A man’s understanding of himself depends on where he steps into history; not mere academic nor written and catalogued information, but the past as assimilated into a personality, and as taking on the very existence of a man. When Belloc writes history he is one with the march of the West. Whatever was divisive of the unity of Christendom, even if dead and long conquered, receives at his hands a hatred that is almost personal. Belloc the soldier haunted the battlefields of the First Crusade, marked with his fingers the high point of the Mohammedan wave, and went with Napoleon into the Russian winter. He said once of a friend that “history had overlapped on him.” He was describing himself.
All this does not make for dispassionate scholarship, but it makes for something vastly more important: it situates a man squarely in the path of history, and it renders him conscious of all that has gone before to make him what he is. He becomes himself twice over. What contemporary writer speaks of the time when “we broke the back of Islam at Tours”?
Spiritual insight into the destiny of Christendom, added to an imagination that could vividly resurrect the past, were tools that rendered Belloc uniquely capable of presenting the drama of Europe to an age that largely had ceased living by the old Faith. But above their value in furthering his Christian vocation, they added to his theocentric humanism further integration. The person who is unified in himself and in society through Faith is further enriched if he is, in a sense, all that has gone before. It was Belloc’s good fortune that there was enough of the older Christendom physically in being for him to see at first hand. His historical perspective is uniquely realistic. He frequently deplored historical investigation that proceeded exclusively through written testimony. Such history is lacking in two things: the past is not brought back to us with sufficient vigour and colour, and the past loses its personal, human, integrative value, because history must be seen in things which now exist because of that which has existed.
History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new dimension.... But history, if it is to be kept just and true ... must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things.[30]
Belloc’s intensive preoccupation with Christendom is an interest not in a concept, nor in an abstracted framework nor an academic “problematic”; it is an engagement in an historical reality, to be seen and understood on the spot. Occasionally, as he stands in some place hallowed by past significance, he seems almost burdened by the grandeur of the task. See how he writes of the fascination of pursuing the Roman Road between Winchester and Canterbury:
For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil.[31]
What he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical recovery of the self, so that spiritual isolation will not claim the soul.
If modern man is isolated, and who can doubt that he is, his isolation stems from a variety of causes, some of which have been briefly indicated. Among others is the almost total loss of not only the reality of tradition, but of the sense of tradition, in industrial man. By industrial man, of course, one indicates not simply the man engaged in factory production. By industrial man one means that mechanical personality who has been fashioned by the age—a wound that few if any of us have escaped.
Without a steady tradition enduring through the passage of generations a man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be. The drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his finding an analogue of eternity. Without this, man is without moorings; he drifts and is alone; he is obscurely guilty of lacking something demanded by his nature. Without tradition, he is a victim offered daily to the cruelties of the moment.
Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things.... Not only death ... but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability ... the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety, honour harassed, all the bitterness of living—become part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude. For they are all connected in the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were, the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.[32]