Tea at Trianon: American Literature and the Catholic Faith

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, November 16, 2022

American Literature and the Catholic Faith

From NCR:

It’s difficult to know where to start or finish in any discussion of the connection between American literature and the Catholic Faith. The whole topic is fraught with complexity, as is the relationship between the American nation and the Catholic Faith, or American history and the Catholic Faith. There are few American writers who are unashamedly or unabashedly Catholic, whereas there are many who have an ambivalent relationship with the Faith, sympathizing in some ways and yet keeping a safe distance. Others are converts whose embrace of the Faith radically transformed their very approach to life and literature.

One such convert, who is often seen as the American equivalent of John Henry Newman insofar as his conversion was highly publicized and highly controversial, is Orestes Brownson (1803-76). An almost exact contemporary of Newman, Brownson converted to the Faith in 1844, a year before Newman took the same life-changing and life-giving step. Thereafter, like Newman, he became a tireless defender of the Faith and an outspoken controversialist on many topics, especially through his published essays in Brownson’s Quarterly Review.

Of the same generation as Brownson were two other major American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), neither of whom were converts to the Faith but both of whom were attracted to what might be called the Catholic aesthetic. Hawthorne’s late work The Marble Faun is often seen as indicative of his sympathetic attitude towards the Church, and his short story, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” conveys a timeless moral perspective entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching on original sin and concupiscence. An intriguing connection between Hawthorne and the Catholic Faith is the fact that his daughter, Rose, converted to the Faith, becoming a religious sister, whose charitable work has led to calls for her canonization. As Mother Mary Alphonsa, the name she took as Mother Superior of the order of Dominican Sisters she founded, she is now recognized by the Church as a Servant of God.

Longfellow, like Hawthorne, his lifelong friend, would never have countenanced conversion to Catholicism and yet his work, like Hawthorne’s, is often congruent with a Catholic aesthetic and sometimes displays implicit or even explicit Catholic sympathies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the marvelous narrative poem, Evangeline, in which the devoutly Catholic heroine searches for her true love, the man to whom she had been betrothed until they were forcefully separated on the eve of their wedding. And, of course, there is Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, indicative of his great admiration for Dante but also, surely, an indication of some level of sympathy and understanding of the Thomism which informs Dante’s work. (Read more.)