,transcriber's ,notes3 ,underscores are used to enclose text in italics2 the three words that end this sentence are in italics4 ,the spelling and punctuation of the book have not been changed4 ,there are #fe endnotes4 ,each endnote is labelled by a copy of its marker which consists of a number in square brackets4 ,,hilaire ,,belloc3 ,no ,alienated ,man ,,hilaire ,,belloc3 ,no ,alienated ,man ,a ,study in ,christian ,integration ,by ,frederick ,wilhelmsen ,sheed and ,ward ,new ,york #aiec ,copyright #aiec by ,sheed ,ward1 ,inc4 ,library of ,congress ,catalog ,card ,number3 #ec-ihja ,manufactured in the ,united ,states of ,america ,,to ,,jack ,,maddux ,,preface ,poet1 sailor1 ,grizzlebeard--this trinity sums up1 not only the man who is ,hilaire ,belloc1 but the vision of integrated humanity concretized in his work4 ,bellocian humanism is ,hilaire ,belloc grasped in the essence of his spirit1 seen at the center of his being4 ,only a detailed biography will reveal to this generation the full flavour1 the magnificence1 of this latter-day ,villon4 ,nonetheless it seemed to me that the perfections symbolized by the ,poet1 the ,sailor1 the ,grizzlebeard are not the peculiarities of one man whose life has spanned almost two ages4 ,they are perfections essential to the integral completion of ,christian humanity4 ,with this thesis in mind1 ,i wrote this book3 an attempt not only to introduce the contemporary reader to ,belloc1 but also an attempt to disengage1 from the vast corpus of ,bellociana1 those themes that are of permanent value4 ,what follows is not a biography1 nor is it a book of literary criticism4 ,it is1 if you like1 a 8metaphysics of the concrete0 seen through the eyes of a man rooted in the things that are4 ,,contents ,page ,,one ,no ,alienated ,man #a ,,two ,grizzlebeard3 ,history ,from ,within #di ,,three ,christendom3 8,esto ,perpetua0 #hd ,,conclusion ,the ,future ,place of ,hilaire ,belloc in ,english ,letters #aja ,,notes #aje ,list of ,editions ,cited #ajf ,chapter ,one ,,no ,,alienated ,,man ,the ,four ,men3 ,natural ,humanism ,the ancient ,arabs spoke of a creature having life in two worlds3 his body was rooted in the earth1 but his soul swept out across the horizons to a world beyond4 ,let us call him by his name3 ,man4 ,this balance which is ,man is a tension rarely maintained in the course of human existence4 ,let us call the one who situates his destiny in this world1 and who habituates his gaze to the things this side of the horizon1 ,aristotelian ,man4 ,let us call the one who despises the limits of the horizons1 and who contemplates the world beyond1 ,platonic ,man4 ,this first alienation of man from himself was healed in the ancient world by the ,incarnation4 ,aristotelian ,man1 like ,st4 ,thomas the ,doubter1 could put his fingers in the side of his ,creator2 and ,platonic ,man1 like the mystic ,john1 found the ,word1 but it was the ,word made ,flesh4 ,revelation restored to man the unity that was himself4 ,anima naturaliter ,christiana4 ,this unity was achieved as a reality both personal and corporate for a period of time in that small segment of the globe known as ,western ,europe4 ,human unity was gradually lost1 and a new man came into being4 ,this man has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a heaven beyond4 ,nor is he ,christian ,man1 man reconciled to himself4 ,this new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round about him4 ,he looks within1 and attempts to find his salvation by a penetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality4 ,this is ,modern ,man1 man twice alienated from himself1 and he has not yet found his soul4 8,je est un autre10 said ,rimbaud4 8,i ,,is an ,other40 ,and yet the ,other which he is1 is shrouded in darkness2 and it is in this crucifixion of himself that ,modern ,man has come to see1 without knowing that he sees1 the hidden irony of the ,cross4 ,rimbaud was to wreak his vengeance on this ,other he could not find by denouncing poetry1 and by turning to what consolations the sands of ,africa and the keel of a slave ship could offer an alienated man4 ,he was a forerunner of what has become the dominant motif of the ,western soul as expressed in its literature3 the ,man of ,guilt4 ,guilt is the effect of estrangement2 it follows on a renunciation1 explicit or implicit1 of some dimension of the human spirit which is essential to the integral perfection of man4 ,this renunciation has nothing to do with asceticism1 which is a discipline sanctified and defined by the ,christian tradition1 having as its goal the flowering of human existence4 ,the ascetic is an artist who prunes away the irrelevant so that the end may be achieved4 ,alienation is altogether different4 ,it is the renunciation of something without which the end cannot be4 ,hence1 wherever you find this sense of guilt so preoccupying modern man1 you find a rupturing of the human heart1 a positive surrender of some value which is consubstantial with achieved1 completed1 personal perfection4 ,being cannot be mocked with impunity4 ,a whole body of literature has grown up within the last seventy-five years devoted to exploring and understanding the estrangement of contemporary civilized man4 ,that this body of art1 chiefly found in the novel1 should deal with the expatriate seems extremely significant of the crisis facing man today4 ,one need only recall the world of ,henry ,james to find an apt symbol for the modern dilemma4 ,this ,new ,englander left his ,american home to find himself in a ,europe that existed chiefly in his imagination4 ,some of his best work is an attempt at penetrating into the restlessness and homelessness of the ,western soul4 ,james is full of trans-,atlantic crossings4 ,his short story 8,four ,meetings0 brings out the paradox of alienation4 ,it concerns a young ,new ,england school teacher who yearns for the day when she can see the ,europe of her dreams4 ,she succeeds after years of work and saving1 but is tricked1 when her boat docks in the ,port of ,le ,havre1 into turning over her money to a young man who claims to be a distant cousin4 ,she returns to ,new ,england by the next ship4 ,james ends the story on a note of delicate savagery3 the wife of the cousin1 a bogus countess from the streets of ,paris1 comes to ,america to live with and off the young school teacher1 now disillusioned1 alienated1 but desperately maintaining the situation out of a sense of decency1 and out of the need to hang onto the frame of an illusion1 rather than face the irony of the complete nothingness of her existence4 ,the irony is deepened in that this aging school mistress of ,boston ,puritan antecedents symbolizes ,james himself in his relationship to the older culture that he sought to know1 and yet never penetrated to its depths4 ,james remained an alienated man4 ,all of this suggests the true story1 so heavy with possibilities1 that ,g4 ,k4 ,chesterton recounted about ,james4#a ,chesterton had taken a summer house in ,rye1 and ,james1 8after exactly the correct interval10 made a formal call1 accompanied by his brother ,william4 ,everyone talked politely of one thing and another1 mostly letters1 until a roar went up from the garden2 two bearded1 unkempt tramps burst in on the delicately poised teacups1 and sang out boldly for beer and bacon4 ,it was the introduction of ,henry ,james to ,hilaire ,belloc1 and to the reality of that ,european tradition that ever remained a stranger to the ,new ,englander4 ,chesterton suggests that the profound significance of this encounter eluded ,mr4 ,james1 whose subtle mind seemed incapable of coping with anything beyond the shadow of a reality4 ,belloc bulked too big for him4 ,he continues to bulk too big for the generation that has carried the estrangement of ,james to its preordained and lonely end4 ,belloc incarnated a sanity and a vigour that reached back to ,chaucerian ,england and the ,paris of ,franois ,villon for roots4 ,for this reason he has always irritated the advance guard of spiritual decay4 ,he seems too confident of himself1 too dogmatic4 ,there is a healthy earthiness sustaining all his work that is too solid1 too full of substance for the intellectual attuned only to broken men4 ,belloc has fed himself on reality1 and he has tasted its bitterness and its salt4 ,he has affirmed being4 ,in so doing1 ,belloc has accepted whatever can genuinely nourish and sustain the fabric of human existence4 ,he is not starved4 ,there is to be found in his work no trace of that sense of guilt in simply being a man that so defines the modern spirit4 ,belloc's ,christian conscience is keenly aware of the limitations of human perfection1 and his soul is soaked in a healthy conviction of the fact that sin has rendered us all more or less ugly in the sight of ,god4 ,belloc wrote once that 8man1 being man1 has a worm in his heart40 ,he penetrated into the reality of evil and his healthy realism and high integrity prevented him from surrounding sin with the glamour of a 8mystique40 ,guilt1 for ,belloc1 was the result of a failure in human nature2 it was not rooted1 as it is for the contemporary mind1 in the very fabric of human existence4 ,it is because of this that ,belloc parts company with the contemporary mind1 which is almost ashamed to be4 ,every other emotion1 every shade of feeling and nuance of thought can be found within his vast literary output3 irony1 humour1 a deep pathos that never degenerates into sentimentality1 hate1 piety1 rigorous logic1 a profound gravity that at times only ,christian hope rescues from despair1 tenderness1 love2 all these in abundance1 but guilt--guilt in the mere fact of existence--is nowhere to be found1 because ,hilaire ,belloc is1 in every sense of the term1 an unalienated man4 ,if ,belloc is almost completely incomprehensible to the post-war intellectual 7even the post-war ,catholic intellectual71 the lack of understanding can be traced to the amazing personal integration of the man1 and to the lack of a comparable integration today on the part of those most representative of the modern spirit4 ,the ambiguity of ,belloc's position in ,english letters is rendered still more pronounced in that he spans three well-marked and sharply differentiated generations1 while his work deploys itself over an extraordinary number of apparently diverse fields of interest4 ,to some he is known as the founder of the ,distributist movement in ,english economic thought4 ,to others he is the intransigent enemy of parliamentary government and monied aristocracy4 ,in the field of letters1 he remains the author of ,the ,path to ,rome and of a host of delightful essays that reveal a man profoundly at home in the hills and fields of ,south ,england and the ,latin ,continent4 ,to most1 the name ,belloc probably conjures up a ,catholic ,apologetic1 for the first time not defensive1 but aggressive1 militant1 and confident in the superiority and the justness of its cause4 ,in time1 ,belloc encompasses not merely three generations1 but two ages4 ,to a youth maturing into manhood in the second half of the twentieth century1 his name may mean an era that never was4 ,born in the year of the fall of the third ,napoleon and the proclamation of the ,german ,empire in the ,hall of ,mirrors at ,versailles1 ,belloc marched in the dust of the caissons of the ,third ,republic when the return of the white flag of ,bourbon still hung like a threat and a promise over the fields of ,france4 ,his first book was minted in the presses while ,victoria was still ,queen of ,england4 ,in him the ,oxford ,movement of ,newman yielded its finest harvest1 and ,edwardian ,london was filled with the sound of his laughter1 the vigour of his person1 and the early splendour of his prose4 ,he belongs to an age now dead4 ,the total significance of the man cannot be grasped by isolating him within his time1 nor by analyzing separately his accomplishments in the dozen and more disciplines in which he laboured4 ,the specific ,bellocian theses--his espousal of both ,french ,republicanism and the monarchical principle1 his distributist economics1 his defence of the ,western continuity with ,rome1 his doctrine on the relationship between ,catholicism and ,europe1 his contempt and his arrogance before all things demonstrative of the modern temper--march forth and deploy themselves controversially as commanded by an essential1 integrated position that can only be called classical in the larger sense of the word4 ,it is for this reason that the causes for which ,belloc fought so long and so eloquently can be understood in all their grandeur1 and can be evaluated objectively and with full sympathetic precision only if his cardinal intuition is explored and fully grasped4 ,above all else1 ,belloc is an unalienated man3 a representative of a rarely achieved ideal1 that of the integrated ,christian humanist4 ,the integrated man achieves himself by making his own all those dimensions of human personality and perfection which when isolated one from another seem mutually incompatible4 ,integration is a steady struggle4 ,it is not usually characterized by any sudden and dramatic affirmation or negation2 it does not lend itself easily to artistic depiction4 ,integration grows from within1 and if it flowers in grace and the supernatural order1 it has its roots in the hidden depths of natural man4 ,the classical humanist spirit1 whether it be found in the pre-,christian or in the ,christian world1 always aims at placing before man an ideal that is neither angelic nor animal1 but human1 and which is therefore limited in the way man is limited4 ,it is an ideal oriented in harmony with the reserves of reality at hand to human beings4 ,for the humanist hopes to unite perfections in the concrete order of existence which1 if left to themselves1 would tend to conflict4 ,the ,christian humanist places his faith and hope in the ,incarnation not only as a doctrine to be believed1 but as a ,divine vindication of the intrinsic goodness of man and of the world in which he lives4 ,he restores all things to ,god1 not by suppressing them1 but by seeing in them the ,creative ,act which is the patent letter of nobility to whatsoever is1 in any sense1 being4 ,a ,christian humanist realizes that he cannot be a ,christian man unless he is first man1 and hence his supernatural life is grounded in a natural life which has been harmonized4 ,unfortunately ,christian humanism has more often remained an academic ideal than a reality1 and in a day in which human dignity is more and more suppressed in a society increasingly inhuman in its techniques and accomplishments1 a man who actualized within himself this ideal to an astounding degree should grow in significance4 ,belloc's centralized personality was not given him2 it was achieved4 ,his realization of his own destiny does not appear as an easy victory1 but as something battled for4 ,it is precisely in that battle that its grandeur lies4 ,the most articulate and symbolic statement of the natural humanism underlying his militant ,catholicism is to be found in ,belloc's ,the ,four ,men1 a curious 8,farrago0 written rather early in his career4 ,this book reveals the necessity of harmonizing the separate drives in man if man would be himself4 ,it faces man with the paradox of natural humanism3 its insufficiency in the face of death4 ,man1 after a struggle1 wins the battle against personal alienation only to face an alienation that strikes at deeper roots3 an alienation of his very self1 of his very being4 ,the ,four ,men is a book filled with an earth-sadness1 and an almost pagan prescience of the passing of things4 ,a favourite theme of ,belloc's1 the mood of the second of ,november1 ,all ,hallow's ,eve1 the ,night of the ,dead1 runs like a somber motif through the entire work4 ,the ,south ,english countryside1 the land of ,sussex1 the author's own county1 is permeated with an autumnal gloom2 the hills and the valley of ,arun1 the surf booming quietly in the night1 the sea air stiffening the drama of things1 all this is threatened by a dissolution1 not so imminent as to rob nature of its beauty1 but present enough to render more lovely the things that pass4 8,myself0 sits in the inn ,george1 8drinking that port of theirs and staring at the fire10#b and moved by thoughts of youth and of the river ,arun1 he arouses himself and resolves to be off to see his home once again4 ,he is joined by an old man 7still vigorous against the march of the years7 who lets himself be known as ,grizzlebeard4 ,the following day1 ,october #cj1 #aijb1 the two men are met by a ,sailor1 a fellow in the full flood of life1 a singer of songs and a profound realist2 and the company is completed by a ,poet1 a man with visions and no money4 ,the ,four ,men join in a pilgrimage to 8the land they know40 ,they pass through the ,sussex weald regaling one another with stories and songs1 and they speak of the 8,worst and the ,best ,thing in the ,world40 ,that night they rest in a hut4 ,the next day is given over to good bacon and to the singing of many songs1 among which is the incomparable 8,bishop of ,old ,auxerre40 ,it is in this fashion that they arrive by easy stages at the house of ,myself1 where they rest until the following morning4 ,the next night1 the first of ,november1 finds them at a little inn1 and ,grizzlebeard engages a philosopher1 a 8metaphysician10 in heated conversation over the ultimate causes of things4 ,on the second of ,november1 ,myself awakes 8from a dream10 and ,grizzlebeard tells him solemnly that it is the day of parting4 ,the ,four ,men walk slowly and silently through the mists until they take 8that lane northward which turns through ,redlands and up to the hill of ,elstead and its inn40#c ,then they break bread together for the last time in the communion of friendship1 and the ,three1 led by ,grizzlebeard1 part company from ,myself1 who until the very end protests and urges yet another day of comradeship4 ,grizzlebeard replies3 8,there is nothing at all that remains3 nor any house2 nor any castle1 however strong2 nor any love1 however tender and sound2 nor any comradeship among men1 however hardy4 ,nothing remains but the things of which ,i will not speak1 because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days4 ,but ,i who am old will give you advice1 which is this--to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent things which are1 as it were1 the shores of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea40 ,when he said this 7by which he meant ,death71 the other two1 looking sadly at me1 stood silent also for about the time in which a man can say good-by with reverence4 ,then they all turned about and went rapidly and with a purpose up the village street4 ,i watched them1 straining my sad eyes2 but in a moment the mist received them and they had disappeared4#d ,myself hurries on 8into the loneliness of the high ,downs that are my brothers and my repose40#e ,alone1 somewhat shaken and bitter in his dereliction1 he passes quickly over the burial mounds of the old kings of ,sussex4 ,i 444 felt the full culmination of all the twenty tides of mutability which had thus run together to make a skerry of my soul4 ,i saw and apprehended1 as a man sees or touches a physical thing1 that nothing of our sort remains1 and that even before my county should cease to be itself ,i should have left it4 ,i recognized that ,i was 7and ,i confessed7 in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality2 something had already passed from me--,i mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as a tiny mirror of burnished silver4 ,youth was gone out apart2 it was loved and regretted and no longer possessed4 ,then1 as ,i walked through this wood more slowly1 pushing before me great billows of dead leaves1 as the bows of a ship push the dark waters before them1 this side and that1 when the wind blows full on the middle of the sail and the water answers loudly as the ship sails on1 so ,i went till suddenly ,i remembered with the pang that catches men at the clang of bells what this time was in ,november2 it was the ,day of the ,dead4#f ,pushing on in this mood1 dark with the mystery of death and the soul1 ,myself comes at last to the platform over ,barl'ton1 where to the east stretch the ,downs and to the south lies the sea4 ,brooding over the communion of man and his fields1 ,myself thinks of the children on the plain below just coming into the world he must soon depart4 ,putting pencil to paper1 he gropes toward poetic expression of the chaos within him1 and as his emotions are incarnated in verse a song of hope emerges4 ,the ,dead do not die4 ,they remain1 if only to people the land of their birth as ghostly influences from beyond the grave4 ,and on this note of doubtful affirmation1 the book ends almost as mysteriously as it began4 ,what is one to make of this strangely moving work8 ,considered artistically1 the book is almost a literary curiosity1 not only when viewed in the context of the ,bellocian corpus1 but even when situated in the larger field of ,english letters4 ,there is nothing quite like it in modern literature1 and ,belloc's farrago cannot be judged by standards appropriate to the novel or indeed to any other genre familiar to contemporary criticism4 ,on one level ,the ,four ,men is clearly patterned after the medieval allegory4 ,the personages depicted are archetypes4 ,grizzlebeard is symbolic of the wise man of the folk1 full of ancient lore1 singing dirges of the race and of the passing of youth4 ,he is the custodian of the household gods1 and philosophy is not unknown to him4 ,he stands for order1 historical continuity1 and he views existence with a realism born of age and wisdom4 ,grizzlebeard is the tribal count1 the feudal baron1 the landed squire3 he is ,tradition incarnate4 ,the ,sailor represents man's communion with the physical universe3 he is the eternal adventurer1 the spirit of romance4 ,although attached to ,sussex1 his eyes are in love with sudden landfalls and distant hills4 ,he is the wanderer in all men4 ,the ,poet1 lean in body and ragged in appearance1 is a man whose visions trip him up2 he is not at home in this world1 but he belongs to that company of ,eternal ,poets1 the ,seers of ,western ,tradition1 that reach back to ,plato4 ,these ,three are archetypes of ,man1 as ,las ,vergnas has pointed out1#g and ,belloc succeeds in maintaining their physical separation visually by delineating sharply distinct physical types1 indicating distinct spiritual or psychological types4 ,and yet the whole movement of action throughout the four days clearly indicates that these three must become one4 ,on one level they are distinct men4 ,on a deeper level they are ,myself1 and ,myself is clearly ,hilaire ,belloc4#h ,the ,four ,men is thus more than a mere allegory2 it presents itself to us as a complexity of meaning3 the three men are companions necessary to the welfare and happiness of ,myself2 they are ,archetypes of ,man1 particularly ,western ,man2 they are dimensions of the personality of ,myself4 ,the identification of the ,three with the ,one is achieved by ,belloc through the use of irony1 a device he frequently employed in a peculiarly ,french manner4 ,the man called the ,sailor is clearly of that calling3 8these eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea40 ,but he is not simply a ,sailor1 as he would be in a mere allegory4 ,he composes finer verse than does the ,poet1 a fellow he good-naturedly despises for his singular lack of perception3 a dual use of irony1 in that the ,poet fails in that precise attribute in which he would be expected to excel4 ,grizzlebeard1 the sage1 when asked what is the ,best ,thing in the ,world1 replies3 sleep4 ,his intellectuality and wisdom are countered by a naive naturalism4 ,although personifications on one level1 the ,four constantly contradict their surface symbolism4 ,this gives them individuality1 and it also furthers their identification with one another and with the personality of ,myself4 ,this ironic ambivalence ministers to the key significance of ,the ,four ,men which ,grizzlebeard reveals in his assertion that 8,estrangement is the saddest thing in the world40#i ,myself must be joined by the ,three ,men in his journey through ,sussex1 his passage through life1 because these three are essential to the fullness of his own personality3 to its integrity and completion4 ,belloc seems to be saying that there is a ,poet1 a ,sailor1 and a ,grizzlebeard in each of us4 ,let them be nourished4 ,without the lifting of the soul to the horizons1 