In the Grail section, the underlying weakness and futility of Arthur's court, which up to now Malory has only suggested by ironic juxtapositions, is laid out openly: Merlin's Round Table is a figure for the world, in medieval Christian doctrine the source of three dangerous temptations — "lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life" (see 1 John 2:16), that is, sinful concupiscence, covetousness, and overweening pride. Whatever the original function of the lady in Arthur's world, she has become in the end not the genteel embodiment of social judgment, but the object of sexual lust; whatever the original function of knightly accouterments, titles, and lands, they have degenerated into things sinfully coveted; and chivalric heroism has in the same way degenerated into sinful pride.
Along with these central Christian tenets, a number of less central Christian virtues are introduced in the Grail section to comment on what is wrong with Arthur's world. It is a world which cannot distinguish clearly between appearance and reality, or, in Christian language, outer appearance and inner meaning — surface and allegory. It is a world which thrives on legalized murder, forgetting the law "Thou shalt not kill;" a world in which fathers war with sons (one of the leitimotivs in Isaiah). Or to put all this another way, it is the eye-for-an-eye world of the Old Law, which must be overthrown by the New Law of charity.
The lucidity and conviction of Malory's Grail section are no doubt in large measure reflections of the personal religious feeling of the writer; but they are also effects of brilliant technique. Nearly everything Malory has done before, nearly every symbol and convention he has established earlier, he repeats here in a new context — the context of spiritual quest. For instance the convention of the borrowed shield, established in "Launcelot du Lake" and developed in every conceivable way in later tales, gets its final twist in the Galahad story: Galahad jousts with no shield at all, protected by grace (like Launcelot among the lions, later in the Grail section), then gets his red cross shield from an agent of God.
