Tea at Trianon: A Medieval Remedy for Modern Maladies

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

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

A Medieval Remedy for Modern Maladies

From Law and Liberty:

In a scholarly tour de force, Brague demonstrates how much of what moderns hold dear first came to light, or was made possible, in the Christian Middle Ages. For example, “the conditions of possibility for secularization were put in place and brought together during the medieval period.” Likewise democracy itself: “Therefore, our democratic ideals of a rule of law or of a moral conscience supposed to function as the final authority in the spirit of each human being, be he citizen, judge, or something else, these ideals have a theological origin.” Even “our concept of a profane culture which distinguishes itself from religion actually had a religious origin.” With these historico-cultural lessons, the vaunted self-sufficiency of modernity was taken down several notches.

This, however, was only a first step in Brague’s argument. There was more (and worse) to report about self-affirming modernity. Employing a striking image found in Chesterton and Péguy, Brague argued that modernity as project is also a “parasite,” with all that that entails for its host and itself. It not only lives off of cultural capital that it did not produce, but actively destroys it, and eventually itself.

In the much earlier Eccentric Culture, Brague had coined an evocative phrase: “cultural Marcionism.” Marcion was the second-century Christian heretic who divorced the New Testament from the Old Testament. He did so because he could only see contrast, dichotomy, and opposition, rather than continuity, preparation, and ongoing debt in the relationship between the two Covenants. In 1992, Brague saw many signs of this attitude of repudiation at work on the western European scene. Now, though, it was directed at the premodern in the name of the modern. By the time of Moderately Modern (MM), he had traced these disparate efforts to their common root in modernity itself, understood as a project. (Read more.)