Tea at Trianon: The Death of Christian Privilege

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, April 18, 2023

The Death of Christian Privilege

From Mary Harrington at UnHerd:

In a cemetery near the fishing village of Mousehole, in Cornwall, stands a memorial stone to Dolly Pentreath. Erected in 1860, it commemorates her death in 1777: already, by then, the last known native speaker of the Cornish language. What would it be like to watch your language die over your lifetime? A language encodes a way of looking at the world, as much as of interacting with others. The many Inuit words for “snow” may or may not be apocryphal, but the legend captures something true: a language goes into great detail on subjects its speakers believe important. What would it be like to be the only one left for whom these words, those sentences, felt natural and obvious?
In a similar way, a religious faith is a moral language. A faith goes into great detail on themes its speakers believe important. Moral languages can also die, or evolve into something new, as (for whatever reason) its adherents stop passing on its grammar and priorities.

These gloomy thoughts percolated last Sunday as I sat, with my daughter on my lap, gazing around the 800-year-old nave of a little Norman church near our home, as we listened to the Palm Sunday reading of the Passion of Christ. This story is the heart of the Christian faith: it describes an incarnate God, acclaimed in his own capital city as Messiah — and betrayed in the moment of worldly triumph. It tells of that deity swarmed by a mocking crowd, and abandoned by even the disciples who swore never to do so. It recounts his death on the cross, as a criminal flanked by criminals, crying out at the last moment of agony about having been forsaken by the God in whom he trusted.
Today, we view the cross through a 2,000-year prism of Christian meanings. In the pre-Christian tradition absorbed into that symbolism, though, it was often held to symbolise the four material elements of earth, air, fire, and water. And from this perspective, we might read the Crucifixion as in part the story of a God that doesn’t just willingly take on flesh, but also the profound suffering that comes with embodied life: limitation, pain, and — finally — agonising death, in the certainty of having been forsaken by the divine.

And in this sense, the two-millennia trajectory of the Christian Church also echoes the Passion narrative. A faith born among the poor, rising to immense worldly reach and power; even in that little church, one of thousands throughout England, gravestones and memorials mark more than 800 years of the great and the good whose lives pepper this story. Then, the same institution, crippled from within at the moment of peak political reach, and now spiralling toward irrelevance.

The Passion, and the Holy Week in which it’s celebrated, is the central festival in the Christian liturgical calendar. Not so long ago, whole communities would have turned out to celebrate it. Last weekend, though, nearly all of the thin congregation was over 60. What will happen to that unbroken fabric of cultural continuity when people stop showing up? Will my daughter, like Dolly Pentreath, see her native moral grammar and way of looking at the world fade and disappear? (Read more.)