What is a woman? The divine feminine

 When the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition in the United Kingdom, one Sir Keir Starmer (a tricky lawyer by profession) was unable to define what a woman is he was rightly mocked.  It also seemed to be revelatory of a joke played upon all of us by  the woke lobby,  A woman can be defined by biology and the woke postmodernists would have us deny scientific reality for the purposes of their political and cultural agenda of destroying the West.

In reality though, we cannot answer the question of a woman through biology alone.  Human beings, male and female, while rooted in their biology are more than mere biological and material beings.  The feminine as much as the masculine is only fulfilled if we achieve our cultural, even our spiritual telos.  Just as we are not fully human until we are transfigured through a life of faith, so we are not fully Man or Woman until we fulfil our higher purpose.  In this sense the postmodernists actually help us.  They differentiate between sex and gender, dismissing gender as a social construct.  And in a sense they are right.

Except it is not always just a social construct.  We cannot be completely understood as biological and material beings alone.  We are social, cultural and spiritual.  The trouble with the post-modernists is they have not escaped the empirical Enlightenment paradigm, where things are understood from the bottom rather than the highest point.  Reality begins in the divine, as real as the earth is in the hierarchy.

The story of the West since the Reformation onwards has been a project to erase the feminine from the world.  First with the removal of the Mother of God by the more radical Reformers as the Reformation progressed, then with the rejection of the feminine attribute of intuition in favour of pure rationalism during the Enlightenment.  Today this persists with Anglo-Saxon feminism, whereby a woman is understood to have reached her potential only if she behaves and works like a man in late capitalist democracy.

We remain thinking in an upside-down paradigm.  Instead of understanding the world from the heavenly, we dismiss the heavenly and try to understand by material facts alone.  If men and women are merely biological and have no spiritual side then we reduce them to mere male and female, determined by base natural urges.  In this way we have the 1950s housewife as part of the economic system, motivated by her biological, material and pecuniary needs and preferences alone  The answer from the feminists is not to rediscover the traditional feminine, but to turn women into men ( and a particular type of man at that - the office worker in global capitalism, the proverbial pen-pusher, the tech obsessive or the banker).

There is a more genuinely traditional understanding of Men and Women and it rests in complementarity and the erotic.  Eve came from Adam's side.  We are parted to be reunited in our complementary difference.  Just as the monastic represents in a sense the feminine in his relationship with the masculine Christ or just as the Church is understood as the feminine in relationship with her head - Christ, so Man and Woman reflect the pattern of the divine.  With this comes man's headship, the woman's fundamental support of the man and the full expression of our purpose and telos as a reflection of the cosmic pattern of Christ and the Church.

This does not mean reducing men and women to economic functionaries as attacked by feminism, but neither does it mean equality in the sense of identical interchangeability.  It means rather divine vocation in marriage and even in every other interaction between the genders.

It means to be fully human we need to reach our potential as imago dei and as Man and Woman.  In that sense we have the ultimate archetype in the Mother of God, who supplicates and protects with her veil over Constantinople.  A figure of maternal care, but also feminine strength.

One saw this Marian strength in the babushkas of the USSR as they saved the Church, organising the baptism by priests of their grandchildren secretly.  This was participation in the transfigured feminine in the mould of the Theotokos it seems.

At a lower level, and with care not to return them to an idolatrous status above the Theotokos, we even have the pagan pantheon, where the feminine attributes were understood in goddesses as different as Hera or Hestia, Athene or Demeter, Artemis or Aphrodite.   These goddesses or daemons do tell us something about the feminine just as Hephaestus or Ares about the masculine - as long as we remember all these attributes are gathered up and transfigured in Christ and His Mother.  

The 1950s housewife, infatuated with technology making bourgeois domesticity more convenient, or the radical feminist keen to become a wage slave are a false dichotomy and simply different faces of secular modernity that we must overcome if we are to be fully human.  While in one sense there is neither male nor female in Christ, identity is only ever transfigured, never annihilated.

