death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a
monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which
destroys), 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.[38]
This immemorial _sense_ for history has always run through every artery
of the corporate life of Christendom, and in Hilaire Belloc it finds a
final champion. Read _A Remaining Christmas_ or _The Mowing of a Field_
for an insight into Belloc’s sense of history as tradition. For him,
and here he is one with that past he claimed for himself, history is
simply the recovery of the self: a personal and communal act of memory.
For Belloc, as for the West, tradition begins in the family: the Yule
log was burnt in his home. From the family, tradition spread to the
region: he rendered Sussex immortal. From the region, man recovers
those wider circles of his story—the nation, the state, the broad
sweep of the Empire: some forty books enshrine the Bellocian effort.
All of this is finally stamped one by the Faith that issued from the
Incarnation.
Belloc’s historical work is divided broadly into two chief fields of
interest: England and France; and within these respective areas of
concentration a particular era predominates: in England it is the
Reformation, down to the final exile of the Stuart Kings; in France,
it is the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Transcending these
broad interests, there are works which deal with the wider sweep of
Western History from before the Incarnation, down through the Middle
Ages, up to the Reformation and even beyond World War I to the _Crisis
of Our Civilization_. Biography and general history incarnate the above
work. Besides all that, Belloc has produced an odd dozen specialized
monographs which deal with subjects close to his heart: studies on
the Roman Road, on Sussex, on cities and their river tributaries,
and finally on military history. The first two attach to his general
European history and illustrate his “pro-Roman” and “pro-Catholic”
positions. The military monographs are grouped chiefly, although not
exclusively, around England. Not including his travel books, which
illustrate historical matter, one can count forty-six books written by
Belloc that are historical in the full sense of the term.
The story of Belloc’s going up to Oxford as an undergraduate,
astounding the University with his brilliance and pugnacity, is well
known. The story of his exclusion from Oxford as a tutor because of
his bellicose Catholicism may be revealed some day. In any case, this
rebuff added something personal to his bitterness against what he
called the “official history” of the great English Universities. His
work must be understood in relation to the two historical trends that
he reacted against with such violence: the Whig tradition of Gibbon,
Mommsen, Macaulay, Green, and their copyists and sycophants; and the
implicit idealism and anti-traditionalism of German _Historismus_.
Because he was engaged in a conscious and articulate controversy with
these two historical schools for almost fifty years, an understanding
of what he is opposing is indispensable for placing Belloc as an
historian.
Present-day English history has maintained a steady, unbroken
continuity with eighteenth-century political Whiggery and
eighteenth-century rationalism. History was an admirable tool for the
elucidation of doctrines peculiarly dear to the whole Enlightenment (as
Voltaire so clearly grasped). The indefinite perfectibility of human
reason could be illustrated historically by showing the advance of man
out of medieval darkness into the light of the Age of Reason. Here
the specific dogmas of rationalist deism _happened_ to coincide with
the prejudices of popular Protestantism: that the Church was foisted
on an unwilling Empire at the caprice of Constantine the Great; that
the barbarian hordes from the east swept over the body of Rome and
breathed a new life into Europe that flowered eventually in a host of
Protestant institutions; that the Dark Ages extended into the high
Middle Ages and were expelled only by the advent of the Renaissance of
learning (executed, if not initiated by scholars freed from the tyranny
of Rome); that the growth of Parliamentary Government in Holland and
England was the work of disinterested patriots forging a future freed
from feudal darkness and oppression—all these opinions, dear to the
traditions of the Glorious Revolution, were simply corollaries of the
rationalist doctrine of the expanding perfection of mankind. Darwinism
was only a latter-day confirmation of this ideology. From Protestant
opinion and rationalist philosophy was born the thing known as Whig
History. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig-rationalist was
dead certain that he had in his hands the guide lines to historical
understanding. It seems significant that even old-line Tories who
politically opposed the bulk of the Whig-Liberal traditions fell
into the general Whig position. Bolingbroke himself was a victim of
pre-Darwinian evolutionism.
