The Necessity of Prowess
It is among the most predictable lines. When a man opens a door for a woman in public, some nostalgic onlooker has to chime in, “I guess chivalry isn’t dead.” That’s what most people understand chivalry to be: a series of gestures, which may or may not have romantic undertones, amounting to something like good manners, courtesy, gentlemanliness. And it is almost only spoken of in regards to its proverbial death. This is how I understood chivalry for most of my life.
If we want to know why it died (or at least has come very near death), we should first ask whether chivalry deserves to be alive. I like old-school manners as much as anyone—but has a compelling argument been made that chivalry is anything more than an aesthetic preference for a bygone era? Is the chivalrous man doing anything more than LARPing as a Victorian aristocrat? Does chivalry have anything to tell us about a man’s deeper potential? As far as I could tell, the answer to all these questions was, “Not really.” So chivalry died because it didn’t have a reason to be anything but dead: it didn’t make a claim on the heart and demand to be alive.
Or so I thought—until I read an essay by C.S. Lewis called “The Necessity of Chivalry.” Lewis gets at the older, truer, and livelier essence of this idea by quoting from Sir Ector’s eulogy for Lancelot in Le Morte d’Arthur: “Thou wert the meekest 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.”
This passage expresses the “double demand” of chivalry: that a man be well-mannered at the dinner table and also ferocious when confronted by enemies. (Note: I will use the word gentle instead of Malory’s meek which has become hopelessly confusing, now meaning something different than Malory meant.) In other words, simply holding doors open for ladies doesn’t make a man chivalrous; it makes him gentlemanly. The two are not exact synonyms. Chivalry is a higher attainment.
The truly chivalrous man must also be dangerous, always striving for physical and martial excellence, with a heart ready to face whatever peril or villain or monster he comes up against. The medievals used the word prowess to capture that combination of strength, athleticism, martial skill, ferocity, and courage that makes a man formidable—achieved only after years of training and virtuous suffering. After all, worthy causes need formidable men, not just well-mannered ones.
So basically our modern notion of chivalry has forgotten or discarded half of its essence—the more exciting half!
Lewis’ insight was an arrow aimed straight at my heart. When chivalry emphasizes not just gentleness and manners, but also prowess and vigor, it is suddenly an ambitious vision of what a man might become. Humans yearn for something demanding. We respect teachers who don’t give easy A’s, just as we dismiss those who insult us by expecting nothing of us. It follows, then, that the hollowed-out chivalry of our age—more simplistic and less demanding, all manners and no prowess—is a chivalry for the graveyard. But a chivalry that calls a man to be elite, morally and physically, might not be so dead.
And not just elite, but paradoxical. Gentleness and prowess: these qualities are, if not contradictory, at least in dramatic tension. Lewis emphasizes that the chivalrous man is not a compromise or a golden mean between two extremes, but both extremes in the same man; he isn’t sort of kind and sort of ferocious, but both “to the nth.” Only with great effort can such tension be reconciled in a man, which is why Lewis says the knightly character is “art, not nature—something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen.”
The paradoxical quality of the double demand gives gentleness and prowess new meaning. Kindness is made remarkable by strength, and visa-versa. To return to the image of the man holding the door open for a lady: when performed by a weak man, it is a nice gesture, but little more. Often the “nice guy” has no choice but to be nice: his niceness is necessitated by his weakness; it is all he has to offer. But such gestures performed by a strong and potentially dangerous man are altogether different. That truly chivalrous defies type and is thus a bit of a mystery. Since time immemorial, strong men have had the tendency to commit whatever outrages they please and get away with them. But chivalry demands that the strong man commit himself to better conduct. He is not gentle because he must be; he is gentle because he commits himself to an excellent code. To return to the point that Lewis repeats and emphasizes: chivalry aims to make a man into a work of art, combining qualities that don’t naturally go together.
The key to a revival lies in making chivalry aspirational again. Holding doors open for ladies is easy. Becoming a paradoxical gentleman-brawler is definitely not easy. It is beautifully challenging.
Forgetting the Obvious
The emphasis on prowess should seem obvious when one remembers that chivalry is the code of the medieval knight, and that the medieval knight is first and foremost “a man of blood and iron,” as Lewis puts it. The very word chivalry recalls the warrior on horseback. What’s strange is that we ever forgot it.
