Chivalry [Garden Memory Aug. 18, 2023]

“Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.”

Jan 26, 2024

Last time, I posted a New Year’s post from the end of 2022. I meant to give readers a sense of where my head was about a year ago, which could be contrasted to my New Year’s post for this past year, 2023. This letter too should give readers an idea.

Originally posted in Aug. 18, 2023, “Chivalry” shows this Hortus at or near its most refined and elaborated. We have non-partisan social commentary, some wonderful art with its artist’s short biography, and we have the Figures, which should always be and sometimes even are the heart of these letters. There’s also music and poetry and even some history here. This letter is a little longer than normal (you will have to open it in browser to see the whole of it), and it is about twice-again longer than what I intend for 2024. But, all & all, this letter gives a good idea of what you’re getting into here at Hortus Scriptorius.

I hope you enjoy.

         Maybe it’s just my side of the internet, but sex-war Discourse has heated up again. Largely now it’s been ‘a man’s role is this’ or ‘real masculinity is that’. I think all of it kicked off again when a certain accused felon about to stand trial in Romania did the rounds on right-wing media. The less I say about him the less I’ll curse and swear, but it raises many interesting questions which a father must answer – even when he is not, as I am not, a father of sons.
         My daughters will learn what a man is from culture, yes, and from men in our family, sure, and certainly from the talk of women (in and out of our family), but most of all they will learn what a man is from me. If they love my example, they will look for it in other men. If they hate my example, they will flee from it to other men. And so I must be careful to show them a masculinity that will bless them if they seek and nurture it in their friends and husbands and (God willing) sons.
         Which means I must know what men should be.

And I’m sorry to say, but I often don’t.

The Courtyard

         Our current world doesn’t really seem to know what to do with men. I’m reading Ovid, and if his men (or gods) were the complete measure of men, men wouldn’t measure up. They’re scheming, lecherous, cowardly, and boastful – which of course men can be. But in Ovid there’s little virtue to compensate.
         There’s that old saw of History, you’ve likely heard: ‘Tough times make hard men, hard men make good times; good times make soft men; soft men make tough time.’ Depending on how you define ‘hard’, this is either a syllogism or utter nonsense. Examples do spring easily to mind, like the small and hyper-ambitious Latin republic which grew up to gobble the world, or the hard-scrabble pioneers who turned a (not quite) empty plain into a thriving civilization within two generations before handing that civilization over to their sons who turned it into a world Colossus. But counterexamples also lie about like toys in a playroom.
         There was nothing quite as ‘hard’ as the Second World War, and yet it broke the (until that point) unparalleled British Empire. The next generation of Brits made what had once been the Bank of Nations into the Poor Man of Europe. Even this analysis is imperfect, for one could argue the Great War did the damage and only unbelievable ‘hardness’ let the British even endure the Second World War. Likewise, life has been (more or less) equally ‘hard’ for Africans and Asians in the 20^thCentury. And yet it is in Asia where we see economic miracle after economic miracle.
         Or look to Botswana and Zambia. I know of nothing which makes one place ‘harder’ than another. They’re next to each other, and both have suffered war, dictatorship, and famine in recent history. In fact, in the 1960s, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita income of a mind-boggling $60 (that’s $0.16 a day). Yet Botswana is closing in on the relative wealth of Russia. Zambia… isn’t. It’s not ‘hardness’ which made it so.
         Men in the 19^th Century thought it useful to have a good war every now and again – it got the blood pumping. But it’s the rare man who knows much about the trench fighting of the First World War (or its modern-day equivalent in Ukraine) and wishes himself there. It’s not that modern men are soft (though there may be something to that) but that modern men do not want to be hard in this way.
         I wouldn’t want to ride on horseback until my clothes rotted off me, eating blood stew and drinking mares’ milk. But I would far less care to sack a city, putting its inhabitants to the sword in the world’s worst bloodletting before the Holocaust. I wouldn’t want to eat on feasting-tables above the groans and cries of my enemies as they slowly suffocated, crushed below the floor I sat upon. (For a detailed history of the Mongols, may I suggest Dan Carlin's multi-part series.)
         All this reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s definition of Chivalry, from his invaluable essay “The Necessity of Chivalry” (which I recommended under a false title in “On Living Biblically”):

