The Code of Chivalry

This picture is a romanticized image of a young squire making his prayer vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, as was the custom before being knighted. There was no set code of chivalry for the medieval period; it changed according to region and century. However, here are some codes which were attributed to the Emperor Charlemagne:

To fear God and maintain His Church.
To serve the liege lord in valor and faith.
To protect the weak and defenseless.
To give succor to widows and orphans.
To refrain from the wanton giving of offense.
To live by honor and for glory.
To despise pecuniary reward.
To fight for the welfare of all.
To obey those placed in authority.
To guard the honor of fellow knights.
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit.
To keep faith.
At all times to speak the truth.
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun.
To respect the honor of women.
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal.
Never to turn the back upon a foe.

And here is Charlemagne's Exhortation:

Love God Almighty with all your heart and all your powers.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Give alms to the poor as ye are able.
Entertain strangers.
Visit the sick.
Be merciful to prisoners.
Do ill to no man, nor consent unto such as do, for the receiver is as bad as the thief.
Forgive as ye hope to be forgiven.
Redeem the captive.
Help the oppressed.
Defend the cause of the widow and orphan.
Render righteous judgment.
Do not consent to any wrong.
Persevere not in wrath.
Shun excess in eating and drinking.
Be humble and kind.
Serve your liege lord faithfully.
Do not steal.
Do not perjure yourself, nor let others do so.
Envy, hatred and violence separate men from the Kingdom of God.
Defend the Church and promote her cause.


Did all knights follow such codes? Certainly not, but many did, such as St Louis IX, St Ferdinand of Castile, and Saint Nuno. It was really meant to keep military men from indulging overmuch in pillage and rapine, by encouraging the protection of ladies, the poor, and monastic houses. Some of it must have worked, since both the rich and poor traveled a great deal in the Middle Ages, going to various pilgrimage sites throughout Europe, and even to Jerusalem. The Knights Hospitaller had the duty of caring for sick pilgrims and guarding pilgrims on their way. Were all knights saints? No, there were corrupt people back then just as there are now. But that does not mean the system was all bad. Saints such as Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola were inspired by the codes of chivalric conduct and tried to apply the ideals to the religious orders which they founded. This is especially evident in St. Teresa's spiritual masterpiece The Interior Castle.

With the rise of industrialization and the fading of the old aristocracy, the Victorians were enthralled with the old Arthurian legends and the days when Knighthood was in flower. Did they over-romanticize? Yes, probably. But many young people were inspired with ideals, which is one of the purposes of great art and literature.

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The Surprising Bipartisan Fight Against the Chinese Communist Party

 From AMAC:

For years, lawmakers in Washington have warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is exploiting America’s generosity and openness to weaken the United States from within. Now Congress is moving to address that threat and close some of the most glaring pathways the CCP uses to covertly exert its influence.

A series of bipartisan bills introduced this year by members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party would target Chinese involvement in fentanyl trafficking, connected vehicles, robotics, and biotechnology. Though the threats are different, the principle behind the legislation is the same. Chinese companies should not be allowed to use access to American markets, technology, capital, and infrastructure in ways that endanger Americans or strengthen the CCP.

Taken together, the measures reflect a meaningful shift in Congress’s approach toward China. Rather than simply documenting the threats posed by the CCP, lawmakers are increasingly targeting the specific channels through which Beijing-linked entities can gain leverage over the United States — whether by exploiting weaknesses in the financial system, collecting sensitive data, undercutting American industry, or gaining access to strategically important technology. (Read more.)

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Otto Rahn and the Cathars

The Cathars were anti-Semitic, just like the Nazis., which is why the Nazis were fascinated with them. From War History Online:

 Born in Germany in 1904, Rahn became obsessed with European myths and legends at an early age. He was particularly fascinated with medieval German stories about the Grail, such as Parzival (a romantic poem about a knight), Lohengrin (a story about Parzival’s son), and The Song of the Nibelungs (about a dragon slayer).

As a university student, he also became fascinated with Catharism – a Christian branch in France that was wiped out by the Catholic Church in the 13^th century. He, therefore, visited France to look for clues about the Cathars and the Holy Grail.

Rahn concluded that German Christian traditions preserved many elements from its pre-Christian pagan past. He also believed that the Holy Grail was a real object that the Cathars had once held and that it remained hidden near Château de Montségur where the Cathars made their last stand.

