A woman should be able to drive a stick shift, fire a Springfield Arms XD accurately, do the family tax return, throw a football 20 yards, and barbecue steaks. However, when men are around, she should allow men to do things for her, even if she can do them better herself. Men should always be asked to do dangerous tasks (shoveling snow, killing spiders, etc.), and they should never be criticized about their performance in front of other people, only in private.

Great post on the art of feminine chivalry.

Click of the heels to Dawn Eden.

The following list provides links to all the posts that I have written either here or on Dawn Patrol about the Theology of the Body. I will update the list if I have missed any, or if, God forbid, I add others.

Update: Missed posts added to compendium (dates in red text).

Further Update:  Added posts (dates in green text).

• “Hope of the World” (November 11, 2008):  The first reference I made to the “new chastity movement” on this blog shortly after the national election in the context of our lack of will to elect a pro-life president in the United States.
• “Thinking Like a Man” (April, 16, 2009):  Why it is necessary for men to fight the good fight of chastity, rather than hope to be delivered from temptation by a new and holy fascination with the body, as is suggested in West’s presentation.
• “John Paul the Great and Hugh Hefner the Magnificent” (May 8th, 2009):  My original reaction to Chris West’s Nightline interview with a focus on the problem of prudery.
• “Christopher West’s blind spot:  TOB has to be seen through Church’s historical teachings” (May 14, 2009):  A response to those who say that the critique is an attack on Christopher West and a closer look at the question of “original innocence” and its relation to the effect TOB can have on our redemption.
• “Schindler’s list: Sparks fly as JP2 Institute dean raps Christopher West for errors” (May 29, 2009):  An analysis of the responses of Professors Janet Smith and Michael Waldstein to the critique of West by Professor David Schindler.
• “Virgo redacta:  Christopher West and the dangers of overanalogizing Mary” (June 18, 2009):  An attempt to answer the defenders of Christopher West, by addressing some of the specific problems with his presentation, namely,  the phallic symbolism of the paschal candle  and the way that the Blessed Virgin is eroticized by his presentation.  More generally, I touch upon his problematic use of analogy. (See, notation on new information contained in this post).
• “To Chris West: Enough Already. How about a Response?” (June 24, 2009):  A critique of the methodology by which critics of West are dealt with by implying prudery or animus as a motivation for the disagreement, or that disagreement with West constitutes disagreement with John Paul II.
• “St. Agustine and the Theology of the Body” (June 27, 2009):  Comments on and several quotations from Msgr. Cormac Burke’s defense of St. Augustine’s views on marriage.  Another critique of seeing prudery where it isn’t.
• “The Theology of the Body and Courage: Fighting the Real Fight” (July 14, 2009):  Why it is important for men to focus on agape rather than eros.
• “Martyrs, Mystics and Rhetoricians” (July 31, 2009):  A response to Father Thomas Loya’s defense of Christopher West, with a focus on the hermeneutic of discontinuity manifested by the new “holy fascination” with the body advocated by Christopher West and his followers.
• Shame on You.  Amen. (September 1, 2009):  Thoughts inspired by a discussion on The Linde regarding the nature of shame and its relation to modesty, with an emphasis on the cultivation of prudence in the face of the American TOB crusade against prudery.
• Cardinal and Bishop Support Christopher West (September 8, 2009): Text of Cardinal Rigali’s and Bishop Kevin Rhoades letter of support of Christopher West and his work.
• In Defense of Purity (September 20, 2009):  Introductory post to my commentary on Dietrich von Hildebrand’s work In Defense of Purity, proposed as a sure way of coming to understand the true meaning of the Theology of the Body.
• In Defense of Purity I (September 29, 2009):  Commentary on the first chapter of von Hildebrand’s book, focusing on the meaning of shame, particularly in its positive aspect, and distinguished from that shame which seeks to protect the person from use, with a particular reference to its correlation in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
• A Response to Christopher West (October 30, 2009):  My reply to the response to Christopher West, in which he finally breaks his silence regarding the controversy surrounding his presentation of the Theology of the Body.
• Theology of the Tango? (November 1, 2009):  An example of the American version of Theology of the Body gone off the rails.

Or the Theology of the Soapbox

What follows in another one of my long expositions on the Theology of the Body.  I have to give a loud content warning at the outset.  There is some frank talk here about sexuality, or rather, my complaints that there is too much frank talk about such matters.  I would have asked Dawn Eden to publish this one, but she has very courageously retired from blogging.  I have to commend her on her decision; however, it is not without regret on my part.

I again want to let those I disagree with know that my intentions are honorable and I do not question their integrity or commitment to the faith.  I can take my lumps if I deserve them.

In a recent apologia for Christopher West, Father Thomas Loya makes grand assertions:

Christopher West is a bit of a mystic—in the best sense of the word. His work, which seems strange to some, is actually that of a pioneer. And like all pioneers, West is taking a lot of arrows for his courage. In the face of much resistance, West is courageous enough to invite all of us to do just what John Paul II invited us to do: to think and talk in spousal categories.

He goes on to put the author and speaker in good company:

West’s use of this kind of imagery is rooted deeply in the Catholic tradition.  Hence, if we want to condemn West for certain comparisons he makes, then it seems we must condemn a great many saints as well.  St. John Chrysostom told married couples to remember that Christ united himself to the Church “in a spiritual intercourse.”  Teresa of Avila writes of ecstasies she experienced in “nuptial union” with Christ.  St. Bernard of Clairvaux had mystical experiences of nursing at Mary’s breasts. St. Louis de Montfort repeatedly refers to Mary’s milk and breasts as a source of consolation for Christians.  Bishop Fulton Sheen – assuring his audience that he was quoting St. Augustine verbatim – proclaimed that Christ “came to the marriage bed of the Cross, … united himself with the woman [the Church], and consummated the union forever.”  And he didn’t hesitate to share publicly Augustine’s idea that the blood and water from Christ’s side was, as it were, his “spiritual seminal fluid.”  For those with eyes to see, these precious theological jewels are not a cause for scandal.  They make perfect mystical sense; they are beautiful and profoundly healing.

No Mystics or Martyrs

In truth, these “precious theological jewels,” are not a cause for scandal, nor has anyone that I know of been scandalized by them.  This is another straw man argument put forward in defense of Christopher West without addressing any of the real issues that have been raised by those who have problems with his presentation of TOB.

I know very well that there are many people who disagree with my analysis of the West/TOB issue.  I do not claim to have any mystical insight, nor do I believe that anyone who disagrees with me is my persecutor, nor do I know of anyone else on my side of the issue who believes he or she is suffering the slings and arrows of defenders of West.  Considering the influence West already has, I think it would be more productive if these elevations to mystic and martyr were dropped in favor of an effort to engage in a real intellectual discussion of the issues.

I do not know of anyone who has minimized the value of John Paul II’s presentation of the faith in “spousal categories,” nor anyone on my side of the issue who has criticized a saint.  On the contrary, it is West who takes the saints to task for their alleged prudery.  But let me comment on Father Loya’s saint references one by one.

Saintly Eroticism?

The context of St. John Chrysostom’s remark is a discussion about the holiness of marriage insofar as it was denied by heretics who themselves engaged in sexual depravity.  It was not an exhortation to have a holy preoccupation with sex.

St. Theresa of Avila and other mystics, like St. Bernard, often comment on nuptial and erotic imagery of the Song of Songs, but this does not translate into the sexualization of their mystical experiences with Christ or into a constant preoccupation with the natural and holy pleasures of marriage, as I have pointed out elsewhere.  If the contrary is true, I would like to see someone actually make a reasoned argument for the position, rather than simply assert that it is true because saints commented on the Song of Songs.

As for St. Bernard’s mystical experience and St. Louis’s de Monfort’s references to Maria Lactans, are West and Father Loya really suggesting that these experiences and meditations were sexually erotic?  That assertion, quite frankly, would be blasphemous.  If that is not what is meant, I would like to know what the correct interpretation is.  (I have dealt specifically with West’s over-extended and flatly mistaken interpretation of St. Louis, elsewhere.)  If grown men who have a natural and vehement sexual attraction to women find it difficult to have the same regard for a woman’s body as a nursing infant, I do not think this should be faulted them.  Do you?  It is no shame to admit that we are not St. Bernard.

The quote of St. Augustine by Bishop Sheen is conveniently edited to exclude the statement of the saint that Christ came to “a bed of pain, not pleasure.”  Father Loya has done this more than once, as I have learned from Dawn Eden.  In any case, as much as I believe St. Augustine is scapegoated for modern prudery, I can hardly imagine the great doctor of the West preaching and teaching that we ought to have a holy preoccupation with sex.

Since when does nuptial and erotic imagery in the bible and the writings of the saints translate into a constant, marketed, mystic and martyred fascination with sexuality?  Since Christopher West has asserted it and suggested that those who doubt it need to look within themselves and ask why they are uncomfortable with thinking in this way.  And now Loya plays the absolute moral authority card by declaring West mystic and martyr.

Pious Sex Obsession

Let us be clear: The real issue is not whether the Theology of the Body is an important contribution to the Church’s new evangelization, but whether as a single corpus of magisterial teaching it constitutes the new evangelization, and whether its valid interpretation is a mandate for a fascination with the erotic.  I am willing to drop the veiled language only in the sense that we need to make plain that all this revisionist apologetics has become a pious justification for the contemporary obsession with sex.

Loya quotes John Paul II, where he says that “consciousness of the spousal meaning of the body constitutes the fundamental component of human existence the world” (TOB 15:5).  But why are we supposed to believe that this mean that we must keep our minds focused on sex?  And then Loya quotes the Holy Father again in Mulieris Dignitatem, where he says that “the Eucharist is the … sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride” (26).  But why are we to conclude, then, that the pope wants us to think sexual thoughts?  John Paul II’s Theology of the body is so philosophical and dense that “experts” have succeeded in squeezing more out of the text than is warranted because they are very effective apologists and rhetoricians.

