St. Bernard's phrase from his Sermon 84 on the Song of Songs, which appears in the title of the lecture and cannot be translated without weakening its deliberate roughness and rhythm ("it is not by the movement of the feet, but by desires, it is not by walking, but by desiring that we seek God"), is of course aimed at pilgrimages, traditionally forbidden or discouraged for monks, and not at the adventurous wanderings of the knight in search of the Grail. However, since Etienne Gilson's famous article on the influence of Cistercian spirituality on the Quest for the Holy Grail, it has been possible to refer to
to Saint Bernard to shed light on both the novelistic path and the puzzling meaning of Grail literature. To Saint Bernard alone? Jean-René Valette's recent masterly La Pensée du Graal. Fiction littéraire et théologie (XIIe-XIIIe siècle) (2008), points out or shows that other influences - that of Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, the Victorians and, more generally, the theological thought inherited from Augustinianism - can be taken into consideration, even if the reservations or adjustments that some have thought necessary to make to Gilson's position are often ill-founded.
The perspective of the lecture, however, will be different and less ambitious. The question he poses is why the search for the Grail takes the form of chivalric wandering and adventure. Why chivalric adventure rather than pilgrimage, or the contemplation of the hermitage or cloister? Why action as a path to contemplation? Because the novel form demands it, because the Grail exists only in novels of chivalry, whose readers must be seduced? Because medieval literature tends to confuse narration with displacement, and to consider that the story only moves forward if the characters do too? Too simple, almost tautological answers. After all, these novels neither ignore nor disdain pilgrimage or religious life. They readily find their roots or their culmination there. And yet everything revolves around
the Round Table, which brings together King Arthur's knights, is boldly linked to the other two saving tables, the Last Supper and the Grail. So, even after so many well-informed and penetrating works, it's not pointless to return to the subject of militia Christi, the ambiguity of the word miles and its literary consequences, earthly chivalry and celestial chivalry. But this is not enough. We may well wonder whether all the novels really do exalt the quest for the Grail through chivalry, and whether some, including the one to which we give this title, including the first of all, that of Chrétien de Troyes, do not, on the contrary, see in the chivalric quest for the Grail an error and a blindness, the derisory substitution of the "movement of the feet" for the desire of God.