"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

I recently went to the Renaissance Festival at the request of some friends. It was my first time attending since I was a young boy and it hadn't changed at all from my memories. Well, there was a centaur this year. That was novel. But the older chain-mail maidens were still uncomfortably overweight. The ballsy balladeers still swiveled around half-inebriated toward closing time. The schlockly wares (dragon's crystals and other genuine articles) were all out of my price range. And, yes, there were quite a few young ladies garbed in fur-lined leather bikinis and sculpted armor. The only thing I didn't understand was why I had to wait another twelve months till it came around again - and why we couldn't live in surcoats and lederhosen all year round.

So here's the deal. I'm a bit 'off' in terms of centuries. When I see a good medieval flick (unconsciously aware of lurking anachronisms), I don't see a big disconnect between the mannerisms of yesteryear and today. Now I freely admit my provincialism and how being raised in the bosom of Southern hospitality makes things like opening doors for people (especially ladies) rather like preferring ice in my tea. It's just natural. Hand me a sword and I'll fight a sinister engagement to protect the honor of an innocent. I can shrug off this postmodern coil with its engendered ambiguities with the greatest of ease. The problem comes when someone tries to call such behavior 'gentlemanly' or, what's infinitely worse, dubbing the gallant in question as the 'last of the true knights.'

Why this label brushes me the wrong way I can't exactly say. It is similar to the strained romanticism that drips from your standard 'costume dramas,' the sentiment pervading our Victorian view of the Middle Ages, and the heresiarch of all anachronisms: the attitude of wholly segregating the past from the present. To those who lived in those times, however, with their perfunctory duels and striated ecclesiastics, their drama was perfectly normal. They were not nearly as sentimental of themselves, calling each other 'shining knights' only if they were too heady from the equivalent of their romance novels. When the times expected it, whenever a fellow laid down his coat over a puddle for a lady to walk over, one did not expect fireworks to go off. No one should draw attention to himself at the cost of others, and the same goes for epochs. In the view of the Elizabethans, the Romans would have talked, dressed, and acted more or less like anyone of their own period. They drew no distinction between their times. Nor did they single out any fellow as particularly wonderful for doing what was expected of all men. And this is what I would like for us to get back to when one good deed doesn't awake a whole hullabaloo.

It is an uncertain feeling to regard something differently from the sentiments of the run of men, but there comes an immense satisfaction when one sees his words mirrored in treatises centuries older. I thought I was the only one who saw the evils of capitalism and absurdities of communism until coming across Chesterton and Belloc. No less a romanticist than Sir Walter Scott has provided us with one of the best essays on chivalry, in recognition of which I may just quote at random. "In every age and country valour is held in esteem, and the more rude the period and the place, the greater respect is paid to boldness of enterprise and success in battle. But it was peculiar to the institution of Chivalry, to blend military valour with the strongest passions which actuate the human mind, the feelings of devotion and those of love. The Greeks and Romans fought for liberty or for conquest, and the knights of the middle ages for God and for their ladies."

Perhaps I am in love with chivalry, after all; but, uncommon urchin that I am, I prefer that it be called by any other slang than that, and that its extraordinary appearances in today's pluralism be not only more ordinary, but expected once again. In fact, I would that we be so familiar with these customs that, reminiscent of our own relatives, they show us their contemptible and unsightly idiosyncrasies as well.

And History is less kind than the grey twilight

Perhaps there lies the balance in any relationship. Let us examine where such ideas arose in the first place to see what first impressions chivalry confides. From the word itself we have the suggestion of horsemen, raiding men of arms, the standard militia-type soldiery of the day. As knights, they were a far cry from the lantern-jawed Lancelot portrayed in Hollywood. It's a common tale in history. Men whose profession is, well, manslaughter tend to become restless during peacetime. One thinks of Robin Hood, whose original exploits were more along the lines of the Sheriff of Nottingham, shooting hapless innocents in the back. The thrones of Europe were apparently unable to touch many outlaws, vanishing as they did into their convenient forest retreats. This was the case with the brigands.

