Sacramentum Militaire: On Roman Catholic Masculinity
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“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.”
Hercules is depicted making his decision: the whore, Kakia (“badness”), at his feet, offering the world’s pleasures, one breast exposed from her loose gown, her thighs ajar, he leans toward her, she gestures to the slippery slope, go this way, mortal man, and have an easy life; the virtuous woman at his side, Arete (“virtue”), holds a sword, she points the way up the mountainside, struggle, difficulty, pain, suffering, mortal death and immortal memory, go this way, son of heaven, and live forever.
We know the way Hercules chose.
We know how Christ chose in the desert.
How will you choose?
This is the decision every man must face.
The whores at our feet versus the virtuous woman by our side.
Let us endeavour to understand each other.
Veritas, truth, sometimes daughter of Zeus (heaven), sometimes of Cronos (time) and sometimes a creation of Prometheus (thought) – truth is the child of heaven/time/thought, i.e. God, experiential wisdom.
Zeus is Jupiter, Deus Pater, “father sky”, lord of heaven, a St Michael figure, patriarchal and conquering, he murdered his father, time; the conquest of time (chaos) by his son is an ancient Indo-European myth; conquest of formlessness (Tiamat) is the shaping of earth to man’s will (Marduk), or the “moving on the face of the deep”. Linear time is the collaring of divine time (sometimes the wrestling of a bull by the divine hero), Zeus is the thunderbolt that strikes the formless ocean of space-time and creates history.
Cronos is time, the rule of time, the difference between 0 and 1, nothing to something, binary code, mathematics, science, technology and all unknown possibilities. Cronos is the clock and the ruler and the measure, he is death (the god of the Free Masons, holding his rule and compass); once something has beginning, no longer a formless 0, it is already at an end through 1, infinity is nothing as the ancients would have said; a line has beginning and end, a 0 is a circle, formless and empty, 1 must by essence become either 0 again or recreate itself and become 2.
Life must always return to death even if it continues as more life.
The stag your father hunted is not the same stag you hunt, but they are identical.
Prometheus stole fire from heaven, a trickster, chained in the abyss to be eternally devoured by a vulture, only to be rescued and released by Hercules (the semi-divine child of the cosmic war).
Prometheus is forethought, or free will.
The Promethean spirit in Western culture is the desire to bring order to chaos, even with the tools of chaos; defined as Faustian: the urge to dabble with things hidden (the occult), this began with Alchemy and has ended with quantum physics (the creation of artificial intelligence).
Prometheus is present when man alters the genome.
Zeus, Cronos, Prometheus, the fathers of the goddess Veritas, or Aletheia; truth.
This must be meditated on by the individual to make sense.
We make no apology for it being complex.
Veritas is the mother of Virtus, bravery, courage, militarism and strength. Virtus is the creator of Roman “virtues”, the essence of what we men are seeking, for this is the Promethean fire that has been lost somewhere along the pilgrimage. The flame was almost extinguished, but the embers flicker.
In Greek myth, Virtus was Arete, a woman. The one time she appears in legend is at the crossroads before Hercules offering him the sword and the way up the mountain, whilst her opposite Kakia (the whore at his feet) offers him the world’s pleasures.
Thus we return to our source.
Truth holds up a mirror to the skull.
We learn something about ourselves, we are Hamlet holding the skull of his friend, do we seek Virtus or Vanitas?
Return to this question frequently, for it is the question that haunted all the saints and heroes. You can have both but not in equal measure, a man may marry and have the freedom of his wife’s body, but he is monogamous, no man may enter the kingdom of God whilst besmirched with the fluids of his whores.
St King Louis IX banned whoring among his Crusader army.
Heaven, time and free will fathered Truth and gave birth to Virtue, offering the choice to all heroes on the path of struggle, fight up the mountain or slide down to disgrace.
Virtue and struggle leads us up the mountain (towards the realm of God), where Moses was crowned not by entry into the Promised Land (which he was denied) but the receiving of the Ten Commandments at the heights, where God thundered – the Israelites followed a pillar of fire and smoke across the desert, not a man. God is manifest in the still small voice that speaks to the warrior and tells him to seek adversity; He is concurrent in the act of bringing fire, thunder, storm and smoke to test the warrior.
Consider Job.
Western civilisation was built upon the correct performance of duties: husband, father, soldier, saint.
Manhood separate from these ideas – farmer, warrior, priest, king – is irrelevant.
Central to manhood is the certainty that the way to God is through virtue, towards truth and back to godhead/sainthood – the hero.
Understanding virtue is not through academia; it is galvanised in action or it is worthless.
Theoretical virtue is the mere acorn to the great oak of wisdom which comes from experiential virtue.
The acorn is absolutely necessary to the growth of the oak, but no one would compare the two and say the prowess of centuries is the same as a young seed. We must compare thought and action in the same way.
Manly virtue in action is defined by the living of God’s will in the four cardinal points:
I. Love, sex and marriage;
II. Fatherhood, leadership and education;
III. Violence, duty and a code of honour;
IV. Faith, sacrifice and service to a higher order.
These are the inheritance of all men, not just the private property of a reserved elite, it was expected of generations of British men to act like gentlemen and dispense their duties to wife, parents, children, nation, church and community with honour as their fathers did.
