The same sentiment, once again guarded in reticence, is made in an essay written on the death of Chesterton.

To a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace, the personal reserve of the man, prolonged through a life devoted to religious controversy, is bound to be curious if not somewhat irritating. He reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual crisis. He apparently felt it was no one’s business but his own. Nothing could be more typically Bellocian.

The Catholic Church appears in Belloc’s thought, as given us in his writing, as the custodian of the Faith—of a Faith beyond himself, objective, out there, demanding acceptance because it is the Truth. Emotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that which is. Christ came, claimed to be Divine, died, and came back in three days from the dead. Such is the evidence, and it is ultimately traceable, through tradition and written testimony, to the Apostles who saw it with their own eyes. Faith is not established, as such, by personal experience nor by private speculations, but on an evidence which is a heritage common to all mankind. Emotion may aid or may block faith, but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable, and it is the business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be swamped in the vagaries of subjectivism. Belloc’s approach is by no means the only approach to religion, but it is one that is cold, hard, rational; the insight of a man with an intellect which is French in its incisiveness, directness, and confidence in itself. Such a faith is unbolstered by any natural religiosity, but for that very reason it presents a hard, diamond-like character, unyielding and dogmatic in its affirmations: a faith foreign to fashions, be they literary or philosophical.

In a letter written to Chesterton upon the occasion of the latter’s entrance into the Church, Belloc compares the man of Faith to a man who walks through the rain at night, and who feels in his bones that he has gone thirty miles, but who knows well enough from his map and his reason that he has not travelled eleven.

The early death of his wife whom he worshipped, the death of a son in World War I and then again of a son in World War II, the ever present and never fully overcome threat of personal poverty, the passing of the friends of youth, the dire fulfillment of his political and economic warnings which went unheeded, the apparent dryness of his religious life—all these tragedies struck his heart and isolated him from family, friends, political life, society, from joy. He never speaks of these things in his public writings, but they add to his integrated Catholic personality the steel of great character. He maintained himself in a desert.

From the very outset of his career, the Catholic center of Belloc’s life appears as the spiritual hub from whence proceed the amazingly diverse spokes of his personality. The Faith is never glimpsed as a hope in the distance that calls him out of the secularist age in which he lived. The Faith is always present, informing and energizing his being, disciplining his irony, conquering his skepticism, and giving direction to his destiny. Nevertheless, a close reading of the Bellocian corpus reveals a shift in religious emphasis as the man advanced in years. In the earlier books, the humanizing role of Catholicism is the dominant motif: the Church is that corporate organism, Divine in origin, that alone accounts for the high culture of the older European civilization. She is the custodian of personal dignity, the ancient mistress that alone of all societies can harbour the human spirit and nourish it into its fullness. Through her, God offers temporal dignity and eternal salvation to man. But as Belloc grew older he sounded a new religious emphasis as he plunged more deeply into directly apologetic and controversial battle. Although the reality of Christian humanism is never forgotten, the Church emerges in his writing not only as the Divine instrument of human salvation, but more and more as the Truth of God, to which everything personal must be sacrificed, should events dictate such a course.

Belloc saw with unerring accuracy that the bulk of what he called “official history” in the English-speaking world was anti-Catholic. He attacked the thing bitterly, brilliantly, and at great cost to his reputation. He saw that the individualist, industrial, capitalist society of England was anti-human to the core. He attacked it. He grasped the anti-Christian meaning of Prussia, and he fought against this spirit from the North of Germany with intense vigour. He analyzed the anti-intellectual and therefore anti-Catholic bias that moved the “Modern Mind” in the bewildering complexity of that mind’s activities. He detested the Zeitgeist which had surrendered the best man had: his power to reason, judge, and affirm; therefore it had lost the one sure road it had of discovering the Truth of God. Belloc became committed—the French artilleryman in the service of the Church. His intransigence rendered him a marked man. Shaw wondered why Belloc should waste his profuse talents in the service of the Bishop of Rome. Wells noted critically his “partisan fanaticism.” Some Catholic academicians, to gain for themselves the reputation of impartial scholarship and save their standing in the world of learning, disavowed him.

