Hilaire Belloc

Chapter Two

Among all the disciplines in which Hilaire Belloc has laboured, history stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour. Belloc’s historical practice is too complex to be judged in any general essay concerning his essential importance. But his historical theory is crucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated Christian humanism. It is as an extension of his humanism that his historical position will be analyzed.

The cardinal significance of the Bellocian conception of history is its traditionalism. History is organic; it grows from within a culture and is the actual cause of that culture’s corporate existence in present time. Since Christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition that has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past—familial, regional, and the rest—the past is rendered intelligible by grasping the inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of historical man. Those who attack Hilaire Belloc for being biased in his historical perspective must first settle the question of the very nature of history itself. For Belloc history begins as an extension of tradition; history is an act of “self-knowledge,” as he puts it in his magnificent introduction to Europe and the Faith.

This act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to systematize or catalogue facts. It does not proceed from the need man has for the possession of impersonal, objective truth. History is the effect of an inner command to know one’s soul. It is the completion of human consciousness. The passion for history is man’s Grizzlebeard. As the Sailor renders Myself unalienated from the physical universe in which he exists, the Grizzlebeard seals Myself in time which has stamped man in its own image. Belloc returns to this theme time and again in the essays, but nowhere does he express himself more movingly than in The Old Road, where he tells us why he elected to recover the Roman Way from Winchester to Canterbury.

It is well known that the humanist conception of history as a psychological necessity first came into its own in the Western World with the Incarnation of the Son of God in time. In the classical pagan world the status of history was at best ambiguous. Aristotle gave historical knowledge a low place in his hierarchy of values. History for the Greek philosophers could not achieve the dignity of a science because it lacked the universal necessity without which there is no science. The philosophers were right in judging history not to be a science. They were wrong in according history little value. What the wise men of the ancient world took away from history, the common sense of the people gave back. The dignity of history was grasped obscurely because the humanism of the classical universe could not achieve its fullness unless man was unified in time as well as in space. The tradition of the family enshrined in the household gods and in the legend of Aeneas carrying father Anchises on his back out of burning Troy symbolized a need rooted in the substance of human nature: the necessity to link the present with the past. Familial traditions extended to the City, and then to the Empire, and even the work of Virgil the Poet was historical in inspiration.

The Incarnation in time and the prolonging of the Deposit of Faith through the centuries in a living tradition that hands on what it has received, confirmed the humanist insight and at the same time conferred on history a dignity of an altogether new order. No one in the new Christian society, not even the scientist or philosopher, would ever more despise history, and if the West has accorded to history a place unique in the hierarchy of human values, it is because time had been sanctified and conquered by the Son of God.

History added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be himself. The Faith taught Christian man that nothing is ever lost: the ages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the Vision of God. Tradition, which is nothing but the corporate life of the past existing in the present, is the human analogue of the Eternal Morning Who is the End of us all.

Historical tradition, to grow as it should, must commence with that society which is most natural to man: the family. Familial memory incarnated in a host of rites, observances, and actions lifts the members of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a present ever passing, and life is invested with a fullness that the immortal in man demands. The moment is salvaged, and the suffering and estrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes:

This immemorial sense for history has always run through every artery of the corporate life of Christendom, and in Hilaire Belloc it finds a final champion. Read A Remaining Christmas or The Mowing of a Field for an insight into Belloc’s sense of history as tradition. For him, and here he is one with that past he claimed for himself, history is simply the recovery of the self: a personal and communal act of memory. For Belloc, as for the West, tradition begins in the family: the Yule log was burnt in his home. From the family, tradition spread to the region: he rendered Sussex immortal. From the region, man recovers those wider circles of his story—the nation, the state, the broad sweep of the Empire: some forty books enshrine the Bellocian effort. All of this is finally stamped one by the Faith that issued from the Incarnation.