In answer to the question, what is a woman? an Enlightenment scientific answer on biology alone will not do.  Yes gender encompasses biological sex and the two are essentially linked, but it is far more and is fully realised through the telos of the feminine or the masculine.

 

The Final Stage of the Revolution - technocrats, occultists, elites and sexual rights.

 

 

Western Churches in their rather ineffectual and half-hearted attempt to resist the sexualisation of our society (sometimes turning into their full abject surrender to the agenda) are often accused of being obsessed by sex.  Of course the real problem for the churches is they are trying to survive and perhaps even rescue the sinners in an age dominated by sexualisation.  It is becoming all the more apparent that in the 1960s there was not so much a social and sexual revolution as a major project in social engineering directed by elites in power.

The CIA now acknowledges its own involvement in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with the MK Ultra project encouraging drug usage and in other manipulation with the promotion of abstract art against traditional forms, by supporting artists such as Jackson Pollock, or in promoting radical politics such as backing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In terms of drug usage, sexualisation of society and feminism it seems highly likely the CIA was generally involved. Ostensibly this was to present a Western society as “free” and avante garde in contrast to the Soviet Union’s oppressive restrictions and its Soviet realism in art.  While the early USSR had been extreme in its social progressivism after the Revolution, this changed during the Great Patriotic War.  Stalin, party to the original social liberalisation, recognised to win the War and defeat the Nazi threat he needed to give people access to their churches again, bring a halt to abortions and homosexuality and restore some level of traditional values again.  For pragmatic reasons, the Soviet Union had dispensed with the path to moral degeneracy; in a couple of decades time, the West fully embarked upon moral degeneracy during the 1960s.

There was perhaps more to it than merely a good propaganda opportunity to present the United States as the land of the free.  On both sides of the Atlantic, elite intellectuals shared certain progressive ideals often meant to be achieved by sinister methods.  Eliminating religious faith, sexual liberation, feminism, eugenics and an all-powerful State were the ideals of the Transatlantic elites.  Important families -  the Rockafellas, the Rothschilds, the Huxleys, the Darwins were part of an elite linked to progressivism.  The Fabian idea of a slow technocratic revolution promoted by the Webbs, H G Wells’ vision of a new world, Betrand Russell’s dry atheism, all were complementary to each other in an overarching elite and anti-Christian idea of progress.  Valiant opponents spoke out such as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis via his novels, even George Orwell from a non-traditional perspective.  What is sometimes overlooked is the fascination with the occult sitting alongside commitment to atheism and a religious scientism amongst these elites.  Secret societies were popular.  There was undoubtedly an elite agenda following in the tradition of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, secret societies and the French and American Revolutions.

It is important to understand that atomisation and Socialist Revolution go hand in hand.  The real technocratic Socialism of Wells, Mr and Mrs Webb or Russell, rather than the small s socialism of a Schumacher.  And we should not be too distracted by Socialism, an ideology that has probably served its purposes – one of which was to violently destroy Holy Rus and another to achieve a type of Benthamite panoptican.  An obsession with free love, population control and elite power were the Babel preoccupations of the Western elites at the beginning of the last Century.  A brave new one- world government would be achieved by the elites managing the talking monkeys (a degraded view of Man and rejection of Man as the imago dei).

Combined with this were to come structural economic changes that created an opportunity to implement the final revolution.  As capitalism moved from its Fordist stage which had been aided by social engineering to replace the extended family by the nuclear family, the capitalists in the late Twentieth Century now needed dislocated individuals, they needed women in the workplace and a certain cosmopolitan rootlessness as capitalism in the West became global, factories moved abroad, migrants were brought in as labour.   In the Post War era manufacturing’s time in the West was limited.  It was not only militant unions that destroyed industry.

