The grail legend has always had certain hold on my imagination since I encountered it as a child, and I’ve often thought about using it in some way in a story. Partly for that reason, and partly because I’m perennially fascinated by the way that stories evolve over time, I recently read a translation of the original grail romance by Chretien de Troyes and then an interesting book* by Richard Barber which looks at how the story has changed over the centuries. It was a bit of an eye-opener.
One point that Barber makes is that the original grail stories were written for a particular audience. These tales of knightly valour were written for real-life knights and, like so many books still do, served the purpose, among others, of flattering their readers. For instance, looking at the original de Troyes story, and at the extracts of other medieval versions cited by Barber, I was struck by the amount of bling involved. You are constantly being told about the beautiful and costly possessions of the knights and ladies in the story, and being reminded that such things are their due as members of the gentry.
More chillingly, in one early thirteenth century version of the story (The High Book of the Grail), we are reminded of the business of those real life knights:
…the Good Knight went out to scour the land where the New Law [i.e. Christianity] was being neglected. He killed all those who would not believe in it, and the country of was ruled and protected by him, and the Law of Our Lord exalted by his strength and valour. (Barber, p 51)
The High Book was dedicated to Jean de Nesle, a leading figure both in the brutal Fourth Crusade against Constantinople, and in the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars that followed . I happen to have also read a book** recently about the latter. Ordered by Pope Innocent III, it involved (among other things) the massacre in 1209 of the entire 20,000 population of the town of Beziers.
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All this came back to me when, reading the commentary around David Bowie’s death, I was reminded that there had been some controversy about Bowie’s ‘blasphemous’ use of Christian imagery in his video for ‘The Next Day’. And I was particularly struck by a comment of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey: ‘I doubt that Bowie would have the courage to use Islamic imagery. I very much doubt it’.
What a strange and revealing remark. People like Bowie wouldn’t mock Christianity, he is really saying, if they thought they might be killed for it. And Carey should know! His own Anglican church is the largest denomination in the English-speaking world, after all, not as the result of kindly Episcopalians gently persuading Catholics and others of the error of their ways, but through the use of violence and terror. Read Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels for a description of a process which included, among other things, monks who refused to swear allegiance to Henry VIII as head of the English church being publicly castrated and disembowelled.
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Yes, and in the same way, the reason that there are no Cathars today in the South of France is not that the Roman Catholic church engaged in rational argument with that version of the Christian faith, treating its beliefs with respect, and showing the kind of sensitivity to the feelings of its adherents that Bowie was told off for failing to exercise. No. Cathars were hunted down, tortured to make them inform on one another, and burnt alive until their entire faith was completely exterminated. In one case, the Catholic authorities learned that an elderly woman had asked for the Cathar equivalent of the Last Rites. She was taken from her death bed and thrown onto a fire.
The versions of Christianity that we know today are actually only a small subset of the ones that have existed in the past, and the Cathars are only one example of the alternatives that were annihilated by the violence of their more ruthless or more powerful rivals. It’s interesting to consider what kind of effect this Darwinian process has had on the content of Christian belief itself. For a religion, too, is a story written for the benefit of an audience, and this religion, in the form we know it —the form that now asks for its feelings to be respected—was written for generations by or for those who regarded killing and torture as legimate ways of treating those who disagreed with them. Lord Carey’s strange comment suggests to me that he and his church have a long way to go before they fully recognise the implications of that. It reminded me of a husband telling his wife she ought to be more grateful that he doesn’t beat her any more.
Interesting, particularly to a (just about) Christian, though in other times I suspect I would very probably ended up in front of the Inquisition myself like Meister Eckhart. So many (often, to my mind, the more promising) forms of Christianity, such as Gnosticism, have ended up being wholly or largely expunged by the orthodox (ie those with interests to protect or personal axes to grind), much as with Islam today. Ironic hey, for a faith that is supposed to be transformative. Have you read Colm Toibin’s Testament of Mary? As you imply in your comments on Mike Lofgren’s The Party Is Over, hijack the message and the future is yours.
btw, despite your remarks elsewhere about Angie being your favourite character in Daughter of Eden,to me Mary was perhaps more interesting. As the story unfolded she seemed to me to enjoy a little more authorial sympathy than her beliefs and behaviour (scaring the Earth people off early etc etc) deserved? But perhaps your point was, that’s the power of myth.
I was surprised to find myself able to identify with Mary to that extent. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I LIKED her very much (though Angie did), but I realised that she had, in spite of her compromises and her arrogance, a certain stubborn integrity.