Tea at Trianon: Downside Revisited

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

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Downside Revisited

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

I have only visited Downside once. That was, if I recall aright, in 1990 when I was, as an Anglican, on a Benedictine retreat led by Esther de Waal at Glastonbury. We had monks talking to us about the life of the Downside community and visited the abbey for an afternoon for a tour, tea and Vespers. I was deeply impressed by the beauty and scale of the monastic church, and its sense of prayerfulness. This was seemingly a place that stood in a tradition of fifteen centuries of spiritual discipline and creativity. Everything suggested tranquility and orderliness. We did not visit the school but I imagine that if we had a similar spirit would have prevailed. Downside appeared a citadel of a restored English Catholic life in the depths of rural Somerset. It remains in my mind as a very special visit.

Since then revelations of what some monks at Downside and other Benedictine houses were doing have not merely shaken the public perception of monastic houses and schools but have done irreparable harm to both monastic and school life. This is tragic and the result of human wickedness.

The author of the article shows how seeking to understand what happened offers no easy answers. That is perhaps similar to the reflections about abusive priests by Martin Mosebach from Rorate Caeli which I linked to the other day. The incomprehension most of us have as to what leads to such behaviour also renders us unable to fully understand how it can exist as known yet not known in religious individuals and communities.

As a historian I wonder as to how long such things have gone on in monastic houses, or indeed parishes. Whilst I can fully believe that recent decades have seen the emergence of lax discipline and a pursuit of a very wrong type of individualism I suspect that such evils may have been hiding in plain sight for much longer. Accusations of such behaviour can be detected amongst the hostile critics of monasticism in the sixteenth century, amongst the Lollards, and in the sometimes surprisingly candid comments of continental ecclesiastical writers of the thirteenth century. One does not have to have the obsessive seeking after scandal of a Coulton to sense that this is not a new problem.

It is a dispiriting idea to set against the undoubtedly great and positive part Benedictine life has contributed to the life and history of the Church and of Christendom. The fact that that achievement is in risk of being denigrated as a result is a further tragic legacy of whatever was going wrong behind the walls of the enclosure. (Read more.)