The Paladin and the King

A look at two related, yet separate, archetype patterns.

Some time ago, I was asked what defined the Paladin archetype, particularly compared to the Prince or King archetypes. While I did my best to explain my reasoning in the comments, I acknowledged there that I needed to do the subject greater justice at a later date. The problem was finding time for it.

Then this article appeared in my Wordpress reader, and the Almighty Himself dropped what I needed in my lap. (Thank You, as always!)

It might be prudent for you to read the Catholic Stand piece before reading my article, but if you choose to keep going, please consider reading it after the fact. I lean heavily on Mr. Jerome German’s thoughts and other linked pieces to make my point, so you may have to do a lot of extra reading to keep up.

Ready? All right, then.

The paragraphs in Mr. German’s article that caused this piece to coalesce were these:

The question before us is simple: What are the attributes of God? If we are created in the image and likeness of God, are not the best of human attributes a reflection of the Creator?

This is the crux of Christianity. Is love, real love, even possible without allowing ourselves to be vulnerable? Is real love not daring, even reckless? Indeed, if love is real, it is offered without regard to consequence. How would a pure-spirit God give us an example of love given without regard to consequence? How? By having a prophet show us? Seriously? A God of love with no vulnerability? No skin in the game?

Is vulnerability not that line in the sand between affection and love; between sentimentality and reality? If so, then it is the ultimate measure of ultimate love. It is proof of an ultimate reality.

The problem with Jesus is that he is too real. He has gouges in his hands and feet. He bleeds from his side. He has thorn marks on his head. He has spit on his face. He’s dirty and sweaty and smells like a dungeon. He is reckless. To us, he is vulnerable to a flaw. But the flaw is not his.

The problem with Jesus is that he is God, and the problem with God is that he is love, and the problem with love is that it is vulnerable, and the problem with vulnerability is that it scares us. It’s not safe, and therefore, never popular.

BAM! That hit me right between the eyes.

If you have not spent a fair amount of time in Marvel fan circles, you might have missed the fact that Captain America/Steve Rogers is not considered interesting by a fair number of people. Even some of us who love him tend to miss certain parts of his character, and as Professor Geek has mentioned elsewhere, he’s not easy for writers to bring to life.

Why is this? That goes back to not only Mr. German’s piece, but Rick Stump’s article on Don’t Split the Party: Cap is a Paladin.

And Paladins are inherently vulnerable.

Per Mr. Stump, who gives us a good description of what a Paladin in Dungeons and Dragons actually is: “When a paladin rides into town evil people should be scared. Of course, the paladin also knows that he is the #1 target of every miscreant, cultist, and were rat [wererat] in his vicinity.”

“The Paladin is the #1 target” of every evil person in town. Why? Because his innate goodness - which Mr. Stump goes to great pains to point out does not make him stupid, weak, a moralistic busybody, or a pushover - puts them all on notice. Mr. Stump characterizes Paladins as “implacable, driven killing machine(s)”; this means everything evil in their vicinity is their rightful prey. They’re the tigers let loose among the wolves: Big, powerful, dominant apex predators who can rip the smaller, conniving canines to shreds.

Perhaps the Paladin won’t kill someone evil, but that threat of potential death will have EVERY villain within sight or earshot of him bristling in self-preservative defensiveness. Because they know this guy CAN kill them if he sees fit to do so, and that he’s driven and powerful enough that they either won’t walk away from a fight with him, or they will wish he had killed them once they manage to take him down after he has maimed them seriously or for life.

I went into some of this in the “Nice Guys” post on my site with regard to Steve Rogers/Captain America. Cap is the man who puts his life, soul, and body on the line regularly for what he believes is right. The man who will not budge when the whole world tells him to move even a little to the left or right. As the Paladins of old, when he’s told to move, Steve tells the world, “You first.”

And yet, for all that, he is vulnerable. He is at home with his weakness and the weakness of others. He knows what it is to be powerless, what it means to be small and defenseless. At a multitude of points in his character history and in the MCU, he lets his guard down and joins others in their weakness in an effort to support and then lift them out of it. That makes him a Paladin.

In turn, per the Catholic Stand article, it makes him and the Paladin archetype itself Christ-like figures.

