On Chivalry

Day 37

The Necessity of Chivalry is an essay by C.S. Lewis which I first read when I was twelve years old. I found it in an old and obscure book in the darkest corner of my local library. The essay was written for a newspaper syndication in 1940, and came to me accidentally, but I've thought about it for a long time. In the essay, Lewis argues that chivalry is necessary for the ultimate improvement of life and society. The concept of a chivalrous knight is the concept of a person who is “...the meekest man that ever ate in hall...and..the sternest knight to the mortal foe that ever put spear to rest.” A chivalrous knight is not a “compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Lancelot heard himself proclaimed the best knight in the world, 'he wept...” This knight, this ideal person is, Lewis claim, clearly a paradox. He postulates that there are three major types of men. The first is the type who is fierce in hall and on field – the bully, the fighter, the antagonist, and the barbarian. He is a hero by nature, because it is in his nature to fight. The second type is the person who is meek in hall and on field – the modest, the healer, the compromiser, the law-abiding, and the civilized man. He is a survivor by nature, one who is content with a happy life because it fits his nature. The third kind of person is someone who is “brutal in peace and cowardly in war” - The useless, the cruel, who must be whipped and threatened to do anything good, who never really acts out of love for another.

The forth kind of person is the chivalrous sort, the one who can be civilized and peace-abiding, yet is ready and willing to stand up and fight the good fight if need be - the nurturing and protective parent, the kind nurse, and the volunteer firefighter. Lewis according to Lewis, these attitudes are not natural, and are not the general tendency of mankind. The natural tendency of mankind is to be either peaceful or warlike, to be warlike or peaceful. Neither of those two kinds of person are really desirable do be in all situations, though both have their supporters: “In the world today there is a 'liberal' or 'enlightened' tradition which regards the chivalrous side of man's nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the 'false glamour' of war. And there is also a Neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, [a tradition which] would raise from its grave...the..ferocity of Achilles by a 'modern invocation'” and “Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest or the merciful.”

Civilization, the vast tide of folk who love peace more than they love truth or justice, as any child punished by the school for daring ti fight his bully suspects, or any adult who has seen some horror passed over in silence so as to “not cause a scene” knows, will not abide a soldier or a rebel with any good grace. Their cry is 'fighting is never the answer'. On the other side, barbarians who do not know how to deal with the slow growth of a soul, the refinement of purpose, the working out of logical conundrums, or a youth's long thought – policemen hankering for a resisting subject, bullies looking for a victim, politicians and social activists who are so sure they know whats best for everybody, and people who sneer at anyone not like them – cannot abide the peaceful man. They wish either to control or to destroy whatever they see as their enemy - and they always find an enemy, because with no enemy they have no purpose. Their cry is 'you're either with us, or you're against us'. To resist the rule of the barbarian, with its thunderous force, you must have civilization, and must be willing to talk issues out. To resist the rule of civilization, with its slow poison, you must be willing to stand up and push back with blood and iron, or words and heart.

What this required is the chivalrous man, the medieval ideal that “brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valor of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.” Thus, we learn to build up and to defend, to tear down and to protect, all that mankind has made. “But the maintenance of that life depends, in part, on knowing that the knightly nature is art, not nature – something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen.” It is to be hoped that the ethos, the soul and guiding light, of our society will be “a synthesis of what was best in all the classes”, and not a “mere 'pool' with the sediment of all and the virtues of none”. Lewis feels that if we cannot figure this out, then we are doomed to a world which is divided between “wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the thing which makes life desirable.”

