Tea at Trianon: Truth, Conscience, and the (New) American Way

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

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Truth, Conscience, and the (New) American Way

From The Acton Institute:

At least since the American founding, the notion that faith ought to be professed freely has been a commonplace, one that solidified a place for conscience in our national life. Using James Madison’s thought allows Smith to grapple with the shift in how we viewed conscience, from More’s corporate conscience to a more thoroughly disestablishmentarian view. And this was certainly Madison’s goal: not to move religion itself out of the public’s mind but to eliminate ecclesiastical establishment of every kind, an “institutional transformation that Madison, and also Jefferson, had in mind.” Madison basically sidesteps the earlier rhetoric that emphasized the pedagogical reasons for a state church, the need to curb error, and the idea that a common faith could be unifying—all these were a dead letter in the Colonies. In ignoring them, “he was, rather, sensibly and mercifully declining to waste words beating up on straw men.”
Building upon an extended discussion of Madison’s efforts in drafting and revising the Virginia Declaration of Rights and engaging with his extensive body of letters and essays, Smith offers a novel assessment of Madison’s extension of traditional notions of conscience away from a strict understanding of it as our duty to God and toward the idea that all forms of sincere religious belief ought to be respected. Throughout he observes that, while Madison defended religious belief, he seemed also to believe that Christians were altogether too focused on questions of theology, or on “getting it right” rather than respecting the sincerity of other people’s views.

In this view, Madison established something Smith calls the “Gospel of Conscience” as a public theology supreme over any other competing view:

He acted to establish, in and by law, not the outward institutional trappings of the church but rather the real church—namely, the conscience. … Madison took what for More was a sort of peripheral corollary of the Christian faith and made it the centerpiece of his credo. For More, it was Christianity that consecrated conscience. For Madison, it was conscience that consecrated Christianity—and that consecrated our other sincerely held faiths as well.

More’s and Madison’s visions of conscience diverge sharply on what each considered the acceptable content of one’s belief, but in Smith’s account, both of their articulations still lead inexorably toward the individual human person’s beliefs about God. Indeed, both frame their views of conscience with respect to the duties we owe our Creator. (Read more.)