Knights for the Day
The cult of strongman vitalism: why it’s going to fail you, and a better way Christian men can look forward.
The crisis of masculinity is one of the core topics that motivates me to write Clubroom Conversations. In the absence of a ready-made sense of what masculinity should look like in 2024, young men are reaching for answers. I have addressed the importance of physical strength and health to masculinity before. I have been lifting weights and working out for years myself after a childhood of idleness.
But recently I have seen so much stress on physical fitness, as if becoming as muscular as possible (beyond a basic ability and health), and in some cases fighting too, is essential to masculinity. Although proponents of this rightly sense a lack of connection to the physical environment, a hollow modern view of the human person, and a crisis in health and fertility, I don’t think big muscles or fighting help.
Some of these issues can be mitigated with a physically healthy male population of course, but there must be more inventive ways to integrate physical strength with a proper expression of masculinity for 2024. Christian men especially need to grapple with this question without falling for the gym-bro option. However, I see suggestions only that the body ought to be trivialized or worshipped.
On one hand trivializing the body are the New Gnostics. I call them Gnostics after the early Christian heresy teaching that the body belongs to the physical realm which is essentially evil whereas the soul could be saved. This view treats the body as a trapping, or a husk to be inhabited and eventually escaped by the soul.
This extreme, fueled by Enlightenment self-determinism, suggests that the body is not the self but rather something exterior. By relegating the ‘self’ to some disembodied construct instead of an embodied whole, it follows that gender differences are not meaningful and that men and women are interchangeable. This is the prevailing modern view.
Clearly, there are today followers of this thought who claim that gender is a mental or social construct distinct from ‘biological sex’. These are who I call the New Gnostics. Their ideas are active and influential in our day. Those who wish to react against this disintegration of body and soul naturally want to epitomize the physical expression of their sex: for men, physical strength.
On the other hand worshipping the body in response to this New Gnosticism is a camp of vitalists and their fellow-travelers. They sense the crisis of masculinity and attempt to meet it by accentuating and prioritizing strength. These fellows post photos of Greco-Roman art while ordering everyone to get their butts to the gym. They call for a rejection of any weakness. They espouse combat as vital to masculinity. They can be described most accurately as a bunch of dudes play-acting as a character from the Iliad. They are sensitive to history but take it too literally. Their reaction is pitting one pagan flaw against another.
The critical flaw with this reaction is twofold. First, reacting to bodily trivialization with radical glorification holds too many moral dangers- to pride, to vanity, to self-worship. It opens one to the odious pride of Achilles and the vain self-deification of Caesar. This is a call for every man to be the strongest- which few will ever be.
Second, muscle is not how the culture war is fought. It is fought by men who are integrated- that is, men who are physically fit yes, but also in touch with their human emotion and spirituality, men who are able to be vulnerable to their loved ones while standing strong as leaders, protectors and providers. This is a closer ideal to an Aristotelian mean, to mens sano in sano corpore (to invoke the ancient philosophers they’re fond of quoting) than was Diomedes.
Before I move into how we can take advice from the past about how to express strength in masculinity for 2024, I need to say a little about romanticizing the past.
Traditionalists tend to view the ancient Mediterranean as some sort of idyllic high point of culture while ignoring how brutal it was.
published an article (The Universal Empire and Its Discontents, below) which takes away the rose-colored glasses from a view the Ancient World and points out why idealization thereof can be dangerous.The Greeks maintained a cult of bodily aesthetic. They are perhaps the truly vitalist of the two cultures. The Romans on the other hand moved a bit closer to the Christian view: they rejected the aesthetic and thought rather that exercise was undertaken for strength, being the metric of manly power. Both cultures maintained a sexuality governed more by dominance than by moral directive.
These pagans’ views of the human body and sexuality contravene the views of a Christian. The rooting modern trads are looking for in the past through calling back to Greco-Roman vitalism is mistaken. There is nothing ‘trad’ about it. There is only an attempt to resurrect a centuries-past way of life which can’t exist in the modern world.
Nevertheless, reactionaries are not wrong to look to history. Sensitivity to history is one of the advantages of the ‘trads’. They understand the way things have been, and therefore that the way things are in 2024 is so otherworldly to any other historical moment.
The natural reaction of the historically minded is to reach back. Rejecting modernity, traditionalists reach for grounding in the past in order to make the present bearable. But as Ernst Jünger states in The Glass Bees:
“If a person of strength and goodwill who draws his nourishment from the past isn’t able to find firm ground under his feet in the present, he is doomed to impotence.”
The historically informed traditionalist is tasked with taking root in a present where he experiences rejection like a body rejects a transplanted organ it senses as not belonging.
