Tea at Trianon: Ordered Virtue

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, August 29, 2021

Ordered Virtue

From Catholicism:

Revolutionaries love chaos. It’s not that they love disorder for its own sake; they don’t. Disorder is a tool in their toolkit. They want to bring about their own “ordo ab chao” as the Freemasonic motto goes, that is, “order out of chaos.” When they foment the chaos, they can utilize it to subject people to the diabolical order they want. So, too, all revolutionaries. Sexual revolution is a supreme example of this principle, for when people’s venereal appetite has been unleashed from the moral law, they become “chaotic” and therefore highly manipulable, as an excellent book by Dr. E. Michael Jones shows us atgreat historical length.
We do not live in Christendom, but former Christendom. The forces of organized naturalism have been creating a chaos all over former Christendom for centuries. Now, of course, they have established themselves in very high places in the spiritual and temporal spheres of Church and State. We must resist their revolution even if the revolutionaries wear the insignia of high office in either sphere. But in resisting them, we are not ourselves revolutionaries, but counterrevolutionaries, which means that we live within self-imposed (and grace-imposed) parameters of behavior. We are, therefore, to conform our lives to the demands of virtue, even imposing concrete rules upon ourselves that will help us the better to keep the natural and supernatural Divine Law. (Read more.)