ALTHOUGH MEDIEVAL DISCUSSION of the theology of salvation has received close scholarly scrutiny, such ideas have not generally been brought into analyses of chivalry. Yet explanations of precisely how God is seen to effect human redemption from sin—a subject technically known as soteriology—played a powerful if subterranean role in shaping the religious dimension of chivalry as it emerged in an ascetic culture. Christ's role as savior was actively discussed in the High and Late Middle Ages, with no single line of thought dominating. Differing theological views, vigorously asserted, were taken up by advocates of chivalry to strengthen an ideology of heroic asceticism among warriors. Characteristic ideals of knighthood did not adhere to a single explanation, but drew upon both sets of major ideas for a hybrid religious ideology.
This chapter first explores how debates over so basic a theological issue as soteriology provided rich materials for thinkers and writers constructing this ideology. Second, the chapter analyzes how writers could view Christ as a model for knighthood by drawing striking parallels between his role in salvation and that of the knightly profession in the world. As portrayed by medieval thinkers, Christ's own combination of warrior heroism and ascetic atonement was crucially important to the development of themes we have been following. Ideally, a chivalric career meant following a savior imaginatively transformed into one of their own, a magnificent warrior who triumphed over his dread enemies but who also suffered grievously and meritoriously in achieving his crucial victory. A potential paradox becomes a triumph of valorization.
Two Theories on Salvation
A view of long standing often termed the Devil's Rights theory confronted challenges from newly emphasized views of satisfaction or atonement theology. In the traditional view, the devil's rights came to him through the fall of Adam and Eve, who had willfully put themselves—and all their descendants—into his power.1 Christ boldly broke this foul and deadly—if legal—contract of enslavement either (depending on the writer) by a master-stroke of strategy or by bold personal combat. Entering sinless into the world he out-witted the devil by provoking him into a crucial overstepping of his jurisdictional rights over sinful humanity. The blameless son of the Lord heroically rescued rebels and traitors who had utterly abandoned their true sovereign and entered the dominion of a vile master. As R. W. Southern comments, this view was deeply satisfying to its age, perhaps more for its emotional than for its logical or religious impact. Twelfth-century folk, he writes, could “easily associate the daily experiences of life with a cosmic battle between God and the Devil.”2 Though he must die in order to achieve victory, Christ has played the role of a triumphant master strategist and stout champion in this cosmic struggle for the very fate of humanity. He acts, Southern notes, as a “warrior Redeemer” and is a “warlike and resourceful God who had outwitted Satan.” This view could certainly touch knightly imaginations powerfully. God's work is analogous to theirs; he chose the site for battle skillfully, fought in a great struggle for the right, and won heroically, at the cost of his own life, willingly lain down.3
A quite different theory had also long existed, although it had received less emphasis. Christ's death could be interpreted as a sacrificial offering rather than a strategic victory and an outmaneuvering of the devil who possessed licit rights. This view received a major new interpretation and emphasis in a book destined for fame, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), begun by Anselm of Canterbury between 1094 and 1097 and finished in 1098. Scholars generally see this treatise as the new foundation for a theology of satisfaction or atonement.4 In effect, the devil is denied all rights and the suffering Christ is put in place of the triumphant and actively heroic Christ.
In his book, Anselm moves away from the dominant early medieval sense of cosmic struggle between God and the devil; brushing aside Satan and his supposed rights, he focuses instead on sin as offense to divine honor. It would require either punishment by God or satisfaction offered by humans to achieve reconciliation. Since finite humans cannot make satisfaction to an infinite God whose honor has been infinitely offended, the purely voluntary blood sacrifice of Christ, the incarnate God-man, became necessary. Anselm's “stern, proud, and uncompromising refusal of easy comforts and consolations, and his rejection of facile excuses for human frailty” reinforced his technical understanding of the full importance of a lord's honor.5 His stance may, at least in this regard, put us in mind of the treatises of Lancaster and Charny written more than three centuries later. With a tough-minded insistence on the majesty of God and the irreducible human debt, Anselm concisely wrote regarding satisfaction for sin, “only God could do it,” yet “only man should do it.”6 Anselm emphasized that the sacrifice had to be offered willingly.
