Numinous Kindlings: A Conversation with Malcolm Guite
This past winter, Nashotah House senior Micah Hogan talked with Malcolm Guite about Dr. Guite’s influences in poetry, particularly from his mother; interests in Medieval and Renaissance literature, having read some of C.S. Lewis’s books on literary criticism— “the memory of Lewis was still warm at Cambridge,” Dr. Guite says. Furthermore, Dr. Guite reflected on his faith journey; the Psalms being the “journal of the soul”; Arthurian legends; and the relationship between his priestly and poetic vocations. Below, Micah and Dr. Guite share their conversation:
Micah Hogan: Well father, thank you so much for being here and agreeing to be interviewed by the Nashotah House Missioner!
Malcolm Guite: Thank you, I’m delighted to be with you and look forward to the conversation.
M: Wonderful. I thought we would start out first by talking about how you got started in poetry.
G: Right. Well I think I owe a great deal. To both my parents, but especially to my mother. My mother was absolutely full of poetry, and had a great well of it, and an expansive memory. And recited poems to me often. But she did so quite spontaneously; she would never sit me down in a corner and say this is poetry and it’s good for you; it was never a subject or an agenda or a sort of revered item. It was sort of a spontaneous overflow. I suddenly became aware that as my mother talked there would be rhythm and beauty and I would realize she was quoting and I would often ask her where it was from and she would tell me.
Just to give you an example, which turned out to be hugely influential on me. When I was quite a little boy, I was born and brought up in Africa and we used to go back every year when my father was on leave to England. But we would go by sea, so it was two or three weeks each way and my father would fly ahead and set up the house, but my mother and sister and I would sail, and I love being aboard ship. I loved everything about the sea. But it was always a magic moment when the ship left the port and we would stand at the stern and look at the wake furling out, and my mother would say,
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
And you know, I realized that was from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” And that became later on for me, when I saw the poetry written down and realized there were poets and people who did this, that you could read it in school and it was a subject, but for me it was like playtime. I first heard poetry, as it were, heard. Spoken on my mother’s tongue and I heard in my ears and heard the sound of it but I didn’t see it written down. I was pre-literate. And so I think I always yearned toward that, towards the sound, the rhythm.
And that was in my childhood. Eventually I discovered that it was in school and so on. But then I had a sort of big burst of intense adolescent poetry, about the ages of 16 to 18 and I fell in love with Keats. I read him and sort of absorbed that sound. And at the time, I was growing up and I was a teenager in the ’70s and contemporary English poetry following T.S. Eliot was all very freeverse and had lost that pattern and that rhythm. You could hear it on records, in some ways the singer-songwriters, in people like Leonard Cohen and so on were still constructing verses like that, but they weren’t on the printed page. So I was absorbing much earlier poetry and I thought I was born out of my time. And so I wrote a lot of “wannabe” Keats poetry. It was all very slushy you know, but I was learning the ropes. And a little bit later I came up to Cambridge as an undergraduate, having won a scholarship to Pembroke, studied English literature in my first degree and I got a much bigger sense of how it all works and what we can expect to see. After that I thought I might have a more serious go at it myself.
M: How would you say that poetry intersects with your faith journey?
G: Well that’s a very good question. I was fortunate enough to be brought up in a Christian household, but unfortunately I threw it all overboard in my rebellious teenage years. My father was a local Methodist preacher and a man of very strong faith and deep conviction and also capable of giving a very rational account of his faith. My mother was less explicit about faith but, actually in her poetry gave me these numinous kindlings, so in a sense the intellectual spine of faith was something there in my father but the affect, the feel, not so much in a dogmatic statement at all but just in the feel. My mother would recite things all the time, like Masefield’s “The Golden City of St. Mary”:
Out beyond the sunset could I but find the way,
Is a sleepy blue laguna which widens to a bay,
And there's the Blessed City, so the sailors say,
The Golden City of St. Mary.
And the end of it goes:
Oh I'll be shipping sunset-wards and westward-ho
Through the green topping combers a-shattering into snow,
Showed me this beautiful city that was somehow behind the sun. I mean, my mother didn’t use words like transcendence or eschatological or anything like that, if you know what I mean, but it was there.
