Tea at Trianon: The Virtue of Chastity

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, May 19, 2014

The Virtue of Chastity

From Dr. Esolen writing for Crisis:

Milton understood well that chastity is not the same as abstinence. Indeed, Adam and Eve are chaste, and they do not abstain from the “rites mysterious” of wedded love. What they do is not merely permissible. It is blessed by God. It is holy. That is why, when they enter their bower at night, they enter a sacred place where none of the lowly animals will go, “such was their awe of man.” That is where they go after a day of creative labor, and conversation, and prayer; for theirs is not “casual fruition,” but the consummation of their love as embodied souls made by the God of love. Chastity is the virtue of reverence for sexual being, male and female, both in oneself and in all other persons. (Read more.)