Europe and the Faith. By Hilaire Belloc, 1920.
Hilaire Belloc loved controversy. He took pride in his intractable opinions and almost never backed down. Belloc’s irascible temper led to the loss of friendships and career setbacks, but Belloc never adopted the ability to separate personal disagreements from personal relationships that his friend G.K. Chesterton perfected. Belloc’s interests included history, religion, culture, and economics, and all of these subjects are present in Europe and the Faith.
In Europe and the Faith, Belloc presents his history of European society over the centuries, and argues that Catholicism was at the heart of the continent’s cultural and regional identity. This perspective has an added level of controversy in the present day, when the bureaucrats of the European Union have recently attempted to draw up a history of the continent in their constitution without the slightest mention of Christianity. In contrast, Belloc posits that Catholicism formed the core of national identity and shaped the mentality of each individual European. When explaining the centrality of faith to European life and intellectual culture, Belloc writes:
“The Catholic brings to history (when I say "history" in these pages I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: he sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together.
I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is The Church.”
This famous syllogism
has provoked much ire from Belloc’s critics, especially those who stress that contemporary Europe’s secularism and multiculturalism have utterly and permanently divorced it from its religious past. These opinions were present a century ago, more towards secularism than multiculturalism, the latter of which has grown more prominent in the post-colonial period. Belloc was convinced that the Catholic Church traditionally filled the soul and intellect of Europe, and when society was divorced from the faith, innumerable societal and personal problems would follow. He writes:
has provoked much ire from Belloc’s critics, especially those who stress that contemporary Europe’s secularism and multiculturalism have utterly and permanently divorced it from its religious past. These opinions were present a century ago, more towards secularism than multiculturalism, the latter of which has grown more prominent in the post-colonial period. Belloc was convinced that the Catholic Church traditionally filled the soul and intellect of Europe, and when society was divorced from the faith, innumerable societal and personal problems would follow. He writes:
“I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this disaster: its spiritual result--an isolation of the soul; its political result--a consequence of the spiritual--the prodigious release of energy, the consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few under a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the ruin of happiness, the final threat of chaos.”
Belloc’s history of Europe starts with the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, moving through the Dark and Middle Ages, through the rise of Protestantism up to contemporary times. Special attention is paid to the English religious experience. Belloc does not argue that the past was better than the present because Catholicism was more ubiquitous and better protected by the establishment, but he does suggest that a culture that is thoroughly infused with the morals and societal justice preached by the Church made for a better treated and more united civilization. A society permeated with the ideologies that Belloc termed the “modernist heresies,” in his view, isolate the soul from the protective truths and codes of conduct that are necessary to keep people balanced, safe, and sane. Belloc further explains what he means by “the isolation of the soul” when he writes:
“The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the sane balance produced by general experience, the weight of security, and the general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition of its unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than merely complete and confirm human misery.”
Belloc wrote this book long before the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, before Communism fell over Eastern Europe, before the looming demographic collapse of Europe, before the rise of terrorism, and before economic turmoil caused widespread societal unrest. Yet though the modern age saw many technological and medicinal advances, Belloc insisted that with the soul of the continent rotting, no amount of comfort and affluence could protect Europe from slouching toward certain doom. Indeed, over ninety years have passed since this tome was written, and many of the predictions Belloc made have come true.
“So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing.
In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.
Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.
The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”
No overview of European history is complete without a detailed and thorough understanding of how the Catholic Church shaped every faced of it, but unfortunately all too many history of the region do exactly that. Will Europe return to its Christian roots, or will it follow one of multiple pathways to destruction? It is impossible to divine the future, but it must be remembered that with God all things are possible.
Europe and the Faith is in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free for the Amazon Kindle, or from Project Gutenberg as a free e-book in various formats. It is also published in book form.
–Chris Chan