without at least a confused sense of man's belonging to a world which is not this one1 without the visions of the ,poet1 a man is starved4 ,without the spirit of adventure1 of youth1 the awakening to the hills and the sea and to the love of woman and the spirit of song1 without these things1 without the ,sailor1 a man is over-subtle and refined beyond health4 ,he inclines to decadence1 to false mysticism1 and to a pride that feeds on itself4 ,the ,sailor baptizes the idealist metaphysician with a pint of beer in 8the name of the five senses40 ,he carries religion with a smile4 ,and a man without a ,grizzlebeard is a man without home1 without traditions1 without accumulated wisdom4 ,he is a man without a past1 unmarked by distinction4 ,he lacks roots and is alone4 ,hilaire ,belloc's initial integration is seen in this human trinity which is one4 ,what heightens the significance of ,the ,four ,men is the almost total lack of a comparable integration on the part of that intelligentsia most representative of the modern ,western world4 ,because of the religious rupturing of the ,christian center of ,european society1 even natural man lies broken in pieces1 and the pieces continue to splinter with the passing of time4 ,while this is not the place to probe exhaustively the causes of this fissioning of the human spirit1 the fact might well be called the ,great ,evidence of the age4 ,the alienation of modern man has resulted on the natural level1 because these three are not one4 ,myself is not ,myself1 but is an ,other4 ,estranged from his past1 uprooted from the land of his fathers1 cut away from his origins1 modern man is largely a stranger lost in a wilderness of pavements4 ,he lacks a ,grizzlebeard4 ,he has not that bond of family of which ,t4 ,s4 ,eliot speaks3 8,a bond which embraces 444 piety towards the dead1 however obscure1 and a solicitude for the unborn1 however remote40#aj ,abstracted from the actual existence of things by a science intent on constructing its own universe1 he has been told that the ,sailor in him1 the man 8of the five senses10 is a naive realist who is duped by appearances that are not what they seem to be4 ,existence can be for him only ,nothing1 and this last alienation clothes ,guilt with the dignity of a philosophical category4 ,existentialist man1 modern man as mirrored by ,sartre and ,camus1 is the final broken man4 ,the alienation of the ,poet is probably the most terrible of the lot3 told that he must construct his own universe by a criticism and an aesthetics rotten with ,idealism1 he labours under the impossible burden of aping ,god1 and ends frequently enough by playing the ,devil4 ,that is why a man must exorcise the ,poet in himself and turn to a life of action as in ,rimbaud1 or to a life dedicated to the ideals of an outmoded ,enlightenment as in ,thomas ,mann4 ,mann's ,tonio ,krger is told by ,lisawetta ,iwanowna that his guilt stems from the fact that as an artist he is alienated from conventional society4 ,adrian ,leverkhn keeps his art only at the price of selling his soul to ,satan4 ,conrad's ,heyst1 faced with self-betrayal to a philosophy of aloofment from existence1 can do nothing but effect the final alienation3 suicide4 ,sartre's heroes1 all damned quarter-men1 quiver viscously in closed places without exit4 ,the modern intellectual seems driven to carve the human form into pieces1 and then to worship in trembling the suffering he has himself caused4 ,thus vigour has departed from art1 and evil itself is given over to clinical weariness4 ,literary reputations are gained in proportion to one's 8sin mystique10 and one would think1 contrary to the express words of ,saint ,paul1 that conversion to ,christ must follow on a season in hell4 ,suffering is the fashion1 and a well-turned cross is one's ticket of admission to a literati that makes capital of the ,crucifixion4 ,it is the contemporary version of the thirty pieces of silver4 ,yet those who have gone through this darkness and who have come out again into the world of being opening out to the ,being of ,god1 can understand the tragedy of the modern soul4 ,it is a tragedy rooted in a profound misunderstanding of the nature of being and knowledge4 ,precisely where the tragedy begins is shrouded in mystery1 but it may perhaps be said that ,joseph ,conrad stands at the crossroads where ,western man deserted the last remaining traditional values and struck out into the unknown4 ,conrad's brilliant short story1 8,the ,secret ,sharer10 is both symbolic and symptomatic of the crisis of alienation modern man invented for himself4 ,a young sea captain1 new to his exalted position as master of a full-rigged ship1 finds a man of his own years clinging to the bow of the vessel4 ,alone and still somewhat unsure of himself before his veteran crew1 the captain's heart goes out to the swimmer2 unknown to his crew1 he hides the fellow aft in his cabin1 only to discover that he is harbouring a fugitive4 ,the man is guilty of the unpremeditated murder of one of the sailors who served under him in a nearby vessel in which he had been chief mate4 ,the captain looks upon the escaped sailor as his double1 and he feels in some strange way that he is this other1 this criminal4 ,in order to find himself1 he must rid himself of his 8double40 ,he permits the fugitive to escape by swimming ashore1 by means of a daring maneuver in which he almost destroys his ship by sailing her within striking distance of the land1 before bringing her about on the new tack4 ,when the vessel comes about on her new tack1 just short of piling up1 the captain sees that his strange friend and double has escaped by swimming to the land4 ,a confidence in himself surges through him1 and he knows that he is now ,master indeed4 ,thus the captain discovers himself in the ,other2 but the ,other had to be exorcized in order that the ,captain1 ,man1 could genuinely become himself4 ,modern man1 mirrored in the modern artist1 realizes his destiny by casting out the other selves that he finds in his soul4 ,by an extension1 contemporary atheist existentialist philosophy teaches that all others--things1 and persons--are set over against the self1 threatening its existence3 the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed at the heart of the person1 menacing it with otherness4 ,all values1 all wills1 and all being together are but the positive nothingness of the ,myself4 ,they are one's non-being4 ,the philosophy of ,sartre 7a symptom of a universal malaise71 in which the 8in itself0 is discovered as the negation and the opposite of the 8for itself10 presents a world in which the very discovery of personality is constituted by an estrangement of man from existence4 ,the alienation of the soul is the condition of its destiny4 ,only in nausea1 anguish1 disgust and dread can man learn that to be himself is not to be anything else4 ,we are all ,strangers1 even to our own consciousness of ourselves4 ,if 8,the ,secret ,sharer0 symbolizes1 even obscurely1 the birth of the ,new ,man1 ,the ,four ,men is the last picture of the ,older ,man--the ,man of ,christendom4 ,belloc's position takes on an added interest when it is seen to be the exact opposite1 point for point1 of man's situation in the world as conceived by contemporary literature and philosophy4 ,myself is rendered one and whole in becoming these ,others1 without which ,myself cannot be ,myself4 ,in becoming the ,poet1#aa ,myself enters into a world of beauty and of all those visions that have ever stabbed at the heart of man calling him to a world only vaguely seen4 ,in becoming the ,sailor1 ,myself takes his stand within the physical universe of things3 the universe of being4 ,in becoming the ,grizzlebeard1 ,myself conquers the past1 and transcending the world of space1 he enters into the dimension of time wherein he is one with his fathers and the ages4 ,thus ,belloc's ,four ,men might be called ,thomistic2 not in the sense that ,belloc is a professional philosopher1 but simply that his vision is oriented in the direction ,aquinas' was1 in the direction any ,christian's is--toward reality4 ,the revelation of the self to itself is had in knowing things other than the self4 ,this is indeed the very definition of knowledge as it has been understood in the ,western ,world3 man knows himself in knowing other things1 and to know is to be1 or to come to be1 the ,other as ,other4 ,i first know what is not myself1 and in the not-myself ,i am revealed to myself4 ,i conquer the distance between myself and the ,other by feeding on all things and values1 for being is the proper nourishment of man4 ,unless ,i forget myself in the ,other1 ,i shall never be ,myself4 ,he who would gain his soul must lose it4 ,the ,four ,men represent the natural and classical foundation of ,belloc's personal integration4 ,he makes his own these archetypes of ,western ,men of that ,western culture in which human nature most fully came into its own4 ,the ,poet1 the ,sailor1 and the ,man of ,wisdom are the classical unities that underlie traditional ,christian values4 ,belloc's ,poet is as old as the ,republic3 he is less a man of art than a man of dreams2 ,belloc's ,sailor looks to ,homer2 and ,grizzlebeard1 while ,english to the core1 echoes the ,augustan strains of ,virgil4 ,myself is one with himself in these companions4 ,but all the comradery1 the good fellowship1 the hearty wisdom1 and the love exchanged between friends is threatened by what one might call the possibility of classical or human alienation4 ,man is not his own enemy in ,belloc's farrago2 ,death is the enemy4 ,the campfire blazes in the woods and the inn is full of decency and laughter1 but the universe in the background breathes mutability and is marked for the harvest4 ,the seasons rise and fall4 ,generation issues into corruption and the rich leaves of autumn prefigure the coming of death4 ,even the ,county of ,sussex1 marked for eventual dereliction1 will yet outlive man4 ,myself finds his soul in these companions1 who part from him after ,grizzlebeard warns ,myself1 ,man1 to meditate ,death4 ,then 8the mist received them and they had disappeared40 ,myself1 troubled in spirit1 faces the dilemma ,everyman faces4 ,must this humanity1 found and achieved in these four1 be swallowed up in the mists8 ,must alienation1 8the saddest thing in the world10 claim the soul in the end8 ,why discover ourselves and then come to realize that we have found an illusion8 ,we cannot come to be ourselves finally unless ,death itself die in the end4 ,the ,night of the ,dead has always been the night of their return1 and ,belloc implies throughout his closing chapter that this prefigures eventual immortality4 ,he states this more explicitly in an essay from ,hills and the ,sea that is given over to meditating the meaning of autumn4 444 at this peculiar time1 this week 7or moment7 of the year1 the desires which if they do not prove at least demand--perhaps remember--our destiny1 come strongest4 ,they are proper to the time of autumn1 and all men feel them4 ,the air is at once new and old4444 ,the evenings hardly yet suggest 7as they soon will7 friends and security1 and the fires of home4 ,the thoughts awakened in us by their bands of light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare me for the isolation of the soul4 ,it is on this account that tradition has set1 at the entering of autumn1 for a watch at the gate of the season1 the ,archangel2 and at its close the day and the night of ,all-,hallows on which the ,dead return4#ab ,it is only when life is lived close to the senses1 and when the intelligence is brought to bear immediately on what is yielded to man through the body1 that the paradox of sadness in created beauty can be brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness4 ,page after page of ,belloc's writing1 from early youth to old age1 is troubled by a deep melancholy1 heightened by his profound communion with the things of his world3 ,english inns1 old oak--polished and sturdy1 rich ,burgundy1 the sea and ships that sail1 the smell of the tides4 ,these loves run through ,belloc's essays as recurrent themes1 testifying to a vision1 movingly poetic1 that is classical in its simplicity4 ,his gaze is rooted in the primal things that have always nourished the human spirit3 in the things at hand4 ,every pleasure ,i know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind1 which last receives1 confirms1 revives1 and can summon up again what my body has experienced4 ,of pleasures1 however1 in which my senses have no part ,i know nothing4#ac ,here is a man who believes that great beauty is best found in the common3 the common transfigured4 ,this is the food which is the proper nourishment of man4 ,here peace is at hand4 ,and yet this grasp of natural beauty in ,belloc sharply points up the paradox with which the last chapter of ,the ,four ,men is concerned4 ,the more sane man becomes in taking to himself those perfections needed for his fullness1 the more bewildering appears his plight4 ,his personal integration demands the final unalienation of immortal happiness2 and yet happiness eternally possessed1 man's only possible goal1 is a hope and a conviction that attaches itself to the things which pass4 ,why1 ,belloc asks time and again1 does the fatherland come home to us most poignantly when we are moved by the presence of mortality8 ,why should the symbol of the everlasting both partake of the blessedness it promises and attest thereby to its own temporal destiny8 ,a man goes into an ancient inn hidden in the hills of ,south ,england4 ,his soul receives a benediction and he is at peace4 ,he finds peace there1 ,belloc continually insists4 ,this is not the device of a litterateur4 ,it is a reality which carries along its own inexorable insufficiency4 ,man feeds on being1 and the being he feeds on fills him with longing4 ,he is nourished for a little while1 only to hunger again4 8,the ,sign of the ,lion10 an essay rich in grave solemnity1 is given over to a consideration of this perennial dilemma4 ,the author1 again 8,myself10 engages a stranger in conversation4 ,the two sit before a great fire in the old common room1 and they consider a paradox3 why does man try to make the sign of eternal happiness bear the impossible dignity it signifies8 ,these two have sought rest in this inn1 and from all sides the mortality of this mirror of immortal peace floods in on them4 ,they are filled with a somber realism4 ,once more1 in the essay 8,harbour in the ,north10 a stranger appears before the author4 ,belloc has brought his cutter under a long seawall1 and he meets there another small vessel4 ,the pilot of this ship declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a harbour of whose fame he has heard4 444 ,then he went on with eagerness1 though still talking low3 8,the voyage which ,i was born to make in the end1 and to which my desire has driven me1 is towards a place in which everything we have known is forgotten1 except those things which1 as we know them1 reminded us of an original joy4 ,in that place ,i shall discover again such full moments of content as ,i have known1 and ,i shall preserve them without failing40#ad ,the seaman's stores were laid on board1 and he was determined that 8he should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose40 ,belloc answers him from his own boat--the ,ship of ,mortality3 8,you cannot make the harbour4444 ,it is not of this world40#ae ,man is unified in his own being4 ,he is at one with the good things of this world--his habitation4 ,but he is a creature of soul as well as body1 and this world is at once a half promise of an eternal destiny and an image of human mortality4 ,such are the two natural elements of the ,bellocian vision1 and they define felicitously the best in classical humanism3 an acceptance of human nature and of its home1 and a realist understanding of the limits of finite perfection4 ,belloc is earth-rooted1 and this renders him happy and melancholy by turns4 ,it is the fate of every humanist1 and it is not difficult to see why ,belloc suggests ,samuel ,johnson4 ,johnson was not a mystic but a humanist1 and he is therefore what seems to some a curious mixture of idealism and realism1 virtue and cynicism1 faith and skepticism4 ,so too with ,belloc4 ,significantly enough1 ,johnson has been linked with both halves of the ,chester-,belloc4 ,johnson and ,chesterton are linked together through their striking ,englishness2 abstracted1 careless in dress1 gigantic1 they both call to mind the ,london of ,fleet ,street4 ,but for all his associations with ,london1 ,belloc remains either the man of ,paris or the man of the hills of ,south ,england4 ,his love of nature and his affinities with life lived close to the soil and the sea provide the key to understanding the differences between the ,bellocian and the ,chestertonian vision4 ,the two comrades fought together for years for the same truths1 but it would be naive to assume that they both saw these truths in the same way4 ,chesterton was pre-eminently a speculative thinker1 but he invested his thoughts with all the warmth and cockney glamour of the gas-lit and fog-filled ,london he loved4 ,he went through life more abstracted from things than engaged with them1 and he took whatever was at hand without reflection3 if he drank great quantities of wine1 he also drank deeply of water1 if water were put before him4 ,but when ,chesterton shook himself out of his reveries and gazed on reality1 then miracles happened4 ,romance is always something brought to a thing1 and ,chesterton invested the whole world with the great goodness of his heart4 ,chesterton in contact with a thing1 be it a lamppost or an umbrella1 was like the fuse that ignites a ,roman candle4 ,anything at all set his intelligence off on a brilliant fireworks of paradoxes that penetrated into the heart of reality4 ,he was a symbolist1 and the inner meaning of creatures was never hidden from his concentration4 ,this world diaphanously let through the glories of another order1 and ,chesterton could see ,god in a gable4 ,if his world looks like a pasteboard toy theatre created by a father for the sheer joy of his children1 ,chesterton could demonstrate that the analogy was strictly true4 ,if the toy was out of order and deranged1 the contrast fingered more sharply than ever the primeval origin of the world in goodness4 ,chesterton's vision was metaphysical1 as ,mr4 ,hugh ,kenner has suggested2#af broadly speaking1 it was mystical as well4 ,the same cannot be said of ,belloc4 ,his vision is more poetic than metaphysical4 ,on one level almost a rationalist1 on another level--the level that finds him communicating with the world in which he exists--he is profoundly tender and awed before the loveliness of creation4 ,it is the mark of a philosopher that he can see significance apart from the symbol1 whereas it is characteristic of the poet to cling fast to the concrete structure of his intuition4 ,belloc is too much in love with things to use them as stepping-stones to eternity4 ,he sees eternity in their very passing1 and this is the root of the much-misunderstood ,bellocian irony4 ,throughout most of his better essays and in his masterpieces such as ,the ,path to ,rome and ,hills and the ,sea one can sense an awesomeness and love of finite beauty that reveals itself in a style chaste and unadorned in its expression of tenderness and reverence before the things which are4 ,belloc drank at the sources of great rivers4 ,he worshipped the tides4 ,belloc saw things1 but ,chesterton saw through them4 ,this is not to say that one is greater than the other1 but it is to declare their fundamental difference4 ,belloc's close union with the passing universe heightens the great classical humanist dilemma that underlies all his thought3 man is threatened by death4 ,like everything genuinely classical1 this is a universally human paradox4 ,the more fully does man achieve his earthly destiny and bring to a certain pitch of perfection and actuality the possibilities originally latent within him1 the more fully is he aware of the irony of temporal existence4 ,from this follows the perennial preoccupation with the passing of beauty and the inevitability of death4 ,genuinely ,roman1 the vigour and the iron ring of the ,bellocian affirmations are tempered in a lyricism before the lacrimae rerum1 and are frequently mellowed in somber meditation on the great fact of death4 ,in his biographies1 ,belloc brings to the famous death scenes of history a heightened sensibility born of that prolonged consideration4 ,read of the execution of ,danton written in the fires of early youth2 of the murder of ,king ,charles ,i of ,england2 of the conversion of the second ,charles on the point of death4 ,read in ,elizabethan ,commentary1 one of his final books1 that passage in which he attempts to guess at the heart of his subject1 and1 in so doing1 reveals himself3 8,she felt that she was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will feel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of ,azrael40#ag ,a brooding sense of inevitable personal death1 prefigured by the passing of friends and the advance of age1 haunts a great deal of his writing1 and invests it with a solemn majesty that recalls again the great ,doctor ,johnson1 a humanist who faced the end with bleak courage and somber faith4 ,there is an essay in ,belloc's ,towns of ,destiny titled 8,cornetto1 of the ,tarquins0 in which his emotional skepticism emerges into light in an almost pure state4 ,speaking of those tombs which are of the origins of us all1 ,belloc makes us aware of the 8subterranean vision of death1 the dusk of religion1 which they imposed on ,rome and from which we all inherit40#ah ,humanism1 even ,christian humanism1 must pay a price for its achievement of the earthly home1 and that price1 frequently enough1 is the temptation to skepticism4 8,then ,i thought to myself1 as ,i looked westward from the wall1 how man might say of the life of all our race as of the life of one1 that we know not whence it came1 nor whither it goes40#ai ,the bourgeois world has romanticized death so that it can escape facing that most monstrous of indignities4 ,belloc1 on the contrary1 views death steadily as the threat to his humanity which must be explained without being explained away4 ,the final destruction of that precious crucible of human existence1 the individual personality1 cannot be thought without contradiction4 ,everything in man is a drive toward being4 ,if he is sane1 man aims at becoming more and more himself1 and to break the human fabric is to betray humanity itself4 ,the ,dead do not die1 cries the old ,roman in ,belloc4 ,but what can testify to this inner conviction when the senses themselves seem to mock the exigency of human nature for survival8 ,man ought to continue to be1 but all man can see is the passing of things in the eternal rhythm of generation and corruption4 ,there can be no doubt that ,hilaire ,belloc was temperamentally a skeptic1 at least throughout a good part of his career4 ,it is a skepticism which follows on his classical humanism4 ,to be integrated in earthly existence is to conceive both the possibility of an eternal destiny and the threat of the opposite4 ,to be at home in this world is to recognize the composite nature of man4 ,the human soul is not a ,platonic idea1 but the act of a body rendered human by its union with the soul4 ,to be fully aware of this1 and only the man who attends to the reality of the earthly part of himself is so aware1 is to experience a sense of annihilation before the inevitability of death4 ,this is not philosophy1 but it is an attitude which is unmistakably human4 ,if to be myself is to be fully a man1 then when ,i cease to be a man at the moment of death1 ,i shall cease to be myself4 ,aristotle never got clear of this problem1 which can be called the threat of classical alienation3 the final alienation of man should he cease to be4 8,death 444 shakes and rends all that is human in us1 creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys40#bj ,final classical alienation1 let it be insisted once again1 becomes a more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved4 ,since alienation is never affirmed1 but is emotionally grasped as a possibility along with the hope for personal immortality1 classical man feels no sense of guilt simply in being himself4 ,if he is alienated in the end1 it will be too late for guilt4 ,temporal classical guilt results from man's ceasing to be what he