In 1933, he published his theories in the Crusade Towards the Grail, which was well-received in Germany. It also earned him a dangerous fan, because 1933 was also the year that the Nazis took over. That fan was Heinrich Himmler, suddenly one of the most powerful men in Germany and the one whom Hitler tasked with exterminating the Jews and other minorities. Himmler, like many high-ranking Nazi officials, was also obsessed with Germanic myths and legends. To justify their ideals of German racial superiority, the Nazis looked to the country’s pre-Christian era. They wanted to reinvent their history and make it look greater than conventional history would have it. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette as Vesta

The Queen is depicted as the goddess of the hearth. Louis XVI kept a copy of this portrait on his desk in the Tuileries. The lilies symbolize France and purity. The rose is a symbol of Austria as well as of beauty. Louis XVI is shown on the urn. This painting was made after the Royal Family were taken to Paris in October 1789.
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The Iran Victory Hiding in Plain Sight

 From The Enterprise:

Picture a man on a Tehran rooftop on the night of January 8. He has a Starlink dish wrapped in a blanket, one of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 terminals that activists believe were smuggled into Iran, and he knows that a law passed late last year can send him to prison for 10 years for owning it, or to the gallows if a judge decides to call it espionage. Below him, the streets are full. By the following night, according to Iranian health officials who spoke to Western media and hospital tallies compiled by the surgeon Amir Parasta, as many as 100,000 of his countrymen may be dead. The regime cut the internet before the shooting started, and it did so on purpose.

President Trump understood what that blackout meant. On January 11th, he said he would work with Elon Musk to get Iranians back online, and two days later SpaceX waived its fees inside Iran. Then came February 28th, the strikes, and a second blackout that ran 88 days, with connectivity falling to roughly 1% by early March. Since then Iran has been through a ceasefire, a memorandum signed on June 17, attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and renewed hostilities on July 7. Most voters in Ohio or Arizona see strikes and a blockade. They see very little of the Iranian people, and in 27 days they vote.

Iranian American organizations have drafted four measures that would change that picture, and each one passes a single demanding test. The President can direct it now, under authority he already holds, without waiting on Congress, new appropriations, foreign capitals, or corporate goodwill. Congress, which voted in both chambers in June to direct a withdrawal from the conflict, is in no mood to help. The measures are modest on paper. I suspect they would matter more to ordinary Iranians than anything else Mr. Trump could do between now and Election Day. (Read more.)

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‘A Huge Success!’ Year One of the Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

The First Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival was a huge success. It’s an idea I came up with over a year ago, and the idea became a reality when the Victims of Communism Museum became the official sponsor. It was held October 1-4. We screened Pilecki’s Report, The Killing Fields, Night Crossing, Red Dawn, The Lives of Others, and Hail, Caesar! 

We’re already working on next year’s festival, but before moving ahead let me make couple observations. The first is, people on the right need to get better at supporting artists, creatives, and the storytelling that comes with them. I launched the idea for the festival over a year ago with nothing. I traveled to theaters around the mid-Atlantic talking to owners, I cold-called Hollywood about licensing, I wrote over 100 articles and blog posts to bring attention to the idea. The left supports these kinds of efforts to advance their ideas and capture the imaginations of the public, which is why they win so often. We can do the same.

In 1975, a band called The Sex Pistols appeared with a new spirit and energy and forever changed rock ‘n roll. I believe these kinds of projects can inject a similar energy into the conservative movement. Keep the flame alive.

Now for the experience of the film festival itself. Let me first say that the staff and interns at the Victims of Communism Foundation did a fantastic job pulling everything together. They put everything into this, including purchasing a small popcorn popper (a very nice touch that was hugely popular with the audience). They worked out any glitches with the films and were polite and welcoming to the guests.

And the guests—God bless them! They were super enthusiastic about what we were doing. I lost count of the times someone came up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you for doing this.” They deeply understood the point I’ve been making for years: Conservatives are pretty good at organizing top-down enterprises—think tanks, white papers, even movie studios (even when these studios produce bad movies—another thing several guests at the festival mentioned). But what we are not as good at is organizing from the bottom-up. Supporting a pro-freedom punk band. Paying iconoclastic journalists a living wage. Spotting and supporting young actors, directors, artists. Putting on film festivals.

For this festival, I decided to use Hollywood’s weapons against it. As I said in my talk, the idea for the festival hit me when after years of going to ordinary film festivals I realized that many of the best films I saw were actually anti-communist films. It’s cool for hipsters to mock movies like I Was a Communust for the FBI, I Married a Communist, or My Son John. Yet many of these films, in fact, are quite good.

In I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent infiltrates the Communist Party in Pittsburgh. He learns that their plan is “a hellbrew of hate”—urban riots intended to “divide and conquer” by pitting the races against each other and causing so much mayhem that the left can be called in to establish order and make huge profits working the court cases. (It’s hard to argue, given the last decade, that any of this is far-fetched). Another character in the film is a high school teacher. “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” the film notes. That also rings familiar.

