Tea at Trianon: Between Madness and Sanity

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, March 16, 2023

Between Madness and Sanity

From The European Conservative:

As it happens, a worldview that sees the world as essentially satanic, which can only become a realm of human flourishing when gifted to God through becoming a part of Christ’s kingdom, is the very worldview on which the whole of Western civilisation was built. When Delingpole says that a demonic, globalist, Manichean regime has swallowed up the world concurrently with the retreat of Christianity, he is saying something that is extremely traditional and relies on a worldview that laces every pre-modern work of the Western Canon.

Irrespective of whether our predatory, two-faced overlords are literally reptiles, they may—on a traditional Western conception of the world—be deemed demonic. And St. Anthony, whom I quoted above, saw the presence of demons as prowling reptiles during his great temptation in the desert, an event that has been meditated upon by countless master painters.

That Christianity has been banished to the desert, where one must do all one can to overcome harassment from the reptilian demons who want to thwart every attempt at human flourishing, turns out to be a major theme of interpretation down the ages. In fact, this interpretation of our condition may belong to the sanest and most civilising conception of the world that one can possess.

As Delingpole described his “white pill moment,” Oliver sat pondering. Eventually, Oliver said that he wasn’t especially religious, that he didn’t go to church, and that he was essentially a “cultural Christian.” He noted, however, that he had increasingly come to see the world less as a complex of competing factions, and more as an ongoing struggle between good and evil. “I receive thousands of letters of support from all around the world,” he said, “and almost every single one is from a Christian of some denomination, telling me that he or she is praying for me and that I should trust in God.”

Many people seem to be increasingly aware that the situation in which we currently find ourselves resembles a strange mixture of Plato’s Cave and Bentham’s Panopticon. Isolated, expunged from our communities, we sit engaging with concocted tales and discussing them with faceless avatars, titillated by the recurrent dopamine hits, watched and censored by unaccountable agents whose names we don’t know and whose locations are undisclosed. We are rewarded for calling the shadows realities and punished for looking to the light.

It is estimated that one in eight hundred of those who took a COVID vaccine are vaccine-injured, and yet politicians still go about calling it the “miracle vaccine” and criticising those who “dispute the science.” Unreality is presented as reality, and reality is presented as conspiracy. Shadows and surveillance are the lot of the modern world. (Read more.)