I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the
confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true, and what
other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united
European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and
for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things
in person. He is not relatively right in this blame, he is absolutely
right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can the Catholic
testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European
story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic,
look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_ have
to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and
disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its
centre in its essence, and together.
I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is
the Church.[41]
The Bellocian concept of history, as set forth in the above passage,
might well be called Anselmian: historical understanding follows Faith.
If history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified
through a common religion, then it follows necessarily that history
can be grasped only from within. The historian who views the European
story as a series of “phenomena” external to himself must either fall
into the Aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology, or he
must superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it
intelligible. He simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the
eyes of the men he would know, or feel with them as they erupt into
common action. He is alienated from them.
Belloc has been attacked by historians, both Catholic and non-Catholic,
for partisanship, bias, and narrow dogmatism. There is more than a
little truth to their charges. Belloc frequently bludgeons his readers.
In the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost
martial in its proud magnificence: its certainty. But all this is
part of the price Belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian
he did. He is within what he is writing. Do not ask for impartiality
when reading of the First Crusade. Belloc is there: he is one of the
Crusaders. When you know Belloc, you know the Crusades, you know the
revolutionary spirit that swept all France in the eighteenth century;
when you have read _Esto Perpetua_ the grandeur of the first three
centuries of the Christian era comes home to the soul amidst the
contrast of the barren desert of Islam. You understand what Islam meant
to Europe. Belloc gives a reader a one-sided history, but the irony is
that, to a Bellocian, history must always be one-sided. The man “on no
side” is outside history.
Paradoxically enough, Belloc’s contention runs exactly contrary to
the first principle of modern Western historical theory. Contemporary
historians, regardless of political predilection or religious and
philosophical adherence, are united in the common belief that
historical truth is dependent on historical “objectivity.” This
objectivity is achieved in proportion to the historian’s ability to
withdraw from his own cultural antecedents. In so doing, the scholar
shakes himself loose from the prejudices and parochialisms of his own
civilization, he frees himself, in order that he may view the whole.
The story of his people and of his own faith recede until they take
their just place within the broader scope of the cosmic movement of
historical man through time.
It is questionable whether such an objectivity can be more than an
ideal projected before the historian—a goal to be forever missed, but
always aimed at. But assuming for a moment that it is possible for
a single historian to hold before himself the global passage of man
through recorded history, assuming that he could find a set of natural
principles that would unify this vast procession of phenomena into
an intelligible structure—even assuming this ideal of the Toynbee
school of thought—it still remains an open question whether this would
constitute the possession of historical _truth_.
If, on the contrary (assuming Belloc’s hypothesis), historical truth
principally means historical _understanding_ of the men who have
made history, then this understanding can only follow on a grasp of
the spiritual tides that have launched any given culture, that have
given it a common destiny, that have been channelled analogically
through the members of the community. Historical truth depends then
on a subjective, almost intuitive, grasp of this communal spirit; a
penetration into historical man, rather than an analytic dissection of
a spirit that defies mere logical analysis. Historical understanding
escapes the kind of objectivity achieved in the sciences, because it
demands a deeper insight: an entering into the subjective engagement of
the human person. To understand what has caused me to be the kind of
man I am, I must understand what caused the men who made me to be what
they were. I possess my past, in Belloc’s eyes, when I am that past to
such a degree that I could have acted as did my ancestors. Then, and
only then, do I actually know my own fathers from within the depths of
my own personality.
Outside objectivity versus inside understanding; conscious withdrawal
and deliberate cultural alienation for the sake of objectivity, as
opposed to conscious cultural immersion and integration for the sake
of subjective sympathy: two theories of history that can be resolved
finally only by a personal act of choice.
Belloc’s historical theory is anti-academic in that it cannot be
achieved within the confines of the world of the university. As both
an historical position and an historical practice it must always be
suspect to professional historical scholars, whose almost exclusive
preoccupation with _documents_ makes them, quite naturally, more
sympathetic to the scientific objectivity of contemporary history.
Belloc must always appear, by turns, wildly romantic and narrowly
partisan to the academicians. To the Bellocian, academicism in history
must always lack both colour and vigour. It must wear an air of
irritating professionalism.