Belloc’s historical work is divided broadly into two chief fields of interest: England and France; and within these respective areas of concentration a particular era predominates: in England it is the Reformation, down to the final exile of the Stuart Kings; in France, it is the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Transcending these broad interests, there are works which deal with the wider sweep of Western History from before the Incarnation, down through the Middle Ages, up to the Reformation and even beyond World War I to the Crisis of Our Civilization. Biography and general history incarnate the above work. Besides all that, Belloc has produced an odd dozen specialized monographs which deal with subjects close to his heart: studies on the Roman Road, on Sussex, on cities and their river tributaries, and finally on military history. The first two attach to his general European history and illustrate his “pro-Roman” and “pro-Catholic” positions. The military monographs are grouped chiefly, although not exclusively, around England. Not including his travel books, which illustrate historical matter, one can count forty-six books written by Belloc that are historical in the full sense of the term.

The story of Belloc’s going up to Oxford as an undergraduate, astounding the University with his brilliance and pugnacity, is well known. The story of his exclusion from Oxford as a tutor because of his bellicose Catholicism may be revealed some day. In any case, this rebuff added something personal to his bitterness against what he called the “official history” of the great English Universities. His work must be understood in relation to the two historical trends that he reacted against with such violence: the Whig tradition of Gibbon, Mommsen, Macaulay, Green, and their copyists and sycophants; and the implicit idealism and anti-traditionalism of German Historismus. Because he was engaged in a conscious and articulate controversy with these two historical schools for almost fifty years, an understanding of what he is opposing is indispensable for placing Belloc as an historian.

Present-day English history has maintained a steady, unbroken continuity with eighteenth-century political Whiggery and eighteenth-century rationalism. History was an admirable tool for the elucidation of doctrines peculiarly dear to the whole Enlightenment (as Voltaire so clearly grasped). The indefinite perfectibility of human reason could be illustrated historically by showing the advance of man out of medieval darkness into the light of the Age of Reason. Here the specific dogmas of rationalist deism happened to coincide with the prejudices of popular Protestantism: that the Church was foisted on an unwilling Empire at the caprice of Constantine the Great; that the barbarian hordes from the east swept over the body of Rome and breathed a new life into Europe that flowered eventually in a host of Protestant institutions; that the Dark Ages extended into the high Middle Ages and were expelled only by the advent of the Renaissance of learning (executed, if not initiated by scholars freed from the tyranny of Rome); that the growth of Parliamentary Government in Holland and England was the work of disinterested patriots forging a future freed from feudal darkness and oppression—all these opinions, dear to the traditions of the Glorious Revolution, were simply corollaries of the rationalist doctrine of the expanding perfection of mankind. Darwinism was only a latter-day confirmation of this ideology. From Protestant opinion and rationalist philosophy was born the thing known as Whig History. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig-rationalist was dead certain that he had in his hands the guide lines to historical understanding. It seems significant that even old-line Tories who politically opposed the bulk of the Whig-Liberal traditions fell into the general Whig position. Bolingbroke himself was a victim of pre-Darwinian evolutionism.

Since man was supposed to have progressed to that point in time where the historian stood, history was judged from the vantage point of the present. Everything from before Christ, down to the decline of the Roman Empire, the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and beyond the Reformation was measured by standards peculiar to the present. The past received its intelligibility in the light of where man happened to find himself. All this followed on a doctrine of inevitable progress. Since the present was the high point of cultural and personal development, the past was considered ministerially. Our fathers were condescended to.

Now it is extremely significant that Hilaire Belloc, almost alone of his Edwardian generation, reversed that historical perspective. He called before the bar of Christendom the capitalist, industrialist present, and found it wanting. Belloc insisted on judging the present in the light of the past, and the past itself was seen in terms of its own immediate and remote antecedents. The reality of the European traditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice, the very being of cultural historical continuity, entered bodily into his perspective. Whereas the Whig historian judged King Charles I, to take an obvious example, in the light of the twentieth-century development to liberal parliamentary government, Belloc saw the man in terms of the ancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the Stuart monarch died. Cromwell, for the Whig historian, was he who made for parliamentary supremacy; for Belloc, Cromwell was he who was made by an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution.

