The Chivalric Real: On Christian Masculinity

The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere by Julia Margaret Cameron

I have been thinking, in the midst of this confused and confusing cultural moment, about the possibility of a Christian masculinity.

I am well aware of what an anachronism such an idea might appear as we increasingly lurch toward a post-gender world, as absurd as such a notion is. But absurdity has never been a hindrance to human stupidity. Indeed, as we can see only too clearly, such is celebrated.

Both masculinity and femininity have been under attack for a good long while. Certainly it has been a constant presence in my life, but it has obviously achieved ludicrous speed over the past few years. Perhaps the anxieties promoted over the course of the pandemic (such as those just coming to light initiated by Britain’s despicable Matt Hancock’s “project fear”) have for some also loosened sexual identity to such a degree that “switching gender” (another absurdity) becomes a form of imagined empowerment (though it’s really enslavement) for some and participation in its Dionysian intoxication becomes a rite of expiation for many. This may, in fact, be an implication of René Girard’s mimetic theory that never would have occurred to the great thinker, though I doubt he would be surprised at the scapegoat mechanisms often triggered when people, for example, oppose sexualizing children through drag shows or indoctrinating them into gender ideology in elementary schools and kindergarten.

At least symbolically or rhetorically, our culture has more or less succeeded in disassociating gender from biology, including the notion of the terms “father” and “mother,” which appear to be on their way out of the postmodern lexicon. In his book, The Sibling Society, published in 1996, the late Robert Bly shares an observation he received from an acquaintance: “Having made it to the one-parent family, we are now on our way to the zero-parent family.” Here it comes. A world without parents is a world without mothers and fathers; and a world without mothers and fathers is a world without women and men.

What we are left with are simulacra of women and men: appearance without a corresponding reality, spiritual, psychological, or biological. It’s a lab leak of cosplay culture, and highly contagious.

This phenomenon has many cultural and societal implications, of which the Anglican Church’s recent proposal to “de-gender” God is but a symptom. As I have written many times before, the Church writ large is at least partially to blame for having omitted the sophianic from divine consideration, and the utterance of Genesis 1 “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...male and female created he them” is better understood if we adopt the perspective that God is here speaking to Sophia, which reinforces a sound gendered typology. Unfortunately, Christian anthropology and epistemology has never removed the spanner of this misinterpretation from the works. And we’re seeing its telos unfold in real time.

But my concern here is primarily with the masculine. We see many caricatures of the masculine, from the machismo of Andrew Tate to the practices among some Eastern Orthodox and Trad Catholic men to turn prayer and fasting into an Iron Man contest—“Yea, they have already received their reward.” We also see a symptom of the missing father, the missing masculine in the platoons of young men flocking to people like Jordan Peterson or taking up a Norse-themed neopaganism in order to access their inner warrior. I don’t think these are necessarily bad things, but I do often question the authenticity of such gestures.

There is also the polarity to these very butch expressions of masculinity. Bly, whom I met once in 1987 and made me really feel “met” as a man for perhaps the first time in my young life, was wont to call the counter to the butch masculine the “soft male,” a man feminized not by nature but by conditioning. Indeed, boys in many school settings are discouraged from, well, acting like boys. Climbing trees is “too dangerous.” Competition encourages “toxic masculinity.” And so forth. You’ve seen it. This obscene pedagogy is a recipe for neurosis and self-hate. It is no wonder, then, that so many young men are reluctant to enter the work force, or go to college, or leave the adolescent secure fantasy spaces of video games and pornography. They never grow up. Puer aeternus. And no one should be surprised, seeing the indoctrination in self-loathing they’ve been subject to.

In Jungian analysis, we might say that the hyper-butch masculine and its companionate soft male are both evidence of an unintegrated anima. That is, they are exaggerations masking the failure to integrate the feminine into the psyche. I think our culture is doing this at scale right now, and it seems to me that the rise and ready availability of medical services allowing men to “become” women (in no small part encouraged via propaganda) is a cosmetic intervention that ultimately fails to address the inner psychological need to integrate the feminine. I think this is why we see so many absolute caricatures of the feminine arise in this sphere, as if, in far too many cases, a Barbie doll is the essence of what it is to be a woman.