What's worse, with the barbarian populace 'converted' into what Scott calls "the religion which breathes nothing but love to our neighbour and forgiveness of injuries", these tribes were suddenly disarmed of their former warlike disposition and easy prey for invaders. Now what was Roman Catholicism to do about these unsavory characters, the roving highwayman, the pacified denizen, and the irate heathen invader? If we're going off the Gospels, they ought to pray and fast and proselytize these gangsters. However, as was often the case, Catholicism sought to invest itself with secular powers and came up with a sure-fire scheme to rid christendom of two villains at once, the brigands at home and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire abroad.

It was a simple plan. Sanctify brigands as good Christian men, toss in a few indulgences, and enlist them in the Middle East conflict. This combined the most advantageous marks of the pagan and Christian together, not too holy to slay an infidel, but not too ignorant to go to Mass. It certainly got the fighting class to go play outside away from the breakables in Europe. Scott proceeds, "The effect which this union of religious and military zeal was likely to produce in every other case, save that of defensive war, could not but be unfavourable to the purity of the former." By legitimizing mercenaries, they began a precedent that settled honor by means of violence. Thus by the millennium the interests of Catholicism no longer frowned upon the profession of arms and England was permanently wrapped up in Continental affairs with the birth of the slightly oxymoronic 'Christian knight'. It is ironic that moderns deride the knightly code alongside the worst of paganism and Christianity, "which, having softened the ferocity of a barbarous age, was now to fall into disuse, as too extravagant for an enlightened one." By now even the scant and misunderstood dinosaur, the "first of the ways of God" mind you, was fair game for every St. George. I know we can't handle this now, but the dragon does play a primary role as the supreme antagonist to the knight, even though it is man who is chastened and the dragon that is afforded a poetic tribute by the Magisterium in the Book of Job. There is a marked difference between the heroism of Beowulf, who man-wrestled the monsters of the ancient world, and St. George who cantered up to a paltry specimen and skewered it with a ten-foot pole-arm. In brief, as the monsters diminished, men had to change their schema for braggadocio.

This schema was intrinsically reserved for the nobility, the class of men whose livelihood could sustain the time, training, and equipment required of a knight and his retainers. Though these men razed Europe in a war that lasted a hundred years for nothing so much as their own glory and selfishness, the elitist sentiment is not entirely wrong. It is mostly, but not entirely misplaced for knighthood to fall on the rich. But what are we to think of the inspirations from which these original knights drew their strength?

Philosophy has her say

Quick on the heels of the Crusades to free the Holy Land from Muslim control came the Commercial Revolution. It was partly for the protection of trade routes that the wars were started in the first place so it is only fitting that they turn a profit in the end. Added safety allowed for more traffic and soon masses of pilgrims, merchants, and hippies were on to the Orient, anticipating the discoveries in the 1400s in the New World. This connection challenged Europe more than all the attrition from the Crusades. Here many a troubadour learned of other song cycles and courtly themes. It was they who first taught the beginnings of courtly (read: romantic) love and such epics featuring Charlemagne, Havelock the Dane, and, of course, King Arthur in his more motley, if rather Frenchified suit. Now many developments were occurring during this time. Cathedrals and universities and such began to dot the landscape. But more to the point, Marianism or Mariolatry was on the rise. The same themes troubadours learned from the east, to be specific: from Sufi love cults, began to color Catholicism with matriarchal motifs.

At this point our faithful readers might question whether women were truly exalted on a pedestal as is so often claimed. I will not belabor the point. One need only read an account from the times to see a vast swing in the estimation of womankind. Remember to whom the Gawain swore his five-fold fealty? Even the high Queen of heaven. Those cathedrals I mentioned earlier had at their head a little apse called a Lady Chapel so that, in reality, every church was Notre Dame. Even if the primary exchange of honor was between two men, there is every indication that the goodly esteem the Goths had of their women and of chastity was now idolized to the point where no violence, not even that of sexual union may come to it. Such a premium is always the mark of misogyny. That is, insomuch as chastity is the end-all, the sexuality of a woman was not revered. Marianism is really the other ascetic extreme to pornography, one valuing the worship only for her chastity, the other for her lack of chastity. So in the secular poems, this eastern mystical element of star-crossed lovers in the pangs of futility, a la Tristan and Isolde, this thing of the lover's free-will and all the subtleties and magical plot devices that went along to confound it, was entirely subversive to what the social mores had come to expect of relationships and marriage.

