Tea at Trianon: A Carthusian Bishop

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

Sunday, September 6, 2020

A Carthusian Bishop

From Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs:

This is how sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs sums up her new painting of St. Hugh of Lincoln, the 12^th century Carthusian monk who was plucked from the obscurity of the Grande Chartreuse to become bishop of Lincoln and advisor to the Plantagenet kings Henry II and Richard Cœur de Lion. Gwyneth designed the painting to capture what she sees as the essence of St. Hugh.

“I think he was essentially a Carthusian monk who would have preferred to remain obscurely at prayer in the monastery, but a monk whose natural talents and fidelity to the divine will led him to the fruitful exercise of high spiritual and temporal authority,” Gwyneth says. In her reading, St. Hugh’s life might be divided into two phases or movements.

First there was the movement toward an ever more radical abandonment of the world to know only “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). After living first in the world, then with his father among Augustinian canons regular, Hugh became a Benedictine novice at fifteen, rising to become prior of a monastery. Soon after, when Hugh was in his thirties, he discovered the Carthusian Order. Founded by St. Bruno in 1084 in a remote Alpine valley, the Order combines the eremitical and the cenobitical versions of monasticism. As a Carthusian choirmonk, Hugh would have lived out the Order’s motto—Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (the Cross stands steady while the world turns)—by singing Matins, Lauds, the conventual Mass, and Vespers in common, and spending the rest of the day alone in his cell praying the Office, meditating, studying, and tending a small garden. (Read more.)