This is what the vitalist lifter trend tries in vain to accomplish. They are doing something which feels cathartic but is ultimately powerless against the real problems they seek to combat. They may build strong bodies and fancy themselves warriors but will ultimately fail to combat any of the real issues in society.
Answering modern problems by molding yourself to succeed in a world that is not today’s world of 2024 is foolish. You may be super strong but you will be beaten in the 2024 game by some guy who has 33% of your deadlift and 500% of your income. You will find yourself as impotent as Jünger prophesized.
So how can you draw from history to find useful advice on how masculinity and strength should look in 2024? Luckily, Christian history has an exemplary call to strength embodied in the Medieval concept of chivalry. I covered this at more length in my previous article Medieval Manliness:
“You should not seek violence, but you should not passively avoid confrontation if it’s necessary and just. Medieval Christians saw the necessity for good men of developed character and refinement who could physically defend their civilization and codified it in chivalry. “
The genius of chivalry is the balance of strength and meekness. The Medieval knight in our modern mind lived their expression of chivalry by prowess in combat which necessitated great physical strength while carrying themselves gently and nobly in their halls.
The less idealistic reality is that knights were combatants in savage warfare because of the requirements of their historical moment. They had to kill in hand-to-hand combat to protect and provide. Today, most of you do not have to fight hand-to-hand. You do not need to win a sword clinch against an armored opponent. That is unlikely to materialize in any foreseeable near future. You’d be better off playing paintball to simulate modern war.
The demands of today mean that to express chivalry, you will not look like knights. You must discern what that expression of virtue will look like for today. The following is a more appropriate question for today’s Christian men to answer:
What does Christian chivalry look like in 2024 and how does physical strength play a role?
First, you need to equip yourself for the current environment. The modern world does not require a ton of physical strength to achieve manhood. The thing that most enables a man to fulfill those roles is (and perhaps has been for longer than we admit) the ability to make and manage cash. Protecting, providing, and procreating in 2024 more accurately requires money.
Our society fights with lobbies, tariffs, and bills of debt, not with castles and swords. Staying out of debt and building a productive business is one of the most important ways Christian men can empower themselves today. Capital influences culture. Whether the moneyed economy is good or dignifying is beside the point; it’s the reality of 2024.
Another aspect which perhaps requires more strife is serious spiritual and intellectual cultivation. You don’t have to spend as much time training to fight because the world you live in (assuming you’re in the West) is safer than Medieval Europe. It is far less likely today than in 1424 that you will ever be physically attacked.
Any direct attack you suffer is more likely to be spiritual or intellectual in nature. Therefore you can and should spend more time in prayer, getting to know God, and more time in study, learning about God and His creations. You will become an abler moral leader for your family and community.
Finally, the physical aspect. To accomplish the above business concerns and moral endeavors, you need a healthy body. They are endeavors of the mind, and the mind is supported by a healthy body.
Health is one thing, but what about strength? How strong should a modern man be? I aim to keep myself in shape enough to pass the military PT tests. That’s just one opinion. My friend Peter suggested another great metric for strength:
“If I can’t carry my unconscious wife and child out of a burning building, I’m out of shape.”
His metric is that of a knight for the day. It’s not about single combat or some dream of chiseled physique, it’s ordered toward being the most effective servant and protector of his family. He moves the object of his strength outside himself. This metric optimizes for current conditions and avoids the pride pitfall, both of which those pushing excessive fitness tend to miss.
You should take care to keep yourself reasonably strong and healthy. In 2024, there are manifold ways to destroy your health with increasingly disembodying technology, poor car-centric infrastructure, and unhealthy food (read: seed oils).
It is as important that you care for your community financially, spiritually, and relationally. Yes, a Christian man should study and emulate something like chivalry as a moral code, but you don’t fight hand-to-hand anymore. You fight with your wallet and your character. You need to be a knight for the day.
It’s on you to meet the challenges of today knowing that your ancestors needed different tools- and that means you may have smaller pecs than Ajax. So what? Ajax is dead and so is his time. You have to drop the shame of being weaker than your ancestor. He lived in a physically harsher world. Yours is mentally and spiritually harsher. History is change.
You must find rooting in the present, or you are doomed to impotence, even if you can bench 225. Your bench max doesn’t matter if you can’t afford to raise a family and raise them as a spiritual father. So, let’s drop this macho warrior-bodybuilder shtick and get creative about building a future for ourselves and our communities in the now.
Virtuous masculinity cannot and will not look the same in 204 as it did in 1204 or does in 2024. Figuring out how Christian masculinity looks in every age is one of the challenges of practicing the faith. In that manner, 2024 is no different than any other year.
How is chivalry any less anachronistic and impotent than ersatz Greek themed athleticism in the current day?