There is no doubt that Belloc entered into battle with his eyes open. If he was anything at all, he was a realist: he understood men and the motives that move them; he was aware of the doors opening to political and literary preferment. His brilliance was such that he could have risen to a Cabinet post through the Liberal Party. He could have carved out for himself an exclusively literary reputation, possibly as great as Conrad’s. He could have become the recognized first historian in the Empire. He sacrificed it all and placed his sword at the service of the Church. It has been suggested that the decisive turning point in his career occurred when he delivered a fighting speech before Archbishop Bearne against the Liberal Government’s intention to prohibit a Eucharistic procession through the streets of London.[25] At that time Belloc was a Liberal Member of Parliament, and the Tories thought that he would turn to them after his break with his own party. His political principles would not permit such a sellout. He went up to the platform a public figure, and came down an Apostle. “I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love ... as tragic as first love, and (it) drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.”[26]

Belloc’s career as an apologist exemplifies the first paradox inherent in Christian humanism. Only the Incarnation can make man whole, but as the Incarnation issues into Calvary, so too must the whole man sacrifice himself to the service of the God-Man. The ascent of man to God is impossible without the prior descent of God to man, and the two meet at the Cross. Once this truth is lived, then the second paradox of Christian humanism can follow. The man who has given himself is paid back with his own gift: himself transfigured in the Divine Fires.

Belloc became himself in controversy. He warmed to the battle entered into freely, and his personality expanded before the prospect of facing all official England arraigned against him. It was a time in which things Catholic were neither popular with the masses nor fashionable with the elite. His opposition was enormous. Possibly he could have gained some concessions to his cause had he compromised; but Belloc never stooped to conquer. It is small wonder that Douglas Jerrold called him one of the last men in England who was, in the full sense of the term, not vulgar.

He became most widely known as a brilliant and somewhat brutal defender of the Catholic Order. But what is not so widely known is the fact that Belloc’s vocation was erected on a delicate structure of human values accepted in their fullness, disciplined by an understanding of their limits, and welded into one by Faith. Belloc is not simply a Michael defending his beloved Church. His partisan belligerence masks his humanist complexity: he is really many men—a pagan Roman classicist—an English naturalist, a French rationalist, a soldier—a Catholic—one man.

The contrast between pagan humanism—man achieved on earth, but threatened by death—and Christian humanism—man achieved forever—can best be grasped by contrasting The Four Men with the great Path to Rome. In the former book, Myself finds himself in his companions, but having found himself he faces the threat of final isolation, the alienation of death. The somber beauty of the Sussex wood, the lonely Downs and the pounding of the tides, the time of autumn, symbolize the threat to the human person who is just coming into his own. Death is all around him, and Sussex itself is marked with the inexorable mutability attaching to a passing world. Although all Four Men are Catholics, their religion functions in the foreground, around the campfire as it were, as hardly more than a mythology. Immortality is hoped for, but is not affirmed clearly as a reality. Belloc achieved a brilliant artistic success in painting the dilemma of the ancient pagan, and the dilemma of every man, in a framework which is, on the surface, both Catholic and contemporary. He was able to do this because he remained throughout his life, on one level of his personality, the threatened Myself.

The Path to Rome, on the contrary, is most particularly the book of a Catholic man at home in Christendom. Man is in no sense alienated. Myself (here openly the author) is a member of the Church Militant, destined for the Church Triumphant. Belloc tramps through the Alps, down into the broad Italian plains, and his heart expands under the graciousness of Catholic skies. An abounding good humour flows into every event, conferring on the most trivial encounter the character of high adventure. Here is the picture of a man who has fought the battle for Faith, and who has been granted some share of peace. He still ponders the nature of the soul. A man so at home with mountains, good wine, and the laughter of friends will never approach the supernatural with the confidence of a contemplative. Belloc’s delight is with the old Europe he loves so deeply, and if there be ecstasies beyond what he can see, he will “take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in Rome.”[27] The irony of this essentially somber spirit is relieved by a humour that is thoroughly Catholic in its simplicity.

