Another example of Belloc’s prophetic insight can be found in his book about the United States, The Contrast. Writing in 1924, before the New Deal was even a dream, Belloc calmly announced that a great increase of Presidential power would be effected in the near future. His historical thesis, still paradoxical to most of his readers, was that great wealth always operated through representative institutions, and always aimed, neither at monarchy nor democracy, but at aristocracy. In a country in which the sense of individual liberty was still strong, the people would tend to incarnate themselves more and more in the head of the state, who, by his very position, stood above special interests, which worked naturally through parliamentary structures. One does not have to agree with Belloc that this monarchical tendency was a good thing; but it must be granted that he nailed the tendency to the wall.
Belloc’s historical insight passes the pragmatic test time and again. Another example of history rendered intelligible when seen in the light of the traditions of Christendom was Belloc’s very early penetration of the essential foreignness of Prussia to the family of nations that constitute Europe. Prussia, the legitimate child of the Reformation, arose and developed apart from the older European Unity. Of her very nature she opposed that unity, and refused to be bound by the morality common to Christian nations and men. Frederick the Great’s rape of Silesia, the work of Bismarck, the over-all meaning of the First Reich and of World War I make sense only within the context of Belloc’s discussion of the problem. When all England and the United States as well were singing the praises of the Nordic man and the superiority of the blond beast of the north, Belloc knew what Prussia really meant: a gun pointed at the heart of the West. The resurrection of Prussianism under Hitler confirmed bitterly the prophetic insight of Belloc, who had been warning England for over forty years about the intentions of North Germany. Belloc knew where Prussia stood in the light of the unity of Christendom. She was beyond the pale.
It is largely due to the Bellocian polemic that the old-fashioned Whig history, although still taught as a matter of course almost everywhere, is no longer the accepted dogma of serious historical scholarship. Historians today can labour at their profession without the fear that their work will be branded as partisan, as is the work of the man who cleared the field for them.
Belloc’s historical technique suffered from one self-imposed liability. He worked within a tradition, and thereby defined himself. But his strength lay in his very limitation. The Bellocian philosophy of history can operate only within some one well-defined civilization. The effectiveness of his method depends on the historian’s entering profoundly into the spirit of a culture, and on assuming to himself the religious and social beliefs and values of the society in question. Without his Catholicism, or without at least a deep sympathy for the religion that made Christendom, Belloc’s historical method cannot be made to function realistically. It is of no use, for example, to a man who would work toward an historical understanding of global history. World history must be seen, to the Bellocian, as something outside of the European Unity, as something foreign, threatening that unity, or as penetrated by it. To enter into a diversity of religious and cultural traditions in order to grasp the complete picture of world history from within is a psychological impossibility. A man would break down under the strain, because he cannot take to himself traditions that are mutually contradictory. He cannot be that which he rejects.
Philosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality typified by academic journals or international youth congresses. So long as these historians simply record facts they are safe, but as soon as they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary lack of inside understanding. World historians frequently fail to grasp even the story of their own nations. They are within nothing at all, but are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from an academic outside; hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything that has ever moved men to common action. These historians tend to succumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically; they perpetually find meetings between an East and West, where there is only conflict; they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically; they build vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching for his own antecedents. A Christian comes away from Belloc knowing his own soul.
The Weltanschauung historian must fail in the end because no “world view” has ever acted to cause anything historically. History is caused within cultures, and the clash of civilizations occurs when two cultures in act meet on the field of battle, be it economic, military, or spiritual.
The final objection that the “world historian” has against Belloc is that he takes sides, and the final answer to that objection is simply this: to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history. A historian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more than the surface of things. He cannot see the inside of the spiritual drama of, let us say, the Reformation or the Arian heresy, without being touched by an absolute: absolutes either wound or enlist the assent of the spirit. There can be no impartiality when a man has been actually grazed by the realities that have stirred all Christianity to its roots. Intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death simply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been reached by the historian, and unless they are reached and elected for or rejected, nothing historical can be known in its very substance. Credo ut intelligam.
Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from without, he understands it from within ... he is also that which he has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.
The Catholic brings to history (when I say “history” in these pages I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true, and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in this blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: he sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together.
I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is the Church.[41]