techniques to historical evidence arose in Germany and was saddled from
the outset by a philosophy that was utterly contemptuous of realism and
of the common sense of mankind that accepts implicitly the proposition
that “things are.” If historical method had grown up unencumbered by
ideological weeds, the Western World would never have seen the great
destructive attack made on Scripture in the last half of the nineteenth
century by German scholarship. It seems reasonable to assume that the
new scholarly techniques would have aided men like Belloc in exploding
the older Whig myths. Things did not happen that way, because the
academic mind behind the new method was corrupted with the pride of
idealism. It was a mind diseased to the core that laid its hands on
everything hitherto held sacred and true by the united conscience of
Christendom. German historical research, around the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, touched nothing that it did not negate: filial
traditions, the lore of the old rooted peasantries of Europe, religious
symbolism whose meaning had been settled for centuries, finally
Scripture itself.
This was one of the Barbarians who can never build, but who can only
destroy that from which he feeds. Chesterton fought the same battle
against these iconoclasts on the level of comparative religion that
Belloc fought on the level of secular history. They united in an
assault against the idol-breakers, against that mentality that refuses
to look and see what is there to be seen. Their enemy was a mind primed
by two hundred years of an idealism that had permeated every artery
of thought and action with a suspicion of being, a truculence before
the things which are. If the things which engage the senses and call
forth the assent of the intellect interfere with academic theory, then
the things are thrown away, and the theory wins the day. If physical
evidence attests to a late and active Roman influence in ancient
Britain, and in so doing contradicts official dogma, then the evidence
is to be ignored or explained away. If the physical evidence of a
document attests to its authenticity, when a theory insists that it be
a fraud, why then the document is a fraud. If reason and the senses
attest to an existing world, and philosophy proclaims the contrary,
then so much the worse for the world.
Belloc keenly grasped the destructive tendencies at work within the
Western intelligentsia, which insisted on fencing itself off from the
world by weaving around itself fabric upon fabric of theory. He had
nothing but contempt for the scholar who lives in a world of images,
unrelated to existing things. The typical Intellectual[45] inevitably
commences to think in terms of, let us say, maps coloured this way
and that; he judges peoples and ideas according to the standards of
textbooks and fashionable opinions; he sees the human person in the
light of statistical tables (what Belloc could have done with the
American School of Education mentality!); he measures reality by rulers
laid on sheets of cut cardboard, and by sums reckoned on pads of paper.
This sort of thing, typified and caused by idealism, breeds jingoism,
pacifism, internationalism, and other brands of ideologies unrelated
to reality, and conformed to nothing but systems of phantasy and
imagery.
Belloc’s historical attack against German _Historismus_ must be coupled
with his social satire. Both functioned as part of the same polemic
against “the Barbarian.” As a social satirist he sprayed his irony like
acid on this mythological world that has come upon the West. Dozens
of his essays and all of his nonsense novels are aimed at exposing
and ridiculing the contemporary loss of the sense for reality. Belloc
penetrated, sometimes almost inarticulately, into the core of the
business: if man is removed from being he cannot be himself, and if he
cannot be himself, he cannot enter into the City of God, without which
there is neither happiness here nor beatitude beyond. This realization
of his rendered him the great iconoclast of the iconoclasts: he broke
the idols of the idol breakers. Science he openly branded “the enemy
of the truth.” Industrial Capitalism was the “Servile State,” and the
Successful Business Man was a “share shuffler,” a “liar and thief”; art
was a “stinking trade,” because he knew well enough that this would
blood the solemnity of the _avant-garde_; advertising he labels a
“disgusting lie.” The servants of the rich are consigned to the bottom
of hell, and polite society is damned with the incomparable:
Good morning, Algernon: Good morning, Percy.
Good morning, Mrs. Roebeck. Christ have mercy![46]
The attack against academic idealism was but the center of Belloc’s
broader assault, carried out through a dozen different artistic media,
against the _Zeitgeist_. To grasp the essence of Belloc’s integrated
Christian humanism is to possess the key to understanding his position
as a satirist and controversialist. This age, Belloc repeats over and
over again, is not at one with the destiny worthy of a man. Belloc is
ever hammering home one message: shake off this bad dream, and look
once again at reality, at being, at Creation. “Dear reader, read less
and sail more.”