Belloc’s position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel,
his minute detection of physical details, his sympathy with verbal
tradition, his suspicion for the “outlander.” These were all humanistic
instruments, rendering him one with the past, capable of seeing
things as did his forefathers, understanding reality as they did, and
eventually grasping the inner spirit of their personal and communal
action that constitutes the heart of their history.
Such history is both conservative in ultimate judgment and it is
radical: conservative in that it proceeds by way of a personal
guarding of an ancient heritage; radical in that it makes a man
totally opposed to a new world at odds with that heritage. The final
and the fatal limitation to Bellocian history is that it depends for
success on a constant living continuity, on a vital tradition acting
like a road the historian can travel down and back again at will.
The radical discontinuity of the modern world with its past in the
older Christendom makes it almost impossible for anyone to perpetuate
Belloc’s historical practice. It is becoming increasingly more
difficult, if not impossible, _to be_ spiritually and affectively one
with our heritage. The past of Christendom is becoming more and more a
written patrimony, and the Bellocian brand of historical integration
cannot thrive on such jejune food.
History by way of inside understanding is practicable today only
on a regional and familial basis; and even the family, within the
industrialized world, has lost any living touch with its own dead. The
father has become a stranger to his son.
For Belloc, therefore, an apprehension of the European past demands
an understanding and a sympathy for the Catholic Faith, tending to
allegiance, if not to formal profession. As Belloc sees it, only such
an history can comprehend the over-all pressure of the Christian
dispensation as it exercised a steady influence on the person and
on society; acting always as a balm, sometimes as a force, both
conservative and full of ringing affirmations that are not of this
world. Nonetheless, Belloc affirms, this apprehension is of itself
sufficient to insure only an over-all sane judgment about things
historical. The Christian vision, to perfect itself historically, must
take on a judgment that is temporal, human, and almost cynical in its
realism. The great Action advances or retreats as it is involved in the
individual actions of ages, generations, decades, and even days and
hours. These, in their turn, are caused by a host of agents, tangling
one with another, clashing in opposition and uniting in the coincidence
of common interest: causes which are both impersonal and personal, but
chiefly the latter.
The historian, says Belloc, must possess himself of a mass of detailed
impersonal information, which must be sifted and fitted into proper
perspective. “But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind
all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed
knowledge is possible.”[42] In short, as Mr. Robert Hamilton pointed
out in his study on Belloc, the historian must be a humanist. He
must understand men and the motives that move them. History, to be
faithful to what was actually productive of the past, must go beyond
the physical, phenomenal evidence at hand. A judgment of motive
will normally transcend the synthesis of observable fact. A man of
action (unless he be a Communist) does not give himself away on
paper. His motives must be inferred from the way he acts. A detailed
observation of a man’s conduct over a period of time and through a
succession of historical crises will yield sufficient evidence for an
over-all judgment as to his intentions, and hence to his place in the
historical drama in which he was engaged. No one piece of information
is sufficient for such an evaluation. The sum of facts, considered
separately, would yield only probability concerning the directed human
will. The information as synthesized, however, permits of an inductive
judgment yielding a species of certitude about the moral role men play
in history. In _The Cruise of the Nona_, that mosaic of Bellociana,
the theory is put forth by the author that a sum of probabilities can
furnish certitude, if that sum is taken as a patterned whole. It looks
as though Belloc is here reflecting the influence of his early teacher,
John Henry Newman, who developed an epistemology around this conception
of certitude as emerging from a set of probabilities. When all the
evidence together points to one conclusion, converges on one exclusive
explanation, then the mind should assent to that one conclusion without
fear of the truth of the opposite. It is clear that this is a risky
and dangerous instrument for the acquisition of historical truth. A
fool, or a mind purely speculative or deductive in bent, would bungle
in attempting such judgments. A mind overly pious and overly sanguine
about human nature, or excessively cynical about the good in men, would
not be suited for the task. It is an instrument for a humanist: a man
who knows men as they are. Belloc was peculiarly capable of exercising
his own theory, and if he erred sometimes, it was on the side of
cynicism, not piety.