Since Belloc’s conception of history is traditional and organic, he constantly insisted on judging the past in the light of the lines of efficient causality that were actually productive of this or that historical event or crisis. These lines are many and diverse, but at least one of them, Belloc insists, renders European history a steady continuity. This line of causality is the Catholic and Greco-Roman classical tradition; an almost immemorial tradition existing in the present in two dimensions: corporately—in Christendom as a whole, molding it by shaping institutions, forming consciences, transforming the land, incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and literary arts, and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn; and personally—as summing itself up in a man, annealing him, and giving direction to his destiny.

In taking his historical stand on the Catholic tradition, Belloc was fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been, and although radically attenuated still was, the one bond of continuity that could enable the historian to grasp a steady, continuous causality in his province. The Whig doctrines were myths, but even assuming for a moment that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were superior to the Medieval and Continental traditions—that the present was the threshold to a golden age, as the Victorians and Edwardians still thought—nonetheless, that supposition was completely valueless as a principle of historical explanation.

The Whig historian and his Liberal counterpart attempt to find some intelligibility or meaning in history. The rejection of the Catholic ethos robs the Whig of the one steady, continuous influence that has always operated in the West through the ages. The Whig cannot, for example, see the rise of liberty as something caused by the Faith, as an effect of an institution already in existence. His dilemma consists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty; his rejection of the Catholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives: either liberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause, and history is thereby totally unintelligible; or liberty is the effect of something not actually in existence, but which is conceived as though it were. From the latter issues the Liberal-Whig mythology of “progress,” “evolution,” “human perfectibility,” and so on. What these historians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand for nothing but tissues of imagery, existing in the minds of men who view historical situations after the fact. In no sense did “progress” ever cause anything historical, for the simple reason that “progress” has no being of its own. Yet the Liberals treat these constructs as though they were physical laws operative in the extramental order. Belloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy, and he fingered it for the imaginative trick it is, in his controversy with H. G. Wells.

Wells was not alone in this personification of the abstract. He was only a popularizer of a tendency that is ever at work in all historical theory that commences by minimizing the religious causality operative in the West. The Whig substituted for the Catholic tradition an over-all finality which he called “progress.” The idealist historian and the Weltanschauung historian add to the Whig denial the negation of the personal will. All the historian is left to work with are impersonal forces, either physical or logical. He falls into the old error of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist.

The Liberal is bound by his own theory. His sociological ideals must be projected ahead of his historical understanding; they can never emerge from an insight into that which actually has existed. The classical European Liberal (and his contemporary counterpart) is always marked by his rejection of any way of life rooted in the older past of Christendom.

When Hilaire Belloc launched his concept of the proprietary state, he effected a political and sociological revolution that had its roots in his historical vision. Mr. Douglas Jerrold has analyzed brilliantly the profound effect made by Belloc’s polemic against the English parliamentary party system which was wedded to Whig ideals and their Edwardian Liberal refinements.[40] It was a time when Britain had reached next to the limit of its material expansion. English industry and productivity were unequalled in excellence and quantity. The nation was united in the firm conviction that Britannia ruled by the grace of God. Providence had specially blessed the Island Empire. The innate superiority, not only of Englishmen, but of English ways and English religion, was less a conscious doctrine than a broad myth on which a whole people reposed. Liberal capitalism appeared to the “progressivists” as the final flowering of a history that had its roots in the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Belloc’s economics and sociology, the fruit of his historical insight, effected a revolution. Since it was a revolution of thought, its effects were not immediately apparent, but acting as corrosives they gradually ate away the rust of centuries of complacency and smugness. Belloc told the Englishmen of his day that their cherished system of parliamentary government represented not the nation, but two parties that stood for the same thing: capitalist, industrial wealth. He went on to tell them that the supposed incorruptibility of this ancient governmental institution was a lie: men were bought and sold, and titles were bartered for privilege.

Expanding his polemic, Belloc informed the nation that liberal capitalism would not issue into the golden age, but would work inexorably toward the Servile State: a state in which the vast majority of the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy owners, or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts. He grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional economic basis of Western Christian societies: the institution of small property, widely distributed, giving the tone to society, and reposing on the family community. As far back as 1908, in The Servile State, Belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were reestablished, the nation would give itself over to slavery. The England of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with tragic finality. Belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant point; if the society were propertyless, contractual slavery would inexorably result. The age of the ration card, the social leveling of the whole people, the increasing drabness of life, the elimination of the middle classes, the legislation of enforced labour—this age is upon England, and it will remain until and unless property is restored.

