Tea at Trianon: Dead Man Walking in Lent

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, February 27, 2024

Dead Man Walking in Lent

From The Catholic Thing:

One was discovering that the phrase had been used by the English poet and novelist, Thomas Hardy. His poem, “The Dead Man Walking,” was published in 1909 (though probably written in 1890). Many commentators claim the poem is autobiographical. Because of his biting attacks on class, religion, and social mores in his time, Hardy’s reception as a novelist was mixed – certainly not as positive as Hardy thought his work deserved. If this gloomy poem is from 1890, it reflects a more personal woe.

Hardy’s life was something of a mess, especially in his marriage, which seems to have become something like a living death:

They hail me as one living
but don’t they know
that I have died of late years
untombed although?”

But a second insight into the phrase came in a sermon by my pastor and TCT contributor, Fr. Paul Scalia. The Gospel of the Sunday just before Lent featured Jesus’s healing a leper. As Scalia observed, leprosy was a kind of living death, perhaps more accurately a living dying. A leper’s body, although animate, is already decomposing. It’s why in Scripture, Scalia noted, physical leprosy is a symbol of the spiritual leprosy of sin. One may still be walking physically, but is morally dead inside.

This, of course, is no reason to discriminate against real-life lepers: the easy, one-on-one correspondence of the earlier Old Testament between sin and suffering (already under stress in the Book of Job) is not Christian theology (see John 9:2-3). But it is also not Christian theology to see no relationship between suffering and sin. (Read more.)