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          "But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals—if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il faut which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture—we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory’s Morte Darthur.          
          "'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'"

         This is the Christmas Truce. This is the famous chivalry of British (and, to a lesser extent, American) GIs during the Second World War. This is Grant allowing the Confederates (traitors though they were) to keep their mounts and sidearms. It’s the English taking the French knights captive at Agincourt. (At least, those French knights who hadn’t drowned in the mud.) And it’s Robin Hood feasting his enemies before he robs them – and harming not one of them but in self-defense.
         If these then are the hard men of the historical proverb, what about the savages? What about the Vikings or the Mongols, those for whom might made right and the powerless wept. And is it fair to call them ‘savages’? Or would that exile Homeric –even Golden Age – Greece unaccountably from civilization? The question of truly savage men explodes the ‘hard men’ proverb, I think, and returns us (whether we’ve read the Nicomachean Ethics or not) to Aristotle – to Aristotle and to Lewis.
         Too far one way, and you get Roman Orgies and the (often probably unfairly exaggerated) decadence of the East which was the horror of the ancient world, the ‘soft men’ who make ‘tough times’. Too far in the other direction and you get not the ‘hard men’ who make ‘good times’ but the barbarians who burn Rome. That is, on one extreme you have those who let civilization burn and on the other those who burn civilization.
         Tough times do not create the hard men who create good times. Hard men domesticated by culture create good times. Hannah Arendt said, “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.” Our need then is not to be ‘hard’ nor is it to be ‘soft’, but to be cultured and to acculturate.

Flowerbeds

         John Lu Hung-nien was born in 1919 in Taicang, a small town along the Yangtze, which was in his day near (and now literally abuts) Shanghai. He studied with a famous landscape painter (Li Zhichao) in middle school and went on to Fu Jen Catholic University’s Fine Arts Department in 1932. (Fu Jen in Peking (now Beijing) was dissolved by the Chinese Communist Party in 1952 but re-established in Taipei by the Republic of China and the Vatican in 1961.)
         John Lu Hung-nien graduated in 1936 and stayed on at the Peking university as an assistant teacher through both The War and the Civil War. Selected to be a member of the China Artist Association, he completed archival copying at both the Yongle Palace and the North Qi Gaorun Tomb, one before the Cultural Revolution and the other during that sanguinary period. How he weathered both wars, and how he (a deeply Catholic artist) survived the Cultural Revolution and the CCP’s other purges, I cannot tell.
         But survive them he did. He survived to have a long career. Perhaps he stopped painting his religious art once the Communist took over. What else happened in his life, I do not know. Whatever sources exist about him exist in Chinese or English only beyond my reach. So anything else I say would be mere speculation, except this: he died peacefully in 1989. And this: please enjoy his art, as I have.

The Annunciation, John Lu Hung-nien, circa 1950

Jesus Calming the Storm, John Lu Hung-nien, circa 1950

Jesus with the woman at the well, John Lu Hung-nien, circa 1950

Mosaic Copy of "Our Lady of China", John Lu Hung-nien, 2012, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Dayton, Ohio

Hortus Proprius

         Paronomasia, (pa-ro-no-MAISE-ee-uh), also called agnominatio, the nicknamer, and the pun.
         The next time you hear a howler of a Dad Joke, you can shrug and say “it’s all Greek to me”. For the good ol' pun has its own fancy Greek name: paronomasia. It may seem silly to give examples of such a standby, but “[a] pun is its own re-word” (Silva Rhetoricae).
         Puttenham tells us that they used to call the Emperor Claudius Tiberius Nero, on account of how much he drank, Caldius Biberius Mero (which is altered Latin roughly meaning ‘intemperate drinker of wine’). And a friar irate with Erasmus called him Errans mus (that is to say, ‘erring mouse’). The paronomasia works in wit. By taking two words which sound similar and using them in two different forms, we get a winning strategy (that is, one which wins and one which persuades), as when, according to Puttenham, a man says to his wife against an accusation of adultery:

         “Proue me madame ere ye fall to reproue,
         Meeke mindes should rather excuse than accuse.”