Belloc’s prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can succeed. What he said would come to pass did come to pass; and it came to pass the way he said it would. There is more than irony in looking back thirty years to that superman of the Wells school of thought: that uninhibited, traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march of liberal progress; that dull abstraction, “the man of the future,” who was to inherit the earth. Who is he today, and where is he? He is the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt Europe—Heidegger’s faceless “one” who neither owns nor can be said even to be.

The striking truth in the utter failure of the hopes of post-Victorian Liberalism lies in the fact that Liberalism, the child of Whiggery, grounded its predictions in an historical theory that was a well-intentioned myth. The future simply is not a magnet. It has no existence. It is a refuge for cowards, Chesterton said somewhere; a retreat for men who cannot bear to face the grandeur of their own past. Belloc was able to lay down the broad lines which were leading to the Servile State because his historical vision was orientated realistically: it looked to causes actually operative in the past, whose collective efficacy hardened and sharpened with the passing of time. The English Reformation had created a wealthy landed aristocracy. This aristocracy had ruined a crown that for all its failures had stood, immemorially, for the rights of the common man, already a landed owner in large part by the close of the fourteenth century. Having gained political power, the aristocracy usurped economic power; the long series of legislative acts and judicial decisions, from the Poor Laws to the final enclosure acts, ended in the creation of a rural proletariat. The rise of industrialism was controlled by a capitalism already in existence, and the rural proletariat was transformed into its urban counterpart.

Belloc’s prophetic ability, strikingly demonstrated time and again, worked because it was based on his grasp of causality actually operative in history. The future can never be predicted with certitude because causes operating at the present moment in time are contingent. They can be replaced, diminished, checked, or rechannelled. Nonetheless, to have an insight into these causes is to possess an instrument for predicting a possible or even probable future. No historical theory grounded in a mere Weltanschauung, nor any history deduced from a philosophical system such as the Hegelian and Marxist, is of any practical utility in understanding what might happen.

Another example of Belloc’s prophetic insight can be found in his book about the United States, The Contrast. Writing in 1924, before the New Deal was even a dream, Belloc calmly announced that a great increase of Presidential power would be effected in the near future. His historical thesis, still paradoxical to most of his readers, was that great wealth always operated through representative institutions, and always aimed, neither at monarchy nor democracy, but at aristocracy. In a country in which the sense of individual liberty was still strong, the people would tend to incarnate themselves more and more in the head of the state, who, by his very position, stood above special interests, which worked naturally through parliamentary structures. One does not have to agree with Belloc that this monarchical tendency was a good thing; but it must be granted that he nailed the tendency to the wall.

Belloc’s historical insight passes the pragmatic test time and again. Another example of history rendered intelligible when seen in the light of the traditions of Christendom was Belloc’s very early penetration of the essential foreignness of Prussia to the family of nations that constitute Europe. Prussia, the legitimate child of the Reformation, arose and developed apart from the older European Unity. Of her very nature she opposed that unity, and refused to be bound by the morality common to Christian nations and men. Frederick the Great’s rape of Silesia, the work of Bismarck, the over-all meaning of the First Reich and of World War I make sense only within the context of Belloc’s discussion of the problem. When all England and the United States as well were singing the praises of the Nordic man and the superiority of the blond beast of the north, Belloc knew what Prussia really meant: a gun pointed at the heart of the West. The resurrection of Prussianism under Hitler confirmed bitterly the prophetic insight of Belloc, who had been warning England for over forty years about the intentions of North Germany. Belloc knew where Prussia stood in the light of the unity of Christendom. She was beyond the pale.

It is largely due to the Bellocian polemic that the old-fashioned Whig history, although still taught as a matter of course almost everywhere, is no longer the accepted dogma of serious historical scholarship. Historians today can labour at their profession without the fear that their work will be branded as partisan, as is the work of the man who cleared the field for them.

