Tea at Trianon: God & the Jews

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

Monday, November 6, 2023

God & the Jews

From The Catholic Thing:

From obscure origins, dwelling at Ur of the Chaldees (Genesis 11:31), and nomad wandering, with Abraham into Canaan, and then into slavery in Egypt; and out of Egypt and slavery with Moses; and led by Joshua back into the promised land of Canaan; the Hebrews are brought into the focus of history.
And we are traveling with them through these distant, often impenetrable times. As we are told with reiterated clarity in the Bible, this is a chosen wandering.

It was not chosen by the people themselves, but by their God; or as we have come to understand more simply, by God. The story that we inherit is the life we inherit, which proceeds unambiguously from the Jews.

The more one familiarizes oneself not only with the Hebrew Scriptures, but with the literary remains of all the other peoples of the “Near” and “Middle” East, the more strange this becomes. For we are reading not only an unusual ethnic history. The shafts that are sunk in time also reach a theological reality that is palpable.

The Jews are not chosen, as by a divine but arbitrary hand. They are chosen in divine revelation, and shown the direction they must follow, or fail to follow. This makes them different, unique, distinct from all the other ancients that we study.

The hand of God may be traced through Hebrew scriptures – again, unlike that from which we would become familiar in any of the alternative, “pagan” traditions. The spiritual and moral sensibility that emerges, the structure of commandment, marks them radically apart. (Read more.)