Tea at Trianon: An Unfamiliar Faith

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

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

An Unfamiliar Faith

From Fr. Benedict Kiely at The Catholic Thing:

As the American novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, the “constant reading of the Bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under language as a whole, and under the English language.”

Chesterton’s point, in what he called the “specially Christian case,” was the near impossibility of making the “facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen man it is often true that familiarity is fatigue.” He continued that, if Christ were presented as a Chinese hero (in other words, as an esoteric figure) people would be more ready to respond.

That familiarity simply does not exist anymore, and not just in Britain. Across the Western world, as three or four generations have been successfully educated into ignorance, not only of the foundation of Western civilization, which is Christianity, but of the works of literature, music, and art which are the products of that civilization.

Quotations from the Bible or Shakespeare, the knowledge of which could be assumed in the time Chesterton was writing, are now as unfamiliar as Sanskrit verse. To speak of “seeing through a glass darkly,” or the “blind leading the blind,” will not register with people who are the product of four years of expensive brain deprivation, known as a bachelor’s degree. (Read more.)