Today, I wandered away from my group to indulge one of my favorite literary pass times – Arthuriana. The 26th International Conference on Medievalism was hosted at UNM this weekend and took as its theme Medievalism, Arthuriana, and Landscapes of Enchantment. Our own Anita Obermeier was on the conference organizing committee and was a presenter in the session on “Medievalism in Renaissance Courts and Theatres.” Given my vocational background in law and my undergraduate focus on the Renaissance, this was the session I attended.

Arthur became a preoccupation of mine, not as a result of studying Le Mort d’ Arthur or such other Arthurian classics, but from reading a twentieth century rendering of the tale that was written from a much more historical perspective. Relying on such scant historical accounts as exist, Rosemary Sutcliff – the invalid daughter of a British naval admiral – took a look at Arthur in a 4th century, military and nationalist context. The book, The Sword at Sunset, engaged my imagination by depicting a believable, human Arthur in believable human circumstances. Sutcliff does a remarkable job unraveling the mythos bestowed on him by the medievalists to postulate “real” events that might have inspired such lore. While none of the three presentations that I attended examined the “historical” Arthur, two of them engaged the concepts of reality and authority in ways that brought both Sutcliff and pragmatism to mind.

The first paper of the series discussed the illumination of medieval legal documents. Using slides, the presenter pointed out intricacies in the design of the decorated initial letter of plea documents, in most cases a “p” for the word “plea,” which show Henry VII enthroned and circumscribed by the branches of a tree. The trees, in various samples, incorporate birds, dragons, Cardinals’ hats and armed hairy wild men. The meaning of these beasts and symbols, which was too intricate to reproduce here, was largely explained in terms of Henry’s desire to authorize the power of his reign by showing his descendancy from Arthur. As the French kings did with Charlemagne, and the popes/Catholicism did with Peter, so the British did with Arthur.

The second paper, presented by Dr. Obermeier, looked at the magical birth of Arthur’s advisor and mentor, Merlin. She used the Renaissance play The Birth of Merlin as a context for discussing how Merlin’s birth, which is always depicted as magical in the sense that only his mother was human, changed from medieval times through the Renaissance. Roughly, the trajectory goes from a blameless, beguiled nun to a whore who invites rape by a daemon; but, the twisted “immaculate conception” of Merlin, regardless of the character of his mother, reflects a societal move from the sacred to the secular. The study reveals how sacred myths were tapped to legitimize and empower secular authority.

So, enters pragmatism. Several thoughts occurred. First, I was tempted to see the move from sacred to secular as an “evolutionary” shift from “T”ruth to “t”ruth. But, this idea ran into trouble as soon as I remembered secular “T”ruths such as Henry VIII legitimizing his “administration” with lineage to a mythical hero, and Hitler’s “Big Lie,” and LBJ’s “Great Society.” The idea just didn’t hold up. Then another occurred: given the persistence of man’s drive for authorizing power, pragmatism must be profoundly radical - it challenges a fundamental, immutable human characteristic. David and Goliath. But, this notion didn’t work either. It is undone by the Sophists. As we know the tug of war between legitimacy and livelihood has been going on since Plato and Protagoras and, to date, neither has been pulled (at least not permanently) into the mud. So, after pondering the fallacies provoked by my venture into Arthuriana, I have come to rest, for the moment, on the following question: Is there is some “gravitational” force that holds sophistic/pragmatic and platonic/authoritative impulsion in a forever, yin-yang, embrace? It seems unlikely that power and the drive to claim the higher authority will ever be absent from the human condition. But the same may be said of social problem solving, communal discourse, and the democratic urge. One is forceful and alluring; the other persuasive and commonplace, but both abide. Could it be that the fulcrum between the two is itself a “T”ruth?