Tea at Trianon: No Mercy Without Rules

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, January 10, 2023

No Mercy Without Rules

A protestant assesses the legacy of Benedict XVI. From First Things:

Christianity makes it clear that human beings are designed to be a certain kind of creature. We are free and self-determining in a way that other creatures are not: The swallow instinctively builds a nest but we design houses freely and intentionally. Our freedom, however, operates within certain parameters as set by the limits of human nature. I cannot jump off the Empire State Building and fly, for example, or dive into a cauldron of boiling oil and expect to emerge unscathed.
Yet human nature also has a moral shape. It is not simply leaping off high buildings that damages me. There can be moral damage, too. Behaving in certain ways can ruin me, spiritually, physically, and eternally. Perhaps paradoxically, my freedom requires rules, which sometimes run against my instincts. It is thus a mercy that those rules are given to me and, where necessary, enforced by external authority, whether that of family, employer, or church.

Strange to tell, the New York Times itself argued a similar point numerous times during the COVID era, when vaccinations and masking were deemed important rules to follow if we were to show grace and mercy to our neighbors, especially the weak and vulnerable. That the Gray Lady seems to regard the Benedict papacy as somehow less merciful because of its apparent concern for moral rules is therefore a rather odd development. But then again, it is entirely predictable: Those COVID rules conformed with the atomistic individualism that ends up with no shared vision for human existence beyond its mere continuation. Life becomes no more than the avoidance of death.

Christianity, by way of contrast, is not like modern secularism: a religion that merely flees death. It is a religion that pursues God and sees this life as necessarily shaped in relation to the life hereafter. Underlying the Times’s selective attitude to rules and mercy is a deeper anthropological shift: We are now required to see life as the be-all-and-end-all of existence, but we are not allowed to prescribe in what that life might positively consist. To do so would be, well, rather distasteful to the modern palate. (Read more.)

On the resignation of Pope Benedict, HERE.