So I had those two things, but when I was fourteen we lived in Canada at that time, and my parents were afraid I was losing my British identity as it was, and so they sent me to a boarding school in England. Which at first I found very traumatic; I was homesick and it was a very dysfunctional place. It was a great school but dysfunctional, and over the course of that time I threw overboard my faith and tried to become not simply an atheist, but an atheist of the most material, hard boiled— as I thought “scientific kind.” The equivalent of Dawkins in those days was a behaviorist named B.F. Skinner who was trying to make an entirely mechanistic account of everything, including not only human behavior but the basically illusory sense that we had of our individual persons or consciousness, that these were merely random actions and reactions of neurons. I really tried to believe that in order to have this kind of safe, rational cosmos that didn't have all that stuff. But as I rejected faith I was also concreting over the springs of poetry. And then they were released dramatically when I was visiting Keats’ house. My parents couldn’t afford to bring me home for the holiday so I was sort of bounced around to different relatives and one of my aunts took me to Keats’ house, and I was quite resentful of being there but I sort of stopped to read Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale'' which was written up on the wall in a room above the window which opened out onto the tree where you could hear the nightingale sing. And I was completely transfixed by the poem.
It begins very darkly and I was in a very dark mood, as I was quite a depressed adolescent really. The poem begins:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
So you had all these words like “ache,” “drunk,” “drains,” “sunck.” It was a very unpromising opening but it was where I was at the time. So I was reading this and going “Yeah, totally know how you feel there.” And suddenly, as with the song and flight of the nightingale, the poem takes off into a different realm:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
And so the poet is sort of carried off by the nightingale. And I was transfixed. I had no idea language could be so wonderful. Now one of the things that happened as I reflected on that epiphany was that it cracked open my very, very reductive, immanent-frame materialism. I really believed that we were just the unwinding of enzymes and the self-replication of selfish genes. I didn’t there was anything else really to say about being human, except for the accident, the sort of horrific, ironic, and absurd accident of our consciousness and our pretended personhood. I really took a very bleak view. But what happened in reading the Keats poem was that I really knew, “this is not chemical.” This is not the unwinding of an enzyme. Whatever this is, its spiritual and transcendent. So the spiritual came back, but it came back through a very secular piece of poetry— which though it does have the wonderful allusion to the Book of Ruth in it, it's very discrete and subtle. And so I then switched from science to the arts because I had to pursue this poetry. And the poetry was, if you like, the spirituality and the faith. And what happened when I came out to Cambridge was that I was no longer an atheist, but was changing over into an agnostic. I thought there was a mystery, but that it defied definition, and dogmatic definitions were probably just distortions of it. But I became particularly interested in medieval and renaissance literature, having read some of C.S. Lewis’s books on literary criticism— the memory of Lewis was still warm at Cambridge, they created the chair in medieval and renaissance literature for him, and I began in order to study literature at Cambridge. Now in those days they were serious about it and on the reading list was the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. You needed to have read those before you came up in order to recognize patterns in the literature. And I was particularly interested in a period of literature which was essentially a great age of faith. It was also suggested that I read Augustine’s Confessions and at least a summary of Aquinas.
I was bowled over by Augustine’s Confessions. I was astonished and still am astonished at that book. And part of my atheism had been the idea that we, humankind, modern man, had somehow outgrown the age of faith, that the age of faith was somehow childish and ignorant and that now that we knew the facts we could move on. Which was implying that we somehow had greater minds or were cleverer. The presumption was that anyone who still held onto Christianity at this late stage must be someone of small mind. But of course whatever else you think about Augustine, what you realize by the time you’re even a few chapters into the Confessions, is that you’re walking through the little door that’s set in the big door of a cathedral. You were walking into a vast space. You realized this mind was huge and capacious and comprehensive and richly furnished. And that Augustine has been to places and thought of arguments that you’ve never even thought of yet. And so it completely destroyed what I subsequently discovered C.S. Lewis had called “chronological snobbery,” that is to say the notion that the “up-to-date” but be cleverer than the “out-of-date”-- the very idea that “date” has anything to do with truth.
