WHY BELLOC STILL BOTHERS THEM

The hunting season on Hilaire Belloc has never really ended.

It began in his lifetime and finding fault with this incomparable writer has remained the favorite sport of many minds since, some of those minds quite shallow and some quite brilliant.  His biographers have followed suit, finding his prose delightful but his insights - to use their well-worn word - "troubling".  Even the biographers most sympathetic to him have, strangely, not understood him.  It is hard to understand a man who is Catholic to the very core of his being.  Such men are few in history.

But the pot-shots aimed in his direction keep-a-coming and nearly all of them come from those who either have never read him, or read him only very superficially.  Many Catholics, both of the Modernist variety and those of the Catholic variety, find it necessary to dust off the old subject and come gunning for the man whose very name is a synonym for an intensely strong and virile Faith.  We came across this somewhat recent example from Britain's Catholic Herald: 

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2011/12/05/is-belloc-best-forgotten/

The author is a Catholic priest, Father Lucie-Smith.  We might say he is evidently a Catholic priest who is not too much in tune with his Church's glorious past.  We might say with some justification that he has not as yet been gifted with a "sensus Catholicus", that manner of thinking which sees everything with the eyes of that Faith which is completely true and which was presented to the world by the Son of God Himself and therefore from God Himself.  A Catholic man without a sensus Catholicus is a man who is easily buffeted by winds coming from all directions for he has not anchored himself to those truths which came from his Creator.  Nor is this a particularly harsh judgment of the man.  For all I know he may be a prayerful, orthodox priest who says a reverent Mass and lives the pure and challenging life of a man in Holy Orders.  But being such a man and such a priest does not necessarily give him greater insights into historical or even religious matters.  He is, after all, a man, like all of us fallible and human.

What he could and should be, is well-read.  Reading the article it is evident that he is surprisingly uncurious about a whole body of literature that came to be known in the early years of the 20th century in England as the Catholic Literary Revival.  He criticizes Belloc for the very same views held by other notable Catholics of the day, Cardinal Manning, J.B. Morton, Chesterton, Wyndham-Lewis and Hollis among others.  If he is going to castigate Belloc for these "troubling" views he is going to have to apply the same dislike to a number of other eminent men whose thinking matches the thinking of Hilaire Belloc.  But Belloc is, in my view, still a  favorite target because he is so thoroughly Catholic.  Modern Catholics cannot understand a Catholic like this.  Such men are looked upon as sadly prehistoric.  They will tolerate, even admire, Chesterton mainly because he is perhaps a bit more gentle in his prose, but for the forthright Mr Belloc they shudder and turn away.  He is much too direct for the modern taste.

Consider the sentence which closes the first paragraph of Father Lucie-Smith's article:

       "I have never read anything substantial by Belloc."

What is one to make of such a sentence?  Really, such a remark is unworthy of comment, as it can only bring embarrassment to its author.  Yet undaunted he continues on in much the same vein throughout the rest of the piece.

To say that Hilaire Belloc never wrote anything substantial is pretty much an admission that you have never opened the pages of one of his books.  That would be the most charitable explanation.  The less charitable explanation is that he has completely severed any connection with Catholicism's past and, therefore cannot understand what the Church has handed down over its 2,000 year history.

Reading Belloc is like living through the times he is writing about.  He had that uncanny ability to bring the reader a perfect understanding of the time, people and place.  His judgments were nearly always sound, and though I would be a poor admirer of the man if I did not point out that he did seem to misjudge certain historical events, most notably (and oddly), the French Revolution, I would be poorer still if I did not see the perfect rightness of his overall views as to how the Catholic Church built civilization, and the minute details of, say, the English Reformation.  No other historian has more clearly explained what exactly happened in England when after a thousand years it decided to cast off its Faith.

Father Lucie-Smith again:

     "His history books are very thin on fact and solid research, and long on argument, and the arguments, one gets the impression, are repeated again and again."

When I was a boy in school my teachers, bless their hearts, had to hammer into my mind again and again certain points which my dreamer's mind failed to grasp.  Spaced repetition is sound learning technique.  It is the technique Belloc used to get his points across, apparently to the dismay of critics like Father Lucie-Smith.  If the good Father understands Belloc's point after reading it once, well and good.  He is far more gifted than more obtuse souls like the present writer.  But we can always use a reminder and Belloc was there to give us those reminders.  And with the gift for prose writing that he had every word was music.  As to Lucie-Smith's remark that Belloc's books are "thin on fact and solid research" all I can say is that we readers would have been edified if he had produced several examples to support such a statement.  However, we look in vain for those examples for he doesn't offer any.

He finds Belloc's delightful The Path to Rome "unreadable".  That would surely qualify him for the honor of being in the one-of-a-kind category.  Even Belloc's most furious detractors are charmed by that book, which makes one wonder if Father Lucie-Smith is here possibly engaging in mere cheap shots.  Unreadable?  Father embarrasses himself with such comments.  Can anyone be so dead as to not enjoy that wonderful book?  If Father Lucie-Smith had merely written that the work of Belloc does not appeal to him that would have been simple enough to say.  We would have understood and let it go at that.  But for Father to say that so towering a figure in English letters writes essentially rubbish, except for a few charming children's books, is to suggest that we are in the presence of someone who has only a very superficial knowledge of literature, more importantly historical literature.

Here is a bit of Belloc, writing in "The Great Heresies" about the coming modern attack upon the Church (the book was written in 1938):

"I say again, the Modern Attack on the Faith will have in the moral field a thousand evil fruits, and of these many are apparent today, but the characteristic one, the one presumably the most permanent, is the institution everywhere of cruelty accompanied by a contempt for justice."

Insubstantial?  That might have been written today. 

A recent blog post on Linen on the Hedgerow highlights a statistical study of conversions to the Catholic faith in England over a century and more.  In the graph which is shown it is interesting to note that conversions spiked precisely during those years (1920 - 1940) when strong Catholic authors like Hilaire Belloc were writing their insubstantial books.  It is needless to note when the decline in conversions took place but suffice it to say that it coincided with a certain calamitous event in the early 1960s and it also coincided with the loss of vibrant Catholic writing.  Illness put an end to Belloc's writing in 1942.  The Second World War began the slow Catholic decline and even though there were a few spikes here and there in the 1950s the bottom fell out in the swinging 60s.  Yet the fact that Englishmen were becoming Catholics while great Catholic writers were writing is the most eloquent testimony to the importance of the Bellocs, the Waughs, the Knoxes, Feeneys, Chestertons, Barings and many others like them.

Father Lucie-Smith tells us at the outset of his article that in his view Hilaire Belloc is best forgotten.  I would say to him that he can rest well in the assurance that that will not happen.  True, probably not one in a thousand Catholics today, clergy or layman, has ever heard of Belloc but that will change when the Church comes back to Her senses.  It is not Belloc who will be forgotten but those who refuse to be taught by him.

In all fairness to Father Lucie-Smith he does end his article on a reasonably kindly note toward the man.  Perhaps he at last saw something in this noble Catholic apologist that gave him pause.  It is our hope that the good Father will find a quiet time to open up not a biography of Hilaire Belloc but a work written by him.  Any book by him.  May he, like us, enjoy the bird song that is the lovely prose of one of the finest authors who ever put pen to paper.