target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_800c998c-df84-5638-9c20-d7c22ea7a6dd.png" alt="Image"/> 3 Tom’s pulse quickened as he turned down Catte Street, heading for what C. S. Lewis had called “the most beautiful room in all England.” It was the first of May, and Tom was going to hear Lewis’s friend Charles Williams speak on “The Meaning of the Grail” at the Bodleian Library. Tom decided to arrive early for the mid-afternoon lecture, to get a good look at the Divinity School room, and to get a good seat for the lecture.
Walking down the narrow street under a lowering sky, Tom arrived at the east entrance to the Bodleian and turned in at the gate. His first response to the Schools Quadrangle, the courtyard east of the main building, was disappointment. Having seen so many velvet lawns and spectacular flower gardens in the college quads, he was surprised to find a large enclosure with nothing but slippery flagstones. The eastern façade of the Bodleian made no better impression, a soot-stained slab with little ornamentation except for long vertical lines, almost like jail bars. How odd, Tom thought, that one of the most famous and venerated libraries in the world should look like an old prison.
Tom crossed the quad, following others through a large wooden door and into a narrow passageway that led to the Divinity School. Emerging from the dark corridor into the lecture hall, Tom instantly changed his mind about the Bodleian. Entering the Divinity School room was like moving from darkness to light, from confinement to liberation, from all that weighs down the spirit to all that makes it soar. The whole room was suffused with an amber glow, the afternoon sun warming the cream-colored walls, which seemed to radiate a light all their own.
The whole interior commanded Tom to look up. The floor was unadorned flagstone covered with rows of wooden chairs. But the lofty arched windows with delicate tracery carried his eyes upward toward the ceiling, where he saw rows of ornately carved pendants, hanging like lanterns, each one radiating fan-shaped curves, like shafts of light chiseled in stone. The plain stone floor and the portable chairs, crouching humbly under that magnificent vaulted ceiling, seemed to suggest that all the richness and gladness of life comes not from the plane on which we live and walk, but from higher planes of intellect, imagination, learning, and faith.
The chairs in the lecture hall began filling quickly, even as Tom was admiring the room. He had wondered what sort of audience a publisher’s editor would attract, and he soon had his answer. He found a seat near the center, about five rows back, before every seat was taken as the clock neared three. There were a few men who looked like dons scattered around the room, but most of the listeners were about Tom’s age, with more women in the crowd than he had seen in any one place since arriving at Oxford.
Precisely at three o’clock, Mr. Charles Williams stepped briskly stepped to the lectern. He was a tall man in his fifties with wavy hair, wearing a black gown and gold-rimmed spectacles. Tom was not accustomed to lecturers wearing academic gowns, so his first sight of Williams made him think of a priest or wizard. Williams briefly surveyed his listeners and smiled. The furrows on his cheeks ran all the way down to his jaw, giving the impression that someone had placed his mouth in parentheses. Tom heard someone in the row behind him whisper the word “ugly,” but that was not quite accurate. There was a look of energetic intelligence in Williams’s face, the owlish eyes and simian jaw giving a sense of endearing homeliness, not mere coarseness.
Williams set down his notes and hardly glanced at them again for the next hour. “Did any of you buy a newspaper this morning?” he began. There was a hint of Cockney in his voice, an accent that certainly wouldn’t impress the person who had whispered the word “ugly.” Abandoning the lectern, Williams paced back and forth in front of the room, looking into individual faces for the answer to his question. Several nodded that they had, and Williams smiled to see his hypothesis confirmed. “You offered a coin and received a newspaper in return. A mutually satisfactory transaction. That is the life of the city. Exchange.” Williams paced briskly back toward the lectern and continued: “And thus you took one step closer to the Holy Grail.” Pausing to let this comment have its effect, Williams came out toward his listeners again and asked, “Did any of you hold a door open for someone today? Did you help someone who’d dropped an armful of books?” Seeing a few nods 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