So my mind was prepared for a reassessment. And I began to find that the poetry that I loved most was in fact the Christian poetry. And so I compromised and said to myself “Well of course Christianity is not the case, but it's imaginatively or psychologically true.” So I internalized the stories of Christianity symbolically. Which is quite convenient, because I could have the pleasures and compensations of its poetry without it actually impacting on my life or asking any difficult questions about sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was a kind of bifurcation that couldn’t last forever. It began to be intellectually as well as imaginatively compelling to me. Towards the end of my second year, while reading the Psalms as a background to literature and European poetry, I just had an overwhelming sense of the presence of God and the reality of the whole thing, and I subsequently heard a Franciscan friar preaching about the Incarnation that made huge sense to me. And so I had good conversations with my college chaplain, who was an American Episcopal priest of a very Catholic persuasion, who was really discerning and really really helpful to me. And as a result of that I prepared myself for confirmation and was confirmed in February of 1980, just in my final year as an undergraduate. And in a sense that coming to faith allowed me to go back to all this poetry and see even how much more there was in it. I love C.S. Lewis, and one of the books I particularly like is his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. And there’s a place in that where he says in effect, “My imagination was baptized before I was, and the rest of me just took a little while to catch up!” And that was very much my story. That in a sense I was wooed back to faith through poetry. But I couldn’t have assented to it unless I also thought that it had some intellectual rigor. I mean, I think it is the case, I am an orthodox Christian. I think the great creeds are in fact the case. I think we were made, I think we were made in God’s image, I think God found us in Christ, I think He died for our sins and genuinely rose from the dead, actually and physically as well as spiritually, for our justification. So I defend it as true and remaining true whether I’m in a period of great faith or of doubt.
M: That’s wonderful. I hear in your story several echoes in your story of C.S. Lewis’s own journey, the boarding school and the atheism…
G: Yes, as I was going through it I didn’t know it. I had read the Narnia books as a child and absolutely loved them, and one of the things I did in the summer before I came back to faith was to reread the Narnia books. I had three things I read that summer. I read the Chronicles of Narnia, I read the Dialogues of Plato, and I read the four Gospels.
M: That’s some good summer reading!
G: Those three in combination made me think, “Ok, this is the case” you know? So subsequently, long after that, I read Surprised by Joy and found these extraordinary parallels between that and my own story. I could feel the Divine Spirit saying, “Well, if it worked once, let's try it again!”
M: No need to reinvent the wheel! Switching gears for a moment, would you be willing to talk about how you understand the relationship between your priestly and poetic vocations?
G: Well that’s really a great question. You know, these things don’t become clear all at once. You see, after I became a Christian I wasn’t aware of a priestly vocation. Because my father was a preacher I was aware of the power of preaching, I gradually became aware that expounding the Gospel was something I could do, but I was quite keen to retain my lay status. I took a job as a school teacher just in a regular state school, what you would call a public school, I was teaching in a regular state high school, which was quite a challenge trying to infuse my students with a love for literature and poetry. But I began to feel more and more that maybe the ordained ministry was something I should consider. And in the mid-80’s I got married and it happens that my wife was a tutor in doctrine and a deaconess in those days, and she was tutor in doctrine at Westcott House, the Anglo-Catholic theological house at Cambridge, but also a deaconess at the church I was attending which was where I met her. And part of me thought, “oh look, there’s one ordained person in the family, that’s enough, you know?” But I was living in a theological college by then and I was formed by the chapel worship and so on, and so I remember saying to my wife, “Maggie, I know this is a crazy idea, but I think I might be called to the ministry.” And she said “I know, I’ve been waiting for you to say that for ages!”
Now the thing about the priestly vocation was it was all consuming. It's a permanent ontological thing, you become something in the divine economy which you always are. [18:32] And when I was learning what it was and learning to do it it was all absorbing. My first several years of priestly ministry were all in parishes, which can sometimes be quite demanding. In a sense they left no time or space for poetry, but in another sense they were instilling in me some of the things I most wanted but hadn’t so far been able to accomplish with success in my poetry. I mean, if you think about the liturgy, what I always would have hoped to do in a poem was to create a beautiful shape in words, through a series of responses and evocation of images through which a person would journey and at the end of which they would in some sense be transformed and have a different vision of the world. But I got to do that every week at Mass! I had a beautifully shaped thing and we all went into it and I articulated the words. And in some sense all poetry is an attempt, in a small echoing way, that words should be made flesh. As Shakespeare says
Imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Of course that’s what God did supremely in the Incarnation, and it's what all happens in the Eucharist.
So in a sense the poetic part of me was being more than fulfilled in the liturgy. And also a lot of poetry is listening to the poets of the past and listening to themselves and trying to discern a pattern and give back. And that’s what a lot of pastoral life is. It's about hearing somebody else’s words and then reshaping them for them so they can get a clearer grasp of what’s happening in their life and what it is they’re saying.
