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 Dark Ages / The New Middle Ages

In his magisterial, if somewhat long-in-the-tooth study The Waning of the Middle Ages, Jan Huizinga diagnoses the end of that mysterious and wondrous time in decidedly psychological terms. “At the close of the Middle Ages,” writes Huizinga, “a somber melancholy weighs on people’s minds.” [1] As I have written on this blog and in my recent book, Sophia in Exile, I detect a similar melancholy strain in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, originally published by early English publisher Caxton in 1485 during the twilight of those same Middle Ages. The same sensibility resounds in this famous engraving by Dürer:

I raise these points not out of scholarly or antiquarian interests, but because I see the same cultural development all around me. We, too, are living during a cultural decline and deflation characterized by melancholy; and I would argue that the “pandemic” (read “plague” if you want) is not so much a cause but a symptom of this degeneration.

Like the medieval period, our times are a blend of superstition and ignorance combined with blind faith and an increasingly feudal societal structure. I see superstitious belief in “the science,” which has taken over the authority once held by the Church, replete with the punishment of heretics. I see ignorance widespread, but particularly in college students, who don’t seem to know much about anything for the most part. They’re completely ignorant about history—even the Holocaust—religion, philosophy, politics. I could go on. I noticed this decades ago when I started teaching, but it is far worse (and even more depressing to behold) now. As I said to a class yesterday, “If you don’t ask the Life Questions now, when will you? How can you learn to Live in Truth if you’ve never thought seriously about what Truth is?” People really don’t go to college looking for answers to these questions anymore; their aims, though no fault of their own making, are more utilitarian. As a result, the last generation or so is more susceptible to the influence of propaganda, and ours is certainly the Golden Age of Propaganda, aided and augmented by the pernicious prevalence of social media and surveillance technologies. Perhaps students can’t grapple with the Life Question because they’ve been trained by these technologies to avoid them in order to avoid social and technological ostracization and recrimination. But what should one expect when even a Supreme Court nominee can’t answer simple question about biology?

Unlike the earlier age, our own is not suffused by a religious culture. So we don’t get the consolation of Heaven, only the threat of a technocratic Hell. “You’ll own nothing and be happy” is the promise of the new manorial barons to their ignorant and obedient serfs. We should expect nothing less: we’ve been chemically and technologically lobotomized.

All this is to say that we are now living in a New Dark Age. There is simply no other way to describe it.

Nikolai Berdyaev saw all of this over a hundred years ago. In his book The End of Our Time, first published in Russian in 1919, Berdyaev, taking the mantle of prophet, looks into the future: “The time is coming fast when everyone will have to ask himself whether ‘progress’ was progress or whether it was a most vicious ‘reaction,’ a movement away from the meaning of the universe and the authentic foundations of life.” [2] He wrote this under the threats of Communism and Socialism, “the end and crown of all contemporary history,” a phrase he used as the opposite of a compliment. [3]

Berdyaev, however, also prophesied the coming of what he called “The New Middle Ages.” He did not propose a retrograde movement to the past, but traced the trajectorial habits of history to predict what would happen next: an era of universality, that was also a feature of the earlier Middle Ages: “The idea of universality so characteristic of the middle ages has ceased to have any influence in ours. It is only when human personality is rooted in the universal, in the cosmos, that it finds an ontological ground to give it its chief substance.” [4] But his vision also has economic and social implications:

“By this path we should be obliged to revive rural economy and return to trades, organizing ourselves into economic association and trade corporations. The town will have to link up with the country again, and competition be replaced by co-operation. The principle of private property will be kept as an eternal foundation, but will be limited and spiritualized in application: no more of those scandalous huge private fortunes with which we are so familiar. There will be no pretence at equality, but neither will there be avoidable hunger and poverty. We shall have to have a much more simple and elementary material culture and a spiritual culture that is more complex.” [5]

The future, that is, is a religious one. It is also a Distributist one (if only the alleged Distributitists would stop reading The Hobbit for five minutes and actually do something.) But Berdyaev also has something to say about woman in this future (and he doesn’t need to be a biologist to do so):

