The dual economy of knighthood: material wealth and spiritual idealism in medieval society

“ One may, in philosophical moments, think kingship an outworn institution, and jeer at all its pomp and pageantry. One’s democratic soul may thrust all its ritual into the lumber room of antique furniture, but something of the old romance of its meaning, something of its warmth and color in the tapestry of English history, something of that code of chivalry and knighthood by which the King was dedicated to the service of his peoples, stirs in the most prosaic mind alive when a king is crowned again in the Abbey Church of Westminster. ”

“ The idea of knighthood still stirs us and the deeds of chivalry and the courtesy and the honour of the social Knights of the Round Table, Crusaders and knights errant, the quest of the Holy Grail, rescue and adventure, the fighting with paynims and powers of evil, still stir our blood and arouse in our minds strange contrasts and antinomies. ”

“ A knight was a young man, the son of a good family, who was allowed to wear arms. In the story "How the Child of the Sea was made Knight," we are told how a boy of twelve became a page to the queen, and in the opening pages of the story "The Adventures of Sir Gareth," we get a glimpse of a young man growing up at the court of King Arthur. It was not an easy life, that of a boy who wished to become a knight, but it made a man of him. He was taken at an early age, sometimes when only seven years old, to the castle of the king or knight he was to serve. ”

“ I see that your armor is bent and that your clothes are worn. Tell me now, were you a yeoman and made a knight by force? Or have you been bad steward to yourself and wasted your property in lawsuits and the like? Be not bashful with me, we shall not betray your secrets."
"I am a Norman knight in my own right; and I have always lived a sober and quiet life," the sorrowful knight replied. "My father, and his father, and his father's father were all knights of the King; but, as is often the case, friend Robin, rich men sometimes find their riches fly away from them. ”

“ This does not mean that the form of government is of no moment, it is of the utmost importance for I cannot too often insist that the organic life of society is the resultant of two forces; spiritual energy working through and upon the material forms towards their improvement or—when this energy is weak or distorted—their degeneration; the material forms acting as a stimulus towards the development of spiritual energy through association and environment that are favourable, or towards its weakening and distortion when these are deterrents because of their own degraded or degrading nature. ”

“ I would ask you to look upon this youth who sits beside me. He is so dear to me that I cannot very well make you know how dear he is. I have brought him hither from our dwelling-place for one certain reason; to wit, that you should make him knight. That is the great favor I would ask of you. To this intent I have brought armor and all the appurtenances of knighthood; for he is of such noble lineage that no armor in the world could be too good for him."
"Lady," quoth King Arthur, "I will do what you ask with much pleasure and gladness. ”

“ King, my name is Knight-Beast; many a beast have I slain, and men call me Tyolet. Well do I know how to catch venison, for, an it please thee, sire, I am son to the widow of the forest, and of a surety she hath sent me to thee to learn skill and wisdom and courtesy. I would learn of knighthood, of tourney, and jousting, how I may spend, and how I may give, for never aforetime came I in a king's court, and I think me well that never again shall I come where I may learn such fair nurture and courtesy. ”

“ Have you not dissipated a splendid patrimony in a series of the most liberal entertainments? Has not your generous board been graced with the presence of royalty? and the banquet enriched by the attendant stars of nobility, from the duke to the right honorable knight commander. And have you not since felt the most cruel neglect from these your early associates, and much obliged friends, with no crime but poverty, with no reproach but the want of prudence? Have you not experienced ingratitude and persecution in every shape that human baseness could find ingenuity to inflict? ”

“ Las Casas had learned by this time that the desire for wealth must be considered in any plan that he might make if he wanted it to succeed, and he believed he knew of a way by which he could satisfy the King and at the same time carry out his design of converting the Indians by kindness. He thought he could find fifty men who would make the conversion and civilization of the Indians their first object. These fifty were to wear white dresses, with red crosses, so that the Indians would know them from other Spaniards. They were to teach the natives and protect them from all who would harm them. ”

“ Riches do not consist only of money and lands, of stores of food or clothing, of machines and tools. The particular knowledge of any art—the general understanding of the laws of nature—the habit from experience of doing any work in the readiest way—the facility of communicating ideas by written language—the enjoyment of institutions conceived in the spirit of social improvement—the use of the general conveniences of civilized life, such as roads—these advantages, which the poorest man in England possesses or may possess, constitute individual property. ”

“ On the other hand, many a man, whose life, according to the mere capitalist doctrine, has not been "a failure," and who has taught his family to attach only a money-value to every object of creation, bequeaths to the world successors whose rapacity, ignorance, unskilfulness, and improvidence, will be so many charges upon the capital of the nation. The "muckhill" will by them be "cast abroad," but it will be devoted to the mere pursuit of sensual indulgence, losing half its fertilizing power, and too often burning up the soil that its judicious application would stimulate. ”

“ To secure independence, the practice of simple economy is all that is necessary. Economy requires neither superior courage nor eminent virtue; it is satisfied with ordinary energy, and the capacity of average minds. Economy, at bottom, is but the spirit of order applied in the administration of domestic affairs: it means management, regularity, prudence, and the avoidance of waste. The spirit of economy was expressed by our Divine Master in the words ‘Gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing may be lost.’ His omnipotence did not disdain the small things of life ”

“ Religion united its influence with those of loyalty and love, and the order of knighthood, endowed with all the sanctity and religious awe that attended the priesthood, became an object of ambition to the greatest sovereigns. ”

