There can be no doubt that Hilaire Belloc was temperamentally a skeptic, at least throughout a good part of his career. It is a skepticism which follows on his classical humanism. To be integrated in earthly existence is to conceive both the possibility of an eternal destiny and the threat of the opposite. To be at home in this world is to recognize the composite nature of man. The human soul is not a Platonic idea, but the act of a body rendered human by its union with the soul. To be fully aware of this, and only the man who attends to the reality of the earthly part of himself is so aware, is to experience a sense of annihilation before the inevitability of death. This is not philosophy, but it is an attitude which is unmistakably human. If to be myself is to be fully a man, then when I cease to be a man at the moment of death, I shall cease to be myself. Aristotle never got clear of this problem, which can be called the threat of classical alienation: the final alienation of man should he cease to be. “Death ... shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys.”[20]
Final classical alienation, let it be insisted once again, becomes a more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved. Since alienation is never affirmed, but is emotionally grasped as a possibility along with the hope for personal immortality, classical man feels no sense of guilt simply in being himself. If he is alienated in the end, it will be too late for guilt. Temporal classical guilt results from man’s ceasing to be what he can be, and this defines the nature of tragedy. Modern alienation, on the contrary, is an alienation existing within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is alienated. Hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference defining his existence. He is almost ashamed to be.
Classical humanism is basically insufficient, since man cannot achieve, of himself, the fullness of his dignity. Threatened from without by death, the humanist’s integrity is attacked from within by the wounds of sin that divide him from himself. Belloc never romanticized man, and he is so conscious of the fact of sin that his historical judgments frequently seem cynical. In a short story called “The Opportunity,” he writes of three men that “each of these ... being a man, had a worm at his heart, eating it out.”[21] Courage excepted, the classical European humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final questions.
The humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so fascinated the Eastern World, because his initial choice has been an election for all human values. Romantic irrationality, be it aesthetic, political, or naturalistic, is an insult to his reason. His world outlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness, and in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the world in which he exists. He cannot, without betraying the light which has been given him, join the oriental drive to the beyond. He has too much respect for who he is, and for where he is. Only faith, a Faith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built, and a Faith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny, can guarantee his fundamental vision: personal perfection and the happiness that issues therefrom. The classical humanist, the old European, sees the gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that have come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has built. They offer everything to man, provided he destroy himself in the darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow with atheism and nothingness. The only immortality worth having is one that is personal and that unites man with a Personal God who can bestow happiness on the creature of His Image. Man is, and only He Who Is can slake his thirst.
The Path to Rome: Christian Integration
The Catholic Faith came to Hilaire Belloc from his birth to answer this humanist dilemma. Yet Faith came to him hard, and precisely because it did his final Christian affirmation has about it the resounding ring of iron: the iron which is the adherence of the will to a God unseen. If Belloc ever had what are called “religious experiences,” or supernatural “consolations” to aid him on his pilgrimage, he has kept them sedulously to himself. He seems to appear, the more closely he is read, as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered.
There is a passage in The Path to Rome that would lead one to think this born Catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the confused time of youth. Years later, in at least two published works, he hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to a more fully articulated understanding of Catholicism.
In the first place I was baptized into the Faith upon my birth, and have known it all my life.... Next, I have, though baptized into it and familiar with it from my earliest years, in some sense also discovered the Faith—but this I will not pursue as it is somewhat intimate, and hardly to the point; unless, indeed, it be to the point to tell those who read me and who are balancing, that I also have balanced.[22]
The same sentiment, once again guarded in reticence, is made in an essay written on the death of Chesterton.
I was not when I first met him as alive to the strength of that word “Catholic” as I am today; I myself have gone through a pilgrimage of approach, to an understanding in the matter.... Having said so much ... I will leave it, for it is too personal and has been too prolonged.[23]