Fortitude & the Grail Knights
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“There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is the truth.”
Now that we have laid the groundwork of Roman Catholic manhood, we may get into virtue theology’s gristly substance.
Courage is not the same as bravery, for courage comes from the same Latin root which deals with “heart”, hence Richard the Lionheart, “Coeur de Lion”; courage is heart, and oft bravery is coupled with recklessness, for only the Fool can set off on the journey which leads to his annihilation and sublimation into the high(est) form (fool-initiate-knight-king-hero).
Courage is contrarily rooted in a physical hardiness and the certainty that what we do is what we are.
This is how the modern world has poisoned the concept of courage, celebrating the standards of decadence, calling sin courageous and all that opposes sin cruelty. Only the weak can be cruel and only the strong can be truly merciful. It takes courage to hold back the hand crushing the enemy, hence Christ’s teaching of heaping shameful coals on the head of our opponent when he asks for a drink after the combat: mercy is courageous, but not brave. Bravery only deals with the dominance of fear during the firefight, but courage is manifest in kindness, making it the higher virtue; the father of the Prodigal Son for example.
Fortitude, by nature, is hardiness, strength, bravery, firmness that feeds into the courage of the individual; one is said to be fortified against adversity, against the siege weapons of the enemy, hence a fort and a fortress.
Taking the symbolism of the “full armour of God” which St Paul expounded and hundreds of saints expanded upon, the medieval scholars spoke of the defences of the heavenly kingdom as a castle, each layer of the outer defences leading towards the central keep in which the throne of the monarch sits empty, and upon which the Holy Grail rests, awaiting the virgin squire (Parsifal-Galahad) – “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Any seeking the Grail outside the inner castle is futile, much in the same way as searching for the Isle of Avalon, or Hyperborea or Atlantis are now; these were never physical places (even if they were), just as Rome (the idea of Rome – in the guise of the Eternal City) is not a real place seated in the country of Italy, Rome is an earthly counterpart of the heavenly city, just as Jerusalem was (is) intended to be, and just as the Temple mirrored the Temple in heaven, so the crucifixion at Golgotha mirrors the Mass in heaven.
The questing knight is searching for the lost relic, the mistakenly asked question closing a doorway, the king falling asleep, into infertility and sin, but the knight is shown again and again to be looking for something internal before it appears external.
As Above So Below – the Kingdom of God is within you.
The Magnum Opus is an inner quest as we have discussed, the crossing of the abyss, the dark night of the soul, King David’s valley of the shadow of death; the Grail is in a dungeon or an abandoned witch haunted tomb, the sleeping king is surrounded by his slaughtered knights who also lay in purgatorial slumber in the Gloomy Castle. The knight must go downwards, inwards, behind and around, lose his armour (St George in the dragon’s swamp) or his sword (Beowulf in Grendel’s swamp) and be stripped of all earthly pleasures and defences. Naked and nearly dead, he discovers that secret spark of original fire God bequeathed to Adam, the light which is immortal, joining either the conflagration in heaven at the end of days or consumed in the lake of eternal hellfire.
As we approach the true root of knighthood, we discover what the Knights Templar were looking for underneath the Temple in Jerusalem, “found” in the catacombs of Solomon far under the temple mount and brought back with them to Scotland. The Holy Grail is not hidden in Rosalyn Chapel, but if you go down into the tomb and speak to the Templars there, you might discover something else.
“Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”
True courage brings with it what Nietzsche describes, the laconic warrior seeking after wisdom, in the same chivalrous quest as that of the Grail knights (for the cup of Christ’s blood is brought to the banquet by maidens who can never be touched by male hands – in the same manner as the Vestal Virgins in Rome or nuns in perpetual adoration of the Eucharist).
The knight is the same as Parsifal, foolishly stumbling through the major events of his life, molesting the first woman he meets, not realising the identity of King Arthur, asking the grail king the wrong question, finding and then losing the object of his quest etc. But he persists and he eventually succeeds, starting out as a boorish idiot and ending as a world weary hero, passed as he has through the darkness of his own failings and finding the truth of human frailty (hence courage).
Notions of manhood outside of this integral meaning to life itself are irrelevant.
One may be born, live as a fool and remain a fool his entire life, and die, without ever having truly lived, and the world will be no better or worse, for who can care but the man and his God? Even the greatest of heroes, decorated with mausoleums, statues, thrones and memorials will still be crumbling mummified bones in a century and little more than calcified dust in a millennium. Heroism lives forever only in the memory of God, and thus the idea of heroism is the most important aspect of manhood and therefore the meaning of life, but also utterly absurd in its futility.
Even if we accept that our deeds are important we must also accept that everything will one day end in the fires of apocalypse and an ocean of ashes prior to the resurrection and judgement; the point is to fight on anyway and do as we are commanded even though we know we will fail.
This is courage, and fortitude, and the calling of the Roman Catholic man.
