The thorn-crowned God

September 5, 2021 by Amy Welborn

And now, on to Gawain.

I’ve not seen the movie – The Green Knight– and am not planning to – well, maybe when it starts streaming, I’ll take a look, especially since I’ve just re-read the poem. So just know that compare-and-contrast isn’t a part of this post.

Nor is this an overview or an analysis. You can find that anywhere and everywhere. I’m just using this space to share a bit from my reading – what intersects with my sense of life and faith.

Here’s my first, and overarching thought after today’s reading.

You know, today we’re told over and over to dispense with the binaries the black-and-whites that supposedly characterize the past ,and to be more wiling to sit with the greys and the ambiguities and tensions of the present.

Well, it seems to me that even a cursory survey of the present social and cultural scene compared with, say the great literature and religious traditions that have lasted through the centuries is that, folks, it’s not them who are all about the binaries and sharp categories – it’s us.

Don’t you think it’s true that great literature is, indeed, great and endures because it is thick with the truth of human experience, that wisdom, accumulated and sifted, has kept what is real and true – and what it keeps tends to be springing with tension, layered with complications?

Even the Scriptures – for those who bother to read them – which do not hide Saul’s mental illness and suicide, David’s unfaithfulness and Peter’s weakness, and which stubbornly kept Qoheleth’s cyncism and Job’s persistent, angry questions.

So, Gawain is not uncomplicatedly brave, stalwart and true – although he certainly tries, and intends to be, helped by God and the Blessed Virgin (whose image he has painted on the side of his shield that faces him.)

And he declared absolutely that he would never agree/to take either gold or keepsake before God gave him grace/to finish the task he had undertaken.

(1836-9)

Again, we have the tension – the reality – of divine grace and strength always at the ready – but waiting, in a sense, for our readiness and openness.

Gawain is deeply Christian, many steps further away from paganism than Beowulf, with its structure around the liturgical year and the central themes of temptation and self-sacrifice. Gawain is also a few steps closer to the modern world, with our doubts and self-questioning and hesitations.

It is the matter of temptation that interested me the most in this reading. What tempts Gawain – what is it in the temptation that is so tempting?

Yes, self-preservation, yes pleasure. But there is something else, something at the heart, of course, of the fantasy of courtly love – the struggle between what is desired and and what is socially appropriate.

It’s a tension that can certainly reflect the deep truth of a situation, if what is “socially appropriate” indeed expresses moral realities.

But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes our temptations become more of a struggle than they should because in doing the right thing, we’d be violating what is really no more than a social convention or even just hurting someone’s feelings.

So, Gawain, encountering the very determined lady of the castle yet again:

For that noble lady so constantly pressed/pushed him so close to the verge, that either he must/take her love there and then or churlishly reject it./He felt concerned for good manners, lest he behaved like a boor,/And still more lest he shame himself by an act of sin,/And treacherously betray the lord of the castle.

(1770-1775)

And so, there, coursing through Gawain’s conscience, are a stew of motivations – doing the right thing would be poor manners and offend her – but no, he doesn’t want to sin – or perhaps even betray the lord’s trust, either.

What a valuable journey to invite young people to take – to consider their lives and choices in this context. To contemplate why they do wrong or right, and the ways in which social conventions can either express values that are true and good or masquerade as such – and how to tell the difference.

There’s more of course, but it’s late and we are going to try to do another long hike in the morning – Mondays are turning out to be our only even-close-to-free day.

That said, if you are interested in looking at more of the same, far more knowledgeably explored, head to this blog post by Mike St. Thomas:

One crucially important detail of the story escapes most modern readers, including myself the first several times I taught it. The final encounter with the Green Knight occurs on January 1st, which is both New Year’s Day and the Eighth Day of Christmas. Up until the 20th century, this day was also celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord—now in the Catholic Church it’s celebrated as the Feast of Mary, Mother of God (which after a little Googling I discovered was what the feast was called in the earliest days of the Roman Church as well). For most of the last millennium, and for the Gawain poet and all of his or her original readers, January 1st would have been associated with the circumcision of Christ, which according to Jewish law, took place eight days after his birth.
In this context, Gawain’s slash on the neck takes on new significance. The poet carefully describes the cut as one that “severed the skin” as “the end of the hooked edge entered the flesh, / And a little blood lightly leapt to the earth.” The Green Knight might as well be a moyel. Gawain’s mock beheading is a kind of circumcision, not of the usual organ but closer to what Deuteronomy (and later St. Paul) calls the “circumcision of the heart”: “circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stiff-necked any longer” (Dt 10:16). Gawain will bear his scar as the Jews bore the mark of circumcision as the sign of their covenant. When he arrives at Camelot after his journey, he shows Arthur the girdle, and calls it the “blazon of the blemish that I bear on my neck.” Both the scar and the girdle are reminders of his sin of not being open to love—of having an uncircumcised heart. The sin is small—certainly understandable—but it brings him shame no less.

The contrast between Gawain’s dejection and Arthur’s joy is striking and significant. It speaks, I think, to the inevitability of Gawain’s sin, despite the guilt it brings him. Arthur and his court accept the symbol of the girdle with “gay laughter and gracious intent” and the whole incident folds into the twelve-day-long Christmas feast. Joy, then, is the proper response to Gawain’s (and our) inability to give of ourselves in the way that Christian love demands. Joy is the emotion proper to commemorate the birth of a child who will one day die. Joy is necessary to accompany us, like Gawain, on our quest not just to understand but to enter into the Christian paradox of gaining by giving.

Again – that paradox: as Paul tells us again and again – in Christ we can (and must) be honest about the weak sinners we are – but still live in joy because of who He is.