So what happened to make us forget?
Too much to detail here. But one thing to mention is that life simply became easier, work moved indoors, and less was required of our bodies. Escalators started carrying us up a single flight of stairs, lawnmowers became self-propelled or seated, and so on. The purpose of so much “technological advancement” was to save us from physical exertion, and unused muscles become weak muscles.
Life also became safer, and safety became a fixation. The most dismaying metaphor for this development is the increasing lameness of children’s playgrounds in recent decades, which are no longer built for children but for overly anxious parents who apparently don’t want the young ones to get any ideas about daredevilry—because that would be unsafe. The old monuments of childhood fun are rarer and rarer, replaced by a couple of stairs leading up to short plastic slides which seem designed for friction and reduced speed. Just as ease makes the muscles go weak, the cult of safetyism discourages us from testing ourselves and activating those parts of us that rise to the occasion.
Hand in hand with these developments, we got the curious dogma of non-violence. Elementary school teachers reminded us constantly that “Violence never solves anything!” Such sayings were not exactly new, but they had taken on new meaning: whereas “violence” once meant unjustified, criminal violence, it now means any force whatsoever. So boys were strictly discouraged from fighting, even when fighting would help them solve their disputes and resume functioning relations. If ever we encounter danger, we are instructed to call the police and wait for them to arrive—above all, we are not to take matters into our own hands! This denial of any need to be ready to meet violent men means, once again, leaving that faculty undeveloped.
And once prowess had become mostly unnecessary, it became suspect. An acquaintance of mine once commented, with perplexing tautology, that “a man doesn’t need to be stronger than he needs to be.” For most people in the 21st century, this means that we don’t need to be able to perform any act more difficult than carrying grocery bags from the car to the kitchen. Prowess became a “lifestyle choice,” a hobby for gym enthusiasts, who were suspected of probably being vain barbarians. (Despite our present-day adamance against judging others, we have no problem dismissing gymbros as “meatheads.”)
At the same time, our trash diets, fake stress, industrial chemicals, and endless plastics have caused testosterone levels to plummet—making prowess hormonally impossible for many men. Today the average twenty-two year old male has the testosterone levels of a sixty-seven year old from 2000, and it’s not like the men of the Clinton and Bush years were Spartans. We’ve declined from serious decline.
Even our language starts to change: I mostly hear the word strength used metaphorically, to mean inner strength, mental toughness, resilience, and so on. We seem to think that we don’t need the original meaning of the word anymore.
One might draw the conclusion that modern life is a grand campaign against prowess.
What Now?
The remedy is pretty simple: sun and steel! (Please note: I said simple, not necessarily easy.) A program for vitality is what’s needed—lifting heavy weights, training in the martial arts, eating real food, getting sun, getting sleep, and confronting danger every now and then. We must avoid too much sitting and soy and all the things the work against a man’s vitality.
For those concerned about the time commitment involved in such a program, I should clarify that training need not become a part-time job. Incredible results can be achieved in three intense gym sessions per week, one hour each. Adding a short workout of hillsprints (maybe half an hour) and another workout of striking the heavy bag (same) brings the grand total to about four hours per week.
On top of that, a man ought to befriend other men of prowess and try to help others who possess unrealized potential. Friendships made at the gym and dojo are crucial in the 21st century. My lifting partner is an absolute warhorse in the gym, and his friendship has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me because there can be no complacency in his presence.
A man might also study history and draw inspiration from the great men of the past. I cannot read about Richard the Lionheart or El Cid without feeling something rise in my heart. Even if we could never match their deeds, it is a sign of nobility to be moved by the heroes of old and to emulate them as best we can in the opportunities given to us.
The bad and good news, depending on how you look at it, is that a return to prowess might be made necessary in the years ahead. Violence seems on the rise. Political instability looks to make life more dangerous. As the world becomes a rowdy place once again and the comfort and safety of recent times are shown to have been fake, my acquaintance’s line (“A man doesn’t need to be stronger than he needs to be”) might suggest a different course of action.
Prowess, to conclude, is what truly distinguishes a man from women and children. The essence of chivalry is the noble use of prowess for worthy causes, including the protection of those who cannot protect themselves. First things first, this requires that we actually have something to put to use. So that is the most pressing task before us: developing prowess.