Manichaean Bogeyman

Father Loya has his own question which I am happy to answer once he clarifies if for me:  “Could it be that those tainted by a Manichaean suspicion are actually projecting their own issues on to West?”  And who would these persons “tainted by a Manichaean suspicion” be?  Perhaps those who disagree with West, precisely because they disagree with him?  This is a classic example of the fallacy of the complex question.  So who is projecting?

Lest you think I exaggerate, lest you think that we are not being told to shed our inhibitions and get erotic, behold the language of Father Loya’s Holy Week meditation:

So, is your sex life improving? It should for those who have really understood and embraced the season of Lent. We said last time in this column that the season of Lent was great for our sexual lives.  Now it gets even better!

. . . . The events of the week leading up to Christ’s death on the Cross are like a mystical “foreplay.” In fact, Jesus is even stripped naked during this process. What happens on the Cross is not just the death of Christ but the consummation of a mystical marriage between God and His Bride. This is why Christ looks down from the Cross at his mother and calls her “Woman.”  He echoes the name Adam gave to Eve because in this climactic moment, Christ becomes the new Adam and his Mother becomes the new Eve.

. . . . This is why in my church we sing with great exuberance on the days of Pascha (EasterJ “Christ emerges from the tomb like a bridegroom from the bridal chamber and fills the women with great joy!” Wow! Now is that sexual or what!?

Lent is “mystical foreplay”?  And Holy Week the best part of our sex lives?  No, the problem here is not that prudery reacts against something holy, but that common sense reacts against the vulgarization of something holy.

Sex Sells

But we are told this kind of language is necessary because people are deeply wounded in their sexuality and need to be talked to frankly about it.  That is certainly a valid consideration. Good people will have to be free, within measure, to decide for themselves where the line ought to be drawn.  My inclination is not to burden apologists by all kinds of secondary rules about what they may or may not say; however, a good argument does not justify a bad conclusion.  I contend that a holy fascination with sexuality is not in any way mandated by John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

The problem with marketing language designed for our oversexed age, is that it canonizes and intellectualizes the modern sex obsession.  That objections to this are rooted in Manichaeism is a red herring, because the people claimed to be in most need of healing through TOB are those who already have little in the way of sexual inhibitions.  Furthermore, the advance levels of indoctrination into this popularization of TOB are not less explicit, but more explicit.  So the erotic preoccupation really has little if anything to do with apologetical exigencies.

Hermeneutic of Discontinuity

In fact, this sex fascination is based on a hermeneutic of discontinuity and is not a development of doctrine at all, because, as Newman would point out, its “action upon the past” is not “conservative.” That is, on the contrary, it “obscures,” not “illustrates”; corrects, not “corroborates,” “the body of thought from which it proceeds.”  Thus, it is a corruption of doctrine, not a development.  Any recourse to mystic intuitions in support of this kind of speculation or martyrdom when it is opposed just sinks the position further into fallacious argumentation.

I do not oppose this with such vehemence because I dislike West or Loya, or because I am jealous (another really swift argument), but because the assertions I criticize are false.  The topics being discussed are extraordinarily important. The more those who disagree with me call my part of the discussion foul play, the more I am convinced that what they espouse is harmful.

Mystery and Martyrdom

In fact, chastity is a mystic reality, precisely because it is the mystery of martyrdom.  This is the doctrine of marriage, according to St. Paul, which teaches that marriage is a great mystery, precisely because the Bridegroom gave Himself up for the Bride (Eph 5: 32, 25).  As John Paul II states:

The Church is herself in the degree to which she, as body, receives from Christ her head the whole gift of salvation a fruit of Christ’s love and of his giving for the Church: fruit of Christ’s giving to the end.  The gift of self to the Father through obedience to the point of death (see Phil 2:8) is at the same time, according to Ephesians, an act of “giving himself for the Church.”  In this expression, redeeming love transforms itself, I would say, into spousal love: by giving himself for the Church, with the same redeeming act, Christ united himself once and for all with her as Bridegroom to the Bride, as the husband with the wife, giving himself through all that is included once for all in “giving himself” for the Church (TOB 90.6).

“Redeeming love,” “spousal love,” “giving himself,” and “obedience to the point of death,” are all dimensions of the same love, the focus of which is oblative and sacrificial.  Certainly erotic pleasure is related to sacrificial love as receiving is to giving, but even the theological meaning of giving of one’s body in Christian marriage is more about sacrifice than possession, more about selflessness than pleasure.  Christ spousal love is the act of “giving himself” to his bride on the cross in the embrace of death.  The paradox is that the keenest joy and pleasure, even in the marital embrace, is experienced when there is complete selflessness.  The eros God intends for us is gained, not by focusing on it, but on agape.

This primacy of oblative love reveals the full context of St. Augustine’s remark, only selectively quoted by Father Loya:

The heavenly bridegroom left the heavenly chambers, with the presage of the nuptials before him.  He came to the marriage bed of the cross, a bed not of pleasure, but of pain, united himself with the woman, and consummated the union forever.  As it were, the blood and water that came from the side of Christ was the spiritual seminal fluid.

Pope Benedict XVI clarifies this in Deus Caritas Est when he calls the death of Christ on the cross “love in its most radical form,” from which “our definition of love must begin.”  This “act of oblation” is given an “enduring presence” in the Eucharist through which we “are drawn into Jesus act of self-oblation (12, 13).  The pope says:

The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God’s presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus’ self-gift, sharing in his body and blood. The sacramental “mysticism”, grounded in God’s condescension towards us, operates at a radically different level and lifts us to far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could ever accomplish (13).

So yes, the Eucharist is “the sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride,” but this statement is not a pretext for dwelling on the marital embrace.  It is not holy eroticism.  There is far too much in the world today that, a la Dan Brown, turns eroticism into piety and prayer.  This is not the “sacramental mysticism” of the Church, but the “human mystical elevation” of the pagans which the pope criticizes.

Let’s Talk Sex, Not

Lest I be misconstrued, I must refer once again to the context of my remarks, which is in no way determined by an antipathy toward erotic love, or by the machinations of the Manichaean demon.  The fact is that John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is being used by others to justify a fascination with erotic love and the institutionalization of sex talk as the new evangelization.  The pretext for this is the presumption that the absence of this kind of talk and discomfort with it is due to prudery.

Prudery is a problem, as I have attested many times before, but it is simply not true that prior the sexual revolution, Vatican II and John Paul II there was no mainstream corrective offered here in America by prominent Catholics.  Dawn Eden has done some research on this subject and has discovered, for example, that in 1958 Msgr. George A. Kelly edited and published a highly successful and acclaimed manual on marriage that addressed prudery in very explicit terms.

Monsignor Kelly was prominent priest of the Archdiocese of New York, appointed by Cardinal Spellman to be Family Life Director in 1955, and who in 1977 founded the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.  Monsignor Kelly’s Catholic Marriage Manual “sold a quarter-million copies and netted him almost a quarter-million dollars in royalties, every penny of which went to the New York Foundling Hospital.”  It received Cardinal Spellman’s imprimatur, and was highly and widely praised by members of the Catholic media and academia.

Chapter 3 of the manual was written by Bernard J. Pisani, M.D. and entitled “A Catholic Doctor Looks at Marriage.”  There Dr. Pisani addressed prudery in no uncertain terms:

Since sex is God’s creation, it is presumptuous for any creature to call It “dirty” or “vulgar.” Yet misunderstanding of the goodness of sex when its use conforms with God’s law is the cause of many difficulties in marriage. These problems stem from the prevailing point of view of a century ago that the sex act was not “nice” under any circumstances. Sex was something shameful, a necessary evil that should be kept hidden from children as long as possible. Remnants of that puritanical point of view remain. Often a woman in her twenties, who is ready to enter matrimony, has the fixed notion taught by her parents that the act of physical love is an animal function which should be tolerated when necessary but never enjoyed. She has been warned since adolescence about the evils of sexual intercourse. Because of their own misunderstanding her parents were unable to draw the necessary distinction between the improper use of sex outside of marriage and its proper role inside marriage. They regard God’s creation as a necessary evil at best.

What is more noteworthy is that doctor Pisani addressed the question of “mutual climax” at more or less the same time that Karol Wojtyla was delivering his talks in Lublin that included the same notion.  The written work Love and Responsibility did not appear until 1960 and was not published in English until 1981, twenty-three years after American Catholics had the opportunity to read these words of Dr. Pisani:

Since the typical male will reach a climax sooner than his wife unless he controls himself, he should learn to delay the peak of his excitement and to caress and stimulate his wife so that they achieve release in unison.  Young brides especially should realize that the reaching of such an adjustment often requires considerable time. Because the act of sex is such an intimate activity, its enjoyment requires the gradual flowering of mutual understanding and a sense of freedom. The husband must learn to recognize his wife’s reactions at the various preliminary stages and to govern his own impulses accordingly. Satisfactory adjustment in the sense of simultaneous release may require many months or even years to achieve, and perhaps may never be achieved on a regular basis. You will help this adjustment if you discuss your relationship with love, frankness and an understanding of your partner’s fundamental nature and specific responses.

So much for West’s claim that the Holy Father was revolutionary on this point.  And to think this was first put into print in the body-hating, sex-despising U.S. of A.  The popular American interpretation of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body which at heart is a formula to overcome prudery is based on a myth that the Church had no effective means or even the awareness to address the problem.  This is not to say that John Paul’s teaching is not a tremendous contribution, only that the American interpretation is based on a historical falsehood used to justify a hermeneutic of discontinuity.

One thing can be learned from the time in which prudery was being addressed by the Church without the “theological time bomb” that has become a pretext for focusing on the erotic:  It is actually possible to address problems of sexuality and prudery without ripping down all the veils, vulgarizing our catechesis and making sure we train ourselves to look on nakedness without shame.

