Tea at Trianon: Remembering and Misremembering Vatican II

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

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Remembering and Misremembering Vatican II

From Church Life Journal:

In the rich Catholic imaginary of a former age, Dante Alighieri launches his pilgrim into the heights of Paradiso by bolding announcing in the very first canto the theme of this concluding portion of his pilgrimage: “trasumanar” (l. 70)—transformation beyond the human. And the final sublime canto of the entire Commedia poeticizes Dante’s transforming vision of the Trinity. To his astonishment the pilgrim discerns that the second of the revolving circles bears human imprint: “la nostra effîge” (l. 131). The graced destiny of the pilgrim/poet’s transfiguring journey is divinization. And the condition for its possibility is the Ascension of the Incarnate Word.

Seven centuries later, Charles Taylor, in a little noticed retrieval, challenges a secular age to recover a sense of theosis. To move beyond merely human flourishing to that “further greater transformation”[32] that breaks through the constricted and ultimately dehumanizing “immanent frame.” It entails a purification of the spiritual senses that enables one to perceive, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom Taylor invokes in his final chapter “Conversions”) that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” and that “Christ plays in ten thousand places/ lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ to the Father, through the features of men’s faces.”

Christ’s Ascension has definitively broken the bounds of the “immanent frame” and inaugurated the new creation of humanity’s transfiguration in the glory of God. As the Collect for the Mass of the Ascension proclaims: “Christ’s Ascension is our exaltation!” The Ascension brings into bold relief the unique Headship of Jesus Christ and founds the new identity of Christians as members of his body. In a rich and stimulating study on the theology of the Ascension, Douglas Farrow:

The Ascension of Jesus is the act by which God in principle—or rather in Person—completes the formation of man and perfects his image in man. In bearing our humanity home to the Father, Jesus brings human nature as such to its true end and to its fullest potential in the Holy Spirit. He causes it to be entirely at one with God, and so become the object and (for other creatures) the mediator of God’s eternal blessing.[33]

That “perfected created image” of the Triune God is not the Head alone, but the Head together with the members, forming the totus Christus, beloved of Augustine. It is the new, supernatural order of redeemed and transfigured relations which is vividly imagined and celebrated in the final chapters of the Book of Revelation. (Read more.)