The Knight, the Monk, the Lady, the Nun

The conclusion of “The New Middle Ages”

Feb 20, 2025

Herbert James Draper, “Lancelot and Guinevere”

Enrollment is still open for my course on William Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, set to begin in March. You can read all about it here.

Among the great symbols or archetypes of the Middle Ages, none, it may be argued, have persisted with such resilience as those of the knight and the monk, while their gendered countertypes, the lady and the nun, have almost entirely been erased by the derision heaped upon them by feminist ideology. But “symbol” and “archetype” as terms (do they belong to first, second, or zero imposition?) are not quite equal to the task of living into them, so, as an alternative, I suggest imagination as a better way to enter the spiritual environment of the images.

Berdyaev, to his core a personalist, points to the significance of the imaginations of the knight and the monk in the forming of masculine identity not only during the Middle Ages but through the Renaissance to modernity. “The human personality,” he writes,

“was, indeed, forged and fortified in the Middle Ages—that period which the humanists had long considered to be unfavorable to its development. Monasticism and chivalry were the two forces which contributed most to strengthen and discipline man’s spiritual life in the Middle Ages. The models of the monk and the knight were precisely those of a disciplined personality, which was thus protected by both a spiritual and physical armor against the elemental and disrupting forces of the external world. . . . The model of the monk and knight had preceded the Renaissance and, without them, the human personality would never have been able to exalt itself to its destined heights.”[1]

It surely does not need to be said that actual knights and monks rarely lived up to the ideal proposed by their spiritual imaginations—which is why the anti-types of the robber knight and the corrupted monk populate chivalric romance and the cultural imaginary alongside their more noble counterparts. Nevertheless, it is the positive imagination which first arises in our imaginations at the appearance of the words “knight” and “monk.”

Berdyaev’s point about discipline is an important one, and bears more than a little relevance to our own cultural moment. I would suggest that the current trend, especially in Eastern Orthodox and traditionalist Catholicism, for young men to adopt quasi-monastic practices, renouncing “the world” (whatever they might mean by that term), is indicative of an innate desire for discipline men possess by virtue of their Y chromosome that, quite simply, cannot find a readily available outlet for expression in the modern, self-indulgent, materialist cultural landscape. On the other hand, the hyper-focused dedication to martial arts and weight training in another segment of the male population suggests a parallel search for discipline in a barren and schizophrenic culture that often treats masculinity as “toxic.” The danger, of course, is that both easily become stereotypes, the anti-imagination, as they all too easily become means of escape for weak or damaged personalities seeking refuge from a world hostile to masculinity and given to gender inversion.

One cannot discount the fact that many of these men, especially young men, become attracted to these extremes of discipline due to absent or weak male presences in their own lives. The fact that many converts to Orthodoxy immediately seek a “spiritual father” speaks volumes about the diminishment of the masculine archetype in their own souls and imaginations.

The modern knight and monk, despite their common ground in a life anchored in discipline, by reacting negatively to “the world” in which they can find no home, in their defiant withdrawal easily fall under the spell of the stereotype. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to buy a ready-made costume than to create one’s own individuality. So, at least in the modern cultural scenario, they run the risk of extremism and inauthenticity. And the key to discerning whether or not what we see in these individuals is inauthentic is to observe how long their enthusiasm lasts before they turn to another experiment in identity as they disguise their inner existential panic with a lifestyle that is essentially a hobby. Before they move to a new hobby.

But in the medieval period, the ideal of the knight (and it was an ideal more than a reality) was of a man who was versatile and accomplished in more than one domain of life, an intuition that persisted into the early modern notion of the Renaissance man. Likewise, Shakespeare’s Pericles, for example, is described as “music’s master” as a fitting accompaniment to his prowess as a knight. Likewise, in The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, Tristan is not only a fearsome warrior, but is also an accomplished poet and musician. He further adds to the art of hunting the civilizing influences of ritual and honor, instructing his fellow knights in the school of reverence to the game and to the sustenance it provides..

