a man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be.
The drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his
finding an analogue of eternity. Without this, man is without moorings;
he drifts and is alone; he is obscurely guilty of lacking something
demanded by his nature. Without tradition, he is a victim offered daily
to the cruelties of the moment.
Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and
body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional
things.... Not only death ... but that accompaniment of mortality
which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is
challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive
acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability ...
the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety,
honour harassed, all the bitterness of living—become part of a large
business which may lead to Beatitude. For they are all connected in
the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the
generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were,
the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and
stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing
burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.[32]
Man’s past has never been better known than it is today. Yet this
knowledge is almost exclusively academic. It is encased in the great
libraries of the civilized world, and it exists divisively in the minds
of countless scholars. But it is no longer known _as a whole_ that
translates itself into the life of the community. In ceasing to be a
tradition, the great story of the West has died; for the only existence
the past can possibly have in a culture is traditional. A tradition
is measured in a society by that society’s consciousness of its own
_symbols_, which render the tradition present to men. Contemporary
industrial society has burgeoned within what was once Christendom, but
having lost the old Faith, it has lost the old symbols, which now hang
on precariously as _myths_ and forms emptied of content. Industrial
man has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone, in
the gestures of daily living. He has nothing to recall. As a result
contemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to
his subconscious drives. Political slogans, ideals gleaned from mass
entertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges, and create
his conscious desires. Cinema heroes and contest winners give him an
ever shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday’s
idol or this morning’s news. Even the library that houses last week’s
paper is called “the morgue.”
A society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the
future. It adores that which has not been, and that which never is. If
Shaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, his friend Wells was its prophet. It is through Wells that the
man of the twenty-fifth century came into his own. And Wells’ most
articulate critic in those days, throughout the whole of England, was
Hilaire Belloc. Today Belloc’s long battle against this drive away from
our origins, his long fight to make the West conscious and proud of
its past, has been partially vindicated, ironically enough, in our own
generation. After World War II, with the threat of the atomic age, the
prophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom. When thinking
man looks ahead he does not see the age of superman, but the grim world
of Big Brother and the phantasies of George Orwell. The future, if
the present be not altered by a radical reaction, can only effect a
“Servile State” which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the
coming society envisaged by Belloc when he first penned that now famous
term in 1908.
Belloc had no doubts about the great Western Catholic tradition. He was
absolutely convinced of its superiority—a superiority that extended to
the economic and political orders as well as to the theological. Belloc
was cavalier in the way he flung the reality of European Christendom
at his contemporaries. He was constantly saying to them: look at that,
you fools, what have you to offer? To achieve success in such an
endeavour Belloc had to act the way he did—rough, brutally dogmatic,
sweeping in his argument. Muted tones and footnote scholarship can
gain skirmishes within the classrooms and the scholarly journals; they
have never yet won a large-scale battle. Belloc faced a generation of
English journalist-politician intellectuals who looked expectantly to a
future grounded on the Whig-Liberal industrialist myth. These were men
consciously convinced of the inevitability and the justness of almost
every aspect of modern civilization. Belloc swept their case away in
book after book, and if the myth of Nordic supremacy is discredited
today, if the Catholic ethos and past has something of a hearing in the
English-speaking world of our generation, if industrial capitalism
is no longer thought to be as natural as the air we breathe and if it
is no longer seen as the only alternative to Communism, if the first
fifteen centuries of the British Isles are not automatically dismissed
by the educated—if the air has changed, it is due in no small measure
to that long cavalry charge of Hilaire Belloc, prolonged through fifty
years of warfare against what he tersely called “the Barbarians.”
A full description of his battle belongs more to a consideration of
the man as an historian and as a sociologist. What is to the point
here is that what Belloc did grew out of what he was. His heartiness
and confidence, his good conscience, sprang from what he _knew_ and
what he had _seen_. Christendom was something almost physical to him.
He assimilated his own past in the most concrete way open to him.
He tramped all over Western Europe; he ate much and drank deeply in
half-forgotten inns that for him always symbolized roots and freedom;
he sailed along the coast of England and charted the landing of the
first Normans; he followed the route of the Phoenicians; he knelt
before the site of Calvary as an old man. With an iron determination,
he willed to become one with all that had gone to make him what he
was—a Western Catholic man. In his own home in Sussex he kept alive all
the older traditions of the countryside.