Belloc’s historical technique suffered from one self-imposed liability. He worked within a tradition, and thereby defined himself. But his strength lay in his very limitation. The Bellocian philosophy of history can operate only within some one well-defined civilization. The effectiveness of his method depends on the historian’s entering profoundly into the spirit of a culture, and on assuming to himself the religious and social beliefs and values of the society in question. Without his Catholicism, or without at least a deep sympathy for the religion that made Christendom, Belloc’s historical method cannot be made to function realistically. It is of no use, for example, to a man who would work toward an historical understanding of global history. World history must be seen, to the Bellocian, as something outside of the European Unity, as something foreign, threatening that unity, or as penetrated by it. To enter into a diversity of religious and cultural traditions in order to grasp the complete picture of world history from within is a psychological impossibility. A man would break down under the strain, because he cannot take to himself traditions that are mutually contradictory. He cannot be that which he rejects.

Philosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality typified by academic journals or international youth congresses. So long as these historians simply record facts they are safe, but as soon as they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary lack of inside understanding. World historians frequently fail to grasp even the story of their own nations. They are within nothing at all, but are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from an academic outside; hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything that has ever moved men to common action. These historians tend to succumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically; they perpetually find meetings between an East and West, where there is only conflict; they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically; they build vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching for his own antecedents. A Christian comes away from Belloc knowing his own soul.

The Weltanschauung historian must fail in the end because no “world view” has ever acted to cause anything historically. History is caused within cultures, and the clash of civilizations occurs when two cultures in act meet on the field of battle, be it economic, military, or spiritual.

The final objection that the “world historian” has against Belloc is that he takes sides, and the final answer to that objection is simply this: to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history. A historian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more than the surface of things. He cannot see the inside of the spiritual drama of, let us say, the Reformation or the Arian heresy, without being touched by an absolute: absolutes either wound or enlist the assent of the spirit. There can be no impartiality when a man has been actually grazed by the realities that have stirred all Christianity to its roots. Intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death simply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been reached by the historian, and unless they are reached and elected for or rejected, nothing historical can be known in its very substance. Credo ut intelligam.

The Bellocian concept of history, as set forth in the above passage, might well be called Anselmian: historical understanding follows Faith. If history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified through a common religion, then it follows necessarily that history can be grasped only from within. The historian who views the European story as a series of “phenomena” external to himself must either fall into the Aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology, or he must superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it intelligible. He simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the eyes of the men he would know, or feel with them as they erupt into common action. He is alienated from them.

Belloc has been attacked by historians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, for partisanship, bias, and narrow dogmatism. There is more than a little truth to their charges. Belloc frequently bludgeons his readers. In the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost martial in its proud magnificence: its certainty. But all this is part of the price Belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian he did. He is within what he is writing. Do not ask for impartiality when reading of the First Crusade. Belloc is there: he is one of the Crusaders. When you know Belloc, you know the Crusades, you know the revolutionary spirit that swept all France in the eighteenth century; when you have read Esto Perpetua the grandeur of the first three centuries of the Christian era comes home to the soul amidst the contrast of the barren desert of Islam. You understand what Islam meant to Europe. Belloc gives a reader a one-sided history, but the irony is that, to a Bellocian, history must always be one-sided. The man “on no side” is outside history.

Paradoxically enough, Belloc’s contention runs exactly contrary to the first principle of modern Western historical theory. Contemporary historians, regardless of political predilection or religious and philosophical adherence, are united in the common belief that historical truth is dependent on historical “objectivity.” This objectivity is achieved in proportion to the historian’s ability to withdraw from his own cultural antecedents. In so doing, the scholar shakes himself loose from the prejudices and parochialisms of his own civilization, he frees himself, in order that he may view the whole. The story of his people and of his own faith recede until they take their just place within the broader scope of the cosmic movement of historical man through time.

It is questionable whether such an objectivity can be more than an ideal projected before the historian—a goal to be forever missed, but always aimed at. But assuming for a moment that it is possible for a single historian to hold before himself the global passage of man through recorded history, assuming that he could find a set of natural principles that would unify this vast procession of phenomena into an intelligible structure—even assuming this ideal of the Toynbee school of thought—it still remains an open question whether this would constitute the possession of historical truth.

