Tea at Trianon: Warlords

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Warlords

John Zmirak and his heroes.

Such lofty magnanimity breathed forth from enormous souls like St. Edmund Campion, who earnestly prayed for his Anglican torturers from the scaffold; St. Maria Goretti, who forgave her murderer (and would-be rapist) with her dying breath; St. “Padre” Pio, who patiently endured campaigns of slander that led to his suspension from the public exercise of the priesthood; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose long years in labor camps led him to conversion, and to novels in which he treated even Communist kapos with compassion.

Compared to such spiritual grandeur, the thin-skinned vanity of Achilles, the transgressive glee of Machiavelli, seem petty and adolescent. The pre-Christian “honor” ethos that led so many noblemen to kill or die in duels was not in fact “tougher” or more realistic than the Christian code of humility and patience. Genghis Khan may have left behind more descendants than St. Francis of Assisi, but which one left a better taste in history’s mouth? The pagan love of “glory” that Jesus deconstructed both by word and example gave way to something much more powerfully enduring: a love of the Good for its own sake, despite the hungry urgings of man’s insatiable ego. (Read entire post.)