can be1 and this defines the nature of tragedy4 ,modern alienation1 on the contrary1 is an alienation existing within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is alienated4 ,hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference defining his existence4 ,he is almost ashamed to be4 ,classical humanism is basically insufficient1 since man cannot achieve1 of himself1 the fullness of his dignity4 ,threatened from without by death1 the humanist's integrity is attacked from within by the wounds of sin that divide him from himself4 ,belloc never romanticized man1 and he is so conscious of the fact of sin that his historical judgments frequently seem cynical4 ,in a short story called 8,the ,opportunity10 he writes of three men that 8each of these 444 being a man1 had a worm at his heart1 eating it out40#ba ,courage excepted1 the classical ,european humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final questions4 ,the humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so fascinated the ,eastern ,world1 because his initial choice has been an election for all human values4 ,romantic irrationality1 be it aesthetic1 political1 or naturalistic1 is an insult to his reason4 ,his world outlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness1 and in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the world in which he exists4 ,he cannot1 without betraying the light which has been given him1 join the oriental drive to the beyond4 ,he has too much respect for who he is1 and for where he is4 ,only faith1 a ,faith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built1 and a ,faith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny1 can guarantee his fundamental vision3 personal perfection and the happiness that issues therefrom4 ,the classical humanist1 the old ,european1 sees the gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that have come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has built4 ,they offer everything to man1 provided he destroy himself in the darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow with atheism and nothingness4 ,the only immortality worth having is one that is personal and that unites man with a ,personal ,god who can bestow happiness on the creature of ,his ,image4 ,man is1 and only ,he ,who ,is can slake his thirst4 ,the ,path to ,rome3 ,christian ,integration ,the ,catholic ,faith came to ,hilaire ,belloc from his birth to answer this humanist dilemma4 ,yet ,faith came to him hard1 and precisely because it did his final ,christian affirmation has about it the resounding ring of iron3 the iron which is the adherence of the will to a ,god unseen4 ,if ,belloc ever had what are called 8religious experiences10 or supernatural 8consolations0 to aid him on his pilgrimage1 he has kept them sedulously to himself4 ,he seems to appear1 the more closely he is read1 as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered4 ,there is a passage in ,the ,path to ,rome that would lead one to think this born ,catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the confused time of youth4 ,years later1 in at least two published works1 he hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to a more fully articulated understanding of ,catholicism4 ,in the first place ,i was baptized into the ,faith upon my birth1 and have known it all my life4444 ,next1 ,i have1 though baptized into it and familiar with it from my earliest years1 in some sense also discovered the ,faith--but this ,i will not pursue as it is somewhat intimate1 and hardly to the point2 unless1 indeed1 it be to the point to tell those who read me and who are balancing1 that ,i also have balanced4#bb ,the same sentiment1 once again guarded in reticence1 is made in an essay written on the death of ,chesterton4 ,i was not when ,i first met him as alive to the strength of that word 8,catholic0 as ,i am today2 ,i myself have gone through a pilgrimage of approach1 to an understanding in the matter4444 ,having said so much 444 ,i will leave it1 for it is too personal and has been too prolonged4#bc ,to a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace1 the personal reserve of the man1 prolonged through a life devoted to religious controversy1 is bound to be curious if not somewhat irritating4 ,he reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual crisis4 ,he apparently felt it was no one's business but his own4 ,nothing could be more typically ,bellocian4 ,the ,catholic ,church appears in ,belloc's thought1 as given us in his writing1 as the custodian of the ,faith--of a ,faith beyond himself1 objective1 out there1 demanding acceptance because it is the ,truth4 ,emotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that which is4 ,christ came1 claimed to be ,divine1 died1 and came back in three days from the dead4 ,such is the evidence1 and it is ultimately traceable1 through tradition and written testimony1 to the ,apostles who saw it with their own eyes4 ,faith is not established1 as such1 by personal experience nor by private speculations1 but on an evidence which is a heritage common to all mankind4 ,emotion may aid or may block faith1 but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable1 and it is the business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be swamped in the vagaries of subjectivism4 ,belloc's approach is by no means the only approach to religion1 but it is one that is cold1 hard1 rational2 the insight of a man with an intellect which is ,french in its incisiveness1 directness1 and confidence in itself4 ,such a faith is unbolstered by any natural religiosity1 but for that very reason it presents a hard1 diamond-like character1 unyielding and dogmatic in its affirmations3 a faith foreign to fashions1 be they literary or philosophical4 ,in a letter written to ,chesterton upon the occasion of the latter's entrance into the ,church1 ,belloc compares the man of ,faith to a man who walks through the rain at night1 and who feels in his bones that he has gone thirty miles1 but who knows well enough from his map and his reason that he has not travelled eleven4 ,i am by all my nature of mind skeptical4444 ,and as to the doubt of the soul ,i discover it to be false3 a mood1 not a conclusion4 ,my conclusion--and that of all men who have ever once seen it--is the ,faith3 ,corporate1 organized1 a personality1 teaching4 ,a thing1 not a theory4 ,it4 ,to you1 who have the blessing of profound religious emotion1 this statement may seem too desiccate4444 ,it is my misfortune4 ,in youth ,i had it3 even till lately4 ,grief has drawn the juices from it4 ,i am alone1 and unfed1 the more do ,i affirm the ,sanctity1 the ,unity1 the ,infallibility of the ,catholic ,church4 ,by my very isolation do ,i the more affirm it4#bd ,the early death of his wife whom he worshipped1 the death of a son in ,world ,war ,i and then again of a son in ,world ,war ,,ii1 the ever present and never fully overcome threat of personal poverty1 the passing of the friends of youth1 the dire fulfillment of his political and economic warnings which went unheeded1 the apparent dryness of his religious life--all these tragedies struck his heart and isolated him from family1 friends1 political life1 society1 from joy4 ,he never speaks of these things in his public writings1 but they add to his integrated ,catholic personality the steel of great character4 ,he maintained himself in a desert4 ,from the very outset of his career1 the ,catholic center of ,belloc's life appears as the spiritual hub from whence proceed the amazingly diverse spokes of his personality4 ,the ,faith is never glimpsed as a hope in the distance that calls him out of the secularist age in which he lived4 ,the ,faith is always present1 informing and energizing his being1 disciplining his irony1 conquering his skepticism1 and giving direction to his destiny4 ,nevertheless1 a close reading of the ,bellocian corpus reveals a shift in religious emphasis as the man advanced in years4 ,in the earlier books1 the humanizing role of ,catholicism is the dominant motif3 the ,church is that corporate organism1 ,divine in origin1 that alone accounts for the high culture of the older ,european civilization4 ,she is the custodian of personal dignity1 the ancient mistress that alone of all societies can harbour the human spirit and nourish it into its fullness4 ,through her1 ,god offers temporal dignity and eternal salvation to man4 ,but as ,belloc grew older he sounded a new religious emphasis as he plunged more deeply into directly apologetic and controversial battle4 ,although the reality of ,christian humanism is never forgotten1 the ,church emerges in his writing not only as the ,divine instrument of human salvation1 but more and more as the ,truth of ,god1 to which everything personal must be sacrificed1 should events dictate such a course4 ,belloc saw with unerring accuracy that the bulk of what he called 8official history0 in the ,english-speaking world was anti-,catholic4 ,he attacked the thing bitterly1 brilliantly1 and at great cost to his reputation4 ,he saw that the individualist1 industrial1 capitalist society of ,england was anti-human to the core4 ,he attacked it4 ,he grasped the anti-,christian meaning of ,prussia1 and he fought against this spirit from the ,north of ,germany with intense vigour4 ,he analyzed the anti-intellectual and therefore anti-,catholic bias that moved the 8,modern ,mind0 in the bewildering complexity of that mind's activities4 ,he detested the ,zeitgeist which had surrendered the best man had3 his power to reason1 judge1 and affirm2 therefore it had lost the one sure road it had of discovering the ,truth of ,god4 ,belloc became committed--the ,french artilleryman in the service of the ,church4 ,his intransigence rendered him a marked man4 ,shaw wondered why ,belloc should waste his profuse talents in the service of the ,bishop of ,rome4 ,wells noted critically his 8partisan fanaticism40 ,some ,catholic academicians1 to gain for themselves the reputation of impartial scholarship and save their standing in the world of learning1 disavowed him4 ,there is no doubt that ,belloc entered into battle with his eyes open4 ,if he was anything at all1 he was a realist3 he understood men and the motives that move them2 he was aware of the doors opening to political and literary preferment4 ,his brilliance was such that he could have risen to a ,cabinet post through the ,liberal ,party4 ,he could have carved out for himself an exclusively literary reputation1 possibly as great as ,conrad's4 ,he could have become the recognized first historian in the ,empire4 ,he sacrificed it all and placed his sword at the service of the ,church4 ,it has been suggested that the decisive turning point in his career occurred when he delivered a fighting speech before ,archbishop ,bearne against the ,liberal ,government's intention to prohibit a ,eucharistic procession through the streets of ,london4#be ,at that time ,belloc was a ,liberal ,member of ,parliament1 and the ,tories thought that he would turn to them after his break with his own party4 ,his political principles would not permit such a sellout4 ,he went up to the platform a public figure1 and came down an ,apostle4 8,i begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love 444 as tragic as first love1 and 7it7 drags us out into the void away from our dear homes40#bf ,belloc's career as an apologist exemplifies the first paradox inherent in ,christian humanism4 ,only the ,incarnation can make man whole1 but as the ,incarnation issues into ,calvary1 so too must the whole man sacrifice himself to the service of the ,god-,man4 ,the ascent of man to ,god is impossible without the prior descent of ,god to man1 and the two meet at the ,cross4 ,once this truth is lived1 then the second paradox of ,christian humanism can follow4 ,the man who has given himself is paid back with his own gift3 himself transfigured in the ,divine ,fires4 ,belloc became himself in controversy4 ,he warmed to the battle entered into freely1 and his personality expanded before the prospect of facing all official ,england arraigned against him4 ,it was a time in which things ,catholic were neither popular with the masses nor fashionable with the elite4 ,his opposition was enormous4 ,possibly he could have gained some concessions to his cause had he compromised2 but ,belloc never stooped to conquer4 ,it is small wonder that ,douglas ,jerrold called him one of the last men in ,england who was1 in the full sense of the term1 not vulgar4 ,he became most widely known as a brilliant and somewhat brutal defender of the ,catholic ,order4 ,but what is not so widely known is the fact that ,belloc's vocation was erected on a delicate structure of human values accepted in their fullness1 disciplined by an understanding of their limits1 and welded into one by ,faith4 ,belloc is not simply a ,michael defending his beloved ,church4 ,his partisan belligerence masks his humanist complexity3 he is really many men--a pagan ,roman classicist--an ,english naturalist1 a ,french rationalist1 a soldier--a ,catholic--one man4 ,the contrast between pagan humanism--man achieved on earth1 but threatened by death--and ,christian humanism--man achieved forever--can best be grasped by contrasting ,the ,four ,men with the great ,path to ,rome4 ,in the former book1 ,myself finds himself in his companions1 but having found himself he faces the threat of final isolation1 the alienation of death4 ,the somber beauty of the ,sussex wood1 the lonely ,downs and the pounding of the tides1 the time of autumn1 symbolize the threat to the human person who is just coming into his own4 ,death is all around him1 and ,sussex itself is marked with the inexorable mutability attaching to a passing world4 ,although all ,four ,men are ,catholics1 their religion functions in the foreground1 around the campfire as it were1 as hardly more than a mythology4 ,immortality is hoped for1 but is not affirmed clearly as a reality4 ,belloc achieved a brilliant artistic success in painting the dilemma of the ancient pagan1 and the dilemma of every man1 in a framework which is1 on the surface1 both ,catholic and contemporary4 ,he was able to do this because he remained throughout his life1 on one level of his personality1 the threatened ,myself4 ,the ,path to ,rome1 on the contrary1 is most particularly the book of a ,catholic man at home in ,christendom4 ,man is in no sense alienated4 ,myself 7here openly the author7 is a member of the ,church ,militant1 destined for the ,church ,triumphant4 ,belloc tramps through the ,alps1 down into the broad ,italian plains1 and his heart expands under the graciousness of ,catholic skies4 ,an abounding good humour flows into every event1 conferring on the most trivial encounter the character of high adventure4 ,here is the picture of a man who has fought the battle for ,faith1 and who has been granted some share of peace4 ,he still ponders the nature of the soul4 ,a man so at home with mountains1 good wine1 and the laughter of friends will never approach the supernatural with the confidence of a contemplative4 ,belloc's delight is with the old ,europe he loves so deeply1 and if there be ecstasies beyond what he can see1 he will 8take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in ,rome40#bg ,the irony of this essentially somber spirit is relieved by a humour that is thoroughly ,catholic in its simplicity4 ,this best of all travel books is vintage ,belloc because it displays him in all the rich diverseness of his centralized personality4 ,his grave mood1 his ,grizzlebeard1 is constantly balanced by his robust vitality1 by the ,rabelaisian flavour of this latter-day ,villon4 ,he relishes existence with a zest that does due honour to the gifts of ,god2 he laughs2 he pontificates with mock solemnity2 he trifles brilliantly with words 7see the business about 8windows072 he holds forth on the nature of ,fools2 and then he breaks into some of the loveliest lyrical prose in all ,english letters4 ,and through all this adventuring and tramping runs a sanity that is almost more than human4 ,if great beauty be the 8common transfigured10 as ,belloc holds it to be1 then this record of a shanksmare hike to ,rome shall ever stand as a symbol of what man can be if he will only cease being other than himself4 ,the universe as seen by ,hilaire ,belloc in ,the ,path to ,rome1 ,hills and the ,sea1 and ,the ,cruise of the ,nona is a thoroughly ,catholic universe3 physical nature is grasped as good in its very being1 and to this inner worthiness of all things there has been added the sacramental seal of the power of ,god4 ,one can almost see the ,papal blessing ,urbi et ,orbi1 hanging like a benediction over the vineyards and hills of ,italy as they embrace the man coming down from the cold heights of the ,alps4 ,one can describe the ,bellocian world no better than by saying that it is the total opposite of the world of ,brunner1 ,barth1 ,kafka1 and ,kierkegaard4 ,if ,belloc's way of looking at things seems so strangely foreign when compared with the outlook of the contemporary intelligentsia1 it is because the former is ,catholic and the latter is lapsed-,catholic4 ,the philosophy of the modern ,european is1 as ,edith ,stein once said1 8the philosophy of a lapsed-,catholic with a bad conscience40 ,if ,belloc sees the supernatural order as completely penetrating the natural order1 it is because grace is seen as not destroying a nature essentially corrupted in sin1 but as operating within man and flowering in his very gestures4 ,dozens of times throughout his essays1 ,belloc's ,catholic insight comes home to the reader1 not as something superimposed nor as something articulated conceptually1 but as the very intelligibility of the man's work4 ,he saw reality as a gift to be greeted and revered4 ,there is nothing of the contemporary irritation with existence in ,belloc4 ,he is never shocked by being4 ,he does not stumble guiltily through a world of spikes1 hedged in by the sharp outline of nothingness4 ,human hypocrisy1 greed1 social injustice1 the loss of economic and personal freedom1 the pride of the rich3 these sins arouse his ire and bring forth the great thunder of his hammer-like denunciations4 ,but being has not sinned4 ,it is the innocent one recalling all of us to the morning of the race1 and to the promise of paradise regained4 8,if someone find a beautiful thing1 whether done by ,god or by man1 he will remember and love it4 ,this is what children do1 and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion40#bh ,if we would seek one symbol that best crystallizes the ,bellocian affirmation1 we would find it in wine4 ,belloc1 tramping over the lands of ,barbary1 brooded long on the lost vineyards as he saw nothing but the vacancy of the desert4 ,he turned and went back to that ,europe he so loved1 and he drank wine to her in his heart4#bi ,wine called forth for him the ,sacrament of the ,altar and that one moment in time when a passing world full of passing men was lifted out of the darkness4 ,the mystical figure of wine seemed to him to sum up the ,catholic affirmations1 even to the heart of the ,mysteries of the ,faith4 ,the ,bellocian vision1 while poetic and religious1 finds its completion in history4 ,belloc's grasp of the ,european past was something amazing1 and it grew out of the need his personality felt for total integration4 ,man would remain starved if he did not make his past his own4 ,in ,belloc the ages became one4 ,as the ,church is something visible1 existing in space1 and enduring in time1 so also is the world that she has created something physical to be seen and handled like a ,thing3 something that perpetuates itself against mortality through a tradition that stretches back into the mists of antiquity4 ,a man's understanding of himself depends on where he steps into history2 not mere academic nor written and catalogued information1 but the past as assimilated into a personality1 and as taking on the very existence of a man4 ,when ,belloc writes history he is one with the march of the ,west4 ,whatever was divisive of the unity of ,christendom1 even if dead and long conquered1 receives at his hands a hatred that is almost personal4 ,belloc the soldier haunted the battlefields of the ,first ,crusade1 marked with his fingers the high point of the ,mohammedan wave1 and went with ,napoleon into the ,russian winter4 ,he said once of a friend that 8history had overlapped on him40 ,he was describing himself4 ,all this does not make for dispassionate scholarship1 but it makes for something vastly more important3 it situates a man squarely in the path of history1 and it renders him conscious of all that has gone before to make him what he is4 ,he becomes himself twice over4 ,what contemporary writer speaks of the time when 8we broke the back of ,islam at ,tours08 ,spiritual insight into the destiny of ,christendom1 added to an imagination that could vividly resurrect the past1 were tools that rendered ,belloc uniquely capable of presenting the drama of ,europe to an age that largely had ceased living by the old ,faith4 ,but above their value in furthering his ,christian vocation1 they added to his theocentric humanism further integration4 ,the person who is unified in himself and in society through ,faith is further enriched if he is1 in a sense1 all that has gone before4 ,it was ,belloc's good fortune that there was enough of the older ,christendom physically in being for him to see at first hand4 ,his historical perspective is uniquely realistic4 ,he frequently deplored historical investigation that proceeded exclusively through written testimony4 ,such history is lacking in two things3 the past is not brought back to us with sufficient vigour and colour1 and the past loses its personal1 human1 integrative value1 because history must be seen in things which now exist because of that which has existed4 ,history1 therefore1 once a man has begun to know it1 becomes a necessary food for the mind1 without which it cannot sustain its new dimension4444 ,but history1 if it is to be kept just and true 444 must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things4#cj ,belloc's intensive preoccupation with ,christendom is an interest not in a concept1 nor in an abstracted framework nor an academic 8problematic02 it is an engagement in an historical reality1 to be seen and understood on the spot4 ,occasionally1 as he stands in some place hallowed by past significance1 he seems almost burdened by the grandeur of the task4 ,see how he writes of the fascination of pursuing the ,roman ,road between ,winchester and ,canterbury3 ,for my part ,i desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors4 ,i believed that1 as ,i followed their hesitations at the river-crossings1 as ,i climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain1 as ,i suffered the fatigue they suffered1 and laboriously chose1 as they had chosen1 the proper soils for going1 something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood ,i drew from them1 and that in a sort ,i should forget the vileness of my own time1 and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect1 articulate1 and worshipping ,god1 but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil4#ca ,what he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical recovery of the self1 so that spiritual isolation will not claim the soul4 ,if modern man is isolated1 and who can doubt that he is1 his isolation stems from a variety of causes1 some of which have been briefly indicated4 ,among others is the almost total loss of not only the reality of tradition1 but of the sense of tradition1 in industrial man4 ,by industrial man1 of course1 one indicates not simply the man engaged in factory production4 ,by industrial man one means that mechanical personality who has been fashioned by the age--a wound that few if any of us have escaped4 ,without a steady tradition enduring through the passage of generations a man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be4 ,the drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his finding an analogue of eternity4 ,without this1 man is without moorings2 he drifts and is alone2 he is obscurely guilty of lacking something demanded by his nature4 ,without tradition1 he is a victim offered daily to the cruelties of the moment4 ,man has a body as well as a soul1 and the whole of man1 soul and body1 is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things4444 ,not only death 444 