The potential such ideas presented for a chivalric ideology appears in a double emphasis built into Anselm's treatise. He insists both that the sacrifice and sufferings of Christ were necessary and that they were laudable. “To be acceptable, it needed to be shown to be necessary and glorious”—R. W. Southern writes—“as the only way in which a central purpose of the Creation—man's salvation—could be achieved.”7 Though men who denied their service to God were hopeless, Southern continues, “for those who were prepared to suffer, the Incarnation had extended the limits of the original covenant to the extent of bringing them into the presence of God.”8
However exceptional his intellect, as a man of his age Anselm associated rendering God the honor due him with the servitium debitum, the knight-service owed to a lord.9 That Anselm's ideas, abstract and difficult though they were, could eventually reach at least elite laymen directly or indirectly is shown wonderfully in Jean de Joinville's casual account of a conversation he had with his king, Louis IX. The king asked Joinville to tell him his conception of God. “Your majesty,” Joinville replied, “He is something so good that there cannot be anything better (Sire, ce est si bone chose que mieudre ne puet estre).” Louis liked this answer: “Indeed…you've given me a very good answer; for it's precisely the same as the definition given in this book I have here in my hand.”10 Not only is it evident that Louis possessed a copy of one of Anselm's books—in this case clearly the Proslogion, the treatise in which he establishes this definition—but that in his youth Joinville had been taught and now still retains this definition, no doubt without owning the book, likely without ever holding it in his hand as the saintly king was doing.
Anselm lived in a world obsessed with asceticism, as we have seen. Significantly, an emphasis on meritorious suffering comes to fill much space in the new attention given to the humanity of Christ. Soteriological thinking is here infused with the gloria passionis we examined in Chapter 3. It is easy for modern investigators to forget how very specific this interest in Christ's passion became. In her influential study of the Corpus Christi festival devoted to the body of Christ, Miri Rubin has noted that “Devotions to the wounds [of Christ] had developed in the monastic milieu in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but spread more widely in the later Middle Ages.”11 She adds concisely, “Christ's wounds were hailed as the essence of Christ's humanity.”12 The impact of this devotion on a pious believer's imitation is clearly captured by David Aers:
We can see how the dominant model of Christ's humanity encourages quite specific forms of imitation. They seem characterized by the freely chosen infliction of bodily pain, miraculously sustained by God so that the holy person can go on and on performing such activities, reiterations that themselves confirm and sacralize the model that informs them.13
Given two active sets of ideas about Christ's role in salvation, it would be reassuringly straightforward to imagine that Anselm's views—so important in the broad sweep of Christian history—cleanly came to dominate theories of salvation from the early twelfth century. In fact, we must recognize that ideas of both the devil's rights and the suffering servant continued side by side throughout the Middle Ages. Anselm's theory did not sweep away competing ideas. He did not create a school of close followers, and many clerical thinkers did not accept his line of argument.14 If imitation of Christ's suffering was prominent in devotional literature and practice, many believers continued to emphasize Christ's heroic maneuver and combat against the devil. Two explanations of the cosmic struggle for human salvation continued to satisfy.15
However distinct their emphases, ideas of Christ's heroism and his sacrifice often blended in clerical and lay writing. An early thirteenth-century crusade sermon by Jacques de Vitry rehearses the Devil's Rights argument in the form of a confrontational dialogue between Christ and Satan. But in the end Christ realizes he must counterbalance the sins of mankind and so offers his own body using the cross as a new balance beam for weighing good and evil in souls.16 The hero modulates into the suffering servant. In a similar vein, Middle English sermons of the next century regularly stress the bodily suffering of Christ as a counterbalance to the devil's rights, which continue to be recognized. One sermon says Christ “suffered for us so painful a death to deliver us from the pains of hell and out of the devil's power.”17 In another the preacher proclaims “I assert that every man was won in battle through the mighty death that Christ suffered on the Cross.”18
Henry of Lancaster's Livre de seyntz medicines (as we have seen) draws classically on both major lines of redemptive theology, heroic combat and sacrifice.19 Lancaster emphasizes the “villainous, shameful and supremely anguishing death (vileyne et hontous et tresanguisouse mort)” of Christ, the “pains and grievous torments (peynes et grief turmentz)” suffered by his “sweet and tender body (douce et tendre corps).”20 Yet Christ appears not only as the suffering, sinless redeemer who washes away the stain of human wrong with his sacred blood, but also as the great warrior who victoriously battles the devil, who had gained rights over humans. After all, Lancaster says, humans broke the homage they made to God at the time of their baptism,21 and chose to enter the foul service of the devil (“pur servire l'ord vil diable d'enfern”).22 Lancaster can conceive of Christ as the victorious tourneyer who rescued his undeserving and traitorous human vassals from “everlasting, hopeless prison (prisoun sanz fin et sanz nul remede).”23 The image is entirely compatible with that used by Étienne de Bourbon a century earlier; in one of his sermon stories this cleric refers to “Christus pugil noster (Christ our boxer or fighter).”24
Christus-Miles: Imitatio Christi, Imitatio Militis
Chivalric ideology adopted close parallels between Christ and knighthood and developed them to a remarkable degree, working the mimetic connection in both directions. Not only is Christ pictured as a warrior, the knights are represented as his valiant imitators. Their imitatio Christi parallels Christ's imitatio militis.