“But how can a Paladin be vulnerable if he’s so powerful?” Remember how the Paladin is an instant target the minute someone or something evil recognizes him? Recall, too, that Natasha has to teach Steve how to blend in and hide in a crowd. He stands out like a beacon in the dark, as all Paladins do, because they naturally seek God. The closer one gets to God, the more difficult it is to hide the growing relationship he has with Him. Saints like Padre Pio were surrounded by the sweet scent of flowers all the time. They were also always recognized by devils on sight, as was Our Lord, Who commanded them to silence to prevent them from revealing His Identity to the world before it was time for His Identity to be fully recognized.

So if a Paladin sticks out like a glowing sore thumb, anyone with him is as much a target for evil as he is himself. An episode of The Librarians has the devil (played by John de Lancie) say to the disguised Galahad: “It would be a coup to get your soul.” Evil doesn’t just want Paladins dead. Dead is nice. Broken and reduced to the same level as the demon is preferable.

The best way to break someone and bring them down to the devil’s level is to hurt someone they care about and/or cut them off from God, which means that those closest to a Paladin are automatically vulnerable in a way that few other companions to a variety of heroic archetypes are. Just look at what happens to the people closest to Cap in the comics and the movies: Bucky is turned into a brainwashed assassin; Sharon Carter has to die, go undercover, get resurrected and/or be revealed to actually be alive repeatedly, while the Falcon has to watch Steve run the risk of breaking himself as “the people who shoot at [Steve]” shoot at him, too.

And these are the three people closest to Steve Rogers. Not many of the Avengers fare much better, from time to time, than they do. Hawkeye and Iron Man can and do both get it in the neck sometimes because they follow Steve closely even when they don’t want to or he drives them crazy.

As a Christ-like figure, a Paladin has to be ready to bleed. He has to be ready to be crucified for what and Who he believes in. He has to be reckless with his person, his sanity, even his very soul. At no point can he flinch back from the altar of sacrifice if it seems he is called to climb it. He must follow where his Master trod, and that means he must follow him to the Cross. Or the Stone Table, if you prefer the Narnian imagery.

In short, he must, “Love God with his whole heart, his whole soul, his whole mind, and his whole strength.” At the same time, he must also, “Love his neighbor as himself.” Nothing less than this total self-sacrifice or the willingness and readiness to offer himself as an oblation to God for love of Him and his fellow man will do.

This means, of course, that the Paladin must always live in the present or “in the moment.” He cannot be focused on the past - the past is not coming back. The future will soon be the present. “What does it profit a man,” the Lord said, “if he gaineth the whole world but suffer the loss of his soul?” By remaining in the past, mentally if not physically, one ignores the present, preferring something that he cannot affect or alter to something he can Right Now. To zero in on or pant after a future that will soon be the present is to miss the moment in which one lives now.

God is in the past, present, and future, but He sees things not as His creatures do. The explanation I heard was that, to Him, all of history is as a closed book. That is, He sees everything as now. In the present, because He is the present. And those who live in the present while attending to Him are therefore living fully and in union with Him. Thus a Paladin may admire and draw strength from the past while looking hopefully at the future (especially as regards children, who will someday have a present without him in it), but his focus is inherently directed to God and the moment He made. “Here I am!” the Paladin says. “Send me!”

Mr. German elaborates on this point more explicitly than I can here, but he’s not wrong to say superheroes are Christ-like. Some are just more blatantly Christ-like than others, and that is why Steve Rogers bothers so many fans. He is a Paladin - a naturally Christ-like hero. He reminds us of the fact that God doesn’t call us to safety and comfort but to battle and deprivation. To pain, marginalization, asceticism (of one type or another), and being “outside” the Can’t We All Sing Kumbaya And Make Peace On Earth Ourselves Club - a club which easily gets distracted by the past and/or the future.

It is dirty work living in the present and saying “Here I am. Send me!” It is hard. It leaves you scarred, wounded, bleeding, and crying in the mud, wondering more than once what the hell you did wrong even if you’re going in the right direction. What if all the pain isn’t worth it? What if you suffered all this for nothing? What if you actually made a mistake and wasted your life? What if, what if, what if…?