If, on the contrary (assuming Belloc’s hypothesis), historical truth principally means historical understanding of the men who have made history, then this understanding can only follow on a grasp of the spiritual tides that have launched any given culture, that have given it a common destiny, that have been channelled analogically through the members of the community. Historical truth depends then on a subjective, almost intuitive, grasp of this communal spirit; a penetration into historical man, rather than an analytic dissection of a spirit that defies mere logical analysis. Historical understanding escapes the kind of objectivity achieved in the sciences, because it demands a deeper insight: an entering into the subjective engagement of the human person. To understand what has caused me to be the kind of man I am, I must understand what caused the men who made me to be what they were. I possess my past, in Belloc’s eyes, when I am that past to such a degree that I could have acted as did my ancestors. Then, and only then, do I actually know my own fathers from within the depths of my own personality.

Outside objectivity versus inside understanding; conscious withdrawal and deliberate cultural alienation for the sake of objectivity, as opposed to conscious cultural immersion and integration for the sake of subjective sympathy: two theories of history that can be resolved finally only by a personal act of choice.

Belloc’s historical theory is anti-academic in that it cannot be achieved within the confines of the world of the university. As both an historical position and an historical practice it must always be suspect to professional historical scholars, whose almost exclusive preoccupation with documents makes them, quite naturally, more sympathetic to the scientific objectivity of contemporary history. Belloc must always appear, by turns, wildly romantic and narrowly partisan to the academicians. To the Bellocian, academicism in history must always lack both colour and vigour. It must wear an air of irritating professionalism.

Belloc’s position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel, his minute detection of physical details, his sympathy with verbal tradition, his suspicion for the “outlander.” These were all humanistic instruments, rendering him one with the past, capable of seeing things as did his forefathers, understanding reality as they did, and eventually grasping the inner spirit of their personal and communal action that constitutes the heart of their history.

Such history is both conservative in ultimate judgment and it is radical: conservative in that it proceeds by way of a personal guarding of an ancient heritage; radical in that it makes a man totally opposed to a new world at odds with that heritage. The final and the fatal limitation to Bellocian history is that it depends for success on a constant living continuity, on a vital tradition acting like a road the historian can travel down and back again at will. The radical discontinuity of the modern world with its past in the older Christendom makes it almost impossible for anyone to perpetuate Belloc’s historical practice. It is becoming increasingly more difficult, if not impossible, to be spiritually and affectively one with our heritage. The past of Christendom is becoming more and more a written patrimony, and the Bellocian brand of historical integration cannot thrive on such jejune food.

History by way of inside understanding is practicable today only on a regional and familial basis; and even the family, within the industrialized world, has lost any living touch with its own dead. The father has become a stranger to his son.

For Belloc, therefore, an apprehension of the European past demands an understanding and a sympathy for the Catholic Faith, tending to allegiance, if not to formal profession. As Belloc sees it, only such an history can comprehend the over-all pressure of the Christian dispensation as it exercised a steady influence on the person and on society; acting always as a balm, sometimes as a force, both conservative and full of ringing affirmations that are not of this world. Nonetheless, Belloc affirms, this apprehension is of itself sufficient to insure only an over-all sane judgment about things historical. The Christian vision, to perfect itself historically, must take on a judgment that is temporal, human, and almost cynical in its realism. The great Action advances or retreats as it is involved in the individual actions of ages, generations, decades, and even days and hours. These, in their turn, are caused by a host of agents, tangling one with another, clashing in opposition and uniting in the coincidence of common interest: causes which are both impersonal and personal, but chiefly the latter.

