The Lovely Dragon of Choice
The Freedom Not to Be Free
by Anthony Esolen
The simple knight Percival, on the quest for the Holy Grail, had not been much of a planner. Had he been, he would not have lost the trail of his desired companion, Galahad. He would not have lost both his own horse and the horse he persuaded a stable-boy to lend him. He would not now be sitting, arms across his knees, on a bare cliff overlooking the sea, expectant and hungry and disgusted with himself and his poor fortune.
But all things come to them that wait. Into sight silently draws a ship, draped in black silk, with a maiden of radiant beauty aboard, eager to speak to Percival and to him alone. She asks him the obvious question, “Percival, what are you doing here? Who brought you to this mountain, so lonely that your rescue hangs on a quirk of chance, and so utterly desolate that you will die of hunger and distress before anyone notices your presence?”
It is a rule of the questing life: Beware of maidens in black silk. Those maidens ask reasonable questions like this. Gentle and reasonable are the slopes to eternal loss. It is a broad and well-designed highway that leads to perdition, conveniently banked for the long bends; and precisely because it is apparently so capacious, so easy, so answerable to just what we like, many travel it. One could go down that road in one’s sleep, and many they are that do.
For hidden in the sweet words of the maiden is a denial of the quest itself, the quest for the deepest mysteries. A modern reader may knit his brows and ask, practically enough, how can one be on a quest when one is stuck on a cliff? Surely a man on a quest needs Questing Supplies, to be purchased at a discount at the Questing Depot; or maybe Questing credentials, a B.Q. at least, to be purchased at usurious rates from the nearest coven of charlatans (a mossy dungeon in the Rhineland, let us say, or Harvard), so that he may be equipped with the most advanced Questing Strategies, or at least that he may have practiced upon Standardized Quests.
Modern man is afraid of the quest, and is not particularly fond of hunger and cliffs, either. He will not see that the very point of an adventure is that you cannot plan it. And to be in quest of the Holy Grail—that is, the mystery of Christ made manifest in our world under the humble appearances of bread and wine—is to be prepared for the appearance, sudden and awful, even on a bare rock and when one’s stomach knots with hunger, of the ineffable God.
Man’s Flight
To suggest, as this maiden does, that Percival’s fate hangs on a “quirk of chance” is to deny Providence, surely—but it is also to cast contempt upon the unforeseen, that which, willed by God in the unplumbable depths of his foreknowledge, must strike us as a kind of chance. Modern man is in flight from chance, because modern man is in flight from life. A denial of the bliss of the accidental befits a carnal imagination that sees Percival’s forced fast as mere hunger, and hunger as foreboding death, and death as nothingness.
“Do not be quite so adventurous,” whispers this very modern young lady in silk. “Take heed for the morrow.”
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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