The Theology of Clothing

In fact, it seems that in 2000 Cardinal Ratzinger might have been offering a corrective when he dealt with the modern liturgical penchant for unveiling everything.  He wrote that “the theology of clothing becomes a theology of the body.”  His use of John Paul’s appellative for this modern corpus of teaching on marriage and sexuality cannot be coincidental.

The context of Cardinal Ratzinger’s remarks on this topic in The Spirit of the Liturgy is his discussion of the meaning of priestly vestments, which signify, in the words of St. Paul, the clothing of our perishable nature in immortality (1 Cor 15:53).  Though the context is different from our immediate concern, it is, in my opinion, at least analogous and validly applied to our topic.  The Holy Father himself makes reference to the Theology of the Body and concludes his discussion with a reference to the clothing of the newly baptized in the white garment, which is “an expression of the purity and beauty of the risen Christ” (220).  It is at least interesting that the new man in Christ, redeemed in body and soul, and incorporated into the body of Christ through Baptism, is not stripped but clothed.  In any case, here is Cardinal Ratzinger at length:

Paul describes the body of this time as an “earthly tent”, which will be taken down, and looks ahead to the house not made with human hands, ‘eternal in the heavens’. He is anxious about the taking down of the tent, anxious about the ‘nakedness’ in which he will then find himself. His hope is to be not “unclothed”, but “further clothed”, to receive the “heavenly house” — the definitive body — as a new garment.

. . . Thus the theology of clothing becomes a theology of the body. . . . The liturgical vestment carries this message in itself.  It is a “further clothing”, not an “unclothing”, and the liturgy guides us on the way to this “further clothing”, on the way to the body’s salvation in the risen body of Jesus Christ, which is the new “house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1).  The Body of Christ, which we receive in the Eucharist, to which we are united in the Eucharist (“one Body with him”, cf. 1 Cor. 6:12-20), saves us from “nakedness”, from the bareness in which we cannot stand before him (218).

Perhaps, the reason why John Paul II never went as far as to say that “sex is liturgical,” not even with qualifying words “in a sense,” (a phrase he often uses in TOB, as Steve Kellmeyer has pointed out) is because of the extremes to which men are inclined to go.  Perhaps it had nothing to do with scandalizing the prudish, but with not encouraging those who are inclined to strip everything down to genitalia and sex acts.

The Reform of the Reform

Is not what the pope has called the “reform of the reform” a measured reaction against the vulgarity by which every boundary and veil has been penetrated and every sanctuary violated.  We no longer even have sanctuaries, we have unveiled, boundariless “worship spaces.”  Even Catholic liturgical orthodoxy is presented to us in such a way that we are forced to watch the Easter Candle copulate with the Baptismal font.  I am not going to mince words here.  I have been criticized for not using “nuptial’ language in reference to this groundless assertion.  When is it ever appropriate or even moral to simulate a sex act in public (or even in private for that matter), let alone during the sacred liturgy?  Never.  We fittingly modify the description of such acts with the word “pornographic.”  It is only the skills of the rhetorician that has allowed this travesty to pass for liturgical interpretation.

Or we are told that the Baldichin covering the altar of sacrifice is a bed canopy, because, by all means we need to think about a man and woman having sex on the altar when the Sacrifice of Christ is being offered during the Holy Mass.  But, in fact, isn’t a bed canopy a kind of veil, a boundary that creates a sacred space in which “liturgy” of marriage takes place and in which the revelation and communion is experienced by the two spouses alone? In fact as we learn from the New Liturgical Movement blog, the Baldichin is traced back to the ancient ciborium mangum, the veils of which were actually drawn closed during parts of the sacred liturgy.  There is no question that the liturgy is replete with “spousal” and “nuptial” imagery, as are the scriptures and the writings of the saints, but I take exception to Father Loya’s hijacking of these terms, by suggesting that healthy Catholics ought to see the erotic everywhere.

In fact, the language of the liturgy envelopes the mysteries we celebrate in a sacred clothing. “Holy” means “other,” and times, places and activities are sacralized (made holy) by setting them apart, not by stripping them naked.   Husbands and wives should absolutely rejoice in each others’ bodies and in their embrace which is blessed and hallowed by the Church.  This is not even an issue.  Furthermore, an exalted view of sexuality should be a means of healing us of the wounds of our disordered sexual lives, but this voyeuristic enthusiasm for nakedness is not the proclamation of the holy, on the contrary is the vulgarization of the holy.

The liturgical boundary most often violated in this age of the sexual revolution and crusade against prudery has been the line that delineates the nave of the Church from the sanctuary, or the congregation from the place of sacrifice.  There used to be an altar rail marking that separation, where the rule was reverence and awe of mystery.  In even earlier times, there was the chancel screen or rood screen which obscured the altar of sacrifice and shrouded it in mystery.  Eamon Duffy, in his monumental The Stripping of the Altars, writes that rood screen in medieval England and the veil which was added to it on the weekdays of Lent, did not, contrary most common assumptions, prevent the faithful from fully participating in the liturgy.  The screen was not a wall, but a window that framed the “liturgical drama.”  In this way, the people where able to penetrate the mystery, and at times the mystery would come to them when the ministers would come out carrying sacred objects, especially, at Easter time, when the priest would carry the Sacred Host itself before the screen (111-112).

The purpose of the veil, Duffy says,

“was to function as a temporary ritual deprivation of the sight of the sacring.  Its symbolic effectiveness derived from the fact that it obscured for a time something which was normally accessible; in the process it heightened the value of the spectacle it temporarily concealed (111).

No one is saying that clothes should not come off at times.  But those who reveal themselves, those to whom they reveal themselves, and the time, place and manner of the revelation need to be sacralized, not vulgarized.  It is interesting to note also that in the tradition of the Roman Rite the tabernacle veil is ordinarily the first sign that the Eucharist is present in the tabernacle.  Our Lord is reposed behind the veil and at the sacred hour and within the sacrificial space He comes to His people.

In the East, this custom of veiling the sanctuary is retained in a fuller form by means of the iconostasis.  In the Syriac Church the sanctuary is still completely veiled.

My point is not to argue for a return to the screen, though I believe the elimination of the altar rail has at the very least sent the wrong signal; my point is merely to say that if marriage and sexuality have, “in a sense,” a liturgical dimension, and if the language of the liturgy is nuptial, then it is simply a non sequitur to claim that unveiling every liturgical and nuptial reality is a virtue.  More to the point perhaps is the suggestion of Cardinal Ratzinger that the Eucharistic Canon ought to return to a more silent form.  Silence is a form of veiling.  It is certainly appropriate  to be silent when to say something would only vulgarize a mystery.  Much can be learned from St. John Chrysostom of this silence, which, as I know all too well, has been ignored in the most sterilely clinical and irreverent ways:

Since this heavenly birth cannot be described, neither does His coming amongst us in these days permit of too curious scrutiny.  Though I know that a Virgin this day gave birth, and I believe that God was begotten before all time, yet the manner of this generation I have learned to venerate in silence and I accept that this is not to be probed too curiously with wordy speech.  For with God we look not for the order of nature, but rest our faith in the power of Him who works.

In any case the greater availability of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass might contribute something positive to this needed dialogue of silence and sacrality.

Don’t You Dare Touch that Loincloth

West and company want a clear view of everything and they want to talk about it, and talk about it, and talk about it.  Even the loincloth on Our Lord, they have said, is a necessary evil.  We just can’t handle looking at Our Lord’s nakedness, but that is the real shame, they say.  We are told that His nakedness on the Cross is a revelation.

Actually, it is a shameful thing.  When our Lord revealed himself in glory on Mount Tabor, he was not stripped.  It was his face that did shine as the sun, and his garment that became white as snow (Mt 17:2).  He did not reveal his nakedness; He revealed the light emanating from the veil of His clothing.  No, we were the ones who exposed His nakedness.  We, the blasphemers and ingrates, stripped him naked, raised him on a gibbet and mocked him.

There is no question that in this Jesus fulfills the Old Testament typology as the New Adam, who recreates us in the nakedness of the Cross.  But was it without shame?  To recreate us Our Blessed Lord was made a curse for us.  It is a shameful thing to be stripped and crucified before a jeering mob, and a curse to be hung on a tree (Heb 12:2; Gal 3:13).  The typological correspondence doesn’t mean that we should dare to be so bold as to stare at Our Lord’s nakedness.  It means that the nakedness imposed on Him shamefully is the sign of our restoration to grace, and the hope of the redemption of our bodies.  Where does John Paul II tell us that the Theology of the Body means we should be focused on the erotic, even to the point of wishing to strip Our Blessed Savior naked?  This is truly shameful.

Peril and Martyrdom

In 1927 G. K. Chesterton delivered lucid address entitled Culture and the Coming Peril.  “Vulgarity” was the term he used to describe the peril into which culture was falling.  He defined vulgarity in relation to culture as “standardization at a lower standard.”  He said:

The kind of thing that I mean is a certain large and gross familiarity, not always with bad but often with very good things, a familiarity that indicates insensibility to the thing that the man is handling.

It is certainly not to be suggested that Christopher West and company are insensible to the beauty of human sexuality, nor, in many respects, are the points they make to wounded souls without real merit; however, sexuality is of such a nature, like the liturgy, that constant analysis and drummed-up enthusiasm only vacates the mystery and the sacrality, no matter how exalted and good the object of our gaze is proclaimed to be.

I find it more and more difficult to take seriously the proposal that our real problem is Manichaeism.  Not in this age where states are now finding it necessary to institute laws against the sexting of minor children; not in this age of the sterile voyeurism of the Facebook and Twitter culture, in which we have cultivated and refined the art of exhibitionism.  I cannot tell you of all the instances in which I encounter tremendous heartache, useless drama, unproductive preoccupation and morbid self-loathing as a result of “too much information.”

No, the good news about human sexuality does not have to be expressed in more and more sex talk.  The truth is that are not we really afraid of eros.  We are afraid of agape.

