Tea at Trianon: Privatizing Religion

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, July 5, 2014

Privatizing Religion

A Conservative Blog for Peace examines the appeal of schism for those traumatized by the culture war. To quote:

A wrongheaded reason I got involved in Byzantine Christianity over 20 years ago, apart from being acquainted about 10 years earlier with fine culturally conservative Ukrainian Catholic exiles from WWII, was the pose of being too cool for the culture wars including life issues such as abortion; have your traditional Catholicism and try to be accepted by the mainstream by dropping out and making your religion a purely private matter, an accessory as one blogger has put it. Just drop the hated Pope. Like the forced compromises in Communist countries: Russian Orthodoxy and the schismatic Chinese Catholics. (You can be as high-church as you want as long as the state calls the shots.) The best lies are mostly true: there's a point about seeing the culture wars objectively without falling into the mistakes of the mainstream right as well as the left; the church has a worldview different from both. Contra libertarians, liberty is a means, not an end. But, I still think, the church's doctrine is about the ends, of flourishing and justice, not the means; it's apolitical. (Monarchy? Republic? Dictatorship? We can work with all of them.) For all the good in it, is the pro-life movement a Novus Ordo substitute for Catholic culture that doesn't stop abortion?

In America (as in the rest of the Western world except Russia with its empire, nukes, and European natural-gas monopoly), Orthodoxy is small so it's non-threatening and considered cute, plus you have exoticism (Orientalism) - "diversity," liberal leapfrogging loyalties - arguably working for you: it goes along with the status quo and, like Westernized Buddhism the beatniks liked, you can market it as more mystalicious (as I think Modestinus once put it) than boring old Latin Catholicism. Mainstream liberal America, culturally Protestant: anything but Rome (still) and anything but pre-Sixties America. My guess is the few hipsterdox buy into that. Another half-truth. Byzantine liturgy, etc., has a unique mystical kick, but as the late Fr. Serge (Keleher), a born Roman Riter turned Russian Orthodox priest turned Russian Catholic priest, said, that is entirely Catholic. (Read more.)