Chapter Three
CHRISTENDOM:
“ESTO PERPETUA”
Today when Western man thinks of Christendom, he thinks of an historical order that is dead, or he thinks of an academic humanist tradition that synthesizes the Greek and Roman heritage with the doctrinal truths of the Faith. Western man rarely thinks of himself as being a man in Christendom, for Christendom is no longer a place, existing in space, enduring in time.
Hilaire Belloc was the last representative of a long tradition of Catholic thinkers who actually thought of the Christian Unity in terms of a cultural and geographical order minted into a unity by the genius of the Faith. His understanding of Christendom is the most serious problem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought. Belloc has been accused of identifying Western Europe and Catholicism to the point where it would appear that the Universal Religion was a uniquely Latin thing that carried with it of necessity the temporal and cultural trappings of Mediterranean regionalism. “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.”
Belloc’s position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would assert, nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary Christians when they think of “Christendom.” In the first place it is simply false to assert that he identified Catholicism necessarily with Western Europe. He expressly states the contrary in the famous and controversial Europe and the Faith.[50] Operative behind his passionate and concrete love of European Catholicism is a doctrinal position that can be stated rather simply: grace perfects nature, and grace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions, but grace operates the better, the more perfected is man on the natural level.
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 men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything finite; 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 kind.[51]
Linked with this doctrinal position is his favorite historical thesis that Roman Europe represented the very best man had achieved on the temporal level of existence prior to the advent of the Son of God. In Rome man began to come into his own; in Rome man discovered the possibility of an immortal destiny, because Rome had conceived, even if imperfectly, the nature of human dignity. Roman man is Myself, the Four Men—integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential incompletion of his own handiwork. Christianity came into the Empire and found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the Gospel. It was with such stuff that the Church molded Western Europe. The result was Christendom.
The conception of Christendom lies at the heart of Belloc’s Christian humanism. The necessity for the Faith to penetrate a culture and erect a civilization that bears her lineaments is both a deduction from Belloc’s humanism and an historical cause of his humanism, though it is principally the latter.
Let us first look to the matter theoretically. There is no consciously articulated “philosophy of Christendom” in Belloc, and this for two reasons: Christendom was an historical fact in his eyes; you do not theorize about the possibility of that which is; one Thing had preserved the best of the Roman Order, had sanctified the human hearth, and had worked toward the erection of a social and personal dignity unheard-of in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England—and this one institution was the Roman Catholic Church; secondly, and this is a weakness in his armour, Belloc had little interest in (or talent for) purely philosophical and theological issues as such; outside of a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against skepticism, and an almost inarticulate loathing of German Idealism, he remained aloof from formal philosophy. Christendom is not a “concept” or a “thesis” for him: she is Europe and the ages.
Belloc’s failure to elaborate a philosophical defence, as well as an historical defence, of the theory of Christendom has left his whole position in jeopardy. Today many highly reputable minds are questioning the validity of the very idea of a Christendom. The attack is psychologically understandable. The older European Order, first wounded by the Reformation, then weakened spiritually by four centuries of rationalism, nationalism, and secular liberalism, now physically and morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial capitalism, has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars. The Christian community will survive in the new era now being born, it is said, only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture that no longer exists. Today the East is throwing off its shackles, and if the Faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness of these peoples, it must come as something native to themselves. To cling to an identification of Catholicism and European Catholicism is not only bad theology, it is bad policy. Catholicism is supra-temporal and can never be associated essentially with any of the passing cultural forms that she blesses. It is, then, impossible to speak of a Christendom as being some one unique cultural reality, whose soul is the Faith.
There is more than a little truth to the above reasoning, and there can be no doubt that Belloc’s dogged passion for complete, final integration and his deep love for the European Order rendered him temperamentally incapable of realizing the concrete possibility of the Faith’s taking root in a non-European form. To separate the Faith from the freedom and the institutions of the West was in his eyes to divorce the mother from its child, and to desecrate that historical unity that centuries had hallowed. If he overstated his case, it can be affirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate.
