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 New Demons

In early modern England, a playgoer and diarist recorded an extraordinary special effect during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

“Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certaine number of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores.” [1]

Reportedly, this was not the solitary instance of the appearance of unaccounted-for players at performances of the play. But was it an actual supernatural occurrence, or only some over-the-top PR devised by some Elizabethan theatrical impresario? Nobody knows for sure, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. Always remember: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you call them, they will come.

The early modern period, though it was also the time of the first stirrings of Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Revolution, was still a period of widespread belief in the supernatural, a belief which even found its way into what we might now call scholarly research. In my book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation, I explore this phenomenon in relation to John Dee and his alleged conversation with angels in a chapter entitled “John Dee: Religious Experience and the Technology of Idolatry.” My argument there is that the various occult technologies employed by Dee and his assistant Edward Kelly actually worked toward deluding him (or assisting the spirits with which he was conversing toward deluding him) and resulted in a kind of Maronian lapse into idolatry. It is a tragic and cautionary tale that should make anyone think twice (or more) about using any kind of paraphernalia for attempting converse with supernatural beings. It never ends well. Not a good idea. Don’t do it. But these types of experiences hardly ended with the arrival of the Enlightenment.

On the first day of Easter 1898, for example, the Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov encountered a demon while on ship. It appeared “in the form of a shaggy beast,” and he asked it, “But you know that Christ is risen?” “He may very well have risen,” the beast is said to have replied, “but I will make an end of you all the same” and attacked him. According to Sergey Solovyov, the philosopher’s nephew and biographer, Solovyov was later “found stretched on the floor senseless.” [2] But he lived.

I’ve seen or experienced such things at first hand a number of times over the years, the last time about a year ago. Here’s an entry from my notebook: “My daughter is being bothered by a spirit. It won’t let her sleep. Every time it visits, always late at night, she awakens me in tears and asks me to bless her room. I pray Psalm 68 and sprinkle the room with holy water, and then the entire house, the younger children sleeping in their beds, and I anoint her with chrism. One night the spirit returns and is very reluctant to leave. After removing it from my daughter’s room, it disturbs my sleeping wife who awakens and tells me “Michael, you need to get rid of it,” in a very forthright manner as if telling me to wash the dishes. I anoint her, cleanse the room with holy water., and she goes back to sleep. When I go back to bed I pray the rosary. I finish praying, and start to fall asleep when it attacks me, pushing me down on the mattress by the shoulders. I struggle to breathe, to awaken and rise; but finally yell, “Go!” and I can get up. I anoint myself. It leaves for a time.”

I’ve told other people about what happened, and I have been (and haven’t been, at the same time) surprised to find that such is not as uncommon as one might believe. Perhaps we are not as modern as we have let ourselves believe.

Of course, none of us should really be surprised: the Gospels are full of stories about Christ casting out demons. Unfortunately, many contemporary Christians try to interpret the demons Christ encounters as manifestations of psychiatric disorders, or quirks. Or something. Maybe anxiety.

Maybe.

I say all this, not to wax sensational but only to say that our own cultural moment for the last few years seems to me increasingly to give evidence of a kind of widespread demonolatry, but for the most part masked by a sort of postmodern secular ennui. Or, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” I mean, just look around.

As we see in scripture, notably in the temptations of Eve in Genesis and Jesus in the gospel accounts, the demonic is the origin of false advertising. The subject is promised all kinds of goods—power, wealth, longevity, prosperity—but the delivered product never lives up to the hype. Just the opposite. These promises continue in our own day, though the chosen medium is not via supernatural “magic” in the manner in which it may have been understood from ancient to early modern times, but through medical and technological interventions aided and abetted by governmental policy and popular acclaim. The recently much-touted transhumanism is but one example of this with its accompanying slogan of “You’ll own nothing and be happy” and other Utopian currencies of false coinage. Demons may offer freedom or liberation, but what they deliver is slavery. Every. Single. Time.

Importantly, these interventions—not all at once, but over time and, ultimately, totalizing—distance the subject from nature. We end up imprisoned in a technological-pharmaceutical-bureaucratic Otherworld This was the long-game of urbanization—and the kinds of transhumanist phenomena I’m speaking about are nothing other than afflictions attendant to urbanization. You don’t see it happening with people in the countryside. As Jacques Ellul writes, “The city person is separated from the natural environment and, as a consequence, the sacred significations [of connection to the natural world and its rhythms] no longer have any point of contact with experience.” [3]

I don’t have a precise taxonomy for these various spiritual beings afflicting individuals and the world, but they both seem different in kind and identical in aims. I think this works initially at the individual level, exploiting the traumas and anxieties of good people who have given in to despair and hopelessness, who think something must be wrong with them and that the magic of pharmacology or technology or politics can deliver them. This is a very subtle and sneaky form of idolatry—it happens without one knowing it. But, as happened in many of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and as we are witnessing today, this free-floating anxiety can metastasize into the body politic (the demonic parody of the Mystical Body) and infect entire societies with various forms of possession.

This is why Ellul described our post-Christian era in terms of “the new demons.” Even though our societies in the West are post-Christian, they still retain the assumptions of Christianity, though their allegiances have been unconsciously transferred to other gods. “Post-Christian society,” he writes, “has been deeply affected by Christianity, and bears the latter’s mark: the mark of original sin, of the desire for salvation, hope, and a kingdom of God, of the conviction that a Savior is needed, of the society those who are aware of radical guilt yet know they cannot pardon themselves.” [4] I can’t even read these words without images of the past decade’s ongoing secular fundamentalism—the canceling, the shaming, the iconoclasm, the calls for repentance (but never for those calling for it)—rising before me. But, as Ellul would say, these are demonic parodies of Christianity.