In one of his farewell essays to Chesterton, Belloc declared that the
prime glory of his friend was to have seen things as they are. In his
own turn, and in his own way, that was Belloc’s chief excellence, as
it is the chief excellence of any man who can claim right to public
respect or cultural frame.
Belloc, principally through his historical work, fought a battle that
was spiritual in origin. On the whole Belloc’s attack seems to have
been less effective than Chesterton’s, because Chesterton brought to
the battle an amazing good humour and charity for the enemy. He slaps
his foe on the back, jokes with him, and enjoys himself hugely. Belloc
_publicly_ glowers over against the foe. He was always the Roman
soldier holding the citadel against the savage from without. Belloc
brought to his task an extremely lucid reason, French not only in its
incisive keenness, but in its cynicism as well. He could rarely accept
the good will of men who opposed his judgments. They were either fools
or liars.
There is some irony in Belloc’s judgment that Chesterton’s
effectiveness was blunted because of his charity. For once, Belloc’s
realism broke down, as does the realism of the French break down,
from time to time, when faced with some great simplicity. It was
Chesterton’s very “weakness” (in Belloc’s eyes) that rendered him the
more effective of the two in this one aspect of their work: the polemic
against un-realism. Chesterton won by his very simplicity, and by the
greatness of his childlike vision—so sane and so just, and so full of
good will. Belloc made the enemy mad. He stung them, and they reacted
in the most deadly way possible. They ignored him after a time, so
that today Belloc remains a writer who has not been tried and found
wanting, but who has simply not been tried at all.
Possibly Belloc was _too_ effective in his war against the Dons. He
made fools of them, and then he insisted on rubbing it in. There is
an essay in _Hills and the Sea_ called “The Roman Road.” It is like
many of Belloc’s essays: first there is a bathing from the springs
of something _in being_, which is soaked into the author’s substance
through his senses. Then he brings his intellect to bear on whatever it
is that has engaged his whole personality, and some judgment is passed.
Frequently, the judgment is moral in character. In this particular
essay, Belloc relates the story of a ride he took on his horse
“Monster” over the old road which presents “an eternal example” of what
Rome could do.
... That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word “Cold Harbour,”
is scattered up and down it. There are Roman pavements on it. It
goes plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses
undisturbed land, it is three or four feet above the level of the
down. Here then, was a feast for the learned: since certainly the
more obvious a thing is, the more glory there must be in denying it
... just as they will deny that Austerlitz was fought in spite of
Trafalgar, or that the Gospel of Saint John is the Gospel of Saint
John.
Here, then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of
such men and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don
might be at the moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three
miles away, and I was very glad: for it permitted me to contemplate
the road with common sense, and with Faith, which is Common Sense
transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries climbing the hill....
But chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that
learned men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the _existence_
of this Roman road.... Here was a piece of pedantry and skepticism
which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation ...
but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy. As I considered
carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of
way he talks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the
kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which his
works are bound.... With every moment my elation grew greater and more
impetuous.... But as they brought me beer and bacon that evening, and
I toasted the morning, the memory of things past, I said to myself:
“Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham—you four great Universities—you
terrors of Europe—that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink
to your continued healths, and let us have a little room ... air, give
us air, good people. I stifle when I think of you.”[47]
No wonder he was ignored! What else could they do with a man like that?
Once he subjected his own masterpiece, _The Path to Rome_, to the
techniques and presuppositions of the “Higher Criticism,” and he proved
his own book to have been written probably as early as the year 2006.
