and the wine as the Bread of Life and the Cup of Heaven. Williams concluded that all attempts, in literature and in life, to fully embody the ideals we most deeply believe, are ultimately doomed to failure.

      As he neared the end of his lecture, Williams returned to the podium and leaned on it heavily. He asked the audience to indulge him for quoting a few lines from his own book of poems, Taliessen through Logres. Then closing his eyes and lowering his head, as in both weariness and prayer, he quoted from a scene in which Merlin the wizard looks on at Arthur’s coronation, seeing in the glorious founding of Camelot “the glory of Logres, patterns of Logos in the depth of the sun.” Williams ended by noting that, even at that glad moment, Merlin knew in advance that it would all end in chaos and ruin:

      “At the door of the gloom sparks die and revive;

      the spark of Logres fades, glows, fades.”

      Williams’s voice sounded husky as he ended his lecture, perhaps because he had been speaking continuously for nearly an hour. But Tom sensed in those last few words not only Williams’s sadness at the fall of Camelot, but some greater sorrow, perhaps some unspoken grief of his own. Perhaps there was something too in that broken voice about this new war, perhaps the whole “turbid ebb and flow of human misery.”

      When Williams had finished speaking, no one moved for several seconds. The man up front in golden spectacles almost seemed unaware that there was anyone else in the room. He seemed to gaze above and behind the sea of faces, as if the very stone walls of the Divinity School were a transparent screen through which he could see something else. Gradually, though, people began stirring and gathering up their things. Most filed quietly toward the exits, but at least a dozen listeners made their way to the front to meet Mr. Williams and ask questions. Tom himself had some questions to ask, so he too walked toward the lectern. He stood