Chansons de geste made a powerful contribution by stressing the heroic and ascetic parallels: if Christ suffered combat and laid down his life willingly, so do his warrior heroes.25 The parallel continued: in a classic case a French preacher (in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century) explicitly compared the death of Christ to that of the great warrior Roland: both acted as great heroes, both in their combats cry out in anguish and thirst.26 A long procession of epic heroes intone a crucial line in the formula: Christ died for us, his men; we must be ready to die for him.27 Duke Girart notes the cost entailed in this formula and then intones the ideal in the Chanson d'Aspremont:
In Your most holy name, O Lord God,
I came here, Sire, for You to the battlefield of Aspremont;
So many worthy men whom I had raised,
I committed to you yesterday morning;
And here is the only homily to be drawn;
You died for us, and we should die for your sake.28
Vivien, the martyred hero of the early part of the Song of William, elaborates the ideal in this twelfth-century chanson. He at first prays the Blessed Mary to help him avoid death at the hands of Saracens.29 Yet he quickly repents of this prayer and explains why.
That was the thought of a stupid fool, thinking that I could save myself from death, when the Lord God Himself didn't do it, suffering death for us on the Holy Cross to redeem us from our mortal enemies. Respite from death, Lord, I may not pray for, since You would not spare Yourself from it.30
Earlier in this text, Vivien has stoutly maintained his willingness to suffer for his men in battle against countless pagans; he swears he will not fail them and employs a revealing oath: “And I vow to you by God, the mighty king and by the spirit He embodied when He suffered death for sinners, I shall not fail you however hard-pressed my person.”31
The message is equally clear in chronicle. Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain pictures Bishop Dubricius admonishing Arthur's men before battle, expounding the meaning of the Scriptures by shouting out from a knoll serving as pulpit:
The Sacred text teaches that Christ laid down his soul at His enemy's feet for our sake: lay down your souls for Christ's limbs, which are being torn by the insanely motivated tyranny of the Saxon people.…To the just man death brings glory, to the sinner eternal punishment.…He who has fought the good fight will be given a crown in recompense.…Reverence is owed to martyrs along with Christ, Himself a martyr, to Whom be glory, power, and honour for all time.
