Tea at Trianon: The Cosmologies of Sigrid Undset

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, August 17, 2022

The Cosmologies of Sigrid Undset

From Genevieve Kineke at Catholic World Report:

Fr. Nichols traces the major influences on her formation—familial, cultural, and political—but it is his tender illustration of the curious soul creeping forward that is so competently done: distinguishing the telltale clues and intellectual breakthroughs that create the essential pivot points in Sigrid’s growth. A successful novelist dissects such a journey and reassembles it on the page for the sake of the reader, and what Sigrid did for her fictional characters Fr Nichols does for us, although not in narrative form but as a mosaic—arranged according to myriad themes, and how and where they emerged in her writing.

Sigrid’s experiences, a “storehouse of life’s impressions,” were poured into her fiction, allowing her to create profoundly interesting characters who grow organically according to circumstances and grace. Indeed, it was her own rocky setting that simultaneously caused her to flee Europe, to apply her writing skills to war propaganda, and ultimately to embrace the Catholic Church. Near the end of this book, Fr Nichols offers the image of the bridge, which makes sense of her life, the arc of her writing, and even the larger culture being transformed in radical and disturbing ways.

These ends, unfortunately, are at cross-purposes, because while she was driven to sharpen the distinctions between froth and Faith, at the same time the wider world was letting go of hard-won truths and sinking back into chaos. Her love of Scholasticism allowed her to let go of sentimentality and idealism for the sake of “the philosophy of the real,” which would carry her securely through the shifting sands of modernism and the “intellectual anarchy” of Protestantism. She saw clearly that the vague “brotherhood” being sold in the secular market—especially after the war—was impossible without the Fatherhood of God and the discipline of applied virtue.

This is where the bridge imagery fits. With the rejection of natural law, the traditional family, and Christian morality already taking firm shape all around her, she stressed the importance of motherhood as a critical bond between the child and the world, the family as a bulwark against the chaos of political instability, and the truths of the faith as essential bedrock to instantiate reality in a world grasping for comfortable ideologies. She saw that the rationalist view of man was shredding his ability to find God, because man is, in actuality, a creature in need of soil, roots, and structure—ideas which were amply illustrated in all her writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Without such concrete things at his fingertips, modern man was prone to anxiety and despair, and yet his sophisticated pretentiousness blinded him to the “miniature cosmologies” all around him. (Read more.)