Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of th

Europe and the Faith

“Sine auctoritate nulla vita”

by Hilaire Belloc

Contents

INTRODUCTION. THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY

I. WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

II. WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

III. WHAT WAS THE “FALL” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

IV. THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONS

V. WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?

VI. THE DARK AGES

VII. THE MIDDLE AGES

VIII. WHAT WAS THE REFORMATION?

IX. THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN

X. CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY

I say the Catholic “conscience” of history—I say “conscience”—that is,

an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which

is one with the knower—I do not say “The Catholic Aspect of History.”

This talk of “aspects” is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is

false, and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather

do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic

“aspect” of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish

aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all

of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from

within. There is no more a Catholic “aspect” of European history than

there is a man’s “aspect” of himself.

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man’s “aspect” of

himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For

a man’s way of perceiving himself (when he does so honestly and after a

cleansing examination of his mind) is in line with his Creator’s, and

therefore with reality: he sees from within.

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the

voice of God. Not only does he know by this that the outer world is

real, but also that his own personality is real.

When a man, although flattered by the voice of another, yet says within

himself, “I am a mean fellow,” he has hold of reality. When a man,

though maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, “My purpose

was just,” he has hold of reality. He knows himself, for he is himself.

A man does not know an infinite amount about himself. But the finite

amount he does know is all in the map; it is all part of what is really

there. What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, fit

in with what he does know about himself. There are indeed “aspects” of

a man for all others except these two, himself and God Who made him.

These two, when they regard him, see him as he is; all other minds have

their several views of him; and these indeed are “aspects,” each of

which is false, while all differ. But a man’s view of himself is not an

“aspect:” it is a comprehension.

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 cannot understand it

altogether because he is a finite being; but he is also that which he

has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.

The Catholic brings to history (when I say “history” in these pages 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 his 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.

The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins

with the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean.

It goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil

in which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can,

he understands the Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with

the gross Asiatic and merchant empire of Carthage; what we derived from

the light of Athens; what food we found in the Irish and the British,

the Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality; what

cousinship we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions,

and even how ancient Israel (the little violent people, before they got

poisoned, while they were yet National in the mountains of Judea) was,

in the old dispensation at least, central and (as we Catholics say)

sacred: devoted to a peculiar mission.

For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The

picture is normal. Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our

great story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final.

But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of the

English tongue, suffers from a deplorable (and it is to be hoped), a

passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a

conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study violently hostile

authorities, North German (or English copying North German), whose

knowledge is never that of the true and balanced European.

He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd,

either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But

unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his

finger upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads—if

they are in the English language at least—he finds things lacking which

his instinct for Europe tells him should be there; but he cannot supply

their place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant

of such things, or rather could not conceive them.

I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present

battlefield of Europe: a large affair not yet cleared, concerning all

nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent

to the Faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze (one would

think) and which yet no historian explains.

The second I deliberately choose as an example particular and narrow:

an especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of

Canterbury, of which the modern historian makes nothing but an

incomprehensible contradiction; but which is to a Catholic a sharp

revelation of the half-way house between the Empire and modern

nationalities.

As to the first of these two examples: Here is at last the Great War in

Europe: clearly an issue—things come to a head. How came it? Why these

two camps? What was this curious grouping of the West holding out in

desperate Alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to a victory

apparently inevitable after the breakdown of the Orthodox Russian

shell? Where lay the roots of so singular a contempt for our old order,

chivalry and morals, as Berlin then displayed? Who shall explain the

position of the Papacy, the question of Ireland, the aloofness of old

Spain?

It is all a welter if we try to order it by modern, external—especially

by any materialist or even skeptical—analysis. It was not climate

against climate—that facile materialist contrast of “environment,”

which is the crudest and stupidest explanation of human affairs. It was

not race—if indeed any races can still be distinguished in European

blood save broad and confused appearances, such as Easterner and

Westerner, short and tall, dark and fair. It was not—as another foolish

academic theory (popular some years ago) would pretend—an economic

affair. There was here no revolt of rich against poor, no pressure of

undeveloped barbarians against developed lands, no plan of

exploitation, nor of men organized, attempting to seize the soil of

less fruitful owners.