Since man was supposed to have _progressed_ to that point in time
where the historian stood, history was judged from the vantage point
of the present. Everything from before Christ, down to the decline of
the Roman Empire, the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance
and beyond the Reformation was measured by standards peculiar to the
present. The past received its intelligibility in the light of where
man happened to find himself. All this followed on a doctrine of
inevitable progress. Since the present was the high point of cultural
and personal development, the past was considered ministerially. Our
fathers were condescended to.
Now it is extremely significant that Hilaire Belloc, almost alone of
his Edwardian generation, reversed that historical perspective. He
called before the bar of Christendom the capitalist, industrialist
present, and found it wanting. Belloc insisted on judging the present
in the light of the past, and the past itself was seen in terms of
_its_ own immediate and remote antecedents. The reality of the European
traditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice, the very
being of cultural historical continuity, entered bodily into his
perspective. Whereas the Whig historian judged King Charles I, to take
an obvious example, in the light of the twentieth-century development
to liberal parliamentary government, Belloc saw the man in terms of the
ancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the
Stuart monarch died. Cromwell, for the Whig historian, was he who made
for parliamentary supremacy; for Belloc, Cromwell was he who was made
by an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution.
Since Belloc’s conception of history is traditional and organic, he
constantly insisted on judging the past in the light of the lines of
efficient causality that were actually productive of this or that
historical event or crisis. These lines are many and diverse, but at
least one of them, Belloc insists, renders European history a steady
continuity. This line of causality is the Catholic and Greco-Roman
classical tradition; an almost immemorial tradition existing in the
present in two dimensions: corporately—in Christendom as a whole,
molding it by shaping institutions, forming consciences, transforming
the land, incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and
literary arts, and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn;
and personally—as summing itself up in a man, annealing him, and giving
direction to his destiny.
In taking his historical stand on the Catholic tradition, Belloc
was fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been, and
although radically attenuated still was, the one bond of continuity
that could enable the historian to grasp a steady, continuous causality
in his province. The Whig doctrines were myths, but even assuming for
a moment that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were
superior to the Medieval and Continental traditions—that the present
was the threshold to a golden age, as the Victorians and Edwardians
still thought—nonetheless, that supposition was completely valueless as
a principle of historical explanation.
The Whig historian and his Liberal counterpart attempt to find some
intelligibility or meaning in history. The rejection of the Catholic
ethos robs the Whig of the one steady, continuous influence that has
always operated in the West through the ages. The Whig cannot, for
example, see the rise of liberty as something caused by the Faith,
as an _effect_ of an institution already in existence. His dilemma
consists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty; his rejection of the
Catholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives: either
liberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause, and
history is thereby totally unintelligible; or liberty is the effect
of something not actually in existence, but which is conceived as
though it were. From the latter issues the Liberal-Whig mythology of
“progress,” “evolution,” “human perfectibility,” and so on. What these
historians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand
for nothing but tissues of imagery, existing in the minds of men who
view historical situations after the fact. In no sense did “progress”
ever cause anything historical, for the simple reason that “progress”
_has no being_ of its own. Yet the Liberals treat these constructs as
though they were physical laws operative in the extramental order.
Belloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy, and he fingered it
for the imaginative trick it is, in his controversy with H. G. Wells.
When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying “I strut to no such
personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I
belong uses me and will go on beyond me, and I am content,” he does
two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the
imaginary ... and next he falls into the very common error of confused
intellects—the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which
we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may
use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use
us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like
that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets
up to be definition.[39]
Wells was not alone in this personification of the abstract. He was
only a popularizer of a tendency that is ever at work in all historical
theory that commences by minimizing the religious causality operative
in the West. The Whig substituted for the Catholic tradition an
over-all finality which he called “progress.” The idealist historian
and the _Weltanschauung_ historian add to the Whig denial the negation
of the personal will. All the historian is left to work with are
impersonal forces, either physical or logical. He falls into the old
error of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist.
The Liberal is bound by his own theory. His sociological ideals must
be projected ahead of his historical understanding; they can never
emerge from an insight into that which actually has existed. The
classical European Liberal (and his contemporary counterpart) is always
marked by his rejection of any way of life rooted in the older past of
Christendom.