This best of all travel books is vintage Belloc because it displays him in all the rich diverseness of his centralized personality. His grave mood, his Grizzlebeard, is constantly balanced by his robust vitality, by the Rabelaisian flavour of this latter-day Villon. He relishes existence with a zest that does due honour to the gifts of God; he laughs; he pontificates with mock solemnity; he trifles brilliantly with words (see the business about “windows”); he holds forth on the nature of Fools; and then he breaks into some of the loveliest lyrical prose in all English letters. And through all this adventuring and tramping runs a sanity that is almost more than human. If great beauty be the “common transfigured,” as Belloc holds it to be, then this record of a shanksmare hike to Rome shall ever stand as a symbol of what man can be if he will only cease being other than himself.

The universe as seen by Hilaire Belloc in The Path to Rome, Hills and the Sea, and The Cruise of the Nona is a thoroughly Catholic universe: physical nature is grasped as good in its very being, and to this inner worthiness of all things there has been added the sacramental seal of the power of God. One can almost see the Papal blessing Urbi et Orbi, hanging like a benediction over the vineyards and hills of Italy as they embrace the man coming down from the cold heights of the Alps.

One can describe the Bellocian world no better than by saying that it is the total opposite of the world of Brunner, Barth, Kafka, and Kierkegaard. If Belloc’s way of looking at things seems so strangely foreign when compared with the outlook of the contemporary intelligentsia, it is because the former is Catholic and the latter is lapsed-Catholic. The philosophy of the modern European is, as Edith Stein once said, “the philosophy of a lapsed-Catholic with a bad conscience.” If Belloc sees the supernatural order as completely penetrating the natural order, it is because grace is seen as not destroying a nature essentially corrupted in sin, but as operating within man and flowering in his very gestures.

Dozens of times throughout his essays, Belloc’s Catholic insight comes home to the reader, not as something superimposed nor as something articulated conceptually, but as the very intelligibility of the man’s work. He saw reality as a gift to be greeted and revered. There is nothing of the contemporary irritation with existence in Belloc. He is never shocked by being. He does not stumble guiltily through a world of spikes, hedged in by the sharp outline of nothingness. Human hypocrisy, greed, social injustice, the loss of economic and personal freedom, the pride of the rich: these sins arouse his ire and bring forth the great thunder of his hammer-like denunciations. But being has not sinned. It is the innocent one recalling all of us to the morning of the race, and to the promise of paradise regained. “If someone find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it. This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion.”[28]

If we would seek one symbol that best crystallizes the Bellocian affirmation, we would find it in wine. Belloc, tramping over the lands of Barbary, brooded long on the lost vineyards as he saw nothing but the vacancy of the desert. He turned and went back to that Europe he so loved, and he drank wine to her in his heart.[29] Wine called forth for him the Sacrament of the Altar and that one moment in time when a passing world full of passing men was lifted out of the darkness. The mystical figure of wine seemed to him to sum up the Catholic affirmations, even to the heart of the Mysteries of the Faith.

The Bellocian vision, while poetic and religious, finds its completion in history. Belloc’s grasp of the European past was something amazing, and it grew out of the need his personality felt for total integration. Man would remain starved if he did not make his past his own. In Belloc the ages became one. As the Church is something visible, existing in space, and enduring in time, so also is the world that she has created something physical to be seen and handled like a Thing: something that perpetuates itself against mortality through a tradition that stretches back into the mists of antiquity.

