Christianity's theory, or perhaps we should say theories, of signification and mediation were hardly static at any time in its history, but they were undergoing seminal change in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as theologians probed the mystery of sacramental causality. 18 Some, Aquinas for example, argued that the sacraments of the New Covenant efficiunt quod significant ("effect what they signify") because of value inherent in them. 19 Other theologians, notably Franciscans like Bonaventure and nominalists like Pierre d'Ailly, argued that the sacraments were thus efficacious because of value ascribed to them by God through his covenant (pactum) with man: in the words of William Courtenay (1971:119), "de potentia ordinata . . . the sacraments effect grace ex pacto, that is, they operate within and because of God's ordained system, his covenant with the Church.... Theological causation, de potentia ordinata, is . . . exclusively ex pacto or sine qua non . . . in the sense that man's merit or the sacraments are signs or tokens that will unfailingly and directly produce their effect because God has committed himself to accord such a value to them." Courtenay and Oberman, among others, have remarked on the extraordinary importance to this shift in theory of contemporary economic change and upheaval:
Behind the initial argument for sine qua non causality and Thomas's rejection of it lay two conflicting theories of monetary value within a metallistic system. One theory, supported by Thomas and dominant throughout the Middle Ages, maintained that money must consist of a precious metal or other substance having, because of its composition, a value equivalent to the commodities for which it is exchanged, allowance being made for shifts in market value as a result of supply and demand. I he second theory, appearing toward the middle of the thirteenth century and distrusted by Thomas, maintained that money need not "consist of" but need only be "covered by" a commodity having value apart from its monetary role. (Courtenay 1972: 188)Oberman's incisive characterization (1977:167) also deserves quotation:
Die von Duns Scotus entwickelte und von den Nominalisten ubernommene Akzeptationslehre--die Rechtfertigung durch Gottes {28/29} "Annahme" der an und fur sich ungenugenden menschlichen Gerechtigkeit--findet eine deutliche Parallele in dem valor extrinsecus, d.h. in dem zugeschriebenen Wert des Geldes.It is in such an economic and theological context as this that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem concerned with covenants (pacta) if ever there was one, explores the margin between signs and sacraments. The poem moves from a theory of inherent value, evinced chiefly in the pentangle, to a theory of ascribed value, evinced chiefly in the green girdle. Youthful idealists, like the folk who inhabit Arthur's court (54), believe quite readily in the inherent value of human signs, such as pentangles and chivalric manners. It seems characteristic of youth to take such things very seriously. Mature stewards of the ideal, however, such as the humbled and circumcised Gawain, accept that all signs of human institution are arbitrary, relative, comparative, ascriptive. Youthful idealists (childgered and of brayn wylde) are particularly vulnerable to idolatry because of their devotion to the inherent value of signs; mature stewards of the ideal are much less vulnerable, without necessarily being cynical, since they can recognize the arbitrariness of a value without mocking the value. Mature stewards of the ideal know that all signs are separated from their signified by the distance of their arbitrary institution; at the same time, however, they also know that this distance does not necessarily preclude faith in the possibility of meaning. Moreover, in addition to such faith is an exception to the rule of arbitrary institution: namely, those signs that are sacraments by virtue of the pactum that God made with man through His only begotten Son. These signs, as sacraments, efficiunt quod significant. The mature steward of the ideal, then, is neither cynic nor infidel. He is, rather, someone who recognizes the quandary of the ideal--an absolute that is nonetheless arbitrary. He is someone who, in the poem's sense of things, has been circumcised.The acceptation doctrine, developed by Duns Scotus and taken up too by the nominalists--the doctrine, in other words, that man's righteousness, insufficient in and of itself, is justified by God's "acceptance" of it--finds a clear parallel in the concept of valor extrinsecus, that is, in the concept of the ascribed value of money.
Circumcision constitutes a very special case of sacramentality, one that is directly relevant to Sir Gawain's narrative motion from a theory of inherent to a theory of ascriptive value. Circumcision is a sacrament instituted ante legem and operative sub lege (see chap. 2 at n. 6). It {29/30} is not a sacrament of the new pactum but a sacrament of the old pactum. As such it is the sacramentum Mediatoris in carne venturi ("sacrament of the Mediator who is [yet] to come in the flesh"). 20 Circumcision in the flesh of Abraham and his seed is a sign and a sign only of their faith in the Mediator to come. 21 Therefore, circumcision is the sacrament that retains and makes visible the essential differentiae of the sign: it is radically separated from its signified--in carne venturi--and it remains the presence of an absence--a mark or a trace in the flesh, of a reality absent temporally and materially (cf. Saussure 1966:123). Circumcision is a sacrament or rite, therefore, openly significatory and mediatory; as such, it is the rite through which Gawain the youthful idealist is finally instructed in the mature understanding and thus stewardship of signs and ideals. Circumcision is a rite that emphasizes the separateness of sign and signified; just so Gawain, who had collapsed the ideal that he signified into identity with his own person, its sign, is circumcised so as to emerge from the ritual wearing a sign, the syngne of surfet and token of vntrawþe which is a wisp of cloth indisputably separate from its signified. Gawain's error was finally the error of idolatry, the deliberate confusion of sign and signified. He is liberated from his error and purified through a rite or sacrament that was instituted, Aquinas tells us, against idolatry. 22
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was composed in a world that had restored to rightful eminence in human thought the radical Otherness of God who, still, from that Otherness, covenants with man to love and cherish him. The poem was composed in a world where the armor of Platonic idealism had begun to show chinks. It was composed in a world where signification had become just one more human institution contingent upon the benevolence of the Holy Other. From such a world, the poem gathered a vision of faith-- faith as fragile and as delicate as the media that exchange it between man and man, between man and God. For such a world, the poem figures in the circumcision of Gawain the restoration of mediation and faith to the court of Arthur, the return of the admirabile commercium of the Mediator whose birth that court was celebrating the day the Green Knight cried, "`Wher is . . . / þe gouernour of þis gyng?'" (224-25).