Tea at Trianon: The Bohemian Tory & the Oxbridge Knights

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

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

The Bohemian Tory & the Oxbridge Knights

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Thus while jousting with the Cambridge knight, Sir Charles Snow, Kirk revealed much of what he opposed in the culture of modern science. But his opponent was not science itself, it was the ideology of scientism, which Kirk believed could be thwarted by liberal learning which included restoring the “just claims of pure science.” Scientism’s full defeat also required the pursuit of wisdom and the retention within the empire of science of a high regard for mystery and faith.

Was such an ideal possible? Had Kirk ever known of such a scientist–a liberally educated, wise man, captivated by mystery, and possessing Christian faith, yet also a man of science, an experimenter, and follower of empirical methods? In short, was there another type of C.P. Snow, someone adept at natural science and a literary man, but one not sold out to scientism? Yes, of course there were such men. The history of science was littered with them: Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Copernicus, Boyle, leap right to mind; and there were others. Kirk knew he was not imagining a chimerical fancy. The one he had in mind was another knight, too. But this one took degrees from Oxford, not Cambridge, and was 300 years older than Sir Charles.

He was the seventeenth-century doctor Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), the man whom historian of science A. Rupert Hall called “the greatest of all the English virtuosi.”[27] Browne was a physician, a theologian, a scientist, a literary master. Kirk called him “inimitable.” Who could match, Kirk wondered, Browne’s multi-faceted qualities? He authored, what Kirk described as “splendid prose–glowing with the moral imagination.” He possessed a firm Christian faith that qualified him, in Kirk’s curious words, as “not merely a flying buttress of the church, but a veritable pillar.” He practiced medicine and interrogated nature. With three degrees from Oxford (including an M.D.) and formal scientific and medical training at Montpellier, Padua, and Leyden, Browne ranked among the best-trained scientific minds in a century known for great scientific minds. In 1664 he was elected an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and in 1671 Charles II knighted him at Norwich, Browne’s home.[28] Consideration of a few items from Browne’s life and work, gives another angle on Kirk’s estimation of genuine science and its connections with other humane subjects. Where the case of C.P. Snow provided Kirk with a platform from which to castigate scientism, in Sir Thomas Browne Kirk found a praiseworthy sample of humane sanity residing within the empire of science.
Perhaps, as a man of science, Sir Thomas Browne qualified for Kirk’s high praise because Browne was a product of the seventeenth century, a time when narrow specialization had yet to be widely mistaken as the mark of an educated man. The great historian of seventeenth-century science and biographer of Isaac Newton, Richard Westfall, used to say that the single best adjective to describe Western Civilization at the opening of the seventeenth century was the word “Christian.” He insisted, however, that by the century’s end the single word that rightly characterized the West was “scientific.” This watershed century was, after all, the century of Harvey and Newton, Bacon and Descartes, Boyle and Galileo; the century of the birth of modern science. But the founders of modern science were nevertheless men broadly trained, liberally educated, steeped in the classics, drawn to metaphysics and religiously faithful. Sir Thomas Browne stood as a chief exemplar of the type. As the Cambridge scholar Basil Willey put it in his description of Browne: “Perhaps no writer is more truly representative of the double-faced age in which he lived, an age half scientific and half magical, half skeptical and half credulous, looking back in one direction to Maundeville, and forward to Newton.” This is because Browne had, according to Willey, “what T.S. Eliot called the ‘unified sensibility’ of the ‘metaphysicals’… [That is] the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and another, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.”[29] Basil Willey’s account of the seventeenth-century intellectual landscape bears remarkable resemblance to the contours of Newman’s liberally educated mind, or of Kirk’s world inhabited as it was by such a diverse lot: scientists, poets, political theorists, ghosts, and gods alike. (Read more.)