Before the sound of his words has faded, the men seize their weapons, eager for the fray.32 Sometimes this message is delivered in language that is less direct but no less powerful. Ambroise, who wrote a poem on the crusade of Richard Lion-Heart, parallels the sufferings undergone by crusaders on particular days during Holy Week with the events of Christ's passion on those days:
'Twas Wednesday of the Holy Week
When God knew pain and travail bleak
That we, for our part, suffered
From vigils and from fear and dread.33
The idea appears in both Old French and Middle English romance. Perceval states the principle clearly, late in the Perlesvaus, using the potent language of bodily toil and pain:
there are no knightly deeds so fine as those done for the advancement of the Law of God, and we should toil for Him more than for anyone; for just as He exposed His body to pain and suffering and destruction for us, so must every man risk his body for Him.34
A later English author wrote a similar sentiment into The Siege of Milan, though here stated as a curse hurled by Archbishop Turpin against Charlemagne who is temporarily reluctant to join battle with Saracens:
Christ suffered more sorely for you, grievously wounded with a spear, and wore a crown of thorns. And now you dare not enter the battlefield for to fight for him. I tell you men will hereafter think your soul lost, since you falsely abandon your law, and will call you King of Scorn.35
This Christ-knight link was praised as embodied in the thoroughly historical leader, King Louis IX of France. In his moving account of this king's crusade, Joinville seems almost to lift the formula straight from the page of a chanson. He says, “as our Lord died for the love He bore His people, even so King Louis put his own life in danger…for the very same reason.”36 In the dedication of his book he is even more specific about the comparison between Louis and Christ. Joinville says his king should be placed among the martyrs: while wearing the crusader's cross Louis had not only suffered grievously, he had died in Tunis, following the example of Christ who died for his men.”37
What is more, when Joinville says Louis put his life in danger, the phrase is “mist-il son cors en avanture,” literally “he put his body into adventure,” using the very term, avanture, that summed up the questing of knights in romance.38 This usage seems all the more significant when we read on to find Joinville say he will tell of Louis's great “chevaleries,” his great feats of chivalric prowess. Joinville interprets chivalric questing as imitatio Christi, fighting the good fight and suffering as Christ did for his people. While the king and his men were in Muslim captivity as this disastrous crusade collapsed, we should recall that an aged and white-haired man comes to them—as so often Joinville narrates striking events but gives no explanation—and says they must not be downhearted. “For you have not yet died for him as he died for you.”39 Such imagery, moreover, was not limited to crusade settings. Across the Channel, the image of a later king of England as miles Christi was proclaimed in the liturgy employed in public worship. Under the guiding hand of Archbishop Chichele, these rituals presented Henry V as the victorious warrior of God in ceremony and public processions arranged for the feast days of a roster of military saints, with St. George at the head of the list.40
The imagery even takes on tones of courtly love service, as Christ becomes not only a knight but a lover of his lady, the church, saving her, suffering for her.41 An explicit presentation of the Christ-knight as courtly lover was written into the Middle English Ancrene Wisse, probably composed in the second quarter of the thirteenth century.42 The author (who wrote for some anchoresses from privileged families in the English West Country) sets the stage for the story that interests us by asking a question that would have warmly pleased Geoffroi de Charny: “Is not he a foolish knight who seeks rest in the fight and ease in the place of battle?”43 He then quotes from the Book of Job the line we first encountered (at the beginning of Chapter 1) in our Harley manuscript illumination, “Milicia est vita hominis super terram,” which he renders in Middle English as “Al þis lif is a feht as Iob witneÐ (All this life is a fight, as Job testifies).”44 The story itself takes a romance setting: a lady is besieged in her castle by enemies who have ravaged her lands and reduced her own estate to poverty. Though a powerful king offers help and sends gifts and embassies, she foolishly rejects his offers. When the king comes in person to show her his power, tell her of his kingdom, and offer to make her his queen, she still disdains him. With selfless love the king defeats her enemies, but suffers grievously in the fight and dies of his wounds. Only by a miracle does he rise again. The text explicitly draws out the obvious meaning as an allegory of Christ's work of salvation. He is said to have shown the lady “by his knightly prowess that he should be loved.”45 He has “engaged in a tournament, and had, for his lady's love, his shield everywhere pierced in battle, like a valorous knight.”46 This shield is actually his body, which he willing offered in suffering. The large theological question is then asked: could he not have achieved this victory in some less difficult way? An answer is given: he chose this means, to give humans no excuse for not loving one who had paid so dear a price. His shield, like that of any victorious knight, is set up prominently in the church—in his case, it is the rood screen uplifting the cross bearing his body, the shield-image in the poem.
The text is doubly important. Though it conveys the earliest known English Christ-knight imagery,47 it tells its story in a manner that suggests familiarity on the part of the hearers. This imagery is not being told for the first time. Effortlessly, courtly elements have blended with a type of soteriological exemplum. Moreover, as Sister Marie le May perceptively noted, this text quotes St. Bernard more than a dozen times and states outright that “hit is almest Seint Beornardes Sentence.”48 This reference to Bernard's ideas puts at least the roots of the Christ-knight image back into the middle decades of the twelfth century. Le May plausibly suggests that St. Bernard's military imagery and thoughts of king, lover, and spouse gradually took on the specificity of the word knight in texts like this one in the thirteenth century.49
Twelfth-century thoughts and images derived from St. Bernard and his Cistercian followers, picturing Christ as a knight, were redoubled by Franciscan and Dominican friars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An “Allegorical Romance on the Death of Christ”50 has been convincingly attributed to Nicholas Bozon, “that prolific Franciscan” of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.51 In a casual aside of much interest for our inquiry, the noted Anglo-Norman scholar Dominica Legge commented that in Henry of Lancaster's Livre “there are many resemblances to the Contes of the Franciscan Nicole Bozon.”52 Ideas flowed easily between elite members of lay and clerical society.