So much then for the words of Lewis – I have reproduced the general form of the essay here because it was important to me, but also so that I could continue on and talk about some of the thoughts that arose in me after reading this – the most important of which was not the idea of the knight as the best, but the idea of the chivalrous person as art. The ideal of chivalry perhaps has much to do with the ideal of beauty, as something that perhaps we only ever reach for a short moment, and which we can recognize but not always clearly, and which we do not always agree on. Most importantly though, beauty can reside both in the natural and the artificial, the found and the made. A grand landscape and a picture of that landscape can both be beautiful, but are different kinds of beauty. There is another sort of picture which can be beautiful as well – the picture of a landscape which is not to be found in the real world, for example a picture of Draenor, with floating islands and herds of Clefthoofs. None of these three types of pictures is precisely like the other, but they all posses a kind of beauty, they each touch the ideal in some way. However, the ideal of Chivalry which Lewis entertains is only like two of those kinds of beauty – the picture of the Terran landscape, or the picture of the Draenoran landscape. It is made art.

Art usually has a medium has something which it is soaked in and which it is a type of art of. I do not know of any 'pure art', but rather of painting, sculpture, and music. The art of Chivalry has as its medium “human beings”. We don't seek to end up with a Chivalrous painting, statue, or sound – we aim to make a Chivalrous person: A knight. Because the ideal knight is an artificial man, he is like an artificial painting. A painting is made up of a bunch of paint; just as a sculpture involves a lot of sculpting of something, and a song involves a lot of singing, knight is made up of natural men, or at least the natural tendencies of mankind. The tendencies that Lewis mentions are the be meek in hall and to be fierce in battle, and these are, he says, the important tendencies to meld together to make a knight. However, we can ask a more general question – what else can a man be made into? There are other kinds of people in the world besides knights after all.

A knight is a kind of person. A person is a sort of world-object, a large mind or a complex logical field. A knight is an artificial person who is a mix of natural persons. Lewis contents that there are two types of natural persons – those who tend to be meek in hall, and those who tend to be fierce in battle. We presume that men can be more complex then that, and so we have the advent of the artificial man – the man who balances the various tendencies of mankind. The various tendencies of mankind are the tendencies of a person to do something. Since a person is a world-object and logical field, the various tendencies of mankind are the tendencies of a particular world-objects or a complex field to evolve or change in a particular direction. Generally speaking, if a man is a large mind, then the minds within him, which are various logical fields and world objects or gems, are the various natural persons who make up an artificial person. A knight is, by definition, a large mind, since they contain multitudes.

I suspect that the vast majority of us are artificial persons. We are complex people who are not easily describable by a single simple and natural category. However, what does it mean to be artificial? It means to be made – made by what? If we were made by 'nature', then we would be natural men, not artificial ones. One could argue though, that this distinction is the wrong use of the ideas of natural and artificial here. You might think that artificial, as it has so far been used, could mean complex, while natural stood in for simple. Thus, to say that we are artificial is to say that we are complex, and saying that nature is complex is not anything strange, and so we could well be complex and natural man. However, this ignores a particular part of Lewis's ideal of Chivalry; that “The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another.” The person who matches up to the chivalrous ideal, the knight, the artificial person, does not arise due to natural tendencies. Thus, the complex man who binds together opposing tendencies, tends not to by natural means.

The knight is a thing, and so the knight is a thing in the world. The world is caught between two unknowns of the reality outside, and the free will inside. The reality outside is what we term natural, it is the power and force of what is that is not within our control. Thus, if the artificial man is caused by anything, is made by anything, then it is made by us – by our free will. The existence of the knight, to become a knight, is due to a choice that we have made. This accords with the ideals of chivalry – it is not the trapping of honor, the arms and armor that make us the chivalrous person, but rather the spirit inside which decides. The face after all has changed often, but the truth of a noble nature, from Scipio Africanus, to Marcus Aurelius, to Buddha, or to the characters whom we read about today in our tales of high fantasy, is not to be denied by anyone with clear sight. Perhaps those men never existed exactly as we understand and hope them to be, but many mortal failures does not perhaps override a moment of immortal claim, especially a thousand years after the fact. If they were not knights, then we hope that they were, and hope to be as good as our dreams and stars. If we, in turn, cannot reach the heavens then at least we can say that we tried, and maybe, just maybe, we shall at least have climbed higher then before, high enough to be giants.

Lewis, C. S., and Walter Hooper. “I The Necessity of Chivalry.” Essay. In Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, 8–10. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.