The Chivalric Virtues
In the first season of HBO’s True Detective, an exchange between Marty Hart and Rust Cohle captures a very old problem.
Hart: “Do you ever wonder if you’re a bad man?”
Cohle: “No, I don’t wonder, Marty. The world needs bad men. We keep other bad men from the door.”
It’s one of the great lines in the history of anti-hero rhetoric. But I’d argue that Cohle’s statement ignores the most important development in the history of masculinity.
All societies after Adam and Eve exited the Garden have needed a warrior class. When the enemies are at the gates, you’d better have some muscular men to turn them away—or you can expect to be executed or enslaved. But so often those warriors can be as bad as the invaders they fight off. The very qualities that make them good protectors also make them difficult to live with.
Then came the Middle Ages and chivalry, the greatest solution ever devised to the challenge of masculinity. Chivalry aimed to turn rough and dangerous brutes into gentleman-warriors: men who can repel the enemies at the gates and prove themselves gentle everywhere else. Beowulf and Mr. Darcy—in one man. This code demanded, among other things, that a man not use women as playthings or exploit his advantage over the weak, but honor the fairer sex and protect the vulnerable.
In The Compleat Gentleman, Brad Miner suggests that the code of chivalry can be expressed in five core virtues: prowess, courtesy, honor, generosity, and loyalty. To these I will add the virtue of faith, which beautifully ties the others together and acknowledges the origins of the code. What follows is a brief examination of these virtues and what it means to be chivalrous.
Hopefully these notes will make it apparent that chivalry is not simply a curious relic from a distant age, but an idea urgently applicable for our lives.
Prowess
Chivalry starts with strength and courage—and without these there can be no chivalry. This is apparent in the word itself, the roots of which refers to a horseman, a mounted warrior: chivalry —> chevalier —> caballarius —> caballus. In past usage, the word meant not just the code of the mounted warrior, but has also referred to a collection of knights, and even to the mighty deeds of such knights. As in: “You should have seen the chivalry that Roland performed at Roncevaux Pass.”
I wrote last week about the necessity of prowess, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. In short: prowess is the combination of strength, skills, and courage that makes a man formidable in the face of danger.
Our culture spouts a lot of lip-service in praise of nonviolence, which we’ve all heard since kindergarten: “Violence is never the answer!” and “Be like Gandhi!” These wishful cliches cover over the basic fact that darkness, brutality, and disorder are never far from the human heart, despite our constant self-congratulations on our progress and enlightenment. A real man, a chivalrous man, knowing that danger might come for him and his loved ones at any moment, must be strong and ready, hoping for peace but preparing for something else.
It follows that the chivalrous man spends time strengthening his body and sharpening his skills: lifting weights, hitting the heavy bag, grappling on the mat, familiarizing himself with weaponry, and otherwise readying himself for conflict or danger, should it come.
Many will object at this point, offering a million reasons why they refuse to undertake such training. “Lifting weights is vain.” “The gym is contrived and artificial.” “It’s mental toughness that counts.” (My favorite is “I don’t want to get too big,” as though biceps immediately start popping once you lift a 20 lbs dumbbell a few times). These non-lifters have their reasons, surely, and I wish them well. But they are not chivalrous. Chivalry is a code for men who can fight, not for soft men who perform kind gestures towards ladies but couldn’t raise a fist to protect them.
Courtesy
On any list of chivalric virtues, prowess should be followed immediately by courtesy because the two are obviously in tension, and this tension defines chivalry. C.S. Lewis calls it “the double demand on human nature,” which ultimately aims to make a man into a work of art, a brawler with high manners.
Courtesy means behavior befitting the court. Once upon a time, men conducted themselves in a certain respectful way when in the company of royalty and nobility—not only because good behavior was due to people of rank, but also because powerful men had to agree to a code of conduct that would limit occasions for high tempers and the violence that might ensue. In a sense, they adopted fine manners so that they wouldn’t kill each other.
Now that the court is a thing of the past, courtesy survives as etiquette, decorum, good form, the done thing. In future essays, I will aim to articulate some specific and useful tips on what courtesy should look like in the 21st century, but please understand that it must be more about a disposition of the heart than just a set of rules. According to Cecil B. Hartley, “True courtesy chiefly consists in accommodating ourselves to the feelings of others, without descending from our own dignity, or denuding ourselves of our own principles.” In other words, the courteous gentleman thinks of others and takes the trouble to do well by them, while still being his own man.
Honor
Honor is the trickiest of these virtues, for it has meant different things at different times, as well as different things at the same time. Honor has inward and outward aspects; it has emphasized character and virtue and also reputation and acclaim. These are related, but sometimes in conflict. Any conversation about honor is an attempt to hit these multiple moving targets.
Ron Swanson was speaking truth when he said, “Honor—if you need it defined, you don’t have it.”
Nevertheless, I’ll give it a try. Honor should be about the delight a man takes in intense striving for greatness of character. He should be willing and eager to sacrifice comfort, safety, and luxury in pursuit. A corresponding revulsion should rise in his heart at just the thought of anything disgraceful, cowardly, or base. He should despise gain and advantage acquired through dishonest means—lying, cheating, stealing. Great strength is to be found in this attempt to become a man of honor. He is a knight errant on quest.