“ Surety of position works towards independence of thought and action and towards strong leadership. It establishes and maintains certain high ideals of honour, chivalry, and service as well as of courtesy and manners. If the things for which the gentlemen, the knighthood and the nobility of Europe during the Christian dispensation were responsible were stricken from the record there would be comparatively little left of the history of European culture and civilization. ”

“ In the shifting of activities, ideals and aims so brought in with the advent of wealth and ownership, the part of the priests and their divinities is not to be overlooked, for herein lies one of the greater cultural gains brought on by the technological advance at this juncture. The margin of service and produce available for consumption in the cult increases, and by easy consequence the spiritual prestige and the temporal power and prerogatives of the priesthood grow greater. ”

“ So evident is it that the means of spiritual life have been so confused with the purely material, that it occasions no surprise when a neighbourhood having changed from the residence district of the comparatively well-to-do to the very poor, the vestry feels bound to consider the moving of the church to a more 'desirable' quarter. ”

“ And this atmosphere is one in which faith cannot exist, it is stifled, crushed, killed, except it breathe the pure, sweet air of God, with which it can alone surround itself when human hearts will.
"It is not surprising that out of such conditions should grow false values, and that spirituality should be measured by the world's standard. Thus we have fallen into the vicious habit of adjudging qualifications for spiritual leadership among the clergy by the amount of their stipends, and measuring their potentialities for usefulness in the Kingdom of God by the amount of their yearly incomes ”

“ It commonly happens where predatory enterprise comes to be habitual and successful that the temporal power tends to centre in an autocratic and arbitrary ruler; and in this as in so much else, spiritual affairs are likely to take their complexion from the temporal, resulting in a strong drift toward an autocratic monotheism, which in the finished case comes to a climax in an omnipotent, omniscient deity of very exalted dignity and very exacting temper. ”

“ As Christians, we accept the authority of the Church, as the careful dispenser of the deposit of eternal truth inherited from Christ, to regulate and govern our religious life, and to interpret and supply its living needs and claims. We accept, further, the dogmas and rites by which all souls, in the communion of faith, hope, and charity, may participate in the life of the living Christ. ”

“ You have preferred the men of the syllogism to the men of profound and positive knowledge as though the salvation of the Church lay, not in the objective establishment of historical truth, as your predecessor desired it should, but in maintaining intact traditions which are devoid of meaning and foundation; you have regarded as a blasphemer the man who was able to demonstrate the insufficiency of the proofs of the miraculous translation of the Holy House of Loretto—as if the worship paid to the Blessed Virgin were founded upon its historical reality. ”

“ Without any respect for that share of freedom which God has granted to every conscience; without regard to the holiness of life with which these persons are clothed; forgetful, it would seem, that it is faith which inspires works with life and that Christian works are not wrought save as the product of faith, you use suspension a divinis as a means of violating the rights of conscience, more inexorable in this than our civil tribunals, which take away civil rights only in exceptional cases, and after giving an opportunity to the accused to prove his innocence. ”

“ We have a glimpse of the same truth in the teachings of Jesus when he says, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven"—which implies that whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations. He who is bent upon accumulating riches is unable, with his ego continually bulging, to pass through the gates of comprehension of the spiritual world, which is the world of perfect harmony ”

“ The true principle, both of political and domestic economy, is self-denial, renunciation. He who seeks the world and lives for it, shall lose it, since in so doing he violates the divine order, and takes as his end what at best is only a means. Other things being equal, then, we should expect a truly Catholic people to surpass in wealth and well-being, as in industry and virtue, a heathen, an infidel, or a Protestant people. Certainly, the inferiority of Catholic nations in material wealth and well-being is no argument against Catholicity ”

“ Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare [20] ”

“ In the spiritual life originate all those ideas and organising capacities that enrich the life of the State and of industrial economy. For everything thus supplied to both these fields of social life from the spiritual source, the recompense will either, as in the other cases, be raised through voluntary recognition on the part of those who directly draw from this source, or else it will be regulated by the “rights” that gradually become built up in the political sphere. ”

“ He needs a spiritual life from which power can come,—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. ”

“ If one is to work in the direction already urgently demanded by the evolutionary [117] forces of mankind, one must not suffer oneself to be deluded by the type of thought, which regards as an unpractical piece of idealism the demand, that the spiritual life should be set free, and given control of the employment of capital.
At the present moment, certainly, people seem but little disposed to connect the spiritual life in any way directly with that social idea, which is to put capital on sound lines. ”

“ The reason why people are so ill-disposed to-day to form an unbiassed opinion as to the position spiritual life occupies in the social order, is that they are accustomed to think of what is spiritual as being at the opposite end from all that is material and practical. Not a few will find something rather absurd in the view here put forward, that the employment of capital in economic [119] life must be regarded as the way in which one side of the spiritual life manifests itself. ”

“ These people will be obliged to recognise the practicability of much that has seemed to them absurd idealism. And although they may condemn this book at the outset, because its opening pages say less about the economic than about the spiritual life of modern mankind, yet the author’s [viii] own acquaintance with life forces him to the conviction, that, unless people can bring themselves to pay due and accurate attention to the spiritual life of modern mankind, they will only go on adding fresh mistakes to the old ones. ”

“ Political Economy, as I have said on another occasion, concerns itself only with "such of the phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth. [Pg 494] It makes entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive ”

“ Shall we forget, or put at all into the background, the fact that men have a spiritual nature, and that in this lies their highest and fullest measure of being? This, to some, may savor of cant and of the seminaries. Let it, however, be settled, apart from sects or creeds, whether there are such excellences as sincerity, purity, truthfulness, self-forgetfulness in the desire to be and to do good. ”