between Catholicism and European Christendom. And yet he pushes his
position even further in a daring move that links him with those early
Christians who saw in Rome the special mark of Divine Providence,
preparing a way for the Incarnation. As a man never exists outside
of the supernatural order, with the result that even his natural
perfection is achieved under the impetus of grace, one can say that God
is operating with lavish gratuity wherever a cultural organism is found
to have reached a certain high level of human perfection. Humanism is
crowned by grace, but in a deeper sense, humanism is caused by grace.
“The Church makes men,” Belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in _The
Path to Rome_.[54] It is small wonder, then, that when viewing that
sweep of Empire which is the foundation of the West, when seeing that
high pitch of humanism that avoided the Eastern nihilisms, when gazing
at that magnificent legal structure, imperfect though it was, that had
as its end the defining of human dignity—when seeing all these things,
it is no wonder Belloc frequently talked like those Latin Fathers who
saw in Rome a Unity raised by God to prepare man for the Incarnation.
Grace not only crowns nature but causes nature to flower into its
fullness. All human values, tending of isolation and separate
destruction outside Catholic Christianity, are unified within the
Body of Christ by the bond of Charity. It is, therefore, reasonable
to believe that the Roman Order—classical humanism—was created by God
for the sake of the preaching of the Gospel. Compare two passages
rather closely: one was composed around A.D. 385 by the Christian poet
Prudentius; the other was written in 1906 by Hilaire Belloc in his
_Esto Perpetua_.
We live in every clime, as if a paternal city enclosed within its
single walls citizens of a single birthplace; we are all one in heart
within our paternal hearth. Now, men from afar and over land and sea
appear before a single and common court; now, for business and the
arts they gather together in the great assembly; now, they contract
marriages and one people is formed from the mingling of different
blood. This has been achieved by so many triumphant successes of
the Roman Empire, believe me, that the way has been prepared for
Christ’s event, a way which the communal friendship of our peace has
built under Roman guidance. For, what place could there be for God
in a savage world, in the discordant breasts of men and in those who
guard their own rights by different laws, as was formerly the case?
But, if the mind, from its lofty throne, bridle impulsive rage and the
rebellious organs and bring every passion under the sway of reason,
then is built a stable way of life; then with surety does it drink in
God and live in submission to the one Lord. Omnipotent One, now is
Your hour; penetrate the earth where no discord reigns. Now, O Christ,
the world accepts You, this world which peace and Rome together hold
within their grasp.[55]
Setting aside details and moving to the heart of the text, we could
say that the poet has laid down the proclamation of Christendom: a
corporate theocentric humanism. Man’s personal and social integration
exists in order that God may conquer the soul. Now listen to Belloc’s
passage as he sails away from the African shores and faces once more
the Latin Order:
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look
back, as upon an adventure, towards journey in this African land ...
I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns ...
and I shall see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought
about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her
though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had
made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that
authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account,
although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the
bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny....
We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain
for ever. What happens in this life of ours, which we had from you,
_Salva Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken
away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself
shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you
are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of
this world.
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her
“_Esto Perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not
die.”...[56]
We pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time.
Suffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth
that “piety of speech” reminiscent of the seventeenth century.[57] As
Prudentius sees classical Roman Europe as caused by God in order to
be a highway, a Roman Road, over which will pass the message of the
Gospel, so does Belloc look back on this prophecy, fulfilled through a
thousand years full of a Christendom, armed, proud, conscious of its
destiny. Aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the
cruel laws of time, he nonetheless prays that historic Christendom may
remain one Thing, “the standing grace of this world.”
To a contemporary thinker, even a contemporary Christian thinker,
Christendom is something apart from himself—an historic era, good in
its day, but its day is now done. He stands outside of the old European
Unity, for it exists no longer, except perhaps in “the river-valleys,”
and in the mountains, as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism.
_He_ looks to a new synthesis of Christianity with the modern world,
and in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look
back and who would still hope for the Resurrection of Europe.