How came these two opponents into being, the potential antagonism of

which was so strong that millions willingly suffered their utmost for

the sake of a decision?

That man who would explain the tremendous judgment on the superficial

test of religious differences among modern “sects” must be bewildered

indeed! I have seen the attempt made in more than one journal and book,

enemy and Allied. The results are lamentable!

Prussia indeed, the protagonist, was atheist. But her subject provinces

supported her exultantly, Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and tamely

Catholic Bavaria. Her main support—without which she could not have

challenged Europe—was that very power whose sole reason for being was

Catholicism: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine which, from Vienna,

controlled and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav: the

House of Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic organization in

Eastern Europe.

The Catholic Irish largely stood apart.

Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those

things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the

unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within

herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious

analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will make

anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk of

“Democracy” as the issue of the Great War may be neglected:

Democracy—one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human

government—was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The

essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy,

the despotism of Russia and Prussia, the immense complex of all other

great modern states gives such nonsense the lie.

People who talk of “A struggle for supremacy between the two Teutonic

champions Germany and England” are less respectable still. England is

not Teutonic, and was not protagonist. The English Cabinet decided by

but the smallest possible majority (a majority of one) to enter the

war. The Prussian Government never dreamt it would have to meet England

at all. There is no question of so single an issue. The world was at

war. Why? No man is an historian who cannot answer from the past. All

who can answer from the past, and are historians, see that it is the

historical depth of the European faith, not its present surface, which

explains all.

The struggle was against Prussia.

Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization

of the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia,

the western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was

an hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from

the Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman West rose a strong garden

of weeds. And weeds sow themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of

weeds, could not extend until the West weakened through schism. It had

to wait till the battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited.

And at last, when there was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed

patch over-ran first Poland and the Germanies, then half Europe. When

it challenged all civilization at last it was master of a hundred and

fifty million souls.

What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they

are Poland and Ireland—the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the

conservators of the Past through a national passion for the Faith.

The Great War was a clash between an uneasy New Thing which desired to

live its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe, and the old

Christian rock. This New Thing is, in its morals, in the morals spread

upon it by Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein three

hundred years ago Europe made shipwreck and was split into two. This

war was the largest, yet no more than the recurrent, example of that

unceasing wrestle: the outer, the unstable, the untraditional—which is

barbarism—pressing blindly upon the inner, the traditional, the

strong—which is Ourselves: which is Christendom: which is Europe.

Small wonder that the Cabinet at Westminster hesitated!

We used to say during the war that if Prussia conquered civilization

failed, but that if the Allies conquered civilization was

reestablished—What did we mean? We meant, not that the New Barbarians

could not handle a machine: They can. But we meant that they had learnt

all from us. We meant that they cannot _continue of themselves_; and

that we can. We meant that they have no roots.

When we say that Vienna was the tool of Berlin, that Madrid should be

ashamed, what do we mean? It has no meaning save that civilization is

one and we its family: That which challenged us, though it controlled

so much which should have aided us and was really our own, was external

to civilization and did not lose that character by the momentary use of

civilized Allies.

When we said that “the Slav” failed us, what did we mean? It was not a

statement of race. Poland is Slav, so is Serbia: they were two vastly

differing states and yet both with us. It meant that the Byzantine

influence was never sufficient to inform a true European state or to

teach Russia a national discipline; because the Byzantine Empire, the

tutor of Russia, was cut off from us, the Europeans, the Catholics, the

heirs, who are the conservators of the world.

The Catholic Conscience of Europe grasped this war—with apologies where

it was in the train of Prussia, with affirmation where it was free. It

saw what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided upon the future—the

two alternative futures which lie before the world.

All other judgments of the war made nonsense: You had, on the Allied

side, the most vulgar professional politicians and their rich

paymasters shouting for “Democracy;” pedants mumbling about “Race.” On

the side of Prussia (the negation of nationality) you have the use of

some vague national mission of conquest divinely given to the very

various Germans and the least competent to govern. You would come at

last (if you listened to such varied cries) to see the Great War as a

mere folly, a thing without motive, such as the emptiest internationals

conceive the thing to have been.

So much for the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to

the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The

Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone

can see and judge in this matter.

From so recent and universal an example I turn to one local, distant,

precise, in which this same Catholic Conscience of European history may

be tested.

