His soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit and makes for isolation. There is a passage in Esto Perpetua in which Belloc—once again “Myself”—met a stranger in Timgad, that African town, once Roman and fertile, now empty and given back to the desert. They spoke to one another, and their conversation was the drama of salvation and damnation. Belloc looked on the desert, and he was tempted: the soul seemed nothing, and he thought of those who “see at last that there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.”[36] He felt terror and was less a man. But he turned and went back to the place he had known, and the terror left him, and he was a man once again.
Chapter Two
GRIZZLEBEARD:
HISTORY FROM WITHIN
Among all the disciplines in which Hilaire Belloc has laboured, history stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour. Belloc’s historical practice is too complex to be judged in any general essay concerning his essential importance. But his historical theory is crucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated Christian humanism. It is as an extension of his humanism that his historical position will be analyzed.
The cardinal significance of the Bellocian conception of history is its traditionalism. History is organic; it grows from within a culture and is the actual cause of that culture’s corporate existence in present time. Since Christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition that has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past—familial, regional, and the rest—the past is rendered intelligible by grasping the inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of historical man. Those who attack Hilaire Belloc for being biased in his historical perspective must first settle the question of the very nature of history itself. For Belloc history begins as an extension of tradition; history is an act of “self-knowledge,” as he puts it in his magnificent introduction to Europe and the Faith.
This act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to systematize or catalogue facts. It does not proceed from the need man has for the possession of impersonal, objective truth. History is the effect of an inner command to know one’s soul. It is the completion of human consciousness. The passion for history is man’s Grizzlebeard. As the Sailor renders Myself unalienated from the physical universe in which he exists, the Grizzlebeard seals Myself in time which has stamped man in its own image. Belloc returns to this theme time and again in the essays, but nowhere does he express himself more movingly than in The Old Road, where he tells us why he elected to recover the Roman Way from Winchester to Canterbury.
To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives, which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land—all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations are confirmed.... One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfillment.[37]
It is well known that the humanist conception of history as a psychological necessity first came into its own in the Western World with the Incarnation of the Son of God in time. In the classical pagan world the status of history was at best ambiguous. Aristotle gave historical knowledge a low place in his hierarchy of values. History for the Greek philosophers could not achieve the dignity of a science because it lacked the universal necessity without which there is no science. The philosophers were right in judging history not to be a science. They were wrong in according history little value. What the wise men of the ancient world took away from history, the common sense of the people gave back. The dignity of history was grasped obscurely because the humanism of the classical universe could not achieve its fullness unless man was unified in time as well as in space. The tradition of the family enshrined in the household gods and in the legend of Aeneas carrying father Anchises on his back out of burning Troy symbolized a need rooted in the substance of human nature: the necessity to link the present with the past. Familial traditions extended to the City, and then to the Empire, and even the work of Virgil the Poet was historical in inspiration.
The Incarnation in time and the prolonging of the Deposit of Faith through the centuries in a living tradition that hands on what it has received, confirmed the humanist insight and at the same time conferred on history a dignity of an altogether new order. No one in the new Christian society, not even the scientist or philosopher, would ever more despise history, and if the West has accorded to history a place unique in the hierarchy of human values, it is because time had been sanctified and conquered by the Son of God.
History added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be himself. The Faith taught Christian man that nothing is ever lost: the ages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the Vision of God. Tradition, which is nothing but the corporate life of the past existing in the present, is the human analogue of the Eternal Morning Who is the End of us all.