On Chivalry

So there I stood in the church basement, addressing a dozen teenagers. My friend, the youth minister, had spent his whole $200 budget buying them all new Bibles. Not garish “Teen Bibles” with cartoon illustrations and tie-dye covers. Grown-up Bibles¹ – the kind they wouldn’t be embarrassed to keep on their bookshelf in college. And I was leading them in sword drills: I’d call out a reference – John 3:16, Leviticus 19:18, Genesis 27:11 (my life verse) – and the first teen to find it won the round. The girls were beating the boys handily. (They’d figured out there was a table of contents.) I was running out of time, so I cut to my last verse: 1 Peter 3:3. As expected, one of the girls found it – which was fitting, I told them, since this was St. Peter’s counsel to Christian women. I had her read to the end of the sentence:

Let not yours be the outward adorning with braiding of hair, decoration of gold, and wearing of fine clothing, but let it be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.

And I said, “This is why, from the very beginning, Christianity spread so quickly among women. You’ve got to understand: as far as the Greeks and Romans were concerned, women were just inferior men, useful only for household chores and birthing the next generation – of hopefully mostly boys. Oh sure, some of the philosophers thought that women were sometimes capable of exhibiting manly virtues – like the Amazons, for instance. But the only virtues were the manly ones! Christianity was the first time women had ever been told they were valuable as women – not because they could act like men, but for their very femininity itself – ‘which in God’s sight is very precious.’ ”

A girl at one of the tables frowned and put up her hand. I gave her the floor. “Doesn’t the Bible say adulteresses are supposed to be stoned to death?”²

Oh boy. What do you even say to that? “Um, ackchyually, if you read Deuteronomy 22, the adulterous man was subject to the same penalty.” Does that really help? I scratched my beard, pondered a moment, and said, “Okay, bonus round: John 8:1.” The girl who’d asked the question won again. I had her read through verse eleven – and the basement bore witness to Christ’s clemency to the adulteress. It was apparent the girl had never heard the story before. After a pregnant pause, I said, “This is our God.” There were no further questions.

I.

When G.K. Chesterton toured the Holy Land in 1919, he could not help marking a difference between the Christian and Muslim populations of Bethlehem. The Muslim woman hid her face behind a veil, “to prevent her from receiving the admiration or even the notice of strange men.” The Christian woman, on the other hand,

is made to look magnificent in public. She not only shows all the beauty of her face; and she is often very beautiful. She also wears a towering erection which is as unmistakably meant to give her consequence as the triple tiara of the Pope. A woman wearing such a crown, and wearing it without a veil, does stand, and can only conceivably stand, for what we call the Western view of women, but should rather call the Christian view of women. This is the sort of dignity which must of necessity come from some vague memory of chivalry.³

It has long been my position that the measure of a civilization is how it treats its women. Chesterton recognizes this implicitly: the differences he noted in the attire of Bethlehemite women were not to be mistaken for mere particularities of style. They marked a fissure between two civilizations, the one keeping its women in bonds, the other raising every housewife to the dignity of an empress. And as Chesterton drives home, the civilization against which all others must be measured, the high-water mark for the treatment of women in all history, was Christendom in the age of chivalry.

But what is “chivalry”? I can think of no greater definition of the term than Edmund Burke’s panegyric to the ancien régime, the full flowering of the chivalric ideal:

that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness! This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry.… It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.⁴

As Burke defines it, chivalry is the decision of the mighty, whom no external force could subdue, to gentle themselves, and to order their strength to the protection of the weak and innocent. Chivalry is therefore a paradox. As C.S. Lewis graphically describes:

The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.⁵

Lewis goes on to remark how strange this combination is. Things were not so among the ancients: Achilles cultivated no meekness. “The heroes of the Sagas knew nothing of it.”⁶ And Jupiter himself, although possessed of a certain fondness for women, treated them with no more reverence than a bull in rut. This is the natural pattern of the warrior class. In the words of our Lord, “the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them” (Matt 20:25). The chivalrous marriage of meekness and might may seem commonplace to those reared on tales of courtly love, but it truly was something new under the sun.

