The Lion Hearted

Happy in truth, might he have been deemed had he been without rivals who envied his glorious actions, whose only cause of enmity was his magnificence, and his being the searcher after virtue rather than the slave of vice.

This eulogy by an eyewitness propels us instantly into medieval Christendom. No one in the West writes that about anyone. Maybe the last person in the English speaking world to receive anything like that was Winston Churchill in Westminster Abbey in 1965. Then the world came to homage the victor of World War Two. It is a sign of our morbid times that my fingers had hesitated over the keys. Should I put in quotation marks? Since that imperial funeral, lion hearts have been for critics' arrows. Real lions in safaris, of course, have become beyond reproach.

In Islamic nations the Arabic and Persian languages use, without embarrassment or self-consciousness, that heroic language about their champions. Bin Laden among his Islamic supporters is without question a lion-heart. In the Islamic street his lion-heartedness is a given. The rest is commentary.

In the Old Testament, the great Hebrew Kings who championed their people and their religion are Lions of Judea. For all the millions spent by their spin doctors, Bush, Blair, let alone poor Howard, struggle to be taken seriously at all. Their crusade against Islamic terrorism might succeed in new Monty Python scripts "The Search For The Holy Toilet Brush" or "The Life of Bin".

There is no question that the West has been hoisted by its own petard. We twentieth-century Western people have been born, and grown old and weary, to the endless snorts and derision of our fragile dreams of glory and high-mindedness.

Sometimes there has been a whisper of personal public courage and integrity to the truth. They now lock up those people. If they are not mad, they are certainly bad. We need the poison, we must believe the palpable absurd because … Well they will lock us up. The Islamicist lion-hearted they now will kill on sight.

That long-quoted sentence at the top of the article was written by a twelfth-century Norman English clergyman. Aside from his history of the Third Crusade, his literary speciality seems to have been the arts of the vintner.

The sentence, with its torturous clauses and sonorous terms, is Latin. Even the Roman Senators avoided Latin in their daily discourse. The immediate body functions and little envies and foibles are crushed by the Latin grand architecture. In the Latin original, "searcher after virtue rather than the slave of vice" employed word terms qualitatively different from the English. Prurient English has since Victorian times only seen virtue and vice with sexual meanings.

In Latin the original word "virtus" held a universe of lion-hearted meanings. It meant a searcher after courage, integrity, reality. A person, man or woman, who did not lie low under the prevailing public orthodoxies but spoke his mind and acted, even when it hurt or troubled. Vice in Latin meant human weakness, a craving for sensual happiness. Vice means exactly that which drives globalisation.

I read this morning in the business pages that globalisation is "inevitable". That means there are rich and powerful people out there who will gang-up to kill any effective opposition to it because they are desperate and afraid.

King Richard the Lion Heart strikes me as the first recognisable Englishman. That is ironical as he did not know English, lived in adulthood only a few months in England and simply regarded England as a cold and wet cash-cow. By victories and defeats in war he was celebrated from the sixteeenth-century as the exemplary Englishman. As the Irish proverb goes, he called a spade a spade.

What else could they, the mediocre of his time, do but lock him up and silence him in a dungeon in Austria?