Christ and Quixote (Part 1 of 2)
Roland’s refusal to blow upon his oliphant at Roncevalles is a famous expression of chivalry. Less well known is the indignant reaction of Oliver, the second hero of the Chanson de Roland, to this refusal. Three times, as he watches the “paynim” forces enveloping their own rear-guard, Oliver pleads with Roland to blow the horn and summon reinforcements from the king. But Roland does not wish to subject his king to the danger, and so he will not set the horn to his lips. “May never God allow that I should cast dishonor on my house,” he responds, demonstrating his willingness to carry loyalty to the very last exigency. “I have no more to say,” remarks Oliver bitterly as Marsile’s forces approach, “to sound your horn for help you would not deign, so here you are, you’ve not got Charlemagne.”
Not until the battle proves every bit as disastrous as Oliver apprehended does Roland offer to blow on the horn. Oliver, covered with wounds and aware of the inevitability of death for himself and all the French forces, chides his friend for the tardy futility of the gesture. “Twould ill beseem a knight. I asked you comrade, and you refused, for pride. Had Charles been here, then all would have gone right.” His asperity does not stop there; when a bewildered Roland asks, “why so angry with me, friend,” Oliver shoots back: “Companion, you got us in this mess. There is wise valour, and there is recklessness. Prudence is worth more than foolhardiness. Through your overweening you have destroyed the French.” What is remarkable about this passage, among the earliest literary depictions of the ideal of chivalry, is that one of the figures presented to us as a certain kind of embodiment of that ideal balks at its final implication. He cannot help suspecting it to be something ruinously implausible, a form of “foolhardiness,” of “overweening,” of “pride” even.
When Edmund Burke complained, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, that “the age of chivalry is gone,” he earned considerable derision, from friends and foes alike, for the seeming sentimentality of the lament. To pine for the days of chivalry, on the cusp of the nineteenth century, must have sounded like archaic romanticism. But it was not only the distance of the years that would have engendered this reaction. From the start, there was a certain instability at the heart of the chivalric ideal. As Burke properly recognized, the essentially aristocratic standard chivalry embodied did have an immensely civilizing effect on Western society, exerting a constant counter-tension on the more expansive masculine energies, in a manner that could give rise to qualities like gentility and restraint. On the other hand, the fulsome impracticality of the ideal always left it resembling “foolhardiness” to one extent or another. Greaved or ungreaved, the man of chivalry always had a streak of Quixote to him.
Much of the literature of chivalry is quite explicit about this tension. In “The Knight’s Tale,” for instance, Chaucer places a poignant encomium to the ideal on the dying tongue of Arcite, when he cries: “And Juppiter so wys my soule gye, /To speken of a servaunt proprely, /With alle circumstances trewely,/That is to seyen, trouthe, honour, and knyghthede,/Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede,/Fredom, and al that longeth to that art.” And yet “knyghthede” is exactly what lies behind his rivalry with Palamon, the very rivalry that has led him to his death-bed. Their mutual infatuation with Emily, and their inability to ditch the histrionics of the chivalrous lover, prevent either man from acknowledging the actual desires of the young woman herself, who is actually quite loath to marry either man. Thus Theseus, discovering the two men dueling to the death over a woman with whom neither has exchanged a single word, can only exclaim, “Now looketh, is nat that an heigh folye? /Who may been a fole, but if he love?”
But it is in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (to my mind, the most accomplished work among the literature of chivalry) that the inextricable absurdity of the chivalrous ideal is captured most memorably. Students are typically dumbfounded by the notion that Gawain’s attempt to preserve his life by keeping the green girdle a secret can be construed as some sort of sin, and they have no idea what to do with the fervent self-reproach that consumes the knight at story’s end. It is quite difficult to impress upon them the deviation from chivalrous integrity entailed by that deception, and quite hopeless to convince them that such nice scrupulosity plays any part in a viable moral paradigm. There is much sense in their resistance on this matter too, since, after all, the desire to keep one’s head attached to one’s shoulders is an eminently justifiable one. When one’s moral standard is pitched so high that to flinch before a raised axe-head is considered a matter of shame, one is straying awfully close to the realm of folly.
In fact, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes little sense outside the context of Scripture. It must be read as a narrative meditation on Christ’s injunction to “be perfect, as your God in heaven is perfect.” It is not irreverent to point out that this command has more than a little touch of absurdity to it as well. The so-called “counsels of perfection,” with which Christ illustrates the uncompromising thrust of his injunctions, are latent with all sorts of comic possibilities. Imagine a sketch in which the main character goes for a walk in the street and is instantly beset by muggers; they beat him for his coat and in turn he insists they take from him his shirt as well. And then later, when he stops to buy the paper, he gets into a row with another customer; the stranger punches him in the jaw, at which our hero promptly thrusts out his chin and exclaims, “here, my good man, why don’t you have another go at it.” The whole thing could be quite hilarious.
Not for nothing did St. Paul make his stand upon the “foolishness of preaching” and the “foolishness of God,” and insist, quite explicitly, that the Christian faith could not but appear like folly to a certain kind of perspective. Not for nothing did St. Francis of Assisi, the most perfect exemplum of Christ’s teaching after Christ himself, call himself the jongleur de Dieu, or the fool of God. The unearthly idealism at the heart of the Christian creed – its emphasis on a morality of love rather than of lawfulness, convention, or resignation; its celebration, and arguable prioritization, of the rarest sorts of virtue, like purity and self-sacrifice; its refusal to make the least comprise with the “ways of the world” – means that there will always be a streak of folly running through Christian civilization. Tonsured or untonsured, the Christian will always have a touch of Quixote to him.
It was Cervantes’ brilliance, then, to intuit this inextricable facet of Christian culture, and to conceive the icon who could perfectly embody its comic dimensions. Quixote is no mere send up of knightly literature; he is the realization of the faith’s comedic corollary, the jocular shadow cast always by Christ’s solemn creed. In his rueful countenance we discern the only slight exaggerated features of the man of sorrows; in the irrepressible idealism that perceives a Dulcinea in an Aldonza we trace a faint hyperbole of the irrepressible love that sees a Saint Mary in a Mary Magdalen. Quixote besetting passers-by out of an intent to “right all wrongs” could hardly display a more outlandish high-mindedness than Christ lashing the sanctioned money-lenders out of the temple, and when Sancho Panza complains that they have only received “cudgeling upon cudgeling” for their efforts, who could fail to hear the echoes of Saint Paul declaring the “stripes above measure” that were the reward of his own magnanimous labors.
If there is any bright color of Christian civilization that has faded in modern times, it is this flamboyant unrealism. We are all Olivers now, exasperated by the impossible idealism of the past. My students’ bewilderment at Gawain’s fastidious conscience shows them partly to be children of their age, an age with almost no room left in its imaginative landscape for the extravagance of heroism. This mental condition did not develop recently; it is the result of too many centuries spent in the pursuit of certainty. Recall that Descartes’ great fear was being fooled; he thought the prime use of philosophy was to guard him from a state of illusion. If I could generalize wildly, I would say that the whole project of foundationalism that emerged from his speculations was motivated more by fear of error than by a love of truth. The one thing the modern thinker cannot bear is to play the fool.
But Socrates could. And Kierkegaard. And Tolstoy. It is worth reflecting on what has been lost in our inability to emulate their confident folly. It is worth considering what we can no longer reach when we come down to earth. So in the second part of this essay, I will turn to a brief account of Christian idealism.