The strangeness of chivalry can perhaps best be seen from the outside. Yukio Mishima, in his astonishing “Discourse on Misogyny,” discusses openly, even casually, his utter contempt for the female sex. In a telling passage, Mishima explains that the spirit of chivalry, which moved men to cherish and protect women, was purely a Christian phenomenon – and that he loathed it. For instance, he criticizes the 20th century French novelist Henry de Montherlant as follows:

Montherlant mocked and insulted women, and this young nobleman was surely full of indignation at the chivalric spirit. However, since he did not attempt a revolt against the Christian spirit, which formed the womb of the chivalric spirit, his novels are exceedingly tepid, and they are comical for a Japanese to read. My misogyny surely has deep roots in anti-Christianity. Thus, I view Christianity as the most harmful thing that modern Japan has adopted from Western civilization.⁷

In Mishima’s view, before the advent of Christianity, the Japanese knew what to do with their women. It was Christianity that had muddied the waters with its appalling reverence for “the feminine genius,”⁸ and Mishima called for a return to the old ways. Lewis observed that there was a cognate movement budding in the West: “a neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles.”⁹

II.

That movement is in full swing today in online circles of the far-right. Many of its thought leaders still write under pseudonyms, like Bronze Age Pervert and Zero H.P. Lovecraft – their misogyny, and even more their unapologetic racism, are for now too marginal to be owned in the public square. Others, like Andrew Tate and Richard Spencer, flaunt it openly. But they are winning over, in increasing numbers, young men disillusioned with the many counterfeits of manhood on offer in contemporary society. One of their guiding lights is the aforementioned Mishima, who by his worship of the male physique and meteoric public suicide self-consciously fashioned himself into a masculine icon. But by far the deeper and more dangerous thinker guiding the atheistic right today is Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s system is atheistic at the level of presupposition. But for him, the death of God¹⁰ is not proclaimed with the vapid sneer of the modern-day Internet atheist. For Nietzsche, the death of God is terrifying. He understands that in God’s absence, man is left in a vacuum, drifting through a cosmos devoid of meaning and purpose. The only solution for Nietzsche is to seize meaning for oneself: to create a purpose for the universe by a sovereign act of the will. The Nietzschean system is built upon this will to power (Wille zur Macht) as exercised by the Superman (Übermensch).

Nietzsche’s ethics is a solemn intonation of the hymn of Achilles, “storming on with brandished spear / like a frenzied god of battle trampling all he killed / and the earth ran black with blood.”¹¹ This was the way great men ruled the earth before they were taught meekness by the Galilean. Nietzsche is the champion of the strong against the weak; his philosophy is a whisper in the secret hearts of the mighty that if they but slip off the shackles of conventional morality, they too can be proud and cruel like the son of Peleus, they too can be like gods among men:

Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.¹²

For according to Nietzsche, the bourgeois categories of “good” and “evil” are but the cerements of decomposing Christianity, which the weak throw about the strong to bind them to their will. Once the Superman is unchained, he is free to live – to do what he wants, take what he wants, drink deeply of the well of pleasure, laughing like Dionysus, uninhibited by the slave morality. It is no wonder, then, that Nietzsche deplored any limitations on the will – such as chivalry:

The man of beliefs, the “believer” of every sort and condition, is necessarily a dependent man;—he is one who cannot regard himself as an aim, who cannot postulate aims from the promptings of his own heart. The “believer” does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he must be used up, he is in need of someone who uses him up. His instinct accords the highest honour to a morality of self-abnegation…. If one considers how necessary a regulating code of conduct is to the majority of people, a code of conduct which constrains them and fixes them from outside; and how control, or in a higher sense, slavery, is the only and ultimate condition under which the weak-willed man, and especially woman, flourish; one also understands conviction, “faith.”¹³

Nietzsche’s reference to “woman” is a tell. In Nietzsche, the relationship between man and woman is paradigmatic for that between weakness and strength:

Woman! One-half of mankind is weak, chronically sick, changeable, shifty—woman requires strength in order to cleave to it; she also requires a religion of the weak which glorifies weakness, love, and modesty as divine: or, better still, she makes the strong weak—she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong. Woman has always conspired with decadent types,—the priests, for instance, against the mighty, against the “strong,” against men.¹⁴

This dissonant melody runs like a leitmotif through radical online discourse. Women represent weakness, men strength; and of course, Nietzsche’s vision is for the strong to revel in the exploitation of those weaker than themselves, untrammeled by external restraints. If reverence for women is the paradigmatic facet of chivalry, resentment toward women is the heart creed of the atheistic right.

