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The point at which the myth of the Grail begins holds in its first appearance the most important account of all. No invention can come near it; no fabulous imagination excel it. All the greatest mythical details are only there to hint at the thing which happens; that which in the knowledge of Christendom is the unifying act, perilous and perpetual, universal and individual. That origin took place in the Jerusalem to which (it was reported) the Captain-General Arthur had gone before his final victory. Its record is in the Gospels; it is taken here from the Revised Version of the Gospel of St. Mark.

‘And as they were eating he [Jesus] took bread, and when he had blessed, he brake it, and gave it to them, and said, Take ye: this is my body, and he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many. Verily I say unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’

This is the first mention of that Cup which in its progress through the imagination of Europe was to absorb into itself so many cauldrons of plenty and vessels of magic.

It was not for some centuries that the intellectual attention of Christendom directed itself to the nature of the Blessed Sacrament. Its first preoccupation was with the nature of God and of the Redeemer. Piety and spiritual devotion might centre on it, but the lesser powers of the Church (so to call them) were not yet free to turn to it. The identification in some sense of the Eucharist with our Lord was immediate; the documents of the New Testament confirmed, when they came, the settled habit of the Church. It was regarded as a sacrifice—by Christ 14 and of Christ; therefore, as a sacerdotal act. It was used, as well it might be, as an argument against the Gnostic doctrines of the unreality of matter and of the evil of the flesh. The sense in which the dedicated elements were consecrated into something other was not defined. Nor the moment of change; our Lord was supposed by some to condescend to the whole Rite and general prayer of the Church; by others, to the actual repetition of the Words of Institution. But on these things there was as yet no controversy.

Only the Act continued everywhere. The phrase of the New Testament—‘He was known of them in the breaking of bread’—remained true and became more widely true, although the knowledge was not intellectually epigrammatized. The relation of the elements to the Sacred Body was called sometimes identity, sometimes figure or symbol. But neither figure nor symbol implied separation; each word implied an interior closeness which they have perhaps with us lost. The Act was priestly, by Christ and for Christ; the mysterious sacrifice was of Christ; and Christ in it was the food of man. The sacrifice was offered not only on earth but in the heights of the heavens. He offered, who was the offering, and there was as yet no controversy in the Church.

But as the Nature of our Lord was defined, and as the Church became more and more aware of what in fact she believed, so the intellectual problems of that Act were more and more discussed. It was stressed now one way and now another; but no stress necessarily denied another. It was a symbol, but it was He. It was the offering of His passion, and communion with His ascended life; also it was communion with His passion and an offering of His ascended life. This was His very death; it was also His very Resurrection; it was, all ways, His Incarnation. It was a double Act; there was a kind of exchange in it. The Church gave itself, and Christ gave Himself, and the two were united. ‘If you have received well’, said Augustine, ‘you are that which you have received.’ Such a sentence, in some sense, holds all; it is this which, in the English words of 15 Malory, centuries later, was ‘the secret of our Lord Jesus Christ’.

It was this communion which was referred to in the Lord’s Prayer. St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote: ‘Give us this day our substantial bread: Common bread is not substantial, but this holy bread is substantial. . . . It is imparted to your whole system for the benefit of body and soul.’[1] And as it was communicated for each body and soul, so it was all bodies and souls in the Church that were offered. ‘The whole redeemed City itself is offered as a universal sacrifice to God by the High Priest’, wrote St. Augustine. ‘In a certain sense’, he wrote again about the first Institution, ‘He carried Himself in His hands.’ This was the centre of the Christian and Catholic life: ‘in this thing which the Church offers she herself is offered.’

So the great meditations ran on. There were—not so much disputes as faint disagreements, but there still seems to have been very little controversy. In East and West alike the sense of the Act grew keener; the belief in the identification of the elements with Christ clearer. Miraculous visions began to appear—as in the tale in the Paradise of the Fathers (meaning the hermits of the Thebaid) in which an angel is seen slaying a child with a knife. The child or the man was seen ‘smiting itself into the bread’. And with the visions, the controversies; the young Church had known neither.

They did not however seriously begin in the West until about the eleventh century. No more need be said of them here than may suggest how the subject exercised the minds of men; how therefore it preoccupied their minds. This is not to say that it was argued about in every place where men talked. But it was very likely to be at least spoken—if not argued—about in any place where the intellectuals talked. It was not, I suppose, discussed 16 as politics are to-day, but neither was its discussion confined to a particular class of the pious, as such things usually are to-day. A more general imagination, a more universal (almost—dare one say?—a more casual) intellect was aware of it; and even the people who did not argue had probably heard of the argument. For something like two centuries the nature of that Act and of its consequences was, in various times and places, disputed. Decisions were taken by Councils; rites were ordained by bishops; devotions were multiplied by the pious. So that, slowly perhaps but generally, among all the other affairs of secular and religious life, the image of that Act, and of the Host and the Chalice which were its means, grew primary in the imagination of Europe.