Too many men, even Catholic men, define their masculinity in terms of libido, and too many women have either chosen to use their sexuality as a form of manipulation, or have otherwise consented to have foisted upon them a bill of goods that turns sexuality into spirituality.  Yes, the cross and the liturgy are the places where the nuptial realities are consummated, and eros is the gift of that consummation, but we are kidding ourselves if we think we are going to ride our way to holiness on a bed of pleasure.

Yesterday I happened upon a YouTube video of the inimitable Danny Kaye in the role of Captain Hook, singing of pirate philosophy in the TV production of Peter Pan with Mia Farrow in the title role and score by Anthony Newley (1975).  Hook, who personifies a kind of anti-chivalry, is the nemesis of Peter Pan, the perpetual boy who refuses to become a man.  Peter Pan, though he represents an opposite extreme from Hook, cannot be considered chivalrous either.  Neither Hook nor Pan are real men.  Captain Hook has indulged his brutality and Peter Pan his puerile fantasies.

I have been reflecting a great deal lately on the virtues of prowess and courtesy.  One of the classic summaries of chivalric virtues is a fivefold division:  fidelity, honesty, courtesy, prowess and largess.  In my opinion perhaps the most common extremes to which men go in terms of masculinity runs along the line that extends between prowess and courtesy.

Prowess is not only courage, but also the magnificence by which a man invests himself into a great work without counting the cost.  Prowess makes a man truly prepared for battle; however, where it is not balanced against courtesy, men simply become brutal and are committed to win “by hook or by crook,” as the pirate says:

Hit him with a hammer when his noggin is turned.
Kick his teeth in.
This is the philosophy I have learned.
And never be concerned about how you win.
Just delight that you’re winning at all.

Always fight somebody frail and small.
At first you charm or flatter him
And gently chitter-chatter him,
Then suddenly you batter him on the chin
And simply shatter him;
It doesn’t matter how you win.

On the other hand, courtesy is a high-minded regard for the person, no matter who he or she is.  It is the unbending standard of fair play, by which we rule every engagement of love or war, and everything in between.  It is not merely manners, but includes them, for it begins in the mind and heart and flows from there into a man’s every word and deed. However, if it is not balanced against prowess it becomes misguided compassion or self-serving suavité.

And it is precisely for this reason that, while Captain Hook personifies prowess gone awry, Peter Pan does not represent a kind of misplaced compassion.  No, the intransigent boy is too narcissistic to be guilty of maternal sentimentality.  On the contrary, when Wendy wants to take the boys of Neverland to her home in London, Peter obstinately refuses to go with them and gives everyone a self-justifying lecture:

I’ve got no time for growing up.
When you’ve got time don’t waste it.
Taste it, each and any way you chose.
Use each lovely moment.
Youth is too good to lose.
Raise your voice and make your choice.
If you’ve got youth, rejoice!

Peter Pan is a cocky adolescent with a self-serving idealism.  If there is misplaced compassion here, it is directed entirely inward, where Peter lives.  Neverland is a state of mind, where one indulges the fantasy of being the center of the universe.  Neverland is ever the land of our age.

Even the presence of evil in Neverland only serves to focus Pan’s ego on himself.  One wonders if Captain Hook is a dragon of Pan’s own making, the archetypical villain devised for the adventures of Neverland, much like the villains created by college-age zealots who since the sixties have prided themselves on being radical when, in fact, their rebellion is so much a pose, like the fashions that go along with “activism,” such as perennially in-style Che T-shirt.

Isn’t that the lie of so much activist pacifism?  In reality it’s just another form of fascism, where men are threatened—not with guns but with adjectives like “lowbrow” and “narrow-minded,” and are silenced—not by force but by public opinion.

The perennial teenager desires neither war nor peace.  He wants tolerance at all costs, especially of everything he believes in and desires.  He shouts down opposition in the name of tolerance as long as it is politically correct to do so.  Opponents of same-sex marriage, for instance, are said to be bigots and have to pay for answering honestly a direct question put to them.

Peter Pan adventures are controlled scenarios, where the only possible peril is a threat to the ego.  Hence, so many controversies today are conflated well beyond their concrete significance because of injured teenage sensibilities.

We live in an age of manufactured outrage. Teenage snottiness is often self-righteous anger against the curtailing of one’s narcissism in the name of personal rights, as when activists engage in civil disobedience, provoke law enforcement officers and then are outraged when they get arrested.

In our entertainment culture, where we are encouraged to indulge our puerile fantasies, danger is experienced vicariously through video game avatars and special effects enhanced movie characters.  People become dull to the real peril waiting for them at the dinner table and are incapable of addressing the threats to their families and future, and then shake their fists at the ethereal dragons of Neverland.

And this is the real difference between the misplaced compassion of a woman and the puerile self-absorption of the perpetual teenager.  A boy who refuses to become a man is neither an immature child nor a sentimental woman, but an androgynous, effete and undefined entity.  It is at least significant, then, that actresses have generally been employed to play the role of Peter Pan. The look is androgynous, but worse yet, so is the spirit.

We have even coined terms to define the new hip infantilism:  twixters and parasite singles.  They are unable to decide whether or when they want to grow up, meanwhile they return home after college to live off mommy and daddy and entertain themselves while they contemplate whether they should get a job.  Once upon a time, only one in a million, like Hugh Hefner, could afford not to grow up.  Now with the hyper-management of everything by bureaucracy, we expect someone to always be coddling us.

In this moral climate, men who have never learned to fight in ordinary human conflicts have been so numbed by the artificiality of it all that they join fight clubs just to feel alive.  Feminine and effeminate culture is suffocating them, and getting punched is one of the only solid realities they experience.  Nevertheless, they would rather get a knee to the face than reclaim the even more solid and infinitely more dangerous realities of family life.

The opposite of wanton brutality, derailed prowess, is not always misplaced compassion.  Sometimes it’s just plain old comfy narcissism, and it seems more and more the standard fare.

As winsome as Peter Pan seems, he is really a dull conformist.  His philosophy is that of the world.  The religion of tolerance and the idolization of irresponsible youth is the mantra that several generations now have been taught to repeat.  It is custom, the tradition of our most recent fathers.  Anthony Esolen marks the commandments of this now codified let-down:

Thou shalt not adore. Thou shalt not celebrate with abandon. Thou shalt not honor. Thou shalt not fight. Thou shalt not live under the law of God, but within the parameters of thy keepers.

Neverland is a cage and Peter Pan is too self-absorbed to realize it. Let’s lose it fast.

Well said.

Hat tip, Father Ignatius.

Some time ago, I posted a poll about whether the proverb All is fair in love and war is true or not. At the time, I did not say that I was posting on the subject because it was part of my discussion in the paper I had been working on. In any case, most of you agreed with me.

That being said, I post below the introduction to the paper that I will be giving in about 20 minutes in Fatima.  I will be reading an abbreviated version due to time constraints.  More excerpts to follow.

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All is fair in love and war.

Traced back to the 16th century work, Euphues written by the Englishman John Lyly, this proverb expresses the rejection of the standard of fair play where matters of the greatest importance are concerned.  It also conveys the paradox, or coincidence of opposites, concerning love and war, viz. that while the one connotes a state of peace and the other conflict, the two are never really far apart.  In fact, the very Prince of Peace came not to bring peace, but to bring the sword.  In other words, the unity of love is never attained by man after the Fall without conflict.  On the cross, Christ is both Warrior and Bridegroom.

But the question is whether or not “all” is really fair in love and war.  It seems to me, in this respect Lyly’s proverb is more or less in accord with the present zeitgeist.  At least there is no universally accepted standard by which to determine what, in the main, the common good actually is, so we bump around in the dark until we arrive at some measure of tolerance for one another—a very utilitarian standard of fair play, indeed.  The very same feminists, for example, who in the 1960’s and 70’s wished to deliver themselves from the disparity of subjugation to men as sex objects and insisted on birth-control and abortion in order to accomplish this, now affirm their right to be sex objects as long as they are in control and have something to gain.  Birth-control and abortion have assured that everyone gets what they want, everyone, that is, except the victims of the silent holocaust.  In this way, without an objective measure of fair play, the battle of the sexes has reached a sort of precarious détente, which some of us might argue is more like the threat of “mutually assured destruction.”

Cervantes took up the proverb and put it on the lips of Don Quixote who finds himself breaking up a brawl caused by an absurd romantic trick.  The maiden Quiteria has consented to marry the rich Camacho solely for his wealth and in so doing jilts her true love Basilio.  At the wedding before the vows have been exchanged, Basilio shows up and throws himself upon his own rapier in front of the wedding couple.  As he lay dying, Basilio refuses to confess to the priest unless Quiteria agrees to marry him.  As soon as he has obtained her consent Basilio jumps to his feet and reveals his “suicide” to be a trick, and in spite of the deceit Quiteria remains firm in her intention to have him.  A brawl between the parties of Camacho and Basilio ensue and Quixote intervenes, crying:

“Hold, sirs, hold! . . . we have no right to take vengeance for wrongs that love may do to us: remember love and war are the same thing, and as in war it is allowable and common to make use of wiles and stratagems to overcome the enemy, so in the contests and rivalries of love the tricks and devices employed to attain the desired end are justifiable, provided they be not to the discredit or dishonour of the loved object.

Cervantes never tires in poking fun at the literature of chivalry, which often promulgated a code of ethics for love and war that mandated contradictory behavior; Don Quixote speaks of rights but in the same breath denies rules of fair play.  In fact, foolish, romantic sentimentalism by definition discredits and dishonors the loved object.

But it is not only the fictional literature of chivalry that reveals the contradiction.  The 12^th century work In The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, written at the request of the Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and followed by many of the courtiers of Europe, we are given an adulterous mandate as the first rule of love:  “Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.”  Then, having said this, Capellanus absurdly exhorts his readers that they should “be mindful to completely avoid falsehood.” So much for the Lancelots and Guineveres of the world.