Consider the particular (and clerical) example of Thomas à Becket: the

story of St. Thomas of Canterbury. I defy any man to read the story of

Thomas a Becket in Stubbs, or in Green, or in Bright, or in any other

of our provincial Protestant handbooks, and to make head or tail of it.

Here is a well-defined and limited subject of study. It concerns only a

few years. A great deal is known about it, for there are many

contemporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to

history. The Catholic may well ask: “How it is I cannot understand the

story as told by these Protestant writers? Why does it not make sense?”

The story is briefly this: A certain prelate, the Primate of England at

the time, was asked to admit certain changes in the status of the

clergy. The chief of these changes was that men attached to the Church

in any way even by minor orders (not necessarily priests) should, if

they committed a crime amenable to temporal jurisdiction, be brought

before the ordinary courts of the country instead of left, as they had

been for centuries, to their own courts. The claim was, at the time, a

novel one. The Primate of England resisted that claim. In connection

with his resistance he was subjected to many indignities, many things

outrageous to custom were done against him; but the Pope doubted

whether his resistance was justified, and he was finally reconciled

with the civil authority. On returning to his See at Canterbury he

became at once the author of further action and the subject of further

outrage, and within a short time he was murdered by his exasperated

enemies.

His death raised a vast public outcry. His monarch did penance for it.

But _all the points on which he had resisted_ were in practice waived

by the Church at last. The civil state’s original claim was _in

practice_ recognized at last. Today it appears to be plain justice. The

chief of St. Thomas’ contentions, for instance, that men in orders

should be exempt from the ordinary courts, seems as remote as chain

armors.

So far, so good. The opponent of the Faith will say, and has said in a

hundred studies—that this resistance was nothing more than that always

offered by an old organization to a new development.

Of course it was! It is equally true to say of a man who objects to an

aëroplane smashing in the top of his studio that it is the resistance

of an old organization to a new development. But such a phrase in no

way explains the business; and when the Catholic begins to examine the

particular case of St. Thomas, he finds a great many things to wonder

at and to think about, upon which his less European opponents are

helpless and silent.

I say “helpless” because in their attitude they give up trying to

explain. They record these things, but they are bewildered by them.

They can explain St. Thomas’ particular action simply enough: too

simply. He was (they say) a man living in the past. But when they are

asked to explain the vast consequences that followed his martyrdom,

they have to fall back upon the most inhuman and impossible hypotheses;

that “the masses were ignorant”—that is as compared with other periods

in human history (what, more ignorant than today?) that “the Papacy

engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm.” As though the Papacy

were a secret society like modern Freemasonry, with some hidden

machinery for “engineering” such things. As though the type of

enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom was the wretched mechanical thing

produced now by caucus or newspaper “engineering!” As though nothing

_besides_ such interferences was there to arouse the whole populace of

Europe to such a pitch!

As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place at St. Thomas’ tomb,

the historian who hates or ignores the Faith had (and has) three ways

of denying them. The first is to say nothing about them. It is the

easiest way of telling a lie. The second is to say that they were the

result of a vast conspiracy which the priests directed and the feeble

acquiescence of the maim, the halt and the blind supported. The third

(and for the moment most popular) is to give them modern journalistic

names, sham Latin and Greek confused, which, it is hoped, will get rid

of the miraculous character; notably do such people talk of

“auto-suggestion.”

Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story, when he has read all

the original documents, understands it easily enough from within.

He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very important in its

special claims, and was probably (taken as an isolated action)

unreasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads and as he notes the

rapid and profound transformation of all civilization which was taking

place in that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out for a

principle, ill clothed in his particular plea, but absolute in its

general appreciation: the freedom of the Church. He stood out in

particular for what _had_ been the concrete symbols of the Church’s

liberty in the past. The direction of his actions was everything,

whether his symbol was well or ill chosen. The particular customs might

go. But to challenge the new claims of civil power at that moment was

to save the Church. A movement was afoot which might have then

everywhere accomplished what was only accomplished in parts of Europe

four hundred years later, to wit, a dissolution of the unity and the

discipline of Christendom.

