Tea at Trianon: Anastasis and Transfiguration

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, April 20, 2025

Anastasis and Transfiguration

From Hilary White:

The Anastasis, literally “a rising up” or “standing up again in Greek. It is the icon that shows us what happened beyond the view of living men after the Crucifixion. Christ has descended not as a lifeless corpse but as a radiant figure, full of divine power, bursting with the Uncreated Light, reaching down into death itself to rescue Adam, Eve and all the righteous held captive since the beginning of time. In this image, Holy Saturday is not a pause. It is an explosion.
The Anastasis is one of the most commonly repeated of all iconographic prototypes in the Eastern tradition. It is not merely a depiction of an event but a visual proclamation of victory, a theological image so central that it appears again and again in apses, narthexes, chapels and manuscripts across centuries and empires. (Read more.)