What if is a demon. So are Coulda, Woulda, and Shoulda. Paladins know this and respond accordingly. They are here to not only remind us of our duty but to encourage us. To be with us in our weakness and lift us out of it, so we can reach higher than we did before. To stand with us in our present and help us murmur, “Here I am. Send me.”

Still, it is uncomfortable. It will always be uncomfortable. And thus, Paladins will always be mocked, belittled, called stupid or boring or moralistic nags who won’t shut up and go away already. They will be accused of living in the past when they are the ones staring a present problem in the face, trying to get others to see and admit that it is there waiting to eat them. “It’s hard to light a candle/Easier to curse the dark instead,” as the song says. Some would rather curse the dark than try to strike a match, light a candle, or keep the candle they do have lit. Why fight when lying down and dying is so much less work, to paraphrase Sloth from Fullmetal Alchemist?

Paladins aren’t popular with their antitheses. They are not meant to be so. Rather, they are intended to be popular, but it is a perverse popularity in a society that dismisses or otherwise belittles them so that those who are “in the club” who would rather not feel inadequate, uncomfortable, or bestir themselves to do things they would really rather not do. Those who would rather wither and fade away than grow up will remain the acorns and always detest those who keep growing like the great oaks they become and are meant to be. The Paladin, as the greatest oak among the lesser trees and brush, will be the one the club of acorns wish to feel the bite of the woodsman’s axe the most.

Now for the King archetype.

In the comments in “Nice Guys,” I pointed out that a king cannot risk his person the way that a Paladin can. A prince has more leeway, particularly if there is a Spare to the Heir, but if he is the sole recipient of the throne, then things get dicey.

From a straight archetypal perspective, a King has as little movement as the king in chess. He is the most powerful piece on the board, but that fact means you cannot afford to lose him. You CANNOT let him be put in checkmate - not unless you have the means to break him out of that lock, or have an Heir to take his place. (Blending items, I know, but bear with me here.) He has to stay home and do the executive work of his office, as well as act the part of judge on occasion. He has to put his seal on laws or have them amended, sign treaties, and otherwise manage the day-to-day affairs of the kingdom (unless he over-relies on one of his courtiers to do it, as the Sultan does in Disney’s Aladdin, or unless he is a fop or a fool, in which case you have to hope there’s a decent courtier running things for him…).

More than that, though, he has to do the humanly impossible. He has to try to predict the future. This means he has to lay in stores against famine while his courtiers say, “Hey, the harvest was great! Let’s eat more!” - and they may be right, as there may not be a famine next year. But if they are wrong and eat through the stores, then they will go hungry next year and perhaps the year after that, so the King must weigh the present against the potential future.

Then the King has to think about his neighbors and try to sift through rumors to find the truth: Are they really building up an army for an attack? Do they really have a new type of siege engine that moves under its own power? Is the neighboring king’s daughter really that ugly and/or nasty? How likely is it that this new diplomat is angling to kidnap the queen or the princes? Or is he just a fop with an overdeveloped sense of self-importance?

The King also has to worry about the next generation. Is his son sickly? Can he have a son? If he only has daughters, that could cause serious problems because his nephew is a proud, snot-nosed jerk and he’s next in line for the throne. He can’t let one of his precious daughters get married off to a man like that even if it does keep the kingdom in the family….

But if he never has a son or no neighboring kingdom’s prince of eligible character appears, that might just be what the King has to do to preserve his kingdom. Thus a King can never rest easy in the present. He must always be ready to conciliate and/or compromise to “stave off something worse” even if “worse” never appears. The present is not and cannot be his focus. The future must be his main concern, because someday he won’t be there to manage it. His heirs will have to do it, and he wants them to have as easy a time of it as possible.

In Arthurian legend, Arthur is remanded to the rear as time goes on. This isn’t because he is less interesting than his knights but because, after the days of the warrior kings, it became more than a little taboo for a king to risk his person on the field of battle. Even jousts were a bad idea - just ask Henry the Second of France, who received the splinter of an opponent’s lance through his eye. It took him ten days to die following that sad misadventure.

