Tea at Trianon: The Wood of the Cross

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

Friday, January 29, 2016

The Wood of the Cross

From Catholic Exchange:

The prevailing idea was that the Cross was formed of three or more woods; either that the various parts were made, each from one of the three in that trinity springing from one root or, an idea not consistently followed, that the three woods were amalgamated, forming one trunk, out of which the upright beam was fashioned, thus containing in one beam the qualities of the three plants. And again, this peculiar growth was produced from three seeds containing three properties, although the fruit of one and the same tree.

It is curious to see how the same traditions will last through ages, taken from or added to, until in the last edition the earliest form is unrecognizable. Even Mandeville (fourteenth century) must have had very simple faith in the tradition — by his time much confused — to speak in his travels of a tree that was then lying as a bridge over the Kedron “of which the Cross was made.”

The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) and John Cantacuzenus (c. 1292-1383) both record the idea that the Cross was composed of four kinds of wood: cypress, cedar, pine, and box. Innocent says the upright was of one wood, the transverse beam of another, the title of a third, and that the feet were supported on a projecting step made of a fourth wood. In England a notion existed that the wood was mistletoe, then a tree, but that ever since the Crucifixion it has been but a parasite. The aspen leaf was said to tremble because the Cross was of that wood.

In some parts of England the elder tree is supposed to have been the wood of the Cross, and to the present day some reverend peasants carefully look through their faggots before burning them for fear there should be any of this wood among them. (Read more.)