'A Catholic in the room': second thoughts on Hilaire Belloc

Commonweal, Oct 26, 2007 by Peter Steinfels

On May 18,1937, Hilaire Belloc completed a series of lectures at Fordham University, published later that year as The Crisis of Civilization. On May 18, 2007, seventy years to the day, if not quite to the minute, I finished reading that book. I had chanced upon it on the shelves of the university library. What, I wondered, did one of the great figures of the twentieth-century Catholic revival have to say at a moment when, all exaggeration aside, civilization truly had faced crisis--faced, in fact, world war and genocide and the extinction of one totalitarianism and the expansion of another and the creation of new forms of mass destruction that continue to cast a chill on our existence.

More than three decades before delivering those lectures, Belloc had published The Path to Rome. It was a book I read and reread, savored and celebrated, as a high-school student. (Long before the name Hilaire Belloc meant anything to me, I was hugely entertained by parental readings from his Cautionary Verses for children. Having an older brother named James, I naturally reveled in the gruesome details of the tale of "Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion.") What exactly made The Path to Rome so winning to a seriously Catholic adolescent of the late 1950s? Part of it certainly was Belloc's ardent portrait of Catholicism as a rooted culture, something more deeply implanted even than a set of tenets or a code of conduct. Part of it was the joie de vivre, the irreverent, opinionated, even anarchic spirit that burst out, for instance, in the sudden arguments between "Auctor" and "Lector" that interrupted the narrative, or in the hyperbolic curses or benedictions that Belloc laid upon surly or welcoming villagers. He cheerfully broke or casuistically reinterpreted the vows he had made about conducting his pilgrimage strictly on foot to Rome, indeed attributing to the "voice of the Gods" his decision to cover the last few dozen miles to Milan by railroad. All this was a delightful and salutary challenge to the crabbed moralism then clouding American Catholicism. I probably owe him some important component of whatever healthy mix of piety and humanity that I possess.

Over the years, I have collected other books by Belloc, less to read them, I realize in retrospect, than as souvenirs of my early enthusiasm and as homage to this looming character in recent Catholic intellectual history--stories about memorable Belloc descents on Commonweal's office were still recounted there in the mid-1960s, decades after they had occurred. More recently, Belloc has become one of the canonical literary fixtures around which some conservative Catholics have been striving to construct a Catholic cultural identity. He has even provided a pedigree for a revival of a form of triumphal, aggressive Catholicism that could properly be called neo-Bellocian. "We sometimes hear of the 'triumphalism' of the preconciliar church," philosopher and novelist Ralph McInerny wrote in the National Catholic Register in 1994. "Often, this means mostly the grateful confidence that one holds the true faith. On this basis, Belloc could be the patron of triumphalists. Alas, it's a dwindling band."

"When Belloc was present one always knew there was a Catholic in the room," McInerny added. References to Belloc's directness are inevitably advanced in contrast to the supposed pusillanimity of today's leading Catholics.

These were all reasons for my interest in The Crisis of Civilization. To be sure, I had not remained innocent of the ugly spots in Belloc's outlook--the idiosyncratic but indelible strain of anti-Semitism and the growing sympathy for fascism (but never Nazism) that disfigured his economic radicalism. I suspected that his 1937 lectures might be found wanting.

They were. The thesis was standard Belloc. Catholic Christianity has made European civilization--"formed the nature of the white world," Belloc was not too self-conscious to say. Catholicism had given that world the strength to resist both the passing barbarian assaults in the north and the persistent pressure of Islam on its south and east. That civilization peaked in the high Middle Ages, from 1000 to 1300, "perhaps the highest point in the history of our race." The thirteenth century not only left marvels of intellectual and visual beauty but, despite its inevitable subjection to original sin and its "one great blunder" in which the Fourth Crusade's violent capture of Constantinople rendered irreversible the division between Eastern and Western Christianity, "came nearer to the rule of justice on earth than anything effected before or since."

  All society arranged by status, every man in his place and knowing his
  place, wealth rendered less odious and even noble by stability and
  long succession, the well-divided property of the now almost free
  peasantry and fully free craftsman of the town guaranteed by guild and
  village customs, a hierarchy of functions strictly bound in one feudal
  scheme satisfactory to the political conscience of man, and all that
  ordered social body guaranteed by the vigorous faith whose officials,
  the clergy, came from every source in society, enjoyed a moral
  authority they were not later to know, and performed their mighty
  function adequately and in full order.