It has been said frequently that Belloc remained a stranger in England.
Las Vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a Frenchman. He was
neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman; he was both of them, and he
was more than either of them. In his essays Belloc is a South English
peasant and a channel sailor. In his political sympathies, he is an
English Monarchist and a French Republican. In the soldierly dimension
of himself he is thoroughly Gallic. In his over-all vision, he belongs
to the old Roman Empire and to Christendom. He combines within his
personality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are
never bastardized in any specious internationalism, but which retain
their individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his
Catholicism. His was a precarious but happy balance that included the
main lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents.
If Belloc’s over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping
thing that encompasses the centuries, it must be remembered that this
central principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid
sense of the immediate drama of things past and present. One of the
most revealing characteristics of the Bellocian humanism is its lack of
academicism—one might almost say its anti-academicism. Belloc is always
out on the road with his senses peeled. This psychological fact points
up a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each
other: a self-conscious emphasis on the past, and a communion with the
physical universe which actually exists.
Traditionalism, when it is espoused by an intelligentsia, frequently
suffers from an overdeveloped symbolism. Things are not seen in
themselves. They are seen only as symbols. The now is important only to
illuminate the past, or to call to mind spiritual and moral values. The
purely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete, the individual,
the existent; it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal
which is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction.
Several of the great Eastern traditional cultures have atrophied
through an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking.
Byzantine iconography suffers from it, and insofar as it does, it is
not of the West. Carried to the end in the moral order, pure symbolism
means that nothing is valued or loved for itself. Philosophically
considered, such a traditionalism is a kind of Platonism in which the
world functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas.
If the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious, social
and historical symbols, the intellectual suffers from the contrary:
he turns everything solid into a mirror. Intellectually this ends in
a simple inability to see things as they are. Theologically, it would
appear to be a kind of subtle Manicheanism, in which nothing is good
enough as it is.
Belloc constantly kept himself engaged with things. His understanding
of the Catholic tradition escapes the purely symbolic and academic
order. What he sees in the river valleys and inns of Europe _is_
symbolic of a great historical effort stamped with the City of God; but
what is so stamped is good in itself. If you would understand the past
that has made you and grasp something of the spirit of its religion,
Belloc urges that you go to Arles, for example; but above all, _see_
Arles. Belloc’s Grizzlebeard, the custodian of tradition, is one with
his Sailor, the man of “the five senses.”
If his Grizzlebeard were without a Sailor, Belloc’s traditionalism
would have stiffened into something Egyptian, mummified. But since he
is of the West himself, of an order which has been eminently practical
and concrete as well as visionary, these two remain one. To exemplify
the nature of tradition, Belloc finds his best instance to be a
seaman’s knot.
If his Sailor had had no Grizzlebeard, then Belloc’s concrete vision
and communion with reality would have degenerated into a kind of
irrational naturalism. Naturalism is merely an escape into the physical
universe, away from burdens which are peculiarly human. It is one of
the less healthy offshoots of the fertile tree of Romanticism. Since no
man can just wallow in nature for long without reacting in some way,
the pure Romantic soon comes up with a view of nature as an irrational
force within whose bosom is to be found salvation. The spectacle of
D. H. Lawrence comes to mind immediately. The humanist reacts to
nature by taming the beast; the Christian humanist tames a Good Beast.
But the romantic naturalist attunes himself to the wilderness and
finally renounces his social nature. The eighteenth-century City of
Man appeared to the early Romantics to be an utter sham. The Age of
Reason had run its course, and the intellect had become an intolerable
burden. The Romantics tried to escape from their humanity into a
physical beyond; having surrendered the reason, they gave themselves
up to mythmaking. Mr. Auden has analyzed the peculiar significance of
the “sea” and the “desert” for European Romanticism.[33] The “sea”
represented the infinite possibilities that urged human nature to
break its bond. But this optimism carried within itself the seeds
of a subsequent despair. The “desert” represented the possibilities
exhausted, the sea dried up. The surrender of the reason and of
the corporate wisdom of society ended in giving the spirit over to
darkness. The older traditions reminiscent of the Catholic Unity were
jettisoned, and the result is known to us all. The _Walpurgisnacht_
orgies under Nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that
just missed wiping out the remnants of Western Christian Europe.