Widely known thirteenth-century romances made their own significant contribution to linking the image of a Christ-like knight with the work of salvation, or at least conversion to true religion. The High Book of the Grail, or Perlesvaus, probably written in the first decade of the thirteenth century, spills over with symbolism complex enough to snare any who would interpret it; yet it seems safe to assert that it enthusiastically and closely sets knight-hood within the context of salvation: the task confronting the knights and heroically performed by them is establishing and upholding the New Law of Christianity, with the hero Perceval cast in a powerfully messianic role. His fellow knights Gawain and Lancelot, late in the romance, witness his bold entry into the Turning Castle, achieved by driving his sword deeply into the gate, frightening off the fierce guarding beasts and causing the castle to stop its miraculous revolutions. Though they are themselves warned off because of its many perils, Gawain and Lancelot are fully aware of Perceval's triumph and its results:
They drew back straightway, and there in the castle they could hear the greatest rejoicing that ever a man had heard; many were saying that the knight who had come would save them in two ways: he would save their lives and save their souls, if it pleased God to let him conquer the knight who bore the devil's spirit.53
The point is driven home as firmly as Perceval's sword in the gate. Prophecy, the text informs its readers, held that all the people of that castle and of the other castles of which he was guardian would worship the Old Law until the coming of the Good Knight; that is why the people of the castle said as soon as he came that the knight had arrived who would save their souls and save them from death; for the moment that he appeared they all ran to be baptized, and firmly believed in the Trinity and adopted the New Law.54
Of course the mountain peak of Christ-knight images in romance appeared about a decade later, in the character of Galahad written into the romances of the Vulgate Cycle. Although the setting is that of a Round Table feast, the drama presented in the Quest for the Holy Grail soon incorporates elements from the biblical account of the meeting of the risen Christ with his disciples in the upper room, combined with aspects of Pentecost. As a prelude to Galahad's entrance, the doors and shutters close by themselves, without darkening the hall. A venerable man dressed in white miraculously appears, leading a knight in red armor (red and white being colors associated with Christ). The guide utters the characteristic blessing of the savior: “Peace be with you.”55 The knight is Galahad, whose salvific career and actions—including the performance of miracles—will unfold in the romance. His character and achievement explicitly counterbalance the role and function of Balain, the unfortunate knightly bearer of sin, whose story is outlined elsewhere in the cycle. Balain's career tells us much about Galahad. Merlin had spoken frankly to Balain in the Merlin Continuation, prophesying his Dolorous Stroke that will maim the Grail keeper with the sacred Lance of Longinus, begin the frightening marvels of the Grail, and cause so much divine wrath and destruction:
It is my opinion that in you we have recovered our mother Eve, for just as from her deeds there resulted the great sorrow and misery by which we all pay, suffering, from day to day, so the people of three kingdoms will be impoverished and devastated by the blow that you will strike. And just as there was a prohibition against eating the dolorous fruit, so there is a prohibition from the High Master himself against doing what you will do. This sorrow will come about, not because you aren't the best knight now in the world, but because you will break the commandment no one should break and wound the man most valiant in our Lord's sight at this time in the world.56
In short, Galahad, the perfect knight who achieves the Grail and heals its keeper, figures Christ, undoing the terrible wrong introduced into the Arthurian world by Balain. “Since by man came death, so by man came also the way of salvation,” as St. Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 15:21). Writers of romance might reasonably be considered as borrowing and rephrasing in chivalric form these famous words. This parallelism was no heresy, for Balain is no Eve and Galahad no Christ. Yet one knight calls to mind “our mother” who brought sin into the world, while the other recalls our savior who redeemed the world. The most familiar story is told with chivalric figures in the key roles. We would miss the potency of this symbolism were we to ignore the religious figuration at work.
