The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church.
What does it take to build an Order that echoes throughout history?
What forms a brotherhood so glorious that their story captivates boys a thousand years later? What does it take to engender ferocity of spirit, iron discipline, wild sacrifice, and immortality?
What does it take to build a community that produces great men?
The answers are complex. Here I will focus on a single aspect: that men’s freedom must be taken from them for them to become great. They must be denied the freedom to walk away from their duty.
has written excellent pieces tying the loss of communities to the erosion of the duties, rules, and obligations that traditionally underpinned them. For modern man, liberty no longer means the freedom of a people to determine their own destiny without state oppression. It is now a maximalist position advocating for the personal shedding of all limits and restrictions.Accepting this modern understanding means destroying true community. It also means destroying a people’s greatness.
If one wants a community then one must accept limitations on individual autonomy. People must live their lives in a particular locality, worship the same divinity, converse in their own tongue, share rituals, rites, and holy days, and accept a common telos.
Once individuals within the community are allowed to make personal choices about any one of these fundamental structures, then they are lost, and more erosion will result.
Thus there must be a set of inviolable understandings that define the borders of the community. If a person wishes to excuse themselves from any one of these then so be it, but everyone must understand that they are leaving the community as a whole.
Below, I will show that by taking these principles of self-subjugation to the extreme - by demanding more from one’s people than seems possible to us today - one can achieve not just community, but greatness.
Here we turn to the example of the Knights Templar.
The Templars are most excellent soldiers. They wear white mantles with a red cross, and when they go to the wars a standard of two colours called balzaus is borne before them. They go in silence. Their first attack is the most terrible. In going they are the first, in returning the last. They await the orders of their Master. When they think fit to make war and the trumpet has sounded, they sing in chorus the Psalm of David, ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, kneeling on the blood and necks of the enemy, unless they have forced the troops of the enemy to retire altogether, or utterly broken them to pieces.
— Anonymous pilgrim, 12th Century
How did the Templars achieve this ferocity of spirit? What did these men give to their Order, what did they receive, and what did they become?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Becoming Noble to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.