Maybe twenty years ago, a woman colleague of mine stopped me one day and said, “Michael, you have the most developed feminine side I’ve ever seen in a man.” I was a little taken aback, so I punched her. Just kidding. I don’t know if what she said is or was true, but I suspect it had something to do with my being a man who writes and loves poetry and literature, knows how to take care of flowers, is attracted to the Divine Sophia, and is comfortable talking to women. The first three are often construed as “feminine” qualities (I don’t know why), but my comfort among women has much more to do with growing up with sisters and a strong mother than it does with trying to develop any kind of lotharian skill set. But I also know how to work hard at manual labor, kill and butcher an animal, how to sacrifice, and how to be a husband and father.

I’ve known plenty of men who feign being feminists or “into the goddess” as a way to flatter women they plan on seducing. I’m sure you’ve met the type. I also know plenty that play the macho role to similarly impress women. I swear, sometimes it’s like a hetero Village People.

So, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a Christian masculinity.

Yesterday, I took to Twitter to canvas people about what or who might be their ideal of a Christian masculinity. I didn’t get a ton of suggestions, but some were interesting. One guy nominated Aragorn, son of Arathorn (a good model), and another suggested Pa Ingalls from the Little House on the Prairie books and television series. A few people pointed to Richard Rohr’s work (which I’m not familiar with) and someone even pointed to Holy Week in the Orthodox Church. I even asked my two youngest sons (ages 12 and 14). The younger one chose Aragorn and his brother picked Kambei Shimada, the leader of the samurai in the classic film Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (I thought that was a great choice). Only one woman joined the conversation! And she nominated chivalry.

I certainly share her admiration for chivalry, but not in the rather abstract way in which it is often sold. For me, the chivalric ideal gives way to what I might call “the chivalric real.” Its most complete realization is found in the character of Launcelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.

Launcelot represents the most noble expression of Christian masculinity because he is fully aware of his inadequacy. His love for Guinevere, the wife of his best friend, is not evidence of hamartia, but of his true humanity—and it also serves as an indictment of arranged marriage, the abandonment of which Denys De Rougement in his odious Love in the Western World laments as a great loss.

Indeed, the figure of Launcelot has haunted me since childhood, and then my early twenties, when a few of the young women I knew were convinced I was the reincarnation of Launcelot after they’d read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, in which he is rather a John Donne-like character, crucified between the trees of love and religion. Recently, I wrote this poem about him (from a forthcoming book that is moving along at a very slow pace):

VOCATION

When first I saw him: beautiful, noble of both mien and of bearing,

standing upon sunrise at the lake, the sun behind him and the water

like fire of crimson and gold, the ripples like flame reaching to his feet

the wind in his dark hair and his arms full of rushes for bedclothes.

We always knew him fearless, but more than that he was kind, humble,

feeling himself somehow unworthy of the accolades, embarrassed even

by his contrition, by his weeping when he prayed for the life of young Urry;

even more by our amazement when the lad’s wounds vanished like smoke.

So, after a time, seeing him at enmity with his dearest friend we found ourselves

all at enmity, with ourselves, with the world, and those who died not from despair

in the search for something holy lived in disdain for the abject failure of the Good;

and in our anger at this betrayal all was lost in the lust of blood and fire and ruin.

The failure of this vocation led him to another, but even then he failed to find solace,

forgiveness cruelly eluding him in this broken cosmos where all that lives can only die.

We followed, thinking if we found no comfort, at least we would refrain from harm;

yet the barley and corn grew very thin and the heavens were ever masked in grey.

One night he was bidden in vision to Almesbury, where he found the beloved already dead.

The women wailed and struck up the dirge as he bore the corpse and laid it in the chapel

offering the Mass of Remembrance while wax candles melted under undulant flame.

Even this was a betrayal, for betrayal is as much a property of the world as love.

The cloister is also a fellowship, but the dangers here are within and not in the wolds

or on the fields of blood. His loves and friends had vanished, but his vocation yet held

him in thralldom to sorrow. And he slept and did not waken. Then angels, they say, bore him away to a lake of rippling waters with waves the colors of crimson and gold.