This isn’t to say there weren’t kings and princes who led charges into battle. King John III Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna by leading the Winged Hussars down on the Turks, forcing them to abandon their attack on the city, which was on the verge of being taken. (Hmm. Maybe that’s where P.M. Griffin got her idea for her story in Flight of Vengeance.) For many kings and many battles, however, the idea was to NOT charge into the fight at the head of the army and get killed. You present a very good target in the lead, so even if God miraculously spares you from being grievously wounded or killed and it boosts morale, it still tends to be a bad idea. The King was typically commanding from the rear as often as his courtiers, generals, and advisors could keep him there, which was most of the time. Why?

Because they couldn’t afford to lose him.

So in a word, the King cannot be vulnerable. He must be closed off from his subjects; separate and apart, above them in every sense of the word. This is to protect his person so that he may in turn protect them by remaining in office, but it has some severe downsides.

Let me explain. A King must necessarily be insulated from his subjects. That means that he is less likely to know what they really need, want, or what is best for them in the present than if he mingled with them directly or had some way of actually seeing or experiencing similar things to them. Warrior kings and royals such as Sobieski had the advantage of sharing food and foxholes with their men, even if their victuals and tent were better than the rest of their soldiers’. They were still on the march, on horseback all day, in the heat and the cold. Their food might have been better, but it was still pretty rotten. Moreover, they and their soldiers got to watch each other at work, so they got to know each other even through the invisible wall that status forced between them.

Other kings, not so much. John the First (and only) was notoriously capricious and downright nasty, to say nothing of lecherous, while Charles the Ninth of France was nuts. The isolation of the royal family and particularly the King/Heir means there is a disconnect between the people and the King. It also means that if the King loses his mind somehow, becomes emotionally compromised, is given bad information purposefully by subordinate(s) who isolate him further from everyone else, or gets “stubborn” about enforcing his will when he really, really should not, then things are going to get messy fast.

In the Bible, at the end of the book of Judges, the people of Israel demand a king so they can be like other nations. Samuel, their current (and last) Judge - a leader raised up for the people by God Himself - tells them on God’s behalf, “No, you really don’t want that. The Judges are your leaders, you have to trust God to send them to you.” But the people want to be like the other nations - to be with the “in-crowd.” So they keep asking and God finally says, “Okay, but remember, you asked for it.”

He appoints Saul their new king, and Saul flubs the job. So God raises up David, a “man after” His Own Heart. David is a great king - until he spots Bathsheba bathing. Then he commits adultery with her, has her husband killed, and God has to send the prophet Nathan to him to not only tell him off, but to prophesy all the pain that will spring from this sin of the king. David’s sons war with and kill each other, so he has to promise Bathsheba that their son Solomon will become the next king. Solomon’s initial reign is great due to the wisdom he asks of God, but it all falls to ruin when this - the wisest man history has ever seen - abandons his gift and leads Israel into idolatry, whereafter more troubles plague the nation.

Aesop’s Fables contains a similar story: In the fable of “King Log and King Stork,” the frogs of a pond beg the god Zeus for a king. So Zeus sends them a Log. The frogs are ecstatic until they realize that the Log does nothing. Then they demand a “real” king.

So Zeus sends them a Stork, which begins eating the frogs. The surviving frogs ask Zeus why he did this and he reminds them that they asked for a king. He gave them a log and they weren’t satisfied, so he sent them a stork, and they still aren’t satisfied. Maybe they shouldn’t have asked for a king in the first place and just gone merrily on their way? Or at least been content with a “king” that left them alone to their own lives.

This is where Tony Stark, who fits a modern form of the King archetype, comes in. As stated in the comments in “Nice Guys,” Tony can count as a King archetype due to his position as a business tycoon. In the MCU, he might actually better fit the foppish prince forced by circumstance to straighten up and fly right after his father dies and leaves the kingdom in his hands version of the archetype.

From this it follows that Tony can’t allow himself to be vulnerable. Not to the degree that Steve can, as he has the duty to hold his kingdom in trust. It is all very well for the Paladin to go hang on the Cross or worry about little things, but for a human King? Yeah, no, that doesn’t end well for the kingdom. When the king is distracted and/or killed and all his house with him, the dynasty - and sometimes the kingdom itself - dies. In the comics and most other media, Tony cannot put his life and body on the line to the extent that Steve can. He is not that much of a Christ-like figure, in the comics or the films.