The weakness of the anti-Bellocian position lies in its sheer abstractionism. In the abstract there is no question but that the Faith is culturally neutral. But historically it is simply false to say that the Church has always been, and could always be, neutral to any given civilization to which she has come, or will come, preaching salvation. The Church could never have sanctified Carthage with its human sacrifice to Moloch; the Church could never have concreted itself in those border cultures that produced the Mystery Cults and flirted with the pantheisms of the East. Belloc fingered a profound historical truth when he declared that as Revelation incarnates itself the better in a man in proportion to that man’s natural perfection, so too Revelation has always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of corporate perfection achieved by that society.
If certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to receive Faith than others, it is still true that Faith comes to them as a pure gift. Catholicism did not have to fix itself within the boundaries of the Greco-Roman world. But the historical fact is that it did so. That Rome was more apt to receive the Gospel than were her neighbours is, to Belloc, one of the clearest truths of Western history. Those who accuse Belloc of theoretically tying the Church to Rome confuse two questions: a theological question and an historical question. Doctrinally, the Faith belongs to no one by right; but if the Faith does come to a man, it will come to him as to one formed by a unique set of cultural exigencies, which will aid or will hinder his reception of the Divine Gift. The Faith belongs to no culture by right. Some cultures could never have received her; other cultures could have, but historically they did not. The fact remains that she came into Rome, transformed the Empire and built a Europe that had been humanized to a high level by the already existing Latin Order.
It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.
The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church might have arisen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring up in the high Greek tide of the Levant and carries to this day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial Roman system which we are about to examine. 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 civilizations, living or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.[52]
Such is the principal meaning of Europe and the Faith: as a matter of fact the Church arose within the bosom of the Roman Empire; as a matter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the classical world; it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into the larger Thing which was the Faith and which made Europe in her own image. If you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that breathed the spirit of Christianity, you would find it in Western Europe that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from without, and from all the schisms from within. A free peasantry, the sacredness of marriage, the dignity of man, the steady rejection of every Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the sacramental view of the universe: these are to be found in Catholic Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and they are to be found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this earth.
The Church “lays her foundations in something other,” says Belloc, but “out of that something other came the art and the song of the Middle Ages.” And he adds his famous taunt to the Englishmen of his day, “and what art or song have you?”[53]
Such is the basic Bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship between Catholicism and European Christendom. And yet he pushes his position even further in a daring move that links him with those early Christians who saw in Rome the special mark of Divine Providence, preparing a way for the Incarnation. As a man never exists outside of the supernatural order, with the result that even his natural perfection is achieved under the impetus of grace, one can say that God is operating with lavish gratuity wherever a cultural organism is found to have reached a certain high level of human perfection. Humanism is crowned by grace, but in a deeper sense, humanism is caused by grace. “The Church makes men,” Belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in The Path to Rome.[54] It is small wonder, then, that when viewing that sweep of Empire which is the foundation of the West, when seeing that high pitch of humanism that avoided the Eastern nihilisms, when gazing at that magnificent legal structure, imperfect though it was, that had as its end the defining of human dignity—when seeing all these things, it is no wonder Belloc frequently talked like those Latin Fathers who saw in Rome a Unity raised by God to prepare man for the Incarnation.
Grace not only crowns nature but causes nature to flower into its fullness. All human values, tending of isolation and separate destruction outside Catholic Christianity, are unified within the Body of Christ by the bond of Charity. It is, therefore, reasonable to believe that the Roman Order—classical humanism—was created by God for the sake of the preaching of the Gospel. Compare two passages rather closely: one was composed around A.D. 385 by the Christian poet Prudentius; the other was written in 1906 by Hilaire Belloc in his Esto Perpetua.
