a more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved.
Since alienation is never affirmed, but is emotionally grasped as a
possibility along with the hope for personal immortality, classical man
feels no sense of guilt simply in being himself. If he is alienated
in the end, it will be too late for guilt. Temporal classical guilt
results from man’s ceasing to be what he can be, and this defines the
nature of tragedy. Modern alienation, on the contrary, is an alienation
existing within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is
alienated. Hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference
defining his existence. He is almost ashamed to be.
Classical humanism is basically insufficient, since man cannot achieve,
of himself, the fullness of his dignity. Threatened from without by
death, the humanist’s integrity is attacked from within by the wounds
of sin that divide him from himself. Belloc never romanticized man, and
he is so conscious of the _fact_ of sin that his historical judgments
frequently seem cynical. In a short story called “The Opportunity,” he
writes of three men that “each of these ... being a man, had a worm
at his heart, eating it out.”[21] Courage excepted, the classical
European humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final
questions.
The humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so
fascinated the Eastern World, because his initial choice has been an
election for all human values. Romantic irrationality, be it aesthetic,
political, or naturalistic, is an insult to his reason. His world
outlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness,
and in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the
world in which he exists. He cannot, without betraying the light which
has been given him, join the oriental drive to the beyond. He has too
much respect for _who_ he is, and for _where_ he is. Only faith, a
Faith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built, and a
Faith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny, can
guarantee his fundamental vision: personal perfection and the happiness
that issues therefrom. The classical humanist, the old European, sees
the gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that
have come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has
built. They offer everything to man, provided he destroy himself in
the darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow
with atheism and nothingness. The only immortality worth having is one
that is personal and that unites man with a Personal God who can bestow
happiness on the creature of His Image. Man is, and only He Who Is can
slake his thirst.
_The Path to Rome: Christian Integration_
The Catholic Faith came to Hilaire Belloc from his birth to answer this
humanist dilemma. Yet Faith came to him hard, and precisely because
it did his final Christian affirmation has about it the resounding
ring of iron: the iron which is the adherence of the will to a God
unseen. If Belloc ever had what are called “religious experiences,” or
supernatural “consolations” to aid him on his pilgrimage, he has kept
them sedulously to himself. He seems to appear, the more closely he is
read, as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered.
There is a passage in _The Path to Rome_ that would lead one to think
this born Catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the
confused time of youth. Years later, in at least two published works,
he hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to
a more fully articulated understanding of Catholicism.
In the first place I was baptized into the Faith upon my birth, and
have known it all my life.... Next, I have, though baptized into
it and familiar with it from my earliest years, in some sense also
discovered the Faith—but this I will not pursue as it is somewhat
intimate, and hardly to the point; unless, indeed, it be to the point
to tell those who read me and who are balancing, that I also have
balanced.[22]
The same sentiment, once again guarded in reticence, is made in an
essay written on the death of Chesterton.
I was not when I first met him as alive to the strength of that word
“Catholic” as I am today; I myself have gone through a pilgrimage
of approach, to an understanding in the matter.... Having said so
much ... I will leave it, for it is too personal and has been too
prolonged.[23]
To a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace,
the personal reserve of the man, prolonged through a life devoted
to religious controversy, is bound to be curious if not somewhat
irritating. He reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual
crisis. He apparently felt it was no one’s business but his own.
Nothing could be more typically Bellocian.
The Catholic Church appears in Belloc’s thought, as given us in his
writing, as the custodian of the Faith—of a Faith beyond himself,
objective, out there, demanding acceptance because it is the Truth.
Emotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that
which is. Christ came, claimed to be Divine, died, and came back in
three days from the dead. Such is the evidence, and it is ultimately
traceable, through tradition and written testimony, to the Apostles
who saw it with their own eyes. Faith is not established, as such, by
personal experience nor by private speculations, but on an evidence
which is a heritage common to all mankind. Emotion may aid or may block
faith, but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable, and it is
the business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be
swamped in the vagaries of subjectivism. Belloc’s approach is by no
means the only approach to religion, but it is one that is cold, hard,
rational; the insight of a man with an intellect which is French in
its incisiveness, directness, and confidence in itself. Such a faith
is unbolstered by any natural religiosity, but for that very reason
it presents a hard, diamond-like character, unyielding and dogmatic
in its affirmations: a faith foreign to fashions, be they literary or
philosophical.
In a letter written to Chesterton upon the occasion of the latter’s
entrance into the Church, Belloc compares the man of Faith to a man who
walks through the rain at night, and who feels in his bones that he
has gone thirty miles, but who knows well enough from his map and his
reason that he has not travelled eleven.
