Honor

Continuing with my article about the Nine Noble Virtues in Heathenry, I will next explore the third virtue, honor. I think it’s a fair estimate, that when most people think about the virtues of Heathens past and present, honor is as commonly thought of as courage – certainly the Romanticists of the late 18th – early 20th centuries held a similar view, one that was often mixed with the pseudo-racist idea of a noble savage. But what is honor, and where does it come from? My short description for it, that it wasn’t about reputation, that it was instead about worth and integrity, seems to have raised some eyebrows and I think that’s a good starting point for this attempt at exploring the virtue….

In the corpus of Heathen lore that’s been left to us, and even in modern dictionaries, it seems that honor and reputation go hand-in-hand. We are told in Hávamál that a well-earned reputation will long outlast us (stanzas 77 and 78), and it would seem from reading any of the heroic tales in our lore that our heroes were quite preoccupied with their good reputations – indeed, contemporary Heathens are no different, as we continue with the Heathen tradition of Sumbel, and strive to maintain our own reputations. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary gives as its first definition for honor the following:

honor: 1 a : good name or public esteem : REPUTATION

This perspective of honor is external in nature, it reflects the honor that others see or understand to be possessed by an individual, and is of vital importance in social settings. It is also most likely the definition our forebears would have understood it to be, having equated the word with concepts of glory and renown. However, reputation is at best a reflection of one’s internal honor – at worst, a reputation can be falsely inflated or slandered so that it does not accurately reflect one’s true honor. It is primarily for this reason that my interpretation of the virtue of honor is more internally focused, and more in accordance with this definition of honor:

honor: 8 a : a keen sense of ethical conduct : INTEGRITY

Without a sense of ethical conduct, without integrity, honor as I see it couldn’t exist. As a sense of ethical conduct, the virtue of honor is the main point of the Nine Noble Virtues (NNV), as the NNV guide us to being honorable people. Honor can also be said to be the virtue that binds the NNV together. But how is this so – how is it known what is and what isn’t honorable? Who decides? The simple answer to this is that everyone decides on what is and what is not honorable. We each, on an individual level, determine and live by our own codes of ethical and honorable conduct – and how these personal codes fit with what our communities consider as honorable traits or conduct determines how honorable our communities determine us to be. Integrity and worth are two words I use in my description of the virtue of honor. Worth is in this case, by necessity, determined by one’s community or society. Your code of self-governance, your sense of honor, is what determines your worth to those around you – seen this way, it adds a new perspective on the word, values. Your integrity is determined by how strongly you hold yourself to your own ethical compass. So again we see that honor is something that weaves its way among the individual and society. For those who are versed in Heathen lore, this should remind us of something else that weaves its way among individuals and society – and one’s honor is indeed closely bound with one’s Wyrd and Ørlög (described briefly in this post about the Heathen afterlife).

It should be noted that honorable and lawful are not always synonymous – a famous example of this is the hero of legend, Robin Hood, who became a symbol of honor and heroism by openly defying the law. In my own mind (and I suspect in the minds of most other contemporary Heathens), those Heathens of old, who stood in defiance of their kings when ordered to abandon our gods and convert to Christianity, are honorable heroes … but would they have thoughts of themselves the same way? Oddly, a number of characters and people we regard as heroic have a common trait for preferring honor over law, when forced to make a choice or when law fails. This last scenario brings us to the purpose of honor – it is a form of self-governance that exists so governance-by-law doesn’t have to, or in situations where enforcement of the law is either unlikely or unwanted. It’s for this reason that honor can show up in some unlikely places, like criminal gangs or, as the old saying goes, among thieves.

As with the previous virtues of courage and truth, honor can be carried too far. It’s possible to get lost in one’s own sense of honor, so that one is blind to all other aspects of life in some sort of nobility complex that – rather than enabling him or her to better serve society – causes the person to lose touch with humanity. This state of being overproud takes place at the internal level. When the obsession over external honor and reputation is taken out of proportion, the result is someone who will stump around, looking for any excuse to defend or prove his or her honor. As something that is determined as much by society as it is by the individual, one must also keep in mind that what was honorable a thousand years ago may not be honorable in today’s society … especially with the afore-mentioned emphasis today in societies of law. We walk perhaps a more delicate balance than did our forebears … honor is still every bit as necessary, but the sheer volume of laws nowadays would likely have staggered our ancestors in shock. The change in society’s emphasis from external honor, to internal honor, is another reason why my own approach is more internally focused – if I were to stubbornly set out on a quest for glory and renown in a society that saw such a quest as being one of arrogance, the name I would achieve for myself would not be a good one. As such, a balance between external and internal honor must be struck.

Something else to remember about honor is that it’s one of only two virtues of the NNV that, without modification, can be used as either a verb or a noun. To honor, then, means to show respect for someone or something else (to honor the gods during our holy tides, for example, or to honor our ancestors); and without the ability or will to honor others, honor fails as a virtue. In some ways, then, honor requires humility – not the groveling on our knees, servitude kind of humility, but the kind of humility that makes us aware that there are things greater than us, and enables us to defer, and give these things the respect that they are due. To me, that honor is able to bind such seemingly contradictory concepts as pride, humility, individual, and community is one of the things that makes it truly singular among virtues; and I welcome the challenge of trying to capture the spirit of elder and contemporary concepts of this virtue. In closing, I leave you with this quote, from Walter Lippmann:

“He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.”