We live in every clime, as if a paternal city enclosed within its single walls citizens of a single birthplace; we are all one in heart within our paternal hearth. Now, men from afar and over land and sea appear before a single and common court; now, for business and the arts they gather together in the great assembly; now, they contract marriages and one people is formed from the mingling of different blood. This has been achieved by so many triumphant successes of the Roman Empire, believe me, that the way has been prepared for Christ’s event, a way which the communal friendship of our peace has built under Roman guidance. For, what place could there be for God in a savage world, in the discordant breasts of men and in those who guard their own rights by different laws, as was formerly the case? But, if the mind, from its lofty throne, bridle impulsive rage and the rebellious organs and bring every passion under the sway of reason, then is built a stable way of life; then with surety does it drink in God and live in submission to the one Lord. Omnipotent One, now is Your hour; penetrate the earth where no discord reigns. Now, O Christ, the world accepts You, this world which peace and Rome together hold within their grasp.[55]
Setting aside details and moving to the heart of the text, we could say that the poet has laid down the proclamation of Christendom: a corporate theocentric humanism. Man’s personal and social integration exists in order that God may conquer the soul. Now listen to Belloc’s passage as he sails away from the African shores and faces once more the Latin Order:
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look back, as upon an adventure, towards journey in this African land ... I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns ... and I shall see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny....
We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain for ever. What happens in this life of ours, which we had from you, Salva Fide, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world.
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her “Esto Perpetua!” which means in her undying language: “You shall not die.”...[56]
We pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time. Suffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth that “piety of speech” reminiscent of the seventeenth century.[57] As Prudentius sees classical Roman Europe as caused by God in order to be a highway, a Roman Road, over which will pass the message of the Gospel, so does Belloc look back on this prophecy, fulfilled through a thousand years full of a Christendom, armed, proud, conscious of its destiny. Aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the cruel laws of time, he nonetheless prays that historic Christendom may remain one Thing, “the standing grace of this world.”
To a contemporary thinker, even a contemporary Christian thinker, Christendom is something apart from himself—an historic era, good in its day, but its day is now done. He stands outside of the old European Unity, for it exists no longer, except perhaps in “the river-valleys,” and in the mountains, as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism. He looks to a new synthesis of Christianity with the modern world, and in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look back and who would still hope for the Resurrection of Europe.
But Belloc always saw Christendom as some one historic Reality, thrusting itself into the dimension of present time—a Reality within which he has consciously situated himself. Having become one with the men of old Europe (how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery of the Continent, the silent men of South England, and the company of those that sail) he could only look back for corporate salvation. To look to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the Roman Order would be for him to destroy himself. You cannot uproot an unalienated man.
Supporting this hidden marriage with his origins is Belloc’s firm opposition to the Hegelian conception of history, in which the old is necessarily overcome by the new, and in which nothing historical remains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism. Those men who say that the old Christendom is dead may be right, but when they ground their opinion in an historical determinism, they demonstrate their inability to understand the organic nature of a traditional society, in which the past can be renewed through an ever recurrent act of collective memory.
The old European Christendom that Belloc loved so well may never come back; its rich cultural diversity, its personal individualism and patchwork of small property, its shrines, its liberating chaos—these things can have no place in a world committed to the principle of technological and collectivist barbarism. The European way of life died, not because it had to, but because there were not enough men left with the will to keep it alive.
Belloc had the will, but his prayer, “You shall not die,” seems a trifle remote in this fifth decade of the century. It seems more and more probable that the Christian community of the future will resemble Communist cells lost in a world given over to the barbarism of faceless men. The Faith may, at some future date, arise out of the new catacombs and be faced with sanctifying a society that is neither humanist nor humane. Belloc recognized this possibility,[58] always believing the contrary more likely. But should a Christian Order commence to arise out of the atomic ruins of a mechanical and industrial desert, it will work again to the erection of a genuinely human order. And should the men of this new age wish to know that freer and broader vision of their half-forgotten fathers, they could do no better than to turn to the work of this last of the rooted men.
If the old Christendom is dead, then a new Christendom will be built in time. Christendom may be considered an “outmoded concept” by some thinkers who consider the modern world to have been a necessity. These intellectuals fail to see that Christendom is rather a fundamental urge, deep within man, grounded in an ontological need for the complete integration of man’s spiritual and temporal destinies.
