Tea at Trianon: Can Beauty Save The World?

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, June 5, 2020

Can Beauty Save The World?

From Voyage Comics:

“At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.”
(The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo at Rivendell, pg. 233)
Power of Beauty
This passage from The Lord of the Rings displays the capacity of Beauty (in particular beautiful music) to lift us out of ourselves into the Eternal. In this example, Frodo is enchanted and feels as if he has been transported to another realm. Beauty has the ability to take us out of ourselves, out of the mundane reality of life, into a place beyond ourselves. In a culture that continually tries to make us believe there is nothing beyond the confines of this world, Beauty has a particular role in leading us to our true home of Heaven. For Saint Augustine, Beauty had the added power to change a person. In his own life, his experience of Beauty eventually led him to break away from his past life of sin and to start anew,

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old, and so new: late have I loved you. And see you were within, and I was in the external world and sought for you there. I was deformed, drowning in those fair forms you made. […] You called. You shouted. You battered my deafness. You shone. You glistened. You shattered my blindness. You radiated and I breathed in your spirit, and I desired you. I tasted you and hungered, thirsted after you. You touched me and I burned for your peace.”
St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 201.
Power of Music
In particular, Augustine affirms the role that beautiful music has in leading us to the Eternal,

“Music, that is the science or the sense of proper modulation, is likewise given by God’s generosity to mortals having rational souls in order to lead them to higher things.”
Epis. 161. De origine animae hominis, 1, 2; PL XXXIII, 725.
It is a gift given to Men and one that is more powerful than mere words. Speaking about the power of music over simple recitation of words, he says,

“I feel that our souls are moved to the ardor of piety by the sacred words more piously and powerfully when these words are sung than when they are not sung, and that all the affections of our soul in their variety have modes of their own in song and chant by which they are stirred up by an indescribable and secret sympathy.”
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, chap. 33, MPL, XXXII, 799ff.
Augustine’s writing about the power of music seems to echo Frodo’s experience in Rivendell and shows that beautiful music has a particular capacity to change something within us and lead us to God. (Read more.)