When the shepherd’s weak, the wolf shits wool.
~Guèrin, “Bèrenger of the Long Arse” (translated from the 13th Century French)
The line above delivers a flippant and thus poignant moral to one of literature’s most outrageous depictions of the battle between the sexes. Afraid of work and even more so of his wife, the oafish husband ends the story outsmarted and humiliated. The weak man’s wife steps into the masculine void, pretending to be a knight named Bèrenger, and forces her husband to, quite literally, kiss the titular arse. The concluding epigram references his failures as a husband and the debacles of a society in which weak leaders allow the wolf to prey with impunity. For an American audience, the title might be better translated as “Bèrenger of the Long Asshole,” referring not to a general anatomical region but “exactly in the middle, if you please.” The story hinges on the origins and precise meaning of this moniker for a fake knight, as discussed in detail below. The name Bèrenger of the Long Arse simultaneously mocks chivalry and those who fail its standards of honor and strength. Depicting the results of social collapse on macro and micro levels, from the economy to the bedroom, the story becomes more relevant today than during the 13th Century. Weak men and women run the 21st Century, and now the wolf brazenly shits wool.
Summary
“Bèrenger” falls into a genre that flourished in 13th-Century France called fabliau, a corpus of irreverent, bawdy tales told in verse, featuring sexual and scatological humor at the expense of avaricious churchmen, cuckolded husbands, and other symbols of vocational botchery. The story presumably circulated in multiple oral and written forms, but only two known copies survive. In this article, I quote from the better-known version attributed to a fabliau writer named Guèrin, using a contemporary English translation available here.
The story begins with a nobleman marrying his daughter to the son of a churlish usurer to cancel a debt he cannot repay. The marriage elevates the lazy son to knighthood, an office for which he lacks all preparation and interest. Unamused with his boorishness and her general lot in life, the noble woman fruitlessly struggles to motivate the husband to become worthy of his new title (and his wife).
By labelling the father of the newly knighted peasant as a usurer, Guèrin instantly clues in the audience to his moral and cultural vacuity. The marriage is thus not only ill-suited but unjust. Only a social breakdown would produce such a union. Harshly condemned throughout Christendom until the spread of Protestantism, the practice of usury signifies an egregious rejection of social norms. Today, the concept of interest on credit is so pervasive that we might struggle to imagine our economy without it, but the usurer was a pariah of Medieval society. Usury was considered not only uncharitable but also irrational because the money lender sells something that nobody can possess, an abstraction of value conjured purely by the loan’s arbitrary terms. The husband’s father thus distorts the role of money beyond its rightful place in society, just as his agreement with the nobleman perverts the institute of marriage.
For the first ten years of marriage, the new knight aggravates his hapless wife by lazing around, ignoring the demands of chivalry. “He loved pressing a mattress better / Than wielding a shield or a lance.” Fed up, she tells him tales of the chivalrous knights in her family and their daring adventures. To prove himself worthy, the husband dresses in armor and rides off into the nearest forest. Out of sight, he hangs his shield on a tree, striking it with his weapons to fake the wear and tear of battle. He rides home to his wife, showing off his battered armor, declaring, “There is no one in your family so bold / Or so daring as I am.” He repeats this process daily, each time bragging of his gallant victories. Noticing that the husband, unlike his armor, never returns harmed, nor even fatigued, the wife dresses as a knight and secretly follows him into the forest. Witnessing his method of deception, she becomes enraged, charging her horse toward him, threatening to kill him (still dressed in armor). Failing to recognize her voice, mistaking her for a real knight, the husband begs for pity:
“Sire,” he said, “for the mercy of God,
If I have done you wrong in any way,
I will make it up to you without argument;
Willingly — as much as you want —
I will give you riches and money.”
