It is extremely difficult to find out what Mr. Belloc, as a
representative Catholic, believes about human origins. I was extremely
curious to get the Catholic view of these matters, and I heard of the
advent of these articles with very great pleasure, because I thought
I should at last be able to grasp what I had hitherto failed to
understand in the Catholic position. But if Mr. Belloc has said all
that there is to say for Catholicism upon these points, Catholicism is
bankrupt. He assures me that to believe in the Biblical account of the
Creation is a stupid Protestant tendency, and that Catholics do not
do anything of the sort. His attitude towards the Bible throughout is
one almost of contempt. It is not for me to decide between Christians
upon this delicate issue. And Catholics, I gather, have always believed
in Evolution and are far above the intellectual level of the American
Fundamentalist. It is very important to Catholic self-respect to keep
that last point in mind. Catholic evolution is a queer process into
which “Design” makes occasional convulsive raids; between which raids
species remain “fixed”; but still it is a sort of Evolution. My peasant
neighbours in Provence, devout Catholics and very charming people, have
not the slightest suspicion that they are Evolutionists, though Mr.
Belloc assures me they are.
But, in spite of this smart Evolutionary town wear of the Church, it
has somehow to be believed by Catholics that “man” is and always has
been and will be the same creature, “fixed.” That much Mr. Belloc gives
us reiteratively. A contemporary writer, the Rev. Morris Morris, has
written an interesting book, _Man Created During Descent_, to show that
man’s immortal soul was injected into the universe at the beginning of
the Neolithic period, which makes those Azilians and Capsians, with
their bows and carvings, mere animals. The new Belloc-Catholic teaching
is similar, but it puts the human beginnings earlier. Somewhen after
the Chellean and Moustierian periods, and before the Reindeer men, I
gather that “man” appeared, according to Catholic doctrines, exactly
what he is now. Or rather better. He was clad in skins and feathers,
smeared with paint, a cave-hunting wanderer with not even a dog at his
heels; but he was, because Mr. Belloc says so, a devout monotheist
and had a lucid belief in personal immortality. His art was pure and
exalted--there were little bone figures of steatopygous women in
evidence. He had no connection with the Neanderthal predecessor--or
else he had jumped miraculously out of the Neanderthaler’s bestial
skin. Sometimes it seems to be one thing and sometimes the other. But
all that stuff about Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Tree and the
Serpent, so abundantly figured in Catholic painting and sculpture,
seems to have dropped out of this new version of Catholic truth.
Yet those pictures are still shown to the faithful! And what the Fall
becomes in these new revelations of Catholicism, or whether there
was a Fall, historically speaking, Mr. Belloc leaves in the densest
obscurity. I have read and re-read these articles of his, and I seek
those lucid Latin precisions he has promised me in vain. Was and is
that Eden story merely symbolical, and has the Church always taught
that it is merely symbolical? And if so, what in terms of current
knowledge do these symbols stand for? Is it symbolical of some series
of events in time or is it not? If it is, when and what were the
events in time? And if it is not, but if it is symbolical of some
experience or adventure or change in the life of each one of us, what
is the nature of that personal fall? What is the significance of the
Garden, the Innocence, the Tree, the Serpent? To get anything clear
and hard out of Mr. Belloc’s papers in reply to these questions is
like searching for a diamond in a lake of skilly. I am left with the
uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Belloc is as vague and unbelieving about
this fundamental Catholic idea as the foggiest of foggy Protestants
and Modernists, but that he has lacked the directness of mind to admit
as much even to himself. Yet surely the whole system of salvation, the
whole Christian scheme, rests upon the presumption of a fall. Without
a fall, what is the value of salvation? Why redeem what has never been
lost? Without a condemnation what is the struggle? What indeed, in that
case, is the Catholic Church about?
What modern thought is about is a thing easier to explain. In the
_Outline of History_, against which Mr. Belloc is rather carping
than levelling criticism, there is set out, as the main form of that
_Outline_, a progressive development of conscious will in life. It is
not a form thrust upon the massed facts by any fanatical prepossession;
it is a form they insisted upon assuming under my summarising hand.
What is going on in this dispute is not that I am beating and putting
over my ideas upon Mr. Belloc or that he is beating and putting over
his ideas upon me, but that the immense increase of light and knowledge
during the past century is imposing a new realisation of the quality
and depth and import of life upon us both, and that I am acquiescent
and he is recalcitrant. I judge his faith by the new history, and he
judges the new history by his faith.
V