The cinematographer for I Married a Communist, Nicholas Musuraca, is the same cinematographer for the noir classic Out of the Past. (Read more.)

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Catharism, Calvary Chapel, and Catholicism

2 Cathari perfecti give the consolamentum to a dying man while fending off 2 friars

 From Nicholas Gulda:

To begin, the terms Cathar and Albigensian are synonymous.  Generally speaking, historians have understood the Cathars to be more or less what Tim referred to them as; “gnostic heretics”.  [3]  Similarly, in his Manual for Inquisitors Bernard Gui (d. A.D. 1331) referred to them as “Manichean heretics”, before giving a brief synopsis of their beliefs.[4]  The heresy itself is often associated with the Albigensian Crusade.  By the thirteenth century the targets of the maturing crusading movement had expanded to include heretics, pagans, and even political opponents of the papacy.  The targets of this particular crusade were the heretics and their Catholic protectors.

 The Cathars/Albigenses of the Languedoc region in the South of France ultimately drew the ire of the papacy.  They had entrenched themselves within the nobility there, facilitated by the fact that it was largely independent of the Capetian monarch to the North.  Initially, the Church’s response of preaching, and public debating seemed to make little headway in rolling back the heresy, and the conventional wisdom was that force was needed.  After the papal legate to the region was assassinated,– apparently on the orders of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (a protector of heretics)­, Pope Innocent III issued the indulgence for what became known as the Albigensian Crusade (ca. A.D. 1209-1229).

 Some omissions aside for brevity’s sake, this is more or less how the origins of the Albigensian Crusade is presented in standard survey works on the subject of the Crusades, such as the late Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A History (2005), or Thomas Madden’s The Concise History of the Crusades.  Both authors are well known Crusade historians, and both are/were university professors.  Both were recommended reading on a syllabus in a colloquium on the Crusades I took at a secular university.  Both present Catharism as a non-Christian, dualistic religion.[5]  Both happen to be Catholics.

 Additionally, both scholars above have influenced the historiography of the Crusades, are peer reviewed, have reputations to uphold, and are top notch.  Madden also was a contributor to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on the Albigensian Crusade (hardly a pro-Catholic source).  Nevertheless, since the very notion that Catharism was a non-Christian dualistic religion has been called “a Catholic lie”, we will look elsewhere for a basic understanding of this medieval heresy.

 “Catharism was the greatest heretical challenge faced by the Catholic Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”.[6]  Thus reads the first line of Malcolm Barber’s work, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages.  He notes that the common view is that it was transplanted from the East in the form of Bogomilism, though some like R. I. Moore believe that it was a home grown dualism.[7]  That it was a form of dualism is a given throughout the first chapter on the topic of the origins/ pedigree of Catharism.[8]

 Like Madden and Riley-Smith, Barber affirms that the Cathars [aka Albigenses] denied the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that they had a rite known as consolamentum.  After receiving this rite, the mere “believer” became one of the initiated (perfecti), and it was often delayed until just before death.[9]  Like his discussion on the pedigree of Catharism in the first chapter, he includes a robust discussion of Cathar beliefs and practices in the third chapter.  The evidence discussed there contradicts any notion of the Cathars/Albigenses being akin to modern day Evangelicals, as Yardley’s position seems to imply.

 Though I don’t suspect that Mark Pegg would endorse Baptist successionism, he is nevertheless a historian who might possibly be coopted by its proponents.  One major argument in his book A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom is that “a very distinct Christian culture…was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church”.[10]  He called for a revision of Christian history, arguing that “The Albigensian Crusade…was not a martial pilgrimage against a discrete religion with an organized heretical ‘Church’”.[11]

A survey of three reviews published about Pegg’s book shows that they were overwhelmingly critical regarding this particular aspect of it.  One reviewer said that it was against “academic consensus”, and that the evidence presented failed to convince with respect to the historical revision.[12]  While too mentioning that the scholarship is stacked against Pegg, another reviewer was also critical of his “dismissal of so many primary sources that support a Cathar church because he constantly suspects orthodox intent”.[13]  Of the three reviews, it was the one in the Catholic academic journal which was arguably most sympathetic on the topic of Catharism, but even there the reviewer acknowledges that Pegg is contradicting notable scholars on this topic.[14]

