Lancelot and His Ilk

Christians always seem shocked when I bad-mouth King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. How can any moral person be opposed to chivalry and courtly love? What’s wrong with me, anyway?

What’s wrong, I suppose, is that I take scripture seriously. Christ says that anyone who even looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her (Matthew 5:27-28). The chivalric code and its accompanying ideas about courtly love flagrantly ignore this. Consider the “logic” behind courtly love, as articulated by C.S. Lewis in his excellent The Allegory of Love:

“The love which is to be the source of all that is beautiful in life and manners must be the reward freely given by the lady, and only our superiors can reward. But a wife is not a superior [to the medieval mind]. As the wife of another, above all as the wife of a great lord, she may be a queen of beauty and of love, the distributor of favours, the inspiration of all knightly virtues, and the bridle of ‘villany’; but as your own wife, for whom you have bargained with her father, she sinks at once from lady into mere woman. How can a woman, whose duty is to obey you, be the midons whose grace is the goal of all striving and whose displeasure is the restraining influence upon all uncourtly vices?”

Once we hear it in those terms, we can understand why anyone with any sympathy towards feminism is suspicious of chivalry. But Christians should also recognize how tainted courtly love is at its very root. Who can you love passionately? Not your wife. To be more exact, the only person you can love passionately is another woman who is from a higher class than your wife.

Ugly. Courtly love may couch itself in gorgeous language, and may argue its case in heroic deeds—but the premise for all of it is ugly. Instead of turning heroic impulses in the male toward serving and fulfilling the woman that God has provided as his wife, it turns all of those impulses away from the very woman he is called to love “just as Christ loved the Church” (Ephesians 5:25). It sanctions the very mindset that Christ condemns in the Sermon on the Mount.

And that is why, be he ever so courageous, Lancelot is a bum. Courtly love isn’t romantic, because it saps the romance from its rightful home: married life. To which King Arthur would probably add, “Amen.”