Tea at Trianon: Seeking Truth through Wonder

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, February 23, 2024

Seeking Truth through Wonder

From Peach Smith:

Jacques Maritain was a Catholic philosopher and one of the principal modern Thomists. In opposition to contemporary educational philosophers such as John Dewey, Maritain argued that it is impossible to properly educate a human being without religion. In Maritain’s penetrating words, “Education ought to teach us how to be in love always and what to be in love with” (1943, 23). Dewey, among many other Pragmatists, viewed Maritain’s proposal as a return to the proverbial Dark Ages where the realms of the spiritual and theology were supposedly of greater importance than scientific truths. Maritain boldly argued against the mainstream that truth is not relative, and does not change as a consequence of studies or polls. He viewed that “intellectual understanding, moral development, aesthetic cultivation, and religious formation” could only happen through the” inculcation of perennial truths and values” (1959, 166). The Pragmatists responded that human intelligence and understanding are social constructs, while Maritain maintained that there is an absolute truth that human beings have an inherent desire to seek, and as such deserve teachers who will ultimately guide them to that Truth. Maritain dismissed the Pragmatist’s view as one which reduced human existence to the empirically observable and verifiable. Children do not create Truth, they discover it, and teachers should develop their lessons in such as way as to help guide students in that discovery of Truth. (Read more.)