Tea at Trianon: The Good is Always Useful

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

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

The Good is Always Useful

From Seton Magazine:

Arguing that “the good is always useful,” Newman explains that anything that is “beautiful, perfect, admirable, and noble in itself…must be useful to the possessor and all around him” but not always in terms of tangible results or sudden noticeable benefits such as a job or higher salary

To Newman “useful” means real gains and improvements that transcend quantification and calculation. Unlike a train, car, or computer, the value of goodness “is not useful in any low, mechanical, mercantile sense, but as diffusing good, or as a blessing, or a gift, or power, or a treasure.”

Thus goodness always serves a practical purpose, reaps benefits, enriches human lives, and improves the world. It produces effects and aftereffects that Newman compares to the spreading, diffusing, and communicating of light, joy, and love.

The good is useful because of its discharge. Like a child’s play that produces joy, a person’s contemplation of beauty that evokes wonder, the pleasure of friendship that offers companionship, or the delight of singing that lifts the heart, goodness—like liberal education—brings immediate and far-reaching blessings:

Good is not only good, but reproductive of good; this is one of its attributes; nothing is excellent, beautiful, perfect, desirable for its own sake, but it overflows, and spreads the likeness of itself all around it. Good is prolific…. A great good will impart great good…. I say then, if a liberal education be good, it must necessarily be useful too.
(Read more.)