So in a sense some of the skills that were there in my love of and reading of poetry and attempts to write it were all richly available in my priestly ministry. But I didn’t write anything. When I say I was ordained and I didn’t write anything for seven years, they all assume this was a sort of bizarre Gerard Manley Hopkins vow, you know my Jesuit superior has forbidden me you know. It was not the case! It was simply that that art and desire was fully absorbed in my vocation as a priest. However, as everyone knows who undertakes that vocation knows, you can end up trying to do it in your own strength and not draw from the well springs deep within and you can get burn-out. And after about seven years I was just exhausted from burnout. And my bishop said to me “look, just take three months off and do research or write a report about something. But I don’t care what you do, just do what you need to do.” And so I thought, “God, I really need poetry, I really need poetry.” And I sat down and pretty much reread the whole corpus of classic English poetry, much of which I realized was still had within my mind just underneath the surface. And it was a huge blessing, it was like wellsprings of water coming up and fertilizing my mind. So I rediscovered my love of poetry and therefore my desire to write it. But it also had the effect, as it had done years before, of completely revitalizing my faith. And out of that came a series of lectures I gave I published under the heading Faith, Hope, and Poetry. At the same time my wife Maggie and I decided that I would move out of parish work and into academic chaplaincy, and it seemed the right time to do that. And I found that in the role of academic chaplain that the poetic vocation could come to the fore. And now I would say that I see the priestly and the poetic vocation as actually two sides of the same coin. My priestly life teaches me more about poetry and my poetic life renews my priestly life. And during this time I did a PhD through Durham on how the sermons of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes influenced the poetry of T.S. Eliot. And Donne became a very important figure for me both as a poet and as a preacher.But Donne and Herbert and Hopkins, between them and later, as I came to appreciate him R.S. Thomas, all showed me the precedence for what it is I’m doing now and the way it can be done with integrity and a gathering of both vocations into one.
M: That’s really interesting. Do you think Anglicanism lends itself to a melding of the priestly and poetic vocations?
G: I think it does, and that’s one of the Anglican charisms. If you think about Donne and Herbert and R.S. Thomas are all within that Anglican tradition. Right from the beginning because it had to justify itself to the world and luckily for it it had Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes among others, and Jeremy Taylor, who were all incredible writers and deeply convinced Anglicans, and before that the liturgical genius of Thomas Cranmer, and it had Andrewes, who was heavily involved in the making of the Authorized Version. So it had a huge, beautiful literary ferment right around the time of its beginnings in that collection of people who are sometimes referred to as the Caroline Divines. So there’s a huge formative thing there. And I think it always cultivated a literary awareness. It made space, perhaps it's not doing so right now, but it did make space for its priests to be literary figures. I’ve got a wonderful book on my shelf, which I actually bought just for the title, called The Rye Romance of the Literary Rectory, about how much good poetry has been written in rectories, even if it hasn’t been written by the rector (think of Tennyson). So I think that’s there.
I think it's very interesting that Coleridge also was brought up in a vicarage and his father was a vicar, though like me Coleridge rebelled against that and went various different ways but he then came back to it with a really full Trinitarian faith and a rich theology and a theology of the imagination. And in the book when he’s beginning to form that, called the Biographia Literaria, he was going to his parish church and writing wonderful marginal notes in his copy of the Book of Common Prayer, and he has a chapter in that on advice to young men where he says, if you are a young man with a literary bent, consider ordination. At least, to put it at its very lowest, if you become a writer you become chained to your desk, you become utterly dependent on it, you become servile to the means and to the press. But if you already fulfill the vocation of serving people using language through your ministry, you can also have space for literature. But then he goes on to say, and this is where he came up with the term clericy, he has a vision in that chapter of the vicarage and of the parish priest himself, because there were parishes everywhere, even in small rural places without literary pretentious that didn’t have a university, a university-educated literary rector could become a hub of learning, could become a place of hospitality, could become the man who lent books to the villages, could be the place where discussion took place, could be the leavening of the lump and a kind of lightening in many places. And he thought that might be one of the distinctive vocations of the Church of England. This was before the Education Act, and I think that often happened. So I think there’s a long, rich tradition in the Anglican Church of a priesthood of letters as well as a priesthood of sacrament.
