IMMERSED as I am at the moment in all things Arthurian, I am struck by the special significance that Pentecost seems to have in the early narratives. There is clearly something about the feast of Pentecost which our forebears found especially resonant when speaking of “The Matter of Britain”, as the entire cycle of Arthurian legend used to be called.

The emphasis on Pentecost is set within a keen medieval awareness of the liturgical year. In the matter of pulling the sword out of the stone — usually a one-off event in modern retellings — in Malory’s account, Arthur is made to repeat the feat on a series of successive feast days: Christmas, Twelfth Night, Candlemas, Easter, and finally and decisively at his crowning, on Pentecost.

Pentecost is also given as the day Arthur marries Guinevere, and the knights, gathered at the Round Table (which was part of Guinevere’s dowry) for the first time, take the famous “Pentecostal oath”, which sets out the new code of chivalry. Malory gives this as: “Never to commit outrage or murder, always to flee treason, and to give mercy to those who asked for mercy, upon pain of the forfeiture of their honour and status as a knight of King Arthur’s forever more. He charged them always to help ladies, damsels, gentlewomen, and widows, and never to commit rape, upon pain of death. . . So all the knights of the Round Table, both young and old, swore to uphold this oath, and every year at the high feast of Pentecost they renewed their oath.” There are, I feel, still some who might do well to take that oath.

After the coronation, the wedding, and the oath comes perhaps the most significant, certainly the most mysterious and numinous of all these Pentecostal episodes: the arrival, first, of Galahad, the Grail Knight, and then of the Grail itself at the feast of Pentecost. Here, the emphasis is unmistakable: there is a thunderstorm, a rushing wind that shuts all the doors and windows, and “all they were alighted of the grace of the Holy Ghost”.

Interestingly, the effect of this “alighting”, according to Malory, is not the gift of tongues — indeed, the knights are struck dumb with wonder — but a gift of clarified vision, of transfiguration. It’s as if for a moment they see each other as they might be in glory, and it is only then, when their vision of each other is transfigured, that they see the Holy Grail: “Then began every knight to behold other, and either saw other, by their seeming, fairer than ever they saw afore. Not for then there was no knight might speak one word a great while, and so they looked every man on other as they had been dumb. Then there entered into the hall the Holy Grail covered with white samite, but there was none might see it, nor who bare it.”

There is much to ponder here, especially if we intend to receive communion on the feast of Pentecost. The sending of the Spirit is the pledge of the glory yet to come, and tongues of flame anticipate the haloes of the saints in glory. A gift that we might well ask of the Spirit is the gift to see one another for a moment sub specie aeternitatis, “from the standpoint of eternity”, so that we might find, as C. S. Lewis wrote, that “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”