The usurer’s son understands the leverage of money, not the virtues of knighthood. The wife gives him a choice: fight to the death or “come and kiss my arse, / Exactly in the middle, if you please.” Without hesitation, the husband chooses the latter; the wife dismounts, drops trow, and bends over, instructing the cowardly husband where to place his lips. Looking at his wife’s exposed bottom, the man mistakes the vulva and anus for one continuous “crevice,” remarking to himself that he had “never before seen so long an arse.” Since the story makes no mention of children n, the husband’s ignorance of female biology suggests the marriage remains unconsummated after 10 years. Or perhaps whatever sexual activity did transpire lacked the level of intimacy that would familiarize the husband with the appearance of his wife’s sexual organs. His inexperience with female anatomy underscores his thoroughgoing ignorance of his wife, including her nobility. He will never know anything beyond his loutishness.
The husband bestows a “hearty kiss,” and Guèrin states that the wife had “brought him to what he deserved.” As the wife turns around, the man begs to know the name of the knight who bested him without battle. “[T]hen you can leave here entirely satisfied.” The wife declares, “I am called Bèrenger of the Long Arse, / Who puts all cowards to shame.”
The wife then rides home and invites a real knight into her bed. Upon returning home to find his wife in bed with another man, the husband threatens her. The wife calmly tells the husband to shut up, lest she tell the world of his cowardice, for she has met his “dear friend […] Lord Bèrenger / Of the Long Arse, who will put you to shame.” Henceforth, she does as she pleases, and the husband bears his shame. The tale then quickly wraps up with the epigram quoted above.
A tale of a weak man and an angry woman
The battle between the husband and wife seems familiar yet grotesquely exaggerated and distorted. If you were to update the setting to a contemporary US city, the husband and wife would resemble the clichés of sitcom couples: he slumps onto the sofa with a beer, while she urges him to do more. His loutishness causes problems for everyone; her patience and wisdom fixes everything. The situation varies with each episode, but the resolution remains the same. The tension eases when the husband yields to the wife. This dynamic is nothing new in life or literature. Perhaps the most famous exasperated literary wife and her hesitant husband appear in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Frustrated with her husband’s irresolution, Lady MacBeth declares, “Infirm of purpose! / Hand me the daggers” (Macbeth Act 2, Scene 2, lines 49–50). As G. K. Chesterton observes, with a few words changed, this scene between the murderous Macbeths could easily describe a suburban breakfast table: “Infirm of purpose, hand me the postage stamps.” Other examples abound. The patterns are undeniable. Even with strong marriages in healthy societies, these struggles would undoubtedly play out between the sexes.
Yet Guèrin never suggests that this marriage represents anything typical or merely hyperbolic but a divergence from the norm. The woman does not symbolize normal femininity, nor does the man embody masculinity. Rather, the woman becomes masculine, or at least a stereotype of it; the man becomes feminized, at least in the sense of meek. Although their actions may include stereotypes expected of men and women, they both violate the norms because their lives are disordered, to great comedic effect.
Somehow, this marvelously unwholesome story has largely escaped the attention of feminists and red-pillers alike, even though it centers upon a woman filling roles traditionally limited to men (and it was written in those dark times before Wi-Fi or even the Enlightenment). You will find little written about it from the usual critical perspectives. I am happy to fix this oversight. Everyone should read this story and repeat its epigram frequently throughout the day: “When the shepherd’s weak, the wolf shits wool.” It explains much about contemporary life and raises conundrums that exceed the interpretive powers of silly prevailing theories like radical feminism and red-pillism.
The woman’s sexual liberation at the end might epitomize the feminist utopia or dystopia, depending on your dogmas. The husband’s life is a horror story fit to rally the men’s rights activists. He is emasculated, even before marriage, utterly subjugated after. Radical feminists and red-pillers, however, would both misunderstand the true horrors at the heart of the story, too caught up in their narcissistic resentments, wrapped up in their own brands of weakness. In a weak, confused society, the battle of the sexes escalates into a cold war in which both sides weaponize shame, with immeasurable collateral damage.
