Tea at Trianon: Weeping Icons

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

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Weeping Icons

From Mystagogy:

Reports have circulated in the media that dozens of icons in Ukraine and Russia have suddenly started weeping in light of recent tensions between the two countries. However, the video news report circulated (above) was posted on September 27, 2013. Therefore, this phenomenon actually took place on the eve before the unrest that came to Ukraine, which began in November 2013 and escalated in January 2014. Since this video was posted by the actual news station, it is assumed the report was in fact made in late September 2013.

It thus appears that in September dozens of icons began weeping in Ukraine and Russia in various parishes and monasteries. The people wondered at the time what kind of heavenly sign this was, since signs like this have often taken place in history on the eve of large-scale disasters, such as, for example, the Russian Revolution of 1917. Due to the more recent revolutionary activity in Ukraine, it is interpreted now that this phenomenon is associated with it. (Read more.)