The historian, says Belloc, must possess himself of a mass of detailed impersonal information, which must be sifted and fitted into proper perspective. “But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible.”[42] In short, as Mr. Robert Hamilton pointed out in his study on Belloc, the historian must be a humanist. He must understand men and the motives that move them. History, to be faithful to what was actually productive of the past, must go beyond the physical, phenomenal evidence at hand. A judgment of motive will normally transcend the synthesis of observable fact. A man of action (unless he be a Communist) does not give himself away on paper. His motives must be inferred from the way he acts. A detailed observation of a man’s conduct over a period of time and through a succession of historical crises will yield sufficient evidence for an over-all judgment as to his intentions, and hence to his place in the historical drama in which he was engaged. No one piece of information is sufficient for such an evaluation. The sum of facts, considered separately, would yield only probability concerning the directed human will. The information as synthesized, however, permits of an inductive judgment yielding a species of certitude about the moral role men play in history. In The Cruise of the Nona, that mosaic of Bellociana, the theory is put forth by the author that a sum of probabilities can furnish certitude, if that sum is taken as a patterned whole. It looks as though Belloc is here reflecting the influence of his early teacher, John Henry Newman, who developed an epistemology around this conception of certitude as emerging from a set of probabilities. When all the evidence together points to one conclusion, converges on one exclusive explanation, then the mind should assent to that one conclusion without fear of the truth of the opposite. It is clear that this is a risky and dangerous instrument for the acquisition of historical truth. A fool, or a mind purely speculative or deductive in bent, would bungle in attempting such judgments. A mind overly pious and overly sanguine about human nature, or excessively cynical about the good in men, would not be suited for the task. It is an instrument for a humanist: a man who knows men as they are. Belloc was peculiarly capable of exercising his own theory, and if he erred sometimes, it was on the side of cynicism, not piety.

Belloc’s theory of history is not developed philosophically in any one piece of writing. He tosses out his ideas within the limits of short personal essays, and occasionally he illuminates what he is doing in some concrete situation by standing back, as it were, and reflecting briefly on the presuppositions guiding his reasoning. He wrote history analogically, and if he had thoroughly developed his doctrine theoretically, he would have revealed something unique in the philosophy of historical practice. Historical research, if it would conform itself with historical truth, must be analogical as is historical truth itself. A diversity of causal lines, one at least almost immemorial, others lengthening into centuries, and still others contracted within the space of a man’s life or within a lesser temporal span, all act together to produce history, but each causal line acts in its own way. The historian must constantly shift his perspective as he makes his way through this tangle of actualities, which encompass everything from a living Faith, through the whole gamut of human vice and honour, to the half-forgotten contours of the field of battle. No one factor determines history (although one factor—the Christian Greco-Roman tradition—renders history intelligible). Herein Belloc is consciously separated from Marxist history, which would explain the past as determined exclusively through economic pressures. Even more so is the Bellocian theory opposed to the Hegelian or dialectical concept of history in which the past is judged to be caused by a logical clash of ideas which work themselves out in time, independently of, or dominating, the counter-pressure of human action.

To study, think, and write history as Belloc did demands a rare brand of personal integration. A personal Faith, through which the Christian tradition is comprehended, is united with humanism, through which the human and non-human causes operative in history are accorded their just causality in the judgment of the past. These lines of causality must be kept distinct, but they cannot be separated. If they are separated, the historian will fall into some kind of Barthianism, in which the Gospel is conceived as a message that acts through the ages independently of men and society, and in which secular man goes his own way totally uneffected by the Christian dispensation. If, on the contrary, the lines of causality are identified, then history is turned into the pious hagiography of fashionable French ladies of the last century. To ignore or to minimize either the Church or the secular is to fail to understand Western Europe.

As an example of Belloc’s balancing of historical causality one should watch him in act as he analyzes the French Revolution. A host of causes made the Revolution: the Christian doctrine of human equality; the ruining of the prestige of the monarchy by Louis XV’s public indulgence of the flesh prolonged into middle and old age; the antiquated system of taxation, based on a defunct manorial society, which bankrupted the realm; the extravagance and scandal given by a woman too long denied the rights of marriage; Drouet’s ride (“Good Lord, what a ride!” says Belloc); the heroism of the French at Wattignies; the democratic spirit of the Gauls united so paradoxically with the temper of the soldier—these were all actual causes of the Revolution. The failure of almost any one of them would have ruined or at least modified the Revolution.