Striking images of the Christ-knight, often including the courtly lover theme, continued to appear in the early fourteenth century in much humbler works, such as an anonymous French poem, “Comment le fiz deu fu armé en la croyz (How God's Son Was Armed on the Cross).”57 This work even begins with the address familiar to readers of chivalric romance: “Hear now, lords, about great chivalry (Seignours ore escotez haute chiualerye).”58 Another intriguing poem (written about the same time) that develops the Christ-knight image with particular richness was appended to a manuscript of Peter of Langtoft's chronicle. Its language is worth noting, for this is another hybrid work, blending the aventure of romance with a mini-sermon on satisfaction theology.59 The very title given the poem by its adept nineteenth-century English editor, Thomas Wright, accurately shows the fusion: “An Allegorical Romance on the Death of Christ.”60 A knight/king seeks to revenge himself on the traitor who led away his lady. Though he could have come in full power with an overwhelming army of horse and foot, the king wills to win back his lady by himself, as he is well qualified to do. “His name was so renowned for prowess,” we learn, “that the tyrant feared his chivalry.”61 Aware that the tyrant would never consent to fight if he recognized his opponent by his proper arms, the knight takes on the armor of one of his lowly bachelors, named Adam. Slipping into his lady's chamber, he is armed by her with “very strange armor (mut estraunge armure).” His aketon (padded undercoat), for example, was pure white flesh; his armor plates were bones, his helmet a skull. Thus armed, he freely offers himself (fraunchement se profrit) to do battle against the tyrant. The gentle knight takes “many a hard blow (Maint dure assout)” at the tyrant's hands, but “suffered it a little while (un poy de temps suffrit).”62 When the disdainful tyrant demands homage and service, the knight tells him that no serf could use force to demand service from his lord. The tyrant then tries, and fails, to tempt the knight with great gifts of lordship, but is again defied. They set a date for a new battle; they will meet on a mount, on a Friday. There the knight—”completely by his own will (tout à son ayn degré)”—mounts a warhorse with a varied coat showing four elements: cyprus, cedar, olive, and palm. It was a painful mount (trop dure), but the king persevered.63 He is alone, having prohibited his own army from coming to his aid, to show that he alone will regain the love of his lady. Surrounded by the tyrant's entire army the king displays his white shield, his blood-red helmet and hauberk, his sword forged of an iron nail, a lance of patience. The tyrant's fierce blow penetrates the shield and inflicts five wounds. Though the tyrant thinks he has won, the knight has actually defeated all his enemies “through his prowess (par sa pruesce).” He raises his lance, now called sufferince (qui suffraunce est dist) and cuts off one of the traitor's hands. When the tyrant rips off the king's assumed armor and realizes whom he confronts, he flees in confusion.64 The knight rescues his lady and grants her the pardon she seeks, significantly adding, “you have cost me very dear today (Vos me avez costé mut chier huy ceo jour).” He has won her, he admonishes, “by blood and sweat (par saunk e suour).” She must recognize the cost: “Look at my face, how it is bruised; / Look at my body, how it is wounded for you (Regardez ma face com est demaglé / Regardez mon corps, cum est pur vous plaié).” He sets his love in a safe place, promising to return and marry her, taking her to his palace. The poem ends with a prayer to the noble knight who won the entire human race in battle (Qe conquist en bataille tot humayne ligné).65 The admonition to look at Christ's body “wounded for you” seems almost drawn out of the liturgy of the mass.
This text intricately twines the two major lines of soteriological thought we have examined. The lance of suffering cuts off the devil's hand: heroism and satisfaction ideas merge in the thrust of a lance blade. The cross, site of suffering, becomes a warhorse. Christ's very human, sweaty labor in the fight recalls the French lords pointedly reminding clerics that warrior sweat had brought Christian France into being.66 Christ's bruised face calls to mind Henry of Lancaster's blunt but pious meditation on the bruised face of the figure Langland named Iesus the Jouster.67
Indeed, the image of Christ as knight may be best known from Passus 18 of William Langland's Piers Plowman (written 1377–79), within a generation after our model knights Lancaster and Charny. Already in Passus 16 in the B text of that work, Langland has said that Christ must joust to settle “by judgment of arms whether Piers's fruit should be taken by the Devil or Christ.”68 Christ then “jousted in Jerusalem, a joy for us all.”69 Passus 18 specifies, in famous language, that Christ “will joust in Piers's armor / In his helmet and hauberk, human nature.”70 The fierceness of their fight will be registered in the natural world by earthquakes and unnatural darkness.