A man’s understanding of himself depends on where he steps into history; not mere academic nor written and catalogued information, but the past as assimilated into a personality, and as taking on the very existence of a man. When Belloc writes history he is one with the march of the West. Whatever was divisive of the unity of Christendom, even if dead and long conquered, receives at his hands a hatred that is almost personal. Belloc the soldier haunted the battlefields of the First Crusade, marked with his fingers the high point of the Mohammedan wave, and went with Napoleon into the Russian winter. He said once of a friend that “history had overlapped on him.” He was describing himself.

All this does not make for dispassionate scholarship, but it makes for something vastly more important: it situates a man squarely in the path of history, and it renders him conscious of all that has gone before to make him what he is. He becomes himself twice over. What contemporary writer speaks of the time when “we broke the back of Islam at Tours”?

Spiritual insight into the destiny of Christendom, added to an imagination that could vividly resurrect the past, were tools that rendered Belloc uniquely capable of presenting the drama of Europe to an age that largely had ceased living by the old Faith. But above their value in furthering his Christian vocation, they added to his theocentric humanism further integration. The person who is unified in himself and in society through Faith is further enriched if he is, in a sense, all that has gone before. It was Belloc’s good fortune that there was enough of the older Christendom physically in being for him to see at first hand. His historical perspective is uniquely realistic. He frequently deplored historical investigation that proceeded exclusively through written testimony. Such history is lacking in two things: the past is not brought back to us with sufficient vigour and colour, and the past loses its personal, human, integrative value, because history must be seen in things which now exist because of that which has existed.

Belloc’s intensive preoccupation with Christendom is an interest not in a concept, nor in an abstracted framework nor an academic “problematic”; it is an engagement in an historical reality, to be seen and understood on the spot. Occasionally, as he stands in some place hallowed by past significance, he seems almost burdened by the grandeur of the task. See how he writes of the fascination of pursuing the Roman Road between Winchester and Canterbury:

What he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical recovery of the self, so that spiritual isolation will not claim the soul.

If modern man is isolated, and who can doubt that he is, his isolation stems from a variety of causes, some of which have been briefly indicated. Among others is the almost total loss of not only the reality of tradition, but of the sense of tradition, in industrial man. By industrial man, of course, one indicates not simply the man engaged in factory production. By industrial man one means that mechanical personality who has been fashioned by the age—a wound that few if any of us have escaped.

Without a steady tradition enduring through the passage of generations a man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be. The drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his finding an analogue of eternity. Without this, man is without moorings; he drifts and is alone; he is obscurely guilty of lacking something demanded by his nature. Without tradition, he is a victim offered daily to the cruelties of the moment.

Man’s past has never been better known than it is today. Yet this knowledge is almost exclusively academic. It is encased in the great libraries of the civilized world, and it exists divisively in the minds of countless scholars. But it is no longer known as a whole that translates itself into the life of the community. In ceasing to be a tradition, the great story of the West has died; for the only existence the past can possibly have in a culture is traditional. A tradition is measured in a society by that society’s consciousness of its own symbols, which render the tradition present to men. Contemporary industrial society has burgeoned within what was once Christendom, but having lost the old Faith, it has lost the old symbols, which now hang on precariously as myths and forms emptied of content. Industrial man has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone, in the gestures of daily living. He has nothing to recall. As a result contemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to his subconscious drives. Political slogans, ideals gleaned from mass entertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges, and create his conscious desires. Cinema heroes and contest winners give him an ever shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday’s idol or this morning’s news. Even the library that houses last week’s paper is called “the morgue.”

A society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the future. It adores that which has not been, and that which never is. If Shaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, his friend Wells was its prophet. It is through Wells that the man of the twenty-fifth century came into his own. And Wells’ most articulate critic in those days, throughout the whole of England, was Hilaire Belloc. Today Belloc’s long battle against this drive away from our origins, his long fight to make the West conscious and proud of its past, has been partially vindicated, ironically enough, in our own generation. After World War II, with the threat of the atomic age, the prophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom. When thinking man looks ahead he does not see the age of superman, but the grim world of Big Brother and the phantasies of George Orwell. The future, if the present be not altered by a radical reaction, can only effect a “Servile State” which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the coming society envisaged by Belloc when he first penned that now famous term in 1908.