But love and war have always been pretty much the same thing, at least since the Fall.  God created Man, male and female.  Marriage is the first sacrament established by God.  Theologians call it a sacrament of nature.  In America, where the battle over same-sex marriage rages (more love and war), the proponents of sodomy assert that it is solely the State, not the Church, that creates and has the right to define and regulate marriage.  In fact, marriage arises from neither the Church nor the State.  Marriage exists because man is male and female; it is a sacrament of nature.  Both the Church and the State take in interest in marriage because it is a fundamental good for both, but it pre-exists both the Church and the State.  (Relative to the Church, of course, the solemnization of the union is also Sacrament of the New Testament established by Christ, but that does not change the fact that neither the Church nor the State has created marriage).

Again, without universal standards we bump around in the dark unable to perceive any objective definition of our fundamental institutions and settle on dogmatizing a standard of tolerance which is intolerant of everything but tolerance.  Nothing has really changed since the garden of paradise.  Fallen man is still a usurper.  He reaches out for love, but by denying the source of love the result is war.

The temptation of the serpent is an act of consummate violence.  The sin of our first parents is an arrogant and petty assault on heaven.  The subsequent history of mankind is a family feud, whose body-count is virtually numberless.  The primordial prophecy and promise of our redemption reveals that human history will be the recounting of a nearly endless war, in which finally victory will only come at the end of the world, when the Immaculate foot of the Woman will have stamped out the last efforts of the serpent to win over souls to his lie.  The Father of Lies knows of no code of ethics in regard to either love or war.  And from his point of view, love and war are the same because lust and hatred are espoused in the darkling rites of the netherworld.  But, in some sense, they are the same also from God’s point of view because both courtesy and courage will be forever united by the bond of a brotherhood in arms against all that is godless.

Our first and fallen parents are types of the new man and woman, by which the rest of us are recreated—not only in the image of God, but also in the image of the new and true Adam and Eve.  Christ and Our Lady are the new couple, the heads of the new family that is the Church.  Their story is an adventure of the most epic proportions and it concerns entirely the working out of ultimate love and ultimate war.  If we are honest we will have to admit that our salvation is all about love, but it is also all about war.  There is no use in living in denial, by pretending that some fuzzy and warm concept of the universal brotherhood of man will save us, but neither will we get away with fighting our way out of the mess we are in without a code of warfare.  Love and war are close allies, but all is not fair in love and war.

In doing some research in order to answer a question of a commenter I found this article by Monsignor Cormac Burke, whose book on marriage I highly recommend.  It is an article on St. Augustine and his views concerning marriage and sexuality.  St. Augustine is identified by many–but not by Christopher West, to my knowledge–as the bogeyman of Catholic puritanism because of his negative views of sexuality based on his over-emphasis of original sin.  Monsignor Burke shows that this interpretation of great western doctor is not accurate.  This article is also helpful aid to the understanding of TOB in context.  The Church has always emphasized the inherent goodness of human sexuality.

Here is a quote from St. Augustine:

Let these nuptial blessings be the objects of our love: offspring, fidelity, the un­breakable bond. . . . Let these nuptial blessings be praised in marriage by him who wishes to extol the nuptial institution.

Here is part of Monsignor Burke’s conclusion:

It may well be that earlier in the twentieth century Christians needed to shake off a certain Puritanism in sexual matters, although it should be said that this was a particularly Protestant problem. In any case, it is scarcely the problem fac­ing us today.

In this context, it is interesting to recall how Augustine had first to defend marriage and sexuality against the Manichean tendency to treat them with contempt or ha­tred, and later had to continue to defend them against the Pelagian tendency to treat them as if there were nothing deli­cate or problematic about them.

Insofar as Puritanism or Jansenism contained some semi-Manichean elements, we have moved away from them. Augustine’s firmly held, middle-of-the-road position can warn us of the dangers coming from a neo-Pelagianism, with its false suggestion that nothing is wrong with sex, that there is nothing needing control in sex.

One commenter pointed out that in my exposition of the Blessed Mother’s courage (“Damsels in Distress“), that my distinction between the masculine courage of action and the feminine courage of suffering, according to St. Bonaventure, did not sufficiently take account of the many biblical images, nor of the great Chesterton’s “The Ballad of the White Horse.”  She is right, of course, that discussion about passive courage does not do enough to account for the Blessed Virgin’s active role in the redemption of mankind, or of women in general throughout history.  I have no disagreement with the commenter.

In fact, I have have written on the subject Our Lady’s presence in “The Ballad of the White Horse” in a paper I delivered at our international symposium on the Coredemption in England, 2001, entitled “Seven in the Heart, One in the Hand:  The Mediation of the Immaculate in the Poetry of Hopkins and Chesterton” (Mary at the Foot of the Cross II:  Acts of the International Symposium on Marian Coredemption, New Bedford:  Academy of the Immaculate.  395-439).  I am attaching here a pdf of the complete paper for those who are interested.  Also, FYI, there is an excellent reprint of the 1928 illustrated edition of “The Ballad of the White Horse,” published by Ignatius Press, that also includes a very helpful introduction and endnotes by Sister Bernadette Sheridan.

Since I have been studying the Theology of the Body lately, I would like to suggest that one of John Paul II’s insights–one that is thoroughly traditional–would be helpful here.  There is no question that man is characteristically the “giver” (“the one who loves”) and woman the “receiver” (“the one who is loved”; cf. TOB 92.6); however, the Holy Father also  says:

The two functions of the mutual exchange are deeply connected in the whold process of “gift of self”: giving and accepting the gift interpenetrate in such a way that the very act of giving becomes acceptance, and acceptance transforms itself into giving (TOB 17.4).

By way of analogy, I think we can say that the “giver” is also the “defender,” and the “receiver” is also the “defended,” but this does not preclude a mutuality, though the courage of action in a woman, such as in the case of Judith or St. Joan of Arc is particularly marked by empathy and uniquely maternal characteristics.

I think of St. Joan, in particular, who received the ability to ride a horse, to formulate military strategy, especially the placement of artillery, as an extraordinary grace.  She was not merely a figure head of the French army; nevertheless, she never raised her sword against a man.  It was merely enough for her to get to the enemy castle and touch it with her banner.  I also recall how she nursed the dying, including the English, and shed tears over them.

I include below an apropos excerpt from my paper.  Without burdening this post with too much back story, one should at least know that at the beginning of the ballad, King Alfred, who is leading the Saxons against the invasion of England by the Danes, receives a vision of Our Blessed Lady in an hour when he has all but lost hope.  In desperation he asks Her:

“When our last bow is broken, Queen,
And our last javelin cast,
Under some sad, green evening sky,
Holding a ruined cross on high,
Under warm westland grass to lie,
Shall we come home at last?”

Her answer is paradoxical:

“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

“Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?”

Alfred then goes onto gather his chiefs and army in order to enter into a battle and quest in which he is offered no promise of victory.  Here is the excerpt from my paper:

King Alfred, after an initial victory in battle (Book V), and then the eventual slaying of all three of his chiefs (Book VI), was left in a predicament very much like the one he had been in when he had seen Our Lady, although his later doom and England’s was far more imminent.  The Battle of Ethandune was all but lost.  In a long speech Alfred convinced what was left of his army that “death is a better ale to drink” (bk. 7, 119) than to drain the cup of surrender to heathendom.  Convinced by their captain, the soldiers “stood firm” and “feeble” (153).  Alfred blew his horn calling his men to the hunt, and “The people of the peace of God/ Went roaring down to die” (184).  But in the desperation of the situation the Immaculate was present in Her causeless joy and hopeless faith:

And when the last arrow,
Was fitted and was flown,
When the broken shield hung on the breast,
And the hopeless lance was laid at rest,
And the hopeless horn was blown,

The King looked up, and what he saw
Was a great light like death,
For our Lady stood on the standards rent
As lonely and as innocent
As When between white walls she went
In the lilies of Nazareth.

One instant in a still light,
He saw Our Lady then,
Her dress was soft as western sky,
And she was queen most womanly–
But she was queen of men.

Over the iron forest
He saw Our Lady stand;
Her eyes were sad withouten art,
And seven swords were in her heart–
But one was in her hand. (185-205).

In the moment of supreme sacrifice, the Mother of God interceded on behalf of Her children.  The seven swords of Her own heartfelt sorrow, became one which She wielded in hand on behalf of those for whom She suffered:  In the first vision of King Alfred Mary had said to him:

“But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save” (bk. 1, 250-53).

Thus we are shown how this intercession of the Immaculate in temporal war is also connected to a greater war for the salvation of souls.  These wars hardly won and souls hardly saved are remarkably juxtaposed in another of Chesterton’s poems whose theme is along the same lines, viz., “The Queen of the Seven Swords.”  That poem is actually the introduction to seven monologues delivered by seven saints of Western Europe, who, as Chesterton notes, “have no connection with the historical saints” that “bore their names,” but rather are types of the different nations, viz., St. James of Spain, St. Denys of France, St. Anthony of Italy, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. David of Wales and St. George of England.  There, in “The Queen of the Seven Swords,” Chesterton records a dream in which he saw Europe as a waste land, and after surveying the panorama of desolation said:  “There is none to save.” It is obvious from his descriptions that the wasteland is typical of moral desolation.  In the gloom, however, he saw a source of hope:

I saw on their breaking terraces, cracking and sinking for ever,
One shrine rise blackened and broken; like a last cry to God.

Old gold on the roof hung ragged as scales of a dragon dropping,
The gross green weeds of the desert had spawned on the painted wood:
But erect in the earth’s despair and arisen against heaven interceding,
Whose name is Cause of Our Joy, in the doorway of death she stood.

The Woman who had asked of Alfred “Do you have joy without a cause?” is in fact the Cause of His Joy, and this as She stands in the “doorway of death.”  Thus we begin to understand that the doom of Alfred is not a joy strictly without cause, but one without any natural explanation, for his joy has its source in the Heart of the Queen of the Seven Swords.  Chesterton goes on in “The Queen of the Seven Swords:

The Seven Swords of her Sorrow held out their hilts like a challenge,
The blast of that stunning silence as a sevenfold trumpet blew
Majestic in more than gold, girt round with a glory or iron,
The hub of her wheel of weapons; with a truth beyond torture true.

