The Grail as judgment

The Queste del Saint Graal is the most uncompromising book in the tradition, and it says what it is doing on the first page: no one ought to enter upon such a lofty service before being cleansed and purged of all villainy and mortal sins. This Quest is not a quest for earthly things, but is to be the search for the deep secrets and confidences of Our Lord.

Everything follows from that sentence. The quest is not an adventure with obstacles. It is an assessment, the criteria are moral, and they are not negotiable.

So Gawain — the best-loved knight in the English tradition, the man who takes the beheading game when nobody else will — rides out, meets a hermit, and is told plainly that he will find nothing, because he has not confessed in years and does not mean to. He accepts this without much distress and goes home. He kills eighteen knights on the way, most of them companions of the Round Table, mostly by accident.

Lancelot is stopped at a door.

And the man who succeeds needed no instruction, because he was never at fault. Galahad does not learn anything in the course of the quest. He is not tested in any sense that could have gone otherwise.

The book has been called cruel since the Middle Ages, and the charge is not a misreading. The secular order — the fellowship, the love, the world, the ordinary decent knights — is sacrificed so that one virgin may see God. Everything that made the Round Table worth writing about is, by this book's standards, disqualifying.

Which is exactly why the argument in this tradition is worth following. Wolfram, writing at almost the same time in Germany, has a wounded king healed by a question asked out of pity. Malory copies the Queste almost scene for scene into English and then frames the whole thing as a bereavement. Neither of them is contradicting the facts. They are contradicting the verdict.