The weak shepherd
The epigram’s obvious biblical allusions make clear that the putrid marriage is a microcosm for social decay, which stems from spiritual (or at least moral) rot. As Guèrin counted on his audience to remember, the medieval church called everyone to follow the one true shepherd and to avoid wolves in shepherd’s clothing, despite rampant corruption among the burgeoning clerical professions. Writing firmly in the fabliau tradition, Guèrin knew his audience would recognize the stock figures that lampooned those who failed in their duties as protectors: cuckolded husbands, avaricious priests, and other common symbols of perverted authority. The usurer’s son shirks his responsibilities as a husband and knight. His usurious father and his debt-ridden father-in-law had both failed in their roles, leading to the unharmonious union. The marital disfunction reflects the societal crises that produced the marriage in the first place. The shepherd within the epigram references all the individuals and institutions whose weakness engendered suffering, including the Monarchy and the Church, which had failed to curtail the practices of usury, indulgence, and other social acids. The weakness is foremost psychic and spiritual, before it can be familial, social, and political.
The wolf
The wolf can never change. It preys upon the weakest target in sight without fail. But unlike a real wolf, the metaphorical predator need never rest, especially when the shepherd’s weakness remains unremittent. No matter how you interpret the wolf — metaphysically or politically, psychologically or sociologically — it shits metaphorical wool of one type or another, through the negligence of those called to be shepherds (every adult). We all have metaphorical sheep and weaknesses aplenty. Yet for some, weakness is not a collection of momentary lapses but a lifestyle. Guèrin wastes no words describing physical strength or weakness, only spiritual and mental. Presumably, the wife is far smaller than the husband but easily bests the cowardly churl. Guèrin sets up the epigram to encompass all varieties of spiritual weakness, making physicality irrelevant.
Spiritual weakness is a recursive pattern that remains consistent at each stratum, from the individual mind to society, like a Sierpiński triangle, whose pattern of nested equilateral triangles looks the same at any level of magnification. Differing in magnitude but never in kind, spiritual weakness defines both the industrious usurer and his lazy son. The father brings disorderedness to the market, the son to the home.
The piles of wool
Today, our self-appointed shepherds mask their lunatic timidity as altruism, practicality, and progressiveness. The shepherds and wolves are in cahoots. The shepherds allow men into women’s locker rooms in the name of inclusivity, praising men with makeup as “stunning and brave.” Our colleges are riddled with “safe spaces” to shield fragile psyches from imaginary threats, while our leaders resolutely disregard the safety of the truly vulnerable.
Weak judges turn the law against lawfulness and order against orderliness, freeing criminals and persecuting those who hold ideals of justice. Those entrusted to serve the law attend to the lawless ambitions of the ruling class. Police officers arrest peaceful protesters at abortion clinics, while standing clear of “mostly peaceful protests,” enabling criminals to loot and burn down businesses, vandalize churches, and terrorize law-abiding citizens. Not all or even most cops are corrupt, but the average police officer in a major American city is powerless to uphold true law and order, by design of our weak leaders. Illegal immigrants flood across non-existent borders. When a nation’s leaders have no concern for their constituents, nor respect for their borders, neither do criminals, who traffic drugs and humans between countries with impunity.
Dumping billions into an escalating proxy war, our weak leaders ignore a flywheel of crises at home: inflation, crime, depression, addiction, homelessness, suicide, and more momentum added by the minute. Dispensing pills for every problem, our therapeutic culture now suffers an epidemic of highly concentrated synthetic street drugs. Addicts shuffle like zombies through cities of tents and tarps.
Doctors turn from “health” to “wellbeing” as the benchmark of medicine, prioritizing mental health over life. When wellbeing — a protean amalgamation of current physical health, happiness, and long-term outlook — becomes impractical to achieve, the patient now has access to the universal cure of every malady: death. Under such euphemisms as MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), doctors in Canada now offer death to cure cancer, depression, and other ills. After its initial soft launch for terminally ill patients, MAID continues to roll out for more conditions and consumer categories. “Mature minors” can at last “die with dignity.” Once dismissed as a right-wing spook story, euthanasia is legally available in over 10 countries. In some cases, doctor-assisted suicide may be prescribed simply for unbearable suffering (the affliction of every suicidal person). Eliminating pain is now more important than treating the underlying causes, many of which have no cures or palliatives.
