Tea at Trianon: The Form of the Altar

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

Friday, January 28, 2022

The Form of the Altar

From The Liturgical Arts Journal:

The Liturgical Movement of the twentieth century was, as we well know, a bit of a mixed bag. Like any movement, its adherents were not always on the same page with some factions being more conservative and others more "progressive"; some more traditional, some more extreme In relation to the altar, there was an appropriate focus in this movement upon it given its central role in both a church and within the sacred liturgy. Very frequently this was manifest by the very good desire to ensure that the altar was made of noble materials (such as marble or stone) and another subset sought to restore the use of the ciborium magnum -- another noble inclusion. But another form this focus took was less ideal; namely, some polemical and archeologistic notions started to creep in where the form and shape of the altar are concerned. I refer here not only to the question of a table form of altar or not, but also the altar in relation to its other associated parts and pieces. In particular there began to be some circles who casted aspersions on altars as they had come to frequently develop, with the idea that the altar had become "a mere shelf" before gradines or a grand reredos. It was felt these parts and pieces had come to overshadow the altar itself and this notion became tied to the supposed ideal of the free-standing altar. (Read more.)