I am by all my nature of mind skeptical.... And as to the doubt of
the soul I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion. My
conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once _seen_ it—is the
Faith: Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a
theory. It.
To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this
statement may seem too desiccate.... It is my misfortune. In youth I
had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am
alone, and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the
Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the
more affirm it.[24]
The early death of his wife whom he worshipped, the death of a son in
World War I and then again of a son in World War II, the ever present
and never fully overcome threat of personal poverty, the passing of the
friends of youth, the dire fulfillment of his political and economic
warnings which went unheeded, the apparent dryness of his religious
life—all these tragedies struck his heart and isolated him from family,
friends, political life, society, from joy. He never speaks of these
things in his public writings, but they add to his integrated Catholic
personality the steel of great character. He maintained himself in a
desert.
From the very outset of his career, the Catholic center of Belloc’s
life appears as the spiritual hub from whence proceed the amazingly
diverse spokes of his personality. The Faith is never glimpsed as
a hope in the distance that calls him out of the secularist age in
which he lived. The Faith is always present, informing and energizing
his being, disciplining his irony, conquering his skepticism, and
giving direction to his destiny. Nevertheless, a close reading of
the Bellocian corpus reveals a shift in religious emphasis as the
man advanced in years. In the earlier books, the humanizing role
of Catholicism is the dominant motif: the Church is that corporate
organism, Divine in origin, that alone accounts for the high culture
of the older European civilization. She is the custodian of personal
dignity, the ancient mistress that alone of all societies can harbour
the human spirit and nourish it into its fullness. Through her, God
offers temporal dignity and eternal salvation to man. But as Belloc
grew older he sounded a new religious emphasis as he plunged more
deeply into directly apologetic and controversial battle. Although the
reality of Christian humanism is never forgotten, the Church emerges in
his writing not only as the Divine instrument of human salvation, but
more and more as the Truth of God, to which everything personal must be
sacrificed, should events dictate such a course.
Belloc saw with unerring accuracy that the bulk of what he called
“official history” in the English-speaking world was anti-Catholic.
He attacked the thing bitterly, brilliantly, and at great cost to his
reputation. He saw that the individualist, industrial, capitalist
society of England was anti-human to the core. He attacked it. He
grasped the anti-Christian meaning of Prussia, and he fought against
this spirit from the North of Germany with intense vigour. He analyzed
the anti-intellectual and therefore anti-Catholic bias that moved the
“Modern Mind” in the bewildering complexity of that mind’s activities.
He detested the _Zeitgeist_ which had surrendered the best man had:
his power to reason, judge, and affirm; therefore it had lost the
one sure road it had of discovering the Truth of God. Belloc became
committed—the French artilleryman in the service of the Church. His
intransigence rendered him a marked man. Shaw wondered why Belloc
should waste his profuse talents in the service of the Bishop of
Rome. Wells noted critically his “partisan fanaticism.” Some Catholic
academicians, to gain for themselves the reputation of impartial
scholarship and save their standing in the world of learning, disavowed
him.
There is no doubt that Belloc entered into battle with his eyes open.
If he was anything at all, he was a realist: he understood men and the
motives that move them; he was aware of the doors opening to political
and literary preferment. His brilliance was such that he could have
risen to a Cabinet post through the Liberal Party. He could have carved
out for himself an exclusively literary reputation, possibly as great
as Conrad’s. He could have become the recognized first historian in the
Empire. He sacrificed it all and placed his sword at the service of the
Church. It has been suggested that the decisive turning point in his
career occurred when he delivered a fighting speech before Archbishop
Bearne against the Liberal Government’s intention to prohibit a
Eucharistic procession through the streets of London.[25] At that time
Belloc was a Liberal Member of Parliament, and the Tories thought that
he would turn to them after his break with his own party. His political
principles would not permit such a sellout. He went up to the platform
a public figure, and came down an Apostle. “I begin to think this
intimate religion as tragic as a great love ... as tragic as first
love, and (it) drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.”[26]
Belloc’s career as an apologist exemplifies the first paradox inherent
in Christian humanism. Only the Incarnation can make man whole, but
as the Incarnation issues into Calvary, so too must the whole man
sacrifice himself to the service of the God-Man. The ascent of man to
God is impossible without the prior descent of God to man, and the two
meet at the Cross. Once this truth is lived, then the second paradox of
Christian humanism can follow. The man who has given himself is paid
back with his own gift: himself transfigured in the Divine Fires.