That truth which is beyond torture true is that faith which saves, not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering.  Hence we understand what the Lady meant when She asked Alfred “Do you have faith without a hope?”  Not a natural hope, or a conviction that things will get better, but a conviction that God is faithful to His promises.  In “The Towers of Time,” Chesterton says that “the heart of the swords, seven times wounded,/ Was never wearied as our hearts are.” And in the poem “In October,” honor is due to Mary, because Hers was “The broken Heart and the unbroken word.” Is this not why in his Encyclical, Redemptoris Mater, the Holy Father compares the Blessed Virgin to Abraham, saying with St. Paul that in hope believed against hope, She is blessed for Her unwavering faith?

I started on this post more than a year ago and have come back to it from time to time.  While I am up at Mount St. Francis, hiding in my cave and working on my paper for our Coredemption conference in July, I thought I would finally knock it out.  I shot a video on the same topic  a while back.

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As one interested in helping to bring about a revival of Christian Chivalry, I have thought fondly of the image of the “damsel in distress” as being both iconic and inspiring of the chivalric ideals. I was horrified, then, to see such an honorable term being disparaged by those otherwise promoting the ideals of chivalry. Call me naive or nostalgic (or worse), but I cannot for the life of me see anything wrong with it.

I will admit, if we understand “damsel in distress” as it is caricatured, for example, by the film image of the pretty woman being tied screaming to the train tracks by Dastardly Dan and then being rescued by Agent Jim West, then there is much to be disparaged. The poor helpless thing is abused by one womanizer only to be rescued by another, and all the while is oblivious to everything but the attention she is getting. The ideals of chivalry have always been partially obscured by the cult of “courtly love.” There is nothing new under the sun.

Television and film have that curious ability of turning unalloyed gold into lead, and contrariwise, of cultivating a fondness for the most obvious absurdities. We have learned to despise feminine vulnerability and celebrate the wonders of the Bionic Woman.

So what is the “damsel in distress,” and why should her place in the venerable history of womanhood be preserved and honored? To answer this question we must first examine the contemporary feminist trend to idolize the Amazon.

Ms. Rambo

TV and movies are rife with tough, violent women nowadays. And it’s a scary thing. The movie tough girl look likes a starlet but fights like Rambo.

I am reminded of the Greeks who invented the Amazon myth as a kind of horror story. No men resided in Amazon territory. Once a year the Amazons would travel to a neighboring tribe where they would allow themselves to be impregnated. All the male children were either put to death, sent back to their fathers or left in the wilderness. Nice.

The modern version is not just a horror story; it is feminist vicarious revenge, although, as usual, women are the losers in this gender horseplay. Misandry just ends in the frustration that women aren’t really men.

Not only are feminists in the mood to caricature men as jerks and buffoons, now they are literally kicking men’s rear ends–but only in Hollywood. No, in reality the Amazon myth is just a myth. The day all-women teams compete on a par with men in the NFL is the day I will believe otherwise. I am well aware that there are individual exceptions to this, but that just proves the rule, doesn’t it?

The Ms. Rambo fantasy is a sub-created world where women have their complete independence and men get payback from way back. I suppose it expresses the modern mood of male guilt over the past, when men and women believed that they were really different from each other. Women get their revenge all right, but at the expense of their femininity.

Women have, in fact, achieved a great deal of independence, some of it particularly critical in the light of divorce, abandonment and fatherlessness. Both single and married women have asserted their prowess in the public square and shown themselves formidable competition for men. In particular, many single moms have managed to create functioning families without a father.

But radical feminists have asserted women’s prowess most of all through divorce, abortion and birth control. After all, traditional childbearing has to go if women are to really be free of the dominance of men. Radical feminists have not yet figured out how to create a “woman only” utopia, so until they do, men are not quite as expendable as they would like to think.

In fact, in this charade men still win, don’t they? Now men have sex with women without consequences, and even when the woman keeps the baby, men feel more entitled than ever to opt out. It’s still a man’s world.

The Weaker Sex

Yes, women, like it are not, are the weaker sex, and while to say this is anathema in the public square, in my experience most women do not deny it, or are even inclined to deny it. Many will assume that by saying “weaker sex,” I mean “inferior sex,” which is not at all the case, nor does it even logically follow.

It is a women’s capacity to bear a child more than anything else that makes her the weaker sex. Physique and hormonal instability are secondary when compared to the immense vulnerability of female fertility. Men don’t get pregnant and have no fear of being abandoned by the mother of their child. The potential for motherhood is a woman’s greatest gift, but by its very nature it is something she is not capable of safeguarding by herself. She needs to be protected.

If anything, the ability to bear a child makes a woman superior to men, not inferior, but it certainly does not make her stronger. Alice Von Hildebrand, in her little book, The Privilege of Being a Woman, points out very clearly that the “weakness” of a woman does not mean that she is “less intelligent, less talented, less reliable, less moral, etc.” (35). She says that a woman’s weakness has both its cons and pros. (I paraphrase.) On the con side there is emotional vulnerability, greater sensitivity and openness to being wounded, emotional impressionability and sentimentality and emotional vulnerability to less than sincere men. On the pro side there is the fineness of womanhood in which her fragility and beauty are inherently connected; a woman’s weakness is one of the main motives for the promotion of chivalrous and courteous behavior; it is the fineness and beauty of vulnerability which tends to humanize men and promote the primacy of charity (cf. 36-47).

Now, I know I will get arguments from women, that point to certain facets of human life, where women generally manifest themselves as stronger than men, for example, in the ability to suffer and in the ability to persevere in the rigors of parenthood. However, full-fledged feminists would not count these examples as strength; quite the opposite.

All this being said, it is the vulnerability of feminine fertility, more than in any other way,  that leaves the feminists ambivalent over the woman’s capacity for motherhood. They know motherhood is a great good, but it is also one that puts them at a very real disadvantage.

Babies as Parasites

According to pro-life feminist Mary Krane Derr, feminists have alternately defended a woman’s distinctive capacity to bear children and then capitulated to the tendency to self-devaluation resulting from the changes that take place in a woman’s body during pregnancy. Most feminists, however, whether defending or attacking motherhood, have advocated for abortion. This ambivalence concerning motherhood, together with the gut reaction support of abortion, quite naturally has manifested itself in the regard of pregnancy as a disease and the fetus as an aggressor or parasite.

Derr quotes from a 1969 play by Myrna Lamb, “But What Have You Done for Me Lately?” It is another version of the Ms. Rambo myth in which the endgame always finds women still inferior and still the looser. The only consolation here is in sharing the misery:

. . . The drama depicts the reactions of a man in whom a pregnant uterus was forcibly implanted, clarifying for him the anger, desperation, and anguish of a woman when she faces the same dilemma:

“Why should I give this . . . this thing representation?” he cries. “It is nothing to me. I am not responsible for it or where it is nor do I wish to be. I have a life, an important life. I have work, important work . . . and this mushroom which you have visited upon me in your madness has no rights, no life, no importance to anyone, certainly not to the world. It has nothing. It has no existence . . . A tumor. A parasite. This has been foisted upon me? and then I am told that I owe it primary rights to life? My rights are subsidiary! This insanity! I do not want this thing in my body! It does not belong there. I want it removed. Immediately. Safely.”

The pregnant uterus he finds in him was implanted by a woman he once impregnated and abandoned. She remembers what it was like to have that unwanted disease and speaks for all women like her who are deprived of the surgery that would cure the unwanted pregnancy:

“Our work suffered. Our futures hung from a gallows. Guilt and humiliation and ridicule and shame assailed us. Our bodies. Our individual unique familiar bodies, suddenly invaded by strange unwelcome parasites, and we were denied the right to rid our own bodies of these invaders by a society dominated by righteous male chauvinists of both sexes who identified with the little clumps of cells and gave them precedence over the former owners of the host bodies.”

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate revenge, to force men, against their will to bear children? Do these women really hate themselves that much? It seems so.

Derr also points to the same self-devaluating root when considering the cause of anorexia. Studies have shown that the cult of thinness (which now seems even vogue in fashion and has resulted in the death of high profile models) is connected to many women’s discomfort with their own bodies, which they consider inferior, and that drives them to shed their feminine curves and appear more like a man.

No, women are not inferior and pregnancy is not a disease. Women need to rediscover their own dignity in that which is at the same time their vulnerability. Derr concludes her article:

Such a transformed understanding of gestation can give women the confidence to demand proper recognition of pregnancy as a truly indispensable contribution that they, and only they, can make to human life. Indeed, women must make this demand if they wish to achieve full liberation. If feminists are to heal women’s estrangement from their bodies, they must not think of pregnancy as disease, even when it occurs in tremendously unsupportive contexts. When they accept this construction of pregnancy, they only perpetuate the female tendency to lash out at the self rather than challenge societal conditions that deny the worthiness of the self.

The “societal conditions” to which Derr refers are many, but clearly one of those conditions is the devaluating of femininity by men, and the consequent acceptance and assimilation of that devaluation by women themselves. For some feminists, achieving “full liberation” means to reject all gender differences beyond biology as oppressive social constructs. It means gaining the strength not to be dependent on men at all. If this is what full liberation means, it is hard to imagine its achievement apart from birth control, abortion and divorce. The only other avenue, it seems would be lesbianism, a path, which logic based on false premises, has led some feminists to take. As Charlotte Bunch explains in Lesbians in Revolt:

Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy. The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women’s ‘innate’ need for men (even for pro-creation if the science of cloning is developed).

It’s a brave new world.

