Chivalry For Grown Ups
And a conversation with Malcolm Guite
Hello friends, I’m delighted to say that Bardskull in paperback is now available at my small press – I have quill in hand and will sign the first fifty copies…
CHIVALRY FOR GROWN UPS
This last weekend teaching Parzival really shifted some chess pieces in my soul.
I’ve been banging on about the chivalric tradition for years now; the first published mutterings back in 2014 with Snowy Tower (my book of the Parzival grail epic), though I’d been teaching it for five years before that. At the very end of the book I made a case for what I called dark chivalry. What did I mean by that? Well, with the benefit of hindsight I realise I was talking about Initiatory Christianity. I was groping, but the ‘dark’ element was to place the gritty, the reality of suffering, the pressured Underworld in the centre of true gallantry. I realised even then that chivalry on its own seemed too flowery a word.
It was chivalry-for-grown ups I was getting at, and that, for me, these days, is called Christianity.
In Parzival the first part of the story is a raw lad getting slowly educated into the exterior values of becoming a knight. He causes a lot of chaos but is lucky enough to find a teacher who focuses on the brass tacks, ‘how to hold your sword’ type stuff that helps him look and act the part. When, however, he meets the wounded Grail King he simply isn’t sufficiently mature to ask the question that heals him, and also the land.
The failure of not asking the question is what starts the deeper story.
What follows is the task of trying to find by will what was once gifted him by grace. For years he traverses a kingdom in peril – the wasteland – to locate the Grail castle again but no luck. Finally he encounters another teacher, very different to the first. This is a hermit who both explains all the interior meanings of gallantry and the history of the Grail itself. He demystifies the Grail by, ironically, deepening Parzival into the mysteries. Parzival moves from sheer ignorance into the much more spiritually alive terrain of ‘not-knowingness’ and with that kind of openness the miraculous can happen.
Different Seasons, Different Teachers
Most importantly; if Parzival had met the Hermit when he was twenty we’d have no story and the journey would be oddly unconvincing. The Hermit does not berate this earlier stage of Parzival’s – in fact he once was a warrior himself. We need different guides at different times is what I’m saying. The Hermit is – in the language of the Desert Fathers – the one who brings Parzival from the Exterior Mountain to the Interior Mountain. Without the wasteland, without the lostness, we move from red straight to white (see: Flying the Colours) and lose the enormous education of the black. Red is all the bluster and drama of young knighthood, white is the sagacity of the Hermit, black is the difficult, essential bit. Those times when you get to know God in his absence rather than relentless presence. I don’t speak of that flippantly.
Michael Martin has recently been writing about the need for knights as well as monks in the Christian life. Now to be absolutely clear, he is drawing on a rich seam of symbolic language that is not to do with robber barons, plunder and crusades. He’s talking about the very best of the tradition: the vitality of the quest, the imperative of courtesy to the struggling, the valiant sacrifice of a truly Christian heart. It faces out towards the world while still testing the spirits of the age.
What we find in the Arthurian tradition is that you don’t have to choose one way entirely over another, but recognise in the stages of one’s life different disciplines are called for at different times, just like Parzival. If you’re looking at having kids, a job you enjoy, a convivial group of friends then there’s a lot to learn from in these stories. They reach out to the rough and tumble of the market place in a way that still keeps your soul aimed towards the good. My whole way of looking at almost everything as a kid was a synthesis of Arthurian myth and the Robin Hood ballads. And I think God led me to those rich wellsprings.