St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy; he fought and he

resisted in the spirit dictated by the Church. He fought for no

dogmatic point, he fought for no point to which the Church of five

hundred years earlier or five hundred years later would have attached

importance. He fought for things which were purely temporal

arrangements; which had indeed until quite recently been the guarantee

of the Church’s liberty, but which were in his time upon the turn of

becoming negligible. _But the spirit in which he fought was a

determination that the Church should never be controlled by the civil

power_, and the spirit against which he fought was the spirit which

either openly or secretly believes the Church to be an institution

merely human, and therefore naturally subjected, as an inferior, to the

processes of the monarch’s (or, worse, the politician’s) law.

A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that St. Thomas was obviously

and necessarily to lose, in the long run, every concrete point on which

he had stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing

for which he was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the

enthusiasm of the populace rose: the guarantee of the plain man’s

healthy and moral existence against the threat of the wealthy, and the

power of the State—the self-government of the general Church, had been

defended by a champion up to the point of death. For the morals

enforced by the Church are the guarantee of freedom.

Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic,

with a blind, irrational assertion that the miracles _could_ not take

place. He is not wholly possessed of a firm, and lasting faith that no

marvelous events ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot

believe that there was a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all

proof of such conspiracy). He is moved to a conviction that events so

minutely recorded and so amply testified, happened. Here again is the

European, the chiefly reasonable man, the Catholic, pitted against the

barbarian skeptic with his empty, unproved, mechanical dogmas of

material sequence.

And these miracles, for a Catholic reader, are but the extreme points

fitting in with the whole scheme. He knows what European civilization

was before the twelfth century. He knows what it was to become after

the sixteenth. He knows why and how the Church would stand out against

a certain itch for change. He appreciates why and how a character like

that of St. Thomas would resist. He is in no way perplexed to find that

the resistance failed on its technical side. He sees that it succeeded

so thoroughly in its spirit as to prevent, in a moment when its

occurrence would have been far more dangerous and general than in the

sixteenth century, the overturning of the connection between Church and

State.

The enthusiasm of the populace he particularly comprehends. He grasps

the connection between that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended

St. Thomas’ intercession; not because the miracles were fantasies, but

because a popular recognition of deserved sanctity is the later

accompaniment and the recipient of miraculous power.

It is the details of history which require the closest analysis. I

have, therefore, chosen a significant detail with which to exemplify my

case.

Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of the English

squires and of their position in the English countrysides would have to

explain at some length (and with difficulty) to a foreigner how and why

the evils of the English large estates were, though evils, national;

just as a particular landlord case of peculiar complexity or violent

might afford him a special test; so the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes,

for the Catholic who is viewing Europe, a very good example whereby he

can show how well he understands what is to other men not

understandable, and how simple is to him, and how human, a process

which, to men not Catholic, can only be explained by the most grotesque

assumptions; as that universal contemporary testimony must be ignored;

that men are ready to die for things in which they do not believe; that

the philosophy of a society does not permeate that society; or that a

popular enthusiasm ubiquitous and unchallenged, is mechanically

produced to the order of some centre of government! All these

absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel,

nor is there any but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains

it.

The Catholic sees that the whole of the à Becket business was like the

struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and is compelled to

maintain it (such being the battleground chosen by his opponents) upon

a privilege inherited from the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot

understand it and does not pretend to understand it.

Now let us turn from this second example, highly definite and limited,

to a third quite different from either of the other two and the widest

of all. Let us turn to the general aspect of all European history. We

can here make a list of the great lines on which the Catholic can

appreciate what other men only puzzle at, and can determine and know

those things upon which other men make no more than a guess.

The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman world, not because the Jews

were widely dispersed, but because the intellect of antiquity, and

especially the Roman intellect, accepted it in its maturity.

The material decline of the Empire is not co-relative with, nor

parallel to, the growth of the Catholic Church; it is the counterpart

of that growth. You have been told “Christianity (a word, by the way,

quite unhistorical) crept into Rome as she declined, and hastened that

decline.” That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase and retain it:

“The Faith is that which Rome accepted in her maturity; nor was the

Faith the cause of her decline, but rather the conservator of all that

could be conserved.”

There was no strengthening of us by the advent of barbaric blood; there

was a serious imperilling of civilization in its old age by some small

(and mainly servile) infiltration of barbaric blood; if civilization so

attacked did not permanently fail through old age we owe that happy

rescue to the Catholic Faith.

