“Reflections on the Revolution in France”

I could not help but think, as I looked over the once-lethal Place de la Concorde, where, among hundreds if not thousands of others, Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded during the French Revolution, and as I walked about the one-time “Temple of Reason” (aka the Cathedral of Notre Dame), of the following passage from the essay Reflections on the Revolution in France by the great eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke, defender of the American Revolution and opponent of the French Revolution, who is often identified as the founder of modern conservative thought:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely 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 just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream that, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.—But the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

***

And that got me to thinking of the self-described forces of such “reason” . . .

Many times over the past decade or two, I’ve encountered this quotation, which is supposedly from the trial of Galileo and is attributed to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621):

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin . . .

The quotation is popular with some critics of Christianity, I suppose, because it seems to solidify their claim that Christianity and/or religion in general is an enemy of science and because, in a humorous way, it illustrates their notion that belief in the virgin birth of Jesus is as ridiculous as the now thoroughly discredited and abandoned geocentric view of the universe.

Unfortunately, as this useful website shows, the quotation is also essentially bogus.  (Scroll down to “Bellarmine, Cardinal.”)

Never take this sort of allegation at face value.

There are too many dishonest secularist polemicists out there, blindly followed by too many gullible dupes.

P.S.  I’m pleased to report that my last line, above, received the angry response that I expected within just minutes.  It was, of course, deliberately designed to lampoon those who routinely claim that apologists for religious faith in general, and for Mormonism in particular, are dishonest, and that those who “follow” them are brain-dead “sheeple.”  “Mor(m)ons.”  “Morgbots.”  The irony was lost on the respondent, however, as might easily have been predicted.  He also took it to mean that, in my view, all secularists are either dishonest polemicists or gullible dupes, and that such a simple-minded either/or exhausts the possibilities.  Of course, the sentence says absolutely nothing of the kind.  (It says absolutely nothing of the kind because I hold absolutely no such view.)

Posted from Paris, France