Tea at Trianon: Virtue Over Victimhood

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, September 25, 2020

Virtue Over Victimhood

From Crisis:

The urban aspirants who come to Victory Home, a Woodson-sponsored center in San Antonio, Texas, are like the Old Testament Jacob who struggled with an angel in the dark night. They might be limping, but they’re not paralyzed. They sign on to its program because they want to be like the center’s leader, Freddie Garcia, and its resident councilor, Juan Rivera. They want to kick their debilitating addictive habits for good. To move the needle in that direction, immediately after their detox process, these enrollees begin the discipline of acquiring the virtue of temperance. How? By acting temperately—abstaining from drugs and alcohol—time and time again until, in time, it becomes a settled disposition, a second nature, as it is for Freddie and Juan. Both are able to readily activate the good habit of temperance every time it’s needed.

Those who come to them are “boot campers.” They want the same freedom Freddie and Juan have, the freedom to control their desire for drugs and alcohol rather than let their intemperate desire control them.

As the virtue of temperance helps them integrate their basic bodily desires for food, drink, drugs, and sex into the realm of reason, these aspiring young adults don’t just acquire the virtue of temperance. They simultaneously acquire its virtue correlates: the courage to be temperate, the prudence to choose rightly in respect to addictive substances, and the justice to render what they owe their families, their neighbors, and God. Armed with the powers of these natural virtues, these young men and women begin to enjoy the goods of life, health, truth, and community, the basic human goods that shape their overall character and enhance their freedom for moral excellence. (Read more.)