Moreover, the MCU and some other media add extra complexity to his character that wasn’t present in the original stories. Remember Charles the Ninth of France and John the First of England? They are extremes, but when you consider that most princes and future kings are raised in environments where their word is law to habituate them to their future role (and because who dares discipline the son of the king the way he would his own boy?), you automatically have an environment where it is VERY easy for vice to grow. Tony had everything handed to him on a silver platter and, outside of his parents’ discipline, no one would dare to tell him “no.” He also actively had people trying to curry favor with him (see an example of this after his speech at MIT in Civil War) once he reached the age of majority and probably before that as well.

It’s not surprising he went off the rails after his parents died to “avoid processing [his] grief” and tried to fill his life with hedonistic pleasures. He had had little to no training in actual social responsibilities or responsibility in general. Remember his “I don’t like to be handed things”? That means he didn’t want to be given responsibility. He would take something he wanted - most often by purchasing it, or having a one-night stand with a willing woman - but accept something given specifically to him to care for in trust? Uh, nope! “I’m not the responsible type, clearly,” he says in the finale of Iron Man. Not until he has to learn the hard way that his refusal to accept the responsibilities handed on to him by his father and others has severe, personal consequences.

Thus, when reality slaps Tony Stark upside the head in a somewhat similar manner to the way it did John the First at Runnymede, Tony has the ability to learn from and amend his mistake (before you ask, no, John didn’t accept the memo). But this comes with a cost, and that is the fact that Tony never reached emotional maturity. He doesn’t like being vulnerable because he associates it with failure, with weakness. Failure means imperfection and, like a King who has never learned humility or how to accept chastisement, Tony absolutely rebels at the idea that he can at all be wrong about anything.

Kings can’t be imperfect. Well, they can - they’re human, after all. It comes with the territory. But they cannot afford the appearance, indication, or semblance of weakness. A weak king is a king who is at risk of losing his throne and his kingdom.

John knew this in his life and it is why depictions of him in fiction show him desperately clinging to whatever fig leaf of legitimacy and strength he can scramble to project. Likewise, Tony is always trying to appear tough, to behave as though whatever has hit him emotionally hasn’t actually hurt him. If he doesn’t project an image of strength he risks losing it all permanently.

Human kings are always at risk, in history and in fiction, of assassination. Betrayal lurks around every corner. Their courtiers are always after them for favors, for promotions, for gifts and special attention. At few, if any, points in their lives can kings afford to be vulnerable. Even their wives could be the death of them. Nero’s mother poisoned his stepfather, the Emperor of Rome, to get her son on the throne. And like Charles the Ninth, Nero was crazy. Caligula was worse but that doesn’t exactly absolve Nero of his insanity.

So the isolation of a King means he is always at risk of (a) losing contact with the people he is meant to protect and serve, and (b) possibly growing in vice due to his word being automatic law, or losing his mind due to being surrounded daily by predators and leeches looking to advance themselves at his expense. To say this takes a toll on a man is an understatement; it’s not surprising so many hereditary rulers have lost their minds. What is amazing is that any of them were even halfway sane due to the environment in which they were raised (or not raised, depending on the investment or lack thereof from their parents and/or how much of a presence said parents were in their lives).

MCU Tony is a product of this type of environment. With a distant father (or a father he willfully distanced himself from - either interpretation could fit the films’ thin portrayal of Howard Stark) and a mother who couldn’t (or didn’t) discipline him and had no help from his father, it’s no surprise that Tony has issues being vulnerable. Maria Stark was probably one of the few people he felt comfortable being vulnerable with, and of his three closest friends, it is Pepper he trusts with his greatest secrets. Not Happy Hogan, his chauffeur and bodyguard. Not Rhodey, who he knows right away in the first Iron Man movie is the one who told Stane about the arc reactor in his chest.

Of his “courtiers,” therefore, Tony trusts Stane least, Rhodey second least. Happy he trusts to a much greater degree since he is Tony’s bodyguard and driver, but he reserves his most fervent and complete trust for Pepper alone. Furthermore, since he is new to the world of discomfort and deprivation, he treats these things as curable items. In essence, he makes the age-old mistake of thinking Humans Can Fix The World. So when Thunderbolt Ross comes to the team in Civil War with a proposal to Fix The World that Tony feels he broke worse in his own attempts to repair it, he desperately seizes on it as a Last Ditch Effort. A Hail Mary Pass into the endzone.