Heroic and sacrificial notions twist and intertwine like flourishing vines. Literary texts have provided one connection between such ideas and knight-hood. Surviving sermons show another route by which ideas could reach many who never read them directly. A Latin sermon, very close in theme to Friar Bozon's poem, was written in the late thirteenth century by the Dominican Gui d'Evreux. A similar Latin sermon from the early fourteenth century was written by the Franciscan Albert of Metz.71 One work in a collection of sermon tales by Odo of Cheriton from the mid-thirteenth century72 again presents Christ as an armed knight who has engaged in what is once more specified as the hard, bloody work of knights; he has entered into battle and has emerged victorious. Yet he wins by suffering. His knightly lance is called both Patience and Sufferance (as in our in our opening Harley manuscript). Once again Devil's Right theology blends with satisfaction theory to form the amalgam that is so important to the ideology of chivalry.
The trail of known sermons leads in the direction of others long lost or obscure. One of a set compiled about mid-fourteenth century (preserved in Merton College, Oxford), and intended for popular consumption, familiarly refers to “that sermon about the round table (illo sermone de rotunda tabula).” At least five manuscripts refer to this theme.73 The most complete example, copied in a fifteenth-century preacher's notebook, unmasks the meaning of this tantalizing reference. The preacher's aim is to explain an obscure theological point: why the Son, rather than the Father or Holy Spirit, was made incarnate for human salvation, a theme Anselm could have appreciated. All three persons of the Trinity, the text explains, “can be called knights of the Round Table, because all are equal in virtue and power.” But the devil challenged the Son, like a knight at a festive joust called a round table, that is, a tournament in which one knight would touch the displayed shield of another to initiate combat.74 “Therefore it was fitting that the Son descend and defend his shield and fight with the devil.”75 These Round Table sermons go off in a particular direction, explaining a somewhat esoteric theological question. Yet they significantly adopt practices of Arthurian chivalry in claiming that all persons of the Trinity could be compared to jousting knights.
Throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages evidence is abundant and unambiguous.76 In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a Middle English sermon meant for the laity pictures Christ as a knight conquering a giant (the devil) who has captured and imprisoned his father's servants (humanity). The preacher declares that sinful humans were won in battle by Christ's powerful death on the cross.77
Even the book of advice for his daughters written by a French knight in 1371, only about a decade after the deaths of Charny and Lancaster (and printed in English translation by Caxton in 1483) uses the same knightly imagery for Christ's passion. The author, the Chevalier de la Tour Landry, adds to a story about a knight selflessly saving an accused woman that he acted “As did the sweet Jesus Christ who fought for the pity of us and of all humanity.”78 A poisoned apple enters the story (perhaps borrowing from the Arthurian tradition of Queen Guenever), but there can be no doubt of the allegory. The Chevalier makes all plain. In Caxton's translation,
And thus for compassion and nobility the gentle knight fought and suffered five mortal wounds, as the sweet Jesus Christ did, who fought out of pity for us and all humanity. He had great compassion lest they fall into the shadows of Hell; thus he alone suffered and fought the terribly hard and cruel battle on the tree of Holy Cross. His shirt of mail was broken and pierced in five places, namely his five grievous wounds received of his free will in his sweet body for pity of us and all humanity.79
Whatever the overlaps in soteriological ideas, the persistence of two major theories of salvation and their frequent fusion remain highly informative. Christ's prowess joins his suffering. Knightly imaginations could readily identify with each, for the warriors could picture themselves triumphing with the victorious savior as milites Christi and suffering like him in hard chivalric life that was a form of imitatio Christi. Their good work was modeled on Christ's salvific sufferings emphasized in satisfaction theology.
Painful awareness of distortions and paradoxes must have struck some thoughtful observers then as they will now. Cultural alternating current of high voltage easily leaped the gaps between opposed ideas. Movement was constant and rapid in both directions. If the knights piously performed imitatio Christi, their tendency was to clothe Christ in military dress. The model of the heroic, nonviolent life had lost its key qualifier. If the historical consequences can be debated, the benefits to knighthood were undoubted. This will be apparent, in the next chapter, in the notion of the chivalric as forming an ordo, with sacred work to perform in the divine plan.