Tea at Trianon: It’s Time to Recover Emotion in Religion

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, October 26, 2025

It’s Time to Recover Emotion in Religion

It should be pointed out that part of the spiritual journey of serious Christians involves periods of aridity and dryness in which they feel little or no devotion and yet continue to pray and fulfill their temporal duties. Also, we live in an Anglo-Saxon culture in which my Irish ancestors were scolded for public displays of emotion. From Word on Fire:

It strikes me as ironic that oftentimes—especially among the crowd that champions an almost ecstatic, at times emotional, love of good academia—there exists an attitude of disregard for the role of emotion in religious expression. Being moved to tears while reading Dante is fine, but being moved to tears in prayer is immature. If we want to make a gesture of gratitude at a supra feast, accompanied by tears or raucous laughter, then raising our glass with gusto is commended. But if we dare to raise our hands in praise during the eucharistic feast, we are called at worst irreverent and at best poorly formed. Either way, we are made to feel that we ought to be ashamed for our spontaneous acts of love toward God. There is a place for the heights and depths of human emotion in academia, it seems, but when it comes to the thing that academia points to—Christ—we are told to sober up, to put our emotions in a box and shelve them. This seems not only logically fallacious but also dangerous.

One way to reveal this double standard is to look again at the example of teaching. Imagine if a student shared that they had cried while reading a passage of Shakespeare. In response, the teacher looked at them with a sober expression and replied, “Well, that’s fine. Most people have that experience when they are still young in their literary life. But just remember, the important thing isn’t to feel like you love it. The important thing is just to read it.” Any teacher would (rightly so) laugh at the idiocy of such a response. A good teacher would be thrilled to hear that a student was profoundly touched by an assigned book! More importantly, they would look at the emotional response as valid proof of a genuine encounter with beauty. They wouldn’t disparage or discourage it. So why is it seen as acceptable to disparage or discourage emotions in the realm of religious experience? (Read more.)