Hilaire Belloc was the last representative of a long tradition of Catholic thinkers who actually thought of the Christian Unity in terms of a cultural and geographical order minted into a unity by the genius of the Faith. His understanding of Christendom is the most serious problem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought. Belloc has been accused of identifying Western Europe and Catholicism to the point where it would appear that the Universal Religion was a uniquely Latin thing that carried with it of necessity the temporal and cultural trappings of Mediterranean regionalism. “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.”
Belloc’s position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would assert, nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary Christians when they think of “Christendom.” In the first place it is simply false to assert that he identified Catholicism necessarily with Western Europe. He expressly states the contrary in the famous and controversial Europe and the Faith.[50] Operative behind his passionate and concrete love of European Catholicism is a doctrinal position that can be stated rather simply: grace perfects nature, and grace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions, but grace operates the better, the more perfected is man on the natural level.
It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more fully men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most normal of its own kind.[51]
Linked with this doctrinal position is his favorite historical thesis that Roman Europe represented the very best man had achieved on the temporal level of existence prior to the advent of the Son of God. In Rome man began to come into his own; in Rome man discovered the possibility of an immortal destiny, because Rome had conceived, even if imperfectly, the nature of human dignity. Roman man is Myself, the Four Men—integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential incompletion of his own handiwork. Christianity came into the Empire and found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the Gospel. It was with such stuff that the Church molded Western Europe. The result was Christendom.
The conception of Christendom lies at the heart of Belloc’s Christian humanism. The necessity for the Faith to penetrate a culture and erect a civilization that bears her lineaments is both a deduction from Belloc’s humanism and an historical cause of his humanism, though it is principally the latter.
Let us first look to the matter theoretically. There is no consciously articulated “philosophy of Christendom” in Belloc, and this for two reasons: Christendom was an historical fact in his eyes; you do not theorize about the possibility of that which is; one Thing had preserved the best of the Roman Order, had sanctified the human hearth, and had worked toward the erection of a social and personal dignity unheard-of in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England—and this one institution was the Roman Catholic Church; secondly, and this is a weakness in his armour, Belloc had little interest in (or talent for) purely philosophical and theological issues as such; outside of a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against skepticism, and an almost inarticulate loathing of German Idealism, he remained aloof from formal philosophy. Christendom is not a “concept” or a “thesis” for him: she is Europe and the ages.
Belloc’s failure to elaborate a philosophical defence, as well as an historical defence, of the theory of Christendom has left his whole position in jeopardy. Today many highly reputable minds are questioning the validity of the very idea of a Christendom. The attack is psychologically understandable. The older European Order, first wounded by the Reformation, then weakened spiritually by four centuries of rationalism, nationalism, and secular liberalism, now physically and morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial capitalism, has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars. The Christian community will survive in the new era now being born, it is said, only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture that no longer exists. Today the East is throwing off its shackles, and if the Faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness of these peoples, it must come as something native to themselves. To cling to an identification of Catholicism and European Catholicism is not only bad theology, it is bad policy. Catholicism is supra-temporal and can never be associated essentially with any of the passing cultural forms that she blesses. It is, then, impossible to speak of a Christendom as being some one unique cultural reality, whose soul is the Faith.
There is more than a little truth to the above reasoning, and there can be no doubt that Belloc’s dogged passion for complete, final integration and his deep love for the European Order rendered him temperamentally incapable of realizing the concrete possibility of the Faith’s taking root in a non-European form. To separate the Faith from the freedom and the institutions of the West was in his eyes to divorce the mother from its child, and to desecrate that historical unity that centuries had hallowed. If he overstated his case, it can be affirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate.
The weakness of the anti-Bellocian position lies in its sheer abstractionism. In the abstract there is no question but that the Faith is culturally neutral. But historically it is simply false to say that the Church has always been, and could always be, neutral to any given civilization to which she has come, or will come, preaching salvation. The Church could never have sanctified Carthage with its human sacrifice to Moloch; the Church could never have concreted itself in those border cultures that produced the Mystery Cults and flirted with the pantheisms of the East. Belloc fingered a profound historical truth when he declared that as Revelation incarnates itself the better in a man in proportion to that man’s natural perfection, so too Revelation has always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of corporate perfection achieved by that society.
If certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to receive Faith than others, it is still true that Faith comes to them as a pure gift. Catholicism did not have to fix itself within the boundaries of the Greco-Roman world. But the historical fact is that it did so. That Rome was more apt to receive the Gospel than were her neighbours is, to Belloc, one of the clearest truths of Western history. Those who accuse Belloc of theoretically tying the Church to Rome confuse two questions: a theological question and an historical question. Doctrinally, the Faith belongs to no one by right; but if the Faith does come to a man, it will come to him as to one formed by a unique set of cultural exigencies, which will aid or will hinder his reception of the Divine Gift. The Faith belongs to no culture by right. Some cultures could never have received her; other cultures could have, but historically they did not. The fact remains that she came into Rome, transformed the Empire and built a Europe that had been humanized to a high level by the already existing Latin Order.