Remembering Belloc

By James V. Schall, S.J.

St. Augustine’s Press, 2014 (February)

$22.00, 192 pages

To order: www.staugustine.net

 

As the Christmas season comes to a close as the Epiphany nears, the essay “A Remaining Christmas,” by Hilaire Belloc, came across my desk. In it, Belloc describes the Christmas traditions that took place in his own home in the English countryside in the early years of the last century. The essay is the subject of a chapter in Remembering Belloc, a wonderful collection of essays by Jesuit Father James Schall, who has been reading and writing about Belloc for half a century.

The Christmas essay, writes Father Schall, “is about a place wherein the things that change, and rapidly change, can find themselves confronted with things that do not change, with things that are.” As often with Father Schall, the italics are his: the things that are express man’s ultimate longing, the bedrock reality of our existence. For Belloc, as for Father Schall, Tradition orients us toward the eternal.

Belloc (1870-1953) was an English essayist, poet, and critic, whose great books, such as A Path to Rome, The Cruise of the Nona and The Four Men, remain classics of Catholic literature. Belloc’s faith was one of song, wine, good friends and good food, but also one highly sensitive to internal and external threats to Catholicism. His confident and sometimes-cantankerous Catholicism won him a few enemies and a few friends, the most famous of the latter being G.K. Chesterton.  But this is only part of the story. 

Belloc challenges the easy assumptions that many Catholics hold about Church history and their own relationship to the things that are. 

In Belloc, the whole Tradition of the Christian West comes alive, from Charlemagne to Cromwell, King Richard to King Charles, the first monks to the most recent martyrs. He reminds us that, sometimes, the Church has had to fight to stay alive.

Father Schall argues that Belloc should be remembered as one of the greatest English prose stylists of the 20th century. His innumerable books and essays put forth what Father Schall calls “the mystery of how we stand to one another in the highest things.”

Moreover, his prose is not only of historical interest. Belloc was prescient about a host of issues, where his opponents, such as H.G. Wells, have been proven wrong. Belloc was right about the rise of bureaucracy, communism and secularism.

His Christmas essay begins, “The world is splitting more and more into two camps, and what was common to the whole of it is being restricted to the Christian, and soon will be to the Catholic half.” What Belloc means by common are the old traditions of Christian reason and a lived faith; his description fits our own time even better than it did his.

Further, well before other writers of his generation, or ours, Belloc identified Islam as a continuing challenge to the West based on his deep understanding of history and the relationships among the Peoples of the Book. In books on the Crusades and in numerous essays, Belloc sets out the stakes for Christianity if we do not understand that religion as it understands itself. "Ideas, especially religious ideas, do have consequences,” Father Schall writes, something that our secular elites prefer to forget, thinking, wrongly, that religion can be explained away or shown to be ridiculous.

This collection is divided into 30 short chapters, each dealing generally with one of Belloc’s essays.

One essay is devoted to Belloc’s infamous phrase, “Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe.” This is not, as once was charged, exclusionary. Belloc, in the first part of the phrase, is simply stating a fact. The Church created Europe out of a multiplicity of peoples, as Pope Benedict XVI recently reiterated. Even the second part of the phrase must be properly understood. Europe expressed the faith as a combination of Hebraic spirituality and Greek rationality and Roman authority.

But the mission of that faith “assumed that reason was common to all men. … The purpose of the mission was salvific, to explain the ultimate meaning of each person in the world.” The faith is Europe, in the sense that Europe would not exist without it; but that specific gift of faith demands it be presented to others through the force of reason, since reason is the common gift to humanity.

Father Schall is a gifted interpreter of Belloc’s work, and even if one does not know Belloc well, or at all, these essays are a perfect introduction. For those who do know Belloc, this is a perfect gift. For those who know Father Schall and his work, this book is a necessity.

Gerald J. Russello is editor of the University Bookman (KirkCenter.org).