Clearly, honor begins in the heart—but that doesn’t mean it is a purely inward matter. As far as prudence allows and dictates, the man of honor should have a proper regard for the outward forms of honor. To the extent that he can, he should care for and protect his reputation. I’m not suggesting a return to dueling, but we might try to understand what drove men to “demand satisfaction” when their name was sullied, rather than simply dismissing them as barbaric. In many ways they were more civilized than we are.
Honor might also take on an older and corporate aspect for us—corporate not in the sense of having to do with bloodless business interests, but relating to something shared by all the members of a group. We moderns like to atomize everything, so that all analysis happens on the individual level. The sense of honor that I’m proposing has a more communal meaning: a man’s excellent conduct and deeds bring honor not just to himself, but also to his lady, his family, his bloodline, his church, and whatever organizations he belongs to. He loves this. Others are depending on him. And not just the living, but the dead and the unborn too.
Generosity
The code of chivalry called knights to be famously generous, almost recklessly so. It was incumbent upon them not to hoard capital. The ninth commandment of Leon Gautier’s code of chivalry proclaims, “Thou shalt be generous, and give largesse to everyone.” In his biography of William the Marshal, Georges Duby writes, “The knight owes it to himself to keep nothing in his hands. All that comes to him he gives away. From his generosity he derives his strength and the essentials of his power … all his renown and the warm friendship that surrounds him.”
Money takes on a mysterious power when given away.
We should emulate the knight by tithing and giving to worthy causes. We should be more eager to give gifts. We should host dinners and gatherings for our friends and family. I have never felt so rich as when I host or donate or give presents.
Chivalry with money should also mean increased thoughtfulness with our expenditures—like buying from local businesses and patronizing local farmers. Clearly it cost more to support mom & pop operations, but that’s part of the point: it is inherently more worthy to support actual people in our communities and their businesses, not distant shareholders and coastal investment firms who don’t give a damn about us.
Though this virtue involves giving money, other opportunities for generosity present themselves for those with fewer financial resources. Giving our time and talents. Giving a kind word of encouragement. Giving our good cheer. Giving our full attention to the people we are with—a noteworthy gift in this age of “attention deficits.”
Generosity can also involve giving our strength. A strong man is always useful—for commonplace tasks (carrying luggage, moving a couch, opening a jar) as well as more exciting tasks (defending the weak from bullies, intruders, and assailants). This opportunity to be useful, even indispensable, is all the more reason for us to develop the virtue of prowess.
As Duby notes above, our generosity is a source of strength. It wins friends. It builds reputation. It encourages God’s favor in our endeavors. And, in a more internal sense, it requires us to refrain from the smallness and complacency of hoarding and counting and calculating like an old miser, and instead encourages activity and vigor in further endeavor.
Loyalty
It is self-evident that a chivalrous man must be loyal—to his God, king, country, family, and friends. The opposite is unthinkable. He is a ride-or-die kind of man.
Loyalty is also required to the code. For the medieval knight, chivalry was an order, a calling, and we too should think of it that way and remain true to the code.
This involves a pre-rational way of thinking. The chivalrous man doesn’t calculate the advantage of loyalty—he just is loyal. Often it will cost him. All the better: it means his loyalty is real. And when loyalty is rewarded, it is ultimately not by the immediate compensations we might receive, but by the kind of men we become and the communities we help build when we are loyal to the core.
Of course, our loyalties might come in conflict. To take an example from a popular show of the 2010s: a knight is called to be loyal to his king and his family, but what if his king and his family are at odds? Faux-sophisticated people might be tempted to think that this refutes any argument in favor of loyalty, instead suggesting a hard-nosed loyalty to oneself and nothing else. This is a silly argument, not nearly as original and insightful as they seem to think. Of course loyalties will come into conflict. Such is life. The chivalrous man will simply have to pray for guidance and do his best when conflicts arise.
Faith
Chivalry presents a very Christian—and specifically Catholic—vision of what a man might become. It is a historical anomaly which arose in a particular time (the Middle Ages) and place (Western Europe), and nowhere else. Later interpreters and skeptics attempted to wash this aspect chivalry, hoping to make it more acceptable to a non-Christian age, just as the fantasy authors and Hollywood producers of today also try to borrow the glamor of knights without that awkward stuff about the Lord and his Church. But chivalry is inextricable from faith. Everything follows from devotion to the Lord and eagerness to serve Him, by serving the weakest among us.
It is thus through faith that prowess is baptized, put to good use, and integrated with the rest of the virtues. “Chivalry,” according to Leon Gautier, “is the Christian form of the military profession: the knight is the Christian soldier.” Similarly, it is through faith that the chivalrous man finds the courage to perform noble deeds in all their danger. Chivalry is about praying hard and living dangerously.
Conclusion
These then are the chivalric virtues: 1) Prowess—the chivalrous man is willing and able to fight. 2) Courtesy—he has a disposition of the heart to be thoughtful toward others and act accordingly. 3) Honor—he delights in striving to be a man of stainless character. 4) Generosity—he has a heart for giving and for making himself extraordinarily useful to others. 5) Loyalty—he is with you till the end. 6) Faith—he believes in the Lord and lives accordingly.
One thing to consider is how modern life undermines each of these virtues. And that will be a topic for an upcoming essay.