Tea at Trianon: Ecce Agnus Dei

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, January 11, 2026

Ecce Agnus Dei

The Franciscan answer to the Catharist heresy. From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

These icons were in the line of a movement that started in the 12th century of showing the physical and real suffering and death of Christ on the cross that led to the naturalistic depictions of the crucifixion we’re familiar with today. The intention is to generate an emotional response of pity, empathy, sorrow and repentance in the viewer. And this is part of a greater spiritual movement that was later to be popularised by the new mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, who emphasized the importance of Christ's human and physical suffering and our own ability to “enter into” and participate in it through our affections. Of course, the creation of sacred art is a key component of this kind of evangelisation.
[...]
As such, the artistic development of these paintings over the following 200 years would be part of a larger and permanent change in the way Christians thought about Christ, their ideas of having a genuine affective relationship with a real person, who knew pain and understood them at a visceral level. The Italo-Byzantine and Duecento panel paintings showing Christ in agony only intensified as more natural looking figures were created.
Master of St. Francis. Perugia National Gallery. It’s impossible for a photo to do justice to it. It smacks you in the head when you walk into the very large room it’s housed in. At least 12 feet tall. You have to stand on the other side of the room to take the whole thing in.
And this movement, in both spirituality and art, is thought by some scholars as a response to the materialist ideas of the Cathar heresy1 that was spreading in Northern Italy and southern France at the time. In the early 12th century the idea that Christ was just a man and His death was of no redemptive significance, were growing.
The Cathars adopted the ancient Manichaean dualistic ideas of two gods; an evil god who created material reality and a good god who created spiritual beings like angels and human souls. The soul was entrapped in the material body and had to be released by a process of spiritual purification and ultimately death. Catharism rejected Catholic sacraments and authority, including the Bible, and its popularity ultimately threatened the political and economic stability of Europe.
Of course this all meant that the Cathars also rejected the redemptive value of the crucifixion, holding that Jesus was just a human being, perhaps inspired by the Holy Ghost, and that the only way to be “saved” was to free the soul from the evil material world. (Read more.)