Belloc became himself in controversy. He warmed to the battle entered
into freely, and his personality expanded before the prospect of facing
all official England arraigned against him. It was a time in which
things Catholic were neither popular with the masses nor fashionable
with the elite. His opposition was enormous. Possibly he could have
gained some concessions to his cause had he compromised; but Belloc
never stooped to conquer. It is small wonder that Douglas Jerrold
called him one of the last men in England who was, in the full sense of
the term, not vulgar.
He became most widely known as a brilliant and somewhat brutal defender
of the Catholic Order. But what is not so widely known is the fact that
Belloc’s vocation was erected on a delicate structure of human values
accepted in their fullness, disciplined by an understanding of their
limits, and welded into one by Faith. Belloc is not simply a Michael
defending his beloved Church. His partisan belligerence masks his
humanist complexity: he is really many men—a pagan Roman classicist—an
English naturalist, a French rationalist, a soldier—a Catholic—one man.
The contrast between pagan humanism—man achieved on earth, but
threatened by death—and Christian humanism—man achieved forever—can
best be grasped by contrasting _The Four Men_ with the great _Path to
Rome_. In the former book, Myself finds himself in his companions,
but having found himself he faces the threat of final isolation, the
alienation of death. The somber beauty of the Sussex wood, the lonely
Downs and the pounding of the tides, the time of autumn, symbolize
the threat to the human person who is just coming into his own. Death
is all around him, and Sussex itself is marked with the inexorable
mutability attaching to a passing world. Although all Four Men are
Catholics, their religion functions in the foreground, around the
campfire as it were, as hardly more than a mythology. Immortality is
hoped for, but is not affirmed clearly as a reality. Belloc achieved
a brilliant artistic success in painting the dilemma of the ancient
pagan, and the dilemma of every man, in a framework which is, on the
surface, both Catholic and contemporary. He was able to do this because
he remained throughout his life, on one level of his personality, the
threatened Myself.
_The Path to Rome_, on the contrary, is most particularly the book of
a Catholic man at home in Christendom. Man is in no sense alienated.
Myself (here openly the author) is a member of the Church Militant,
destined for the Church Triumphant. Belloc tramps through the Alps,
down into the broad Italian plains, and his heart expands under the
graciousness of Catholic skies. An abounding good humour flows into
every event, conferring on the most trivial encounter the character of
high adventure. Here is the picture of a man who has fought the battle
for Faith, and who has been granted some share of peace. He still
ponders the nature of the soul. A man so at home with mountains, good
wine, and the laughter of friends will never approach the supernatural
with the confidence of a contemplative. Belloc’s delight is with the
old Europe he loves so deeply, and if there be ecstasies beyond what he
can see, he will “take them upon trust and see whether they could make
the matter clearer in Rome.”[27] The irony of this essentially somber
spirit is relieved by a humour that is thoroughly Catholic in its
simplicity.
This best of all travel books is vintage Belloc because it displays him
in all the rich diverseness of his centralized personality. His grave
mood, his Grizzlebeard, is constantly balanced by his robust vitality,
by the Rabelaisian flavour of this latter-day Villon. He relishes
existence with a zest that does due honour to the gifts of God; he
laughs; he pontificates with mock solemnity; he trifles brilliantly
with words (see the business about “windows”); he holds forth on the
nature of Fools; and then he breaks into some of the loveliest lyrical
prose in all English letters. And through all this adventuring and
tramping runs a sanity that is almost more than human. If great beauty
be the “common transfigured,” as Belloc holds it to be, then this
record of a shanksmare hike to Rome shall ever stand as a symbol of
what man can be if he will only cease being other than himself.
The universe as seen by Hilaire Belloc in _The Path to Rome_, _Hills
and the Sea_, and _The Cruise of the Nona_ is a thoroughly Catholic
universe: physical nature is grasped as good in its very being, and
to this inner worthiness of all things there has been added the
sacramental seal of the power of God. One can almost see the Papal
blessing _Urbi et Orbi_, hanging like a benediction over the vineyards
and hills of Italy as they embrace the man coming down from the cold
heights of the Alps.
One can describe the Bellocian world no better than by saying that
it is the total opposite of the world of Brunner, Barth, Kafka,
and Kierkegaard. If Belloc’s way of looking at things seems so
strangely foreign when compared with the outlook of the contemporary
intelligentsia, it is because the former is Catholic and the latter
is lapsed-Catholic. The philosophy of the modern European is, as
Edith Stein once said, “the philosophy of a lapsed-Catholic with a
bad conscience.” If Belloc sees the supernatural order as completely
penetrating the natural order, it is because grace is seen as not
destroying a nature essentially corrupted in sin, but as operating
within man and flowering in his very gestures.