And then the Paladin steps in his way and quietly reminds him, as a beloved and loving friend, “This isn’t going to work. Earth isn’t our ultimate home. Every time people try to stop a war before it starts, innocent people die. Every time.”

This is why the King Archetype has more appeal for audiences than the Paladin Archetype. It gives people the illusory sense that This World Is Fixable. That We Can Bring About Utopia With The Right Person In Charge.

It isn’t. It can’t be. Not by us. Not by mere humans. For the world to be perfectible at all requires a Higher Power to step in.

Luckily, He already has.

I haven’t exactly been kind to the King Archetype, have I? Well, that’s because I’ve been talking about the purely human King Archetype. Humans are fallen creatures. We can’t fix the world. Millennia of trying - and the last century or so in particular - has proven that when we try, all we do is pile up bodies. Every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die. Mankind is incapable of fixing itself and, therefore, the world in which he finds himself. Only by turning to and constantly relying on God can any meaningful change come about, and that’s a consistent, every-minute-of-the-day task that requires constant effort and the will to be always in the present with The Presence.

But what of Christ-like King Archetypes such as Aslan and Aragorn? First, of the two, Aslan is the unique one. Aragorn still holds to the human, whereas Aslan is notably not human. He is the Great Lion, the Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea. He is like to His creation in Narnia and yet apart from it.

Thus, in this respect, Aslan is more directly analogous to the God-Man, Jesus Christ, the Messiah and Savior of the world. For whether you believe in Him or not, the fact remains that Christ claimed to be God, and God by nature is entirely different from His creation. He stoops down to us and takes our nature, as Aslan takes the nature of the lion, but only the Hypostatic Union makes this possible at all. Otherwise, Christ’s divine nature would annihilate His human nature.

Aragorn is a Christ-like figure but his is not a direct allegory. Tolkien didn’t want him to be. Rather, Aragorn is more of a saintly king in the vein of Edward the Confessor of England or Louis the Ninth of France. Saintly kings in this world are rarer than good or even great kings, for the reasons listed above. Their environment, described previously, isn’t exactly conducive in any case to sanity and hardly to sainthood. It is not impossible - nothing is with God - but it remains statistically unlikely.

Right out of the gate, therefore, Aragorn is an anomaly. He is even an anomaly among his fellow royals, Eomer and Theoden. They are good men and good kings yet neither of them are saints or as saintly as Aragorn. Part of this is due to the fact that he has been raised in a far healthier environment than even they have been, being fostered first by Elrond and then spending most of his adult life toiling in the wilds for others.

That makes him far sharper and better able to spot traps than even a man like Theoden, who is accustomed to dealing with lying and conniving courtiers. Wormtongue’s poison for Theoden’s ears wouldn’t have worked if he couldn’t get close to the king in the first place. That means Theoden trusted him - to a point - long before Wormtongue proved himself false, just as Tony trusted Obadiah Stane to a degree before the latter revealed himself as an enemy. This trust in Wormtongue cost Theoden his son, led to the despair and near death of his beloved niece, and caused no end of trials for Rohan and its people. The Iron Man film does a pretty good job of showing what Tony lost and nearly lost due to trusting Stane even as little as he did.

Finally, Aragorn is mortal. The character who dies and comes back in the trilogy is Gandalf, not Elessar the Elfstone. Of the three most Christ-like figures in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo fails at the last moment in his appointed task. Aragorn does not fail but he also doesn’t die and get sent back to finish his mission, either. When he dies, it is permanent, and Arwen Undomiel gives up her life a year later out of intense grief.

Gandalf - the incarnate Maiar - is the most directly Christ-like figure in the narrative.

For a Christ-like figure to be a human king in toto is impossible. No human king has ever come back from the dead, nor will he. No human king has beyond human powers, as Canute is reported to have shown the soothsayer who told him the very earth obeyed him because of his greatness as king. Tony Stark gives up his life in Endgame only after he has sired a daughter, ensuring that his “kingdom” has an heir.