but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change1 is challenged1 chained1 and put in its place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability 444 the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind1 anxiety1 honour harassed1 all the bitterness of living--become part of a large business which may lead to ,beatitude4 ,for they are all connected in the memory with holy day after holy day1 year by year1 binding the generations together2 carrying on even in this world1 as it were1 the life of the dead and giving corporate substance1 permanence and stability1 without the symbol of which 7at least7 the vast increasing burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne4#cb ,man's past has never been better known than it is today4 ,yet this knowledge is almost exclusively academic4 ,it is encased in the great libraries of the civilized world1 and it exists divisively in the minds of countless scholars4 ,but it is no longer known as a whole that translates itself into the life of the community4 ,in ceasing to be a tradition1 the great story of the ,west has died2 for the only existence the past can possibly have in a culture is traditional4 ,a tradition is measured in a society by that society's consciousness of its own symbols1 which render the tradition present to men4 ,contemporary industrial society has burgeoned within what was once ,christendom1 but having lost the old ,faith1 it has lost the old symbols1 which now hang on precariously as myths and forms emptied of content4 ,industrial man has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone1 in the gestures of daily living4 ,he has nothing to recall4 ,as a result contemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to his subconscious drives4 ,political slogans1 ideals gleaned from mass entertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges1 and create his conscious desires4 ,cinema heroes and contest winners give him an ever shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday's idol or this morning's news4 ,even the library that houses last week's paper is called 8the morgue40 ,a society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the future4 ,it adores that which has not been1 and that which never is4 ,if ,shaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century1 his friend ,wells was its prophet4 ,it is through ,wells that the man of the twenty-fifth century came into his own4 ,and ,wells' most articulate critic in those days1 throughout the whole of ,england1 was ,hilaire ,belloc4 ,today ,belloc's long battle against this drive away from our origins1 his long fight to make the ,west conscious and proud of its past1 has been partially vindicated1 ironically enough1 in our own generation4 ,after ,world ,war ,,ii1 with the threat of the atomic age1 the prophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom4 ,when thinking man looks ahead he does not see the age of superman1 but the grim world of ,big ,brother and the phantasies of ,george ,orwell4 ,the future1 if the present be not altered by a radical reaction1 can only effect a 8,servile ,state0 which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the coming society envisaged by ,belloc when he first penned that now famous term in #aijh4 ,belloc had no doubts about the great ,western ,catholic tradition4 ,he was absolutely convinced of its superiority--a superiority that extended to the economic and political orders as well as to the theological4 ,belloc was cavalier in the way he flung the reality of ,european ,christendom at his contemporaries4 ,he was constantly saying to them3 look at that1 you fools1 what have you to offer8 ,to achieve success in such an endeavour ,belloc had to act the way he did--rough1 brutally dogmatic1 sweeping in his argument4 ,muted tones and footnote scholarship can gain skirmishes within the classrooms and the scholarly journals2 they have never yet won a large-scale battle4 ,belloc faced a generation of ,english journalist-politician intellectuals who looked expectantly to a future grounded on the ,whig-,liberal industrialist myth4 ,these were men consciously convinced of the inevitability and the justness of almost every aspect of modern civilization4 ,belloc swept their case away in book after book1 and if the myth of ,nordic supremacy is discredited today1 if the ,catholic ethos and past has something of a hearing in the ,english-speaking world of our generation1 if industrial capitalism is no longer thought to be as natural as the air we breathe and if it is no longer seen as the only alternative to ,communism1 if the first fifteen centuries of the ,british ,isles are not automatically dismissed by the educated--if the air has changed1 it is due in no small measure to that long cavalry charge of ,hilaire ,belloc1 prolonged through fifty years of warfare against what he tersely called 8the ,barbarians40 ,a full description of his battle belongs more to a consideration of the man as an historian and as a sociologist4 ,what is to the point here is that what ,belloc did grew out of what he was4 ,his heartiness and confidence1 his good conscience1 sprang from what he knew and what he had seen4 ,christendom was something almost physical to him4 ,he assimilated his own past in the most concrete way open to him4 ,he tramped all over ,western ,europe2 he ate much and drank deeply in half-forgotten inns that for him always symbolized roots and freedom2 he sailed along the coast of ,england and charted the landing of the first ,normans2 he followed the route of the ,phoenicians2 he knelt before the site of ,calvary as an old man4 ,with an iron determination1 he willed to become one with all that had gone to make him what he was--a ,western ,catholic man4 ,in his own home in ,sussex he kept alive all the older traditions of the countryside4 ,it has been said frequently that ,belloc remained a stranger in ,england4 ,las ,vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a ,frenchman4 ,he was neither a ,frenchman nor an ,englishman2 he was both of them1 and he was more than either of them4 ,in his essays ,belloc is a ,south ,english peasant and a channel sailor4 ,in his political sympathies1 he is an ,english ,monarchist and a ,french ,republican4 ,in the soldierly dimension of himself he is thoroughly ,gallic4 ,in his over-all vision1 he belongs to the old ,roman ,empire and to ,christendom4 ,he combines within his personality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are never bastardized in any specious internationalism1 but which retain their individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his ,catholicism4 ,his was a precarious but happy balance that included the main lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents4 ,if ,belloc's over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping thing that encompasses the centuries1 it must be remembered that this central principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid sense of the immediate drama of things past and present4 ,one of the most revealing characteristics of the ,bellocian humanism is its lack of academicism--one might almost say its anti-academicism4 ,belloc is always out on the road with his senses peeled4 ,this psychological fact points up a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each other3 a self-conscious emphasis on the past1 and a communion with the physical universe which actually exists4 ,traditionalism1 when it is espoused by an intelligentsia1 frequently suffers from an overdeveloped symbolism4 ,things are not seen in themselves4 ,they are seen only as symbols4 ,the now is important only to illuminate the past1 or to call to mind spiritual and moral values4 ,the purely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete1 the individual1 the existent2 it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal which is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction4 ,several of the great ,eastern traditional cultures have atrophied through an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking4 ,byzantine iconography suffers from it1 and insofar as it does1 it is not of the ,west4 ,carried to the end in the moral order1 pure symbolism means that nothing is valued or loved for itself4 ,philosophically considered1 such a traditionalism is a kind of ,platonism in which the world functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas4 ,if the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious1 social and historical symbols1 the intellectual suffers from the contrary3 he turns everything solid into a mirror4 ,intellectually this ends in a simple inability to see things as they are4 ,theologically1 it would appear to be a kind of subtle ,manicheanism1 in which nothing is good enough as it is4 ,belloc constantly kept himself engaged with things4 ,his understanding of the ,catholic tradition escapes the purely symbolic and academic order4 ,what he sees in the river valleys and inns of ,europe is symbolic of a great historical effort stamped with the ,city of ,god2 but what is so stamped is good in itself4 ,if you would understand the past that has made you and grasp something of the spirit of its religion1 ,belloc urges that you go to ,arles1 for example2 but above all1 see ,arles4 ,belloc's ,grizzlebeard1 the custodian of tradition1 is one with his ,sailor1 the man of 8the five senses40 ,if his ,grizzlebeard were without a ,sailor1 ,belloc's traditionalism would have stiffened into something ,egyptian1 mummified4 ,but since he is of the ,west himself1 of an order which has been eminently practical and concrete as well as visionary1 these two remain one4 ,to exemplify the nature of tradition1 ,belloc finds his best instance to be a seaman's knot4 ,if his ,sailor had had no ,grizzlebeard1 then ,belloc's concrete vision and communion with reality would have degenerated into a kind of irrational naturalism4 ,naturalism is merely an escape into the physical universe1 away from burdens which are peculiarly human4 ,it is one of the less healthy offshoots of the fertile tree of ,romanticism4 ,since no man can just wallow in nature for long without reacting in some way1 the pure ,romantic soon comes up with a view of nature as an irrational force within whose bosom is to be found salvation4 ,the spectacle of ,d4 ,h4 ,lawrence comes to mind immediately4 ,the humanist reacts to nature by taming the beast2 the ,christian humanist tames a ,good ,beast4 ,but the romantic naturalist attunes himself to the wilderness and finally renounces his social nature4 ,the eighteenth-century ,city of ,man appeared to the early ,romantics to be an utter sham4 ,the ,age of ,reason had run its course1 and the intellect had become an intolerable burden4 ,the ,romantics tried to escape from their humanity into a physical beyond2 having surrendered the reason1 they gave themselves up to mythmaking4 ,mr4 ,auden has analyzed the peculiar significance of the 8sea0 and the 8desert0 for ,european ,romanticism4#cc ,the 8sea0 represented the infinite possibilities that urged human nature to break its bond4 ,but this optimism carried within itself the seeds of a subsequent despair4 ,the 8desert0 represented the possibilities exhausted1 the sea dried up4 ,the surrender of the reason and of the corporate wisdom of society ended in giving the spirit over to darkness4 ,the older traditions reminiscent of the ,catholic ,unity were jettisoned1 and the result is known to us all4 ,the ,walpurgisnacht orgies under ,nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that just missed wiping out the remnants of ,western ,christian ,europe4 ,western man for centuries now has lost the key to his own meaning4 ,he has been striving for a long time to break out of the ruins of a ,city half destroyed at his own hands4 ,political ,liberalism of the old-fashioned ,marxian variety grew out of a psychological desire to get away from where man actually found himself4 ,post-,world ,war ,,ii existentialist despair1 considered as a socio-historical reality1 is a philosophical justification for this urge to break all existing cultural and historical limits4 ,what must be done1 at all costs1 is to exorcise our common historical heritage1 our faith1 our corporate memories4 ,a fresh beginning can be the only beginning4 ,this is a presupposition that is operative everywhere1 most concretely in the arts1 most consciously in philosophy1 and most dangerously in religion4 ,such is the estrangement modern man has carved for himself4 ,in social and economic life the masses are estranged from their spiritual and cultural past4 ,politically1 techniques forged by ,western man himself have alienated him from his ancient freedom4 ,the home1 the nation1 the ,church1 the ,west1 the past1 roots1 origins--these are always wrong1 always wicked3 only the wilderness of the future promises salvation4 ,the poet has retreated to that uniquely modern place invented in the early nineteenth century--the state of mind called ,bohemia4 ,his destiny seems assured when he has pruned away everything reminiscent of the objective order1 and when he finds himself alone with his broken soul4 ,philosophically1 the age has had urged on it the clever monstrosity that since consciousness renders to me what is ,other than ,myself1 then my personality is defined by a negation4 ,theologically1 the ,barbarian ,god of the peat bogs has come back with 8neo-orthodoxy10 and man is told that he is so utterly other than ,god that he is in no sense the image of his ,creator4 ,the human fabric has been so cut to ribbons that man has been reduced to a nothing that can parade his utter absurdity only by putting on a mask4 ,the clown has come into his own4 ,now it is part of the enduring significance of ,hilaire ,belloc that he saw all of this long ago4 ,he saw it as the enemy of all that ,christendom had ever built and loved and believed4 ,he saw it as a unique concentration of evils that separately1 one after another1 had attacked the ,christian ,city since its inception4 ,he nailed the thing to the wall when he called it the spirit of ,barbarism3 the spirit that cannot build for itself because it rejects all limit1 the essence of finite perfection2 the spirit that makes its way in the intellectual world and in that necessary parasite1 the world of fashion1 by negating all that has gone on before2 a spirit that thrives on opposition and rebellion1 and that can cheaply dismiss as nothing the common effort of three thousand years4 ,the ,barbarian hopes--and that is the very mark of him--that he can have his cake and eat it too4 ,he will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort1 but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods1 nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being4 ,discipline seems to him irrational1 on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers4 444 ,in a word1 the ,barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this1 that he cannot make2 that he can befog and destroy1 but that he cannot sustain2 and of every ,barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true4#cd ,belloc is one of the few writers in the ,english world of the last fifty years who wanted to remain himself1 and who desired to stand exactly where he was3 a ,christian man standing in a tradition whose religion is ,catholic and whose origins are in the ,roman ,order4 ,because of this1 ,belloc will never be considered an ,intellectual4 ,he should not be so considered4 ,he detested the term4 ,the contemporary ,intellectual of the ,western ,world has come out of the same past as ,belloc1 but he rejects that past as he rejects its religion4 ,that is why the past fifty to seventy-five years of intellectual life have been fevered with experiment--in literature1 in philosophy1 in politics1 in all the arts1 and in morals4 ,if some new truth has emerged from it all1 and if some beauty has been etched in the darkness1 does it not seem as nothing to what has been given up8 ,christopher ,dawson stated once that the modern soul is at bottom anti-ontological4 ,it hates being4 ,hilaire ,belloc has said that the modern soul hates proportion and limitation4 ,they are both affirming the same truth1 because the condition of all being save ,god is limitation4 ,integrated ,christian humanism accepts the finite goodness that constitutes the nature of man4 ,out of this affirmation the soul can build of itself a work of art2 without this affirmation1 man gives himself over to the darkness in the suicide of self-alienation4 ,we sit by and watch the ,barbarian1 we tolerate him2 in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid4 ,we are tickled by his irreverence1 his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us2 we laugh4 ,but as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond3 and on these faces there is no smile4#ce ,these faces are masks of that one ,evil that has ever enticed man into the wilderness4 ,belloc the soldier saw it riding out of the ,eastern wastes1 trampling under the vineyards and desecrating the shrines of ,christian men1 giving over the soil to the sands and the mind to an awful simplicity4 ,he saw it rising within the great ,universities of ,europe1 rubbing out the certitudes and the songs of ,catholic ,men4 ,his soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit and makes for isolation4 ,there is a passage in ,esto ,perpetua in which ,belloc--once again 8,myself0--met a stranger in ,timgad1 that ,african town1 once ,roman and fertile1 now empty and given back to the desert4 ,they spoke to one another1 and their conversation was the drama of salvation and damnation4 ,belloc looked on the desert1 and he was tempted3 the soul seemed nothing1 and he thought of those who 8see at last that there is no ,person in destiny1 and that purpose is only in themselves4 ,their ,faiths turn to legend1 and at last they enter that shrine whose ,god has departed and whose ,idol is quite blind40#cf ,he felt terror and was less a man4 ,but he turned and went back to the place he had known1 and the terror left him1 and he was a man once again4 ,chapter ,two ,,grizzlebeard3 ,,history ,,from ,,within ,among all the disciplines in which ,hilaire ,belloc has laboured1 history stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour4 ,belloc's historical practice is too complex to be judged in any general essay concerning his essential importance4 ,but his historical theory is crucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated ,christian humanism4 ,it is as an extension of his humanism that his historical position will be analyzed4 ,the cardinal significance of the ,bellocian conception of history is its traditionalism4 ,history is organic2 it grows from within a culture and is the actual cause of that culture's corporate existence in present time4 ,since ,christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition that has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past--familial1 regional1 and the rest--the past is rendered intelligible by grasping the inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of historical man4 ,those who attack ,hilaire ,belloc for being biased in his historical perspective must first settle the question of the very nature of history itself4 ,for ,belloc history begins as an extension of tradition2 history is an act of 8self-knowledge10 as he puts it in his magnificent introduction to ,europe and the ,faith4 ,this act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to systematize or catalogue facts4 ,it does not proceed from the need man has for the possession of impersonal1 objective truth4 ,history is the effect of an inner command to know one's soul4 ,it is the completion of human consciousness4 ,the passion for history is man's ,grizzlebeard4 ,as the ,sailor renders ,myself unalienated from the physical universe in which he exists1 the ,grizzlebeard seals ,myself in time which has stamped man in its own image4 ,belloc returns to this theme time and again in the essays1 but nowhere does he express himself more movingly than in ,the ,old ,road1 where he tells us why he elected to recover the ,roman ,way from ,winchester to ,canterbury4 ,to study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time1 is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths3 it is rather a function whose appetite has always rendered ,history a necessity4 ,by the recovery of the ,past1 stuff and being are added to us2 our lives1 which1 lived in the present only1 are a film or surface1 take on body--are lifted into one dimension more4 ,the soul is fed4 ,reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land--all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning4 ,visions or intimations are confirmed4444 ,one may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and a whole2 and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfillment4#cg ,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 time4 ,in the classical pagan world the status of history was at best ambiguous4 ,aristotle gave historical knowledge a low place in his hierarchy of values4 ,history for the ,greek philosophers could not achieve the dignity of a science because it lacked the universal necessity without which there is no science4 ,the philosophers were right in judging history not to be a science4 ,they were wrong in according history little value4 ,what the wise men of the ancient world took away from history1 the common sense of the people gave back4 ,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 space4 ,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 nature3 the necessity to link the present with the past4 ,familial traditions extended to the ,city1 and then to the ,empire1 and even the work of ,virgil the ,poet was historical in inspiration4 ,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 received1 confirmed the humanist insight and at the same time conferred on history a dignity of an altogether new order4 ,no one in the new ,christian society1 not even the scientist or philosopher1 would ever more despise history1 and if the ,west has accorded to history a place unique in the hierarchy of human values1 it is because time had been sanctified and conquered by the ,son of ,god4 ,history added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be himself4 ,the ,faith taught ,christian man that nothing is ever lost3 the ages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the ,vision of ,god4 ,tradition1 which is nothing but the corporate life of the past existing in the present1 is the human analogue of the ,eternal ,morning ,who is the ,end of us all4 ,historical tradition1 to grow as it should1 must commence with that society which is most natural to man3 the family4 ,familial memory incarnated in a host of rites1 observances1 and actions lifts the members of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a present ever passing1 and life is invested with a fullness that the immortal in man demands4 ,the moment is salvaged1 and the suffering and estrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes3 444 part of a large business which may lead to ,beatitude4444 ,not only death 7which shakes and rends all that is human in us1 creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys71 not only death1 but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change1 is challenged1 chained1 and put in its place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability4#ch ,this immemorial sense for history has always run through every artery of the corporate life of ,christendom1 and in ,hilaire ,belloc it finds a final champion4 ,read ,a ,remaining ,christmas or ,the ,mowing of a ,field for an insight into ,belloc's sense of history as tradition4 ,for him1 and here he is one with that past he claimed for himself1 history is simply the recovery of the self3 a personal and communal act of memory4 ,for ,belloc1 as for the ,west1 tradition begins in the family3 the ,yule log was burnt in his home4 ,from the family1 tradition spread to the region3 he rendered ,sussex immortal4 ,from the region1 man recovers those wider circles of his story--the nation1 the state1 the broad sweep of the ,empire3 some forty books enshrine the ,bellocian effort4 ,all of this is finally stamped one by the ,faith that issued from the ,incarnation4 ,belloc's historical work is divided broadly into two chief fields of interest3 ,england and ,france2 and within these respective areas of concentration a particular era predominates3 in ,england it is the ,reformation1 down