To a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace, the personal reserve of the man, prolonged through a life devoted to religious controversy, is bound to be curious if not somewhat irritating. He reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual crisis. He apparently felt it was no one’s business but his own. Nothing could be more typically Bellocian.
The Catholic Church appears in Belloc’s thought, as given us in his writing, as the custodian of the Faith—of a Faith beyond himself, objective, out there, demanding acceptance because it is the Truth. Emotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that which is. Christ came, claimed to be Divine, died, and came back in three days from the dead. Such is the evidence, and it is ultimately traceable, through tradition and written testimony, to the Apostles who saw it with their own eyes. Faith is not established, as such, by personal experience nor by private speculations, but on an evidence which is a heritage common to all mankind. Emotion may aid or may block faith, but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable, and it is the business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be swamped in the vagaries of subjectivism. Belloc’s approach is by no means the only approach to religion, but it is one that is cold, hard, rational; the insight of a man with an intellect which is French in its incisiveness, directness, and confidence in itself. Such a faith is unbolstered by any natural religiosity, but for that very reason it presents a hard, diamond-like character, unyielding and dogmatic in its affirmations: a faith foreign to fashions, be they literary or philosophical.
In a letter written to Chesterton upon the occasion of the latter’s entrance into the Church, Belloc compares the man of Faith to a man who walks through the rain at night, and who feels in his bones that he has gone thirty miles, but who knows well enough from his map and his reason that he has not travelled eleven.
I am by all my nature of mind skeptical.... And as to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion. My conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once seen it—is the Faith: Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate.... It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone, and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it.[24]
The early death of his wife whom he worshipped, the death of a son in World War I and then again of a son in World War II, the ever present and never fully overcome threat of personal poverty, the passing of the friends of youth, the dire fulfillment of his political and economic warnings which went unheeded, the apparent dryness of his religious life—all these tragedies struck his heart and isolated him from family, friends, political life, society, from joy. He never speaks of these things in his public writings, but they add to his integrated Catholic personality the steel of great character. He maintained himself in a desert.
From the very outset of his career, the Catholic center of Belloc’s life appears as the spiritual hub from whence proceed the amazingly diverse spokes of his personality. The Faith is never glimpsed as a hope in the distance that calls him out of the secularist age in which he lived. The Faith is always present, informing and energizing his being, disciplining his irony, conquering his skepticism, and giving direction to his destiny. Nevertheless, a close reading of the Bellocian corpus reveals a shift in religious emphasis as the man advanced in years. In the earlier books, the humanizing role of Catholicism is the dominant motif: the Church is that corporate organism, Divine in origin, that alone accounts for the high culture of the older European civilization. She is the custodian of personal dignity, the ancient mistress that alone of all societies can harbour the human spirit and nourish it into its fullness. Through her, God offers temporal dignity and eternal salvation to man. But as Belloc grew older he sounded a new religious emphasis as he plunged more deeply into directly apologetic and controversial battle. Although the reality of Christian humanism is never forgotten, the Church emerges in his writing not only as the Divine instrument of human salvation, but more and more as the Truth of God, to which everything personal must be sacrificed, should events dictate such a course.
Belloc saw with unerring accuracy that the bulk of what he called “official history” in the English-speaking world was anti-Catholic. He attacked the thing bitterly, brilliantly, and at great cost to his reputation. He saw that the individualist, industrial, capitalist society of England was anti-human to the core. He attacked it. He grasped the anti-Christian meaning of Prussia, and he fought against this spirit from the North of Germany with intense vigour. He analyzed the anti-intellectual and therefore anti-Catholic bias that moved the “Modern Mind” in the bewildering complexity of that mind’s activities. He detested the Zeitgeist which had surrendered the best man had: his power to reason, judge, and affirm; therefore it had lost the one sure road it had of discovering the Truth of God. Belloc became committed—the French artilleryman in the service of the Church. His intransigence rendered him a marked man. Shaw wondered why Belloc should waste his profuse talents in the service of the Bishop of Rome. Wells noted critically his “partisan fanaticism.” Some Catholic academicians, to gain for themselves the reputation of impartial scholarship and save their standing in the world of learning, disavowed him.
There is no doubt that Belloc entered into battle with his eyes open. If he was anything at all, he was a realist: he understood men and the motives that move them; he was aware of the doors opening to political and literary preferment. His brilliance was such that he could have risen to a Cabinet post through the Liberal Party. He could have carved out for himself an exclusively literary reputation, possibly as great as Conrad’s. He could have become the recognized first historian in the Empire. He sacrificed it all and placed his sword at the service of the Church. 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 London.[25] At that time Belloc was a Liberal Member of Parliament, and the Tories thought that he would turn to them after his break with his own party. His political principles would not permit such a sellout. He went up to the platform a public figure, and came down an Apostle. “I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love ... as tragic as first love, and (it) drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.”[26]
Belloc’s career as an apologist exemplifies the first paradox inherent in Christian humanism. Only the Incarnation can make man whole, but as the Incarnation issues into Calvary, so too must the whole man sacrifice himself to the service of the God-Man. The ascent of man to God is impossible without the prior descent of God to man, and the two meet at the Cross. Once this truth is lived, then the second paradox of Christian humanism can follow. The man who has given himself is paid back with his own gift: himself transfigured in the Divine Fires.