The Emancipation of Domesticity

It seems that modern feminists are more afraid and jealous of men than they care to admit. The feminist cry for emancipation from men is a misfiring femininity, a woman’s natural grace, an exhortation to men to be fair and humane, turned shrill and ugly. Emancipation has come to mean “free” to become like a man, which is to say, something not at all like a woman.

The absurdity of this strikes me in the gut (pun intended), as when popular culture play acts and allows Ms. Rambo to stand on the top of her heap of conquered and broken boys. As much as I pity the poor deluded girl, I pity the rest of us as well. The Amazon myth has trampled us all.

Feminists admonish men to give them quarter, but not to respect them. And men don’t. Abortion and birth control have not raised the status of women one iota. Abandonment and fatherlessness are a plague upon family and civil life. No one is better for it, certainly not women, but neither are men nor children. Feminists are manlier and less feminine, and for that reason they are less humane, and therefore, so is everyone else.

Just as men in film and television pretend to be beat up by women, so real-world men comply with the demands of the feminists and meanwhile snicker privately at the foolish girls who have guaranteed a man’s right to be a perpetually irresponsible, puerile, post-pubescent, and juvenile. Ladies, I hope you are happy.

Unfortunately, I think many women are quite happy. Gone are the days when they were regarded as the guardians of chastity and domestic life. One may no longer assume that the bimbo is dumb. The real feminine prowess has been cultivated and refined into a college educated, hyper-sexualized form of manipulation. The women’s clothing section of the local Walmart now looks like some out of the way, sleazy sex shop. It’s the new, smart, emancipated look. The war of the sexes goes on, and everyone is losing.

Women are, in fact, inherently the weaker sex; however, the whole world is at the mercy of this weakness. Unless women once again become the guardians of chastity and domestic life, we are all doomed. The dignity and power of a woman lies in her prerogative to say yes or no. She becomes a queen or a plaything with the well-placed whisper of one little word.

The whole world turns on this power, and it must be defended unto the death. It is both the stuff of adventure and a primordial, domestic thing. But isn’t domestic life the real adventure, the place where every day is perilous and uncertain, where the whole world hangs in the balance? Yes, the power of a woman’s consent is a domestic reality, one pertaining to marriage and procreation before anything else, but it extends to the whole of civilized life. G.K. Chesterton, perhaps the most chivalrous man of the twentieth century, had this to say about the “emancipation of domesticity”:

But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean.

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene: I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness (What’s Wrong with the World).

I can hear the groans. No, I am not saying that a woman’s place is only in the home, but I am saying that it is primarily there. A woman is not accidentally maternal; she is essentially so. Edith Stein, St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, put it succinctly: a woman’s vocation is “empathy.”

But empathy is a weakness. It is openness to experience and participate in what others experience, especially pain. It makes a woman vulnerable. But without it we all die.

Damsels in Distress

That brings me more directly to the question of the “damsel in distress.” It is a chivalric image of vulnerability and innocence. Of course, such an image is not complete without the “knight in shining armor,” who conveys the sense of courage and heroism. The image, completed with the damsel in distress being saved by the knight in shining armor, is the picture of courtesy and contains as happy an ending as anyone could hope for. Perhaps the word that best describes it is one coined by Tolkien: eucatastrophe, meaning the complete reversal of catastrophe, idealized as the triumph of the Cross made available to all of us in the Eucharist.

Historically one of the earliest and most important examples of the image as it entered the West is the legend of St. George and the Dragon. The story is by no means an exclusively Western treasure (I think of Russia and Lebanon, for example), but it is particularly important for an understanding of Western chivalry (especially in England).

As the legend goes, or at least one version of it, a dragon took up its abode at the spring from which the locals drew their water. The dragon thus took custody of the spring and demanded a price for its use. The only way the townsfolk could draw their water was by the offering of someone to the dragon as a human sacrifice. Each day a new victim was selected by common agreement through the drawing of lots. One fateful day, the lot fell to the princess of the kingdom, and even the intervention of her father, the king, was not enough to save her from the dragon; the people insisted that the arrangement be respected. At this point, St. George providentially ride up on his steed and volunteered his services to face the dragon, which he did to great effect, the dragon being slain and the damsel rescued. The awestruck townspeople as a result abandoned the ways of paganism and became Christians.

Crusaders, it is said, brought the story back from the East, and retold it as a courtly romance. In a way typical of the Middle Ages, Christian tradition and hagiography was transformed into quasi-secular romance. Certainly, for courtiers who heard this story the “art of courtly love,” could easily serve as the hermeneutic for the understanding of the story, in which case, it would not be any different from the story of the rescue of a damsel in the Arthurian cycle. However, the Christian symbolism, even in the most embellished version of the legend, is unmistakable: the Christ figure enters into combat with the Demon and rescues the Virgin Church from his clutches. This is paradise regained. In some versions of the legend, there is even a tree (Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) to which the maiden is tied and from which she is rescued.

The damsel in distress is the bride of Ephesians 5.  This passage of St. Paul on marriage is a holy incantation and exorcism that scatters the feminist demons to their dark and gloomy pits. St. Paul, the “misogynist,” is actually the guardian of feminine weakness and the promoter of chivalry. He admonishes the coward Adam and kneels at the feet of the hero Christ.  Both men and women are better for it, if by casting off the modern prejudice they can just for a moment wave away the wafting mist of the Ms. Rambo deception and see the Bridegroom and Bride for who they truly are.

Damsels Not So in Distress

We live in an unreal age, when we have “pregnant men,” surgically enhanced beauty queens and the Hollywood myth of the female soldier. I don’t say this lightly, or in any way to disparage the brave women who serve in our armed forces, but take the example of PFC Jessica Lynch, who was lionized by the Pentagon as the Rambo-like heroine of the Iraq war, but as it turns out, had never fired her weapon. This story is not only symptomatic of Pentagon propaganda, but of the general acceptance of the Ms. Rambo myth.  That myth is putting women in harms way in a manner that goes far beyond the ordinary dangers of military life.  Sexual abuse of military women by military men is of “jaw-dropping proportions.

But what about the valiant women of history and literature: Judith, Esther, Jael, St. Joan of Arc, Luthien, Eowyn, ect.? Examine each of their stories and you will find a woman driven by love and a prophetic spirit, not someone preoccupied with the worldly ways of domination and prowess. In each case, more importantly you will find a woman who picks up the sword that a man, derelict of his duty, has dropped and from which he has walked away. In each case you will find a victress who conquers not so much by force of arms, but by her beauty, virtue and charm.

Judith, that type of Our Lady, for example, is the ultimate femme fatale, beautiful and virtuous, who lulls her enemy by her charms and then decapitates him in his lustful sleep. Being the proper lady that she is, she is accompanied to and from her encounter by one of her maids who carries back to the city the head of the enemy in her purse. The men of Judith’s city who were too afraid and desperate to solve the problem themselves are left with no other resource than to sing her praises:

Thou art the glory of Jerusalem, thou art the joy of Israel, thou art the honor of our people: For thou hast done manfully, and thy heart has been strengthened, because thou hast loved chastity, and after thy husband hast not known any other: therefore also the hand of the Lord hath strengthened thee, and therefore thou shalt be blessed for ever (Judith 15:10, 11).

In regard to the dangerous character of virtuous femininity, which character is perfectly harmonious with a woman’s character as damsel in distress, Chesterton said it best:

I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess (The Victorian Age in Literature).

The Valiant Woman

Who shall find a valiant woman? far, and from the uttermost coasts is the price of her.

St. Bonaventure writes that this verse from the Book of Proverbs (31:10) is prophetic of the Blessed Virgin’s fortitude, especially at the foot of the Cross. The “price of her,” that is, her worth, is the fruit of Her womb, which fruit she bore, offered and possesses. Thus she bore the price in joy at Bethlehem; She paid the price in sorrow on Calvary; and now She possesses the price as Mediatrix in heaven.

Far off and from the last ends is her price; and who is she? This woman, the Blessed Virgin, is the price, through which we prevail to obtain the Kingdom of Heaven; or it is Hers, that is, taken from Her, paid by Her and possessed by Her: taken from Her in the Incarnation of the Word; paid by Her in the redemption of the human race; and possessed by Her in the gaining of the glory of paradise. She brought forth, paid and possessed that price; therefore it is Hers as the one originating, as the one paying and as the one possessing. That woman brought forth that price as one strong and holy; paid it as one strong and pious; possessed it as one strong and vigorous (Conferences on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Conference 6).

Mary is the ideal woman and the iconic Damsel in Distress. St. Bonventure chooses to speak in reference to Her when discussing thd Gift of Fortitude.  He makes a distinction between the courage of action, which he attributes properly to man, and that of suffering, which he attributes to the woman: “Men are they that do; women are they that suffer” (pati). The root here of the word suffer is passio (literally, “that which is undergone”), so in the first place it indicates receptivity, an openness to what it is real; secondarily, but most importantly, it is openness to suffering willed out of love. Mary is the Queen of Martyrs and the Sorrowful Mother. She is the Queen of the Seven Swords.

In the friars chapel in Griswold, Connecticut, the rood beam spans the width of the Church and  separates the sanctuary from the nave.  On it a summary of St. Bonaventure’s doctrine are carved and gilded:

Pretium Redemptionis Nostrae Maria Protulit, Persolvit Possidet,

that is, “Mary bore, offered (paid) and possesses the price of our redemption.”

Taken out of the context of Christian revelation the idea of men acting and women suffering could and has been interpreted to mean: “Men are those who do unto; women are those who are done unto.” But one must recognize that the context for this relationship in the mind of saints like Bonaventure is John 19 and Ephesians 5. The Ms. Rambo myth and the accoutrements that go along with it, like contraception and abortion, are the paraphernalia of a world that has rejected the cross, where mutual manipulation is the rule, where persons are used, not loved.

Historical chivalry from the point of view of Christian ethics was about channeling the courage of action in such a way that it respected the high dignity of the courage of suffering. Women were venerated precisely for the fine delicacy of their beauty, which is exemplary of everything that is worth dying for, namely, the true, good and beautiful.