Throughout the sixties Governments still obviously dominated by liberal elites passed laws that “liberated” or atomised us.  Instead of living a life in a context of traditional values and responsibilities we were encouraged by legal changes and engineered popular culture to think what was good was what was pleasurable and aided my passions and appetites.  Homosexuality and abortion were legalised.  Divorce was made easy.  In America elite liberals had pushed for the creation of an effective contraceptive to break people from the responsibilities of child bearing (an early transhumanist move). This further facilitated the shifting of women out of the family home and into the workplace, usually into lowly jobs trying to find money for childcare.  Racial hatred laws were introduced for what would be the inevitable future multiculturalism of an increasingly global capitalism based on shifting cheap labour from poorer countries into richer countries.  They would be a means to prevent discontent boiling over in the face of mass migration.  Whatever the merits of such laws, they were drafted with an eye on the plans for the future.   

Most central to everything was the sexual relationship.  If the most personal and sacred encounter between two people, the act at once most intimately physical and spiritually unifying could be extracted from the sacramental union of marriage and taken out of the family home and was no longer between two spouses, but rather made casual, then alienation and atomisation would be achieved.  The powerful elites, with their occultist interests and their Darwinian reduction of men to mere intelligent apes saw the power of sexual desire.  If taken off the yoke of social taboos unrestrained sexual desire would create a new race who could never really connect, who were driven by their passions, which they felt it was their right to sate.  Harm between persons and distrust would turn us into the isolated individuals subject to anomie and self-loathing, but preoccupied with our rights, and the technocrats knew they would be able to control people thus demoralised.  We would become exactly the sort of alienated and isolated individuals that would be passive in the face of an ever encroaching progressive system.  Furthermore if deviant relationships could be promoted, the family would be undermined, the greatest bulwark as Chesterton pointed out against the oppressive State.

Another development was in the elite’s favour – the invention of television.  The visual image is far more powerful than the spoken word of radio (already a propaganda tool).  Serials with popular characters were written pulling at the heart strings to make radical changes in what was socially acceptable achievable.  The social revolutionary themes of freemason Mozart’s operas entered popular culture with narratives of oppressive patriarchs being ridiculed.  The propaganda would develop to actively promote what was once seen as taboo in sitting rooms across the country, via that glowing, talking box.  With the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s role television could be used to push boundaries of taboos until unwittingly a conservative society would become liberal.  In America former propagandist Edward Bernays had already utilised the social-engineering potential of advertising.

And so the elites who long planned this seem to have achieved their goal.  The bread and circuses of entertainment, sexual promiscuity, LGBT, and the impact of feminism have all helped towards Malthusian goals of population reduction.  People are unable to think as they focus on consumption.  Churches are in decline.  Marriage is in decline.  These are the very aims of those Occultist progressives at the start of the Century.    What is more they cannot tolerate the survival of any foreign government not fully on board with the revolution of “liberation”.  International tensions are therefore escalated to pressurise countries to abandon not only economic freedom from debt to globalist institutions, but also their traditional values.  Western NGOs are often focused not only on protecting human beings from oppressive regimes, but more on promoting the new subverted values of the revolutionary West.  So much so that the six-coloured banner of LGBTQ+ has come to be seen as a flag of globalist imperialism in many non-Western countries.

The “rights” of sexual freedom, from heterosexual promiscuity to LGBT are now being used to increase the reach of the Panoptican, so that speech is suppressed if it makes a case for a return to traditional values.  The surveillance system via the State and Big Tech is the other side of the revolutionary coin to the “rights” rhetoric.  And so in the name of freedom not only have we been enslaved to our passions and appetites, isolated and atomised, but we have lost the freedom to speak out and question the agenda imposed by long-established families and secret societies that are in their deepest beliefs hostile to God, the Church and Tradition.

It ain’t over until the woke lady sings – The Battle of the Proms

 

Over the years the conductors and the BBC itself have become increasingly uncomfortable with the popular and patriotic music of the Last Night of the Proms.  For that one night only, the British are allowed to take pride in their nation and celebrate who they are and where they are from.  The woke British Broadcasting Corporation dislikes anything that celebrates Britishness, dominated as it is by the contrary woke-ideology that encourages the validation of disparate identities at the expense of the mainstream population.

