We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain for ever. What happens in this life of ours, which we had from you, Salva Fide, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of this world.
It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her “Esto Perpetua!” which means in her undying language: “You shall not die.”...[56]
We pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time. Suffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth that “piety of speech” reminiscent of the seventeenth century.[57] As Prudentius sees classical Roman Europe as caused by God in order to be a highway, a Roman Road, over which will pass the message of the Gospel, so does Belloc look back on this prophecy, fulfilled through a thousand years full of a Christendom, armed, proud, conscious of its destiny. Aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the cruel laws of time, he nonetheless prays that historic Christendom may remain one Thing, “the standing grace of this world.”
To a contemporary thinker, even a contemporary Christian thinker, Christendom is something apart from himself—an historic era, good in its day, but its day is now done. He stands outside of the old European Unity, for it exists no longer, except perhaps in “the river-valleys,” and in the mountains, as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism. He looks to a new synthesis of Christianity with the modern world, and in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look back and who would still hope for the Resurrection of Europe.
But Belloc always saw Christendom as some one historic Reality, thrusting itself into the dimension of present time—a Reality within which he has consciously situated himself. Having become one with the men of old Europe (how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery of the Continent, the silent men of South England, and the company of those that sail) he could only look back for corporate salvation. To look to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the Roman Order would be for him to destroy himself. You cannot uproot an unalienated man.
Supporting this hidden marriage with his origins is Belloc’s firm opposition to the Hegelian conception of history, in which the old is necessarily overcome by the new, and in which nothing historical remains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism. Those men who say that the old Christendom is dead may be right, but when they ground their opinion in an historical determinism, they demonstrate their inability to understand the organic nature of a traditional society, in which the past can be renewed through an ever recurrent act of collective memory.
The old European Christendom that Belloc loved so well may never come back; its rich cultural diversity, its personal individualism and patchwork of small property, its shrines, its liberating chaos—these things can have no place in a world committed to the principle of technological and collectivist barbarism. The European way of life died, not because it had to, but because there were not enough men left with the will to keep it alive.
Belloc had the will, but his prayer, “You shall not die,” seems a trifle remote in this fifth decade of the century. It seems more and more probable that the Christian community of the future will resemble Communist cells lost in a world given over to the barbarism of faceless men. The Faith may, at some future date, arise out of the new catacombs and be faced with sanctifying a society that is neither humanist nor humane. Belloc recognized this possibility,[58] always believing the contrary more likely. But should a Christian Order commence to arise out of the atomic ruins of a mechanical and industrial desert, it will work again to the erection of a genuinely human order. And should the men of this new age wish to know that freer and broader vision of their half-forgotten fathers, they could do no better than to turn to the work of this last of the rooted men.
If the old Christendom is dead, then a new Christendom will be built in time. Christendom may be considered an “outmoded concept” by some thinkers who consider the modern world to have been a necessity. These intellectuals fail to see that Christendom is rather a fundamental urge, deep within man, grounded in an ontological need for the complete integration of man’s spiritual and temporal destinies.
The issue needs further elucidation. There have been so many attacks in recent years against the Bellocian position on the relationship between Europe and Catholicism, and on his understanding of “Christendom,” that a thorough airing of the subject is necessary. In the first place, only an irresponsible writer like Sidney Hook would accuse Belloc of identifying the interests of Catholicism with the ancien régime.[59] Belloc gloried in the best traditions of the Revolution, and, with the exception of Bernanos, he seems to be the only historian to have grasped the Christian continuity of the new and the older political traditions of Europe. He was so much the Republican that he was duped by the pretensions of Rousseau. The charges of reaction are not worth the dignity of a formal reply. In the second place, those quite responsible men who oppose the Bellocian slogan of “Europe is the Faith” are guilty, not of irresponsibility, but of a lack of intellectual subtlety. To state that the Faith is supra-temporal and is thereby never to be identified with any given civilization is to enunciate a truism, and to miss the point. It is one thing to say that no cultural order is of the essence of the Faith; it is another thing to say that the Faith is of the essence of some given cultural order. The latter is Belloc’s position. When the Faith is of the essence of that culture, then that civilization is part of, or coincident with, Christendom. The historical proof of Belloc’s point lies in the brutal truth that when that given social order loses the Faith, it ceases to be itself. Such is the meaning of “Europe is the Faith.”