A few points in that development may be mentioned. About 1040 Berengar of Tours, Archdeacon of Angers, was believed to have taught that the Body in the Mystery was not to be identified with that which was born of our Lady St. Mary, and to have denied any ‘conversion’ of the elements. He was opposed by, among others, Lanfranc, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; who, in maintaining the reality of that conversion, declared that the many occasions on which the body of Christ had been miraculously seen in the Sacrament, proved the reality of the presence. Durand, Abbot of Troarn, wrote that the Sacrament was ‘none other than that very flesh which the Virgin conceived of the Holy Ghost, and brought forth with the integrity of her spotless virginity unbroken, contrary indeed to the common course of human nature, but not contrary to the reality of the human body’. It is this sentence, and others like it, which condition and characterize, as we shall see, the later image of Galahad. The errors of Berengar were condemned at various councils—in 1050 at Brienne (convoked by William of Normandy, afterwards William I of England, and patron of Lanfranc), in 1059 in Rome, in 1063 at Rouen, and in 1078 and 1079 again at Rome under the presidency of Gregory VII. At all of these the doctrine of the identification was asserted, and ‘the union of flesh and soul in the resurrection of Christ’. The 17 phrase is ascribed to St. Peter Damian (1007-1072).[2] To him also is ascribed in the West the first use of the word transubstantiation.

A few other phrases from the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century may be quoted, to show the kind of doctrine and of image that was in the heart and the imagination of Christendom. Odo of Cambrai (1050-1113) wrote: ‘It is divided and it cannot be consumed. It is eaten, but it remains uncorrupted. It is crushed and it is unimpaired. It is broken, and it is whole. This offering is flesh, but it is not carnal. It is unstained light rather, and pure. It is body, but not corporal. It is spiritual light rather, and pure. It is pure and cleansing, pure and purifying, pure because divine, more pure than material light.’ And again: ‘It is offered here, it is accepted here, not by change of place or succession of time, as if a movement of translation were begun in one place and completed in another. . . . There is no transference of place that bread may become flesh yet there is transference from the altar to heaven, because from being bread it is made God. . . . The Word of God is the altar on high.’ Honorius of Autun (d. 1130) wrote: ‘This is the same thing in the mouth of the worst of men as it is in the mouth of the most holy. . . . But, as the sun is the same in its heat and in its brightness, and yet produces different results in these two aspects, namely, burning the earth by its heat and giving light by its brightness, so the flesh of Christ remaining the same produces different results in different persons, incorporating the righteous with himself, separating the unrighteous from his life.’ Robert Paululus (c. 1178) wrote: ‘The golden altar [in the Jewish Tabernacle] signifies the altar of faith in the heart that is purged by penitence, and bright and clear with the testimony of a good conscience. On this altar the priest, now dead to the world but living to God, no longer the old Melchizedeck, flesh born of flesh, but the new man, spirit born of spirit, offers the invisible offering of flesh and blood through the oblation of earthly food.’ Rupert of Deutz (d. 1135) wrote: ‘Because the 18 Virgin conceived him of the Holy Ghost, who is eternal fire, and he himself through the same Holy Ghost, as the Apostle says, offered himself a living sacrifice to the living God, by the same fire is the roasting (“roast with fire”—that is, burnt by the travail of the Passion) on the altar, for by the operation of the Holy Ghost the bread becomes the body and the wine the blood of Christ.’ William of Champeaux (d. 1121) defined the ‘doctrine of concomitance’ in the phrase: ‘He who receives either species receives the whole Christ. . . . In each species is the whole Christ, who after his resurrection is wholly invisible and impassible and indivisible, so that neither is the blood without the flesh, nor the flesh without the blood, nor either without the human soul, nor the whole human nature without the Word of God personally united to it.’ Hildebert of Tours (1057-1134) defined the method of the Act: ‘I utter the words of the Canon and the Word of the Transubstantiation.’ And, as a final quotation, as if peculiarly applicable to that great myth which was soon to come into being, as if it were a warning and a watchword to the poets and makers of romances, Ivo of Chartres (1040-1116) declared in a sermon: ‘It is a sacrament of faith; search can be made into it healthfully, but not without danger’.

