Tea at Trianon: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

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

Monday, March 4, 2019

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

From Dr. Joseph Pearce:

Considering the unity of faith and reason, it should come as no surprise that the Church has been a major contributor to the progress of the physical sciences throughout the centuries. Nicolaus Copernicus, the founder of modern astronomy, was a Third Order Dominican; Basil Valentine, one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry, was a Benedictine monk; Thomas Linacre, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, was a priest; Athanasius Kircher, a pioneer in diverse scientific disciplines including microbiology, astronomy, and physics, was a Jesuit; Nicolas Steno, a pioneering anatomist and the father of geology and stratigraphy, was a convert to Catholicism who became a priest and, as a bishop, a leading figure in the counter-reformation; René Just Haüy, the pioneering mineralogist and father of crystallography, was a Premonstratensian and honorary canon of Notre Dame cathedral; and Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was an Augustinian monk. Such a procession of scientists, all of whom were priests or in holy orders, constitutes a veritable scientific eminenti and illustrissimi. Apart from nailing the lie that the Church has been an enemy of scientific progress, this litany of great Catholic scientists illustrates that science is standing on the shoulders of faith as well as reason. (Read more.)