In the next period—the Dark Ages—the Catholic proceeds to see Europe

saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the

Scandinavian: he notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that

anything save something divinely instituted would have broken down. The

Mohammedan came within three days’ march of Tours, the Mongol was seen

from the walls of Tournus on the Sâone: right in France. The

Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul,

and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain. There was nothing

left of Europe but a central core.

Nevertheless Europe survived. In the refloresence which followed that

dark time—in the Middle Ages—the Catholic notes not hypotheses but

documents and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some

imaginary “Teutonic” root—a figment of the academies—but from the very

real and present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in

Gaul—never outside the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic

architecture spring high, spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the

territory of Paris and thence spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch

Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product of

the soul of Europe, re-awakened—he sees the marvelous new civilization

of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the old Roman society,

a transformation wholly from within, and motived by the Faith.

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses of the fifteenth

century, are to him the diseases of one body—Europe—in need of

medicine.

The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the

European body at the Reformation.

It ought to be death; but since the Church is not subject to mortal law

it is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion

and from civilization none (he perceives) were of the ancient Roman

stock—save Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that

struggle _England_: not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of

Europe, on Holland, North Germany and the rest. He is anxious to see

whether _Britain_ will fail the mass of civilization in its ordeal.

He notes the keenness of the fight in England and its long endurance;

how all the forces of wealth—especially the old families such as the

Howards and the merchants of the City of London—are enlisted upon the

treasonable side; how in spite of this a tenacious tradition prevents

any sudden transformation of the British polity or its sharp severance

from the continuity of Europe. He sees the whole of North England

rising, cities in the South standing siege. Ultimately he sees the

great nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut off,

apparently forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food

upon which they had fed.

Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land

only that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or

miraculous, preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side

by side with that loss the preservation of Ireland.

To the Catholic reader of history (though he has no Catholic history to

read) there is no danger of the foolish bias against civilization which

has haunted so many contemporary writers, and which has led them to

frame fantastic origins for institutions the growth of which are as

plain as an historical fact can be. He does not see in the pirate raids

which desolated the eastern and southeastern coasts of England in the

sixth century the origin of the English people. He perceives that the

success of these small eastern settlements upon the eastern shores, and

the spread of their language westward over the island dated from their

acceptance of Roman discipline, organization and law, from which the

majority, the Welsh to the West, were cut off. He sees that the

ultimate hegemony of Winchester over Britain all grew from this early

picking up of communications with the Continent and the cutting off of

everything in this island save the South and East from the common life

of Europe. He knows that Christian parliaments are not dimly and

possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly monastic in their origin;

he is not surprised to learn that they arose first in the Pyrenean

valleys during the struggle against the Mohammedans; he sees how

probable or necessary was such an origin just when the chief effort of

Europe was at work in the _Reconquista_.

In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally

before the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to that succession of

theories, self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of

novelty, which has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the

past. Above all, he does not commit the prime historical error of

“reading history backwards.” He does not think of the past as a groping

towards our own perfection of today. He has in his own nature the

nature of its career: he feels the fall and the rise: the rhythm of a

life which is his own.

The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century

or the fifteenth; shrines are not odd to him nor oracles; and if he is

the supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods.

EUROPE AND THE FAITH

I

WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE?

The history of European civilization is the history of a certain

political institution which united and expressed Europe, and was

governed from Rome. This institution was informed at its very origin by

the growing influence of a certain definite and organized religion:

this religion it ultimately accepted and, finally, was merged in.

The institution—having accepted the religion, having made of that

religion its official expression, and having breathed that religion in

through every part until it became the spirit of the whole—was slowly

modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it

did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new

soul. It re-arose and still lives.

This institution was first known among men as _Republica_; we call it

today “The Roman Empire.” The Religion which informed and saved it was

then called, still is called, and will always be called “The Catholic

Church.”

Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.

It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth

whether it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or

to a man who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in

distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to

examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as

would a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an

intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary

atheist, some supposed student in some remote future, reading history

in some place from which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly

departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our civilization

will therefore be wholly alien, would each, in proportion to his

science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped today by the Catholic

student who is of European birth, the truth that Europe and the

Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who do _not_

grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose

special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic

Church, or who have a traditional bias against it.

