The Knight of the Spirit

Enquirers who have read the other studies in this series sometimes ask a fair question. If the three streams of the Order are the Hermetic, the Rosicrucian and the Martinist, why does the Order dress them in the language of knighthood? Why Pages and Squires, swords and spurs, Knights and Dames, rather than the grades of knowledge that most esoteric bodies use? The Charter's answer is that the Order's chivalry is "a chivalry of the soul." This study tries to show that the founders did not invent the knight of the soul. They found him already at work, in the literature of the Grail and in each of the three streams, and they gave him a Rule to keep outside the lodge room.

The question at the castle

The first story of the Grail was written in the 1180s by Chrétien de Troyes, a poet of Champagne, and he did not live to finish it. Its hero, Perceval, is a boy raised in the forest by a mother who has tried to keep him from knighthood, and who rides off to become a knight with no idea of what one is. An old knight teaches him the use of arms and gives him some advice, among it that a knight should not talk too much. One evening Perceval comes to the castle of a wounded king, who fishes in the river because he cannot ride, and at supper he sees a strange procession pass through the hall: a youth carrying a lance from whose point a drop of blood runs down, and a maiden carrying a vessel of gold and jewels, from which a great light shines. He wonders whom the vessel serves. Remembering the advice, he does not ask. In the morning the castle is empty. Later he learns that if he had asked, the king would have been healed and his lands restored, and that because he did not, they remain waste.

Some twenty years later the German knight Wolfram von Eschenbach retold the story in his Parzival, and finished it. In Wolfram the Grail is not a vessel but a stone, kept by a company of knights, and the wounded king is the hero's uncle. Parzival spends years in bitterness and wandering, and when at last he returns to the castle he asks, simply, "Uncle, what ails you?" and the king is healed. A little later again, a French author steeped in the spirituality of the monasteries wrote the Quest of the Holy Grail, in which the Grail is achieved by Galahad, the perfect knight, and in which Lancelot, the best knight in the world, is turned back because he cannot give up the sin he loves. Sir Thomas Malory gathered these stories into English about 1470, and his book, printed by Caxton in 1485, has never since been out of print.

The Discourse on the Cup sets out what the Order reads in these romances, and I will not repeat it. I will say only that every one of them is a story about a knight whose arms and courage are not enough. Perceval fails for want of compassion; Lancelot fails for want of purity; Galahad succeeds because he wants nothing for himself. The Grail romances are the first great literature of the knight of the spirit, and they say plainly that his real battles are within.

The squire and the hermit

Some fifty years after the Quest was written, a Majorcan nobleman named Ramon Llull, who had turned from the life of a courtier to the service of God, wrote a small Book of the Order of Chivalry. It begins with a story. A squire riding to court to be knighted falls asleep in the saddle, and his horse carries him to a spring in a forest, beside which lives an old knight who has left the world to pray. The hermit asks the squire what he knows of chivalry, finds that he knows nothing, and gives him a book. The rest is the book: an account of the office of the knight, who is to defend the faith, his lord and the land, and above all the widow, the orphan and the poor; of the virtues he must have; and of the meaning of his arms. The sword is made in the form of a cross, and its two edges signify justice and chivalry. The spurs signify diligence, by which the knight drives himself forward to do what he ought. And the squire, before he is made a knight, should fast, confess, and keep watch through the night in prayer.

William Caxton translated Llull's book and printed it in English about 1484. At Harrowmere in 1987 Edmund Ashby gave a reprint of Caxton's translation to each of his two fellow Wardens, and his own worn copy is in the Ashby Collection still. The reader who knows the page on the Chivalric Ideal will see why. The Vigil of Arms, the sword of discrimination and the spurs of the will were not devised by the Order. They were waiting in a book written seven hundred years ago by a man who had learned that the knight's first enemy is himself.

