Chivalrous sex

In his contribution to Must Christianity Be Violent?: Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology , Milbank points out that “the monasticization of the whole of society is much more difficult than the monasticization of the celibate few” (197). Any attempt to establish a quasi-monastic way of life for laity has to reckon with sex and conflict in ways that monks don’t have to. And the two are parallel: “the placing of sex outside the purview of the sacred is in a way highly parallel to the absolute condemnation of warfare.” Both exhibit a form of clericalism that makes it difficult to see how “a lay Christian can be a Christian at all.”

Chivalry represented resistance to this clericalism: “the elaboration of the notion of chivalry was . . . an attempt to elaborate a lay theology . . . . This lay theology resisted an unintelligent clerical squeamishness about sex: as the Roman de la Rose asks, if clerical chastity is the ‘highest’ path and yet grace is offered to all, how is this consistent with God’s approval of nature and generation? Only the Olympian gods, the authors of this work argue, were jealous of the human physical bliss of the Golden Age: such an attitude is alien to the God of creation and grace, and therefore sexual puritanism is pagan and not Christian.”

Chivalry also resisted “clerical preciosity concerning conflict . . . . if clerical nonviolence is ‘the highest,’ then fighting a just war would imperil one’s salvation, at least to some degree. If some wars are just, they lie therefore within the scope of providence, and such impairment therefore seems inconsistent with divine justice and grace.”