 For Barber, Cathar sources take a primacy when reconstructing Catharism, but “even orthodox [i.e. Catholic] attacks on Cathar belief are important since they were particularly concerned to define it accurately in order to give weight to their refutations”.[15]  He posits a “moderate dualism” extant in the West up until a Cathar Council at St Félix de Caraman  (ca. 1167) attended by envoys from the Bogomil Church in Constantinople changed the religious landscape to one dominated by “absolute dualism”.  The Charter of Niquinta which emanated from that Cathar gathering seems to be a main component of his argument.[16]

Ultimately, Barber says, it was this absolute dualism that really drew negative attention from the Catholic hierarchy.[17]  Though he argues that there were already established Cathar bishops in places like Albi [hence “Albigensian”] in the South of France, after the Council at St Félix de Caraman there would be a network of sixteen dioceses stretching from Tuolouse to Constantinople.[18]  It is generally said that the Inquisition was the tool that the Catholic Church (in concert with the secular authorities) utilized to ultimately vanquish the heresy.  Barber posits that both the moderate and absolute varieties of it may have survived up until the end of the fourteenth century.[19]

Whatever the case may be, Staples was certainly correct when he rejected the notion that, as he paraphrased Yardley), “the Albigensians are some sort of link in true Christians”.  As Barber indicates, almost since the inception of the Reformation, Protestant authors have been concerned with establishing some basis for historical continuity in response to the charges of novelty coming from their Catholic opponents.  Evidently, the first to attempt to link Protestantism with Catharism in a direct line was Jean-Paul Perrin, who in his work Histoire de Vaudois (1618), erroneously conflated the Cathars with the Waldenses [as the title indicates].

This Protestant affinity for the Cathars would sour a little over a century later.  All of this and more Barber observes in his historiography.[20]  Still, there are those in modern times who try to link Protestantism and Catharism.  The position argued by Pegg, and seemingly by others more recently, is very different from the apparent Baptist successionism (or something in that vein) argued by Yardley.  Moreover, the academic/ historiographical argument against the traditional understanding would seem to beg the question of how exactly to define “Christian”, and who has the authority to determine that? (Read more.)

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Sanctuary States Should NOT Be Rewarded

 From The Enterprise:

An Army sergeant from Dayton has been stationed in Germany for two years. She has not slept in Ohio during that time. On Census Day, the Census Bureau still credits her to Ohio, and in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), the Supreme Court said that was fine. Overseas federal employees are assigned to the state that was their usual home, not to the base where they happen to be sleeping. A German tourist standing outside the Ohio Statehouse that same morning is physically in Columbus. Nobody thinks Ohio has earned an extra sliver of a congressman on his account. Presence and belonging come apart. Every census since 1790 has had to pick which one it is counting.

Last month, the Commerce Department published a proposed rule, signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick, rewriting the residence criteria. Proposed section 60.4 would count foreign citizens who also hold US citizenship or a green card, and it marks everyone else holding only foreign citizenship as “Not counted for apportionment.” The rule’s own phrase for the line it draws is “durable permission from the sovereign to settle within the United States.” Aliens whose status is less durable, and less definite in length, than lawful permanent residence fall on the excluded side of that line, along with people here in violation of federal law. Under the proposal, usual residence is the place a person has lawfully spent the most days, as shown by tax records. Comments close October 13, on docket USBC-2026-0628. This is a proposal, not a finished policy. The administration put it through notice and comment in the open, years before the count, rather than issuing a memo in the middle of a census, as Trump attempted in 2020. A 2026 comment file will be the record a court has if the 2030 count is challenged. (Read more.)

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The Mathematics of Beauty, #1: Harmony, Monotony, and Cacophony

 From The Way of Beauty:

This is the first of six posts on the mathematics of beauty1: the traditional body of knowledge, running from the ancient Greeks through the Church Fathers and into the design of Western art and architecture, which held that beauty has a mathematical structure and that this structure can be studied, learned, and applied. It was a standard part of an artist’s and an architect’s formation for centuries. Today it is virtually unknown, and I think its recovery is essential if we are to build beautifully again.

As six posts devoted to a single subject is a lot to post on consecutive weeks, I will post them on alternate weeks.

In this first post, I want to establish the problem by looking at some buildings, and to say something about how this tradition relates to natural science, which is the other great tradition of describing the world by number. The posts that follow will set out where the tradition came from, what it consists of, how it is used in practice, why it was abandoned, and what its recovery would mean.

 If you examine almost any building constructed since the Second World War, the chances are that it will conform to one of two simple guiding principles of architectural design, and in both cases, the results are often bad. These two principles are even spacing and random spacing. The first generates visual monotony; the second generates visual cacophony. I have chosen these terms deliberately to set them against what traditional architecture always sought to achieve instead: harmony. (Read more.)

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