The climax of all this followed in the early years of the thirteenth century. Lothair Conti (1160-1216) became Pope under the title of Innocent III in 1198. Before his elevation to the Pontificate, he had written a book On the Holy Mystery of the Altar. He defines there ‘the double sense of the four kinds of altars, whereby the “higher altars” denotes the Holy Trinity and the Church Triumphant, the “lower altar” the Church Militant and the “Table of the Temple”, the “inner altar” a clean heart and faith in the Incarnation, the “outward altar” the altar of the Cross and the Sacraments of the Church’. The offering is made not by the priest in his own person but in the person of the whole Church. ‘The offering is primarily directed to God the Father as the first principle of the Godhead, yet the sacrifice of praise is offered equally to the Undivided Trinity.’ The risen Body, thus communicated, has four qualities which 19 were manifested in the Body before the resurrection: ‘subtlety (when He was born of the Virgin), glory (when He was transfigured on the mount), agility (when He walked on the sea), impassibility (when He was eaten at the Supper).’ ‘By the power of this Sacrament it becomes possible that they who are of earth ascend to heaven.’

After his accession, Innocent prepared for what was one of the greatest Councils of the Middle Ages. It was held in the Lateran, in the year 1215. More than four hundred bishops, twice as many abbots and priors, many representatives of kings and princes were there. The Albigensian ‘crusade’ had ended just before. It had been a dreadful and murderous business. But its cruelties must not prevent the recognition of the nature of the war, so far as it can now be discerned. It seems probable that there had grown up in Provence a kind of culture deriving from the old Gnostic dreams. Matter was either evil or negligible; it was irrelevant to salvation and incapable of it. The adept would be—perhaps was already—free from it. It was directly against this doctrine that St. Dominic preached and Innocent sent the armies; and against it, less directly and more universally, that the first chapter of the decrees ‘On the Catholic Faith’ was proclaimed. It decreed:

‘There is one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is in a state of salvation. In this Church Jesus Christ himself is both priest and sacrifice; and his body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God, so that, to effect the mystery of unity, we ourselves receive of that which is His, what He Himself received of that which is ours.’

By this decree the doctrine of the Eucharist was, as it were, raised to the level of the great formulating doctrines. It was, formally and theologically, received among those dogmas which defined the Triune Nature of the Omnipotence and the Double Nature of the Redeemer. But between those other doctrines and this, mere was one extreme difference. All were ‘of faith’, 20 but in those others the faith was directed towards the Invisible and in this towards the visible. The Triune Omnipotence, the Two-Natured Redeemer, were real but (since His Ascension) removed. But the transubstantiating Body was visible in the transubstantiated matter of the elements—real and unremoved. There, visible but hidden, perfect under either species, were the subtlety, the glory, the agility, the impassibility. They were there for sacrifice and for communion. The true Priest (hidden in wafer and in wine) offered them, and generously permitted the Church and City a participation in His Act.

The theology was accompanied by the ordering of ritual. Decorum was enjoined on physical movement, as it was on intellectual development; proper order was to rule in all. In the eleventh century at Canterbury Lanfranc had taken care of this, as he had earlier defended the Identity. He directed the method of the sacramental processions on Palm Sunday and the order of the genuflections. The abbot Simon of St. Albans followed him in the next century. It was to St. Albans that the King Henry II Plantagenet (whose name, one way or another, is so commingled with the Matter of Britain) sent a most costly cup to hold ‘the case immediately containing the Body of Christ’. At Paris and at Cologne, at Salisbury and at Oxford, in Ireland and at Rome, from popes, bishops, and synods, decrees of order issued. The ringing of a bell at the consecration, and at the same time kneeling or prostration, intercessions and adorations, were placed and timed. The Ancren Riwle and the Lay Folks’ Mass Book contain similar instructions. In the first (dated in the early part of the thirteenth century) the anchoresses for whom it was meant are instructed, when they are dressed in the morning,’to think upon God’s flesh and on His blood, which is over the high altar, and fall on your knees towards it, with this salutation: “Hail, Author of our creation! Hail, Price of our Redemption! Hail, Support of our Pilgrimage! Hail, Reward of our expectation!”’

