Tea at Trianon: What Is Culture? All That Enhances the Human Mind

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, March 11, 2022

What Is Culture? All That Enhances the Human Mind

From TFP:

Everything we grasp with our senses or intellect affects the powers of the soul. We can free ourselves more, less, or even entirely from this effect depending on the case, but as such, each and everything we grasp tends to have an impact on us. As we said, culture consists of positively cultivating those things that enhance the mind and negatively curbing those things that deform it.
Of course, reflection is the primary means of enhancing the mind. A man of culture must be a thinker far more than a bookworm or a living repository of facts, dates, names and texts. For this thinker, reality is the primary book he has before his eyes; he is his own most consulted author. Other authors and books are precious but subsidiary elements.

However, mere reflection is not enough. We are not pure spirits. By an affinity that is not just conventional, there is a link between the superior realities that we consider with our intellect and the colors, sounds, shapes and perfumes we grasp through our senses. Our cultural effort is only complete when, through the senses, we imbue our whole being with the values that our intellect has contemplated. Singing, poetry, and art have precisely this purpose. Indeed, through an accurate and superior interplay with the beautiful (rightly understood, of course), the soul is fully imbued with truth and goodness. (Read more.)