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. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1923), 3:423-24.

2. Sergey M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution, trans. Aleksey Gibson (Eastern Christian Publications, 2000), 464.

3. Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (Seabury Press, 1975), 62.

4. Ibid., 24.

The Mystical Body of Romanticism

'The Funeral of Shelley' by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889), detail.

Some people, it seems, have a tendency to over-idealize the life I live, as if on our biodynamic farm my family and I shimmer in some agrarian dreamworld in the manner of rather tall hobbits. Ours is certainly a world foreign to that of most of those in my social class (intellectuals, academics, and other learned professionals), but it’s far from idyllic. Farming is hard work, for one thing, and we often put in 12-14 hour days at the height of the growing season. For another, it’s unpredictable—and weather, insects, animals, and a host of other variables can often destroy that which we so earnestly and carefully seek to preserve. And I won’t even get into the human interactions that can often be, well, complicated. In short, farming in this way is not unlike living in a realm somewhat like that depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. But it is a good life. It’s just not an easy one.

My wife and I undertook this life because we wanted something more tangible, more sacred, than that available to us in the wastelands of modernity, overshadowed by corporate superstructures and technocracy and characterized by endemic alienation from the Real. We turned to the land, not only to work it biodynamically as a way to heal the land itself, but also to heal ourselves. Nevertheless, some people think what we do is very quaint, charming even, but dismiss it as nothing but an iteration of Romanticism. I’m fine with that. If the alternative is postmodern alterity and distanciation from the Real, then I’m a card-carrying Romantic.

Paul Kingsnorth, whom I’ve written about recently, also gets smeared with the label of Romantic—and he doesn’t mind, either. And he pushes back. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that Romanticising the past, in our culture at this point in time, is less common than Romanticising the future. The only difference is that Romanticising the future is socially acceptable.” [1] Think about that next time the WEF peddles the chintzy wares of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they of the “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (which has mysteriously disappeared from the WEF website. HA!) future. Kingsnorth lives a life not unlike mine (from what I can tell) and even gives workshops on using a scythe. Which is so cool. And I’m sure he understands the challenges and hardships of such a life and doesn’t get lost in misty-eyed fantasies of an agrarian Elysium. We are not, as of the moment, exactly dead.

But Romanticism is not only about returning to the land, though Wordsworth and many of the great Romantics, not to mention Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, have certainly endorsed such an idea. It’s also about fighting, and even dying, for an ideal. What is really worth fighting, let alone dying, for? Certainly not “strategic governmental objectives,” though Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—however one interprets them—surely are. Lord Byron, profligate that he was, gave his life for an ideal (or tried to) when he left his scurrilous lifestyle to fight for Greek independence, a failed but noble cause. As I write this, citizens of Cuba and France show signs of a willingness to fight for an ideal—freedom. What would you fight for?

Romanticism, that is, is messy, hard to nail down, and, therefore, more human than the technocratic promises of Utopia that are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s hollow project. H. G. Schenk in his The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History, puts it as well as anyone. For him Romanticism is

“a unity […] characterized as contrariness, dissonance and inner conflict of the Romantic mind. Utopian dreams for the future side by side with nostalgia for the past; a marked nihilistic mood accompanied by a fervent yearning for faith; serious attempts to bring about a Christian revival followed, in an admittedly marginal case, by the very abandonment of faith on the part of the former apologist; the long tug-of-war between the old religion and the new ideologies—these are some of the unresolved contradictions which lie at the core of the movement. No shorter formula can be devised to define the essence of Romanticism. All short-cut definitions that have been put forward—well over a hundred—are unsatisfactory.” [2]

Christianity, then, can be construed as a kind of Romanticism. This may be because the god of Christianity is a human god, thereby making Christianity the most human of religions.

Romanticism has, I have to confess, inhabited every phase of my life—from my youth as a musician, my work as a poet and teacher, in my scholarship and writing (Sophiology—hello?), as a husband and father, no less than my thirty years in biodynamics. For me, it’s all about hope: the belief that we can make the Kingdom present in our lives. I heard this in the music that inspired me as a young man—in Kate Bush and The Waterboys, for example—and I felt it in the poets, from the Romantic period and after, who continue to nourish me. They say, with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, “Yes” to this business of being human. The point is that to be human is to be a Romantic. It’s the default position.

One of the great moments of late-20th Century Romanticism.

The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met his end in Italy while sailing into a storm. Unfortunately, though a decent sailor, the poet could not swim. When the Tyrrhenian Sea’s waves brought Shelley’s sodden corpse back to land, a volume of Keats was found in one of his jacket pockets, a volume of Sophocles in the other. At Shelley’s funeral, while the poet’s body burned on the shore of Leghorn, his friend Edward Trelawney poured libations of incense, wine, and oil into the flames and consigned Shelley’s remains to the love of Nature. Then, just before the flames devoured it, Trelawney grabbed the poet’s heart.

The mystical body of Romanticism continues to burn, and we are in no danger of running out of fuel. No matter. What needs transfiguring in the fire of time will be transfigured. The treasures we find in its pockets we will cherish, despite fads and the affectations and disaffections of taste. What will remain is the heart, even if some need to risk burning in order to retrieve it. And how beautiful is fire.

A clip from the 2015 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. 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.

1. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Graywold Press, 2017), 37.

2. H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Frederick Ungar, 1966), xxii.