Tea at Trianon: When the World had Darkened

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

Monday, October 10, 2011

When the World had Darkened

It was pretty bad when St. Benedict's own monks tried to poison him.

Under the leadership of St. Spes, who died in the year 510, one of these communities settled not far from Norcia. It is highly probable that Benedict, who was born around 480, knew these originally Syrian cenobites, who were joined by more and more local inhabitants. Rather than join this community, the young Benedict was first of all sent to Rome for studies. Who knows how the history of the Church and the western world would have developed if he had not been confronted there with the excesses of outright political, moral, and spiritual decline. Firstly, he sought refuge with ascetics in the Sabine Mountains; then he withdrew for several years as a cave dweller; all this, before the call of the monks of Vicovaro befell him, where they wanted him installed as Abbot—and showed themselves to be extremely ungrateful. Because his prescriptions appeared to them to be too strict, they attempted to poison the newly installed Abbot—but the poison, in the form of a snake, escaped from his cup before Benedict was able to drink from it.

Something similar also happened to him with another community in Subiaco, where he led his brother monks on the basis of the strict rule of Pachomius. Perhaps it was these experiences that led him finally to compose his own, balanced “Regula Benedicti”—and in so doing founded Western monasticism and the Benedictine monastic culture. These monasteries were “focal points of the highest culture, of spiritual zeal, of the art of living, of readiness for social action—in a word, a network of centers of highly developed civilization that stood out from the agitated floods of barbarism surrounding them on all sides. St. Benedict is without any doubt the father of Europe. The Benedictines, his sons, are the fathers of European civilization.” (quoted from Grégoire, Moulin, Oursel: Die Kultur der Klöster [The Culture of Monasteries]) (Read entire article.)