What I think is important about the chivalric real is something many might miss: its ability to contain and positively direct the potentially violent drives that are intrinsic to male biology. Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz describe this both beautifully and accurately in their book The Grail Legend:

“The knight represents—at least as a concept—a higher, more differentiated form of the warrior, even though the individual knight might in fact have been undifferentiated enough. What the ideal of chivalry meant to that age has been given expression by poets through the figures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. It is clear that a higher, nobler and more disciplined human being was indicated by the term knight. The virtues demanded of him—strength and skill in arms, valour, courage and loyalty, to the feudal lord in particular but also to the friend and even vis-à-vis the foe—were no small requirements. In the profoundest sense a religious idea was concealed behind all this. Arthur’s Round Table might therefore be looked upon as a symbol in which is mirrored the developing consciousness of Christian man in the first millennium.In those days the spread of Christianity was linked with the great civilizing task of subduing the aboriginal brutality and unconsciousness of the heathen peoples. This lent a higher meaning to the Christian knight’s aggressive masculinity, which was put to the service of a nobler ideal and a higher state of consciousness.”

This certainly seems a quality lacking in contemporary conversations about gender, where discipline of desires and urges is virtually non-existent and notions of loyalty and fidelity are all but invisible. And the lack of these things no doubt attracts mostly fatherless young men to the more severe forms of Eastern Orthodoxy and Latin Catholicism as well as to neopaganism, Freemasonry, or Jordan Peterson. Completely understandable.

Of course, I don’t expect Christian men to start buying swords or joining militias, though I do think acknowledging the violence beneath the surface is a healthy way to keep it in check, as a potential energy one might use at one’s disposal rather than be a victim of its unconscious psychic eruptions. I had to figure out what to do with this in my own biography. Though I do feel an attraction to an absolute Christian non-violence, I also know that if anyone came into my house intending to hurt my wife or children they would not succeed without a fight. I know people who would allow violence upon their own families rather than commit violence, but I know now that I am not of their number. And I am at peace with that, though it took a long time to arrive there.

Finally, I think it best to take the advice of one of the singing masters of my soul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, certainly one of wisest of men, who offers this advice in his poem, “The Godlike”:

Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Distinguisheth him From all the beings Unto us known.

One thing I do know is that a world without men is a world without women. And that’s not a world worth inhabiting.

Friendship, loyalty, forgiveness, stuff like that.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

I have a lot of books. Though I’ve never taken an inventory, my library probably totals in the low thousands, everything from farming to mead making and distilling, literature and literary criticism, arts and crafts, science, biography, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, not to mention many obscure works on magic, alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric subjects. I wrote my dissertation on a number of poets, mystics, and alchemists—John Donne, Henry Vaughan and his alchemist identical twin Thomas, Jane Lead, Sir Kenelm Digby, and John Dee—so there’s my excuse.

Recently, I was interviewed by the very generous Piers Kaniuka for his Youtube channel, Resistance Recovery. We were scheduled to discuss my latest book, Sophia in Exile, but we also spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about the various manifestations of Romanticism—in the 18th century and with the hippies in the 20th, for example—and the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight movements of the 19th century came up as an example of resistance to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the technocracies of its time.

When Marygrove College, where I used to work as a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies, announced it would close at the end of the semester, the library started selling off its collection at 10 cents a piece. Tempt me not, Satan! I did my best to clear the joint. I loaded up on all kinds of books in my various disciplines. Among books by the great Continental philosophers and medieval mystics and theologians, I scored C.G. Jung’s Collected Works (though one volume is in absentia) and the 10-volume set of Donne’s Sermons—that was a good thing, too, because all of my notes from my dissertation research on the sermons were still inscribed in the margins. Don’t judge me: it was obviously all part of God’s plan. I meant to grab the collected works of Sigmund Freud, but the last day of the semester was a snow day and school was closed. I still have nightmares about it.

I have a number of collector’s items, though I used to have more. In my twenties I collected rare books. Let’s call it an investment strategy. Times were hard financially early in my marriage, however, so I ended up selling a lot of the books so we could buy stuff like, you know, food. But I still have a few treasures. I have first editions of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism and W.B. Yeats’s A Vision and I have a collection of The Spectator from 1714 that I picked up twenty years ago in a junk shop in, I think, Niagara Falls, Ontario or someplace thereabouts.

But one of the more curious books I own is one I picked up at Marygrove for a dime. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse was almost an afterthought. I write about poetry and mysticism, so I grabbed it as one might grab a candy bar at the grocery store checkout line. Impulse item. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Then I read it. Wow.

The book starts out, surprisingly, not with Cædmon, but with an incantation:

Amergin

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am the beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of a lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Dang.