These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other

anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal

history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists

are innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still

dogmatically taught in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the

world.

Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is

anti-Catholic—that concerns another sphere of thought—but that it is

unhistorical.

To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and

its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization; to forget or

to diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a

certain religion; to conceal the fact that this religion was not a

vague mood, but a determinate and highly organized corporation; to

present in the first centuries some non-existant “Christianity” in

place of the existant Church; to suggest that the Faith was a vague

agreement among individual holders of opinions instead of what it

historically _was_, the doctrine of a fixed authoritative institution;

to fail to identify that institution with the institution still here

today and still called the Catholic Church; to exaggerate the

insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside the Empire

and did nothing to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire or its

religion have at any time ceased to be—that is, to pretend that there

has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the present

of Europe—all these pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood.

In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is

_nothing_ which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is

not demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.

In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building

materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple

food and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower,

the well, the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very

words of most of our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order

of still more, the logical sequence of our thought—all spring from that

one source. So with implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the

chisel, the file, the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the

ladder; all these we have from that same origin. Of our institutions it

is the same story. The divisions and the sub-divisions of Europe, the

parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with

their boundaries, the emplacement of the great European cities, the

routes of communication between them, the universities, the

Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence, all these

derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.

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 risen 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 origin and

development that its external accoutrement and its language were those

of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.

Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious

bias against the Catholic Church, will do so in many ways, some of

which will always prove contradictory of some others. For truth is one,

error disparate and many.

The attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to the violent,

continual, but inchoate attack of barbarians upon some civilized

fortress; such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from

that, along any one of the infinite number of directions from which a

single point may be approached. Today there is attack from the North,

tomorrow an attack from the South. Their directions are flatly

contradictory, but the contradiction is explained by the fact that each

is directed against a central and fixed opponent.

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Empire as a pagan

institution; they will pretend that the Catholic Church was something

alien to that pagan thing; that the Empire was great and admirable

before Catholicism came, weak and despicable upon its acceptation of

the Creed. They will represent the Faith as creeping like an Oriental

disease into the body of a firm Western society which it did not so

much transform as liquefy and dissolve.

Others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable

Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous

barbarians (Germans, of course) possessing all manner of splendid pagan

qualities—which usually turn out to be nineteenth century Protestant

qualities. These are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of

the Roman Empire which they are pictured as attacking.

Others adopt a simpler manner. They treat the Empire and its

institutions as dead after a certain date, and discuss the rise of a

new society without considering its Catholic and Imperial origins.

Nothing is commoner, for instance (in English schools), than for boys

to be taught that the pirate raids and settlements of the fifth century

in this Island were the “coming of the English,” and the complicated

history of Britain is simplified for them into a story of how certain

bold seafaring pagans (full of all the virtues we ascribe to ourselves

today) first devastated, then occupied, and at last, of their sole

genius, developed a land which Roman civilization had proved inadequate

to hold.

There is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious or

unconscious, pedantic or ignorant, according to the degree of learning

in him who propagates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe

as though it were something quite apart from the general development of

our civilization.

There are innumerable text-books in which a man may read the whole

history of his own, a European, country, from, say, the fifth to the

sixteenth century, and never hear of the Blessed Sacrament: which is as

though a man were to write of England in the nineteenth century without

daring to speak of newspapers and limited companies. Warped by such

historical enormities, the reader is at a loss to understand the

ordinary motives of his ancestors. Not only do the great crises in the

history of the Church obviously escape him, but much more do the great

crises in civil history escape him.

To set right, then, our general view of history it is necessary to be

ready with a sound answer to the prime question of all, which is this:

“What was the Roman Empire?”

If you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and

let him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil

War: if you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial, confused and

very summary account: if of all that went before it, right away back to

the first colonists, you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or

ludicrously misinformed (and slightly informed at that), what then

could he make of the problems in American Society, or how would he be

equipped to understand the nation of which he was to be a citizen? To

give such a man the elements of civic training you must let him know

what the Colonies were, what the War of Independence, and what the main

institutions preceding that event and created by it. He would have

further to know soundly the struggle between North and South, and the

principles underlying that struggle. Lastly, and most important of all,

he would have to see all this in a correct perspective.