Fearful of a head-on confrontation with the British public, up until now the Beeb has attempted to subvert the Proms from within.  It has selected lesbian conductors and sopranos and tried to turn a celebration of Britishness into a celebration of woke British values.  Instead of that which has traditionally been understood as Britishness – rooted in a Christian society that values virtues such as stoicism, courage and martial valour – the non-values of Sodom and Gomorrah are celebrated.  This Trojan Horse strategy of subverting patriotism from within, so that to wave the Union Jack means you also support the waving of the LGBTQ + rainbow flag, is very clever.  Meanwhile across the world our political class promotes values inimical to traditional society and calls this disastrous identity politics “British values”.

People are naturally patriotic and particularly on a party night like Last Night of the Proms they are easily susceptible to having a nefarious agenda slipped past them.  No one wants to be a party pooper.  The BBC’s Last Night of the Proms therefore got away with portraying Britishness as wokeness.

Nonetheless wokeness cannot hide its true colours.  It is not about unity or tradition, it is by definition hostile to what holds us together.  Wokeness is about creating disparate identities that define people as small and “oppressed” groups, downplaying and denying what unites them with their countrymen.  This is the corrosive and poisonous dogma of intersectionality.  It makes the marginal the mainstream at the expense of tradition and shared culture.  This is why the woke are sympathetic to the promotion of traditional Islam and feminism – seemingly contradictory ideologies.  This is not a contradiction if your overarching ideology is actually about destroying the mainstream culture and eradicating tradition.  Contradictory perspectives and ideologies are equally worthwhile of promotion if you wish to destroy Christian society.

Now there is not that much explicitly Christian about Last Night of the Proms (apart from Jerusalem).  Rule Britannia is from the Seven Years War when our Protestant identity was far stronger.  Land of Hope and Glory being Edwardian is more from the zenith or peak of British imperialism when perhaps more Masonic and Deist ideas were in the ascendancy, but the composer himself was a Roman Catholic.  Nonetheless patriotism more than faith is what is celebrated, albeit with references to God natural to a Christian society.  The reason these pieces of music are a target is they support a coherent national identity and that national identity because of our culture and history is linked to being a Christian country.

Subversion by the BBC had been working and was powerfully symbolised in last year’s last night, with both EU and Rainbow flags being unfurled and waved.  Particularly symbolic was the choice made of the soprano for Rule Britannia.  A rather large bisexual or lesbian American was selected who unfurled not a Union Jack, but a Rainbow flag.  She also sang the innocent children’s song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with strong hints of sexualisation.  It really was decadent degeneracy.  In a free society people can follow their sexual leanings, but in a decent society one does not advertise that as an integral part of one’s identity, particularly for a national celebration meant for everyone such as the Proms.  Claiming to be inclusive this behaviour is really exclusive of most of us, who really do not need to know about someone’s preferences and passions in the bedroom . . .

The contrast seemed even more powerful because the beautiful Tartar soprano Aida Garifullina was outside in the park also singing Rule Britannia, as though the mainstream and the traditional ideas of beauty were banished to the outside, while the margin had moved into the centre.  Orthodox Youtuber Jonathan Pageau has talked extensively about the topsy turvy way the woke agenda places the marginal in the centre at the expense of the traditional and normative.

This rendition of Rule Britannia by the woke lesbian Jamie Barton was the very peak of the Trojan Horse strategy.  She was able to ride the patriotic cheers as though they were actually cheers for what she was inclined to do in her private bedroom (a fact she was all too keen to make public).

This strategy that was working now seems to have been abandoned.  Covid 19 has changed the strategy.  Just as we had to witness unrepresentative BLM demonstrators destroying the monuments of our history and identity so the newly appointed Proms conductor from Finland, Dalia Stasevska, sees Covid and our virtual house arrest as an opportunity to “sanitise” the Proms of our patriotic songs.  This really is sneaky, because just like the BLM demonstrators, the conductress feels she can make this move as the audience will not be there.  It is though a strategic blunder.

