On Defenders of the West: How Courage Defends Civilization
Rhetoric, at its highest form, is creation, the coordination of will into industry, as the heroes of the Second World War, Bill Knudsen and Henry Kaiser, proved. Yet what we build must also be held fast against those who would seek to destroy it. So, can the art of rhetoric defend civilization as effectively as it builds it? When faced with existential threat, as the peoples of Europe once were in 1099, can ancient persuasion still apply? Can it still save the world?
Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke and Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, answers that question. Formed by the classical appeals–ethos, pathos, logos, kairos–he transfigured faith into command. By fusing word with deed, he tempered both Christian courage and the very conscience of kings to come.
Before Jerusalem, there was the bear. As William of Tyre recounts, Godfrey once met a great man-eating beast that had been terrorizing the Dorylaean countryside. Upon hearing the cries of a peasant under attack, he turned his steed and charged, sword blazing. When the creature turned from its prey and fixed its narrow eyes upon him, it rose up, roaring with all the fury of Tartarus itself. Godfrey seized his moment and struck.
The bear dodged, lunged, and pinned him beneath its massive weight, sinking its fangs into his neck. Though bloodied and half-dead, Godfrey refused to yield. In a final effort he drove his sword through the creature’s heart and collapsed under it, victorious but near death. Soon the story spread across Christendom, not as mere legend, but as a living emblem. As historian Raymond Ibrahim observes, it became an image of dominion over the brutal; man’s command of nature through courage ordered by reason.
Godfrey mastered the beast because he had first mastered himself. The tale became a prophecy. For the man who conquered the bear would later command men not by domination, but through demonstrated self-mastery. Years later, as the Crusader host reached Jerusalem, that same calm resolve returned and infected all who encountered it like a benevolent virus. His men were sun-scorched, snake-bit, diseased, and wounded. Yet they pressed on.
At Antioch, Ibrahim writes, the knights were “bristling with arrows like porcupines,” scaling siege towers cobbled from the shattered remnants of their own carts and wagons. Even the women, one chronicle records, “dared to assume arms and fought beyond their strength.” At their center rode Godfrey, quiet, unadorned, unafraid.
Before Jerusalem, he prayed for the assault and led it himself, setting his ladder against the wall and climbing first. He was seen high in his tower, arrows jutting from his armor, loosing shafts of his own with the same unbroken rhythm that had driven his sword into the bear’s heart. When the Holy City fell to the defenders, the army unanimously called for his coronation. He refused. “I will not wear a crown of gold,” he said, “where my Savior wore thorns.”
That refusal was more than humility. It was the consummation of discipline. Godfrey’s strength was governed by faith in the Truth. As he once slew the beast without losing command of himself, so he conquered Jerusalem without losing reverence for Heaven. In that union, ferocity ruled by virtue, action directed by belief, glimmered the archetype of Christian courage: the sword and the word bound as one.
Godfrey’s courage was not a brute reflex; it was rhetoric in action. Persuasion made flesh, words made visible. His authority required no declaration. When others swore oaths, Godfrey simply stood and his men followed. He embodied Cicero’s maxim: “No man can be eloquent who is not first a good man.” His virtue spoke before he did, and his silence sealed it.
Where others were caught in chaos, Godfrey orchestrated order. His leadership bore Euclidean precision: every motion measured, every act subordinated to purpose. Aristotle taught that courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness; Godfrey lived that balance with divine symmetry, bold yet never rash, resolute yet never ruthless.
Even the siege tower itself became an argument of ordered conviction, rising plank by plank from the wreckage of their own wagons, a structure of belief assembled through disciplined labor. Through it, every crusader who fell carved his way to Heaven.
The army’s exhaustion became its bond. Like the farmer who burns the field to separate wheat from chaff, disease and hunger stripped away all lesser motives until only belief remained. They did not fight because victory was certain; they fought because Godfrey’s composure made despair unthinkable. Marcus Aurelius counseled, “If it is endurable, then endure it.” Godfrey’s restraint was a living rhetoric of endurance, a discipline that fortified all who saw him.
Each of his defining acts was timed with providential rhythm, the stroke that felled the bear, the arrows that found their marks, the refusal of the crown. He knew, as Cicero taught, that eloquence lives in the moment, the marriage of opportunity and preparation. Edmund Burke would later lament, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.” Yet in Godfrey’s age, chivalry was a kairos made visible; the courage to act precisely when words alone will not suffice.
Thus, Godfrey’s courage became the bridge between chaos and order. The necessary link between the builders who create abundance and the governors who codify law. Kaiser and Knudsen showed the power of progress; Godfrey’s defense gave that progress purpose.
But what of us? The heirs of abundance who have forgotten what to defend? We defend nothing because we no longer believe that anything is worth defending. Our age praises awareness months but despises conviction, calling it “toxic” and stuffing the dissenting mouths with the suffix, "-phobic". We drift, eloquent for nothing and potent in nothing.
Thus Augustine’s warning is apt, “Courage without justice is the lever of wickedness,” yet justice without courage is mere theory. We have justice on our lips but not in our legs. We speak endlessly of “values,” but no longer value speech with a price.
Again, aptly, Plutarch wrote, “The voice of an unprincipled man is the ruin of cities.” Ours is an age surrounded by such silicon voices, smooth, data-fed, untested. They charm without commanding, persuade without purpose, and promise us no peril. Peace, peace they say to us when there is no peace. Modernity risks neither life nor livelihood for its words; thus its words ring hollow. Having divorced word from deed, it finds its deeds dead.
Chesterton once said, “Living things move upstream.” In our time, few even rise to the dignity of the river stone that resists the current. At least the stone is not easily swayed. We are the dead leaf instead, brittle, drifting, carried by every minor movement, neither standing nor falling.
Rhetoric rots where there is nothing to risk. Conviction dies where there is no cost. The builders of the industrial age taught that deliberative rhetoric produces abundance. The defenders of the West taught that epideictic rhetoric produces endurance. The governors of eras yet to come will teach that judicial rhetoric produces law.
Walls are built so that order may thrive within them. Swords make space for scrolls, they do not replace them. Every civilization must pass through a forge: the builder’s vision, the defender’s trial, and the governor’s rule.
We speak often of progress but seldom of preservation. Yet what is not defended is not valued, and what is not valued cannot last. The ancients knew this instinctively. Their courage was not ornamental but custodial. They fought not for conquest, but for continuity, for that sacred garden where culture, faith, and law grows.
To the modern leader, the lesson is clear: defend what you’ve built not out of fear it may be taken, but with the courage that knows it must endure. Let your discipline persuade. Let your restraint lead. True defense is not defiance but durability, a quiet force that holds form when the world dissolves.
Godfrey’s sword was not a monument of gore but an instrument of order. His courage was not born of destruction but of preservation, not for Homeric glory, but for the endurance of the good. The defenders of the West raised walls not to revel in war but to restore justice. They understood that progress without purpose ends in ruin, and boldness without discipline is rashness.
Every civilization is built twice, first by its builders, then by its defenders. One gives it shape; the other gives it permanence.
The sword’s true legacy is not the strife it inflicts, but the peace it protects.
Just as Godfrey forged belief into action to defend what mattered, so must we temper our convictions with our deeds, letting courage and discipline unite to shape, preserve, and rule the world.
Sources:
- William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea
- Raymond Ibrahim, Defenders of the West
- Augustine of Hippo, The City of God
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- Cicero, De Oratore
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
- Plutarch, Moralia