to the final exile of the ,stuart ,kings2 in ,france1 it is the ,revolution and the ,napoleonic ,empire4 ,transcending these broad interests1 there are works which deal with the wider sweep of ,western ,history from before the ,incarnation1 down through the ,middle ,ages1 up to the ,reformation and even beyond ,world ,war ,i to the ,crisis of ,our ,civilization4 ,biography and general history incarnate the above work4 ,besides all that1 ,belloc has produced an odd dozen specialized monographs which deal with subjects close to his heart3 studies on the ,roman ,road1 on ,sussex1 on cities and their river tributaries1 and finally on military history4 ,the first two attach to his general ,european history and illustrate his 8pro-,roman0 and 8pro-,catholic0 positions4 ,the military monographs are grouped chiefly1 although not exclusively1 around ,england4 ,not including his travel books1 which illustrate historical matter1 one can count forty-six books written by ,belloc that are historical in the full sense of the term4 ,the story of ,belloc's going up to ,oxford as an undergraduate1 astounding the ,university with his brilliance and pugnacity1 is well known4 ,the story of his exclusion from ,oxford as a tutor because of his bellicose ,catholicism may be revealed some day4 ,in any case1 this rebuff added something personal to his bitterness against what he called the 8official history0 of the great ,english ,universities4 ,his work must be understood in relation to the two historical trends that he reacted against with such violence3 the ,whig tradition of ,gibbon1 ,mommsen1 ,macaulay1 ,green1 and their copyists and sycophants2 and the implicit idealism and anti-traditionalism of ,german ,historismus4 ,because he was engaged in a conscious and articulate controversy with these two historical schools for almost fifty years1 an understanding of what he is opposing is indispensable for placing ,belloc as an historian4 ,present-day ,english history has maintained a steady1 unbroken continuity with eighteenth-century political ,whiggery and eighteenth-century rationalism4 ,history was an admirable tool for the elucidation of doctrines peculiarly dear to the whole ,enlightenment 7as ,voltaire so clearly grasped74 ,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 ,reason4 ,here the specific dogmas of rationalist deism happened to coincide with the prejudices of popular ,protestantism3 that the ,church was foisted on an unwilling ,empire at the caprice of ,constantine the ,great2 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 institutions2 that the ,dark ,ages extended into the high ,middle ,ages and were expelled only by the advent of the ,renaissance of learning 7executed1 if not initiated by scholars freed from the tyranny of ,rome72 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 opinions1 dear to the traditions of the ,glorious ,revolution1 were simply corollaries of the rationalist doctrine of the expanding perfection of mankind4 ,darwinism was only a latter-day confirmation of this ideology4 ,from ,protestant opinion and rationalist philosophy was born the thing known as ,whig ,history4 ,the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ,whig-rationalist was dead certain that he had in his hands the guide lines to historical understanding4 ,it seems significant that even old-line ,tories who politically opposed the bulk of the ,whig-,liberal traditions fell into the general ,whig position4 ,bolingbroke himself was a victim of pre-,darwinian evolutionism4 ,since man was supposed to have progressed to that point in time where the historian stood1 history was judged from the vantage point of the present4 ,everything from before ,christ1 down to the decline of the ,roman ,empire1 the ,dark and ,middle ,ages1 through the ,renaissance and beyond the ,reformation was measured by standards peculiar to the present4 ,the past received its intelligibility in the light of where man happened to find himself4 ,all this followed on a doctrine of inevitable progress4 ,since the present was the high point of cultural and personal development1 the past was considered ministerially4 ,our fathers were condescended to4 ,now it is extremely significant that ,hilaire ,belloc1 almost alone of his ,edwardian generation1 reversed that historical perspective4 ,he called before the bar of ,christendom the capitalist1 industrialist present1 and found it wanting4 ,belloc insisted on judging the present in the light of the past1 and the past itself was seen in terms of its own immediate and remote antecedents4 ,the reality of the ,european traditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice1 the very being of cultural historical continuity1 entered bodily into his perspective4 ,whereas the ,whig historian judged ,king ,charles ,i1 to take an obvious example1 in the light of the twentieth-century development to liberal parliamentary government1 ,belloc saw the man in terms of the ancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the ,stuart monarch died4 ,cromwell1 for the ,whig historian1 was he who made for parliamentary supremacy2 for ,belloc1 ,cromwell was he who was made by an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution4 ,since ,belloc's conception of history is traditional and organic1 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 crisis4 ,these lines are many and diverse1 but at least one of them1 ,belloc insists1 renders ,european history a steady continuity4 ,this line of causality is the ,catholic and ,greco-,roman classical tradition2 an almost immemorial tradition existing in the present in two dimensions3 corporately--in ,christendom as a whole1 molding it by shaping institutions1 forming consciences1 transforming the land1 incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and literary arts1 and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn2 and personally--as summing itself up in a man1 annealing him1 and giving direction to his destiny4 ,in taking his historical stand on the ,catholic tradition1 ,belloc was fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been1 and although radically attenuated still was1 the one bond of continuity that could enable the historian to grasp a steady1 continuous causality in his province4 ,the ,whig doctrines were myths1 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 age1 as the ,victorians and ,edwardians still thought--nonetheless1 that supposition was completely valueless as a principle of historical explanation4 ,the ,whig historian and his ,liberal counterpart attempt to find some intelligibility or meaning in history4 ,the rejection of the ,catholic ethos robs the ,whig of the one steady1 continuous influence that has always operated in the ,west through the ages4 ,the ,whig cannot1 for example1 see the rise of liberty as something caused by the ,faith1 as an effect of an institution already in existence4 ,his dilemma consists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty2 his rejection of the ,catholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives3 either liberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause1 and history is thereby totally unintelligible2 or liberty is the effect of something not actually in existence1 but which is conceived as though it were4 ,from the latter issues the ,liberal-,whig mythology of 8progress10 8evolution10 8human perfectibility10 and so on4 ,what these historians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand for nothing but tissues of imagery1 existing in the minds of men who view historical situations after the fact4 ,in no sense did 8progress0 ever cause anything historical1 for the simple reason that 8progress0 has no being of its own4 ,yet the ,liberals treat these constructs as though they were physical laws operative in the extramental order4 ,belloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy1 and he fingered it for the imaginative trick it is1 in his controversy with ,h4 ,g4 ,wells4 ,when ,mr4 ,wells concludes this passage by saying 8,i strut to no such personal beatitude10 and then goes on to say1 8the life to which ,i belong uses me and will go on beyond me1 and ,i am content10 he does two unintelligent things4 ,first of all1 he mixes up the real with the imaginary 444 and next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects--the personification of abstract ideas4 8,the life to which we belong uses us0 is a meaningless phrase4 ,god may use us or we may use ourselves1 or some other third ,will1 not ,god's or our own1 may use us3 but 8the life to which we belong0 does not use us4 ,talking like that is harmless when it is mere metaphor1 it is asinine when it sets up to be definition4#ci ,wells was not alone in this personification of the abstract4 ,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 ,west4 ,the ,whig substituted for the ,catholic tradition an over-all finality which he called 8progress40 ,the idealist historian and the ,weltanschauung historian add to the ,whig denial the negation of the personal will4 ,all the historian is left to work with are impersonal forces1 either physical or logical4 ,he falls into the old error of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist4 ,the ,liberal is bound by his own theory4 ,his sociological ideals must be projected ahead of his historical understanding2 they can never emerge from an insight into that which actually has existed4 ,the classical ,european ,liberal 7and his contemporary counterpart7 is always marked by his rejection of any way of life rooted in the older past of ,christendom4 ,when ,hilaire ,belloc launched his concept of the proprietary state1 he effected a political and sociological revolution that had its roots in his historical vision4 ,mr4 ,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 refinements4#dj ,it was a time when ,britain had reached next to the limit of its material expansion4 ,english industry and productivity were unequalled in excellence and quantity4 ,the nation was united in the firm conviction that ,britannia ruled by the grace of ,god4 ,providence had specially blessed the ,island ,empire4 ,the innate superiority1 not only of ,englishmen1 but of ,english ways and ,english religion1 was less a conscious doctrine than a broad myth on which a whole people reposed4 ,liberal capitalism appeared to the 8progressivists0 as the final flowering of a history that had its roots in the ,reformation and the ,glorious ,revolution of #afhh4 ,belloc's economics and sociology1 the fruit of his historical insight1 effected a revolution4 ,since it was a revolution of thought1 its effects were not immediately apparent1 but acting as corrosives they gradually ate away the rust of centuries of complacency and smugness4 ,belloc told the ,englishmen of his day that their cherished system of parliamentary government represented not the nation1 but two parties that stood for the same thing3 capitalist1 industrial wealth4 ,he went on to tell them that the supposed incorruptibility of this ancient governmental institution was a lie3 men were bought and sold1 and titles were bartered for privilege4 ,expanding his polemic1 ,belloc informed the nation that liberal capitalism would not issue into the golden age1 but would work inexorably toward the ,servile ,state3 a state in which the vast majority of the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy owners1 or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts4 ,he grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional economic basis of ,western ,christian societies3 the institution of small property1 widely distributed1 giving the tone to society1 and reposing on the family community4 ,as far back as #aijh1 in ,the ,servile ,state1 ,belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were reestablished1 the nation would give itself over to slavery4 ,the ,england of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with tragic finality4 ,belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant point2 if the society were propertyless1 contractual slavery would inexorably result4 ,the age of the ration card1 the social leveling of the whole people1 the increasing drabness of life1 the elimination of the middle classes1 the legislation of enforced labour--this age is upon ,england1 and it will remain until and unless property is restored4 ,belloc's prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can succeed4 ,what he said would come to pass did come to pass2 and it came to pass the way he said it would4 ,there is more than irony in looking back thirty years to that superman of the ,wells school of thought3 that uninhibited1 traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march of liberal progress2 that dull abstraction1 8the man of the future10 who was to inherit the earth4 ,who is he today1 and where is he8 ,he is the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt ,europe--,heidegger's faceless 8one0 who neither owns nor can be said even to be4 ,the striking truth in the utter failure of the hopes of post-,victorian ,liberalism lies in the fact that ,liberalism1 the child of ,whiggery1 grounded its predictions in an historical theory that was a well-intentioned myth4 ,the future simply is not a magnet4 ,it has no existence4 ,it is a refuge for cowards1 ,chesterton said somewhere2 a retreat for men who cannot bear to face the grandeur of their own past4 ,belloc was able to lay down the broad lines which were leading to the ,servile ,state because his historical vision was orientated realistically3 it looked to causes actually operative in the past1 whose collective efficacy hardened and sharpened with the passing of time4 ,the ,english ,reformation had created a wealthy landed aristocracy4 ,this aristocracy had ruined a crown that for all its failures had stood1 immemorially1 for the rights of the common man1 already a landed owner in large part by the close of the fourteenth century4 ,having gained political power1 the aristocracy usurped economic power2 the long series of legislative acts and judicial decisions1 from the ,poor ,laws to the final enclosure acts1 ended in the creation of a rural proletariat4 ,the rise of industrialism was controlled by a capitalism already in existence1 and the rural proletariat was transformed into its urban counterpart4 ,belloc's prophetic ability1 strikingly demonstrated time and again1 worked because it was based on his grasp of causality actually operative in history4 ,the future can never be predicted with certitude because causes operating at the present moment in time are contingent4 ,they can be replaced1 diminished1 checked1 or rechannelled4 ,nonetheless1 to have an insight into these causes is to possess an instrument for predicting a possible or even probable future4 ,no historical theory grounded in a mere ,weltanschauung1 nor any history deduced from a philosophical system such as the ,hegelian and ,marxist1 is of any practical utility in understanding what might happen4 ,another example of ,belloc's prophetic insight can be found in his book about the ,united ,states1 ,the ,contrast4 ,writing in #aibd1 before the ,new ,deal was even a dream1 ,belloc calmly announced that a great increase of ,presidential power would be effected in the near future4 ,his historical thesis1 still paradoxical to most of his readers1 was that great wealth always operated through representative institutions1 and always aimed1 neither at monarchy nor democracy1 but at aristocracy4 ,in a country in which the sense of individual liberty was still strong1 the people would tend to incarnate themselves more and more in the head of the state1 who1 by his very position1 stood above special interests1 which worked naturally through parliamentary structures4 ,one does not have to agree with ,belloc that this monarchical tendency was a good thing2 but it must be granted that he nailed the tendency to the wall4 ,belloc's historical insight passes the pragmatic test time and again4 ,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 ,europe4 ,prussia1 the legitimate child of the ,reformation1 arose and developed apart from the older ,european ,unity4 ,of her very nature she opposed that unity1 and refused to be bound by the morality common to ,christian nations and men4 ,frederick the ,great's rape of ,silesia1 the work of ,bismarck1 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 problem4 ,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 north1 ,belloc knew what ,prussia really meant3 a gun pointed at the heart of the ,west4 ,the resurrection of ,prussianism under ,hitler confirmed bitterly the prophetic insight of ,belloc1 who had been warning ,england for over forty years about the intentions of ,north ,germany4 ,belloc knew where ,prussia stood in the light of the unity of ,christendom4 ,she was beyond the pale4 ,it is largely due to the ,bellocian polemic that the old-fashioned ,whig history1 although still taught as a matter of course almost everywhere1 is no longer the accepted dogma of serious historical scholarship4 ,historians today can labour at their profession without the fear that their work will be branded as partisan1 as is the work of the man who cleared the field for them4 ,belloc's historical technique suffered from one self-imposed liability4 ,he worked within a tradition1 and thereby defined himself4 ,but his strength lay in his very limitation4 ,the ,bellocian philosophy of history can operate only within some one well-defined civilization4 ,the effectiveness of his method depends on the historian's entering profoundly into the spirit of a culture1 and on assuming to himself the religious and social beliefs and values of the society in question4 ,without his ,catholicism1 or without at least a deep sympathy for the religion that made ,christendom1 ,belloc's historical method cannot be made to function realistically4 ,it is of no use1 for example1 to a man who would work toward an historical understanding of global history4 ,world history must be seen1 to the ,bellocian1 as something outside of the ,european ,unity1 as something foreign1 threatening that unity1 or as penetrated by it4 ,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 impossibility4 ,a man would break down under the strain1 because he cannot take to himself traditions that are mutually contradictory4 ,he cannot be that which he rejects4 ,philosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality typified by academic journals or international youth congresses4 ,so long as these historians simply record facts they are safe1 but as soon as they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary lack of inside understanding4 ,world historians frequently fail to grasp even the story of their own nations4 ,they are within nothing at all1 but are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from an academic outside2 hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything that has ever moved men to common action4 ,these historians tend to succumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically2 they perpetually find meetings between an ,east and ,west1 where there is only conflict2 they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically2 they build vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching for his own antecedents4 ,a ,christian comes away from ,belloc knowing his own soul4 ,the ,weltanschauung historian must fail in the end because no 8world view0 has ever acted to cause anything historically4 ,history is caused within cultures1 and the clash of civilizations occurs when two cultures in act meet on the field of battle1 be it economic1 military1 or spiritual4 ,the final objection that the 8world historian0 has against ,belloc is that he takes sides1 and the final answer to that objection is simply this3 to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history4 ,a historian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more than the surface of things4 ,he cannot see the inside of the spiritual drama of1 let us say1 the ,reformation or the ,arian heresy1 without being touched by an absolute3 absolutes either wound or enlist the assent of the spirit4 ,there can be no impartiality when a man has been actually grazed by the realities that have stirred all ,christianity to its roots4 ,intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death simply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been reached by the historian1 and unless they are reached and elected for or rejected1 nothing historical can be known in its very substance4 ,credo ut intelligam4 ,now then1 so it is with us who are of the ,faith and the great story of ,europe4 ,a ,catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from without1 he understands it from within 444 he is also that which he has to understand4 ,the ,faith is ,europe and ,europe is the ,faith4 ,the ,catholic brings to history 7when ,i say 8history0 in these pages ,i mean the history of ,christendom7 self-knowledge4 ,as a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true1 and what other people cannot judge1 so a ,catholic1 talking of the united ,european civilization1 when he blames it1 blames it for motives and for acts which are his own4 ,he himself could have done those things in person4 ,he is not relatively right in this blame1 he is absolutely right4 ,as a man can testify to his own motive1 so can the ,catholic testify to unjust1 irrelevant1 or ignorant conceptions of the ,european story2 for he knows why and how it proceeded4 ,others1 not ,catholic1 look upon the story of ,europe externally as strangers4 ,they have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly1 by its phenomena alone3 he sees it all from its centre in its essence1 and together4 ,i say again1 renewing the terms1 ,the ,church is ,europe3 and ,europe is the ,church4#da ,the ,bellocian concept of history1 as set forth in the above passage1 might well be called ,anselmian3 historical understanding follows ,faith4 ,if history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified through a common religion1 then it follows necessarily that history can be grasped only from within4 ,the historian who views the ,european story as a series of 8phenomena0 external to himself must either fall into the ,aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology1 or he must superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it intelligible4 ,he simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the eyes of the men he would know1 or feel with them as they erupt into common action4 ,he is alienated from them4 ,belloc has been attacked by historians1 both ,catholic and non-,catholic1 for partisanship1 bias1 and narrow dogmatism4 ,there is more than a little truth to their charges4 ,belloc frequently bludgeons his readers4 ,in the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost martial in its proud magnificence3 its certainty4 ,but all this is part of the price ,belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian he did4 ,he is within what he is writing4 ,do not ask for impartiality when reading of the ,first ,crusade4 ,belloc is there3 he is one of the ,crusaders4 ,when you know ,belloc1 you know the ,crusades1 you know the revolutionary spirit that swept all ,france in the eighteenth century2 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 ,islam4 ,you understand what ,islam meant to ,europe4 ,belloc gives a reader a one-sided history1 but the irony is that1 to a ,bellocian1 history must always be one-sided4 ,the man 8on no side0 is outside history4 ,paradoxically enough1 ,belloc's contention runs exactly contrary to the first principle of modern ,western historical theory4 ,contemporary historians1 regardless of political predilection or religious and philosophical adherence1 are united in the common belief that historical truth is dependent on historical 8objectivity40 ,this objectivity is achieved in proportion to the historian's ability to withdraw from his own cultural antecedents4 ,in so doing1 the scholar shakes himself loose from the prejudices and parochialisms of his own civilization1 he frees himself1 in order that he may view the whole4 ,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 time4 ,it is questionable whether such an objectivity can be more than an ideal projected before the historian--a goal to be forever missed1 but always aimed at4 ,but assuming for a moment that it is possible for a single historian to hold before himself the global passage of man through