The Knights of the Golden Stone

The Rosicrucian stream has its knights too. At the end of the Chemical Wedding of 1616, described in the second study in this series, Christian Rosenkreuz and his companions are made Knights of the Golden Stone, and before they are dubbed they swear five articles. They promise to ascribe their order to God alone and never to any spirit; to abhor all uncleanness and vice; to be ready with their gifts to help all who are worthy and in need; not to use their honour for worldly pride or authority; and not to wish to live longer than God wills. Ashby used to set these five articles beside the Twelve and ask Squires to find the correspondences. There are more than one might think.

The Beneficent Knights

The third study tells how Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, at Lyon in 1778, reformed a Masonic order of Templar knighthood into the Beneficent Knights of the Holy City, preceded by a degree of Squire Novice, and how the convention of Wilhelmsbad in 1782 declared that these knights were spiritual and not historical heirs of the knights of old. The word Willermoz chose is the important thing. His knights were to be beneficent: their chivalry consisted in doing good. The knight of the spirit, in the Martinist stream as in the romances, is known by what he gives.

The Spiritual Knight

In Moscow, in the circle of Rosicrucians and readers of Saint-Martin gathered around Nikolai Novikov, a young nobleman and magistrate named Ivan Lopukhin wrote a small book called The Spiritual Knight, or the Seeker of Wisdom, which was printed privately in 1791. It describes the ideal of an inner knighthood, whose combat is against the passions of the self and whose arms are prayer, self-knowledge and the love of one's neighbour, and it sets out rules for the seeker of wisdom, beginning with the fear of God and the keeping of the Gospel. A ceremony for receiving such knights was worked in Moscow. Lopukhin's knight is perhaps the nearest thing in the history of the Tradition to the Knight or Dame of this Order: a person who has taken the language of chivalry entirely inward, and then turned it outward again as service.

A school of moral knighthood

When Papus founded the Martinist Order in Paris, he described it, as the fifth study records, as an order of Christian and spiritual knighthood, and wrote that it was above all "a school of moral knighthood." He called upon its members to be knights of Christ and enemies of violence. And he lived it: the physician who treated the poor for nothing and died of an illness contracted at the front was, whatever else may be said of him, a knight in the sense that Llull would have recognised.

What Harrowmere added

So the knight of the spirit was everywhere in the Tradition before 1987. What then did the founders add? I think three things.

First, they took the knight out of the lodge room. In each of the bodies I have described, spiritual knighthood was a degree conferred in a ceremony and contemplated in a temple. Ashby wanted a knighthood that could be kept at a shop counter, in a hospital corridor and in a quarrel with one's neighbour. That is why the Rule of the Order is not a ritual but the Twelve Articles, which mention no secret, no symbol and no ceremony, and which a person who had never heard of the Order might keep entire. Ashby's own saying was that knighthood is not a rank conferred but a promise kept daily.

Second, they opened it to everyone. Llull's knight was a nobleman, Willermoz's a Freemason, Lopukhin's a Christian gentleman of the Russian court. The Charter opens knighthood to men and women alike, of every faith and station, on equal terms. The title of the Third Degree is Knight or Dame of the Grail at the member's own choice. One of the three founders was a Dame, and the writer of this study has particular reason to be grateful for that article of the Charter.

Third, they put courtesy first. None of the older knighthoods neglected courtesy, but none of them made it the chief of the virtues, as the Order does. The founders held that the state of a soul is revealed in small dealings more surely than in great ones, and that the recognition of the Divine spark in a waiter or a clerk or a stranger on a train is the daily form of the question Perceval failed to ask. The Grail castle, in the experience of the Order, is not far away. It is wherever someone is wounded and no one has asked what ails them.

The Order did not invent the knight of the spirit. It noticed him, in Chrétien and in Llull, at the Golden Stone and at Wilhelmsbad, in Moscow and in Paris; it asked him to put away his claims to descent and his love of ceremony; and it gave him a Rule. Whether he keeps it is a question that each of us answers every day.