There was, in that century and after Lateran, one more grand development, which was hagiologically referred to the initiative 21 of Christ Himself. Such an initiative was indeed (it is a point to be remembered, whether in the theology or in the myth) at the root of the whole matter. It was our Lord who had first acted and who continued to act. It is this which dominates the fables and inventions: all of them are subject to and conditioned by this. Galahad is conditioned by this. The whole Act is Christ’s and is imparted to those who are also His. But now, as he had commenced the Act, and indoctrinated the theology, He was said to have directed the ritual. A Belgian nun named Juliana was a devotee of the Sacrament. Soon after Lateran, she had a vision of a full moon, in which was one black spot. She became aware that this appearance exhibited the lack in the liturgical year of any feast in honour of the Sacred Body. Her vision was communicated to the then Bishop of Liége, who in 1246 bade a feast of Corpus Christi be held in his diocese. In 1264 the Pope Urban IV, who had once been Archdeacon of Liége, by the Bull Transiturus commanded it to be observed through the whole of the Western Church. It could not be fixed for the day of Institution, the Thursday of Holy Week, because then the Church ‘is not able to be fully at leisure for the commemoration of this chief Sacrament’. ‘Therefore, to confirm and exalt the Catholic Faith, we have worthily and reasonably determined to appoint that, concerning so great a Sacrament, besides the daily memorial which the Church makes of it, there be celebrated yearly a more solemn and special memorial, appointing for this purpose a fixed day, namely, the Thursday after the Octave of Pentecost. . . . We exhort and command . . . that you keep so great and glorious a feast every year on the aforesaid Thursday with devotion and solemnity.’ For this new feast, at the request and by the command of the Pope, St. Thomas Aquinas composed the Office and the great hymn Pange, lingua, gloriosi, and (though not for the Office) ‘Devoutly I adore thee’.

Such then, in brief summary, was the development of Doctrine. The Act had gathered into itself all circumstances. It had, as it were, sunk into, and now dwelled among, all the most fundamental dogmas. It united all contraries in a mystery of exchange. 22 The Flesh and the Blood, invoked by the act of the celebrant, were there in their own full act—and were yet passive. They were carried, and were unmoving; they were eaten, yet they themselves received the eater into themselves; they were separate, yet they were one. They were the visibility of the invisible. They were the material centre of Christendom; and they were the very Act that made them so.

The doctrinal intellect had so defined them. The general imagination, having helped that definition, now received it. But in the period, at least, before Lateran, the circumstances of the Act were received more generally than perhaps they afterwards came to be. Almost any article connected with the Act served for its symbol. Paten or cup, monstrance or tabernacle, were alike used. The word Grail itself is defined by the dictionaries as coming from the Latin gradalis and meaning a shallow dish; thus, the paten; and afterwards, erroneously, the cup. But the ‘erroneously’ is hardly justified. The Grail may, etymologically, have been a dish. In the poems and romances it was ‘chose espirituel’. Even in the Rites there were similarities between the objects used. ‘In the Middle Ages there was not a clear distinction in form nor in part (from doctrinal motives) even in function between the vessel that contained the wine in the Eucharist, and the one that contained the holy wafer. The latter, as well as the former, had the shape of a cup, as it still has in the Catholic Church of to-day, and it was also not infrequently called the “chalice” (calix)—indeed, down into the eighteenth century.’[3] ‘In the eleventh century, the host was broken on the paten, but in the twelfth century Durandus directs that it be broken over the chalice.’[4] The various actions of the Rite were to be accommodated, as far as might be, to the sense of the whole Christ. He was whole under each species—double but undivided, and the Rite was to exhibit him so.

Something perhaps should be said—and may be said here as 23 well as anywhere—about those fabulous vessels, which from Celtic or whatever sources, emerged into general knowledge. There has been much controversy about them—vessels of plenty and cauldrons of magic—and they have been supposed by learned experts to be the origin of the Grail myth. That, in the Scriptural and ecclesiastical sense, they certainly cannot be. Cup or dish or container of whatever kind, the Grail in its origin entered Europe with the Christian and Catholic Faith. It came from and with Christ, and it came with and from no one else. The Eucharist, in Europe, was earlier than any evidence of the fables; that is a matter of history. But then it is a matter of history also that the Eucharist, as it came from and with the whole Christ, was meant for the whole man. It was for his eternal salvation, body and soul; and the doctrinal development precisely stressed this. It was therefore, in the very idea of it, greater than any vessel of less intention could possibly be. If it swallowed up its lesser rivals, it did so exactly because it was greater. The poetic inventiveness of Europe found itself presented with the image of a vessel much more satisfying to it—merely as an image—than any other. There is no need to suppose the poets and romancers were particularly devout; it is only necessary to suppose they were good poets and real romancers. A dogmatic anti-Christian opposition would, no doubt, have rejected the Grail image. But it is hard to see what else could. Cauldrons of magic—‘dire chimaeras and enchanted isles’—are all very well at first, but maturing poetry desires something more. It desires something more actual to existence as we know it. But the Grail contained the very Act which was related to all that existence. Of course, it absorbed or excluded all else; sui generis, it shone alone.