Tea at Trianon: A Syllabus We Should All Be Studying

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, February 21, 2021

A Syllabus We Should All Be Studying

From One Peter Five:

The banishment of religion from civil society and government cannot but darken and eventually extinguish justice and rights, replacing them with egoism, avarice, and violence (§4). The Pope states that the modern opinions mentioned in the encyclical—and, implicitly, those catalogued in the Syllabus—are to be held “reprobated, proscribed, and condemned by all children of the Catholic Church” (§6).

What, specifically, were these opinions? The Syllabus of the Principal Errors of Our Time, to give the document its full title, consists of eighty propositions, divided into ten categories. The first three (“Pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism”; “Moderate rationalism”; “Indifferentism, latitudinarianism”) are predominantly speculative in content, regarding errors about the existence of God and His providence, the divinity of Christ and the truth of Christian revelation, the relationship of faith and reason, and the necessity of the Church for salvation. The seven remaining categories concern chiefly social errors. (Read more.)