A question of life, death, and ethics in the 14th Century:

What happens when a Kantian mind meets a Machievellian body?

Sir Gawain lied and kept the green girdle, so what? He wanted to live. Is that so wrong?

>From the first time I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have been troubled by the question of whether or not Sir Gawain was right or wrong in lying in order to keep the girdle and save his life. He was torn between honesty and his own life. The question he was forced to ask himself was "what did he value more: his honesty or his life? Many scholars have struggled with this question for centuries, as well as the questions of why Gawain made the decision that he did, how guilty he "really" felt for his actions, and what the poet is trying to tell the reader through Gawain's ordeal.

When I was growing up I was told to always be honest. I was only "grounded" twice in my lifetime: once for not telling my mom where I went one afternoon and once for telling her a lie. I was in Kindergarten and broke a candle (don't ask me why or how). I blamed it on the cat. I couldn't stand the pressure of my mother's intense interrogatio

Moralists turned various occasions into opportunities to reflect on death. John Mirk's sermon for the Feast of the Circumcision moves from considering Christ's mortality to exhorting listeners to think on their own.... Images of decaying flesh provide the most dramatic examples of earthly transience. The corpse as memento mori appears early in a Christian context, transforming the Egyptian and Roman image from a carpe diem exhortation to an admonishment not to sacrifice eternal happiness for the fleeting pleasures of the body. The image pervades the later Middle Ages. (60-61)

Clearly a strict respect for the truth... would require that Gawain should hand over the green girdle to Bertilak or perhaps refuse to accept it in the first place. In not doing so because he loved his life too much he was placing his love for himself above his love for truth and therefore God.(321)

According to Clein the fourteenth century culture points out to that another benefit of joining the Christian club is that it does not offer one of those measly life-time memberships. By joining this club, all members automatically receive an eternal warranty on the human soul at no extra cost. A life-time warranty expires way to early:

It is obvious why Gawain accuses himself of "cowardness" (ln 2508) and "untruthfulness" (ln.2509), but why would he charge himself with "covetousness" (2508)? Hills recognizes that in order to understand why Gawain as well as what the poet is trying to tell us we "must examine the medieval concept of covetousness" (313). Hills quotes St. Thomas Aquinas from Summa Theologiae:

It was believed that the pleasures of the court threaten men by distracting them from the "truth" that the corpses can now understand.

A modern reader of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight should gain an understanding of what death means within the "cultural milieu" which surrounded the Gawain writer. Wendy Clein in her book "Concepts of Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" describes the chivalric approach to death as an uncomfortable and awkward marriage between the warrior's code on one side and Christianity of the the antithetical side. The warrior code calls for the knight to "defy death in acts of heroism and thereby gain worldly fame" (55). However, the Christian doctrine demands that the knight surrender worldly fame and accept death as a "passage from this imperfect world to eternity" (55).

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Approximate Word count = 2766
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)