Today, when mental health trumps every medical concern, doctors often let patients provide their own unquestioned diagnoses. When a patient says, “My pain is too great, and the only cure is death,” the doctor now agrees. When a young boy states, “I am a girl, I am transgender,” the doctor confirms the diagnosis. Rather than protecting kids from dysmorphia and dysphoria, therapists now affirm their delusions, rushing them to the pharmacy and the surgeon’s table. The doctors thus perpetuate the gaslighting of abusive narcissistic parents who press their children into “transgender identities,” rather than guiding them out of childhood confusion. “Your mind is trapped in the wrong body,” the parents say, and a chorus of false shepherds joins the refrain. “There’s nothing wrong with your mind — you’re perfect just the way you are,” the teachers exclaim; “the doctors will fix your body.” The doctors echo the teachers and parents: “You are transgender. We have pills, vocal therapy, and surgeries to make your body match your mind.” Anyone who stands up for the confused child is a bigot, a transphobe. The grownups collude to produce the perfect child for a weak society: sterile, permanently dependent on drugs to contravene the body’s natural processes, isolated from society, immobilized with confusion, apathetic toward life.
Now life itself is the primary disease our experts seek to cure. Carbon — a rare element on earth’s surface but essential to every living cell — is the villain of the great climate crisis narrative. Carbon comprises less than 1% of the Earth’s lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere (the crust, water, and air available to normal human activities), yet the climate experts constantly decry this one chemical. We must reach Carbon Zero by 2030 or other arbitrary milestone, or all life will perish, they insist. When the climate cultists talk about reducing carbon, they are talking about human life. As the popular T-shirt suggests, “You are the carbon they want to reduce.” Among many other false shepherds, Bill Gates promises to lead us through the desert of existential despair. If only we had dramatically fewer people, he preaches, we would all reach the promised land. In his TED talk and numerous other speaking engagements, Gates enthusiastically prophesizes population reduction. Too weak to affirm the beauty of life, Gates peddles death with the PR gloss of “philanthropy.” He promotes “reproductive health” initiatives to alleviate poverty by reducing the number of poor people, primarily in non-white countries.
A weak, confused culture prefers death to pain. Weak leaders bring nothing but decay and pain, so the demand for death rises exponentially under their authoritarianism. The weak fear the autonomy of liberty, seeking absolute control, imposing the death-in-life of bureaucracy on every aspect of human affairs. When weak leaders become the majority, their legacy is mass death, as we learned a century ago with two World Wars, though the lessons go unheeded as our nations shuffle toward WWIII.
Too many shepherds without strength
In an age that prefers politics to metaphysics, uncomfortable with God and godlessness alike, this story’s concluding epigram brilliantly encapsulates the current malaise with the broadest type of appeal. Though we no longer understand authority, nobody can ignore the dynamics of power in our world, particularly the abuses of aggregated strength. We all understand the metaphor of the shepherd. Many readers would apply the epigram as a purely secular rubric for political action, thereby demonstrating its larger truth that spiritual infirmity expands in a recursive pattern through all domains of life. Those who only analyze power from a secular standpoint would criticize weak leaders, while ignoring the true causes of our ongoing crises, which go beyond any inept politician.
Turning away from (normative) religions, we seek guidance not from local clerics but from international experts. We don’t suffer a lack of shepherds but a surplus, most of them timid and duplicitous. More to the point, we endure near-constant exposure to a few experts, who monopolize public discourse through our ever-present smartphones and social media apps, setting the talking points, speaking through their partisan mouthpieces 24/7. Branded as our shepherd of health, Anthony Fauci stepped forward to lead an uncertain nation through a pandemic he helped create, through fear mongering if not through gain-of-function research. His media sycophants waxed on about his health, dedication to fitness, and his tireless commitment to public wellness — surefire signs of spiritual weakness. Every time he spoke, millions faithfully, obediently repeated the good news to their friends, family, and colleagues. He appeared on our screens, urging us to trust the science rather than the unreliable faculties of thought. Weak leaders impose rules to replace virtue. Though many of the changes under Fauci, like mask mandates and lockdowns, seemed unprecedented, he is the norm rather than the exception, following the authoritarian patterns of bureaucracy. Fauci and other COVIDians radically changed our world by sticking to politics as usual.
