Tea at Trianon: Alice von Hildebrand, R.I.P.

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

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Alice von Hildebrand, R.I.P.

From Aleteia:

Alice von Hildebrand, a Catholic philosopher who devoted her life to advancing the thought of her late husband, the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, died at her home in New Rochelle, New York, Friday morning. She was 98.
Von Hildebrand, born Alice Jourdain in Brussels, Belgium, on February 11, 1923, had been Dietrich von Hildebrand’s student at Fordham University and later a close collaborator. Two years after the death of von Hildebrand’s first wife, Alice and Dietrich married, in 1959. [The two are pictured in the photo above.]
“We share all the same passions,” she once said. “Shakespeare, art, music, Dante, Italy. When we are particularly happy we speak Italian.”
They settled in New Rochelle, a northern suburb of New York City. Dietrich von Hildebrand died there in 1977. The couple did not have children.
Both Alice and Dietrich were refugees from war-torn Europe. Dietrich’s story of escaping Nazi henchmen who sought to silence him for his strong criticism of Adolph Hitler was dramatically told by Alice in her 2000 biography, The Soul of a Lion: the Life of Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Growing up in Belgium, French was Alice Jourdain’s mother tongue. She wrote that at the age of 11, she discovered Blaise Pascal while taking a course on 17th-century French literature. His Pensées overwhelmed her, especially “with the beauty of his style. [He] awakened in me a profound philosophical interest. I started memorizing many of his most beautiful thoughts, and I recall reciting them over and over again as I walked along the Belgian seashore where my parents had a summer home.”
That idyllic life was brutally interrupted with the May 1940 German invasion of Benelux. At 17, Jourdain set sail for the United States. On the way, a German U-boat threatened to sink her ship. Fortunately, the sub was called off by military superiors, but the close call, she said, focused her attention on questions of eternal destiny. (Read more.)

A last interview. From Crisis:

Kimberly Cook: I am blessed and honored to be at the home of Alice and the late Dietrich von Hildebrand. Both have contributed so much to Catholic philosophy and theology. Alice von Hildebrand is a personal hero to me for her work on the true meaning of femininity. What I wanted to ask you is: what is the main thing that women have gotten wrong in our society, particularly regarding femininity?

Alice von Hildebrand: They have listened to the devil, saying, to be a woman is to be inferior, to be a woman is to be a means of pleasure for men. But they are not respected and understood for what they are. And I simply say, if you read the Bible on your knees (because it’s only on our knees that we can understand it), Eve was created last.

And you will notice that there is a hierarchy. There’s inanimate matter, animate matter, lower animals, higher animals, man, and then comes the woman. She is created last. And when Adam saw her—when she was created, he was put to sleep and he did not see how Eve was taken from his body, and then he woke up and saw her. His response was enchantment, enchantment! Flesh of my flesh—knowing that she has the very same dignity. Now the love between them was something that the devil could not stand, because Satan is hatred and Christian life is love. And so, he tried to pervert it, and to look at her as a means of pleasure and not as a person of equal dignity. It was a very special dignity. (Read more.)