recorded history1 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 truth4 ,if1 on the contrary 7assuming ,belloc's hypothesis71 historical truth principally means historical understanding of the men who have made history1 then this understanding can only follow on a grasp of the spiritual tides that have launched any given culture1 that have given it a common destiny1 that have been channelled analogically through the members of the community4 ,historical truth depends then on a subjective1 almost intuitive1 grasp of this communal spirit2 a penetration into historical man1 rather than an analytic dissection of a spirit that defies mere logical analysis4 ,historical understanding escapes the kind of objectivity achieved in the sciences1 because it demands a deeper insight3 an entering into the subjective engagement of the human person4 ,to understand what has caused me to be the kind of man ,i am1 ,i must understand what caused the men who made me to be what they were4 ,i possess my past1 in ,belloc's eyes1 when ,i am that past to such a degree that ,i could have acted as did my ancestors4 ,then1 and only then1 do ,i actually know my own fathers from within the depths of my own personality4 ,outside objectivity versus inside understanding2 conscious withdrawal and deliberate cultural alienation for the sake of objectivity1 as opposed to conscious cultural immersion and integration for the sake of subjective sympathy3 two theories of history that can be resolved finally only by a personal act of choice4 ,belloc's historical theory is anti-academic in that it cannot be achieved within the confines of the world of the university4 ,as both an historical position and an historical practice it must always be suspect to professional historical scholars1 whose almost exclusive preoccupation with documents makes them1 quite naturally1 more sympathetic to the scientific objectivity of contemporary history4 ,belloc must always appear1 by turns1 wildly romantic and narrowly partisan to the academicians4 ,to the ,bellocian1 academicism in history must always lack both colour and vigour4 ,it must wear an air of irritating professionalism4 ,belloc's position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel1 his minute detection of physical details1 his sympathy with verbal tradition1 his suspicion for the 8outlander40 ,these were all humanistic instruments1 rendering him one with the past1 capable of seeing things as did his forefathers1 understanding reality as they did1 and eventually grasping the inner spirit of their personal and communal action that constitutes the heart of their history4 ,such history is both conservative in ultimate judgment and it is radical3 conservative in that it proceeds by way of a personal guarding of an ancient heritage2 radical in that it makes a man totally opposed to a new world at odds with that heritage4 ,the final and the fatal limitation to ,bellocian history is that it depends for success on a constant living continuity1 on a vital tradition acting like a road the historian can travel down and back again at will4 ,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 practice4 ,it is becoming increasingly more difficult1 if not impossible1 to be spiritually and affectively one with our heritage4 ,the past of ,christendom is becoming more and more a written patrimony1 and the ,bellocian brand of historical integration cannot thrive on such jejune food4 ,history by way of inside understanding is practicable today only on a regional and familial basis2 and even the family1 within the industrialized world1 has lost any living touch with its own dead4 ,the father has become a stranger to his son4 ,for ,belloc1 therefore1 an apprehension of the ,european past demands an understanding and a sympathy for the ,catholic ,faith1 tending to allegiance1 if not to formal profession4 ,as ,belloc sees it1 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 society2 acting always as a balm1 sometimes as a force1 both conservative and full of ringing affirmations that are not of this world4 ,nonetheless1 ,belloc affirms1 this apprehension is of itself sufficient to insure only an over-all sane judgment about things historical4 ,the ,christian vision1 to perfect itself historically1 must take on a judgment that is temporal1 human1 and almost cynical in its realism4 ,the great ,action advances or retreats as it is involved in the individual actions of ages1 generations1 decades1 and even days and hours4 ,these1 in their turn1 are caused by a host of agents1 tangling one with another1 clashing in opposition and uniting in the coincidence of common interest3 causes which are both impersonal and personal1 but chiefly the latter4 ,the historian1 says ,belloc1 must possess himself of a mass of detailed impersonal information1 which must be sifted and fitted into proper perspective4 8,but if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business1 then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible40#db ,in short1 as ,mr4 ,robert ,hamilton pointed out in his study on ,belloc1 the historian must be a humanist4 ,he must understand men and the motives that move them4 ,history1 to be faithful to what was actually productive of the past1 must go beyond the physical1 phenomenal evidence at hand4 ,a judgment of motive will normally transcend the synthesis of observable fact4 ,a man of action 7unless he be a ,communist7 does not give himself away on paper4 ,his motives must be inferred from the way he acts4 ,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 intentions1 and hence to his place in the historical drama in which he was engaged4 ,no one piece of information is sufficient for such an evaluation4 ,the sum of facts1 considered separately1 would yield only probability concerning the directed human will4 ,the information as synthesized1 however1 permits of an inductive judgment yielding a species of certitude about the moral role men play in history4 ,in ,the ,cruise of the ,nona1 that mosaic of ,bellociana1 the theory is put forth by the author that a sum of probabilities can furnish certitude1 if that sum is taken as a patterned whole4 ,it looks as though ,belloc is here reflecting the influence of his early teacher1 ,john ,henry ,newman1 who developed an epistemology around this conception of certitude as emerging from a set of probabilities4 ,when all the evidence together points to one conclusion1 converges on one exclusive explanation1 then the mind should assent to that one conclusion without fear of the truth of the opposite4 ,it is clear that this is a risky and dangerous instrument for the acquisition of historical truth4 ,a fool1 or a mind purely speculative or deductive in bent1 would bungle in attempting such judgments4 ,a mind overly pious and overly sanguine about human nature1 or excessively cynical about the good in men1 would not be suited for the task4 ,it is an instrument for a humanist3 a man who knows men as they are4 ,belloc was peculiarly capable of exercising his own theory1 and if he erred sometimes1 it was on the side of cynicism1 not piety4 ,belloc's theory of history is not developed philosophically in any one piece of writing4 ,he tosses out his ideas within the limits of short personal essays1 and occasionally he illuminates what he is doing in some concrete situation by standing back1 as it were1 and reflecting briefly on the presuppositions guiding his reasoning4 ,he wrote history analogically1 and if he had thoroughly developed his doctrine theoretically1 he would have revealed something unique in the philosophy of historical practice4 ,historical research1 if it would conform itself with historical truth1 must be analogical as is historical truth itself4 ,a diversity of causal lines1 one at least almost immemorial1 others lengthening into centuries1 and still others contracted within the space of a man's life or within a lesser temporal span1 all act together to produce history1 but each causal line acts in its own way4 ,the historian must constantly shift his perspective as he makes his way through this tangle of actualities1 which encompass everything from a living ,faith1 through the whole gamut of human vice and honour1 to the half-forgotten contours of the field of battle4 ,no one factor determines history 7although one factor--the ,christian ,greco-,roman tradition--renders history intelligible74 ,herein ,belloc is consciously separated from ,marxist history1 which would explain the past as determined exclusively through economic pressures4 ,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 time1 independently of1 or dominating1 the counter-pressure of human action4 ,to study1 think1 and write history as ,belloc did demands a rare brand of personal integration4 ,a personal ,faith1 through which the ,christian tradition is comprehended1 is united with humanism1 through which the human and non-human causes operative in history are accorded their just causality in the judgment of the past4 ,these lines of causality must be kept distinct1 but they cannot be separated4 ,if they are separated1 the historian will fall into some kind of ,barthianism1 in which the ,gospel is conceived as a message that acts through the ages independently of men and society1 and in which secular man goes his own way totally uneffected by the ,christian dispensation4 ,if1 on the contrary1 the lines of causality are identified1 then history is turned into the pious hagiography of fashionable ,french ladies of the last century4 ,to ignore or to minimize either the ,church or the secular is to fail to understand ,western ,europe4 ,as an example of ,belloc's balancing of historical causality one should watch him in act as he analyzes the ,french ,revolution4 ,a host of causes made the ,revolution3 the ,christian doctrine of human equality2 the ruining of the prestige of the monarchy by ,louis ,,xv's public indulgence of the flesh prolonged into middle and old age2 the antiquated system of taxation1 based on a defunct manorial society1 which bankrupted the realm2 the extravagance and scandal given by a woman too long denied the rights of marriage2 ,drouet's ride 78,good ,lord1 what a ride60 says ,belloc72 the heroism of the ,french at ,wattignies2 the democratic spirit of the ,gauls united so paradoxically with the temper of the soldier--these were all actual causes of the ,revolution4 ,the failure of almost any one of them would have ruined or at least modified the ,revolution4 ,when faced with these facts1 few historians would deny the rightness of ,belloc's contention4 ,but it remains true that these causes1 all of which moved to one effect1 are not actually operative within the minds of most academic historians when they set down the story4 ,what use would an ,hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the flight of the ,king8 ,his theory cannot admit that wild contingency1 full of the drama of human existence1 to have altered the course of history4 ,he is bound by his own dialectic4 ,neither the free will of ,drouet1 nor the strength of the man's horse1 nor the quality of his skill1 can genuinely enter ,hegelian history2 nor can they enter the systems of ,spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him1 because systems of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical contingency4 ,what modern vulgarian1 conditioned by our mechanical theories about sex1 can really understand ,marie ,antoinette--so ,catholic at the end1 and always so much the woman6 ,theories of history can take these contingencies and admit them as facts1 but they can not use them in their over-all explanations4 ,these historians are not humanists1 but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that escapes the purely scientific4 ,for an insight into ,belloc's humanist penetration1 one could do little better than to read him on ,king ,charles ,i of ,england4 ,for centuries ,charles has been a puzzle to students of history3 carrying with him all the glamour of the ,stuarts1 he was certainly the noblest of that ill-omened house 7if one except ,james ,francis ,edward71 and yet why did he let ,strafford go to his death8 ,this moral failure of the ,king is contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war1 from the raising of the royal standard at ,nottingham to his execution4 ,charles simply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling3 we cannot think of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next2 there is a constancy about his whole life1 and how can this constancy be understood in the light of the death of ,strafford8 ,explained it must be1 if the ,english ,civil ,war is to make sense4 ,belloc1 uniting the ,newmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a humanist1 draws this sketch of the man's character3 ,i may compare the effects of his inward strength to the effects produced by one kind of resistance against an impact4 ,when men plan to make impact against resistance in the will of another they expect1 and commonly find1 at first a resistance4 ,they proceed to wear it down4 ,if it gets less1 they are introduced to a last struggle in which1 when they have taken all the outworks1 they may naturally expect to succeed4 ,so it was with the pressure brought against the boy's father1 ,james ,i1 in the first beginnings of the revolt of the gentry against him4 ,james' ,parliaments--that is1 the country gentlemen--pushed him further and further4 ,such an action is like a siege1 it can have but one end1 and as we know1 ,james1 fighting from trench to trench1 always1 in the end1 gave way4 ,then again1 there is the kind of resistance offered by men who are adamant in the beginning4 ,they bluntly refuse1 and if you lose your first battle against them you can go no further4 ,but ,charles was to be neither of these4 ,his nature1 trained in isolation1 was fluid against the first onset of attack2 then there came a moment when the attack reached something quite different from the first fluid resistance--a stone wall4 ,it was thus that he came to his death4 ,men were led on to think him pliable2 when they came unexpectedly on rigidity1 they were infuriated4 ,now this distinction1 ,i take it1 between his fixity upon certain things1 well defined in his own mind1 and his indecision or rather lack of convinced cause for resistance on the rest--this quality in him which kept in reserve and hidden an ultimate power of complete refusal 7even to martyrdom7 took root1 ,i say1 in these very early years when he was compelled1 almost against himself1 to consider in private what remedy he could find for his defects4#dc ,belloc did not find the above in any written document1 admitting of a learned footnote4 ,he concluded to it1 following on a study of all the available data4 ,his moral judgment concerning ,charles would be called 8romancing0 by historians of one brand of the ,historismus school4 ,if history is but surface phenomena or ideology1 then these men are right4 ,but if history has been caused efficiently1 in part1 by men acting in all their strength and failing in their weaknesses1 then the ,bellocian method is dangerously right3 right1 because without such a method history remains incomplete and even superficial2 dangerous1 because the humanist instrument is a delicate rapier and not one to be used without caution1 skill1 and human understanding4 ,one cannot affirm that ,belloc always kept the necessary balance1 but he kept it steadily enough through a lifetime of historical labour to have bequeathed us a kind of history rarely written in these days1 or in any day for that matter3 history which respects tradition1 both political and religious1 and history which respects the human person in all the tissue of good and evil from whence proceeds human action4 ,although the use of the technique of 8converging probabilities0 frequently issues into judgments that are humanist1 i4e4 judgments about men1 ,belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish historical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human personality4 ,in these impersonal studies about battles1 roads1 rivers1 etc41 ,belloc pointed up his polemic against the ,german ,idealist school that refused to deal with things4 ,the ,stane ,street1 written in #aiac1 is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind of historical investigation4 ,although the book was severely written1 with little of the high rhetoric associated with much of ,belloc's history1 there are two passages that reveal ,belloc's attack against historical idealism4 ,let me not be misunderstood2 the repeated view that ,britain was a sparsely inhabited and only partially ,romanised province1 is one which no one today with a care for historical truth will maintain4 ,it arose in that hypothetical and ,north ,german school of history which prefers to accumulate facts rather than co-ordinate evidence2 which delights to give guesswork an equal rank with record1 and invariably to oppose that guesswork against the tradition of civilization 444 there has grown up a deplorable academic habit which will build most readily upon the very absence of proof1 and one must refute such falsehood before one can proceed to truth 444 the mere lack of evidence is used for the purposes of confident negation 444 it is the peculiar disease of our time in this province of inquiry4 ,for instance1 we know nothing of ,london between the time when ,imperial ,rome still taxed and administered ,britain and the seventh century1 when1 with the return of the ,catholic ,church1 writing and record returned4 ,wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly maintain the fantastical theory that ,london in the interval did--what8 why1 ceased to exist6 ,no one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of the ,universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves responsible for so amazing a statement4 ,it is none the less true4 ,because we do not know what happened to ,london between one fixed date 444 and another 444 therefore it has been solemnly put forward under academic authority that ,london in the interval disappeared6 ,it is folly1 of course4 ,it is as clear an abandonment of common sense as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours when we happen to be absent from them4#dd ,it is amusing to note that one phrase in the above passage was repeated almost verbatim twenty years later1 when ,belloc wrote of his dead companion ,chesterton1 that 8he had the singular good fortune to have escaped the ,university40 ,he wrote this phrase in a context dealing with ,chesterton's realism4 ,this was the same ,chesterton who had said that the only sin was 8to call green grass grey40 ,it was the same ,chesterton who saw with his friend that there is one1 implicit1 rarely articulated first principle behind the modern mind3 things are not what they seem to be2 the postulate of an impoverished universe1 as it has been called4 ,whig history was one enemy2 but the great enemy against which ,belloc directed his historical guns was ,german ,historismus1 the child of ,hegelian idealism1 and the enemy of reality4 ,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 8things are40 ,if historical method had grown up unencumbered by ideological weeds1 the ,western ,world would never have seen the great destructive attack made on ,scripture in the last half of the nineteenth century by ,german scholarship4 ,it seems reasonable to assume that the new scholarly techniques would have aided men like ,belloc in exploding the older ,whig myths4 ,things did not happen that way1 because the academic mind behind the new method was corrupted with the pride of idealism4 ,it was a mind diseased to the core that laid its hands on everything hitherto held sacred and true by the united conscience of ,christendom4 ,german historical research1 around the last quarter of the nineteenth century1 touched nothing that it did not negate3 filial traditions1 the lore of the old rooted peasantries of ,europe1 religious symbolism whose meaning had been settled for centuries1 finally ,scripture itself4 ,this was one of the ,barbarians who can never build1 but who can only destroy that from which he feeds4 ,chesterton fought the same battle against these iconoclasts on the level of comparative religion that ,belloc fought on the level of secular history4 ,they united in an assault against the idol-breakers1 against that mentality that refuses to look and see what is there to be seen4 ,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 being1 a truculence before the things which are4 ,if the things which engage the senses and call forth the assent of the intellect interfere with academic theory1 then the things are thrown away1 and the theory wins the day4 ,if physical evidence attests to a late and active ,roman influence in ancient ,britain1 and in so doing contradicts official dogma1 then the evidence is to be ignored or explained away4 ,if the physical evidence of a document attests to its authenticity1 when a theory insists that it be a fraud1 why then the document is a fraud4 ,if reason and the senses attest to an existing world1 and philosophy proclaims the contrary1 then so much the worse for the world4 ,belloc keenly grasped the destructive tendencies at work within the ,western intelligentsia1 which insisted on fencing itself off from the world by weaving around itself fabric upon fabric of theory4 ,he had nothing but contempt for the scholar who lives in a world of images1 unrelated to existing things4 ,the typical ,intellectual#de inevitably commences to think in terms of1 let us say1 maps coloured this way and that2 he judges peoples and ideas according to the standards of textbooks and fashionable opinions2 he sees the human person in the light of statistical tables 7what ,belloc could have done with the ,american ,school of ,education mentality672 he measures reality by rulers laid on sheets of cut cardboard1 and by sums reckoned on pads of paper4 ,this sort of thing1 typified and caused by idealism1 breeds jingoism1 pacifism1 internationalism1 and other brands of ideologies unrelated to reality1 and conformed to nothing but systems of phantasy and imagery4 ,belloc's historical attack against ,german ,historismus must be coupled with his social satire4 ,both functioned as part of the same polemic against 8the ,barbarian40 ,as a social satirist he sprayed his irony like acid on this mythological world that has come upon the ,west4 ,dozens of his essays and all of his nonsense novels are aimed at exposing and ridiculing the contemporary loss of the sense for reality4 ,belloc penetrated1 sometimes almost inarticulately1 into the core of the business3 if man is removed from being he cannot be himself1 and if he cannot be himself1 he cannot enter into the ,city of ,god1 without which there is neither happiness here nor beatitude beyond4 ,this realization of his rendered him the great iconoclast of the iconoclasts3 he broke the idols of the idol breakers4 ,science he openly branded 8the enemy of the truth40 ,industrial ,capitalism was the 8,servile ,state10 and the ,successful ,business ,man was a 8share shuffler10 a 8liar and thief02 art was a 8stinking trade10 because he knew well enough that this would blood the solemnity of the avant-garde2 advertising he labels a 8disgusting lie40 ,the servants of the rich are consigned to the bottom of hell1 and polite society is damned with the incomparable3 ,good morning1 ,algernon3 ,good morning1 ,percy4 ,good morning1 ,mrs4 ,roebeck4 ,christ have mercy6#df ,the attack against academic idealism was but the center of ,belloc's broader assault1 carried out through a dozen different artistic media1 against the ,zeitgeist4 ,to grasp the essence of ,belloc's integrated ,christian humanism is to possess the key to understanding his position as a satirist and controversialist4 ,this age1 ,belloc repeats over and over again1 is not at one with the destiny worthy of a man4 ,belloc is ever hammering home one message3 shake off this bad dream1 and look once again at reality1 at being1 at ,creation4 8,dear reader1 read less and sail more40 ,in one of his farewell essays to ,chesterton1 ,belloc declared that the prime glory of his friend was to have seen things as they are4 ,in his own turn1 and in his own way1 that was ,belloc's chief excellence1 as it is the chief excellence of any man who can claim right to public respect or cultural frame4 ,belloc1 principally through his historical work1 fought a battle that was spiritual in origin4 ,on the whole ,belloc's attack seems