No reply.
The poor Neanderthaler has to go to the dogs, I fear, by implication, for Mr. Belloc puts it with all the convincing force of italics, that “Man is a fixed type.” We realise now why he wrote the four wonderful chapters about Natural Selection that we have done our best to appreciate. It was to seem to establish this idea of fixed types. Man had to be shown as a “Fixed Type” for reasons that will soon be apparent. Apart from Mr. Belloc’s assertion, there is no evidence that man is any exception to the rest of living creatures. He changes. They all change. All this remarkable discourse about bows or no bows and about the high thinking and simple living of these wandering savages of twenty or more thousand years ago, which runs through half a dozen papers, seems to be an attempt to believe that these early men were creatures exactly like ourselves; and an attempt to believe that the more animal savages of the preceding hundred thousand years did not for all practical purposes exist at all. An attempt to believe and induce belief; not an attempt to demonstrate. Mr. Belloc emerges where he went in, with much said and nothing proved, and the Outline undamaged by his attack. And emerging he makes a confession that he never was really concerned with the facts of the case at all. “Sympathy or antagonism with the Catholic faith is the only thing of real importance in attempting to teach history”—and there you are! All these argumentative gesticulations, all these tortured attempts to confute, are acts of devotion to Mr. Belloc’s peculiar vision of the Catholic faith.
I am afraid it is useless for me to suggest a pilgrimage to Mr. Belloc, or I would ask him to visit a popular resort not two hours by automobile from the little corner of France in which I am wont to shelter my suburban Protestantism from the too bracing English winter. That is the caves at Rochers Rouges, at which, as it happens, his one quoted authority, M. Boule, worked for several years. There in an atmosphere entirely “Latin” and “continental,” under the guidance of Signor Alfredo Lorenzi, he can see for himself his Fixed Type Man at successive levels of change. No northern man need be with him when he faces the facts of these caves; no Protestant shadow need dog his steps; his French, that rare distinguished gift, will be understood, and he may even air such Provençal or Italian as he is master of. The horrid Neanderthaler is not in evidence. But there, protected by glass covers, he will be able to see the skeletons of Cro-Magnon man and Grimaldi man lying in the very positions in which they were discovered. He will see for himself the differences of level at which they were found and have some help in imagining the ages that separate the successive types. He will note massiveness of skull and protrusion of jaw. He will see the stone implements they used, the ashes of their fires, and have some material for imagining the quality of their savagery. He can hunt about for arrow-heads to bear out his valiant assertion that Palæolithic man was “an archer with an efficient weapon.” He will hunt until stooping and the sunshine make him giddy, in vain. And then, with these bones fresh in his mind, he should go to the Museum at Monaco and see the skeleton of a modern human being. He will find no end of loud talk and valiant singing and good red wine necessary before he can get back to his faith in man as a Fixed Type.
Where Was the Garden of Eden?
It is extremely difficult to find out what Mr. Belloc, as a representative Catholic, believes about human origins. I was extremely curious to get the Catholic view of these matters, and I heard of the advent of these articles with very great pleasure, because I thought I should at last be able to grasp what I had hitherto failed to understand in the Catholic position. But if Mr. Belloc has said all that there is to say for Catholicism upon these points, Catholicism is bankrupt. He assures me that to believe in the Biblical account of the Creation is a stupid Protestant tendency, and that Catholics do not do anything of the sort. His attitude towards the Bible throughout is one almost of contempt. It is not for me to decide between Christians upon this delicate issue. And Catholics, I gather, have always believed in Evolution and are far above the intellectual level of the American Fundamentalist. It is very important to Catholic self-respect to keep that last point in mind. Catholic evolution is a queer process into which “Design” makes occasional convulsive raids; between which raids species remain “fixed”; but still it is a sort of Evolution. My peasant neighbours in Provence, devout Catholics and very charming people, have not the slightest suspicion that they are Evolutionists, though Mr. Belloc assures me they are.
But, in spite of this smart Evolutionary town wear of the Church, it has somehow to be believed by Catholics that “man” is and always has been and will be the same creature, “fixed.” That much Mr. Belloc gives us reiteratively. A contemporary writer, the Rev. Morris Morris, has written an interesting book, Man Created During Descent, to show that man’s immortal soul was injected into the universe at the beginning of the Neolithic period, which makes those Azilians and Capsians, with their bows and carvings, mere animals. The new Belloc-Catholic teaching is similar, but it puts the human beginnings earlier. Somewhen after the Chellean and Moustierian periods, and before the Reindeer men, I gather that “man” appeared, according to Catholic doctrines, exactly what he is now. Or rather better. He was clad in skins and feathers, smeared with paint, a cave-hunting wanderer with not even a dog at his heels; but he was, because Mr. Belloc says so, a devout monotheist and had a lucid belief in personal immortality. His art was pure and exalted—there were little bone figures of steatopygous women in evidence. He had no connection with the Neanderthal predecessor—or else he had jumped miraculously out of the Neanderthaler’s bestial skin. Sometimes it seems to be one thing and sometimes the other. But all that stuff about Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Tree and the Serpent, so abundantly figured in Catholic painting and sculpture, seems to have dropped out of this new version of Catholic truth.
Yet those pictures are still shown to the faithful! And what the Fall becomes in these new revelations of Catholicism, or whether there was a Fall, historically speaking, Mr. Belloc leaves in the densest obscurity. I have read and re-read these articles of his, and I seek those lucid Latin precisions he has promised me in vain. Was and is that Eden story merely symbolical, and has the Church always taught that it is merely symbolical? And if so, what in terms of current knowledge do these symbols stand for? Is it symbolical of some series of events in time or is it not? If it is, when and what were the events in time? And if it is not, but if it is symbolical of some experience or adventure or change in the life of each one of us, what is the nature of that personal fall? What is the significance of the Garden, the Innocence, the Tree, the Serpent? To get anything clear and hard out of Mr. Belloc’s papers in reply to these questions is like searching for a diamond in a lake of skilly. I am left with the uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Belloc is as vague and unbelieving about this fundamental Catholic idea as the foggiest of foggy Protestants and Modernists, but that he has lacked the directness of mind to admit as much even to himself. Yet surely the whole system of salvation, the whole Christian scheme, rests upon the presumption of a fall. Without a fall, what is the value of salvation? Why redeem what has never been lost? Without a condemnation what is the struggle? What indeed, in that case, is the Catholic Church about?
What modern thought is about is a thing easier to explain. In the Outline of History, against which Mr. Belloc is rather carping than levelling criticism, there is set out, as the main form of that Outline, a progressive development of conscious will in life. It is not a form thrust upon the massed facts by any fanatical prepossession; it is a form they insisted upon assuming under my summarising hand. What is going on in this dispute is not that I am beating and putting over my ideas upon Mr. Belloc or that he is beating and putting over his ideas upon me, but that the immense increase of light and knowledge during the past century is imposing a new realisation of the quality and depth and import of life upon us both, and that I am acquiescent and he is recalcitrant. I judge his faith by the new history, and he judges the new history by his faith.
V
FIXITY OR PROGRESS
I am glad to say that we are emerging now from the worst of the controversial stuff, irritating and offensive, in which Mr. Belloc is so manifestly my master, and coming to matters of a more honest interest.