“It seems to me that women will be very much to the fore in the new middle ages; an exclusively masculine culture was undermined by the war [WWI], and in these later most trying years the influence of women has been considerable and their achievements recognized as great. Woman is bound more closely than man to the soul of the world and its primary elemental forces, and it is through her that he reaches communion with them. Masculine culture is too rationalizing, out of touch with the mysteries of universal life: this is corrected through woman. Women are filling a notably important role in the present religious revival; as in the gospel, they are predestined to be the myrrh-bearers. Day is the time of the exclusive predominance of masculine culture; at night the feminine element receives her rights…. It is the eternal feminine that has so great a future in coming history, not the emancipated woman or epicene creature” [6]

All he describes here, of course, is the essence of Sophiology.

In this regard, I can’t help but think of Nimue’s enchantment of Merlin in Le Morte Darthur. Merlin enthralled by Nimue, and who “allwayes he lay aboute to have hir maydynhode” is tricked by Nimue into divulging his magical power, by which she entraps him in a stone. I think we can interpret this as a prediction of the aged and decrepit masculine magic of the technological and of war being arrested (not killed) by the feminine. Remember: even the grievously wounded Arthur repairs to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his hurts by a community of women, and is one day promised to return as the Rex Quandam, Rexque Futurus, the Once and Future King.

So, I think we are indeed living in a Dark Age, but I also think we live upon the cusp of a New Middle Ages. But nothing is guaranteed. I think the present Archons also see this movement—and are doing their utmost to hold on to their power through the same tools that destroyed Arthur’s realm: war, magic (or technology to you and me), and a profound misunderstanding of the feminine.

I predict most of our institutions, now faltering, will soon fail, despite the machinations of the Archons. The medical-corporate-industrial complex will implode. The educational system will do likewise. Lastly, it will happen to governments. With them our understanding of economics will undergo a vast realignment.

So what will come in their place? Time to start planning.

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, J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Edward Arnold, 1924), 22.

2. Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, trans. Donald Attwater (Sheed & Ward, 1935), 76.

3. Ibid., 78-79.

4. Ibid., 85.

5. Ibid., 95.

6. Ibid., 117-18.

THE DIVINE FEMININE: LEADING US EVER ONWARD

“The Death of Arthur” by Julia Margaret Cameron

What follows is my introduction to Jesus the Imagination, Volume 5: The Divine Feminine, published last month by Angelico Presss.

“Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.” ~ Julia Kristeva [1]

I have never felt comfortable with Simone de Beauvoir’s bristling in The Second Sex in regards to Goethe’s concluding lines of Faust: “the Eternal Feminine leads us ever onward.” De Beauvoir extends this complaint to allegorical representations of principles (like Liberty or the Church, for example) as female, to Dante’s Beatrice, to divine figures such as the Virgin Mary and the Sophia of Gnosticism. De Beauvoir seems to operate under the assumption (note the term) that only feminine figures are idealized in Western culture, and that such are incommensurate with the actual reality of women. Idealization, however, is a universally human interpretive gesture; and that it is often personified can hardly be evidence of a conspiracy theory of male oppression, as if any man could live up to the model of Jesus, the Buddha, Odin All-Father, or even Pa Ingalls. Figuration leads us ever onward, Simone.

Julia Kristeva, much more generous of spirit and, as a result, much more human, acknowledges the West’s—and particularly Christianity’s—psychic relationship to the feminine, especially as regards the image of the Mother. “The question is,” she writes, “whether this was simply an appropriation of the Maternal by men and therefore, according to our working hypothesis, just a fantasy hiding the primary narcissism from view, or was it perhaps also a mechanism of enigmatic sublimation? This may have been masculine sublimation, assuming that for Freud imagining Leonardo—and even for Leonardo himself—taming the Maternal—or primary narcissistic—economy is a necessary precondition of artistic or literary achievement.” [2] This notion can be applied, with some qualifications of course, to Goethe’s pronouncement.