M: That’s beautiful. Do you have any advice or words for seminarians going into this priestly vocation?
G: Well, I mean everybody who is called to it is called to it by God for distinct reasons. And in a sense it's a universal thing and we all do the thing which we are made priests by our church to do— we serve our community with sacrament and word and service and we’re all going to be doing that thing anyway in our own distinct ways. God doesn’t want us to become identical cutouts. I mean, the great poem that expresses all that is George Herbert’s poem, “The Windows” where he says:
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.
And a little later he goes on:
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe
And here in this poem he compares us to a stain glass window where our very stains, if they’re open and translucent, become something edifying.
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers
So God will take us where we are and use us if we let him. And he’ll do that for all of us. But insofar as there are seminarians who love writing and literature and have a literary bent, I would say that love is the keyword there. If you love reading, read for the love of it. Don’t read in a utilitarian way. Don’t read because you have to or because it will improve your mind or whatever. Don’t come at it with any kind of agenda of achieving righteousness by works. On the contrary, we are in playtime here in the kingdom of sheer grace. Delight and delight in what you read. And as it happens your delight in that will shine out in your sermons and edify others. But if you read solely in order to edify others or to get quotes for your sermons it will be a disaster. You will have killed it. You’ve got to love it and trust to God that your love of it will then shine out always. So I would say delight in reading yourself and if you delight in reading and that leads to a delight in writing so be it, it doesn’t have to. Making books is much weariness you know! But if it does lead to writing then that’s great. But I think really delighted reading should also lead to sharing in that delight and I think forming book groups, sharing with parishioners, and creating an atmosphere where reading and writing are part of the richness of our redeemed life is a good thing in and of itself. And the other thing I’d say is read widely. I think one of the reasons why we read is so that in a civil and genteel way we can encounter the minds of others, particularly those who might disagree with us or with whom we might disagree.
For instance, I have next to each other on the shelf a volume of Herbert’s poetry and a volume of Milton’s poetry. As it happens Milton has a poem on time published the year Herbert’s book came out, which also has a poem on time. And I’ve been reading the two poems together, thinking how richly they answered and compliment one another and how fitting it was that I should have both these volumes next to each other on my shelf. But of course these poets come from completely different parties of the church. Herbert you know was High Church, what we would now call Anglo-Catholic, though that phrase wasn’t used then, and Milton was a puritan who wanted a completely radical reform of church and wanted to abolish bishops. And had Herbert survived into the English Civil War he and Milton would have been on opposing sides. But there they are together on my shelf and they have a huge amount to say to one another. But now we have this problem of the bubble as it were, of only reading people from one side of an argument, and that narrows the mind. And I would advise any seminarian, not only as Lewis would say, don’t read only modern books but old books as well, but also read books from opposing camps and terminologies and think through how they work.
M: That’s very wise. What in Holy Scripture has startled you recently?
G: Well, in a way it's the most familiar thing. Both in the Eucharistic lectionary and as part of one’s own reading in the Daily Office and so on, one goes through the Psalter, so much so that the danger is that they just trip off the tongue. But during our first lockdown which was, you know, quite severe at the beginning of the pandemic I found myself gripped by the Psalms as a journal of the soul. Now there’s obviously quite a lot there about fear, panic and imminent death, and really crying out loud. The thing about the Psalms is their staggering honesty. About bitterness and anger as well as sorrow, as well as outbursts of joy. And I really felt not only a kind of licensing of the whole range of feelings in response to this world crisis but a living voice, a language of the heart being given to us by God in order to use it, and I ended up writing a new sequence of poems called “David’s Crown,” which was a series of poetic responses to the psalms as I read them through the crisis and I found psalm after psalm coming alive for me in completely new ways. And even really really familiar psalms, like psalm 19. You know, I think we all felt much closer to nature in seeing the sun rise. And the psalms really clarified a lot for me. And all that very much came out in David’s Crown, which is the last book I published, which just came out this year.
M: Well I know I’ll be sure to pick up a copy! Speaking of your recent poetry, would you mind sharing with us a bit about your latest poem you’ve been working on about King Arthur and the Holy Grail?