Music and poetry, added to the more noted qualities of self-sacrifice and strength in arms, ameliorate the being of the knight, making him more fully human and less inclined to collapse into caricature. This was also the case in the ethos of the troubadours where the devotion to the lady elevated not only the lady herself to level of ideal, but simultaneously lifted up the lover into something greater than himself through his dedication to something not only beautiful and pure, but to something bordering on the holy as well. This is nowhere more evident than in The Divine Comedy, in which the Dante is led by Beatrice and Santa Lucia to the ultimate goal of the beatific vision, which opens with the theophany of the Virgin Mary. The vision of the Virgin—and not the abstraction of the three rings depicting the Trinity that follows—is, I would argue, the overriding telos in the poem. For, as Goethe said, “The Eternal Feminine draws us ever onward.”

What Goethe and Dante before him attest to is not some overly idealistic view of the feminine, but a psychological reality, certainly for men. There is something deep within in the male psyche that hankers for this truth, though it rarely finds a fitting outlet for its expression. The realization of this form of chivalry has been reimagined as a “sophianic knighthood,” but I have yet to see it take on the flesh in any significant way. However, my friend the great scholar Arthur Versluis, inspired by Jacob Boehme, has some interesting things to say about such a chivalry:

“In a sense, theosophic chivalry is both purer and more open than traditional chivalry. Only a relatively few could be aristocracy or knights in the traditional Christian world. But Böhmean theosophy is open to everyone, and represents the best elements of democracy and hierarchy: its hierarchy is purely mystical, and without any accidents inherent in any institutional framework. No one is born a knight of the holy Sophia by happenstance—everyone must seek to be worthy of Sophia, must purify their souls and become a knight of Sophia not in name or repute, but in reality. . . From all this we can see how theosophic chivalry belongs to the modern era.”[2]

I especially like the notion that one “must seek to be worthy of Sophia,” which is the key to all chivalry and precisely what is lacking in our own world, given as it is to immediate gratification and the ontological sloth fostered by AI and pledges of “equal outcomes.” A feeling of entitlement does not comport well with a sophianic knighthood and the work required for making oneself worthy of the kiss of Sophia.

The compromised masculine, however, is no isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, it indicates a corollary psychic disruption in the feminine as well.

Unlike the appropriation of the monk and knight archetypes in certain quarters of contemporary culture by men, there does not seem to be an accompanying emulation of the nun or the lady by women. Instead, we have the Trad Wife and the OnlyFans whore, two very opposite (and apposite) reactions to decades of a feminism that measured women, for the most part, by metrics usually employed to evaluate men: power, wealth, and prestige—the Trad Wife rejecting the girl-boss “We can do it!” ethos and the OnlyFans whore following it to its logical conclusion (“We can do it!” taking on a comedic ironic connotation in that context). Indeed, it could be argued that women have borne the brunt of psychic and cultural disruption, first in feminism’s denigration of motherhood and homemaking as jobs for slaves and then by selling sexual liberation as a tool of empowerment. This is a feminism that could only have arisen in a Capitalist society. Who’s the real slave in this scenario?

Even though Simone de Beauvoir would vehemently disagree, we could use a little more of the nun and lady symbols in our current social imaginary. For these images point to a poetic metaphysics of mystical marriage: of man and wife, of spirit and matter, of heaven and earth. The troubadours of the High Middle Ages clearly understood the import of such a language of images, a wisdom we seem to have lost along the way. As Ezra Pound asks, “Did this ‘chivalric love,’ this exotic, take on mediumistic properties? Stimulated by the color or quality of emotion, did that ‘color’ take on forms interpretive of the divine order? Did it lead to an ‘exteriorization of the sensibility,’ and interpretation of the cosmos by feeling?”[3]

To interpret the cosmos by feeling is to part the veil between worlds and enter into the realm of a poetic metaphysics. In the examples I’ve given above of the knight/monk and lady/nun, one could argue that men of our moment have overemphasized the symbols of the knight and monk, while women have completely (or almost completely) lost the lady and the nun. The imaginations of the knight and the monk die by becoming concretized, having lost their porosity; while those of the lady and nun die through ontological and imaginative atrophy.

It may be argued that men, by abdicating their masculinity, have surrendered it to women; while women, having been masculinized by male abdication, have ceased to be women and have become, not men, but standing reserve, just another product to be optimized by mass consumption. This does not, obviously, apply to all men and all women across the vast landscape of, mostly, Western culture; but, as social trends, these trajectories are undeniable. In fact, Berdyaev saw it all beginning nearly a hundred years ago:

“The extended activity of women in the future does not at all mean a development of that ‘women’s emancipation’ with which we are familiar, the end and method of which is to reduce woman to the likeness of man by leading her along a masculine road. That is an antihierarchical and egalitarian movement which nullifies the original quality of the female nature. The masculine principle must dominate the feminine and not be her slave, as is so often seen nowadays, in France, for example. It is the eternal feminine that has so great a future in coming history, not the emancipated woman or the epicene creature.

“Naturally she will be closely associated with that crisis of domestic life and the family which is one of the deep causes of world-disturbance today.”[4]

What Berdyaev couldn’t have predicted was that not only would woman be led “along a masculine road,” but that the inverse would also happen: men would move along a feminine road, even to the point of posing as women, and would invade spaces both cultural and material belonging to the spirit of woman and attempt to usurp her dignity in terms of beauty, femininity, and even motherhood. Nor could he have foreseen the legions of women applauding this usurpation.

These disturbing movements have absolutely nothing to do with the integration of the anima or anima proposed by C. G. Jung as indicative of psychic wholeness. In fact, they are without question due to mass psychosis induced by propaganda and social engineering. Tertium non datur. My claim is that what we see in the so-called “trans movement” is an aberration of the symbol of the hermaphrodite, its roots in Greek myth but its cultural and psychological significance integral to the imaginative language of alchemy that so inspired Jung. Quite simply, like the symbols of the knight and monk in our current social environment, the hermaphrodite as symbol has been concretized and perverted, which is why it is no longer an image of integrating the soul but of invasive medical procedures and lifetime subscriptions to hormone treatments, the soul left to flounder in a hell of pain and despair.

By this point, it should be obvious that the symbolic languages of the Middle Ages still participate in our cultural imaginary, degraded or compromised though they be. But one image that has resisted such degradation is that of the Holy Grail. Here, again, it took a Russian priest and theologian to offer to the West the richness of its own symbolic language.

In his essay “The Holy Grail” (1930), Sergei Bulgakov takes the Grail as not only the vessel which Joseph of Arimathea used to catch and store the Sacred Blood of Christ as he hung on the Cross; rather, because the Holy Blood also touched the earth, the earth, too, is the Holy Grail: “The whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is inaccessible to veneration; in its holiness it is hidden in the world from the world. However, it exists in the world as an invisible power, and it becomes visible, appears to pure hearts who are worthy of its appearance.”[5] Cailtin Matthews, a loving reader of Bulgakov, emphasizes the element of anamnesis in both the Eucharist and in Bulgakov’s meditation on it;[6] and it is important to note that Bulgakov’s anamnesis also partakes in retrieving the central theme of the Christian West’s history and meaning—not only in the reality of the Eucharist, but in recalling the iconography and myth of the Middle Ages to the present. As Christopher Bamford has written, “The Grail is the supreme expression of the gift the West has to give to our evolving universe,”[7] a truth clearly evident to Bulgakov. It is precisely with the Grail that we enter a poetic metaphysics.

In the Grail literature, particularly in the Parzival cycles of Wolfram and Chrétien, women take on extraordinarily important roles in the development of the hero from country bumpkin to Grail knight. Wolfram and Chrétien, then, were describing the period of night, of intuition, mysticism, dream, imagination, and the feminine in the life of the world, which the Russian sophiologists anticipated returning in the first decades of the twentieth century. The hyper-intellectualization and mechanization, the hyper-rational and callously calculative culture created by the Enlightenment also created two world wars and nuclear warfare. But surely a new revelation is at hand. As Berdyaev writes,

“It seems to me that women will be very much to the fore in the new middle ages; an exclusively masculine culture was undermined by the war, and in these later most troubling years the influence of women has been considerable and their achievements recognized as great. Woman is bound more closely than man to the soul of the world and its primary elemental forces, and it is through her that he reaches communion with them. Masculine culture is too rationalizing, out of touch with the mysteries of universal life: this is corrected through woman. . . . Day is the time of the exclusive predominance of masculine culture; at night the feminine element receives her rights.”[8]

Like the Parzival stream, the feminine also haunts Arthurian literature, though in a sometimes darker or more ambivalent manner. Guinevere, Morgan le Fey, Ygraine, and Morgause are complicated characters, and the subtexts of adultery, incest, and impotence that permeate the Arthur cycle points to a social order in decline. Likewise, the theme of the Wasteland and the infertility it represents also colors the saga in shades of despair and ruin. The same could be said of the times in which Berdyaev and Florensky prophesied a New Middle Ages. And the same could be said of today. This is an issue of eschatology. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

This kind of “little eschaton” appears throughout history, a type of Eternal Return. Florensky diagnoses its qualities:

This eschatological formula. . . expresses the fact that man has fallen away from Mother Earth and that humanity has grown corrupt. Hunger is a passive quarrel (with the earth) and, further, with the four elements; pestilence refers to infectious diseases in the air; then we have deluge, fire, and finally culture-historical calamities and the degeneration of society; and then there are the purely mystical calamities. . . . Our epoch is attempting to gain final control over nature, raping and ravaging it, instead of listening to it; it is attempting to rationalize and enslave nature according to a predetermined plan. This is a sign of the end.[9]

In the aftermath of Covid, and the accompanying natural disasters (which were not at all natural), coupled with the undeniable degeneration of culture and the obvious attempts of our world’s Archons, like BlackRock, to rationalize and enslave nature to a predetermined plan, I am forced to conclude that Florensky is right to say “This is a sign of the end.”

The only way to enslave nature, however, is to enslave human nature, a project more and more actualized by the mechanization of life over the past two centuries and recently accelerated via technocracy. An enslaved human nature is, by definition, a human nature alienated from the natural world (in this regard, what is the “trans movement” but a largescale enslavement made possible by the false promise of “freedom”?). The antidote to such a predicament is obvious, as Berdyaev explains: “My salvation is bound up with that not only of other men but also of animals, plants, minerals, of every blade of grass—all must be transfigured and brought together into the Kingdom of God. And this depends on my creative efforts.”[10]

This is certainly an element of the Arthurian and Grail cycles and their respective eschatologies: the Arthurian, more (but not entirely) pessimistic, though seemingly incapacitated by the repercussions of the Fall, while the Grail looks to the possibility of redemption in the world as it is. The Arthurian conclusion proves more historically and psychologically accurate, while the Grail is more metaphysically true. But we need both of them, stereo organs of perception, to hold a clear vision of the world.

The antinomy apparent in the tension between the Arthurian and Grail perspectives is essential for a true religious intuition, for religion, especially Christianity, is a game of antinomies. This is why the what John Keats called “negative capability,” the ability to live “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason,” is so useful for those trying to “make sense” of spiritual truths.[11]

One of the antinomies of the Arthurian cycle is that, after the Battle of Camlann, Arthur is taken to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his grievous wounds by three queens—one his sister Morgause, by whom he got Mordred. The implied apocatastasis suggests that, as Julian of Norwich, certainly an emblematic figure of the Middle Ages, writes, “al thing that is done, it is wel.”[12] Apocatastasis, indeed, is nothing if not an antinomy, a reach into a poetic metaphysics.

When Florensky predicted the coming of the New Middle Ages as a time “dominated by the mystical element, noumenal will, susceptibility, femininity,” he was naming the sophianic as a central feature of what was/is to come. His compatriots Solovyov, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev (among many others, including Valentin Tomberg) were in full agreement. At best, I think, it could be argued that they were so far only partially correct. Sophiology, while far from mainstream in any Christian theological, philosophical, or cultural circles, without question claims more than a footnote in the religious imaginary of the age; but, in the broader picture, Sophia has yet to arrive. Instead, we have been inundated with the images and propaganda of the Anti-Sophia.

The earlier Middle Ages, far from being “dark,” was a period of light, the mystical and intuitive, the feminine, and a poetic metaphysics. Gothic architecture, the folk spirituality of the rosary and St. Francis of Assisi, the visionary medicine and music of Hildegard of Bingen, the flowering of mysticism, the troubadours, the Beguines. . . all attested to a sophianic impulse that has been generally ignored by historians and theologians. Sophia was always present in the Middle Ages—but never fully identified. She was revealed, therefore hidden. The New Middle Ages will be different in that she will be fully revealed and recognized.

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