Tea at Trianon: Catholicism, Science and Meridian Lines

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, December 2, 2016

Catholicism, Science and Meridian Lines

This is an interesting article, except for the part on Galileo. The Church did not persecute Galileo for heresy; rather he was penalized for disobedience. Faith and science have never been antithetical; one of the oldest observatories is at the Vatican. From Atlas Obscura:

Easter, a Christian holiday commemorating Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead, is defined not only by Church liturgy but also by astronomical circumstance. As specified by the First Council of Nicaea, Easter is not a straightforward anniversary, always recurring on the same date from now until eternity. Instead, it is to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox—an occasion already laden with astronomical significance. The equinox, after all, is a day when time is split equally into 12 hours each of light and darkness, of illumination and obscurity.

The stakes of getting the date right were unusually high, Heilbron writes. If the faithful were to worship Easter on the wrong Sunday, out of sync with the rest of Christendom, then their very souls could be at risk. This was not merely an academic concern: at the height of the Church’s calendar problem, in the second half of the 16th century, the eastern Church and the western Church were an incredible ten days out of sync with one another. This was only reconciled in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII implemented what has become known as the Gregorian calendar reform.

Gregorian reform eliminated, at a stroke and literally overnight, ten entire days from the western European calendar. People going to bed on October 4th, 1582, when the reform was implemented, would have woken up the next morning to find it was October 15th. Although this disorienting reform was intended specifically to put the calendar back on track for reaching the next spring equinox on March 21st, March 21st is not always the true, astronomical spring equinox. To determine exactly when the equinox would be, in the future—and, thus, when Easter should properly be celebrated—a more subtle and astronomically precise tool of measurement was required. A meridian line. (Read more.)