Tea at Trianon: Civility in an Age of Barbarism

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

Thursday, June 16, 2022

Civility in an Age of Barbarism

From Aleteia:

Just consider: The First World War decimated a generation and revealed a willingness to use science and technology in the name of pitiless barbarism. The 1929 crash of the stock market on Black Tuesday led to a crisis of confidence in the free market philosophy of capitalism and liberal democracy. Amid desperate times, many ran to the Strong Men of ruthless ideology: Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. The Second World War brought death by the millions with civilian bombings, concentration camps and atomic weaponry. And what of Christianity? Beyond the voices of Pope Pius XI and XII and a smattering of saints and martyrs (Bonhoeffer, Kolbe, Stein), the Faith seemed shaken and silent. The world of World War II seemed trapped in the darkness of the Garden of Gethsemane and the Passion. There was little that seemed to promise a Resurrection.
But the Christian promise is that we are an Easter people. We are not unfamiliar with suffering and privation. But we are also familiar with an inexhaustible Grace that penetrates it like shafts of light through the darkest of thunderclouds. Hope is the edifice upon which our Faith is built, or as Chesterton would remind, “Hope means hoping when things are hopeless or it is no virtue at all.” And hope is what made Alan Jacobs’ five figures avoid despair. As they spoke and wrote in those years of receding darkness, the individual threads of their thought came together into a marvelous fabric of Christian humanism. But would it make a difference? Would humanity emerge from this carnage more deeply rooted in the truth of things that mattered? Or would we be a shell, a husk, of our former selves bent beyond recovery and only able to hold fast to the useful, the efficient, the expedient and the self-serving because the Truth, in our eyes, is dead?
Mr. Jacobs spends the entire book examining this question. And he does a wonderful job. But there was one insight by the English Anglican literary luminary T.S. Eliot that spoke acutely (though most striking in its subtlety) to the question of who we are and who we ought to be in the wake of the Second World War’s horror show. What is the distinguishing mark between barbarity and civility? For this, let us turn to a literary classic.
In Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan warrior Aeneas and the beautiful Dido are in love. However, due to the sophomoric meddling of the Greek gods, Aeneas is compelled to leave Dido behind as he and his fleet of ships embark on an adventure to Italy. Distraught and heartbroken, Dido fashions what will ultimately be her funeral pyre and, atop it, thrusts a sword into her abdomen. It was only later that Aeneas, unaware of her death, would find himself shocked to encounter Dido’s shade (or ghost) in the underworld. And he weeps. (Read more.)