Actually, Cædmon never appears. Which is odd.

The book, which was published in 1921, features many of the poets one would expect: Southwell, the Metaphysicals, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley (no Keats), Cardinal Newman, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, George MacDonald, both Dante and Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Francis Thompson, G.K. Chesterton, and John Masefield. It also includes some lesser known poets, such as the Roman Catholic nun Augusta Theodosia Drane, the Pre-Raphaelite Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy, Yeats’s one-time love interest Katherine Tynan, and the great Canadian poet Bliss Carman. But then it gets really weird.

The big surprise (for me, anyway) was to find so many poets of the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight included. I expected Yeats of course—though he only gets two poems! This was, to be sure, before his late flowering and some of his strongest poems, such as “The Second Coming,” “Lapis Lazuli,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here he is represented by “The Rose of Battle” and “To the Secret Rose.” Also included are Yeats’s countryman, the visionary, poet, and social reformer Æ (George Russell) and Yeats’s co-editor of Blake, Edmond Ellis. Alongside these more conventional poets, however, were some real eye-openers.

The collection includes three poems by the (almost entirely unknown today) mystical Freemason W. L. Wilmshurst and work by esoteric historian A.E. Waite, not to mention offerings from William Sharp (also known under the nom de plume Fiona Macleod), the spiritualist Elsa Barker, the Irish pantheist Edmond Holmes, the aforementioned Evelyn Underhill, as well as—wait for it—the magician and all-round naughty person Aleister Crowley—who gets more space than Yeats!

This all kind of blew me away—this was the Oxford University Press, after all. So I checked into the editors, D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.F. Lee. Both, it turns out, were members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—which kind of shatters Oxford’s reputation for propriety and decorum. But this explains many of the others included in the collection—Yeats, Sharp, Underhill, Waite, Wilmshurst, and (I think Barker)—were also members of the Golden Dawn. And in the same lodge! Not much else is known about Nicholson, he seems to have been independently wealthy, but Lee was an Anglican priest.

Still, how did these guys swing the editing gig? The plot, as they say, here thickens. As I discovered, a young editor then at the Oxford University Press hired the editors for the job. His name: Charles Williams. That’s right: the Inkling—but the edgy Inkling. Williams, not surprisingly, also belonged to the Golden Dawn for a period, so The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse then becomes a kind of in-group project, the Esoteric Squad, so to speak.

Another interesting tidbit: Late in the book, which moves chronologically, in the section in which the Golden Dawn poets appear, two poems attributed to “Anonymous” appear. Usually in these kinds of collections, the anonymous poems appear in the beginning, derived as they are from “the dark backward and abysm of time” in which names often become lost to us. These two poems, “At the Feet of Isis” and “A Ballade of the Centre,” then are curiously placed and curiously attributed. I haven’t been able to find any scholarly evidence yet, but my money says they belong to none other than Charles Williams himself. Here’s the closing stanza of “At the Feet of Isis,” chock full of sophianicity:

Her feet are in the darkness, but Her face

Is in high Heav’n—all Truth inhabits there;

All Knowledge and all Peace, and perfect grace,

And in the wonder of Her joy they share

Who, blindly clinging to Her feet erstwhile,

Obtained the priceless gift—the vision of Her smile.

Tell me this isn’t by the same guy who wrote The Figure of Beatrice.

Amazing what a dime can purchase nowadays.

Not in the book: but it should be!

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

Sophia in Exile: An Introduction

My latest book, Sophia in Exile, appeared in print last week courtesy of Angelico Press. Below is the introduction as found in the text.~ mm

INTRODUCTION: NOTES FROM EXILE

After Francis of Assisi and his companions walked the hundred and ten or so miles from Assisi to Rome, a trek that took days, in order to petition approval for founding the Order of Friars Minor, the cardinals interviewing them asked what their rule would be. Pretty straightforward question. Francis, a pretty straightforward man, held up the book of the Gospels. The cardinalate thought he must be either mistaken or a fool, since such a rule “seemed a thing untried, and too hard for human strength.” [1] That says pretty much all we need to know about ecclesial governance. Very few princes of the Church take out their own garbage or dirty their hands with manual labor. Living the Gospel, for all their preaching, is ultimately impractical: at worst a nuisance, at best an ideal. Even the order Francis founded couldn’t live up to its own principles and strayed from them during Francis’s lifetime. It brought him great sorrow.