         (That this could be in any way persuasive leaves me unpersuaded, but there you have it.)

         “Were it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.64)

         “I should leave grazing, were I of your flock And only live by gazing.” (Winter’s Tale, 4.4.109)

         “Messenger: [of Benedick] And a good soldier, too, lady.
         Beatrice: And a good solider to a lady; but what is he to a lord?”
         (Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.53)

         Cicero distinguishes between three types of paronomasia. His third example relies on case-endings which do not truly exist in English, and so we can pass over it without further comment. The second is when the same words, parts of words, or homophones (that is, those words which sound the same) are used in different ways. That’s “here apparent” and “heir apparent” (though less now to our ears, as the years have changed the vowels). It’s also “a good soldier, too, lady” and “a good soldier to a lady”, as well as “prove me madame ere you fall to reprove”.
         Then there are those which simply sound similar but not the same, as “grazing” and “gazing”. That’s how “a pun is its own re-word” works, and again why we change Claudius Tiberius Nero into “Caldius Biberius Mero”.
         Cicero cautions the orator to avoid an over-reliance on paronomasia because its “invention seems impossible without labour and pains.” It can “brighten our style agreeably with striking ornaments” if used sparingly but “lessen[s]” our “seriousness” if used too often. For while the Figure, he says, has “grace and elegance”, it has no “impressiveness [or] beauty”. Indeed the Figure “seem[s] more suitable for a speech of entertainment”.
         And that is indeed exactly where you find it. From the cutting nicknames our nicknamer handed out to Nero and Erasmus, to the husband’s evasions, or Falstaff’s and Beatrice’s wit, the paronomasia is a Figure of comedy.
         That is, except when it isn’t. Shakespeare (of course) transcends this limit. Peacham shows how Shakespeare used paronomasia to deepen exchanges with irony and pathos, as when Lear says to blinded Gloucester, “You see how this world goes” and Gloucester answers, “I see it feelingly”. Or when, dying, Mercutio says, “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”
         In sum, paronomasia is an everyday pun dressed for dinner. As with most puns, he’s the butt of as many jokes as he fronts and is used primarily for comedic effect. But the sensitive practitioner can employ a well-timed paronomasia to underline the agony of a moment.
         Thank you

A Bench Under the Trees

“The Catholic Roots of Liberal Modernity” by Thomas D. Howes
         Dr. Howes starts his piece with, “Young people tend toward radicalism. For young serious Catholics, that radicalism is not usually Marxism but instead an excessive form of anti-modernism. You might have heard the narrative: there was the golden age of Christendom and its Catholic kings obedient to the authority of popes. Then came the decadent hyper-individualism of modernity, the first seeds of which were planted by Ockham, Luther, or Hobbes—depending on who you ask.”
         Dr. Howes dissents from this view. He argues that liberalism was heavily influenced by the work of 16^th and 17^th Century Catholic scholastics writing on human rights. Their philosophy found ill fit in the governments of Catholic Europe but, adopted and adapted, found natural expression in post-Glorious Revolution Britain and thence in these United States. He ends his piece by saying, “[T]his, I am convinced, is a story young Catholics need to hear.” I agree, for young Catholics and for everyone interested in American government.

“Furniture of the Mind” by Shawn Phillip Cooper
         To judge by contemporary culture, we expect the furniture of the American mind to come from Ikea – or worse. Professor Cooper (whose podcast I recommended in “Speak Loudly and Carry Nothing in Your Hands”) lights us down another path. He writes, “It seems that committing words to memory, voluntarily or not, can form us in ways that we can scarcely imagine. We all generally accept this with regard to prayer as it relates to our spiritual formation: if we, like “the pious monks of St. Bernard” in Longfellow’s “Excelsior”, utter “the oft-repeated prayer,” then we will find ourselves changed as a result: not just more faithful and more able to form new connections between what we have read and what we are… but also changed in the very essence of who we are. Thus memorization has both a useful function and a formative function.”
         I’ve written on this theme before (in my essay called “Time”). That old saying tells us, ‘You are what you eat’’, and it’s just as true for what language you digest. The very idiocy of politics oft-times feels the direct consequence of poor diet. Not that we should or ought be too didactic here; the Athenians who created the High Culture we barely read held slaves, and they held slaves with far more open, rampant, and untroubled abuse than any Christian slaveholder, even in our own Antebellum South. Hitler famously loved art; he had good taste too. It helped little his moral sense.
         Art will not guarantee virtue, but it can inform it. More than inform, art and its digestion tie us in a web of mutual influence. Dorothy Sayers says, "Poets do not merely pass on the torch in a relay race; they toss the ball to one another, to and fro, across the centuries. Dante would have been different if Virgil had never been, but if Dante had never been we should know Virgil differently; across both their heads Ezekiel calls to Blake, and Milton to Homer."
         So, if you haven’t already, come join the conversation. Dr. Cooper may not be Virgil, but he’s a damn good guide nonetheless.