This move, to delete patriotic songs, just proves wokeness and patriotism are not compatible.  For the former is about minority identities at the expense of cohesion and the latter brings us all together.   Wokeness, let us be clear, is not simply about tolerance, but promotion of the abnormal, the irregular and the marginal at the expense of the traditional.  Its whole narrative thrives on painting history and shared identity as oppressive of minorities who are of more importance than the majority.  So it was never really true that British values could be woke values.

Britain is a tolerant country, but tolerance is not the same as active promotion of the marginal.  Britain has a history we are proud of that has allowed a space for the margin, but has not attacked the mainstream tradition.  It is a history based on the recognition the mainstream does not need to oppress the margin.  Wokeness, with its cultural Marxist philosophy cannot accept tolerance, because really its programme is all about revolution.  It aims to overturn the normative and will utilise disparate groups and interests to do that.  As with all revolutions it is not promoted by the ordinary working class, but by a narrow group of privileged intellectuals who do not share the concerns of normal people.  Sadly this narrow group dominates in fields like the media, especially the BBC.

What will now happen is that the ordinary public, Sir Henry Wood’s key audience, who so love the Proms will react and no longer accept the woke propaganda, being revealed for what it is and what it is hostile towards.  Thus if the proposal goes ahead, the Proms would become a narrow world for the self-important woke and privileged.  Patriotic music is so often a way into the world of classical music for those not fortunate enough to have been educated through the private system and university (where nowadays you seem to learn to sneer at tradition).  The Brexit voters are the descendants of Sir Henry Wood’s target audience. 

The BBC might see its legitimacy at stake, when the unpopularity of the proposal becomes clear.  Most likely a “compromise” will be found in a dispute that never was other than in the inflamed imaginations of the privileged media class, so the songs will remain, but sanitised and made bland.  Nonetheless, what has happened is a major error.  The woke, having wormed their way into British life have now clearly cast their ideology as the opponent of patriotism.  We can now hope that when the woke soprano sang, it was the swansong of using patriotism as a mask for the woke agenda.

PROGRESS - THE MODERN IDOLATRY

What is very interesting about the typical progressive is their dismissal of religious faith based upon personal revelation and inherited tradition as blind. The ideology of the progressive does not stand up to the sort of scrutiny to which traditional Christianity is continually subjected.  By that ideology I mean the unquestioned premise that the direction of history is towards a positive state and that the new is good by dint of being new.

Such an ideology can be traced back to the Victorian Positivists and further back to the Whiggery of Eighteenth Century England.  The Whigs won the battle of history and wrote history as though it had a providential direction towards the Hanoverian state.  This was taken up as a sort of pseudo-science and spawned the social Darwinism of Spencer, the Dialectical Materialism of Marx and Engels and the liberal assumption that society will become ever-more liberal and ever-more free.  The irony is that such philosophies of blind faith in blind progress have led to persecution, eugenics, concentration camps, class war, the GUlag and the destruction of freedom under the heel of the jack boot of the modern state.

It is to these dangerous roots that the modern Progressive consciously or unconsciously receives the succour for his ideology.  And the key point is that while religious faith is rejected as superstitious and as contradicted by empirical evidence, the Progressive himself places a blind faith in an ever-improving society as state power, censorship and bureaucracy increase, despite the overwhelming lesson of history that from Oliver Cromwell, through to Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler, the radical rejection of inherited society in favour of state-enforced progress has led to misery for countless millions.  From the French Terror to the millions dead in Ukraine from the collectivisation of farms, this blind and superstitious faith in progress has led to misery.

At root is the heresy often criticised by the late Seraphim Rose, the American convert from atheism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity - the heresy of Chiliasm.  That heresy was the belief that God's Kingdom could be created on earth, by political action.  Like so many heresies it moves away from orthodoxy by only the slightest degree, yet the consequences of the original error increase exponentially, so the last state is far worse than the first.  The second commandment of loving one's neighbour is distorted to create an ultimate solution for all our neighbours even at the expense of love of God.  The result has always been and always will be misery.  Utopia on this earth is impossible and to achieve it shows a lack of genuine faith and instead a dangerous blind faith in the inevitability of progress resulting from political action.