Cap should never have been sent back in time to live through seventy years into the present, because doing so means he ran away from the actual present to remain in a past he COULD NOT change. That is anathema to the Paladin archetype in it’s entirety and it should not have happened in the story, as even martyrs do not go back into the past; they go into the eternal now. Living in the present with one’s eye on the Almighty forbids such a retreat and it is a shameful stain on the studio’s name that they forced this ending on Steve Rogers and the MCU.

If you want a Christ-like King Archetype rather than a purely human (even a pure, saintly human) King Archetype, then you have to give him two natures: One mortal, one divine. Essentially, you have to permanently join the Paladin and King Archetypes together in one person and demonstrate that by a heroic sacrifice that renews everyone and everything, as Aslan and Gandalf’s sacrifices do. For most uses of each separate archetype, that kind of union is utterly impossible to achieve because a human king cannot afford to be a martyr and a human martyr cannot afford to be a king. Not unless his entire nation is sacrificed with him, of course, and doing that means he has failed in his duty as king.

This is why God becoming man is “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” A King-Martyr who doesn’t lose, destroy, or diminish his kingdom? God above becoming man, the Creator Himself taking on imperfect human nature? IMPOSSIBLE! All of human history and revelation stands against it!

“For men it is impossible,” the Lord said, “but with God, all things are possible.”

God is King of the Universe by right of creating it in the first place. He is at once above and beyond us, but He loves us with a passionate, ravishing love so deep it is terrifying. “An ant has no quarrel with a boot,” yet what is an ant such as man to God? What is man that God should attend to him at all? He is but a creature, a creation, lesser by far than his Maker and “a little lower than” the angels.

Yet God became the Paladin-King, the God-Man, for mankind’s sake. He died an excruciating death on the most ignominious instrument known to humanity even now and did not lose His kingdom, for His kingdom is not of this world. He set the pattern for all future martyrs and left the door open for all future kings to find their way out of the natural cesspit they must be raised in so they could get out and find Him. It is mind-boggling. It breaks some people’s minds if they face it, for they feel their smallness and weakness and don’t wish to countenance it, as Dean Koontz points out in his novel Sole Survivor.

“There is no fear in love” - indeed, there is not! And why should we be afraid? What have we to fear? Has not the God-Man, King of the Universe and yet also our Eldest Brother, cleared the way for us? What is deprivation, pain, even the agony of loneliness and forever being shunned compared with this immeasurable and incomprehensible gift?!

Blessed be the Name of the Lord! Jesus, I trust in You! My Lord and My GOD. My King and my Paladin, lead on! Viva Cristo Rey! In Nomine Patri, et Filio, et Spiritu Sanctu, Amen!

The Paladin and the King are separate in most of human history and fiction. But God entered our nature, our world, and He left us stories in His parables. He blessed not only reality but fiction.

Fear not, therefore, either the Paladin or the King. Simply recognize that, unless you want to tell a story that is a direct homage to the Almighty’s, you are going to have to keep them separate. Unless you have your own Middle-earth or Narnia in mind, trying to combine these two natures in purely human characters is not going to work. It can’t. Man cannot become divine by his own will, nature, or intellect. Nero and Caligula, among others, tried that. They died miserable deaths. Man is frail, and his status as a creation and not a CREATOR in the sense of being able to create ex nihilo means - among other things - that he cannot raise himself from death by his own power.

Only ONE can do that, and He made the world, man, and the angels. Whether you believe in Him or not, if you can understand this about these two archetypes, you are ahead of the game and can write them both very well.

So go on out there and do it. The Almighty showed you the way by His parables. He wants to hear you sing the song He put in your heart, for He wouldn’t have given it to you otherwise. Go! Be not afraid!

Psalm 96

¹O sing unto the Lord a new song: sing unto the Lord, all the earth.

² Sing unto the Lord, bless his name; shew forth his salvation from day to day.

³ Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people.

⁴ For the Lord is great, and greatly to be praised: he is to be feared above all gods.

⁵ For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the Lord made the heavens.

⁶ Honour and majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.

⁷ Give unto the Lord, O ye kindreds of the people, give unto the Lord glory and strength.

⁸ Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts.

⁹ O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.

¹⁰ Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.

¹¹ Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof.

¹² Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice

¹³ Before the Lord: for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth: he shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people with his truth.