The Bellocian concept of history, as set forth in the above passage, might well be called Anselmian: historical understanding follows Faith. If history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified through a common religion, then it follows necessarily that history can be grasped only from within. The historian who views the European story as a series of “phenomena” external to himself must either fall into the Aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology, or he must superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it intelligible. He simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the eyes of the men he would know, or feel with them as they erupt into common action. He is alienated from them.
Belloc has been attacked by historians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, for partisanship, bias, and narrow dogmatism. There is more than a little truth to their charges. Belloc frequently bludgeons his readers. In the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost martial in its proud magnificence: its certainty. But all this is part of the price Belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian he did. He is within what he is writing. Do not ask for impartiality when reading of the First Crusade. Belloc is there: he is one of the Crusaders. When you know Belloc, you know the Crusades, you know the revolutionary spirit that swept all France in the eighteenth century; when you have read Esto Perpetua the grandeur of the first three centuries of the Christian era comes home to the soul amidst the contrast of the barren desert of Islam. You understand what Islam meant to Europe. Belloc gives a reader a one-sided history, but the irony is that, to a Bellocian, history must always be one-sided. The man “on no side” is outside history.
Paradoxically enough, Belloc’s contention runs exactly contrary to the first principle of modern Western historical theory. Contemporary historians, regardless of political predilection or religious and philosophical adherence, are united in the common belief that historical truth is dependent on historical “objectivity.” This objectivity is achieved in proportion to the historian’s ability to withdraw from his own cultural antecedents. In so doing, the scholar shakes himself loose from the prejudices and parochialisms of his own civilization, he frees himself, in order that he may view the whole. The story of his people and of his own faith recede until they take their just place within the broader scope of the cosmic movement of historical man through time.
It is questionable whether such an objectivity can be more than an ideal projected before the historian—a goal to be forever missed, but always aimed at. But assuming for a moment that it is possible for a single historian to hold before himself the global passage of man through recorded history, assuming that he could find a set of natural principles that would unify this vast procession of phenomena into an intelligible structure—even assuming this ideal of the Toynbee school of thought—it still remains an open question whether this would constitute the possession of historical truth.
If, on the contrary (assuming Belloc’s hypothesis), historical truth principally means historical understanding of the men who have made history, then this understanding can only follow on a grasp of the spiritual tides that have launched any given culture, that have given it a common destiny, that have been channelled analogically through the members of the community. Historical truth depends then on a subjective, almost intuitive, grasp of this communal spirit; a penetration into historical man, rather than an analytic dissection of a spirit that defies mere logical analysis. Historical understanding escapes the kind of objectivity achieved in the sciences, because it demands a deeper insight: an entering into the subjective engagement of the human person. To understand what has caused me to be the kind of man I am, I must understand what caused the men who made me to be what they were. I possess my past, in Belloc’s eyes, when I am that past to such a degree that I could have acted as did my ancestors. Then, and only then, do I actually know my own fathers from within the depths of my own personality.
Outside objectivity versus inside understanding; conscious withdrawal and deliberate cultural alienation for the sake of objectivity, as opposed to conscious cultural immersion and integration for the sake of subjective sympathy: two theories of history that can be resolved finally only by a personal act of choice.
Belloc’s historical theory is anti-academic in that it cannot be achieved within the confines of the world of the university. As both an historical position and an historical practice it must always be suspect to professional historical scholars, whose almost exclusive preoccupation with documents makes them, quite naturally, more sympathetic to the scientific objectivity of contemporary history. Belloc must always appear, by turns, wildly romantic and narrowly partisan to the academicians. To the Bellocian, academicism in history must always lack both colour and vigour. It must wear an air of irritating professionalism.
Belloc’s position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel, his minute detection of physical details, his sympathy with verbal tradition, his suspicion for the “outlander.” These were all humanistic instruments, rendering him one with the past, capable of seeing things as did his forefathers, understanding reality as they did, and eventually grasping the inner spirit of their personal and communal action that constitutes the heart of their history.
Such history is both conservative in ultimate judgment and it is radical: conservative in that it proceeds by way of a personal guarding of an ancient heritage; radical in that it makes a man totally opposed to a new world at odds with that heritage. The final and the fatal limitation to Bellocian history is that it depends for success on a constant living continuity, on a vital tradition acting like a road the historian can travel down and back again at will. The radical discontinuity of the modern world with its past in the older Christendom makes it almost impossible for anyone to perpetuate Belloc’s historical practice. It is becoming increasingly more difficult, if not impossible, to be spiritually and affectively one with our heritage. The past of Christendom is becoming more and more a written patrimony, and the Bellocian brand of historical integration cannot thrive on such jejune food.
History by way of inside understanding is practicable today only on a regional and familial basis; and even the family, within the industrialized world, has lost any living touch with its own dead. The father has become a stranger to his son.