A summary of the doctrine of chivalry (and not only towards women)

[fpb]

AS
the purpose of wisdom is to enlighten ignorance
AND AS
the purpose of wealth is to relieve poverty,
SO
the purpose of strength is to defend weakness.

This seems, once stated, all too obvious; but it is really revolutionary as compared with the apparently universal belief that the purpose of strength is to compel weakness.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing is that if you went back to just about any pagan society, the other two terms would have been acknowledged. Everyone would agree that rich lords had a duty of generosity, to their subjects and to any stranger who might come their way. And pretty much anyone would agree that, whatever homage might be paid to acknowledged wisdom, the wise had a duty to share their wisdom with others, and especially to help them dodge coming dangers and difficulties which they themselves did not understand. My understanding of certain passages of Celtic literature, for instance, is that the worst thing that Druids - the class of wise men - can do, and the one thing for which they can be punished, is to hide their knowledge from a questioner, especially if the questioner is a king, and especially if they know something to his detriment. The next worse is to abuse their position to manipulate people to cover up this same refusal. So the duties of wisdom and wealth were understood; yet, as you say, a great deal of pagan literature includes the duty of the strong to rule. Not everything - the Romans regarded it as the heart of their imperial mission "to strike down the arrogant and to spare the humble" - but even there the defence of the humble is not quite present. I guess that the temptation of strength is so basic and immediate, going back to our childhood and its rows, that its abuse is more universal and easy to fall in than even the abuse of wealth, let alone of wisdom.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

While the wisdom element has been widely recognized, I don't think the second term has been nearly as common. The duty of generosity isn't quite the same thing as saying "the purpose of wealth is to relieve poverty." It is certainly true that it was viewed as improper to use wealth exclusively for your own benefit, but specifically aiming it at relief of the poor is uncommon.

Another example: a Greek would have viewed it as the duty of the rich man to use his wealth to support, strengthen, and glorify the polis -- say, by outfitting a trireme or maintaining a temple. If that happens to benefit the poor members particularly, well and good, but that's more or less incidental.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I disagree. If you read for instance the Mabinogi of Pwyll and Pryderi, or Cullhwch and Olwen, you will find that a prince is expected to give whatever he is asked for, by any beggar who comes around. And alms are a major duty, prescribed in Hindu law (the Manava Dharmashastra). What is misleading is that most of these things were prescriptions for rural societies, where people tended to know each other, and everyone knew who was in need. A class of the poor does not really come into existence until the great cities begin to arise, and even so old values still prevail: Rome at the height of its importance, with more than a million inhabitants, was a network of clientships in which each important citizen gave one meal a day (Juvenal complains of their quality) to literally hundreds of clients. That a lord should be a giver is a commonplace in the Indo-European world at least, and I would be surprised if it were different anywhere else.