When it happened, I had no idea how prophetic an event the tragic fire at Notre-Dame de Paris on 15 April 2019 would prove to be. It’s a fitting icon for a Church in distress, the weight of its own corruption, not least the ongoing sex scandals that fill us with shame and anger, evidence as they are of an ecclesial structure inured to the sufferings of its victims and further complicated by the manner in which some of its most powerful leaders have continued to shield their own from scrutiny. These are symptoms of a deeper pathology. The hierarchy’s inept and milquetoasty response to the global pandemic that began in early 2020 only further betrays how indifference has become a cardinal virtue. How many millions died without receiving the last sacraments? How many more left the Church permanently because it was too hard for the hierarchy to live out the Gospel and too easy to play the political sycophant? Did Christ wait until lepers were no longer contagious to heal them?

It was under these conditions and in this frame of mind that I wrote this book.

This book, however, is not a jerimiad on the sins and ineptitude of the hierarchy, or even about living through the madness of the pandemic. These things, I think, are only tangential, though nonetheless symptomatic, of a deeper estrangement from the Real that is the true source of our cosmological dissociation, and which has its roots deep in the historical Christian imaginary. This dissociation did not begin with the conflagration of Notre-Dame, nor with the complicity of bishops in the abuses among their ranks. When Christ told Francis “Rebuild my Church,” he was not speaking of San Damiano, though that was what Francis thought at the time. Perhaps he was telling us the same thing with the burning of Notre-Dame, for “every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire” (1 Cor 3:13).

I wrote the first chapter, after which the book is named, in 2019. I did not return to the project until fall of 2020, the confusion of the pandemic and work on my farm taking all of my attention in the interim. Looking at it now, the book can be called the third in a trilogy that started with The Submerged Reality (2015) and continued with Transfiguration (2018), though writing a trilogy was at no point my intention. But here we are. I felt the need to write this book because I came to realize that I had left some things, such as the Gnostic mythos of Sophia and the sophiological structure of marriage, undeveloped in those previous books, and I wanted to provide insight into the poetic metaphysics of Sophiology by deeper examinations of Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas Traherne, the legend of the Holy Grail, the Rosary, and the radical Christian philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev (the chapter on whom was originally published in the Russian journal Тетради по консерватизму [Essays on Conservatism]). In addition, I felt a call to write on the Creation and our relationship to it—as a biodynamic farmer, this is an environment in which I live and move and have my being—as well as to contribute something on the role of human creativity. These areas of contemplation organically brought me to a consideration of the Realm of Faerie, which has thankfully been getting more serious attention from John Milbank and David Bentley Hart, among others.

As a result of all these commitments and interests, what you have in your hands here is (with the exception of my poetry) the most personal of all of my books to this point. Sophiology, it is my contention, is above all something one does, a way of being. It is not a grand theory, a beautiful intellectual construction. No. Sophiology is an entrance into life.

In the Gnostic mythos, Sophia lives in exile, trapped in a kind of spiritual prison. We, too, live in exile, which is also a spiritual prison. Most of all, we live in exile from the Divine and the Creation. As the pandemic and the ever-increasing totalization of the technocracy have shown, we are also in exile from each other, and, ultimately, from ourselves. This is an untenable situation and one which, if left unchecked, will have disastrous repercussions, many of which are deep into their implementation stages. The antidote to such a situation, as I argue in these pages, lies in reorienting ourselves to the Real, to the sophianic structure of the world. Like St. Francis’s project, this is one of simplicity and not applicable to the needs of hierarchies of power and influence. In essence, what Sophiology offers is a regeneration of life by an engagement with what is Real. And this regeneration is conditioned by learning how to see.

Love is integral to this seeing, as both agapeic opening and as erotic longing. This integral seeing is in not characterized by a spiritual acquisitiveness or desire to possess, so much as it is a product of the subject’s entrance into a loving disposition to that which shines through the world. St. Paul describes such a condition in 1 Corinthians: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:2–3). Those who try to turn Sophiology (or any theological or philosophical gesture) into a method for comprehending or containing the world are barking up the wrong sacred tree. The first movement is in love, and the response to love is not “to know” but to be known.

And in that spirit, I welcome you to these pages.

1. Bonaventura, The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 30.