to have been less effective than ,chesterton's1 because ,chesterton brought to the battle an amazing good humour and charity for the enemy4 ,he slaps his foe on the back1 jokes with him1 and enjoys himself hugely4 ,belloc publicly glowers over against the foe4 ,he was always the ,roman soldier holding the citadel against the savage from without4 ,belloc brought to his task an extremely lucid reason1 ,french not only in its incisive keenness1 but in its cynicism as well4 ,he could rarely accept the good will of men who opposed his judgments4 ,they were either fools or liars4 ,there is some irony in ,belloc's judgment that ,chesterton's effectiveness was blunted because of his charity4 ,for once1 ,belloc's realism broke down1 as does the realism of the ,french break down1 from time to time1 when faced with some great simplicity4 ,it was ,chesterton's very 8weakness0 7in ,belloc's eyes7 that rendered him the more effective of the two in this one aspect of their work3 the polemic against un-realism4 ,chesterton won by his very simplicity1 and by the greatness of his childlike vision--so sane and so just1 and so full of good will4 ,belloc made the enemy mad4 ,he stung them1 and they reacted in the most deadly way possible4 ,they ignored him after a time1 so that today ,belloc remains a writer who has not been tried and found wanting1 but who has simply not been tried at all4 ,possibly ,belloc was too effective in his war against the ,dons4 ,he made fools of them1 and then he insisted on rubbing it in4 ,there is an essay in ,hills and the ,sea called 8,the ,roman ,road40 ,it is like many of ,belloc's essays3 first there is a bathing from the springs of something in being1 which is soaked into the author's substance through his senses4 ,then he brings his intellect to bear on whatever it is that has engaged his whole personality1 and some judgment is passed4 ,frequently1 the judgment is moral in character4 ,in this particular essay1 ,belloc relates the story of a ride he took on his horse 8,monster0 over the old road which presents 8an eternal example0 of what ,rome could do4 444 ,that sign of ,roman occupation1 the modern word 8,cold ,harbour10 is scattered up and down it4 ,there are ,roman pavements on it4 ,it goes plumb straight for miles1 and at times1 wherever it crosses undisturbed land1 it is three or four feet above the level of the down4 ,here then1 was a feast for the learned3 since certainly the more obvious a thing is1 the more glory there must be in denying it 444 just as they will deny that ,austerlitz was fought in spite of ,trafalgar1 or that the ,gospel of ,saint ,john is the ,gospel of ,saint ,john4 ,here1 then1 sitting upon this ,roman road ,i considered the nature of such men and when ,i had thought out carefully where the nearest ,don might be at the moment1 ,i decided that he was at least twenty-three miles away1 and ,i was very glad3 for it permitted me to contemplate the road with common sense1 and with ,faith1 which is ,common ,sense transfigured2 and ,i could see the ,legionaries climbing the hill4444 ,but chiefly there returned as ,i gazed the delicious thought that learned men1 laborious and heavily endowed1 had denied the existence of this ,roman road4444 ,here was a piece of pedantry and skepticism which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation 444 but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy4 ,as ,i considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things2 the kind of way he talks2 the kind of face he has2 the kind of book he writes2 the kind of publisher who chisels him2 and the kind of way in which his works are bound4444 ,with every moment my elation grew greater and more impetuous4444 ,but as they brought me beer and bacon that evening1 and ,i toasted the morning1 the memory of things past1 ,i said to myself3 8,oxford1 ,cambridge1 ,dublin1 ,durham--you four great ,universities--you terrors of ,europe--that road is older than you3 and meanwhile ,i drink to your continued healths1 and let us have a little room 444 air1 give us air1 good people4 ,i stifle when ,i think of you40#dg ,no wonder he was ignored6 ,what else could they do with a man like that8 ,once he subjected his own masterpiece1 ,the ,path to ,rome1 to the techniques and presuppositions of the 8,higher ,criticism10 and he proved his own book to have been written probably as early as the year #bjjf4 ,it was all high and hilarious fun1 until the enraged ,catholic1 the dedicated man1 flashed out in the last lines3 8,that is how the damned fools write3 and with brains of that standard ,germans ask me to deny my ,god40#dh ,belloc's whole historical practice cannot be understood if it is viewed simply as a reaction against ,whiggery4 ,it is more pointedly a reaction against ,historicism4 ,to this negative side of his work must be added an insight1 as indicated1 into a position that is at once traditional1 theocentric1 humanist1 and because of the union of these things--causal4 ,if this were all ,belloc did as an historian1 the palm of high accomplishment would have been his4 ,but his superb art added the ring of greatness4 ,belloc the ,grizzlebeard was never abstracted from ,belloc the ,poet1 and from ,belloc the ,sailor4 ,he always entered into the past as the whole man1 the ,four ,men4 ,after hunting down innumerable details which gave vividness to the drama of the past1 he re-enacted the story by an act of imaginative reconstruction4 ,belloc personally possessed that ,english gift of visual imagination that he attributed to ,milton4 ,the unification of history and art1 played down but never totally suppressed in the general histories and monographs1 blazed forth in the biographies so powerfully that time was almost physically conquered4 ,belloc's biographical work shows a constant shifting between a universal view that sees the whole of ,christendom1 and an approach that frames the present in a series of vividly sketched vignettes4 ,he could transfigure the past4 ,he would haunt the scenes of great battles and stand in these fields of decision1 now emptied of their glory2 his appearance would be timed to the month and day1 and if the exact weather conditions of history did not prevail1 he returned until they did4 ,some poetic power1 the exact nature of which he often pondered and never discovered to his satisfaction1 was given him1 and the past would roll back before him4 ,a vast and intimate knowledge of the minutiae of history1 informed by his sweeping vision1 seemed to touch the things and places once sanctified or defiled by men and actions past4 ,listen to him as the drums of ,wattignies roll down the centuries3 ,the sleepless men had been launched at last1 the hollow lanes were full of them swarming upward3 the fields were ribbed with their open lines1 and as they charged they sang4 ,immortal song6 ,the pen has no power over colour or over music1 but though ,i cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of triumph yet ,i have heard them singing3 ,i have seen their faces as they cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the #c1jjj upon every side4 444 ,two charges disputed their certain victory4 ,first1 the ,hungarian cavalry 444 then the ,royal ,bourbon1 emigrants1 nobles1 swept upon the ,french1 heads down1 ready to spend themselves largely into death4 ,they streamed with the huge white flag of the old ,monarchy above them1 the faint silver lilies were upon it1 and from either rank the cries that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since ,christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle fronts of ,christendom4444 ,these also failed3 a symbol in name and in flag and in valour of that great1 once good1 and very ancient thing which ,god now disapproved4#di ,this kind of writing is art1 literary art at its best1 wedded here to historical judgment1 keen sensibility1 and poetic vision4 ,this felicitous unity of things not often found together is not a rare perfection1 blessing a dozen odd pages of a life of historical writing2 it is steady1 filling volume after volume1 informing and pleasing through the years2 a life's work of art in which the intended result obtains3 the resurrection of the past1 so that the men of the ,west can come into their own once again4 ,chapter ,three ,,christendom3 8,,esto ,,perpetua0 ,today when ,western man thinks of ,christendom1 he thinks of an historical order that is dead1 or he thinks of an academic humanist tradition that synthesizes the ,greek and ,roman heritage with the doctrinal truths of the ,faith4 ,western man rarely thinks of himself as being a man in ,christendom1 for ,christendom is no longer a place1 existing in space1 enduring in time4 ,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 ,faith4 ,his understanding of ,christendom is the most serious problem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought4 ,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 regionalism4 8,europe is the ,faith1 and the ,faith is ,europe40 ,belloc's position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would assert1 nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary ,christians when they think of 8,christendom40 ,in the first place it is simply false to assert that he identified ,catholicism necessarily with ,western ,europe4 ,he expressly states the contrary in the famous and controversial ,europe and the ,faith4#ej ,operative behind his passionate and concrete love of ,european ,catholicism is a doctrinal position that can be stated rather simply3 grace perfects nature1 and grace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions1 but grace operates the better1 the more perfected is man on the natural level4 ,it may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more fully men4 ,the whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything finite2 and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most normal of its own kind4#ea ,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 ,god4 ,in ,rome man began to come into his own2 in ,rome man discovered the possibility of an immortal destiny1 because ,rome had conceived1 even if imperfectly1 the nature of human dignity4 ,roman man is ,myself1 the ,four ,men--integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential incompletion of his own handiwork4 ,christianity came into the ,empire and found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the ,gospel4 ,it was with such stuff that the ,church molded ,western ,europe4 ,the result was ,christendom4 ,the conception of ,christendom lies at the heart of ,belloc's ,christian humanism4 ,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 humanism1 though it is principally the latter4 ,let us first look to the matter theoretically4 ,there is no consciously articulated 8philosophy of ,christendom0 in ,belloc1 and this for two reasons3 ,christendom was an historical fact in his eyes2 you do not theorize about the possibility of that which is2 one ,thing had preserved the best of the ,roman ,order1 had sanctified the human hearth1 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 ,church2 secondly1 and this is a weakness in his armour1 ,belloc had little interest in 7or talent for7 purely philosophical and theological issues as such2 outside of a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against skepticism1 and an almost inarticulate loathing of ,german ,idealism1 he remained aloof from formal philosophy4 ,christendom is not a 8concept0 or a 8thesis0 for him3 she is ,europe and the ages4 ,belloc's failure to elaborate a philosophical defence1 as well as an historical defence1 of the theory of ,christendom has left his whole position in jeopardy4 ,today many highly reputable minds are questioning the validity of the very idea of a ,christendom4 ,the attack is psychologically understandable4 ,the older ,european ,order1 first wounded by the ,reformation1 then weakened spiritually by four centuries of rationalism1 nationalism1 and secular liberalism1 now physically and morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial capitalism1 has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars4 ,the ,christian community will survive in the new era now being born1 it is said1 only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture that no longer exists4 ,today the ,east is throwing off its shackles1 and if the ,faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness of these peoples1 it must come as something native to themselves4 ,to cling to an identification of ,catholicism and ,european ,catholicism is not only bad theology1 it is bad policy4 ,catholicism is supra-temporal and can never be associated essentially with any of the passing cultural forms that she blesses4 ,it is1 then1 impossible to speak of a ,christendom as being some one unique cultural reality1 whose soul is the ,faith4 ,there is more than a little truth to the above reasoning1 and there can be no doubt that ,belloc's dogged passion for complete1 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 form4 ,to separate the ,faith from the freedom and the institutions of the ,west was in his eyes to divorce the mother from its child1 and to desecrate that historical unity that centuries had hallowed4 ,if he overstated his case1 it can be affirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate4 ,the weakness of the anti-,bellocian position lies in its sheer abstractionism4 ,in the abstract there is no question but that the ,faith is culturally neutral4 ,but historically it is simply false to say that the ,church has always been1 and could always be1 neutral to any given civilization to which she has come1 or will come1 preaching salvation4 ,the ,church could never have sanctified ,carthage with its human sacrifice to ,moloch2 the ,church could never have concreted itself in those border cultures that produced the ,mystery ,cults and flirted with the pantheisms of the ,east4 ,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 perfection1 so too ,revelation has always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of corporate perfection achieved by that society4 ,if certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to receive ,faith than others1 it is still true that ,faith comes to them as a pure gift4 ,catholicism did not have to fix itself within the boundaries of the ,greco-,roman world4 ,but the historical fact is that it did so4 ,that ,rome was more apt to receive the ,gospel than were her neighbours is1 to ,belloc1 one of the clearest truths of ,western history4 ,those who accuse ,belloc of theoretically tying the ,church to ,rome confuse two questions3 a theological question and an historical question4 ,doctrinally1 the ,faith belongs to no one by right2 but if the ,faith does come to a man1 it will come to him as to one formed by a unique set of cultural exigencies1 which will aid or will hinder his reception of the ,divine ,gift4 ,the ,faith belongs to no culture by right4 ,some cultures could never have received her2 other cultures could have1 but historically they did not4 ,the fact remains that she came into ,rome1 transformed the ,empire and built a ,europe that had been humanized to a high level by the already existing ,latin ,order4 ,it may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations of our civilization with the ,catholic or universal religion of it1 is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing4 ,the accusation would be historically valueless in any case1 for in history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural1 but with a sequence of proved events in the natural order4 ,but if we leave the province of history and consider that of theology1 the argument is equally baseless4 ,every manifestation of divine influence among men must have its human circumstance of place and time4 ,the ,church might have arisen under ,divine ,providence in any spot3 it did1 as a fact1 spring up in the high ,greek tide of the ,levant and carries to this day the noble ,hellenic garb4 ,it might have risen at any time3 it did1 as a fact1 rise just at the inception of that united ,imperial ,roman system which we are about to examine4 ,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 civilizations1 living or dead3 of ,assyria1 of ,egypt1 of ,persia1 of ,china1 of the ,indies4 ,as a matter of historical fact1 the ,church was so circumstanced in its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its language were those of the ,mediterranean1 that is1 of ,greece and ,rome3 of the ,empire4#eb ,such is the principal meaning of ,europe and the ,faith3 as a matter of fact the ,church arose within the bosom of the ,roman ,empire2 as a matter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the classical world2 it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into the larger ,thing which was the ,faith and which made ,europe in her own image4 ,if you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that breathed the spirit of ,christianity1 you would find it in ,western ,europe that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from without1 and from all the schisms from within4 ,a free peasantry1 the sacredness of marriage1 the dignity of man1 the steady rejection of every ,manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation1 the sacramental view of the universe3 these are to be found in ,catholic ,europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius1 and they are to be found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this earth4 ,the ,church 8lays her foundations in something other10 says ,belloc1 but 8out of that something other came the art and the song of the ,middle ,ages40 ,and he adds his famous taunt to the ,englishmen of his day1 8and what art or song have you80#ec ,such is the basic ,bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship between ,catholicism and ,european ,christendom4 ,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 ,providence1 preparing a way for the ,incarnation4 ,as a man never exists outside of the supernatural order1 with the result that even his natural perfection is achieved under the impetus of grace1 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 perfection4 ,humanism is crowned by grace1 but in a deeper sense1 humanism is caused by grace4 8,the ,church makes men10 ,belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in ,the ,path to ,rome4#ed ,it is small wonder1 then1 that when viewing that sweep of ,empire which is the foundation of the ,west1 when seeing that high pitch of humanism that avoided the ,eastern nihilisms1 when gazing at that magnificent legal structure1 imperfect though it was1 that had as its end the defining of human dignity--when seeing all these things1 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 ,incarnation4 ,grace not only crowns nature but causes nature to flower into its fullness4 ,all human values1 tending of isolation and separate destruction outside ,catholic ,christianity1 are unified within the ,body of ,christ by the bond of ,charity4 ,it is1 therefore1 reasonable to believe that the ,roman ,order--classical humanism--was created by ,god for the sake of the preaching of the ,gospel4 ,compare two passages rather closely3 one was composed around ,a4,d4 #che by the ,christian poet ,prudentius2 the other was written in #aijf by ,hilaire ,belloc in his ,esto ,perpetua4 ,we live in every clime1 as if a paternal city enclosed within its single walls citizens of a single birthplace2 we are all one in heart within our paternal hearth4 ,now1 men from afar and over land and sea appear before a single and common court2 now1 for business and the arts they gather together in the great assembly2 now1 they contract marriages and one people is formed from the mingling of different blood4 ,this has been achieved by so many triumphant successes of the ,roman ,empire1 believe me1 that the way has been prepared for ,christ's event1 a way which the communal friendship of our peace has built under ,roman guidance4 ,for1 what place could there be for ,god in a savage world1 in the discordant breasts of men and in those who guard their own rights by different laws1 as was formerly the case8 ,but1 if the mind1 from its lofty throne1 bridle impulsive rage and the rebellious organs and bring every passion under the sway of reason1 then is built a stable way of life2 then with surety does it drink in ,god and live in submission to the one ,lord4 ,omnipotent ,one1 now is ,your hour2 penetrate the earth where no discord reigns4 ,now1 ,o ,christ1 the world accepts ,you1 this world which peace and ,rome together hold within their grasp4#ee ,setting aside details and moving to the heart of the text1 we could say that the poet has laid down the proclamation of ,christendom3 a corporate theocentric humanism4 ,man's personal and social integration exists in order that ,god may conquer the soul4 ,now listen to ,belloc's passage as he sails away from the ,african shores and faces once more the ,latin ,order3 8,in ,europe1 in the river-valleys10 ,i thought1 8,i will rest and look back1 as upon an adventure1 towards journey in this ,african land 444 ,i shall be back home4 ,i shall come again to inns and little towns 444 and ,i shall see nothing that the ,latin ,order has not made40 ,i thought about all these things as the ship drove on4 ,europe filled me as ,i looked out over the bows1 and ,i saluted her though she could not see me nor ,i her4 ,i considered how she had made us all1 how she was our mother and our author1 and how in that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free4 ,on this account1 although ,i had no wine 7for ,i had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard71 ,i drank in my soul to her destiny4444 ,we pass4 ,there is nothing in ourselves that remains4 ,but do you remain for ever4 ,what happens in this life of ours1 which we had from you1 ,salva ,fide1 ,i cannot tell3 save that it changes and is not taken away4 ,they say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline2 it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved1 and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world4 ,it was in this watch of the early morning that ,i called out to her 8,esto ,perpetua60 which means in her undying language3 8,you shall not die40444#ef ,we pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time4 ,suffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth that 8piety of speech0 reminiscent of the seventeenth century4#eg ,as ,prudentius sees classical ,roman ,europe as caused by ,god in order to be a highway1 a ,roman ,road1 over which will pass the message of the ,gospel1 so does ,belloc look back on this prophecy1 fulfilled through a thousand years full of a ,christendom1 armed1 proud1 conscious of its destiny4 ,aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the cruel laws of time1 he nonetheless prays that historic ,christendom may remain one ,thing1 8the standing grace of this world40 ,to a contemporary thinker1 even a contemporary ,christian thinker1 ,christendom is something apart from himself--an historic era1 good in its day1 but its day is now done4 ,he stands outside of the old ,european ,unity1 for it exists no longer1 except perhaps in 8the river-valleys10 and in the mountains1 as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism4 ,he looks to a new synthesis of ,christianity with the modern world1 and in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look back and who would still hope for the ,resurrection of ,europe4 ,but ,belloc always saw ,christendom as some one historic ,reality1 thrusting itself into the dimension of present time--a ,reality within which he has consciously situated himself4 ,having become one with the men of old ,europe 7how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery of the ,continent1 the silent men of ,south ,england1 and the company of those that sail7 he could only look back for corporate salvation4 ,to look to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the ,roman ,order would be for him to destroy himself4 ,you cannot uproot an unalienated man4 ,supporting this hidden marriage with his origins is ,belloc's firm opposition to the ,hegelian conception of history1 in which the old is necessarily overcome by the new1 and in which nothing historical remains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism4 ,those men who say that the old ,christendom is dead may be right1 but when they ground their opinion in an historical determinism1 they