Tea at Trianon: The Case for Teaching ‘The Divine Comedy’

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 31, 2023

The Case for Teaching ‘The Divine Comedy’

From Catholicism:

It is becoming increasingly common — to my great dismay — to find one of two scenarios in both Catholic and Public schools in the United States when it comes to its exploration of great literature. The first is that modern educators completely ignore the study of Dante and his Divine Comedy, skirting past the father of the Italian language for the reason of the complexity of his message. The other is perhaps even more egregious and scandalous, which is the tendency for American audiences to be exposed only to Hell, with no hope of Heaven, or even Purgatory. This often leads those who do read Dante’s Inferno to be left with a severe distaste for his work, as well as for the Catholic faith in general, often viewing it as cruel, puritanical, and vengeful. Among modern Dante scholars, Scott Crider of the University of Dallas inveighs against this second scenario trenchantly and eloquently: “Teaching the Inferno alone is such a curricular perversion I hardly know how to be tolerant: no wonder generations of college graduates think of Dante as a cruel tormentor, and Christianity as all judgment and no love.”¹ It is not a fitting assessment to give to Dante, whom Pope Benedict XV calls “the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea.”²

Those who have read the Comedy are all-too aware of the distinctly visceral, violent, and dark nature of Dante’s Hell, divided into nine concentric circles of increasing acridity and severity. The kinds of punishment doled out to those in Hell are both ironic and graphic in nature, ranging from the winds in the Second Circle, to the boiling rivers of blood in the Seventh Circle. This imagery remains embedded in the Catholic imagination, and even in the modern imagination of what a Hell might be, consistently replicated in all forms of modern storytelling that involve some sort of afterlife. (Read more.)