The modern Western man arrived in this life placed among the ruins of a chivalrous tradition. It was a tradition that blended the warrior traditions of Ancient Greece and the Celtic pagans with the morality of Jerusalem. Its ideal was embodied by the knights in King Arthur’s court.
When we think of chivalry today, we think of opening doors and walking on the traffic side of the pavement to protect your partner. Admirable and romantic gestures. But the type of chivalry I’m talking about in this post is much less domesticated.
We see a description of the chivalric ideal in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, when Sir Ector praises a dead Launcelot with these words: “Thou wert the meekest1 man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.”2 Pointing to this line in his essay on The Necessity of Chivalry (which inspired this post), C.S. Lewis called attention to how this highlights the double demand of the medieval ideal called chivalry:
That important thing about this ideal [of chivalry] is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobstrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.3
Before Beowulf and knighthood introduced Christian values into the hero, heroism overemphasized the warrior side of man’s psyche. “Homer’s Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful.”4 Attila and the Romans were quick to cut throats. “Such is heroism by nature—heroism outside the chivalrous tradition.”5 But “[t]he medieval ideal,” Lewis continues, “brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another.”6
It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior becuase everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop…In doing so, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world.7
Lewis argued that when the disintegration of the two halves of Launcelot happens—when the lion separates from the lamb—we condemn ourselves to the cycle of rising and falling civilizations, where conquerors become soft and civilized only to be conquered themselves.8 “[T]hose who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are,” in time, “destroyed.”9 By adding the quality of meekness to the heroic, the chivalric ideal offers a way out of this doom loop.
But excess force isn’t the only thing to be avoided. If the ancient overemphasized the warrior and excluded modesty in the ideal, then modernity makes the opposite mistake—overemphasizing the quality of meekness and excluding the warrior. With modernity’s domestication of man, it carves out half of his spirit and leaves him a hollow man. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”10
From the Middle Ages comes the middle way:
[The ideal embodied by Launcelot] offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.11
This, to me, sums up my obsession with the idea of Plato’s Scholar-Athlete. The man of thought and the man of action. The wolf who understands and the sheep who can defend. The lion and the lamb. Someone supremely modest and kind yet also ferocious. (For more on reclaiming the wild man, see On Iron John.)
Something about that blend seems, to me, precisely right. It is the Way of Heroes and the Tao of true Kings.
Where schools and specialized classes in the past were dedicated to these pursuits, today, it is the individual's responsibility. “Why bother?,” you might ask. Because “men in a desert must find water or die.”12 Because the key to our wholeness as individuals and society rests in our ability to integrate the fragmented pieces of our core and alchemically combine seemingly contrasting characteristics.
Fierceness and meekness. Spiritual and physical. Tradition and invention. Ancient and future. Heaven and Earth. Bodybuilding and poetry. To identify and fuse these traits is to imbue our spirit and revitalize it with what’s been lost. We make ourselves into our finest masterpiece.
The man who combines both characters—the knight—is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of a canvas or marble, for its medium.13
We may not have the same barbarians at our gates as our ancestors, but there are still ways to recover (at least part of) the warrior and wild man. We may yet find ways to make ourselves into the art exemplified by Launcelot. Angel Millar offers this advice for the modern man in search of recovering the forgotten half of his soul:
Do not make yourself into a cliche. Defy easy categorization. Strive to cultivate what is uncomfortable to you. If you are a daydreamer and a romantic and consider yourself “soft,” passive, intellectual, or arististic, cultivate skills of action, such as martial arts or an intense, physical sport. If you consider yourself to be “hard” or a man of action, take up meditation, write poetry, or take up painting. Learn from a master. Cultivate the different aspects of your being to become more three-dimensional, more fully present, more alive, and more difficult to classify. Cultiagve a deeper and wider sense of your own being… Take control of your life. Make things. Develop your body. Respect the great martial arts and the great poets. When men have nothing that they are passionate about, nothing concrete that they love and find engaging, nothing they can mold with their own hands an through their own sweat, they become fanatics about ideas, ideologies, and theories, which, although filling them ith a sense of purpose, slowly drain the life out of them.14
As Jordan Peterson has pointed out many times, “meek” does not mean weak; it means something like making oneself secondary when they have the power to make themselves primary. It is an amalgam of righteousness, inner humility, and patience.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), XXI, xii.
C.S. Lewis, The Necessity of Chivalry (hereinafter, the “Necessity of Chivalry”).
Necessity of Chivalry.
Necessity of Chivalry.
Necessity of Chivalry.
Necessity of Chivalry.
This calls to mind the words of Sir William Butler (often misattributed to the Greek historian Thucydides): “The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.” William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon, p. 85.
See Simone Weil, The Poem of Force.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 26.
Necessity of Chivalry.
Necessity of Chivalry.
Necessity of Chivalry.
Angel Millar, The Path of the Warrior Mystic, p. 24.