Goethe the poet, who was Goethe the scientist as well, however, was also giving utterance to a metaphysical principle. Inspired by his reading of Boehme and the example of Novalis, an incipient Sophiology haunts the conclusion to Goethe’s Faust. Many feminist commentators, like de Beauvoir, have chastised Goethe for not having Faust justly punished for his mistreatment of Gretchen—and the fact that Gretchen even prays for Faust’s redemption from the heavenly realm during his apotheosis in the play’s conclusion further offends them. But such a disposition profoundly misreads Goethe—and Christianity, for that matter. Faust’s denouement is a picture of apocatastasis, the redemption of all, an idea that profoundly colors Sophiology.

What political discourses routinely miss when projecting their biases onto works of literature and metaphysics—to say nothing religion, science, or nature—is that not only the natural world, but the world of the spirit is also gendered. Try as we might, through whatever optics or interventions, we cannot ultimately avoid this reality. It is a matter of primal ontology.

Often sterilized in mistaken conceptions of neutrality, a gendered one-sidedness, as both Alison Milbank and Therese Schroeder-Sheker argue in this volume, is detrimental to everyone, regardless of gender. We act as though this is a reality we are only just now discovering—since the advent of feminism and ideas of gender equity—but this is not at all the case. It is my claim that the Western psyche has been clamoring for a regenerated imagination of the ontological reality of gender for at least a thousand years—and, as Margaret Barker discusses in my interview with her here—the same Western psyche has been in search of a holistic and healthy imagination of gender from at least the time of Lady Wisdom’s expulsion from worship in First Temple Judaism under the reforms of King Josiah.

During the Middle Ages, the Christian psyche was on the way to rectifying this situation. Beguine mysticism, with its holy feminine eroticism, Franciscan spirituality, with its deep relationship to Nature, and the lays of the Troubadours and their adoration of the Lady all rendered witness to the need of the re-entrance of the Divine Feminine into culture. That reformation was not to be fully realized, alas, though the dream lived on. Its palimpsest bleeds through Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, in which the hero’s development depends upon the counsel and examples of both women and men, even though he often misinterprets things at first. As we all do.

But perhaps the most accurate depiction of the phenomenon of which I speak in medieval literature is Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. The great medieval historian Jan Huizinga describes the late-medieval period in which Malory wrote as a time when “somber melancholy weighs on men’s souls,” [3] and nowhere is this more evident than in Malory. Malory’s Arthurian realm doesn’t end in cataclysm so much as in dissipation and self-sabotage. As with Wolfram, women also figure in this story, but they also contribute to the ruin of the land and of chivalry. The knights who survive the Battle of Camlann, even the great Lancelot, end their lives as monks, priests, or hermits. Queen Guinevere herself dies in the cloister. A tremendous ennui taxed with apocalyptic sterility burdens both Malory’s text and its readers. In the nineteenth century, Malory’s melancholia reappeared in that of Tennyson, nowhere so strongly as in his Idylls of the King, a melancholic tableau brought to beautiful realization in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Malory is not entirely without hope (though what hope he offers is as delicate as frost), as Arthur does not die in the text. Malory tells us that in a mysterious bark “resceyved hym three ladyes with grete mournyng. And so they sette hem downe, and in one of their lappis kyng Arthure layd hys hede.” [4] and ferried him to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his grievous wounds with the promise to one day return in parousaic triumph. Avalon is an island of women; it is only there where Arthur can find healing.

I have often thought, over this past, most melancholic of years, that Malory’s tale is precisely the homeopathic medicine required for our particular moment. The West, and especially the Christian West, suffers from a grievous wound and it is only the Divine Feminine which can bring it healing. What was lost must be restored. In our end is our beginning. For the Divine Feminine leads us ever onward.

Toss that Freudian symbol back to the unconscious, my mans!

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. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6, no. 1/2 The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspective (1985); 133-52, at 134.

2. Ibid., 135.

3. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study in the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (St. Martin’s Press, 1924), 22.

4. Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1971), 716.