But Belloc always saw Christendom as some one historic Reality,
thrusting itself into the dimension of present time—a Reality within
which he has consciously situated himself. Having become one with the
men of old Europe (how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery
of the Continent, the silent men of South England, and the company of
those that sail) he could only look _back_ for corporate salvation. To
look to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the
Roman Order would be for him to destroy himself. You cannot uproot an
unalienated man.
Supporting this hidden marriage with his origins is Belloc’s firm
opposition to the Hegelian conception of history, in which the old
is necessarily overcome by the new, and in which nothing historical
remains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism.
Those men who say that the old Christendom is dead may be right, but
when they ground their opinion in an historical determinism, they
demonstrate their inability to understand the _organic_ nature of a
traditional society, in which the past can be renewed through an ever
recurrent act of collective memory.
The old European Christendom that Belloc loved so well may never come
back; its rich cultural diversity, its personal individualism and
patchwork of small property, its shrines, its liberating chaos—these
things can have no place in a world committed to the principle of
technological and collectivist barbarism. The European way of life
died, not because it had to, but because there were not enough men left
with the will to keep it alive.
Belloc had the will, but his prayer, “You shall not die,” seems a
trifle remote in this fifth decade of the century. It seems more and
more probable that the Christian community of the future will resemble
Communist cells lost in a world given over to the barbarism of faceless
men. The Faith may, at some future date, arise out of the new catacombs
and be faced with sanctifying a society that is neither humanist nor
humane. Belloc recognized this possibility,[58] always believing the
contrary more likely. But should a Christian Order commence to arise
out of the atomic ruins of a mechanical and industrial desert, it will
work again to the erection of a genuinely human order. And should the
men of this new age wish to know that freer and broader vision of their
half-forgotten fathers, they could do no better than to turn to the
work of this last of the rooted men.
If the old Christendom is dead, then a new Christendom will be built
in time. Christendom may be considered an “outmoded concept” by some
thinkers who consider the modern world to have been a necessity. These
intellectuals fail to see that Christendom is rather a fundamental
urge, deep within man, grounded in an ontological need for the complete
integration of man’s spiritual and temporal destinies.
The issue needs further elucidation. There have been so many attacks in
recent years against the Bellocian position on the relationship between
Europe and Catholicism, and on his understanding of “Christendom,”
that a thorough airing of the subject is necessary. In the first
place, only an irresponsible writer like Sidney Hook would accuse
Belloc of identifying the interests of Catholicism with the _ancien
régime_.[59] Belloc gloried in the best traditions of the Revolution,
and, with the exception of Bernanos, he seems to be the only historian
to have grasped the Christian continuity of the new and the older
political traditions of Europe. He was so much the Republican that
he was duped by the pretensions of Rousseau. The charges of reaction
are not worth the dignity of a formal reply. In the second place,
those quite responsible men who oppose the Bellocian slogan of “Europe
is the Faith” are guilty, not of irresponsibility, but of a lack of
intellectual subtlety. To state that the Faith is supra-temporal and
is thereby never to be identified with any given civilization is to
enunciate a truism, and to miss the point. It is one thing to say that
no cultural order is of the essence of the Faith; it is another thing
to say that the Faith is of the essence of some given cultural order.
The latter is Belloc’s position. When the Faith is of the essence of
that culture, then that civilization is part of, or coincident with,
Christendom. The historical proof of Belloc’s point lies in the brutal
truth that when that given social order loses the Faith, it ceases to
be itself. Such is the meaning of “Europe is the Faith.”
More profoundly and more to the heart of the issue is the objection to
conceiving Christendom, if there is or has been or will be such, as
a place. Today probably all would agree that Christendom is largely
a state of mind; but with Belloc the writer of these pages asserts
that Christendom _must become a place_, because man is a material as
well as a spiritual creature, existing in space, enduring in time.