It was all high and hilarious fun, until the enraged Catholic, the
dedicated man, flashed out in the last lines: “That is how the damned
fools write: and with brains of that standard Germans ask me to deny my
God.”[48]
Belloc’s whole historical practice cannot be understood if it is
viewed simply as a reaction against Whiggery. It is more pointedly a
reaction against Historicism. To this negative side of his work must
be added an insight, as indicated, into a position that is at once
traditional, theocentric, humanist, and because of the union of these
things—_causal_. If this were all Belloc did as an historian, the palm
of high accomplishment would have been his. But his superb art added
the ring of greatness. Belloc the Grizzlebeard was never abstracted
from Belloc the Poet, and from Belloc the Sailor. He always entered
into the past as the whole man, the Four Men. After hunting down
innumerable details which gave vividness to the drama of the past, he
re-enacted the story by an act of imaginative reconstruction. Belloc
personally possessed that English gift of visual imagination that he
attributed to Milton. The unification of history and art, played down
but never totally suppressed in the general histories and monographs,
blazed forth in the biographies so powerfully that time was almost
physically conquered. Belloc’s biographical work shows a constant
shifting between a universal view that sees the whole of Christendom,
and an approach that frames the present in a series of vividly sketched
vignettes. He could transfigure the past. He would haunt the scenes of
great battles and stand in these fields of decision, now emptied of
their glory; his appearance would be timed to the month and day, and if
the exact weather conditions of history did not prevail, he returned
until they did. Some poetic power, the exact nature of which he often
pondered and never discovered to his satisfaction, was given him, and
the past would roll back before him. A vast and intimate knowledge
of the minutiae of history, informed by his sweeping vision, seemed
to touch the things and places once sanctified or defiled by men and
actions past. Listen to him as the drums of Wattignies roll down the
centuries:
The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were
full of them swarming upward: the fields were ribbed with their open
lines, and as they charged they sang.
Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but
though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of
triumph yet I have heard them singing: I have seen their faces as they
cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the 3,000 upon every
side.
... Two charges disputed their certain victory. First, the Hungarian
cavalry ... then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the
French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into death. They
streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy above them,
the faint silver lilies were upon it, and from either rank the cries
that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since
Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle
fronts of Christendom.... These also failed: a symbol in name and in
flag and in valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing
which God now disapproved.[49]
This kind of writing is art, literary art at its best, wedded here
to historical judgment, keen sensibility, and poetic vision. This
felicitous unity of things not often found together is not a rare
perfection, blessing a dozen odd pages of a life of historical writing;
it is steady, filling volume after volume, informing and pleasing
through the years; a life’s work of art in which the intended result
obtains: the resurrection of the past, so that the men of the West can
come into their own once again.
Chapter Three
CHRISTENDOM: “ESTO PERPETUA”
Today when Western man thinks of Christendom, he thinks of an
historical order that is dead, or he thinks of an academic humanist
tradition that synthesizes the Greek and Roman heritage with the
doctrinal truths of the Faith. Western man rarely thinks of himself
as being a man in Christendom, for Christendom is no longer a place,
existing in space, enduring in time.
Hilaire Belloc was the last representative of a long tradition of
Catholic thinkers who actually thought of the Christian Unity in terms
of a cultural and geographical order minted into a unity by the genius
of the Faith. His understanding of Christendom is the most serious
problem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought. Belloc has been
accused of identifying Western Europe and Catholicism to the point
where it would appear that the Universal Religion was a uniquely Latin
thing that carried with it of necessity the temporal and cultural
trappings of Mediterranean regionalism. “Europe is the Faith, and the
Faith is Europe.”
Belloc’s position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would
assert, nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary
Christians when they think of “Christendom.” In the first place it
is simply false to assert that he identified Catholicism necessarily
with Western Europe. He expressly states the contrary in the famous
and controversial _Europe and the Faith_.[50] Operative behind his
passionate and concrete love of European Catholicism is a doctrinal
position that can be stated rather simply: grace perfects nature, and
grace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions,
but grace operates the better, the more perfected is man on the natural
level.
It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the
more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more
fully men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything
finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most
true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most
normal of its own kind.[51]
Linked with this doctrinal position is his favorite historical thesis
that Roman Europe represented the very best man had achieved on the
temporal level of existence prior to the advent of the Son of God.
In Rome man began to come into his own; in Rome man discovered the
possibility of an immortal destiny, because Rome had conceived, even
if imperfectly, the nature of human dignity. Roman man is Myself, the
Four Men—integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential
incompletion of his own handiwork. Christianity came into the Empire
and found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the
Gospel. It was with such stuff that the Church molded Western Europe.
The result was Christendom.
The conception of Christendom lies at the heart of Belloc’s Christian
humanism. The necessity for the Faith to penetrate a culture and erect
a civilization that bears her lineaments is both a deduction from
Belloc’s humanism and an historical cause of his humanism, though it is
principally the latter.