The issue needs further elucidation. There have been so many attacks in recent years against the Bellocian position on the relationship between Europe and Catholicism, and on his understanding of “Christendom,” that a thorough airing of the subject is necessary. In the first place, only an irresponsible writer like Sidney Hook would accuse Belloc of identifying the interests of Catholicism with the ancien régime.[59] Belloc gloried in the best traditions of the Revolution, and, with the exception of Bernanos, he seems to be the only historian to have grasped the Christian continuity of the new and the older political traditions of Europe. He was so much the Republican that he was duped by the pretensions of Rousseau. The charges of reaction are not worth the dignity of a formal reply. In the second place, those quite responsible men who oppose the Bellocian slogan of “Europe is the Faith” are guilty, not of irresponsibility, but of a lack of intellectual subtlety. To state that the Faith is supra-temporal and is thereby never to be identified with any given civilization is to enunciate a truism, and to miss the point. It is one thing to say that no cultural order is of the essence of the Faith; it is another thing to say that the Faith is of the essence of some given cultural order. The latter is Belloc’s position. When the Faith is of the essence of that culture, then that civilization is part of, or coincident with, Christendom. The historical proof of Belloc’s point lies in the brutal truth that when that given social order loses the Faith, it ceases to be itself. Such is the meaning of “Europe is the Faith.”
More profoundly and more to the heart of the issue is the objection to conceiving Christendom, if there is or has been or will be such, as a place. Today probably all would agree that Christendom is largely a state of mind; but with Belloc the writer of these pages asserts that Christendom must become a place, because man is a material as well as a spiritual creature, existing in space, enduring in time. As his inner perfection necessitates the interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural, so too must this inner personal unity be projected externally in a corporate entity that ideally could be bounded geographically, politically, and socially. That God be found in a shrine is a paradox inherent in the very mystery of the Incarnation. That man, once he is Christian, will try to build a house of such a nature that he can say to himself and to his friends, “This is a place in which Christian men will be at home,” is the inner meaning of Christendom in the thought of Hilaire Belloc. He always sought out old inns, and it was because he hoped to find lingering there something of the essence of what was once the Christian Inn of Mankind.
In one sense, a Christian is always an exile. In another sense, he is an island; and it is in this that is to be found the heart of the need for Christendom—a corporate theocentric humanism—a place so penetrated by the Faith that a man who was there could say that “Jesus Christ was in the morning skies.”[60]
Belloc grasps the older European Christendom, in its ideals and in the best of its actualities, as a truly human society, permeated from top to bottom with grace, and given direction and destiny by the Universal Faith. Personal perfection necessitates the communal act in which society is built as a home for man. The City of Man exists for the furthering of human perfection. The City must be personal: from this follows Belloc’s detestation of impersonal governments. The best government would be one personally exercised by all men, acting together for the common good. Where this democratic society is impossible of fulfillment, the community is best incarnated in a monarchy: one man sums up in himself a people, and one man is responsible to all.
The Bellocian concepts of both democracy and monarchy are not co-extensive with the more usually accepted meanings of those terms. For Belloc democracy is less a static thing than something dynamic. The French erupting into the Revolution, organizing great armies and local governments almost overnight—such is democracy as Belloc sees it. It is the older ideal of the Citizen assuming personal responsibility; it is Drouet accepting history at the crossroads, the Parisians before the Tuileries, man at the barricades. In Belloc’s eyes the only surviving democracies in the West are the Swiss cantons and the mountain state of Andorra. Belloc’s monarchy is one man, symbolizing a people and its traditions, exercising personal authority, responsible before the law, a public sacrifice to the land. He finds his best example in modern times in the United States of America: in the Office of the Presidency.[61]
A personalist society, be it democratic or monarchical, will foster those occupations attached directly to fundamentally human needs. Man needs to build; he needs to plant and to plow, to make things with his hands, to incarnate his aspirations in song and the plastic arts; he needs to fight, and he needs to pray. The peasant, the artisan, the soldier, the scholar, the poet, the priest—these will dominate any humanist culture in Belloc’s sense of the term. A broad base of well-distributed property will lie under the whole economic organism, insuring the personal character of the res publica, stamping it with the mark of humanity. Belloc has little use for a merchant society (exemplified in his eyes by Carthage and Whig England). The merchant necessarily is engaged in furthering his own profit, and he must prosper by feeding on those elements within the community that are productive. Merchants will always be in a society, but if the state is controlled by their spirit, then the City of Man is finished. Profit, not human perfection, is the bourgeois ideal. Viewed ideally, Belloc’s humanist society, on which he constructed his distributist economics, would be characterized by a rich multiplicity of functions rooted in fundamental human drives.