As his inner perfection necessitates the interpenetration of the
natural and the supernatural, so too must this inner personal unity
be projected externally in a corporate entity that ideally could be
bounded geographically, politically, and socially. That God be found in
a shrine is a paradox inherent in the very mystery of the Incarnation.
That man, once he is Christian, will try to build a house of such
a nature that he can say to himself and to his friends, “This is a
place in which Christian men will be at home,” is the inner meaning of
Christendom in the thought of Hilaire Belloc. He always sought out old
inns, and it was because he hoped to find lingering there something of
the essence of what was once the Christian Inn of Mankind.
In one sense, a Christian is always an exile. In another sense, he is
an island; and it is in _this_ that is to be found the heart of the
need for Christendom—a _corporate_ theocentric humanism—a _place_ so
penetrated by the Faith that a man who was there could say that “Jesus
Christ was in the morning skies.”[60]
Belloc grasps the older European Christendom, in its ideals and in
the best of its actualities, as a truly human society, permeated from
top to bottom with grace, and given direction and destiny by the
Universal Faith. Personal perfection necessitates the communal act
in which society is built as a home for man. The City of Man exists
for the furthering of human perfection. The City must be personal:
from this follows Belloc’s detestation of impersonal governments.
The best government would be one personally exercised by all men,
acting together for the common good. Where this democratic society
is impossible of fulfillment, the community is best incarnated in
a monarchy: one man sums up in himself a people, and one man is
responsible to all.
The Bellocian concepts of both democracy and monarchy are not
co-extensive with the more usually accepted meanings of those terms.
For Belloc democracy is less a static thing than something dynamic. The
French erupting into the Revolution, organizing great armies and local
governments almost overnight—such is democracy as Belloc sees it. It is
the older ideal of the Citizen assuming personal responsibility; it is
Drouet accepting history at the crossroads, the Parisians before the
Tuileries, man at the barricades. In Belloc’s eyes the only surviving
democracies in the West are the Swiss cantons and the mountain state
of Andorra. Belloc’s monarchy is one man, symbolizing a people and
its traditions, exercising personal authority, responsible before the
law, a public sacrifice to the land. He finds his best example in
modern times in the United States of America: in the Office of the
Presidency.[61]
A personalist society, be it democratic or monarchical, will foster
those occupations attached directly to fundamentally human needs. Man
needs to build; he needs to plant and to plow, to make things with
his hands, to incarnate his aspirations in song and the plastic arts;
he needs to fight, and he needs to pray. The peasant, the artisan,
the soldier, the scholar, the poet, the priest—these will dominate
any humanist culture in Belloc’s sense of the term. A broad base of
well-distributed property will lie under the whole economic organism,
insuring the personal character of the _res publica_, stamping it with
the mark of humanity. Belloc has little use for a merchant society
(exemplified in his eyes by Carthage and Whig England). The merchant
necessarily is engaged in furthering his own profit, and he must
prosper by feeding on those elements within the community that are
productive. Merchants will always be in a society, but if the state is
controlled by their spirit, then the City of Man is finished. Profit,
not human perfection, is the bourgeois ideal. Viewed ideally, Belloc’s
humanist society, on which he constructed his distributist economics,
would be characterized by a rich multiplicity of functions rooted in
fundamental human drives.
The City of Man is the extension, the natural fulfillment, and the
guarantee of the personal integration symbolized by _The Four Men_.