Bureaucrats run our world because we let them. In the 21st Century, we have too many shepherds, too little authority. The weak prefer appeasement to confrontation and bow before that form of cowardice which understands only power and rejects all true authority: authoritarianism. We are all called to be shepherds of our own souls, but we prefer bureaucracy to responsibility.
An epigram for the post-truth age
The weak fear truth. In a republic of weak citizens, the democratic process serves as public appeasement, a sham to keep unelected bureaucrats installed behind the scenes. The concept of voter fraud becomes meaningless — an election cannot be stolen from a citizenry with no interest in ownership. We get what we are too afraid to ask for: bureaucratic control. We get an Anthony Fauci to guide us through the plague, a Bill Gates to save us from the climate apocalypse, an expert to solve every dilemma for us. Freed from the burdens of thought, we get a mumbling president who tells us, with WWIII looming, that the only thing we have to fear is white supremacy.
Never has so weak a man had such sway as Joe Biden now enjoys (to the extent that he knows where he is and why at any given moment). Sleepy Joe, surely history’s most inept international crime boss, is the leader our country deserves. Intellectually vacuous long before he went senile, Biden is a president fit for a confused, apathetic citizenry. He surrounds himself with gender crusaders and other enemies of human nature. Each day brings new absurdities presented as progress. With the Biden administration, press conferences no longer require the deft artistry of dishonesty expected from politics; it is all paint-by-numbers with the realism of Dali and the precision of Pollock. It’s all performative, without any standards of artistry. Like pornography, contemporary political theater does not need to be convincing, merely close enough to sustain the fantasy. To the extent that it carries out the functions prescribed within the Constitution, the executive branch runs with the ethos, though not the efficiency, of organized crime, persecuting enemies of the administrative state, while real crime escalates. Any institution that exhibits strength, like the Supreme Court, comes under instant attack.
Like our major institutions, the smallest unit of self-sustaining government — the family — is also in crisis, under siege from no-fault divorce, pornography, welfare, and many other enemies of happiness. The political and familial breakdowns are simultaneous and compounding. We have weak governments because we have failing families and vice versa.
Criticizing weakness is not a desperate cry for someone to take charge, not an invitation to authoritarianism, which opposes family and all means of creation, whether we label it Leftist, Right-Wing, or anything else. We each must find strength to protect everything worth preserving.
A world of spiritual rot
Guèrin formulates the epigram with the immutability of a law: when the shepherd’s weak, the wolf will always shit wool, with 100% predictability. Neither sanctimonious nor iconoclastic, Guèrin is not overtly religious but not wholly secular. To be sure, Guèrin has no interest in sermonizing, only laughing at other people’s silliness and pain. A writer of fabliaux couldn’t let religion or irreligiousness stand in the way of a good joke. Yet the epigram clearly broadens the story beyond a failed marriage and the social ramifications of matrimony. Guèrin makes us laugh at our own spiritual infirmity. Those who insist on secular interpretations could even take “spiritual” to mean a moral vision that encompasses the individual within a transcendent order, free of any theological connotations. Either way, the husband suffers a spiritual death-in-life, and his slothfulness reflects broader patterns of decay, exceeding mere maladies of flesh and mind.
The story promises no happily-ever-after, even for the wife with her newfound freedom, because nothing has changed to eliminate the spiritual rot. The wolf, presumably, will go on shitting proverbial wool. None of the underlying causes have changed. The reader gets a good laugh at the husband’s expense, and the story ends. The fabliau shines the same stark light on our own era of smartphones and post-truth media, reminding us that, unless we cure our acedia and rediscover reasons to be strong, the wolf will continue shitting wool right in front of us.
