For Belloc, therefore, an apprehension of the European past demands an understanding and a sympathy for the Catholic Faith, tending to allegiance, if not to formal profession. As Belloc sees it, only such an history can comprehend the over-all pressure of the Christian dispensation as it exercised a steady influence on the person and on society; acting always as a balm, sometimes as a force, both conservative and full of ringing affirmations that are not of this world. Nonetheless, Belloc affirms, this apprehension is of itself sufficient to insure only an over-all sane judgment about things historical. The Christian vision, to perfect itself historically, must take on a judgment that is temporal, human, and almost cynical in its realism. The great Action advances or retreats as it is involved in the individual actions of ages, generations, decades, and even days and hours. These, in their turn, are caused by a host of agents, tangling one with another, clashing in opposition and uniting in the coincidence of common interest: causes which are both impersonal and personal, but chiefly the latter.
The historian, says Belloc, must possess himself of a mass of detailed impersonal information, which must be sifted and fitted into proper perspective. “But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible.”[42] In short, as Mr. Robert Hamilton pointed out in his study on Belloc, the historian must be a humanist. He must understand men and the motives that move them. History, to be faithful to what was actually productive of the past, must go beyond the physical, phenomenal evidence at hand. A judgment of motive will normally transcend the synthesis of observable fact. A man of action (unless he be a Communist) does not give himself away on paper. His motives must be inferred from the way he acts. A detailed observation of a man’s conduct over a period of time and through a succession of historical crises will yield sufficient evidence for an over-all judgment as to his intentions, and hence to his place in the historical drama in which he was engaged. No one piece of information is sufficient for such an evaluation. The sum of facts, considered separately, would yield only probability concerning the directed human will. The information as synthesized, however, permits of an inductive judgment yielding a species of certitude about the moral role men play in history. In The Cruise of the Nona, that mosaic of Bellociana, the theory is put forth by the author that a sum of probabilities can furnish certitude, if that sum is taken as a patterned whole. It looks as though Belloc is here reflecting the influence of his early teacher, John Henry Newman, who developed an epistemology around this conception of certitude as emerging from a set of probabilities. When all the evidence together points to one conclusion, converges on one exclusive explanation, then the mind should assent to that one conclusion without fear of the truth of the opposite. It is clear that this is a risky and dangerous instrument for the acquisition of historical truth. A fool, or a mind purely speculative or deductive in bent, would bungle in attempting such judgments. A mind overly pious and overly sanguine about human nature, or excessively cynical about the good in men, would not be suited for the task. It is an instrument for a humanist: a man who knows men as they are. Belloc was peculiarly capable of exercising his own theory, and if he erred sometimes, it was on the side of cynicism, not piety.
Belloc’s theory of history is not developed philosophically in any one piece of writing. He tosses out his ideas within the limits of short personal essays, and occasionally he illuminates what he is doing in some concrete situation by standing back, as it were, and reflecting briefly on the presuppositions guiding his reasoning. He wrote history analogically, and if he had thoroughly developed his doctrine theoretically, he would have revealed something unique in the philosophy of historical practice. Historical research, if it would conform itself with historical truth, must be analogical as is historical truth itself. A diversity of causal lines, one at least almost immemorial, others lengthening into centuries, and still others contracted within the space of a man’s life or within a lesser temporal span, all act together to produce history, but each causal line acts in its own way. The historian must constantly shift his perspective as he makes his way through this tangle of actualities, which encompass everything from a living Faith, through the whole gamut of human vice and honour, to the half-forgotten contours of the field of battle. No one factor determines history (although one factor—the Christian Greco-Roman tradition—renders history intelligible). Herein Belloc is consciously separated from Marxist history, which would explain the past as determined exclusively through economic pressures. Even more so is the Bellocian theory opposed to the Hegelian or dialectical concept of history in which the past is judged to be caused by a logical clash of ideas which work themselves out in time, independently of, or dominating, the counter-pressure of human action.
To study, think, and write history as Belloc did demands a rare brand of personal integration. A personal Faith, through which the Christian tradition is comprehended, is united with humanism, through which the human and non-human causes operative in history are accorded their just causality in the judgment of the past. These lines of causality must be kept distinct, but they cannot be separated. If they are separated, the historian will fall into some kind of Barthianism, in which the Gospel is conceived as a message that acts through the ages independently of men and society, and in which secular man goes his own way totally uneffected by the Christian dispensation. If, on the contrary, the lines of causality are identified, then history is turned into the pious hagiography of fashionable French ladies of the last century. To ignore or to minimize either the Church or the secular is to fail to understand Western Europe.
As an example of Belloc’s balancing of historical causality one should watch him in act as he analyzes the French Revolution. A host of causes made the Revolution: the Christian doctrine of human equality; the ruining of the prestige of the monarchy by Louis XV’s public indulgence of the flesh prolonged into middle and old age; the antiquated system of taxation, based on a defunct manorial society, which bankrupted the realm; the extravagance and scandal given by a woman too long denied the rights of marriage; Drouet’s ride (“Good Lord, what a ride!” says Belloc); the heroism of the French at Wattignies; the democratic spirit of the Gauls united so paradoxically with the temper of the soldier—these were all actual causes of the Revolution. The failure of almost any one of them would have ruined or at least modified the Revolution.
When faced with these facts, few historians would deny the rightness of Belloc’s contention. But it remains true that these causes, all of which moved to one effect, are not actually operative within the minds of most academic historians when they set down the story. What use would an Hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the flight of the King? His theory cannot admit that wild contingency, full of the drama of human existence, to have altered the course of history. He is bound by his own dialectic. Neither the free will of Drouet, nor the strength of the man’s horse, nor the quality of his skill, can genuinely enter Hegelian history; nor can they enter the systems of Spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him, because systems of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical contingency. What modern vulgarian, conditioned by our mechanical theories about sex, can really understand Marie Antoinette—so Catholic at the end, and always so much the woman! Theories of history can take these contingencies and admit them as facts, but they can not use them in their over-all explanations. These historians are not humanists, but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that escapes the purely scientific.
For an insight into Belloc’s humanist penetration, one could do little better than to read him on King Charles I of England. For centuries Charles has been a puzzle to students of history: carrying with him all the glamour of the Stuarts, he was certainly the noblest of that ill-omened house (if one except James Francis Edward), and yet why did he let Strafford go to his death? This moral failure of the King is contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war, from the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham to his execution. Charles simply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling: we cannot think of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next; there is a constancy about his whole life, and how can this constancy be understood in the light of the death of Strafford? Explained it must be, if the English Civil War is to make sense. Belloc, uniting the Newmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a humanist, draws this sketch of the man’s character:
I may compare the effects of his inward strength to the effects produced by one kind of resistance against an impact.
When men plan to make impact against resistance in the will of another they expect, and commonly find, at first a resistance. They proceed to wear it down. If it gets less, they are introduced to a last struggle in which, when they have taken all the outworks, they may naturally expect to succeed. So it was with the pressure brought against the boy’s father, James I, in the first beginnings of the revolt of the gentry against him. James’ Parliaments—that is, the country gentlemen—pushed him further and further. Such an action is like a siege, it can have but one end, and as we know, James, fighting from trench to trench, always, in the end, gave way.
Then again, there is the kind of resistance offered by men who are adamant in the beginning. They bluntly refuse, and if you lose your first battle against them you can go no further.