Let us first look to the matter theoretically. There is no consciously
articulated “philosophy of Christendom” in Belloc, and this for two
reasons: Christendom was an historical fact in his eyes; you do not
theorize about the possibility of that which _is_; one Thing had
preserved the best of the Roman Order, had sanctified the human hearth,
and had worked toward the erection of a social and personal dignity
unheard-of in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England—and
this one institution was the Roman Catholic Church; secondly, and this
is a weakness in his armour, Belloc had little interest in (or talent
for) purely philosophical and theological issues as such; outside
of a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against
skepticism, and an almost inarticulate loathing of German Idealism, he
remained aloof from formal philosophy. Christendom is not a “concept”
or a “thesis” for him: she is Europe and the ages.
Belloc’s failure to elaborate a _philosophical_ defence, as well as an
historical defence, of the theory of Christendom has left his whole
position in jeopardy. Today many highly reputable minds are questioning
the validity of the very _idea_ of a Christendom. The attack is
psychologically understandable. The older European Order, first wounded
by the Reformation, then weakened spiritually by four centuries of
rationalism, nationalism, and secular liberalism, now physically
and morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial
capitalism, has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars.
The Christian community will survive in the new era now being born, it
is said, only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture
that no longer exists. Today the East is throwing off its shackles,
and if the Faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness
of these peoples, it must come as something native to themselves. To
cling to an identification of Catholicism and European Catholicism is
not only bad theology, it is bad policy. Catholicism is supra-temporal
and can never be associated essentially with any of the passing
cultural forms that she blesses. It is, then, impossible to speak of a
Christen_dom_ as being some one unique cultural reality, whose soul is
the Faith.
There is more than a little truth to the above reasoning, and there
can be no doubt that Belloc’s dogged passion for complete, final
integration and his deep love for the European Order rendered him
temperamentally incapable of realizing the _concrete_ possibility of
the Faith’s taking root in a non-European form. To separate the Faith
from the freedom and the institutions of the West was in his eyes to
divorce the mother from its child, and to desecrate that historical
unity that centuries had hallowed. If he overstated his case, it can be
affirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate.
The weakness of the anti-Bellocian position lies in its sheer
abstractionism. In the abstract there is no question but that the Faith
is culturally neutral. But historically it is simply false to say that
the Church has always been, and could always be, neutral to any given
civilization to which she has come, or will come, preaching salvation.
The Church could never have sanctified Carthage with its human
sacrifice to Moloch; the Church could never have concreted itself in
those border cultures that produced the Mystery Cults and flirted with
the pantheisms of the East. Belloc fingered a profound historical truth
when he declared that as Revelation incarnates itself the better in a
man in proportion to that man’s natural perfection, so too Revelation
has always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of
corporate perfection achieved by that society.
If certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to
receive Faith than others, it is still true that Faith comes to them
as a pure gift. Catholicism did not have to fix itself within the
boundaries of the Greco-Roman world. But the historical fact is that
it did so. That Rome was more apt to receive the Gospel than were
her neighbours is, to Belloc, one of the clearest truths of Western
history. Those who accuse Belloc of theoretically tying the Church to
Rome confuse two questions: a theological question and an historical
question. Doctrinally, the Faith belongs to no one by right; but if
the Faith does come to a man, it will come to him as to one formed by
a unique set of cultural exigencies, which will aid or will hinder his
reception of the Divine Gift. The Faith belongs to no culture by right.
Some cultures could never have received her; other cultures could have,
but historically they did not. The fact remains that she came into
Rome, transformed the Empire and built a Europe that had been humanized
to a high level by the already existing Latin Order.
It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly
foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal
religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely
human thing.
The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in
history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but
with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave
the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument
is equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among
men must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church
might have arisen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a
fact, spring up in the high _Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to
this day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it
did, as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial
Roman system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for
its ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements
and the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living
or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies.
As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in
its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its
language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome:
of the Empire.[52]
Such is the principal meaning of _Europe and the Faith_: as a matter
of fact the Church arose within the bosom of the Roman Empire; as a
matter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the
classical world; it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into
the larger Thing which was the Faith and which made Europe in her own
image. If you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that
breathed the spirit of Christianity, you would find it in Western
Europe that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from
without, and from all the schisms from within. A free peasantry, the
sacredness of marriage, the dignity of man, the steady rejection of
every Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the
sacramental view of the universe: these are to be found in Catholic
Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and they are to be
found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this
earth.
The Church “lays her foundations in something other,” says Belloc, but
“out of that something other came the art and the song of the Middle
Ages.” And he adds his famous taunt to the Englishmen of his day, “and
what art or song have you?”[53]