Dozens of times throughout his essays, Belloc’s Catholic insight comes
home to the reader, not as something superimposed nor as something
articulated conceptually, but as the very intelligibility of the man’s
work. He saw reality as a gift to be greeted and revered. There is
nothing of the contemporary irritation with existence in Belloc. He is
never shocked by being. He does not stumble guiltily through a world of
spikes, hedged in by the sharp outline of nothingness. Human hypocrisy,
greed, social injustice, the loss of economic and personal freedom, the
pride of the rich: these sins arouse his ire and bring forth the great
thunder of his hammer-like denunciations. But being has not sinned. It
is the innocent one recalling all of us to the morning of the race,
and to the promise of paradise regained. “If someone find a beautiful
thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it.
This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end
surely of any act of religion.”[28]
If we would seek one symbol that best crystallizes the Bellocian
affirmation, we would find it in wine. Belloc, tramping over the lands
of Barbary, brooded long on the lost vineyards as he saw nothing but
the vacancy of the desert. He turned and went back to that Europe he
so loved, and he drank wine to her in his heart.[29] Wine called forth
for him the Sacrament of the Altar and that one moment in time when
a passing world full of passing men was lifted out of the darkness.
The mystical figure of wine seemed to him to sum up the Catholic
affirmations, even to the heart of the Mysteries of the Faith.
The Bellocian vision, while poetic and religious, finds its completion
in history. Belloc’s grasp of the European past was something amazing,
and it grew out of the need his personality felt for total integration.
Man would remain starved if he did not make his past his own. In Belloc
the ages became one. As the Church is something visible, existing in
space, and enduring in time, so also is the world that she has created
something physical to be seen and handled like a Thing: something that
perpetuates itself against mortality through a tradition that stretches
back into the mists of antiquity.
A man’s understanding of himself depends on where he steps into
history; not mere academic nor _written_ and catalogued information,
but the past as assimilated into a personality, and as taking on the
very existence of a man. When Belloc writes history he is one with the
march of the West. Whatever was divisive of the unity of Christendom,
even if dead and long conquered, receives at his hands a hatred that
is almost personal. Belloc the soldier haunted the battlefields of the
First Crusade, marked with his fingers the high point of the Mohammedan
wave, and went with Napoleon into the Russian winter. He said once of a
friend that “history had overlapped on him.” He was describing himself.
All this does not make for dispassionate scholarship, but it makes for
something vastly more important: it situates a man squarely in the path
of history, and it renders him conscious of all that has gone before to
make him what he is. He becomes himself twice over. What contemporary
writer speaks of the time when “we broke the back of Islam at Tours”?
Spiritual insight into the destiny of Christendom, added to an
imagination that could vividly resurrect the past, were tools that
rendered Belloc uniquely capable of presenting the drama of Europe
to an age that largely had ceased living by the old Faith. But above
their value in furthering his Christian vocation, they added to his
theocentric humanism further integration. The person who is unified in
himself and in society through Faith is further enriched if he _is_,
in a sense, all that has gone before. It was Belloc’s good fortune that
there was enough of the older Christendom physically in being for him
to see at first hand. His historical perspective is uniquely realistic.
He frequently deplored historical investigation that proceeded
exclusively through written testimony. Such history is lacking in two
things: the past is not brought back to us with sufficient vigour and
colour, and the past loses its personal, human, integrative value,
because history must be seen in _things_ which now exist because of
that which has existed.
History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a
necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new
dimension.... But history, if it is to be kept just and true ... must
be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of
_things_.[30]
Belloc’s intensive preoccupation with Christendom is an interest
not in a concept, nor in an abstracted framework nor an academic
“problematic”; it is an engagement in an historical reality, to be
_seen_ and understood on the spot. Occasionally, as he stands in some
place hallowed by past significance, he seems almost burdened by the
grandeur of the task. See how he writes of the fascination of pursuing
the Roman Road between Winchester and Canterbury:
For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such
ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the
river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine
whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue
they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper
soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake
again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should
forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the
better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect,
articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and
the long accumulation of evil.[31]
What he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical
recovery of the self, so that spiritual isolation will not claim the
soul.
If modern man is isolated, and who can doubt that he is, his isolation
stems from a variety of causes, some of which have been briefly
indicated. Among others is the almost total loss of not only the
reality of tradition, but of the sense of tradition, in industrial man.
By industrial man, of course, one indicates not simply the man engaged
in factory production. By industrial man one means that mechanical
personality who has been fashioned by the age—a wound that few if any
of us have escaped.