The City of Man is the extension, the natural fulfillment, and the guarantee of the personal integration symbolized by The Four Men. Man, unalienated in the densities of his own subjectivity, achieves an objective corporate unity with his fellows. Even the most penetrating and private of natural mysteries, that of poetic creation, finds its full significance only in the Forum. “For the Poet, though divine, is a servant. He is the god of the house of Admetus; and not all his fellowship with heaven would make him what he is did he not bring to birth the struggling song, as yet undelivered in his fellow men.”[62]
Belloc’s ideal of the good social order is not a utopia. The “proprietary state,” as he calls it, is the natural order of things for men, and only the parochialism of a vision that cannot see beyond the last century on the Continent, or beyond the Reformation in England, would insist on viewing industrial capitalism and the consequent Communist or Collectivist dreariness as advances beyond the simple humanist order that meshes so beautifully with human nature. In his final books, written just before the catastrophe of World War II, Belloc declared that Denmark and Ireland, and the Portugal of Salazar, were the most decent states within which man could find his personal and social perfection. In contemporary cultural theory, there are a number of parallels to Belloc’s distributist or proprietary ideal. In the United States a similar conception can be found in the thought of the Southern Critics. In England, Mr. T. S. Eliot has advanced a like doctrine in his Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. Both men conceive of culture as fundamentally traditional, i.e. organic. Both see culture as dual: in one dimension it is familial and private; the attachment of the individual to his ancestral home and to the proven ways of doing things assures a rhythmic continuity to society that expresses itself in local patriotism and the love for the place which is one’s own; status rather than contract is the ideal, for in status is to be found peace, both personal and public; on another dimension culture is public, and the plurality of economic life is given a unity which flowers in political, artistic, and religious life. However, two radical divergencies in the thought of Eliot and Belloc decisively separate their respective humanisms. Eliot’s society is aristocratic and post-Reformation English in inspiration; Belloc’s is either democratic or monarchical, and therefore egalitarian, which is to say that it is Latin and Catholic in spirit. Eliot sees religious conflicts as making for a richer cultural diversity. For Belloc the Reformation and the rending of Christendom is the greatest scandal in the story of the West.
In spite of the French antecedents of Belloc’s social ideals, his proprietary traditions are rooted deeply in the English past. Most anti-collectivist thinking in the English-speaking world today looks to Burke and the theory of prescriptive politics. But for all his conservatism, Burke never succeeded in dispelling the Whig curse. There is another tradition that runs back, like a narrow and straight road, through Chesterton and Belloc to the Tory-Radicalism of William Cobbett, and beyond to the Cavaliers and to the King who died for England; there the road broadens into a great highway filled with the yeomen who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace. And beyond all this stands the high medieval vision of Fortesque: a vision of a land of free men, eating and drinking their own, owing allegiance neither to aristocrat nor capitalist, but to God and England alone.
Such is the City of Man in Hilaire Belloc’s thought. But this City, Belloc indicates time and again, is not of itself. It has no fully independent existence of its own, nor can it ever be a completely autonomous reality. For it to be at all, it must flourish within the higher City which is the City of God. Just as the individual man can find his natural perfection only by losing himself in Christ, so too can the community of all men find its soul only within the bosom of Christian Wisdom. Religious truth, absolute and unquestioned, not only guarantees but causes a God-oriented humanist culture to come into its own. The sacredness of the person and the eternal relationship he bears to God through Christ are truths of an order which is not human, but these truths act within the bowels of society as Divine Seeds, conceiving in time a temporal order both personal and free. This order is Christendom. It is not the City of God, but it is within that City, and it is what it is because it is the child of Faith.
There is a City full, as are all Cities, of halt and maim, blind and evil and the rest: but it is the City of God.... There are not two such cities on earth. There is One.
Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the night.[63]