By Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
What is this spirit of chivalry? It is to admire and love the fight. It is to have a fearless spirit so that when we find ourselves in the apex of effort and complication, we feel fulfilled.
Robert de Normandie at the Siege of Antioch 1097–1098
In other words, the knight was above all a Catholic who was profoundly pained by and indignant with the fact that the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ was in the hands of Mohammedans. And because he had the spirit of faith, he knew perfectly well the sacrosanct sublimity of the Holy Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ and gauged accurately the infamy there was in Catholics allowing such a sacrosanct Sepulcher to remain in the hands of infidels…. It was a sublime indignation because it was turned to the most sublime of ideals, which is Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Hospitaller grand master Guillaume de Clermont defending the walls at the Siege of Acre in 1291, by Dominique-Louis Papéty.
Well, this gave him a great elevation of spirit, a great indignation at seeing the divine being trampled underfoot; and it gave him a heroic spirit of a religious nature and an inspiration that led to every renunciation, every kind of courage, and every epic and magnificent enterprise. This was the spirit of chivalry.
(Excerpt from a Phone Call of Tuesday, October 31, 1989.)
(Nobility.org translation.)
