Romantic Love and the Arthurian Myth

AbstractBoth Lewis and Williams integrate romantic love with the Arthurian legend, but within different world views. Williams’ presentation interweaves a story of love with his theory of transmutation of energy, as well as with the achieving of the Holy Grail and so mystical union with God. In his spiritual geography, he draws on the Kabbala, which offers gateways to divine glory. Achieving the Grail is a consciousness in which one can know the world as sacrament of the glory of God, or ‘co-inherence’. Lewis, however, places this within a strict hierarchy deriving from Christian Neoplatonism, and interprets Williams’ poems through a scheme of active principles and passive recipients. Convergence appears with Lewis’ identification in Williams’ poems of a union of two ways of approach to God. Like Williams, Lewis regards this as ‘co-inherence’, but only later does he conclude that the ‘positive’ way finds the immanence of God’s glory everywhere.