To be frank, fornication was unabashedly in vogue. I say 'unabashedly' for it has been for all time, if somewhat more circumspect and relegated to certain areas of town. The more gnostic of the clergy had had their day denouncing carnal pleasure. Now it was time for Tristan to show just what sport could be made of the prudish in society. The stories, or more properly 'lays', contained key principles in how a man was to relate to a married woman. It was a revolution in etiquette. Soon exhaustive manuals were being written on how a courtier relates to his lady.

But the effect was mixed. "The truth is that the rift between the worlds is irremediable," Lewis admitted in The Allegory of Love. Two extremes fought: the pseudo-spirituality of a pusillanimous, monastic celibacy and the eastern courtly eroticism made so platonic a quake that the cultural structure could not support it. Lancelot took love and emotion as though it were merely some external trapping he could girdle around Guinevere and not get bit. But human will is not made for such lofty heights as the white stag bounds upon and chivalry turned out to be the veritable Tree of Knowledge, undoing her hierarchy and his legalist codes. Holding their eyes to the stars, they failed to sight the pit below.

If Ethics were a lady, I'd kiss her

Here is where the silver screen version of chivalry shows its blemishes. One is often thrilled to hear of men resounding the virtues of the white knight, his staunch daring-do, a good helping of charity, and other assorted traits of fortitude, honesty, faith, and gentleness. Surely this was a vast improvement on our aforementioned roving mercenaries. Many herald this paragon of masculinity as an answer for the erosion of public decency today.

I have several problems with this. The implications are that a new set of rules will keep the primal side of man in check and encourage niceties all around. But what's wrong with those laws we already have and fail to keep, the Ten Commandments writ by the finger of God, the Golden Rule, the four cardinal virtues of the Greeks, or even the velleity of Kant's universal imperative? If Christianity were ever applied sacrificially, there would be no need to "civilize" the barbarians, be they of 12th or 21st century variety and where it is individuals in its primitive purity, there is the Kingdom of God in microcosm. Camelot pales in comparison. There is no improvement now or in the future that can be made to Christ's command to love one another as He has loved us, even unto this last.

For one, chivalry is merely man-made values. In the epistle to the Colossians, the Apostle refers to "the commandments and teachings of men" as "things destined to perish with use … matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence." Let me just say that it was impossible, as far as chivalry goes, for Lancelot not to have betrayed his king by bedding Guinevere. His religion, if you will, was courtly love, which was of no value against fleshly indulgence. He foolishly chose to isolate his honor near his heart, instead of with Christ. He followed his code only too well, to the unvirtuous, inordinate, and inappropriate level of affection due to his lord, and thus to womankind.

C.S. Lewis spoke of this practice in The Abolition of Man. It is the good intentioned reformer (the "Innovator") who, distressed at the progression of decadence and the decline of taboos, reminds the world of certain ethical standards. In the end, however, his half measures are worse than the disease. He has divorced the branch and made it the tree. "What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies,' all consist of fragments from within [Natural Law] itself, arbitrarily wretched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation." If you consider that there were by far more reveling Wiccans than chevaliers at Ren Fest and the simplicity of their rede (or of Libertarians for that matter): "An it harm none, do what thou wilt," it is clipping at the very edges of the limb of self-gratification and worshipping it for the root. Their rudest pagan forbearers knew this as no new doctrine and the wisest of them would have seen that when it has been sown before, its epicurean fruit is ever more sickly and incapable of imparting such sustenance as ordo amoris.