Unfortunately, the ethical ideal in historical chivalry was all too often just that, an ideal. The courtiers and troubadours too often idealized woman in a pagan sense, that is, they made her a goddess, who was to be served and flattered in the hope that she might shed the dew of her grace upon the poor suitor. So reads one of the rules of courtly love: “Being obedient in all things to the commands of ladies, thou shalt ever strive to ally thyself to the service of Love.”

I can never take this kind of thing seriously. Dan Brown tried to resurrect this nonsense in his unbearable Da Vinci Code. Poor little Sophie, so the backstory goes, misinterpreted the sex-rite in which she had discovered her grandfather engaged and refused to speak to him for the rest of his life. Only after his death, when she is fully enlightened by the much smarter men around her, is she able to realize that what had horrified her in reality it is the most respectable form of goddess worship. And guess what?  Sophie also eventually learns that, descending as she does from the bloodline of Christ, she has a special title to the cult of the goddess. The culminating passage where this tripe is fully revealed to Sophie reads like a pious exposition of the most holy mysteries, when in fact it is the diabolic mutterings of the demon of lust. And of course, Sophie takes it all in as the enlightened little sex object she was meant to be.

This is also a reason why I fear what I think has rightly been termed the pansexualism of Christopher West. I do not wish to connect him with the paganism of Dan Brown, but I am always suspicious of pious male veneration of the female body. I am not talking about an ordinary red-blooded attraction. I am talking about the refined, studied and sophisticated trappings of sexual obsession cloaked in euphemisms.  Do I think this is what West is engaged in?  No, but the penchant for unveiling the mystery in explicit language is dangerous.

Chesterton points to the contrast of worldly and other-worldly regard for femininity in his poem “The Ballad of King Arthur.” The historical information we have regarding Arthur is very slim. All we know are the bits and pieces salvaged by monks from the Dark Ages, mostly about what battles he fought in, especially, the Battle of Mount Badon and concerning the fact that he “carried the image of Mary, Ever-virgin, on his shoulder, through whose virtue and that of Jesus Christ,” he was victorious.  Chesterton writes:

King Arthur on Mount Badon
Bore Our Lady on his shield
High on that human altar held
Above the howling field,
High on that living altar heaved
As a giant heaves a tower
She saw all heathenry appalled
And the turning of the hour.

But the woman that the world remembers, when the story of Arthur is retold and embellished, is not the Queen of Virgin’s but the queen that betrayed the king:

The Queen that wronged King Arthur’s house
Had lovers in all lands
And many a poet praised her pride
At many a queen’s commands:
And the King shrank to a shadow
Watching behind a screen
And the Queen walked with Lancelot
And the world walked with the Queen.

But, as we might expect, Chesterton does not walk with the world or with the Queen “that wronged King Arthur’s house, but with the Queen of the Seven Swords:

Stillness like lightning strike the street
And doubt and deep amaze
And many a courtly bard be dumb
Beside his butt and bays
And many a patron prince turned pale—
If one such flash made plain
The Queen that stands at his right hand
If Arthur comes again.

Guinevere was not so much a damsel in distress, even as she was rescued from the flames by Lancelot, because she was a manipulator just like Lancelot. On the other hand, Our Lady is the true Damsel in Distress and Christ, the true Knight in Shining Armor, because they are one in the mutual freedom of self-giving.  Arthur, the “once and future king” will find the honor of his kingdom regained, when the lesson of the Quest of the Holy Grail is learned by the mass of men.  Chivalry cannot be a sham and we cannot live without the real thing.

Yes, women need to be protected. They are damsels in distress. The man should stand guard in front of the veil. The courage of action should be put into the service of the courage of suffering. Christ on the Cross did what the first Adam was afraid to do: He protected his Bride. He entered into battle with the dragon and freed the Virgin tied to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He was slain in the process, but in the power of His paschal mystery has presented her to himself, a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5: 27).

Hail Victress, standing fast,
The banner is lifted.
Unfurl the sign of salvation,
And storm with Thy Lord
the lair of the Dragon.

Holy Lily of our knighthood,
Draw us to Thy side
To die with Thee,
con-crucified in Him.

The Chivalrous Woman

The idea of damsels in distress implies that women need men. But men also need women. And this is not only a matter of marriage and family, or of matrimonial complementarity. It is also a matter of chivalry. Men need women to be chivalrous.

There is a grain of truth in the chivalrous ideal of the service of women. But it has nothing to do with the mutual manipulation that has continued through the ages, even after the presumed death of chivalry. Even among those who hate chivalry, the mutual manipulation of the sexes is a sacred doctrine. Ms. Rambo is tolerated by her brothers in arms because now she is one of the boys. She can use her sexuality on her own terms, but the game is on. Let us see whether she succeeds. She no longer has any claim to protection.

Mutual manipulation can never end unless men are protective and women want to be protected. Motherhood is worthy of the highest veneration. Vulnerability is the delicacy of a flower. If men do not love this, they are not worthy to be loved.

Women need to hold men to the highest standards. They need to be choosy in regard to the men to whom they say yes. This is the real power of a woman: her fiat. On it the whole of history depends. What John Paul II reminds us, and Christopher West stresses, is that the “freedom of the gift” with respect to man and woman in the mystery of marriage is absolutely inviolable, and that the preservation of that gift belongs to the man (the male) in a special way (TOB 15; 33.1-2). A woman’s yes is sacred and it needs to be protected. But if woman does not value her fiat properly, if she sells it off cheaply, she has no real escape. It is either subjugation in the classical sense or the Ms. Rambo myth.

Geoffroi de Charny was a fourteenth century French knight and bearer of the Oriflamme, who wrote a well known manual for knights called The Book of Chivalry. In that work he writes of the duty of courtly women to hold their men to the highest standards.  For the most part that meant that they were only to give their love to knights who had won worldly honor, and who could safely be named a lover of some man without their own loss of worldly honor:

And if one of the other ladies loves the miserable wretch who, for no good reason, is unwilling to bear arms, she will see him come into that very hall and perceive and understand that no one pays him any attention or shows him honor or notices him, and few know who he is, and those who do think nothing of him, and he remains hidden behind everyone else, for no one brings him forward. Indeed, if there is such a lady, she must feel very uneasy and disconsolate when she sees that she has devoted time and thought to loving and admiring a man who no one admires or honors, and that they never hear a word said of any great deed that he ever achieved. Ah, God! What small comfort and solace is there for those ladies who see their lovers held in such little honor, with no excuse except lack of will! (20.14-25).

The worldly standard of pride was somewhat necessary in the training of men of arms, and still is. The warrior must be ferocious, in some measure, and so the warrior culture encourages bold, decisive behavior that is bent upon domination and victory.  That women would hold out for the bravest and most honored men was understandable and promoted the warrior culture, even so, while this may have also promoted the ideals courtly love, it did not necessarily safeguard the true dignity of women or the good of marriage and family life.

Too many women sell their fiat too cheaply to knaves who are not worthy of them, and sometimes those knaves are knights in the making, whose honor, a woman’s cheap yes does not serve.  Men need to be both warriors and true gentlemen and only women can help them find that balance.  Women need to humanize men, without stifling their urge to take risks and to fight.  Men need to protect and defend the honor of women.

I pointed out in some comments on a blog that was discussing Theology of the Body—to which I will not link because of some of the filthy comments found there—that the Playboy philosophy of Hugh Hefner is not only puerile, but effeminate. The playboy is a prurient Peter Pan, who has never learned how to be a man, perhaps because he has never sufficiently identified with a father figure. His preference is to play indoors where he can’t get hurt and where he will never by deprived of the soft touch of a woman.

There are also the men who are just plainly brutal, how have natural bravado, aggression and a libido to match. A woman’s cheap yes, in this regard, and other men’s silence in the face of it, are the stuff out of which tragedies are made. The damsel in distress has one weapon only: her judicious consent over which she is the sole mistress.

Chesterton was inspired by the nursery rhyme “Pears or Pairs” to write a poem on the subject of true courtly love, which he entitled “An Old Riddle.” I will conclude with it, since it so aptly summarizes the battle of the sexes and the formula for mutual victory.  That formula does not provide for the possibility of the damsel in distress being rescued from Dastardly Dan only to be wooed by a more suave womanizer, nor does it provide for the baptism of the Ms. Rambo myth.  The real solution is more difficult and more complex, but as with everything else that is worth living for, it is worth dying for:

Seven Knights of the Court of Love
Each has her for a star above
Seven smite in a single name
Seven hearts are hearts of flame
Round where she doth sit
But a maid’s choice is as God’s choice
And who shall challenge it. . .

Seven titans, huge and starred
Seven giants of God’s own guard
These may merit all years’ renown,
Fit for these be the robe and crown,
Heaven’s fields befit
But a maid’s grace is as God’s grace
And who shall merit it.

The Network of Enlightened Women at Arizona State University have chosen to counter liberal feminist activity on campus by sponsoring a the First Annual Gentleman’s Showcase. They have produced a video in which they ask the following questions:

• What is a gentleman?
• What are some of the characteristics of a gentleman?
• Are there gentleman at ASU?
• Are gentlemen an endangered species?

Follow the link and click “download” to watch the video.  It’s in Quicktime so you will need the player if you don’t already have it.

Here are some of my own opnions on this topic.

The external customs of courtesy, or “gentlemanly manners” (derived from “gentility” or “nobility”), are secondary-but important-expressions of commitment to the common good. They are an acknowledgment that standards exist to which a generous spirit must conform. The chivalrous heart is not narrow, peevish and self-centered, nor is it preoccupied with its own rights and concerns. Rather, it is directed outward, concerned about the good of others, and willing to sacrifice itself in defense of the rights of its neighbor. Good manners, including thoughtfulness in small things, in a truly chivalrous man are merely the outward sign of an interior disposition that gives no quarter to base selfishness, but is rather eager for that which is honorable, no matter what the cost.