The events of 1914-1918 annihilated, branch and bough, the tree of European chivalry and effectively brought medieval piety to a screaming end.
Chivalry was tested in the trenches, and was strangled in no man’s land.
Prior to the complete collapse of the British Empire it was the expectation of even the lowest of the classes to be pious enough to be dutiful subjects. Ancient history, politics, Latin, theology, philosophy, art and a healthy sporting tradition were the expectation of all of the upper classes.
Your manhood is coequal with your perceived usefulness in a meritocracy.
Ours is the theology of masculinity, the process toward heroism/sainthood (for the laity and the military respectively) is via duty and service; to embrace the dogma with rugged determination to become better men without a mundane socio-political agenda.
Politics is the piety of the ignorant.
Medieval philosophy provides us with ample guidance on manhood and we can easily interpret these truths for the modern world (Loyola, Escriva, Aquinas).
We do not need to be shown how to be holy; the sacraments of confession, communion, marriage, vows of chastity, poverty etc. are all extant for Roman Catholic men.
What we need is guidance and advice on how to be a man, without all the dross of quasi-religious nihilistic illusions (LARP) rooted in the philosophy of physical, emotional and political deviants.
We fundamentally reject the notion of “might is right” as the very slippery slope fallacy which Kakia offers to Hercules at the crossroads; cruelty, slavery and genocide.
We determine manhood as knighthood; active mysticism as the root or gate of the Way towards God and towards Christ (who is the Way, the Truth and the Life).
“...Sir Gawain and his gleaming armour, for, ever faithful in five things, each in fivefold manner, Gawain was reputed good, and, like gold well refined, he was devoid of all villainy every virtue displaying in the field. Thus this Pentangle new, he carried on coat and shield, as a man of troth most true, and knightly name annealed. First he was found faultless in his five wits, next his five fingers never failed the knight, and all his trust on earth was in the five wounds, which came to Christ on the Cross, as the Creed tells. And whenever the bold man was busy on the battlefield, through all other things he thought on this, that his prowess depended on the five Joys (the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Assumption), that the Holy Queen of Heaven had of her Child. Accordingly the courteous knight had that Queen’s image etched on the inside of his armoured shield, so that when he beheld her, his heart did not fail. The fifth five I find the famous man practised, were Liberality (generosity) and Lovingkindness (charity) leading the rest; then his Continence (discipline) and Courtesy (nobility), which were never corrupted; and Piety, surpassing all virtue.”
The ideal knight in the warfare of denial of the flesh; gold well refined (the student of the Magnum Opus), devoid of villainy (might is right), virtue displayed in the field (acta non verba); faultless in his five wits (senses); never failing in his five fingers (skilled in his work – war); all his trust in the five wounds of Christ (two hands, two feet, side); depending on the five joys (listed); his shield etched with the Virgin (as was King Arthur’s); his virtues: generosity, charity, discipline, courtesy and piety.
Understand and explore all of these through action not theory.
Our most common failing as modern Roman Catholic men: falling into puritanism.
We are not Puritans.
“I know where Men can still be found, Anger and clamorous accord, And virtues growing from the ground, And fellowship of beer and board, And song, that is a sturdy cord, And hope, that is a hardy shrub, And goodness, that is God’s last word—Will someone take me to a pub?”
Modern Roman Catholicism has been imbued with a clumsy proto puritanical scrupulosity.
Roman Catholicism was once attacked by the puritanical as corrupted with pagan blasphemy, suffocated with customs determined as alien to the Bible, superstitiously discriminatory, drenched in the blood of violent men and equally whorish women.
Somewhere between the height of Roman Catholic arrogance in the 15th century and the slow onslaught of the revolutions (Protestant, French, Russian, and sexual) Roman Catholic man has lost touch with the electrical spark of Golgotha. We were undoubtedly barbarians first, but holy barbarians, and ones that God used to convert the barbarous.
This distorted proto-puritan worldview which rejects human sexuality, violence, ruggedness and essential ferociousness is contrary to the Roman Catholic life. The great medieval kings were all regarded as flowers of the chivalrous era, and all were known to be flawed men with a healthy sex life, men of steel and war.
Roman Catholic manhood is not scrupulous, it is not inhibitive, iconoclastic or repressive, it is dogmatic.
These are massive differences every Catholic must understand.
“The most free, the most upstanding, the most dauntless men are happy, splendidly happy to accept the rule of a real man of power, who draws vitality from the cosmos. And they are unhappy, wretched when cut off from rule and power, and forced to be democratic. Now the fact that the Lord’s prayer says first of all: thy kingdom come, shows that men first and foremost want rule, the sense of power, power in the rulers above them. They want it even before they want bread. The common man wants to be consummated in the might and splendour of rulers above him. It is a primary, paramount need, old and yet still unrecognised. When rulers have no cosmic splendour and might, then the common man tears them to pieces. It is a crime that a ruler should be impotent and without cosmic splendour, it is a great crime against the manhood of men.”
