Tea at Trianon: The Despair of the Philosophes

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

Thursday, April 25, 2024

The Despair of the Philosophes

From Catholic Exchange:

The period known as the Enlightenment (c. 1685-1815) was a critical moment in the history of Christendom, as it saw the emergence of a system of thought hostile to Christianity and the rise of systematic atheism. Many thinkers of the Enlightenment considered revealed religion offensive to reason, for revealed religion insisted that we give our assent on faith, which was considered antithetical to human reason. Consider the thought of Denis Diderot: Diderot (1713-1784) was a French writer and philosopher, best known as the editor of the monumental Encyclopédie, the world’s first general encyclopedia. Diderot began his life as a Roman Catholic, embraced Deism, and later devolved to full-blown atheism. In Diderot’s 1770 tract Thoughts on Religion, we see faith and reason posited as irreconcilable antagonists:
To admit any conformity between the reason of man and the eternal reason of God, and to pretend that God demands the sacrifice of human reason, is to maintain that God wills one thing and demands the other thing at the same time…If reason is a gift from heaven, and the same thing can be said of faith, then heaven has given us two presents not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction with each other. In order to solve this difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.1
Diderot considered the faith the Church asks of believers tantamount to an extinction of reason. We see this in his parable of the candle: “Bewildered in an immense forest during the night, and having only one small torch for my guide, a stranger approaches and thus addresses me: ‘Friend, blow out your light if you would be sure of the right path.’ This stranger is the priest.”2 (Read more.)