Tea at Trianon: The Magnetic Pull of Wonder

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, March 3, 2026

The Magnetic Pull of Wonder

From C.S. Lewis Substack:

For myself, the medium of wonder has often been poetry. As I recently confessed to my friend Miroslav Volf, “I wouldn’t even be a religious person were it not for poetry, which has not only repeatedly brought me into contact with an other, but has seemed to demand something of me in its wake . . . But poetry remains perpetually open. God moves through art but doesn’t get stuck there. I sometimes think he gets stuck in theology—fixed, frozen, and therefore inevitably falsified.”2
Lewis had a way of letting the transcendent move through his art. And for all his reasoned approaches, he left room for awe. He referred to the spiritual dimension as the distinct feeling of “numinosity,” echoing the term coined by German theologian Rudolf Otto. For Lewis, numinosity meant the singular “Other” quality of the divine. In the face of the divine Other, astonishment is the natural human response.
And Christianity is certainly astonishing. In my letters with Miroslav, published in Glimmerings, I reflected, “I often hear secular people marveling at the sheer preposterousness of Christianity—God walking around the world, zapping water into wine, modern people cheerfully eating his flesh and drinking his blood—but, for me, no small part of Christianity’s appeal is that very preposterousness.”3
It is, as I said earlier, an insult to common sense, which I cherish because I am quite sure that what we call common sense is uncommonly wrong. (Read more.)