As Matthew Arnold wrote, "Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it may be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon on the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up." A man can build a religion around hard-work or honesty, but the center is due to collapse. By themselves, virtues turn to vice. Soon hard work alone has made an absentee workaholic father. The well-meant warnings of a friend soon turn intrusive and judgmental. We make a religion around the verse "God is love," forgetting that He is 'a consuming fire' and many other things beside.

The second issue here is that all man-made rules fail to understand the reasoning behind the Ten Commandments and Christ's refinements to them in the Sermon on the Mount. Neither Moses, on behalf of God, nor Christ, being God Himself, ever intended the tablets of stone to be perfectly kept or fulfilled by man. This is the fundamental dress rehearsal for the New Testament message. The whole point of the Moral Law was to be a perfect mirror of God's holy standards ("Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect") showing man to be the dirt-begotten, inimical creature he is ("All your righteousness is as filthy rags"); Hence, the coming of Messiah, the end or fulfillment of the law. Jesus came to live the perfect life we never could live, and pay the ultimate price of sin we deserved to pay.

The third dilemma with the ethics of chivalry and courtly love should be the most obvious. It is downright immoral. Chivalry constitutes a system of honor incompatible with the spirit of the Beatitudes whereby one suffers all things for Christ and rejoices in being persecuted for righteousness' sake wherein is found the perfection of obedience. Courtly love, by definition, is adulterous. A knight errant chooses a married lady to whom he dedicates his honor. He goes about wooing her by divers and sundry means, but never to consummate the deal. It is both too carnal and too ethereal, raising earthly pursuits heavenward. Jesus, however, brought His kingdom to earth. He did not say love your neighbor's wife. The love and honor he codified was not restricted to classes and the way of the matroned soldier. His love was universal in scope and clear in its addressee.

The type of love perpetuated by the romantics is uxorious and demeaning, elevating the feminine in undue areas and neglecting it where it matters most: in its gender relation to the image of God Himself.

What then can be done? Back in college, my professor of government (or political science if you must) was a big fan of the political theory of Augustine and Aquinas. In teaching us of the 'study of good government', the issue invariably led back to what is 'Good' in the first place. From there it is a short distance to discerning the root of the discussion. The definition of goodness can only be measured by another set of standards above and beyond our limited reason and subjective experience. Now we are in theological waters. Politics is a subsection of Ethics, which is always subordinate to Theology. Quite simply, good government, whether in families or in nations, is found in the nature of God.

This is where all questions of masculinity and femininity rest. In light of this, man's social behavior is not defined by whether it allows dignity or equality to women; it addresses his relationship to God. In practice therefore, man derives his image of behavior from what glorifies God and in what way God revealed Himself as a peerless lover. In the medieval lays, curiously, the woman is technically superior, that is, above. In Scripture and nature, we have the opposite. This modern proclamation of gender equality is an absurdity not to be found in the realm of nature. All packs have an alpha male. In every squad there is a captain. Every country has its head. These are not instances of preferential 'sexism' built into the fabric of the universe, but an executive necessity and a relational mercy. The equality evident here is one of essence, value, and worth, not function, role, or position. In advocating gender equality, no one seriously thinks there will ever be a dual-presidency. In the end, one is always the leader. Modernity posits that leader as a woman; tradition and nature posit the leader as a man. There is no real belief in both being the leader, despite the soothing neutrality of the phrase "gender equality."

In her essay "Evangelical Femininity: A Curtsy in the Cosmic Dance (1 Peter 3)" Mary Romero notes, "There is a beauty and harmony in such a dance that can only be attained in the distinction of roles. Two leaders couldn't comply and two followers could never begin." If we would cease associating words like "superior" and "head" in terms of domineering moral judgments and more in terms of a principal or function, the plain reading of the world would reveal what value flows from order. You want to be respected, truly? Then act towardly in relation to your elders, peers, and posterity. Wisdom is known by her daughters. Or, as Miss Romero concludes, "Submission is not merely a 'cultural' but an imperishable beauty. . . . From the very beginning woman was in a hupo relation to man, Eve being the very first holy woman to trust in God by submitting to her husband."