When Hilaire Belloc launched his concept of the proprietary state, he
effected a political and sociological revolution that had its roots in
his historical vision. Mr. Douglas Jerrold has analyzed brilliantly
the profound effect made by Belloc’s polemic against the English
parliamentary party system which was wedded to Whig ideals and their
Edwardian Liberal refinements.[40] It was a time when Britain had
reached next to the limit of its material expansion. English industry
and productivity were unequalled in excellence and quantity. The
nation was united in the firm conviction that Britannia ruled by the
grace of God. Providence had specially blessed the Island Empire. The
innate superiority, not only of Englishmen, but of English ways and
English religion, was less a conscious doctrine than a broad myth
on which a whole people reposed. Liberal capitalism appeared to the
“progressivists” as the final flowering of a history that had its roots
in the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Belloc’s economics and sociology, the fruit of his historical insight,
effected a revolution. Since it was a revolution of thought, its
effects were not immediately apparent, but acting as corrosives they
gradually ate away the rust of centuries of complacency and smugness.
Belloc told the Englishmen of his day that their cherished system of
parliamentary government represented not the nation, but two parties
that stood for the same thing: capitalist, industrial wealth. He went
on to tell them that the supposed incorruptibility of this ancient
governmental institution was a lie: men were bought and sold, and
titles were bartered for privilege.
Expanding his polemic, Belloc informed the nation that liberal
capitalism would not issue into the golden age, but would work
inexorably toward the Servile State: a state in which the vast majority
of the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy
owners, or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts.
He grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional
economic basis of Western Christian societies: the institution of
small property, widely distributed, giving the tone to society, and
reposing on the family community. As far back as 1908, in _The Servile
State_, Belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were
reestablished, the nation would give itself over to slavery. The
England of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with
tragic finality. Belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant
point; if the society were propertyless, contractual slavery would
inexorably result. The age of the ration card, the social leveling of
the whole people, the increasing drabness of life, the elimination of
the middle classes, the legislation of enforced labour—this age is upon
England, and it will remain until and unless property is restored.
Belloc’s prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can
succeed. What he said would come to pass did come to pass; and it came
to pass the way he said it would. There is more than irony in looking
back thirty years to that superman of the Wells school of thought: that
uninhibited, traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march
of liberal progress; that dull abstraction, “the man of the future,”
who was to inherit the earth. Who is he today, and where is he? He
is the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt
Europe—Heidegger’s faceless “one” who neither owns nor can be said even
to be.
The striking truth in the utter failure of the hopes of post-Victorian
Liberalism lies in the fact that Liberalism, the child of Whiggery,
grounded its predictions in an historical theory that was a
well-intentioned myth. The future simply is not a magnet. It has no
existence. It is a refuge for cowards, Chesterton said somewhere; a
retreat for men who cannot bear to face the grandeur of their own
past. Belloc was able to lay down the broad lines which were leading
to the Servile State because his historical vision was orientated
realistically: it looked to causes actually operative in the past,
whose collective efficacy hardened and sharpened with the passing of
time. The English Reformation had created a wealthy landed aristocracy.
This aristocracy had ruined a crown that for all its failures had
stood, immemorially, for the rights of the common man, already a landed
owner in large part by the close of the fourteenth century. Having
gained political power, the aristocracy usurped economic power; the
long series of legislative acts and judicial decisions, from the Poor
Laws to the final enclosure acts, ended in the creation of a rural
proletariat. The rise of industrialism was controlled by a capitalism
already in existence, and the rural proletariat was transformed into
its urban counterpart.
Belloc’s prophetic ability, strikingly demonstrated time and again,
worked because it was based on his grasp of causality actually
operative in history. The future can never be predicted with
certitude because causes operating at the present moment in time are
contingent. They can be replaced, diminished, checked, or rechannelled.
Nonetheless, to have an insight into these causes is to possess an
instrument for predicting a possible or even probable future. No
historical theory grounded in a mere _Weltanschauung_, nor any history
deduced from a philosophical system such as the Hegelian and Marxist,
is of any practical utility in understanding what might happen.