Man, unalienated in the densities of his own subjectivity, achieves an
objective corporate unity with his fellows. Even the most penetrating
and private of natural mysteries, that of poetic creation, finds its
full significance only in the Forum. “For the Poet, though divine,
is a servant. He is the god of the house of Admetus; and not all his
fellowship with heaven would make him what he is did he not bring to
birth the struggling song, as yet undelivered in his fellow men.”[62]
Belloc’s ideal of the good social order is not a utopia. The
“proprietary state,” as he calls it, is the natural order of things
for men, and only the parochialism of a vision that cannot see
beyond the last century on the Continent, or beyond the Reformation
in England, would insist on viewing industrial capitalism and the
consequent Communist or Collectivist dreariness as advances beyond the
simple humanist order that meshes so beautifully with human nature. In
his final books, written just before the catastrophe of World War II,
Belloc declared that Denmark and Ireland, and the Portugal of Salazar,
were the most decent states within which man could find his personal
and social perfection. In contemporary cultural theory, there are a
number of parallels to Belloc’s distributist or proprietary ideal. In
the United States a similar conception can be found in the thought of
the Southern Critics. In England, Mr. T. S. Eliot has advanced a like
doctrine in his _Notes Toward the Definition of Culture_. Both men
conceive of culture as fundamentally traditional, i.e. organic. Both
see culture as dual: in one dimension it is familial and private; the
attachment of the individual to his ancestral home and to the proven
ways of doing things assures a rhythmic continuity to society that
expresses itself in local patriotism and the love for the place which
is one’s own; status rather than contract is the ideal, for in status
is to be found peace, both personal and public; on another dimension
culture is public, and the plurality of economic life is given a unity
which flowers in political, artistic, and religious life. However, two
radical divergencies in the thought of Eliot and Belloc decisively
separate their respective humanisms. Eliot’s society is aristocratic
and post-Reformation English in inspiration; Belloc’s is either
democratic or monarchical, and therefore egalitarian, which is to say
that it is Latin and Catholic in spirit. Eliot sees religious conflicts
as making for a richer cultural diversity. For Belloc the Reformation
and the rending of Christendom is the greatest scandal in the story of
the West.
In spite of the French antecedents of Belloc’s social ideals, his
proprietary traditions are rooted deeply in the English past. Most
anti-collectivist thinking in the English-speaking world today looks
to Burke and the theory of prescriptive politics. But for all his
conservatism, Burke never succeeded in dispelling the Whig curse.
There is another tradition that runs back, like a narrow and straight
road, through Chesterton and Belloc to the Tory-Radicalism of William
Cobbett, and beyond to the Cavaliers and to the King who died for
England; there the road broadens into a great highway filled with the
yeomen who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace. And beyond all this stands
the high medieval vision of Fortesque: a vision of a land of free men,
eating and drinking their own, owing allegiance neither to aristocrat
nor capitalist, but to God and England alone.
Such is the City of Man in Hilaire Belloc’s thought. But this City,
Belloc indicates time and again, _is not of itself_. It has no fully
independent existence of its own, nor can it ever be a completely
autonomous reality. For it to be at all, it must flourish within the
higher City which is the City of God. Just as the individual man can
find his natural perfection only by losing himself in Christ, so too
can the community of all men find its soul only within the bosom of
Christian Wisdom. Religious truth, absolute and unquestioned, not only
guarantees but causes a God-oriented humanist culture to come into
its own. The sacredness of the person and the eternal relationship he
bears to God through Christ are truths of an order which is not human,
but these truths act within the bowels of society as Divine Seeds,
conceiving in time a temporal order both personal and free. This order
is Christendom. It is not the City of God, but it is within that City,
and it is what it is because it is the child of Faith.
There is a City full, as are all Cities, of halt and maim, blind and
evil and the rest: but it is the City of God.... There are not two
such cities on earth. There is One.
Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside
it, is the night.[63]
Conclusion
THE FUTURE PLACE OF HILAIRE BELLOC IN ENGLISH LETTERS
He was the finest prose stylist of his generation. His art was a
habit, possessed at the center of his being by a man who was conscious
of his own power. John Edward Dineen has noted how writers of such
diverse interests and talents as Rupert Brooke, Ford Madox Ford and Max
Beerbohm have paid homage to the literary genius of Hilaire Belloc.[64]
Baring’s famous tribute is well known: “grave prose like the mellow
tones of a beautifully played ’cello ... solemn, melancholy and
majestic.” Belloc’s prose at its finest was what great prose ought to
be: a sensitive instrument adapted to express, with great precision and
subtle nuance, the complex genius of its creator. His was an artistry
that was largely unmannered, simple, sparing in metaphor, and still
remarkably rich: a prose in a line that stretches back to the origins
of classical English. “No man,” says Lord Tweedsmuir, “has attained
more perfectly to the ‘piety of speech’ of the seventeenth century; no
man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.”[65]
It is no exaggeration to say that Belloc’s prose, rooted as it was in
the highest literary tradition, will be read as long as English prose
is read by men trained in that great heritage. Belloc often put forth
the older ideal that prose should minister rigidly to meaning. To
this end he developed an unadorned, plain style as the apt instrument
for the elucidation of his political and sociological ideas. _The
Restoration of Property_, _The House of Commons and Monarchy_, _The
Stane Street_ and, most especially, _The Servile State_ are the finest
examples of Belloc’s working in a manner that is almost dry in its
cold lucidity. The writing in these books is severely unrhetorical
and refreshingly free from the unavoidable pedantries of contemporary
academic prose; here Belloc achieves personality in his style only by
the constant vigour that informs the whole with an almost military
character: _this_ Belloc is the French logician who can make an idea
march to a conclusion. Belloc’s plain style recalls the older Oxford
manner and suggests the Newman of the _Parochial Sermons_ and _The
Arians of the Fourth Century_. Belloc’s lyricism is found perhaps at
the height of its perfection in _The Path to Rome_, _Esto Perpetua_,
and in the little-known translation of Bedier’s _The Romance of Tristan
and Iseult_. But for vintage Belloc, we must turn to the essays, and
most especially to _Hills and the Sea_. There is the grave style of
“The Death of a Ship”; there is the delicious parody of his grave style
in “The Lost Manuscript.” Then there is the anecdotal Belloc telling a
story for the sheer love of adventure recalled. There is the humorous
Belloc of the Great Fool passages. Finally there is the summing up of a
life’s vision—once again, _Esto Perpetua_.
In the light of such an incomparable artistic mastery, why is it that
Belloc’s reputation has suffered so severely within the last fifteen
years? Part of the neglect is probably due to the fate of his own
generation. The whole Edwardian and Georgian period is engulfed under
the snobbery of the _avant-garde_. The heartiness, the zest for
existence, the enormous Elizabethan interest in almost everything, the
sheer magnificence of the Edwardians seem pretentious and a trifle
adolescent to a youth who has aged young in an old world now dead.
The Bellocs and Barings and Shaws, diving into the ocean fully clad
in evening dress, seem somewhat beside the point to a generation
embittered in the fires of World War II. The Belloc who carried
burgundy through the streets of Rye tires the grim and somewhat
desperate intellectual of the day.
A change in fashion partially accounts for Belloc’s decline in
popularity, but there is something deeper than mere fashion. If Belloc
is not understood today, it may be because his own brand of Christian
integration has become almost impossible of achievement at this late
date in the disintegration of the Western World. Most of us are not
rooted men; we do not live in a traditional culture, and to pretend to
do so would be to fall into an archaic lie. The Christian living in
the center of an industrialized secularism has no Grizzlebeard. His
Sailor is dead and his Poet is without sustenance. Belloc’s “corporate
memories,” and Mr. Eliot’s “piety for the dead,” can be, at best, only
truncated actualities and ideals impossible of immediate achievement.
This is the age of _Unheimlichkeit_. Man is no longer at home.
Thinking men turn to those artists who can read the hidden depths
of the contemporary soul, and who can reveal the nature of the
homelessness of modern man. Thinking Christians turn to the vision of a
Mauriac or of a Greene; they look to an aesthetic penetration into the
human soul as it actually passes by on the anonymous pavements of the
modern world. These men are listened to because they have captured the
wounded spirit of the day.
Truth, particularly artistic truth, is not pragmatic. But artistic
popularity always is. He who can speak to a man will be heard. Belloc
cannot speak to the latter-day man.