So it is with us in the larger question of that general civilization

which is common to both Americans and Europeans, and which in its vigor

has extended garrisons, as it were, into Asia and Africa. We cannot

understand it today unless we understand what it developed from. What

was the origin from which we sprang? What was the Roman Empire?

The Roman Empire was a united civilization, the prime characteristic of

which was the acceptation, absolute and unconditional, of one common

mode of life by all those who dwelt within its boundaries. It is an

idea very difficult for the modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to

a number of sovereign countries more or less sharply differentiated,

and each separately colored, as it were, by different customs, a

different language, and often a different religion. Thus the modern man

sees France, French speaking, with an architecture, manners, laws of

its own, etc.; he saw (till yesterday) North Germany under the Prussian

hegemony, German speaking, with yet another set of institutions, and so

forth. When he thinks, therefore, of any great conflict of opinion,

such as the discussion between aristocracy and democracy today, he

thinks in terms of different countries. Ireland, for instance, is

Democratic, England is Aristocratic—and so forth.

Again, the modern man thinks of a community, however united, as

something bounded by, and in contrast with, other communities. When he

writes or thinks of France he does not think of France only, but of the

points in which France contrasts with England, North Germany, South

Germany, Italy, etc.

Now the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally

different way. All conceivable antagonisms (and they were violent) were

antagonisms _within one State_. No differentiation of State against

State was conceivable or was attempted.

From the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands, from the North Sea to the

Sahara and the Middle Nile, all was one State.

The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial

citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no

appreciable arts or sciences, it was _barbaric_. That outside waste of

sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the

frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation.

But that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of

the menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing

a fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities

outside the boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly

populated, and highly organized State within.

The members of these communities (principally the Dutch, Frisian,

Rhenish and other Germanic peoples, but also on the other frontiers,

the nomads of the desert, and in the West, islanders and mountaineers,

Irish and Caledonian) were all tinged with the great Empire on which

they bordered. Its trade permeated them. We find its coins everywhere.

Its names for most things became part of their speech. They thought in

terms of it. They had a sort of grievance when they were not admitted

to it. They perpetually begged for admittance.

They wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy its luxury, now and then

to raid little portions of its frontier wealth.

They never dreamt of “conquest.” On the other hand the Roman

administrator was concerned with getting barbarians to settle in an

orderly manner on the frontier fields, so that he could exploit their

labor, with coaxing them to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies,

or (when there was any local conflict) with defeating them in local

battles, taking them prisoners and making them slaves.

I have said that the mere number of these exterior men (German,

Caledonian, Irish, Slav, Moorish, Arab, etc.) was small compared with

the numbers of civilization, and, I repeat, in the eyes of the citizens

of the Empire, their lack of culture made them more insignificant

still.

At only one place did the Roman Empire have a common frontier with

another civilization, properly so called. It was a very short frontier,

not one-twentieth of the total boundaries of the Empire. It was the

Eastern or Persian frontier, guarded by spaces largely desert. And

though a true civilization lay beyond, that civilization was never of

great extent nor really powerful. This frontier was variously drawn at

various times, but corresponded roughly to the Plains of Mesopotamia.

The Mediterranean peoples of the Levant, from Antioch to Judea, were

always within that frontier. They were Roman. The mountain peoples of

Persia were always beyond it. Nowhere else was there any real rivalry

or contact with the foreigner, and even this rivalry and contact

(though “The Persian War” is the only serious _foreign_ or equal war in

the eyes of all the rulers from Julius Cæsar to the sixth century)

counted for little in the general life of Rome.

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, nor too often repeated, so

strange is it to our modern modes of thought, and so essentially

characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian era and the

formative period during which Christian civilization took its shape.

_Men lived as citizens of one State which they took for granted and

which they even regarded as eternal_. There would be much grumbling

against the taxes and here and there revolts against them, but never a

suggestion that the taxes should be levied by any other than imperial

authority, or imposed in any other than the imperial manner. There was

plenty of conflict between armies and individuals as to who should have

the advantage of ruling, but never any doubt as to the type of function

which the “Emperor” filled, nor as to the type of universally despotic

action which he exercised. There were any number of little local

liberties and customs which were the pride of the separate places to

which they attached, but there was no conception of such local

differences being antagonistic to the one life of the one State. That

State was, for the men of that time, the World.