It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.
The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument is equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among men must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church might have arisen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring up in the high Greek tide of the Levant and carries to this day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial Roman system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for its ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements and the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies. As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome: of the Empire.[52]
Such is the principal meaning of Europe and the Faith: as a matter of fact the Church arose within the bosom of the Roman Empire; as a matter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the classical world; it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into the larger Thing which was the Faith and which made Europe in her own image. If you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that breathed the spirit of Christianity, you would find it in Western Europe that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from without, and from all the schisms from within. A free peasantry, the sacredness of marriage, the dignity of man, the steady rejection of every Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the sacramental view of the universe: these are to be found in Catholic Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and they are to be found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this earth.
The Church “lays her foundations in something other,” says Belloc, but “out of that something other came the art and the song of the Middle Ages.” And he adds his famous taunt to the Englishmen of his day, “and what art or song have you?”[53]
Such is the basic Bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship between Catholicism and European Christendom. And yet he pushes his position even further in a daring move that links him with those early Christians who saw in Rome the special mark of Divine Providence, preparing a way for the Incarnation. As a man never exists outside of the supernatural order, with the result that even his natural perfection is achieved under the impetus of grace, one can say that God is operating with lavish gratuity wherever a cultural organism is found to have reached a certain high level of human perfection. Humanism is crowned by grace, but in a deeper sense, humanism is caused by grace. “The Church makes men,” Belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in The Path to Rome.[54] It is small wonder, then, that when viewing that sweep of Empire which is the foundation of the West, when seeing that high pitch of humanism that avoided the Eastern nihilisms, when gazing at that magnificent legal structure, imperfect though it was, that had as its end the defining of human dignity—when seeing all these things, it is no wonder Belloc frequently talked like those Latin Fathers who saw in Rome a Unity raised by God to prepare man for the Incarnation.
Grace not only crowns nature but causes nature to flower into its fullness. All human values, tending of isolation and separate destruction outside Catholic Christianity, are unified within the Body of Christ by the bond of Charity. It is, therefore, reasonable to believe that the Roman Order—classical humanism—was created by God for the sake of the preaching of the Gospel. Compare two passages rather closely: one was composed around A.D. 385 by the Christian poet Prudentius; the other was written in 1906 by Hilaire Belloc in his Esto Perpetua.
We live in every clime, as if a paternal city enclosed within its single walls citizens of a single birthplace; we are all one in heart within our paternal hearth. Now, men from afar and over land and sea appear before a single and common court; now, for business and the arts they gather together in the great assembly; now, they contract marriages and one people is formed from the mingling of different blood. This has been achieved by so many triumphant successes of the Roman Empire, believe me, that the way has been prepared for Christ’s event, a way which the communal friendship of our peace has built under Roman guidance. For, what place could there be for God in a savage world, in the discordant breasts of men and in those who guard their own rights by different laws, as was formerly the case? But, if the mind, from its lofty throne, bridle impulsive rage and the rebellious organs and bring every passion under the sway of reason, then is built a stable way of life; then with surety does it drink in God and live in submission to the one Lord. Omnipotent One, now is Your hour; penetrate the earth where no discord reigns. Now, O Christ, the world accepts You, this world which peace and Rome together hold within their grasp.[55]
Setting aside details and moving to the heart of the text, we could say that the poet has laid down the proclamation of Christendom: a corporate theocentric humanism. Man’s personal and social integration exists in order that God may conquer the soul. Now listen to Belloc’s passage as he sails away from the African shores and faces once more the Latin Order:
“In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look back, as upon an adventure, towards journey in this African land ... I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns ... and I shall see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought about all these things as the ship drove on.
Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account, although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny....