After ReadingThe dilution of any spirit requires time and language to work their alchemy. Even masterpieces must bear the burden of misinterpretation—how much more so those concepts we don’t particularly cherish. Literary history abounds with such examples.
Consider the old man sketched by Cervantes’ clever pen: perhaps more moving than any actual knight. A single scene can embody an entire ethos; caricature lodges deeper in the mind than epic verse. The image of Don Quixote tilting at windmills with his lance outweighs ten thousand tales of knights kneeling among roses, presenting monster heads to ladies on balconies. Chivalry became Sancho whistling as he led Rocinante by the reins. Cervantes’ prolonged jest transformed chivalry into a subject of ridicule. When Don Quixote turns from the page to solemnly articulate the principles he upholds, chivalry itself begins to fall apart like a butcher’s carcass, piece by piece crumbling to dust.
Years later, chivalry became gentle mockery. Though Dumas at age eight dared to grab a musket and challenge God to a duel, when describing d’Artagnan’s arrival in Paris he could only lightly jest about his sword and horse, Porthos’s cloak, Aramis’s handkerchief. You see how a concept gets diluted, gradually morphing into something unrecognizable.
In our era, with the internet’s ubiquity, public participation in social discourse has reached unprecedented breadth and depth. This ensures that countless terms will be destroyed by popular opinion.
Joyce quietly cast Bloom as Odysseus, transforming his promiscuous wife into Penelope… We all have the urge to deface: in middle school we’d sketch panda faces or Donald Duck over solemn portraits in textbooks. It’s hard to suppress such mischief, especially in an age that champions freedom. Mock everything weighty with playful irreverence, then casually walk away… Everyone becomes Cervantes—a few keystrokes (on phone, computer, or otherwise) to send some clever deconstruction, and we obtain our pleasure.
Yet that chivalric spirit Don Quixote articulated in earnest tones—thereby rendering it more absurd—was never quite as insufferably rigid as we imagine. History tells us chivalry originated with Charlemagne—that “Great Emperor of the Romans” who fought over fifty battles and brought most of Western Europe under his dominion—and his twelve paladins immortalized in The Song of Roland. Chivalry encompassed eight virtues: humility, honor, sacrifice, valor, compassion, spirituality, honesty, and justice.
Because fine horses were rare, knights long remained a privileged class. During Alexander’s eastern campaigns, he enjoyed the cavalry legacy his father Philip had left him—warriors Philip dubbed “Companions of the King.” Under Charlemagne, knights remained warrior nobility. Thus one might say the eight virtues were tailored for aristocrats—though these virtues hardly prevented knights from committing wrongs or indulging in pleasures…
Still, revisiting these eight virtues may surprise you. Knights were neither monks nor common folk who could be compelled by laws and punishments to uphold certain principles. Imposing strict regulations on knights’ private virtue proved difficult; whether chivalry was practiced often depended solely on the knight’s own sense of honor. This reliance was idealistic yet impossibly elusive, like the eight virtues themselves:
To expect a nobleman to be humble, to value honor despite abundant material temptations, to sacrifice for the greater good, to never show cowardice, to show mercy to the weak, to be devout to God, to be honest, and to be just and impartial—each carries an idealistic, even religious coloring. If these precepts were inscribed on a monastery wall, no one would find them too lenient.
Consider this: there once existed a group that, without oversight mechanisms or public pressure, proposed such principles to constrain themselves. In that era of lax law and order, they were bound only by devotion to God and these principles themselves. How strange. Especially considering that these nearly religious, idealized, otherworldly behaviors were expected of people living in secular society.
Viewed this way, perhaps we can grasp something of chivalry’s essence. When a great monarch articulates values, perhaps merely to control subordinates, yet these principles apply so universally that he himself becomes subject to them—relying on an idealistic spirit to inspire those around him, depending solely on their own sense of honor and idealism—this itself is idealism.
What Cervantes mocked included rigidity, fantasy, and cliché—but much of that was the fault of chivalric romances, not chivalry itself. When Don Quixote and Sancho serve as judges presiding over disputes, their justice and—though comical—grace reveal something of chivalry’s true nature. In The Three Musketeers, no matter how many worldly jokes d’Artagnan, Porthos, and Aramis make, Dumas ultimately places his romantic idealism in Athos—that nearly flawless demigod, the nobleman embodying all knightly virtues.
Or consider what gets ridiculed. The pulp fiction Flaubert despised, the chivalric romances Cervantes teased, Jane Austen’s gentle mockery of gentry manners, Rabelais’s giants with their flatulence and urination, Turgenev’s subtle portraits of wavering intellectuals—what people detest shares common traits: hypocrisy, rigidity, verbosity, dullness, empty rhetoric. Yet chivalry itself—or rather, other idealistic principles—has never truly been abandoned. Even those idealistic authors ultimately need some ethereal figure on which to project their idealism: Athos, the deceased Rudin, Don Quixote suddenly wise when rendering judgment.
But we often overlook this. We mock the rigidity and affectation that accompany nobility and solemnity, thinking we mock nobility and solemnity themselves—sometimes indeed missing our true target.
When chivalry becomes synonymous with lofty solemnity, it becomes outdated mockery. Yet it’s not inherently absurd or jarring. Humility? Honor? Sacrifice? Valor? Compassion? Spirituality? Honesty? Justice? Except for spirituality (piety) being difficult to champion in our secular age, the rest remain virtues worth upholding.
What I mean is this: chivalry, and the factors behind it—self-reflection, idealism—remain relevant in any era, including ours where everything is mocked, deconstructed, debased. We desperately need these morals and principles. Yet what makes us reject this spirit may be precisely its idealism. In an age where everyone despises hypocrisy, earnestly discussing humility, honor, sacrifice, valor, compassion, honesty, or justice makes you seem either hopelessly naive or thoroughly hypocritical. In this age of linguistic excess, where frauds and demagogues abound, as noted above, destroying a word is easier than anything.
Let me retrace the process:
Initially, there existed beautiful principles called chivalry.
Then Don Quixote was deceived by chivalric romances, mistaking hypocrisy, foolishness, and rigidity for chivalry.
Then the world, following Don Quixote’s example, rose up to mock chivalry.
The world grew light and floated skyward, while chivalry became a heavy, expired stone.
Calvino’s novel The Nonexistent Knight may perfectly embody this predicament: an exemplary, bodiless knight who, in a peculiar age, faces universal censure until even his past honors are questioned. The chivalric spirit supporting his armor is simultaneously so noble and so absurd, and this tragedy plays out ceaselessly. In an age where even philosophy is declared a language game, any idealistic principle proposed will ultimately be drowned by more pragmatic, worldly ethics. Thus, invoking such spirit is merely grasping at the moon’s reflection—becoming performance art: we say we need it, but we certainly cannot achieve its true return. Perhaps it—chivalry—never existed in this world at all.