Belloc’s theory of history is not developed philosophically in any
one piece of writing. He tosses out his ideas within the limits of
short personal essays, and occasionally he illuminates what he is
doing in some concrete situation by standing back, as it were, and
reflecting briefly on the presuppositions guiding his reasoning. He
wrote history _analogically_, and if he had thoroughly developed his
doctrine theoretically, he would have revealed something unique in
the philosophy of historical practice. Historical research, if it
would conform itself with historical truth, must be analogical as is
historical truth itself. A diversity of causal lines, one at least
almost immemorial, others lengthening into centuries, and still others
contracted within the space of a man’s life or within a lesser temporal
span, all act together to produce history, but each causal line acts
in its own way. The historian must constantly shift his perspective as
he makes his way through this tangle of actualities, which encompass
everything from a living Faith, through the whole gamut of human vice
and honour, to the half-forgotten contours of the field of battle. No
one factor _determines_ history (although one factor—the Christian
Greco-Roman tradition—renders history _intelligible_). Herein Belloc
is consciously separated from Marxist history, which would explain
the past as determined exclusively through economic pressures. Even
more so is the Bellocian theory opposed to the Hegelian or dialectical
concept of history in which the past is judged to be caused by a
logical clash of ideas which work themselves out in time, independently
of, or dominating, the counter-pressure of human action.
To study, think, and write history as Belloc did demands a rare brand
of personal integration. A personal Faith, through which the Christian
tradition is comprehended, is united with humanism, through which the
human and non-human causes operative in history are accorded their just
causality in the judgment of the past. These lines of causality must be
kept distinct, but they cannot be separated. If they are separated, the
historian will fall into some kind of Barthianism, in which the Gospel
is conceived as a message that acts through the ages independently of
men and society, and in which secular man goes his own way totally
uneffected by the Christian dispensation. If, on the contrary, the
lines of causality are identified, then history is turned into the
pious hagiography of fashionable French ladies of the last century. To
ignore or to minimize either the Church or the secular is to fail to
understand Western Europe.
As an example of Belloc’s balancing of historical causality one should
watch him in act as he analyzes the French Revolution. A host of causes
made the Revolution: the Christian doctrine of human equality; the
ruining of the prestige of the monarchy by Louis XV’s public indulgence
of the flesh prolonged into middle and old age; the antiquated system
of taxation, based on a defunct manorial society, which bankrupted the
realm; the extravagance and scandal given by a woman too long denied
the rights of marriage; Drouet’s ride (“Good Lord, what a ride!” says
Belloc); the heroism of the French at Wattignies; the democratic
spirit of the Gauls united so paradoxically with the temper of the
soldier—these were all actual causes of the Revolution. The failure
of almost any one of them would have ruined or at least modified the
Revolution.
When faced with these facts, few historians would deny the rightness
of Belloc’s contention. But it remains true that these causes, all
of which moved to one effect, are not actually operative within the
minds of most academic historians when they set down the story. What
use would an Hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the
flight of the King? His theory cannot admit that wild contingency, full
of the drama of human existence, to have altered the course of history.
He is bound by his own dialectic. Neither the free will of Drouet,
nor the strength of the man’s horse, nor the quality of his skill,
can genuinely enter Hegelian history; nor can they enter the systems
of Spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him,
because _systems_ of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical
contingency. What modern vulgarian, conditioned by our mechanical
theories about sex, can _really_ understand Marie Antoinette—so
Catholic at the end, and always so much the woman! Theories of history
can take these contingencies and admit them as _facts_, but they can
not use them in their over-all explanations. These historians are not
humanists, but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that
escapes the purely scientific.
For an insight into Belloc’s humanist penetration, one could do little
better than to read him on King Charles I of England. For centuries
Charles has been a puzzle to students of history: carrying with him
all the glamour of the Stuarts, he was certainly the noblest of that
ill-omened house (if one except James Francis Edward), and yet why
did he let Strafford go to his death? This moral failure of the King
is contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war, from the
raising of the royal standard at Nottingham to his execution. Charles
simply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling: we cannot
think of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next; there
is a constancy about his whole life, and how can this constancy be
understood in the light of the death of Strafford? Explained it must
be, if the English Civil War is to make sense. Belloc, uniting the
Newmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a
humanist, draws this sketch of the man’s character:
I may compare the effects of his inward strength to the effects
produced by one kind of resistance against an impact.
When men plan to make impact against resistance in the will of another
they expect, and commonly find, at first a resistance. They proceed to
wear it down. If it gets less, they are introduced to a last struggle
in which, when they have taken all the outworks, they may naturally
expect to succeed. So it was with the pressure brought against the
boy’s father, James I, in the first beginnings of the revolt of
the gentry against him. James’ Parliaments—that is, the country
gentlemen—pushed him further and further. Such an action is like a
siege, it can have but one end, and as we know, James, fighting from
trench to trench, always, in the end, gave way.