demonstrate their inability to understand the organic nature of a traditional society1 in which the past can be renewed through an ever recurrent act of collective memory4 ,the old ,european ,christendom that ,belloc loved so well may never come back2 its rich cultural diversity1 its personal individualism and patchwork of small property1 its shrines1 its liberating chaos--these things can have no place in a world committed to the principle of technological and collectivist barbarism4 ,the ,european way of life died1 not because it had to1 but because there were not enough men left with the will to keep it alive4 ,belloc had the will1 but his prayer1 8,you shall not die10 seems a trifle remote in this fifth decade of the century4 ,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 men4 ,the ,faith may1 at some future date1 arise out of the new catacombs and be faced with sanctifying a society that is neither humanist nor humane4 ,belloc recognized this possibility1#eh always believing the contrary more likely4 ,but should a ,christian ,order commence to arise out of the atomic ruins of a mechanical and industrial desert1 it will work again to the erection of a genuinely human order4 ,and should the men of this new age wish to know that freer and broader vision of their half-forgotten fathers1 they could do no better than to turn to the work of this last of the rooted men4 ,if the old ,christendom is dead1 then a new ,christendom will be built in time4 ,christendom may be considered an 8outmoded concept0 by some thinkers who consider the modern world to have been a necessity4 ,these intellectuals fail to see that ,christendom is rather a fundamental urge1 deep within man1 grounded in an ontological need for the complete integration of man's spiritual and temporal destinies4 ,the issue needs further elucidation4 ,there have been so many attacks in recent years against the ,bellocian position on the relationship between ,europe and ,catholicism1 and on his understanding of 8,christendom10 that a thorough airing of the subject is necessary4 ,in the first place1 only an irresponsible writer like ,sidney ,hook would accuse ,belloc of identifying the interests of ,catholicism with the ancien rgime4#ei ,belloc gloried in the best traditions of the ,revolution1 and1 with the exception of ,bernanos1 he seems to be the only historian to have grasped the ,christian continuity of the new and the older political traditions of ,europe4 ,he was so much the ,republican that he was duped by the pretensions of ,rousseau4 ,the charges of reaction are not worth the dignity of a formal reply4 ,in the second place1 those quite responsible men who oppose the ,bellocian slogan of 8,europe is the ,faith0 are guilty1 not of irresponsibility1 but of a lack of intellectual subtlety4 ,to state that the ,faith is supra-temporal and is thereby never to be identified with any given civilization is to enunciate a truism1 and to miss the point4 ,it is one thing to say that no cultural order is of the essence of the ,faith2 it is another thing to say that the ,faith is of the essence of some given cultural order4 ,the latter is ,belloc's position4 ,when the ,faith is of the essence of that culture1 then that civilization is part of1 or coincident with1 ,christendom4 ,the historical proof of ,belloc's point lies in the brutal truth that when that given social order loses the ,faith1 it ceases to be itself4 ,such is the meaning of 8,europe is the ,faith40 ,more profoundly and more to the heart of the issue is the objection to conceiving ,christendom1 if there is or has been or will be such1 as a place4 ,today probably all would agree that ,christendom is largely a state of mind2 but with ,belloc the writer of these pages asserts that ,christendom must become a place1 because man is a material as well as a spiritual creature1 existing in space1 enduring in time4 ,as his inner perfection necessitates the interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural1 so too must this inner personal unity be projected externally in a corporate entity that ideally could be bounded geographically1 politically1 and socially4 ,that ,god be found in a shrine is a paradox inherent in the very mystery of the ,incarnation4 ,that man1 once he is ,christian1 will try to build a house of such a nature that he can say to himself and to his friends1 8,this is a place in which ,christian men will be at home10 is the inner meaning of ,christendom in the thought of ,hilaire ,belloc4 ,he always sought out old inns1 and it was because he hoped to find lingering there something of the essence of what was once the ,christian ,inn of ,mankind4 ,in one sense1 a ,christian is always an exile4 ,in another sense1 he is an island2 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 8,jesus ,christ was in the morning skies40#fj ,belloc grasps the older ,european ,christendom1 in its ideals and in the best of its actualities1 as a truly human society1 permeated from top to bottom with grace1 and given direction and destiny by the ,universal ,faith4 ,personal perfection necessitates the communal act in which society is built as a home for man4 ,the ,city of ,man exists for the furthering of human perfection4 ,the ,city must be personal3 from this follows ,belloc's detestation of impersonal governments4 ,the best government would be one personally exercised by all men1 acting together for the common good4 ,where this democratic society is impossible of fulfillment1 the community is best incarnated in a monarchy3 one man sums up in himself a people1 and one man is responsible to all4 ,the ,bellocian concepts of both democracy and monarchy are not co-extensive with the more usually accepted meanings of those terms4 ,for ,belloc democracy is less a static thing than something dynamic4 ,the ,french erupting into the ,revolution1 organizing great armies and local governments almost overnight--such is democracy as ,belloc sees it4 ,it is the older ideal of the ,citizen assuming personal responsibility2 it is ,drouet accepting history at the crossroads1 the ,parisians before the ,tuileries1 man at the barricades4 ,in ,belloc's eyes the only surviving democracies in the ,west are the ,swiss cantons and the mountain state of ,andorra4 ,belloc's monarchy is one man1 symbolizing a people and its traditions1 exercising personal authority1 responsible before the law1 a public sacrifice to the land4 ,he finds his best example in modern times in the ,united ,states of ,america3 in the ,office of the ,presidency4#fa ,a personalist society1 be it democratic or monarchical1 will foster those occupations attached directly to fundamentally human needs4 ,man needs to build2 he needs to plant and to plow1 to make things with his hands1 to incarnate his aspirations in song and the plastic arts2 he needs to fight1 and he needs to pray4 ,the peasant1 the artisan1 the soldier1 the scholar1 the poet1 the priest--these will dominate any humanist culture in ,belloc's sense of the term4 ,a broad base of well-distributed property will lie under the whole economic organism1 insuring the personal character of the res publica1 stamping it with the mark of humanity4 ,belloc has little use for a merchant society 7exemplified in his eyes by ,carthage and ,whig ,england74 ,the merchant necessarily is engaged in furthering his own profit1 and he must prosper by feeding on those elements within the community that are productive4 ,merchants will always be in a society1 but if the state is controlled by their spirit1 then the ,city of ,man is finished4 ,profit1 not human perfection1 is the bourgeois ideal4 ,viewed ideally1 ,belloc's humanist society1 on which he constructed his distributist economics1 would be characterized by a rich multiplicity of functions rooted in fundamental human drives4 ,the ,city of ,man is the extension1 the natural fulfillment1 and the guarantee of the personal integration symbolized by ,the ,four ,men4 ,man1 unalienated in the densities of his own subjectivity1 achieves an objective corporate unity with his fellows4 ,even the most penetrating and private of natural mysteries1 that of poetic creation1 finds its full significance only in the ,forum4 8,for the ,poet1 though divine1 is a servant4 ,he is the god of the house of ,admetus2 and not all his fellowship with heaven would make him what he is did he not bring to birth the struggling song1 as yet undelivered in his fellow men40#fb ,belloc's ideal of the good social order is not a utopia4 ,the 8proprietary state10 as he calls it1 is the natural order of things for men1 and only the parochialism of a vision that cannot see beyond the last century on the ,continent1 or beyond the ,reformation in ,england1 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 nature4 ,in his final books1 written just before the catastrophe of ,world ,war ,,ii1 ,belloc declared that ,denmark and ,ireland1 and the ,portugal of ,salazar1 were the most decent states within which man could find his personal and social perfection4 ,in contemporary cultural theory1 there are a number of parallels to ,belloc's distributist or proprietary ideal4 ,in the ,united ,states a similar conception can be found in the thought of the ,southern ,critics4 ,in ,england1 ,mr4 ,t4 ,s4 ,eliot has advanced a like doctrine in his ,notes ,toward the ,definition of ,culture4 ,both men conceive of culture as fundamentally traditional1 i4e4 organic4 ,both see culture as dual3 in one dimension it is familial and private2 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 own2 status rather than contract is the ideal1 for in status is to be found peace1 both personal and public2 on another dimension culture is public1 and the plurality of economic life is given a unity which flowers in political1 artistic1 and religious life4 ,however1 two radical divergencies in the thought of ,eliot and ,belloc decisively separate their respective humanisms4 ,eliot's society is aristocratic and post-,reformation ,english in inspiration2 ,belloc's is either democratic or monarchical1 and therefore egalitarian1 which is to say that it is ,latin and ,catholic in spirit4 ,eliot sees religious conflicts as making for a richer cultural diversity4 ,for ,belloc the ,reformation and the rending of ,christendom is the greatest scandal in the story of the ,west4 ,in spite of the ,french antecedents of ,belloc's social ideals1 his proprietary traditions are rooted deeply in the ,english past4 ,most anti-collectivist thinking in the ,english-speaking world today looks to ,burke and the theory of prescriptive politics4 ,but for all his conservatism1 ,burke never succeeded in dispelling the ,whig curse4 ,there is another tradition that runs back1 like a narrow and straight road1 through ,chesterton and ,belloc to the ,tory-,radicalism of ,william ,cobbett1 and beyond to the ,cavaliers and to the ,king who died for ,england2 there the road broadens into a great highway filled with the yeomen who rose in the ,pilgrimage of ,grace4 ,and beyond all this stands the high medieval vision of ,fortesque3 a vision of a land of free men1 eating and drinking their own1 owing allegiance neither to aristocrat nor capitalist1 but to ,god and ,england alone4 ,such is the ,city of ,man in ,hilaire ,belloc's thought4 ,but this ,city1 ,belloc indicates time and again1 is not of itself4 ,it has no fully independent existence of its own1 nor can it ever be a completely autonomous reality4 ,for it to be at all1 it must flourish within the higher ,city which is the ,city of ,god4 ,just as the individual man can find his natural perfection only by losing himself in ,christ1 so too can the community of all men find its soul only within the bosom of ,christian ,wisdom4 ,religious truth1 absolute and unquestioned1 not only guarantees but causes a ,god-oriented humanist culture to come into its own4 ,the sacredness of the person and the eternal relationship he bears to ,god through ,christ are truths of an order which is not human1 but these truths act within the bowels of society as ,divine ,seeds1 conceiving in time a temporal order both personal and free4 ,this order is ,christendom4 ,it is not the ,city of ,god1 but it is within that ,city1 and it is what it is because it is the child of ,faith4 ,there is a ,city full1 as are all ,cities1 of halt and maim1 blind and evil and the rest3 but it is the ,city of ,god4444 ,there are not two such cities on earth4 ,there is ,one4 ,within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth4 ,outside it1 is the night4#fc ,conclusion ,,the ,,future ,,place ,,of ,,hilaire ,,belloc ,,in ,,english ,,letters ,he was the finest prose stylist of his generation4 ,his art was a habit1 possessed at the center of his being by a man who was conscious of his own power4 ,john ,edward ,dineen has noted how writers of such diverse interests and talents as ,rupert ,brooke1 ,ford ,madox ,ford and ,max ,beerbohm have paid homage to the literary genius of ,hilaire ,belloc4#fd ,baring's famous tribute is well known3 8grave prose like the mellow tones of a beautifully played 'cello 444 solemn1 melancholy and majestic40 ,belloc's prose at its finest was what great prose ought to be3 a sensitive instrument adapted to express1 with great precision and subtle nuance1 the complex genius of its creator4 ,his was an artistry that was largely unmannered1 simple1 sparing in metaphor1 and still remarkably rich3 a prose in a line that stretches back to the origins of classical ,english4 8,no man10 says ,lord ,tweedsmuir1 8has attained more perfectly to the #8piety of speech' of the seventeenth century2 no man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition40#fe ,it is no exaggeration to say that ,belloc's prose1 rooted as it was in the highest literary tradition1 will be read as long as ,english prose is read by men trained in that great heritage4 ,belloc often put forth the older ideal that prose should minister rigidly to meaning4 ,to this end he developed an unadorned1 plain style as the apt instrument for the elucidation of his political and sociological ideas4 ,the ,restoration of ,property1 ,the ,house of ,commons and ,monarchy1 ,the ,stane ,street and1 most especially1 ,the ,servile ,state are the finest examples of ,belloc's working in a manner that is almost dry in its cold lucidity4 ,the writing in these books is severely unrhetorical and refreshingly free from the unavoidable pedantries of contemporary academic prose2 here ,belloc achieves personality in his style only by the constant vigour that informs the whole with an almost military character3 this ,belloc is the ,french logician who can make an idea march to a conclusion4 ,belloc's plain style recalls the older ,oxford manner and suggests the ,newman of the ,parochial ,sermons and ,the ,arians of the ,fourth ,century4 ,belloc's lyricism is found perhaps at the height of its perfection in ,the ,path to ,rome1 ,esto ,perpetua1 and in the little-known translation of ,bedier's ,the ,romance of ,tristan and ,iseult4 ,but for vintage ,belloc1 we must turn to the essays1 and most especially to ,hills and the ,sea4 ,there is the grave style of 8,the ,death of a ,ship02 there is the delicious parody of his grave style in 8,the ,lost ,manuscript40 ,then there is the anecdotal ,belloc telling a story for the sheer love of adventure recalled4 ,there is the humorous ,belloc of the ,great ,fool passages4 ,finally there is the summing up of a life's vision--once again1 ,esto ,perpetua4 ,in the light of such an incomparable artistic mastery1 why is it that ,belloc's reputation has suffered so severely within the last fifteen years8 ,part of the neglect is probably due to the fate of his own generation4 ,the whole ,edwardian and ,georgian period is engulfed under the snobbery of the avant-garde4 ,the heartiness1 the zest for existence1 the enormous ,elizabethan interest in almost everything1 the sheer magnificence of the ,edwardians seem pretentious and a trifle adolescent to a youth who has aged young in an old world now dead4 ,the ,bellocs and ,barings and ,shaws1 diving into the ocean fully clad in evening dress1 seem somewhat beside the point to a generation embittered in the fires of ,world ,war ,,ii4 ,the ,belloc who carried burgundy through the streets of ,rye tires the grim and somewhat desperate intellectual of the day4 ,a change in fashion partially accounts for ,belloc's decline in popularity1 but there is something deeper than mere fashion4 ,if ,belloc is not understood today1 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 ,world4 ,most of us are not rooted men2 we do not live in a traditional culture1 and to pretend to do so would be to fall into an archaic lie4 ,the ,christian living in the center of an industrialized secularism has no ,grizzlebeard4 ,his ,sailor is dead and his ,poet is without sustenance4 ,belloc's 8corporate memories10 and ,mr4 ,eliot's 8piety for the dead10 can be1 at best1 only truncated actualities and ideals impossible of immediate achievement4 ,this is the age of ,unheimlichkeit4 ,man is no longer at home4 ,thinking men turn to those artists who can read the hidden depths of the contemporary soul1 and who can reveal the nature of the homelessness of modern man4 ,thinking ,christians turn to the vision of a ,mauriac or of a ,greene2 they look to an aesthetic penetration into the human soul as it actually passes by on the anonymous pavements of the modern world4 ,these men are listened to because they have captured the wounded spirit of the day4 ,truth1 particularly artistic truth1 is not pragmatic4 ,but artistic popularity always is4 ,he who can speak to a man will be heard4 ,belloc cannot speak to the latter-day man4 ,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 ,christendom3 the love of one's own1 the feel for the soil1 the sense of arms1 the hunger for certitude4 ,belloc speaks for the underground of ,europe4 ,but in some future time1 possibly not remote1 when ,new ,man will have exhausted himself attempting to escape his destiny1 when he will have tried all the doors leading nowhere1 when he will have sickened of paper humanisms1 he may turn to the gnarled wisdom and the eternal youth of this last guardian of the ,west4 ,if he does1 he will learn what it means to be a man4 ,,notes #a ,g4 ,k4 ,chesterton1 ,the ,autobiography of ,g4 ,k4 ,chesterton 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aicf71 pp4 #bbb-h4 #b ,the ,four ,men1 p4 #c4 #c ,ibid41 p4 #cjj4 #d ,ibid41 pp4 #cjb-c4 #e ,ibid41 p4 #cjc4 #f ,ibid41 pp4 #cjd-e4 #g ,raymond ,las ,vergnas1 ,chesterton1 ,belloc1 and ,baring 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aich71 pp4 #gi-hj4 #h ,on at least three different occasions1 in the midst of passages that relate intense spiritual crisis1 ,belloc reverts to the 8,myself0 device4 ,these passages will be discussed later on in the chapter4 #i ,the ,four ,men1 p4 #ef4 #aj ,t4 ,s4 ,eliot1 ,notes ,towards the ,definition of ,culture 7,harcourt1 ,brace ,co41 ,new ,york71 p4 #db4 #aa ,belloc's 8,poet10 as indicated1 is in the ,platonic conception of poetry3 poetry as the intimation of the 8divine40 ,what a contemporary critic would consider essential to a poet1 keen sensibility1 is found in ,belloc's 8,sailor40 #ab 8,the ,autumn and the ,fall of ,leaves10 ,hills and the ,sea1 pp4 #cjj-a4 #ac ,path to ,rome1 p4 #aah4 #ad 8,the ,autumn and the ,fall of ,leaves10 ,hills and the ,sea1 p4 #caa4 #ae ,ibid41 p4 #caa4 #af ,hugh ,kenner1 ,paradox in ,chesterton 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aidg71 passim4 #ag ,elizabethan ,commentary1 p4 #agj4 #ah ,towns of ,destiny1 p4 #bce4 #ai ,ibid41 p4 #bch4 #bj 8,a ,remaining ,christmas10 ,a ,conversation ,with a ,cat1 p4 #bif4 #ba 8,the ,opportunity10 ,short ,talks ,with the ,dead1 p4 #ei4 #bb ,why ,i ,am and ,why ,i ,am ,not a ,catholic1 pp4 #aj-aa4 #bc 8,gilbert ,keith ,chesterton10 ,the ,saturday ,review of ,literature1 ,july #d1 #aicf1 p4 #d4 #bd ,quoted in3 ,maisie ,ward1 ,gilbert ,keith ,chesterton 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aidc71 p4 #dgd4 #be ,p4 ,d4 ,murphy1 8,hilaire ,belloc10 ,america1 ,september #be1 #aibj1 pp4 #eci-dj4 #bf ,the ,path to ,rome1 p4 #afa4 #bg ,ibid41 p4 #aah4 #bh 8,the ,idea of a ,pilgrimage10 ,hills and the ,sea1 p4 #bff4 #bi ,esto ,perpetua1 pp4 #ahh-i4 #cj 8,arles10 ,hills and the ,sea1 p4 #hg4 #ca ,the ,old ,road1 p4 #aa4 #cb 8,a ,remaining ,christmas10 ,a ,conversation ,with a ,cat1 pp4 #bif-g4 #cc ,w4 ,h4 ,auden1 ,the ,enchafed ,flood 7,random ,house1 ,new ,york1 #aiea71 pp4 #c-db4 #cd 8,the ,barbarians10 ,this and ,that and the ,other1 p4 #bbf4 #ce ,ibid41 pp4 #bbf-g4 #cf ,esto ,perpetua1 p4 #agg4 #cg ,the ,old ,road1 p4 #i4 #ch 8,a ,remaining ,christmas10 ,a ,conversation ,with a ,cat1 pp4 #bif-g4 #ci ,mr4 ,belloc ,still ,objects1 p4 #db4 #dj ,douglas ,jerrold1 8,hilaire ,belloc and the ,counter ,reformation10 ,for ,hilaire ,belloc1 ed4 by ,douglas ,woodruff 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aidb71 pp4 #a-aj4 #da ,europe and the ,faith1 pp4 viii-ix4 #db ,this and ,that and the ,other1 p4 #bbj4 #dc ,charles ,i1 ,king of ,england1 pp4 #gb-c4 #dd ,the ,stane ,street1 pp4 #add-e4 #de ,cf4 ,belloc's analysis in 8,reality10 ,first and ,last1 pp4 #fi-gd4 #df 8,on ,mundane ,acquaintances10 ,sonnets and ,verse 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aidd71 p4 #afh4 #dg 8,the ,roman ,road10 ,hills and the ,sea1 pp4 #bbb-c4 #dh 8,the ,higher ,criticism10 ,this and ,that and the ,other1 p4 #bdg4 #di ,marie ,antoinette1 pp4 #eec-d4 #ej ,cf4 note #eb4 #ea 8,the ,men of the ,desert10 ,hills and the ,sea1 p4 #bdi4 #eb ,europe and the ,faith1 pp4 #d-e4 #ec ,the ,path to ,rome1 p4 #cea4 #ed ,loc4 cit4 #ee ,prudentius1 ,contra ,symmachum1 ,,pm1 #b4fji-fce4 #ef ,esto ,perpetua1 pp4 #ahh-i4 #eg ,the phrase is ,lord ,tweedsmuir's2 ,pilgrim's ,way1 pp4 #dh-i4 #eh ,survivals and ,new ,arrivals1 p4 #bai4 #ei ,sidney ,hook1 ,the ,hero in ,history 7,the ,humanities ,press1 ,new ,york1 #aidc71 pp4 #aai1 #abc4 7,there is hidden irony1 and humour as well1 in ,hook's judgment4 ,he discusses a short essay written by ,belloc that appeared in a volume called 8,if1 ,or ,history ,rewritten02 ,belloc speculated1 in his essay1 on what ,france would have been like had the ,revolution failed through the ,royal ,family's escaping from the country4 ,hook1 aware of ,belloc's fame as a ,catholic apologist1 simply assumes ,belloc to imagine a modern ,europe continuing the best traditions of ,christendom1 had the ,revolution failed4 ,but the contrary is the case4 ,belloc guesses--rightly or wrongly is beside the point here--that the ,faith would practically be dead on the ,continent had the ,revolution failed4 ,it is difficult to see how ,hook could have read the piece and said what he did47 #fj ,sonnets and ,verse1 p4 #bi4 #fa ,the ,contrast1 pp4 #hc-acf4 #fb 8,talking of ,byron10 ,short ,talks ,with the ,dead1 p4 #cc4 #fc ,essays of a ,catholic ,layman in ,england1 pp4 #aeg1 #cje4 #fd ,john ,edward ,dineen1 introduction to ,selected ,essays by ,hilaire ,belloc1 compiled by ,j4 ,e4 ,dineen 7,j4 ,b4 ,lippincott ,co41 ,philadelphia1 #aicf71 p4 #f4 #fe ,lord ,tweedsmuir1 ,pilgrim's ,way1 ,an ,essay in ,recollection1 pp4 #dh-i4 ,,list ,,of ,,editions ,,cited ,the ,four ,men 7,thomas ,nelson ,sons1 ,london1 #aijf74 ,hills and the ,sea 7,charles ,scribner's ,sons1 ,new ,york1 #aijf74 ,the ,path to ,rome 7,g4 ,p4 ,putnam's ,sons1 ,new ,york and ,london1 #aijb74 ,elizabethan ,commentary 7,cassell ,co41 ,london1 #aidb74 ,towns of ,destiny 7,robert ,m4 ,mc,bride ,co41 ,new ,york1 #aica74 ,a ,conversation ,with a ,cat 7,harper ,brothers1 ,new ,york1 #aibi74 ,short ,talks ,with the ,dead and ,others 7,the ,cayme ,press1 ,kensington1 #aibf74 ,esto ,perpetua 7,duckworth1 ,london1 #bnd4 imp41 #aibe74 ,the ,old ,road 7,constable ,co41 ,london1 #aiaa74 ,this and ,that and the ,other 7,methuen ,co41 ,london1 #aibg74 ,europe and the ,faith 7,the ,paulist ,press1 ,new ,york1 #aibj74 ,charles ,i1 ,king of ,england 7,j4 ,b4 ,lippincott ,co41 ,london1 #aicc74 ,the ,stane ,street 7,constable ,co41 ,london1 #aiac74 ,first and ,last 7,methuen ,co41 ,london1 #aibd74 ,sonnets and ,verse 7,sheed ,ward1 ,new ,york1 #aidd74 ,marie ,antoinette 7,g4 ,p4 ,putnam's ,sons1 ,new ,york and ,london1 #aica74 ,survivals and ,new ,arrivals 7,macmillan1 ,new ,york1 #aibi74 ,the ,contrast 7,robert ,m4 ,mc,bride ,co41 ,new ,york1 #aibd74 ,essays of a ,catholic ,layman in ,england 7,macmillan1 ,new ,york1 #aica74 ,mr4 ,belloc ,still ,objects 7,ecclesiastical ,supply ,association1 ,publ4 and ,imports1 ,san ,francisco1 #aibg74