We know that Nietzsche’s gospel is a lie – and yet like all effective lies, it has a ring of truth. There is a reason his thought has proven itself potent to captivate yet another generation of thinking men. His song of the Superman, postured as heroic, falls sweetly on the ears of a generation of youths longing for a call to greatness. His caricature of Christianity as emasculated and weak – how often is it corroborated by our limp-wristed leadership and moral cowardice? And Nietzsche’s contempt for women is a large enough subject to merit an essay of its own. There is enough of an edge to Nietzsche’s thought that it cannot lightly be dismissed. The challenge must be met – but how?

III.

Both Nietzsche and Mishima called for a return to the old ways, when the mighty held mastery and women knew their place. Chesterton saw the crossroads at which we stand from a distance of over a hundred years. In 1921, during a visit to New Haven, Connecticut, he wrote the following to a local Knight of Columbus:

Some say it is impossible to return to the past; but the truth is that there is now nothing before us but the choice between two paths which both return to the past. We can return to some sort of Catholic fellowship, or we can return to some sort of pagan slavery. There is no third road.¹⁵

Chesterton is right: we also must return. Not to Siegfried or Achilles, but to Arthur and Alfred.

Our struggle is nothing new under the sun. More than a century ago, Chesterton channeled Nietzsche in Harold the Dane’s paean to the pleasures of the flesh, which builds to a crescendo in these lines:

Doubtless your sires were sword-swingers
When they waded fresh from foam,
Before they were turned to women
By the god of the nails from Rome.¹⁶

This is the main thrust of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. How does Alfred answer? Not merely with words, but with dauntless valor on the field of battle, hazarding all for the honor of his Lady.

We must take up once more the chivalry of our forefathers to capture the moral and spiritual imagination of our peers. What is our answer to Nietzsche’s “Song of the Seven Seals”? To sing The Ballad of the White Horse louder – and to sing it by our deeds. What is our answer to Nietzsche’s Superman? The Christian knight – and not merely as a contrasting ideal, but alive in their thousands, rank upon rank, in our homes and in our churches.

In a delightful twist, the most perfect image of the paradox of chivalry in the works of Chesterton is not Alfred, or Arthur, or even St. George, but the Maid of Orleans:

Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them.… I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.¹⁷

The last line is the key: St. Joan of Arc shows us how to be knights because as a saint, she brings to earth the eternal virtues of Jesus Christ. For it is Christ who in the final analysis shows us the way to combine power and meekness – he who is both the Babe of Bethlehem and the Rider on the White Horse. And he is not merely an example to be emulated: he is the God who makes it possible – the God-Man who said to St. Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). The power of the Christian is docility to the will of his Lord.

Our answer to the charge that Christianity emasculates is to show ourselves stronger than the enemies of the Cross by our participation in the strength of Christ – but also gentle, as Christ has been gentle towards us. The Gospel teaches that victory over our earthly foes does not mean their destruction, but their restoration to communion and love. In The Ballad of the White Horse, Alfred does not put his defeated enemy to the sword: he baptizes him. That is how the Christian conquers.

As Chesterton writes, “Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.”¹⁸ That is true greatness. That is our path to victory in this age, for Christ and for his Kingdom.

1. The particular edition he chose was the hardcover RSV-2CE by Ignatius Press. To hear me dilate on this and other Bible translations, see my video, “What Bible Should I Use?”
2. I later learned she was taught this in theology class at one of the local Catholic high schools – which alas was not Chesterton Academy.
3. G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920), 98–99.
4. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Vol. 3, p. 332 in his 1887 collected works.
5. C.S. Lewis, “The Necessity of Chivalry,” Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1986), 13.
6. Ibid., 14.
7. Yukio Mishima, “Discourse on Misogyny,” Shinchō (August 1954), trans. Masaki, Japan, Past and Present (November 30, 2021), emphasis added.
8. To cop a phrase from Pope St. John Paul II – cf., e.g., Mulieris dignitatem 31.
9. C.S. Lewis, “The Necessity of Chivalry,” 15.
10. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) § 125. Vol. 6, p. 168 in his 1909–1913 collected works.
11. Homer, Il. 20.492–494, trans. Robert Fagles, The Iliad (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 519.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) § 259, 5.226.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888) § 54, 13.210–211. Nietzsche developed his idea of Christian “slave-morality” (Sklavenmoral) at length in his Genealogy of Morals (1887).
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1883–1889) § 864, 15.300.
15. G.K. Chesterton, Letter to Edward O’Meara (February 1, 1921).
16. G.K. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse (London: Methuen, 1911), 49.
17. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1909), 76–77.
18. Ibid., 179.