Tea at Trianon: Marriage and Mysticism

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, May 20, 2014

Marriage and Mysticism

From Fr. Angelo:

We are not all called to have visions. Not all true visionaries are holy and visions don’t make anyone holy. But we are all called to an intimate communion with God, which is the holiness that only God can work in us and which is the primary vocation of all men. Sometimes God uses extraordinary charisms to confirm the presence of holiness in a saint, as he did with the stigmata in St. Francis and Padre Pio, but the presence of charisms prove nothing if they are not accompanied by heroic virtue. Balaam was a true prophet of God, for example, but he was an utterly wicked man....

Furthermore, while it is true that the right use of all the Sacraments, including Matrimony contribute to our intimate communion with God, it would be a mistake to suggest that the use of Holy Matrimony is somehow singularly mystical. The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony itself, its whole reality including the use of it, is a great mystery, because of its reference to Christ and His Church (Eph 5:32; here the Greek mysterion is rendered in the Latin sacramentum). But if from all this one concludes that sex in the context of Holy Matrimony, even as it is experienced by saintly couples, is a uniquely instrumental in the mystical life, say perhaps even more than reception of the Sacrament of Penance, then one is veering very close to the kind of sex mysticism practiced by the pagans. In fact, sex mysticism is a particular hallmark of both historical paganism and today’s neopaganism. So the ambiguous use of word “mysticism” in this context can create a great deal of confusion, as indeed it has. (Read more.)