The great Hildebrand resolved to lead all Christendom to
Jerusalem, to found on the site of the Holy Sepulchre the divine
kingdom preached by St. Augustine, and invest--a risen Christ--the
emperor and all the kings of the earth with their kingdoms.
The crusader and the knight in quest of the Holy Grail present together
a paradoxical combination of the Christian-ecclesiastical and the
mundane-chivalric spirit, which is quite in harmony with the spirit of
the age. These two worlds, inward strangers, formed--in the Order of the
Knight-Templars, for instance--a union which, while possessing all the
external symbols of chivalry, attributed to it heterogeneous,
ecclesiastical motives; the glory of battle and victory, the caprice of
a beautiful damsel, were no longer to become the mainsprings of doughty
exploits; henceforth the knight fought solely for the glory of God and
the victory of Christianity. In addition to King Arthur's knights, the
classical Middle Ages worshipped the ideal of these priestly warriors
who waded through streams of blood to kneel humbly at the grave of the
Saviour, of those seekers of the Holy Grail who dedicated themselves to
a metaphysical task.
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