Despite being compelled to use "very" as a superlative, she argues it well. What ugliness came from the Fall was that instant when Adam looked on and simply abdicated his headship while the serpent beguiled his wife. Though she sinned first, he was the one rightly held responsible by God. You see, all this talk about knightly honor is helpful to a point, but, as John Eldridge points out, we don't need nice guys. We need mighty men of God who are not ashamed to call down fire on false prophets, or tell kings what they think of their incestuous infidelity, or crush the serpent's head, even if that means submitting proudly to the disgrace of a dungeon and the humiliation of a beheading or the curse of a cross. It was not for love or duty to woman that martyrs have done this throughout all ages, but soli Deo Gloria.

When Lucy, in Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, proposed that she was, perhaps, brave enough to fight, the point was irrelevant: "Battles are ugly when women fight." This is only a stone of offense to those that pride equality above the morality of sending a little girl off to war, which is just what the Europeans did in the Children's Crusade because of their skewed view of innocence and honor. What do we make of this curious line that was predictably, though inexcusably, cut out of the movie? — not only cut, but distorted to say that battles are ugly, which is not a sentiment Lewis would agree with. Were one to argue otherwise, that battles are proper or dignified or glorious when women fight, is enough to point out the plain absurdity of the egalitarian position. We marvel at the Wonder Womans or Red Sonyas of popular imagination or the alluring Amazons, Boadiceas, and Brodamantes of the past, but they are exceptions, and the bolder for being so. Beatrice's "eat-his-heart-in-the-marketplace" speech in Much Ado About Nothing is no less grand than Kate's submission in The Taming of the Shrew, and of the same cloth. But Beatrice "cannot be a man with wishing" and when Benedick is told, "Give us the swords. We have bucklers of our own," his reply is "If you use them, Margaret, you must put in the pikes with a vice — and they are dangerous weapons for maids."

To be fair, and for the sake of clarity, I should point out some of the courteous, or rather mandatory, things which have been shunned of recent times that can be done toward the fairer sex. One ought to serve and esteem ladies by helping carrying anything of some weight. It is not saying she is an idiot that cannot carry a burden, as feminists male and female may claim, but that a true leader is the best servant. Stand when she enters the room to acknowledge their dignity and publicly confer worth. I might indeed lecture my office workers, male and female both, about their foul language, but especially the men for setting their coarse exemplum in front of them. When walking on the sidewalk, a man ought to take the track closer to the street so that if a car were to splash through a mud puddle or careen out of control you can take the brunt and push her out of harm's way. Common sense, now more than ever, demands you pay for a lady's meal if out together as a sign that providing for her well-being is part of your purview. It is only respectful before lighting your cigar or pipe to first offer her one of equal or finer leaf. Peter says these sorts of things are done "as to a weaker vessel." That is ultimately what is comes down to. We protect the weak. In the New Testament, weakness is something to boast about. Today it is taboo and those on both sides of the battle of the sexes bear no small amount of resentment and spit on anything that reeks of favoritism, preferring themselves as first in importance. When put to a vote, they opt for Machiavelli over Castiglioni. As for me, out there is no-man's land, my allegiance between the two masters has never been a question. There is a quote of Ruskin, from "The Nature of Gothic," I've mentioned in another article and am fond of learning that explains "to yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in the world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind … a man is raised by it which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him."

So, yes, what some call chivalry did much good to help stabilize society. But that is an ephemeral function shared with parts of Islam, Mormonism, Masonry, and any other false religion. Improved morality is not the goal though. Transformation into holiness is. And that way is entered not by the most inordinate deeds of valor, but by the absolute lack of any good deeds of our own, so that the offender might boast only in the one supreme Deed done by Him once for all, the strong for the weak, the godly for the ungodly, on our behalf. After you've dealt with yourself at the cross, go right ahead and catch that door for her.

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