Tea at Trianon: Monastic Decline

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, December 8, 2022

Monastic Decline

From Catholic World Report:

That it is most obvious in Europe is due to the sheer physical evidence of defunct monasteries left behind after so many centuries of Christian worship. As I hiked across Spain and then Portugal during what felt like an End of Days Camino to escape lockdowns during the COVID pandemic, I got used to walking out of cities in the lee of abandoned monasteries and convents high up on a surrounding hill or which had been converted to lavish hotels.

More recently, I organized and led a week-long mini-Camino pilgrimage for the Catholic Herald, one of the world’s oldest Catholic publications. Both the first and last days of hiking ended with our latter-day Canterbury Tales assembly staying in the buildings of former convents converted into holiday and hotel accommodation. This, combined with all those previous examples I’d witnessed of grand monasteries and convents either empty or containing a small religious order holding out amid crumbling and cavernous interiors, gave added resonance to the pressing words of the priest accompanying the Catholic Herald group. He spoke of the need for “spiritual fighting power”—he happened to be ex-military—to counter the sense of doubt, fear and hopelessness that seems to grip so many today.

The modern world, especially its scientific cadre, is especially good at probing and prodding in the search of answers based on empirical data. But the British writer Aldous Huxley, best known for his vivid dystopian rendering in Brave New World, warned how this process can become dangerously one-sided. Huxley argued that the modern era’s increasing obsession with the rational and what can be “proven” has occurred to the detriment of the metaphysical realm and those hidden dimensions deep inside our hearts and souls. As we lose touch with those imperceptible kingdoms—and which is a focus of those who take monastic vows—despair and rancor are often left.

“Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation,” Huxley wrote in The Perennial Philosophy, his anthology of the basic tenets that he contended link all major faiths and have underlined religious inquiry throughout human history. Huxley also highlighted how human behavior has remained remarkably similar across the eons. He put this down to the “fundamental identity” of all humans, consisting of “incarnated minds, subject to physical decay and death, capable of pain and pleasure, driven by craving and abhorrence and oscillating between the desire for self-assertion and the desire for self-transcendence.” (Read more.)