Then again, there is the kind of resistance offered by men who are
adamant in the beginning. They bluntly refuse, and if you lose your
first battle against them you can go no further.
But Charles was to be neither of these. His nature, trained in
isolation, was fluid against the first onset of attack; then there
came a moment when the attack reached something quite different from
the first fluid resistance—a stone wall. It was thus that he came
to his death. Men were led on to think him pliable; when they came
unexpectedly on rigidity, they were infuriated.
Now this distinction, I take it, between his fixity upon certain
things, well defined in his own mind, and his indecision or rather
lack of convinced _cause_ for resistance on the rest—this quality in
him which kept in reserve and hidden an ultimate power of complete
refusal (even to martyrdom) took root, I say, in these very early
years when he was compelled, almost against himself, to consider in
private what remedy he could find for his defects.[43]
Belloc did not find the above in any written document, admitting of a
learned footnote. He concluded to it, following on a study of all the
available data. His moral judgment concerning Charles would be called
“romancing” by historians of one brand of the _Historismus_ school.
If history is but surface phenomena or ideology, then these men are
right. But if history has been _caused_ efficiently, in part, by men
acting in all their strength and failing in their weaknesses, then the
Bellocian method is dangerously right: right, because without such a
method history remains incomplete and even superficial; dangerous,
because the humanist instrument is a delicate rapier and not one to be
used without caution, skill, and human understanding. One cannot affirm
that Belloc always kept the necessary balance, but he kept it steadily
enough through a lifetime of historical labour to have bequeathed us a
kind of history rarely written in these days, or in any day for that
matter: history which respects tradition, both political and religious,
and history which respects the human person in all the tissue of good
and evil from whence proceeds human action.
Although the use of the technique of “converging probabilities”
frequently issues into judgments that are humanist, i.e. judgments
about men, Belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish
historical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human
personality. In these impersonal studies about battles, roads, rivers,
etc., Belloc pointed up his polemic against the German Idealist school
that refused to deal with _things_. _The Stane Street_, written in
1913, is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind
of historical investigation. Although the book was severely written,
with little of the high rhetoric associated with much of Belloc’s
history, there are two passages that reveal Belloc’s attack against
historical idealism.
Let me not be misunderstood; the repeated view that Britain was a
sparsely inhabited and only partially Romanised province, is one which
no one today with a care for historical truth will maintain. It arose
in that hypothetical and North German school of history which prefers
to accumulate facts rather than co-ordinate evidence; which delights
to give guesswork an equal rank with record, and invariably to oppose
that guesswork against the tradition of civilization ... there has
grown up a deplorable academic habit which will build most readily
upon the very absence of proof, and one must refute such falsehood
before one can proceed to truth ... _the mere lack of evidence is used
for the purposes of confident negation_ ... it is the peculiar disease
of our time in this province of inquiry.
For instance, we know nothing of London between the time when Imperial
Rome still taxed and administered Britain and the seventh century,
when, with the return of the Catholic Church, writing and record
returned. Wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly
maintain the fantastical theory that London in the interval did—what?
why, ceased to exist!
No one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of
the Universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves
responsible for so amazing a statement. It is none the less true.
Because we do not know what happened to London between one fixed date
... and another ... therefore it has been solemnly put forward under
academic authority that London in the interval disappeared!
It is folly, of course. It is as clear an abandonment of common sense
as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours
when we happen to be absent from them.[44]
It is amusing to note that one phrase in the above passage was repeated
almost verbatim twenty years later, when Belloc wrote of his dead
companion Chesterton, that “he had the singular good fortune to have
escaped the University.” He wrote this phrase in a context dealing with
Chesterton’s _realism_. This was the same Chesterton who had said that
the only sin was “to call green grass grey.” It was the same Chesterton
who saw with his friend that there is one, implicit, rarely articulated
first principle behind the modern mind: _things are not what they seem
to be_; the postulate of an impoverished universe, as it has been
called. Whig history was one enemy; but the great enemy against which
Belloc directed his historical guns was German _Historismus_, the child
of Hegelian idealism, and the enemy of reality.