Western man for centuries now has lost the key to his own meaning.
He has been striving for a long time to break out of the ruins of a
City half destroyed at his own hands. Political Liberalism of the
old-fashioned Marxian variety grew out of a psychological desire to
get away from where man actually found himself. Post-World War II
existentialist despair, considered as a socio-historical reality, is
a philosophical justification for this urge to break all existing
cultural and historical limits. What must be done, at all costs, is
to exorcise our common historical heritage, our faith, our corporate
memories. A fresh beginning can be the only beginning. This is a
presupposition that is operative everywhere, most concretely in the
arts, most consciously in philosophy, and most dangerously in religion.
Such is the estrangement modern man has carved for himself. In social
and economic life the masses are estranged from their spiritual and
cultural past. Politically, techniques forged by Western man himself
have alienated him from his ancient freedom. The home, the nation, the
Church, the West, the past, roots, origins—these are always wrong,
always wicked: only the wilderness of the future promises salvation.
The poet has retreated to that uniquely modern place invented in the
early nineteenth century—the state of mind called Bohemia. His destiny
seems assured when he has pruned away everything reminiscent of the
objective order, and when he finds himself alone with his broken soul.
Philosophically, the age has had urged on it the clever monstrosity
that since consciousness renders to me what is Other than Myself, then
my personality is defined by a negation. Theologically, the Barbarian
God of the peat bogs has come back with “neo-orthodoxy,” and man is
told that he is so utterly other than God that he is in no sense the
image of his Creator. The human fabric has been so cut to ribbons that
man has been reduced to a nothing that can parade his utter absurdity
only by putting on a mask. The clown has come into his own.
Now it is part of the enduring significance of Hilaire Belloc that
he saw all of this long ago. He saw it as the enemy of all that
Christendom had ever built and loved and believed. He saw it as a
unique concentration of evils that separately, one after another, had
attacked the Christian City since its inception. He nailed the thing to
the wall when he called it the spirit of Barbarism: the spirit that
cannot build for itself because it rejects all limit, the essence of
finite perfection; the spirit that makes its way in the intellectual
world and in that necessary parasite, the world of fashion, by negating
all that has gone on before; a spirit that thrives on opposition and
rebellion, and that can cheaply dismiss as nothing the common effort of
three thousand years.
The Barbarian hopes—and that is the very mark of him—that he can have
his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly
produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be
at the pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension
of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems
to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that
civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that
he cannot _make_; that he can befog and destroy, but that he cannot
sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every
civilization exactly that has been true.[34]
Belloc is one of the few writers in the English world of the last fifty
years who wanted to remain himself, and who desired to stand exactly
where he was: a Christian man standing in a tradition whose religion
is Catholic and whose origins are in the Roman Order. Because of this,
Belloc will never be considered an Intellectual. He should not be so
considered. He detested the term. The contemporary Intellectual of
the Western World has come out of the same past as Belloc, but he
rejects that past as he rejects its religion. That is why the past
fifty to seventy-five years of intellectual life have been fevered with
experiment—in literature, in philosophy, in politics, in all the arts,
and in morals. If some new truth has emerged from it all, and if some
beauty has been etched in the darkness, does it not seem as nothing to
what has been given up?
Christopher Dawson stated once that the modern soul is at bottom
anti-ontological. It hates being. Hilaire Belloc has said that the
modern soul hates proportion and limitation. They are both affirming
the same truth, because the condition of all being save God is
limitation. Integrated Christian humanism accepts the finite goodness
that constitutes the nature of man. Out of this affirmation the soul
can build of itself a work of art; without this affirmation, man gives
himself over to the darkness in the suicide of self-alienation.
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long
stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old
certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we
laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on
these faces there is no smile.[35]
These faces are masks of that one Evil that has ever enticed man into
the wilderness. Belloc the soldier saw it riding out of the Eastern
wastes, trampling under the vineyards and desecrating the shrines of
Christian men, giving over the soil to the sands and the mind to an
awful simplicity. He saw it rising within the great Universities of
Europe, rubbing out the certitudes and the songs of Catholic Men.
His soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit
and makes for isolation. There is a passage in _Esto Perpetua_ in which
Belloc—once again “Myself”—met a stranger in Timgad, that African town,
once Roman and fertile, now empty and given back to the desert. They
spoke to one another, and their conversation was the drama of salvation
and damnation. Belloc looked on the desert, and he was tempted: the
soul seemed nothing, and he thought of those who “see at last that
there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves.
Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose
God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.”[36] He felt terror and
was less a man. But he turned and went back to the place he had known,
and the terror left him, and he was a man once again.
Chapter Two
GRIZZLEBEARD: HISTORY FROM WITHIN
Among all the disciplines in which Hilaire Belloc has laboured,
history stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour. Belloc’s
historical _practice_ is too complex to be judged in any general essay
concerning his essential importance. But his historical _theory_ is
crucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated Christian
humanism. It is as an extension of his humanism that his historical
position will be analyzed.
The cardinal significance of the Bellocian conception of history is its
traditionalism. History is organic; it grows from within a culture and
is the actual cause of that culture’s corporate existence in present
time. Since Christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition
that has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past—familial,
regional, and the rest—the past is rendered intelligible by grasping
the inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of
historical man. Those who attack Hilaire Belloc for being biased in
his historical perspective must first settle the question of the very
nature of history itself. For Belloc history begins as an extension of
tradition; history is an act of “self-knowledge,” as he puts it in his
magnificent introduction to _Europe and the Faith_.
This act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to
systematize or catalogue facts. It does not proceed from the need man
has for the possession of impersonal, objective truth. History is the
effect of an inner command to know one’s soul. It is the completion of
human consciousness. The passion for history is man’s Grizzlebeard.
As the Sailor renders Myself unalienated from the physical universe
in which he exists, the Grizzlebeard seals Myself in time which has
stamped man in its own image. Belloc returns to this theme time and
again in the essays, but nowhere does he express himself more movingly
than in _The Old Road_, where he tells us why he elected to recover the
Roman Way from Winchester to Canterbury.
To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and
almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or
to establish aimless truths: it is rather a function whose appetite
has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the
Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives, which, lived in
the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted
into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge
and security and the love of a good land—all these are increased or
given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations
are confirmed.... One may say that historical learning grants men
glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be
the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from
fulfillment.[37]
It is well known that the humanist conception of history as a
psychological necessity first came into its own in the Western World
with the Incarnation of the Son of God in time. In the classical pagan
world the status of history was at best ambiguous. Aristotle gave
historical knowledge a low place in his hierarchy of values. History
for the Greek philosophers could not achieve the dignity of a science
because it lacked the universal necessity without which there is no
science. The philosophers were right in judging history not to be a
science. They were wrong in according history little value. What the
wise men of the ancient world took away from history, the common sense
of the people gave back. The dignity of history was grasped obscurely
because the humanism of the classical universe could not achieve its
fullness unless man was unified in time as well as in space. The
tradition of the family enshrined in the household gods and in the
legend of Aeneas carrying father Anchises on his back out of burning
Troy symbolized a need rooted in the substance of human nature: the
necessity to link the present with the past. Familial traditions
extended to the City, and then to the Empire, and even the work of
Virgil the Poet was historical in inspiration.
The Incarnation in time and the prolonging of the Deposit of Faith
through the centuries in a living tradition that hands on what it has
received, confirmed the humanist insight and at the same time conferred
on history a dignity of an altogether new order. No one in the new
Christian society, not even the scientist or philosopher, would ever
more despise history, and if the West has accorded to history a place
unique in the hierarchy of human values, it is because time had been
sanctified and conquered by the Son of God.
History added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be
himself. The Faith taught Christian man that nothing is ever lost: the
ages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the Vision of
God. Tradition, which is nothing but the corporate life of the past
existing in the present, is the human analogue of the Eternal Morning
Who is the End of us all.
Historical tradition, to grow as it should, must commence with that
society which is most natural to man: the family. Familial memory
incarnated in a host of rites, observances, and actions lifts the
members of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a
present ever passing, and life is invested with a fullness that the
immortal in man demands. The moment is salvaged, and the suffering and
estrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes: