Tea at Trianon: ’Tis the Season to Be Guilty

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

Thursday, December 9, 2021

’Tis the Season to Be Guilty

From Crisis:

I’ve written before that progressivism is a perverted form of secular religion, Puritanism without redemption. Christianity at least offers some means of getting right; Progressivism, with its Rousseauean faith in inexorable progress, the “arc” of a thoroughly immanentized history that forever moves the goal posts of a socially just community, offers 365 days of Good Friday with no Easter in sight.

Reading Stockman’s apologia pro itinere suo, I was reminded of Mark 7:11. Jesus scores His virtue-signaling religious Pharisees for their practice of korban. The Bible demands respect and care for parents (Exodus 20:12; Sirach 3:12-14), but the Pharisees decided that if one declares the money one would otherwise have spent on parents for the Temple, the Biblical injunction was waived. Jesus rejected this subversion of Torah by mere human customs. (Read more.)