Another example of Belloc’s prophetic insight can be found in his
book about the United States, _The Contrast_. Writing in 1924,
before the New Deal was even a dream, Belloc calmly announced that a
great increase of Presidential power would be effected in the near
future. His historical thesis, still paradoxical to most of his
readers, was that great wealth always operated through representative
institutions, and always aimed, neither at monarchy nor democracy, but
at aristocracy. In a country in which the sense of individual liberty
was still strong, the people would tend to incarnate themselves more
and more in the head of the state, who, by his very position, stood
above special interests, which worked naturally through parliamentary
structures. One does not have to agree with Belloc that this
monarchical tendency was a good thing; but it must be granted that he
nailed the tendency to the wall.
Belloc’s historical insight passes the pragmatic test time and again.
Another example of history rendered intelligible when seen in the light
of the traditions of Christendom was Belloc’s very early penetration
of the essential foreignness of Prussia to the family of nations that
constitute Europe. Prussia, the legitimate child of the Reformation,
arose and developed apart from the older European Unity. Of her very
nature she opposed that unity, and refused to be bound by the morality
common to Christian nations and men. Frederick the Great’s rape of
Silesia, the work of Bismarck, the over-all meaning of the First Reich
and of World War I make sense only within the context of Belloc’s
discussion of the problem. When all England and the United States as
well were singing the praises of the Nordic man and the superiority of
the blond beast of the north, Belloc knew what Prussia really meant: a
gun pointed at the heart of the West. The resurrection of Prussianism
under Hitler confirmed bitterly the prophetic insight of Belloc, who
had been warning England for over forty years about the intentions of
North Germany. Belloc knew where Prussia stood in the light of the
unity of Christendom. She was beyond the pale.
It is largely due to the Bellocian polemic that the old-fashioned Whig
history, although still taught as a matter of course almost everywhere,
is no longer the accepted dogma of serious historical scholarship.
Historians today can labour at their profession without the fear that
their work will be branded as partisan, as is the work of the man who
cleared the field for them.
Belloc’s historical technique suffered from one self-imposed liability.
He worked within a tradition, and thereby defined himself. But his
strength lay in his very limitation. The Bellocian philosophy of
history can operate only within some one well-defined civilization.
The effectiveness of his method depends on the historian’s entering
profoundly into the spirit of a culture, and on assuming to himself the
religious and social beliefs and values of the society in question.
Without his Catholicism, or without at least a deep sympathy for the
religion that made Christendom, Belloc’s historical method cannot be
made to function realistically. It is of no use, for example, to a man
who would work toward an historical understanding of global history.
World history must be seen, to the Bellocian, as something outside of
the European Unity, as something foreign, threatening that unity, or as
penetrated by it. To enter into a diversity of religious and cultural
traditions in order to grasp the complete picture of world history
_from within_ is a psychological impossibility. A man would break down
under the strain, because he cannot take to himself traditions that are
mutually contradictory. He cannot be that which he rejects.
Philosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality
typified by academic journals or international youth congresses. So
long as these historians simply record facts they are safe, but as soon
as they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary
lack of inside understanding. World historians frequently fail to grasp
even the story of their own nations. They are within nothing at all,
but are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from
an academic outside; hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything
that has ever moved men to common action. These historians tend to
succumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically; they
perpetually find meetings between an East and West, where there is only
conflict; they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically; they
build vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching
for his own antecedents. A Christian comes away from Belloc knowing his
own soul.
The _Weltanschauung_ historian must fail in the end because no “world
view” has ever acted to cause anything historically. History is caused
within cultures, and the clash of civilizations occurs when two
cultures in act meet on the field of battle, be it economic, military,
or spiritual.
The final objection that the “world historian” has against Belloc
is that he takes sides, and the final answer to that objection is
simply this: to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history. A
historian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more
than the surface of things. He cannot see the inside of the spiritual
drama of, let us say, the Reformation or the Arian heresy, without
being touched by an absolute: absolutes either wound or enlist the
assent of the spirit. There can be no impartiality when a man has been
actually grazed by the realities that have stirred all Christianity
to its roots. Intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death
simply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been
reached by the historian, and unless they are reached and elected for
or rejected, nothing historical can be known in its very substance.
_Credo ut intelligam._
Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of
Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from
without, he understands it from within ... he is also that which he
has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.