Tea at Trianon: Relearning the Moral Life While Rejecting the Tyranny of the Banal

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, March 8, 2024

Relearning the Moral Life While Rejecting the Tyranny of the Banal

From What We Need Now:

The incarnation represents God’s full and final union with creation. It both binds us to God in Jesus, and shows us how we can participate in this union. Life is for union with the Father, in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit. This union begins now and concludes, hopefully, in heaven.
When we pray, for example, we’re accepting the urge of the Holy Spirit in faith and hope. This acceptance unites us with the Son, Jesus Christ, who is the praying one. And in Christ, we are one with the Father. As such, in prayer, for example, we participate in the Trinity. We forget how incredible this is! In prayer we become one with the Triune life. We’ve been duped into thinking that we’re living in a world in which God is absent, but the incarnation refuses this.
The moral life consists in acts which, like prayer, accept the Holy Spirit, leading to our union with the Son, in whom we are one with the Father. The analogy that the Cappadocians (and others) use is an iron in the fire. The iron (us) is not hot to begin with. It enters the coals (the Spirit), through which it receives heat (union with God) and comes to glow orange (mirroring Christ). We need to think of the moral (and the liturgical) life in this way. In the incarnation, Christ reveals what the good looks like. Further, the Spirit, who proceeds from the Son and the Father most fully through the incarnation, is the basis for participation in this good.
While this logic is dominant in Christian theology for most of its history, we, subjects of the modern West, tend to forget it. Somehow, we think like modern secular liberals and assume that morality is best understood as fealty to rules. From this all kinds of errors flow. We think that a loving God would naturally give us a pass for breaking the rules.
And so, things we do with our bodies like morality and liturgy become seen as less significant, which is disastrous. It’s disastrous because God loves us and forgives us constantly but to be one with this God involves actions that lead to union. If I’m overweight, I can’t get “health” to give me a pass and be one with me despite my actions. I need to do things (diet and exercise) to re-present and become one with health.
So too we accept God’s incarnational self-giving in the moral life. God is love and forgiveness; this doesn’t change, but we accept or reject union with this God. So much that I read from theologians, and even leaders in the Church, tells me that they’re understanding the core grammar for how we become one with God in modern, not coherently Catholic, ways.
There’s a scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita that speaks to me here. In the movie, the protagonist meets a young waitress who is good and innocent and pure. He sees her again, in the movie’s final scene as she waves and calls to him. But the decadence and sin of his life mean that he can only half recognize her, and he can’t hear what she’s calling out to him.
We also tend to have a half-remembered recollection for how the moral or sacramental life works. The Mass is about union with Christ, an ontological union and participation in his redemptive act on Golgotha. Now we most frequently refer to what happens on Sunday as “worship.” It is that, but my goodness, we’re burying the lead. By thinking of it as worship we tend to think that how we worship doesn’t matter, as, after all, God understands. But that’s like saying that if we want to be one with heat it doesn’t matter if we put on layers or take them off, or if the iron stays on the floor or enters the furnace. Union with God is an ontological reality, made possible by the incarnation and this is what the Mass is, not the worship of a Zeus-like deity. (Read more.)