A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

by Hilaire Belloc

The civilized Christian England of the Dark Ages was utterly different socially, and very different racially, from the Pagan, Saxon or Scandinavian; it felt so and it said so the whole time. The languages were similar, though the similarity can be exaggerated: the mind was different. As for the “Normans,” if the word is used in the sense of the Northmen of the old pirate raids, then they were simply Scandinavians; but used as it is on page 400, after mention of the Conquest, it is quite wrong. The Norman of the Conquest was a Frenchman, much like any other—short, stocky, round-headed, and with all the French violence, all the French vice of partizanship and fighting against one’s neighbour, all the French instinct for simple mechanical order in building and measurement and legal system, and much of the French fun. Even the families of known Scandinavian origin were by that time French. William the Conqueror himself had but one-sixteenth of Scandinavian blood.

Still, these bad errors are after all no more than errors of the conventional old textbooks, written in the days when all History had the Protestant air, and any man who has to fill up a popular history in a hurry from our enyclopædias will naturally be behind the times to that extent. What is less excusable is a series of chance sentences which show real ignorance of essentials on which not even the popular textbooks would go wrong. For instance, the Comitatus of which Tacitus speaks as surrounding a German chieftain has nothing whatever to do with our words “Count” and “County.” These come from the Roman official, the “Comes.” Or, again, to talk of the Roman roads (p. 395) as being “destroyed” as early as the eighth century, is to show that the writer knows nothing of the lines of marching or even the sites of battles. The Roman roads remain the great means of communication much later than that. Take a map of Roman roads in Western Europe, put pins in it for the sites of the great religious foundations, the new markets, and especially for the battles up to, say, 1200, and you will see what their meaning was.

In the same way, to talk of the Scandinavians “becoming bolder and ranging further at sea from the Fifth century” is absurd. We know nothing appreciable about them as pirates or long-voyage men until the end of the Eighth, and the very fact that we know nothing about them is proof that they did not early or regularly take these very long voyages.

The worst and most inexcusable direct error is again here in connection with the Filioque clause, on which, as we saw in my last chapter, Mr. Wells quite uncannily specializes in mistakes. He seems to think that this clause was put into the Creed through a sort of personal private whim of Charlemagne in the Council of Aix, and he compares that decree to some vulgar fancy or other of the “late Emperor William writing operas or painting pictures.” He knows that the Spaniards were the first to put it into the Creed, and he knows that the Pope delayed doing so; but he does not know apparently what the reason for the Doctrine was, nor does he appreciate that the vital point at issue was the question of unity. The Greek-speaking half of the Church had never worried very much about the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The fact that the Procession was defined in the Creed as coming from the Father had nothing to do with the idea of excluding the double Procession. The Procession from the Father was only specifically stated in the Creed as against certain heretics who had denied that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father; and the real point about the schism is this: the Universal Church of the early Councils accepted the Primacy of Rome: of that there is no more doubt than of the Battle of Waterloo. But the official and State-ridden Church of the East tended to protest more and more against that Primacy as it developed into the strong Papal idea of the later Dark Ages and Early Middle. That is really the whole affair; and the Filioque was but a pretext.

There appear, of course, those phrases deriving from Mr. Wells’s own anti-Catholic theology, on which it would be tedious to linger after so many earlier examples. Thus the Nestorians—because they are anti-Catholic and far more heretical than the Byzantines—are called “more intelligent and active-minded than the Greeks,” and, of course, “on a much higher level of general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the West.” Theology, when in a Catholic form, excites nothing but ridicule in minds of Mr. Wells’s level of culture—but when it is Persian—and, best of all, Pagan Persian—it becomes “intense” and “subtle.” The Blessed Trinity is something of which one “cannot make head nor tail,” while an obscure Eastern Heresy is respectable.

But the worst mixture of ignorance and sneering at Divine things combined is on page 386. It is something which I hope it it not too disrespectful to call balderdash. Because certain Mohammedans seem to have wondered whether the Koran had been always in the mind of God (I suppose it was—as all things realized have been in the mind of God), Mr. Wells immediately makes up out of his head an imaginary Christian convert to Islam who is introducing to that world the Gospel of St. John; he actually puts forward the phrase “The Word was God” as meaning that the Bible was God!

I confess I am bewildered. Mr. Wells cannot be ignorant of the term Logos—he cannot possibly be as ignorant as that. And yet here he is plainly thinking that Logos means Holy Writ. Ignorance is ignorance and muddle-headedness is muddle-headedness; but when they mix and reach that degree criticism must be silent.

There runs through the whole of this division the nineteenth-century idea of “progress.” It is taken for granted, in all its crudity, all its tautology, all its unproved and untrue postulates, and all its flagrant contrast with reality—for of all forms of mystical enthusiasm that of “progress” is the stupidest.

Here is an example from page 385. “Politically, Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert.” Retrogression towards what—in the name of Heaven, common sense and the rudiments of education? If I say a motor-bus is not an “advance” but a “retrogression” from the old horse bus, I must mean, I suppose, that I like the old horse bus better than the motor-bus (which I do). Does Mr. Wells mean that the Arab of the desert, unorganized, and doing what he liked, is his ideal? Then why does he give us his whole idea of progress as that people should get more and more together, and regard the stricter unity of mankind as a thing at once good and inevitable? What does he mean?

I doubt if he knows himself what he means. He had a vague feeling for the moment, as he wrote the sentence, that it would be jollier to be a free Pagan Arab playing about than an Arab bound down by a religious system. Instead of saying that the change was a change towards the “less jolly,” he calls it a “retrogression”—which simply means that he thinks the word “progress” means nothing more than “getting towards the kind of thing I like.” In this, though he may not know it, he is perfectly right—that is about the only meaning the word “progress” has in the mouths of its faithful flock. But then, to use Progress as a universal philosophy is essential nonsense. For different people will always like different things. Until you have a rational and firm faith (or philosophy) as to what is best, you have no way of distinguishing between going forwards and going backwards.