Tea at Trianon: A Light in the East

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, April 1, 2019

A Light in the East

From Joseph Pearce at the Imaginative Conservative:

Last year saw the passing of Fr. Peter Milward, an old and valued friend, who was a boon and a blessing in multifarious ways. For those who don’t know of this English Jesuit and scholar, a brief biographical sketch might prove helpful.

Fr. Milward studied under C.S. Lewis at Oxford in the early 1950s and also heard J.R.R. Tolkien lecture. Graduating in 1954, he departed for a new life in Japan as a professor at the Jesuit University of Sophia in Tokyo, remaining in Japan until his death more than sixty years later. He is best known as an indefatigable Shakespeare scholar, showing in his work the evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism, most notably in Shakespeare’s Religious Background, an influential and groundbreaking study, published in 1973, and in later works, such as The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (1997) and Shakespeare the Papist (2005), the last of which I was honoured to publish when serving as editor-in-chief of Sapientia Press. He was also a leading scholar of the work of the poet and fellow Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I was also honoured, in 2005, to oversee the publication of his book A Lifetime with Hopkins.

It is, however, his authorship of another book, My Idea of a University in Japan, which will be of particular interest to those who are interested in authentic education. This slim volume, published by the Hokuseido Press in Tokyo, is virtually unknown in the West, which is a crying shame considering the wisdom that it contains. Each of its sixteen brief chapters asks an axiomatic question, which Fr. Milward then answers with succinct and sagacious brilliance: What is a University? What is Education? What is Culture? What is Religion? What is Knowledge? What is Wisdom? What is Philosophy? What is Science? What is Literature? What is Language? What is Art? What is Nature? What is Law? What is Music? What is World? What is Home? (Read more.)