The answer to this serious error in Western thinking is to view society as being better or worse depending upon how much it participates in Truth.  This then removes the philosophical error of assuming history is going in one direction.  Further, rejecting this premise makes us aware of the danger of decline and decadence, and helps us to look for ways to maintain and achieve human flourishing through inherited wisdom.

Man lives a more flourishing life the closer he conforms to Truth, not as a result of being more modern or forward thinking.  This living life in a full and flourishing way can appear reactionary or old-fashioned - for example living life in the vocation of a husband and father or housewife and mother.  It can also be progressive, but not for the sake of being progressive.  William Wilberforce did not fight slavery through an appeal to abstract theory or the demands of progress; he fought and defeated slavery by an appeal to the internal and inherited traditions of Western civilisation - Christian values.  One might say Judaeo-Christian values when one thinks of the emphasis in the Old Testament on God freeing His people from slavery to a human master in the form of Pharaoh.

It is quite simply shallow to place one's faith in an ill-defined concept of progress.  We need to ask rather, does this social or political reform bring us closer to or further from the Truth?  An idea of progress for the sake of progress cannot help here.  We cannot know whether a change is for good or bad unless we turn to inherited tradition and personal faith (if these two work against each other something is very wrong with a civilisation and culture).

To give a specific example, there is a lot now said about the role of the male gender in a society.  The aggressive assaults upon our cultural understanding of what it is to be a male role model by the feminist ideologues has confused many.  They have conflated men when they fail, are violent, drunk or purposeless with the Gentleman.  The Gentleman is close to the Truth, tracing his antecedents in the idea of the Christian Knight, that civilised savage, courteous and true, yet strong and brave. To be fully-developed as a man is to look back to that inherited wisdom, which taught men to use their superior physical strength to defend the weak.  To avoid degenerating into a brute men should not be emasculated, but fulfil their potential as Gentlemen.  Here then we see that looking back enables us to reach closer to the Truth, as opposed to the confused situation resulting from progressive ideologies such as feminism.  When men behave as gentlemen it will be far more difficult for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world to misbehave - their behaviour would reveal them as cads because of the stark contrast with a social norm of chivalry. Our current progressive and socially-liberal milieu allowed cads and scoundrels to pass unnoticed for many years.

Progress as an idea is a false and shallow chimera.  It is superstition and nothingness.  It is far more irrational than faith placed in a personal God, discovered in personal revelation through the institution and inherited traditions of the Church. The progressive really should stop projecting their own flimsiness in their faith upon those who follow a deep, prescriptive and traditional religion.  The empirical evidence is clear, a belief in Utopia rather than Heaven has caused the greatest levels of misery in history, while those social reforms that have endured - equality under the law, the abolition of slavery, political freedom all rest upon an ancient and inherited notion of each man being made in the image of God.

Bring back the age of chivalry!

When a gentleman acts courteously towards ladies, he may often receive the welcome comment that “The age of chivalry is not dead after all!”  Of course the age of chivalry was about much more than behaving as a gentleman towards ladies, but it was certainly an integral part of it.  Etymologically the word comes from the French for horse and was the code of honourable and Christian behaviour for the Knights of Western Europe. 

Back to Troy

G K Chesterton saw the roots of chivalry as going back to pagan times and being embodied by the character of Hector, whose epithet in Homer’s Iliad is “the tamer of horses”.  Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man:

“Hector grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of the Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat.  The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.”

Hector does seem in many ways to prefigure the Christian Knight – he is a type, albeit from a pagan world.  Hector of course was loyal and loving to his wife, but is primarily remembered for giving his life for his brother’s sins inasmuch as he died for his City to protect it from Greek vengeance against Paris.  Chesterton went on:

“And as with the city [Troy] so with the hero [Hector]; traced in the archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight.  There is the prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse.  It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends.  It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry.”

