Tea at Trianon: The Gentleman from Verona

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

Friday, June 30, 2023

The Gentleman from Verona

From Robert Royal at The Catholic Thing:

Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was born in Verona in Northern Italy, but while he was very young his family moved to Mainz in Germany, where his father was Italian consul. Except for regular trips to Italy, he lived in Germany during his formative years and wrote in German. For many thinkers, this history might be a mere biographical detail. In Guardini’s case, it has considerable significance.
He was a beloved figure among his students and had an enormous influence on the Catholic Church and European culture in the twentieth century – and beyond. He inspired later thinkers as diverse as von Balthasar, Pieper, Giussani, Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), and Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis). His influence probably owes something to his dual heritage, which combines German academic rigor with a gentler Italian humanism.

Guardini’s greatest and best-known books – The End of the Modern World, The Spirit of the Liturgy, and The Lord –have remained in print and influenced generations. The End of the Modern World was particularly prescient. In 1950, Guardini could already write that it was easy to describe the modern age because, “in all crucial respects the modern world has come to an end.”

The two World Wars had released not only unbounded violence, but unprecedented human disorientation and rootlessness. More:

Monstrosities of such conscious design do not emerge from the calculations of a few degenerate men or of small groups of men; they come from processes of agitation and poisoning which had been long at work. What we call moral standards – responsibility, honor, sensitivity of conscience – do not vanish from humanity at large if men have not already been long debilitated. These degradations could never have happened if its culture had been as supreme as the modern world thought.

Guardini is a valuable figure for all of us who understand the need to recover the human things that were lost in what he acknowledges were gains in power and wealth – but which also led to the radical discontinuity and fragmentation of recent decades. There’s no going back to some legendary, pre-modern Catholicism. A new way forward has to be created by using past materials in a new synthesis, which he began to develop.

Regnery Books has assembled a one-volume collection (687 pages!), The World and the Person and Other Writings, five lesser-known but equally insightful Guardini books (with my longish introduction), which will be published tomorrow.

Guardini called these books “reflections.” But they “reflect” his deep and internally consistent theological, philosophical, and – unusual among religious writers – literary culture. His books on Dante and Rilke, along with frequent references to Augustine, Pascal, Dostoyevsky, Heidegger, and even Nietzsche, present an eclectic but profound and coherent vision of the Church and the world.

Guardini had the kind of mind – the living virtue, as he puts it in his book on the virtues – that can range everywhere, flexibly but faithfully. His books are less like academic treatises than living conversations with a wise and trusted friend. (Read more.)