Tea at Trianon: The Golden Calf

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, June 30, 2015

The Golden Calf

From Catholic World Report:

Pope Francis, in Lumen Fidei, refers to the famous account of the Golden Calf, noting that one reason idols are attractive is because they are “the work of our hands” and that before an idol “there is no risk that we will be called to abandon our security”. And:

Idols exist, we begin to see, as a pretext for setting ourselves at the centre of reality and worshiping the work of our own hands. Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life-story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth. Those who choose not to put their trust in God must hear the din of countless idols crying out: "Put your trust in me!"

Among the idols of our age are false autonomy, disordered liberty, and false freedom. The rotten fruits are all around us: greed and lust, contraception and abortion, fornication and adultery, pride and homosexuality. These reflect a multiplicity of desires, each promising freedom while never delivering on the promise, for our deepest desire can only be satisfied by and in God. And so satisfaction is sought in consumption, in having, in possessing, and in even trying to remake ourselves and our natures into something they are not and cannot be.

“When people become self-centred and self-enclosed,” says Francis in his new encyclical, “their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality.” This comes in the context of physical goods, but also applies to personal relationships. Once a disordered desire—for a thing, for a person, for an act—becomes the center of our lives, we must make everything else stand behind it and bow before it. When something or someone in God's creation becomes the center of our life and the focus of our passions, we must turn against God himself; in short, we become insane. Even though we can, by reason, recognize God's “eternal power and deity”, as the Apostle Paul told the Roman Christians, those who pursue lusts and impurity refuse to honor or worship him. “Claiming to be wise,” he states, “they became fools...” (Read more.)