G: Oh yes. This has been quite an exciting adventure, and we’re still not far into it, though I have already quite a lot. I’ve loved those stories since I was little, and again I owe that to my mother. My mother used to tell me stories about the knights of the Round Table when I was quite little. She had originally studied both medieval history and psychology, and later on in her sixties she got a degree in history. But she knew and loved Mallory from France, so she really had her sources down, it wasn’t a novice guide to Arthur! And so she would tell me quite dramatic stories which I was almost too little to comprehend, but which nevertheless went into me. She told me the story of the Dolorous Blow, when Sir Balin is going through the Grail castle without realizing it and is pursued by another knight and his sword is broken, and how he comes into this sacred hall, which says don’t enter and he enters and he sees the chalice and he sees the spear and you realize this is the spear that wounded Christ and seizes it to attack this other person, strikes him with it, who is really Pelles who becomes the Fisher King, and as he does it the whole castle falls down into absolute darkness and it devastated not only the castle but a desolation throughout the land. And my mother read all this to me and I remember thinking “Don’t do it! Don’t touch the spear!” And Balin being got out of the ruins by Merlin and then riding through this utterly desolate wasteland, and my mother describing the wasteland and the people in the wasted villages cursing Balin because he’s brought this upon them. Huge things were being uncovered— about the sacred, about pollution, about desecration. Years later I read Wendell Berry saying there are no unsacred spaces, only sacred spaces and desecrated spaces. But in a sense I learned that here. And so my mother told me these stories. And she also told me about Galahad who came to set this right and who would eventually, with the very same spear that wounded Pellas, bring his healing and the healing of the whole wasteland. And I loved Galahad. I mean, she would tell me these stories about Lancelot too, but I knew I was never going to be a Lancelot, because Lancelot was the sort of kid who was captain of the sports team, what I believe the Americans call a Jock. Whereas I knew I was never going to be that. But I could identify with Galahad. So once I had realized that I had become a poet like I had intended to and I had a publisher who would publish my books it occurred to me that I could write an Arthurian poem. But I’ve been putting it off. I’ve been thinking about this, you understand, for about ten or fifteen years, thinking about different ways of doing it. And then, it always takes some little thing to precipitate it. I was asked as a commission by Rabbit Room Press, they were doing a book called The Lost Tales of Galahad and they wanted different authors to contribute Galahad stories that weren’t in the current legendarium. There’s a point where Mallory says, “He had adventures in the forest but nobody wrote them down,” so these are supposed to be those lost tales. I decided to try, because I’ve been studying ballad form, so I wrote a ballad called, “The ballad of Galahad and the Niad,” and it came very swiftly and very freely and I enjoyed writing it. And I thought, “this is it! I found the form! Now I know what to do!” So I started this thing, So I’m starting in media res, I’m not starting with Arthur and the Stone but with the legend of the Grail. I feel even in Tennyson the Grail is downplayed and backpayed, and of course shamefully in many modern versions of it its almost gone, along with the whole Christian underlay of the stories. Scholars still think that a lot of the French prose romances and the Latin poem romances of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries (which eventually find themselves in transmogrified form into Mallory), these were either written by Cistercians or lay people in Ciscercian monasteries. And there’s a very high Ciscercian sacramentalism in there, and actually these are thoroughly Christian stories. But they’re the Christian story reimagined in this magical faerie realm. And that meeting the two is very exciting to me.
So I’ve begun it and as any proper epic in the end (if I finish it!) it will have twelve books. But the Grail bit of it will have three books. But I’ve written two of them, so I’ve got to write the final one which is the actual achievement of the Grail itself, and that’s almost an impossible challenge, to try to get the vision. One poet who is very helpful to me there is Charles Williams. Not that I’m trying to write in Williams’s style, but Williams’s emphasis on the Grail, and also Williams’s prose novel War in Heaven, which is about the Grail as well, has a wonderful mystical passage towards the end, with the modern equivalent of the Grail Knights’ vision of the Grail, and its quite a mystical thing, and I’m pressing on towards that. I wrote a little prelude poem for it called “Take Up The Tale!” which I’ve put out on my blog (https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2021/07/03/take-up-the-tale/). And Rebecca Mary, who did the covers of my other poetry books, has agreed to do some illustrations for it, which I think will make it a very sumptuous thing. I’m going to delight in it, but I think it will in its own way, like the originals, be an expression of a particular type of sacramental faith.
M: Would you mind saying a bit more about that, about what the Grail has to teach us today?