The Origins of the Knight

Mediaeval knights emerged from the chaos of the end of the Carolingian Empire, when Christians fought Christians.  The Church and the Knights themselves felt that there was something profoundly anti-Christian about brethren of the faith killing one another.  The chivalric code therefore grew up to control these mounted warriors and initially dealt with how they should deal with their defeated opponents.  Ransoming your defeated opponent replaced the pagan approach of killing prisoners.  So the Church attempted to restrain Christians in war.  Later with the crusades in response to calls for help from the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, Pope Urban II tried to employ Saint Augustine’s much earlier concept of the Just War, which became part of chivalry in the fight to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim invaders.  Further crusades such as those to drive the Muslims from Catholic Spain led to the just war becoming a positive duty for the Knight.

Courtly Love and Hunting with Hounds

Later the code of courtly love became part of chivalry.  The knight began to serve the lady and the Christian idea of defending and venerating the weaker sex, particularly linked to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, became integral to chivalry.  This is where our idea of behaving as a gentleman towards ladies can be traced.  It is a uniquely Christian cultural approach, where the woman is honoured rather than oppressed.  The lady goes first through the door, not walking behind her man.

One aspect of modern culture where chivalry survives is in hunting with its codes of behaviour.  Hunting was another integral part of being a knight.  The poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a key example of this, where the moral of marital fidelity is combined with long pieces on hunting with hounds.

The Modern Attacks on the Chivalric Code

Today in the modern world there are many forces arrayed against chivalry.  Feminism attacks the gentleness of the gentleman towards the lady as a form of oppression.  Islamist extremists burn poppies when the modern day soldier returns from defending Afghans from the oppression of the Taliban (our armed forces are surely the strongest example of the chivalric code today).  And the anti-hunting movement seems to be motivated not by concern for animal welfare (hunting clearly being the most humane way to control the fox) but through an atavistic loathing of the symbol of the mounted hunter, which can be traced back to the Knights of Christendom.

Of course, even when chivalry was the dominant code there was hypocrisy and a failure to live up to the ideal.  Abuses took place and prisoners were slaughtered.  Because of this, the opponents of all that chivalry represents attack the concept itself, rather than concede flawed humanity will always fail to live up to the ideal.  Does this really mean the knights should have abandoned their code not to kill prisoners because sometimes it was violated?  It is beyond the blogger why the fact individuals fail to live up to a good code should mean the code is wrong.  This seems to be flawed logic.  Let us keep the ideals of chivalry and the gentleman, because those ideals can only be a force for good, raising us up from our flawed nature, however infrequently and fleetingly.

The Moral of Camelot

One is reminded of the story of Camelot.  Of course Camelot failed in the end and part of that failing was Sir Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s adultery.  And yet Malory is clear that the true fault lies with Mordred who exposes Lancelot and thereby brings the whole kingdom down.  Yes Lancelot failed as a human, yet he was still the “noblest knight”.  The real sin was Mordred’s, as revealed at the end of the tale.

Is this not a metaphor for all those who would pull down our inherited moral codes because they detect individual failure.  The exposure of hypocrisy is enough justification to pull down the whole edifice we have inherited from our ancestors.

Living in Ugly Modernity

Returning to Hector, for those of us who believe in that moral code of the knight that evolved into the idea of the gentleman, are we not living in a strange world today?  All that is good and symbolic of that code is disparaged and attacked.  So that like Hector’s widow, Andromache, we find ourselves in a foreign and strange country.  To quote Charles Baudelaire as he bemoaned the loss of traditional Paris:

“Andromache I think of you – this meagre stream,

This melancholy mirror where had once shone forth

The giant majesty of all you widowhood,

This fraudulent Simois, fed by bitter tears,

Has quickened suddenly my fertile memory

As I walked through the modern Carrousel.

The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes

More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart).”