When faced with these facts, few historians would deny the rightness of Belloc’s contention. But it remains true that these causes, all of which moved to one effect, are not actually operative within the minds of most academic historians when they set down the story. What use would an Hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the flight of the King? His theory cannot admit that wild contingency, full of the drama of human existence, to have altered the course of history. He is bound by his own dialectic. Neither the free will of Drouet, nor the strength of the man’s horse, nor the quality of his skill, can genuinely enter Hegelian history; nor can they enter the systems of Spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him, because systems of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical contingency. What modern vulgarian, conditioned by our mechanical theories about sex, can really understand Marie Antoinette—so Catholic at the end, and always so much the woman! Theories of history can take these contingencies and admit them as facts, but they can not use them in their over-all explanations. These historians are not humanists, but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that escapes the purely scientific.

For an insight into Belloc’s humanist penetration, one could do little better than to read him on King Charles I of England. For centuries Charles has been a puzzle to students of history: carrying with him all the glamour of the Stuarts, he was certainly the noblest of that ill-omened house (if one except James Francis Edward), and yet why did he let Strafford go to his death? This moral failure of the King is contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war, from the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham to his execution. Charles simply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling: we cannot think of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next; there is a constancy about his whole life, and how can this constancy be understood in the light of the death of Strafford? Explained it must be, if the English Civil War is to make sense. Belloc, uniting the Newmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a humanist, draws this sketch of the man’s character:

Belloc did not find the above in any written document, admitting of a learned footnote. He concluded to it, following on a study of all the available data. His moral judgment concerning Charles would be called “romancing” by historians of one brand of the Historismus school. If history is but surface phenomena or ideology, then these men are right. But if history has been caused efficiently, in part, by men acting in all their strength and failing in their weaknesses, then the Bellocian method is dangerously right: right, because without such a method history remains incomplete and even superficial; dangerous, because the humanist instrument is a delicate rapier and not one to be used without caution, skill, and human understanding. One cannot affirm that Belloc always kept the necessary balance, but he kept it steadily enough through a lifetime of historical labour to have bequeathed us a kind of history rarely written in these days, or in any day for that matter: history which respects tradition, both political and religious, and history which respects the human person in all the tissue of good and evil from whence proceeds human action.

Although the use of the technique of “converging probabilities” frequently issues into judgments that are humanist, i.e. judgments about men, Belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish historical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human personality. In these impersonal studies about battles, roads, rivers, etc., Belloc pointed up his polemic against the German Idealist school that refused to deal with things. The Stane Street, written in 1913, is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind of historical investigation. Although the book was severely written, with little of the high rhetoric associated with much of Belloc’s history, there are two passages that reveal Belloc’s attack against historical idealism.

It is amusing to note that one phrase in the above passage was repeated almost verbatim twenty years later, when Belloc wrote of his dead companion Chesterton, that “he had the singular good fortune to have escaped the University.” He wrote this phrase in a context dealing with Chesterton’s realism. This was the same Chesterton who had said that the only sin was “to call green grass grey.” It was the same Chesterton who saw with his friend that there is one, implicit, rarely articulated first principle behind the modern mind: things are not what they seem to be; the postulate of an impoverished universe, as it has been called. Whig history was one enemy; but the great enemy against which Belloc directed his historical guns was German Historismus, the child of Hegelian idealism, and the enemy of reality.

The development of historiography and the application of scientific 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:

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.

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:

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

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.

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 Christendom 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.

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]

Such is the basic Bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship 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.

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:

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.

Conclusion

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.

Belloc can only echo the suppressed conscience of those millions of silent men—the men who bend over nets and who rest on their plows and who say nothing—the men who still bear within themselves the dreams and passions of Christendom: the love of one’s own, the feel for the soil, the sense of arms, the hunger for certitude. Belloc speaks for the underground of Europe.

But in some future time, possibly not remote, when New Man will have exhausted himself attempting to escape his destiny, when he will have tried all the doors leading nowhere, when he will have sickened of paper humanisms, he may turn to the gnarled wisdom and the eternal youth of this last guardian of the West. If he does, he will learn what it means to be a man.

NOTES

LIST OF EDITIONS CITED