G: Yeah, how long have you got?! Right, well despite the understanding of people in the 1920’s and 30’s, which tried to recontextualize the Grail as a kind of Pagan cauldron of plenty (and there’s no doubt that it is drawing on these earlier, Pre-Christian sources), in the tales as we have them its clearly the chalice which Jesus uses at the Last Supper, but there’s a long story that goes on after that in various apocryphal sources. One is that it is carried to the cross and receives the blood from His side and that Joseph of Arimathea receives it and keeps it. And that he is then arrested and imprisoned by the Sanhedrin and is fed with the Grail. And there’s this wonderful story where Arimathea and his followers after the Fall of Jerusalem bring it to Glastonbury in England (which isn’t entirely impossible!), where Joseph plants his staff and it flowers. And the idea is that Joseph leaves the hallows, the Grail and the Spear [which pierced Christ], and dish of the Last Supper, and they’re handed down secretly, as it were, and kept through all the darkest times. Looking for a time when the kingdom, Logres, will be reconstituted and there might be a human society which has civilized itself enough and fit enough to receive these hallows again. And that’s the idea of the Round Table. But of course there’s a sort of crack in the wood of the lute and a darkness in the heart— there’s the problem of Lancelot and Guinevere. So the story of the Grail is really sort of the story of an epic failure, of a people who came so close, but then the Grail was withdrawn. Yet even in its withdrawal there is a blessing. Somebody does achieve it. Somebody holds the Grail and is given it by Christ and receives it. And in that receiving it immediately heals the wounded Fisher King. So there’s a light and a healing and a promise. Its another expression of the tension between the now and the not yet.
So there’s all of that. But the bigger thing is that Grail is the emblem of the Incarnation of Christ Himself. Because in the Grail is the Body and Blood. It is the “AM-ness” of the I AM made flesh. So in that sense, as in Christ, the Grail is the meeting of heaven and earth. Jesus says about Himself to Nathaniel, “You will see greater things, you will see the heavens opened and the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” So in the best of the Medieval manuscripts, which are full of Cisctercian mysticism, those who see the Grail not only see the Body and Blood of Christ (and sometimes Christ Himself holding the chalice in His wounded hands), but they also see the meeting of heaven and earth. They see as it were for a moment the eschaton, the earth drawn up into heaven and heaven coming down to earth and they see in the sacrament of the Mass they see the potential sacrament of the world, the whole earth being filled with the glory of God. So that’s the kind of bigger promise of it, and there’s a sense in which the earth herself and the whole created order is the Grail, is the chalice into which God pours His heart’s blood because He loves us, and whose transfiguration He is calling us to. So all of that is there, and the question is how do you even begin to hint at that in the course of the narrative— and that’s why this third book is still unwritten!
M: It’s just staggering!
G: I mean, one way I thought of finishing it was with an ordinary parish communion— that that is also fully the Grail.
M: Like how Williams’s finishes War in Heaven?
G: Exactly so! Which I think is really really good. It’s really great in that War in Heaven passage because everyone hears it in their own language— one person’s hearing the Latin Mass and one person’s hearing the Book of Common Prayer. You know its a fabulous book, War in Heaven.
M: As a final question, could you tell us what you’re reading right now?
G: Well it won’t surprise you to know that I’m reading an English translation of the French quest of the Grail that was published in the thirteenth century (to get behind Mallory). I get sent books occasionally to review, and I’m currently reading a really good one at the moment which is called All’s Well That Ends Well: From Dust to Resurrection— Forty Days with Shakespeare by Peter Greystone, who is quite a good writer. It’s a Lent book, but you could use it in any forty day period. It’s got classic passages of Shakespeare with wonderful contextualization and really rich theological and personal readings of them, in a way you could never do if you were writing a sort of high end literary book on Shakespeare. You’d never get away with this, but this is actually what Shakespeare’s like when you’re reading Shakespeare with a baptized imagination. So I’m reading that enjoying it.
You know I wrote a lot in these last two years and am just now finishing a book called Lifting the Veil, which is the set of the Lang lectures that I did, which is a very short book in the theology series the Word within the Word. But now I want to clear the desk and soak myself in Mallory and finish the Grail poem, though whether I actually manage to do that or not is another question.
M: Well thank you so much for meeting and talking with the Missioner/Chapter.
G: Well it's my pleasure and I’m glad to do it and I wish you all the best at Nashotah House!
The preceding interview was first printed in Nashotah House’s Missioner magazine, Spring issue, Vol. 36, No.1.