The Amphitheater

         I like music covers — the different versions, instruments, voices, the interpretations. My wife… does not. When I catch a song, when I get its bug in my ear, I will go to Spotify or YouTube and open up and listen to a dozen versions of that song in a row. This causes my wife some distress, for which I am only mildly apologetic.
Our elder daughter has adopted her mother’s impatience with foreign versions of beloved songs, which I believe and hope is just the natural antipathy children show to change. My response has been to play even more and various versions of those songs, because I am a kind and loving father. She endures it only slightly better than her mother.
         Our song today is “The Star of the County Down”. As with most Trad (that is, Traditional) songs, "The Star of the County Down" is actually quite recent. First collected in 1909, Cathal MacGarvey (1866–1927) wrote the lyrics to the ballad which was set by (and this is also traditional) no one knows who to the Trad tune “Dives and Lazarus” (known as “Kingsfold” to hymn-singers). Unlike songs, tunes are often too ancient to trace.
         I regularly sing this song to our girls, and here I share Colm R. McGuinness’s version of a song. Sort of. What I’m sharing is my version of the lyrics and (mercifully) his cover of the song. Though I am far fonder of my lyrics (a study in the narcissism of small differences), his singing is more than a little superior.

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Near Banbridge town in the County Down
One evening last July
Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen
And she smiled as she passed me by
She looked so sweet with her two bare feet
And the sheen of her nut-brown hair
Such a coaxing girl, sure I shook myself
To make sure I was standing there 

[Chorus]
From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay
From Galway to Dublin Town
No maid I've seen like the brown colleen
That I met in the County Down 

As she onward sped, sure I shook my head
And I turned with a feelin' quare 
And I says, says I, to a passers-by
"Whose the maid with the nut-brown hair?"
He smiled at me and he says, says he
"That's the gem of Ireland's crown;
Young Rosie McCann from the banks of the Bann
She's the star of the County Down" 

[Chorus] 

At the harvest fair she'll be surely there
So I'll dress in my Sunday-clothes,
With my shoes shone bright and my hat cocked right
For a smile from my nut-brown rose.
No pipe I'll smoke, no horse I'll yoke
Till my plough turns a rust-colored brown,
And a smiling bride, by my own fireside
Sits the star of the County Down. 

[Chorus x2]

And here are The Irish Rovers singing the same song, also much better than mine (you will, I am sure, be shocked to hear).

The first modern version of this song I could trace, the one that sent it mainstream, is from Van Morrison and The Chieftains. I actually don’t like this version very much, but I record it here for posterity and because you may indeed care for it a great deal.

Reviso Amphitheater et Peroratio

Originally, I'd planned to write The Amphitheater about, as a friend on Twitter calls him, That Ginger Musician. I generally like his songs, think they’re good if neither groundbreaking nor revolution-inspiring. Maybe others will feel differently, and bully if they do. Mostly I’ve been amazed watching people who insist they Do Not Care getting so worked up about him. The fear of being taken in (of being not coerced, not really even pressured, merely enticed into an opinion) is prevalent – and probably paranoic.
But if you are interested in modern takes on old-time country, something between bluegrass and the modern pop-country you hear on the radio (does anyone listen to the radio anymore?), then may I suggest Tyler Childers and his song “Way of the Triune God”? It’s exceptional.

Do you have a favorite version of “Star of the County Down”? If you’d like to tell me (that or anything else), please click

Hortus Scriptorius