Tea at Trianon: Ancient Egyptians, Modern Catholics, and Cremation

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, November 28, 2024

Ancient Egyptians, Modern Catholics, and Cremation

From The Catholic World Report:

The museum has a small but rich collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts whose main attraction, obviously, is mummies. But the exhibition also contains canopic jars. In case you’re wondering what canopic jars are, they are the vessels in which Egyptian embalmers preserved certain organs (the viscera and lungs) they extracted from a body during mummification.

It struck me that, in one sense, the pagan ancient Egyptians in one respect had a greater respect for human embodiment and incarnation than many modern semi-gnostic “Christians”.

Surveys indicate that Catholic acceptance of cremation largely mirrors that of the general population. This should be surprising because, as French philosopher Damien Le Guay has pointed out, burial was for the longest time the funerary practice of Christians while cremation was the hallmark of pagans.

Why did Boston’s canopic jars trigger that association for me? Because they show that it’s not just the taxidermized shell of a body that mattered to the Egyptians. What the embalmers removed wasn’t just “junk,” “medical waste,” or “clumps of cells” to be discarded. Even those elements not put into the mummy case were honored.

This, of course, is not alien to Catholicism. On October 24th, Pope Francis issued his encyclical Dilexit Nos, on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Our Savior’s Heart is a symbol–but not “just” a symbol–of the center of Jesus’s Love. This is far removed from disincarnate modern thought. (The ancient Egyptian mummifiers also left the heart intact.)

But, you object, the Church permits cremation today. That’s true. Since rescinding its outright ban on cremation in 1963, the Vatican permits cremation today. But much depends on what “permits” means.

The Church “permits”–in the sense of “tolerates”–cremation. But the Church also “prefers” earth burial, in imitation of Jesus who lay in a tomb. It is like Friday abstinence in the United States: the Church in this country “permits” the eating of meat on non-Lenten Fridays provided Catholics perform some other penitential act. But we all also know the dirty little secret: people heard the permission but ignored the condition. The same is true with cremation.

The Church’s preference for earth burial is connected to her preference for bodily integrity, which is why the Church objects to some practices that cremation has otherwise made commonplace. Examples include the scattering of ashes, denying the deceased a final resting place (which is not an urn resting on the mantel over your fireplace), and the commodification of cremains (e.g., crystallizing human ashes into jewelry). It is why the Church generally sought the burial of bodies intact. Something of that same sentiment found echoes in Egyptian burial treatment of body parts, which mirrored something of their concept of life-after-death. (In the Christian West, parcelization of bodies was usually a punishment for serious malefactors, e.g., traitors whose drawn-and-quartered limbs and torso were publicly displayed at various city gates as part of deterrent punishment.)

I find it striking that the pagan Egyptians appear to have a respect for the body similar to what would be later developed more fully by Christians. It was also striking that many Christians seem to be backtracking on their own heritage. (Read more.)