Belloc had no doubts about the great Western Catholic tradition. He was absolutely convinced of its superiority—a superiority that extended to the economic and political orders as well as to the theological. Belloc was cavalier in the way he flung the reality of European Christendom at his contemporaries. He was constantly saying to them: look at that, you fools, what have you to offer? To achieve success in such an endeavour Belloc had to act the way he did—rough, brutally dogmatic, sweeping in his argument. Muted tones and footnote scholarship can gain skirmishes within the classrooms and the scholarly journals; they have never yet won a large-scale battle. Belloc faced a generation of English journalist-politician intellectuals who looked expectantly to a future grounded on the Whig-Liberal industrialist myth. These were men consciously convinced of the inevitability and the justness of almost every aspect of modern civilization. Belloc swept their case away in book after book, and if the myth of Nordic supremacy is discredited today, if the Catholic ethos and past has something of a hearing in the English-speaking world of our generation, if industrial capitalism is no longer thought to be as natural as the air we breathe and if it is no longer seen as the only alternative to Communism, if the first fifteen centuries of the British Isles are not automatically dismissed by the educated—if the air has changed, it is due in no small measure to that long cavalry charge of Hilaire Belloc, prolonged through fifty years of warfare against what he tersely called “the Barbarians.”

A full description of his battle belongs more to a consideration of the man as an historian and as a sociologist. What is to the point here is that what Belloc did grew out of what he was. His heartiness and confidence, his good conscience, sprang from what he knew and what he had seen. Christendom was something almost physical to him. He assimilated his own past in the most concrete way open to him. He tramped all over Western Europe; he ate much and drank deeply in half-forgotten inns that for him always symbolized roots and freedom; he sailed along the coast of England and charted the landing of the first Normans; he followed the route of the Phoenicians; he knelt before the site of Calvary as an old man. With an iron determination, he willed to become one with all that had gone to make him what he was—a Western Catholic man. In his own home in Sussex he kept alive all the older traditions of the countryside.

It has been said frequently that Belloc remained a stranger in England. Las Vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a Frenchman. He was neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman; he was both of them, and he was more than either of them. In his essays Belloc is a South English peasant and a channel sailor. In his political sympathies, he is an English Monarchist and a French Republican. In the soldierly dimension of himself he is thoroughly Gallic. In his over-all vision, he belongs to the old Roman Empire and to Christendom. He combines within his personality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are never bastardized in any specious internationalism, but which retain their individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his Catholicism. His was a precarious but happy balance that included the main lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents.

If Belloc’s over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping thing that encompasses the centuries, it must be remembered that this central principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid sense of the immediate drama of things past and present. One of the most revealing characteristics of the Bellocian humanism is its lack of academicism—one might almost say its anti-academicism. Belloc is always out on the road with his senses peeled. This psychological fact points up a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each other: a self-conscious emphasis on the past, and a communion with the physical universe which actually exists.

Traditionalism, when it is espoused by an intelligentsia, frequently suffers from an overdeveloped symbolism. Things are not seen in themselves. They are seen only as symbols. The now is important only to illuminate the past, or to call to mind spiritual and moral values. The purely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete, the individual, the existent; it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal which is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction. Several of the great Eastern traditional cultures have atrophied through an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking. Byzantine iconography suffers from it, and insofar as it does, it is not of the West. Carried to the end in the moral order, pure symbolism means that nothing is valued or loved for itself. Philosophically considered, such a traditionalism is a kind of Platonism in which the world functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas. If the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious, social and historical symbols, the intellectual suffers from the contrary: he turns everything solid into a mirror. Intellectually this ends in a simple inability to see things as they are. Theologically, it would appear to be a kind of subtle Manicheanism, in which nothing is good enough as it is.

Belloc constantly kept himself engaged with things. His understanding of the Catholic tradition escapes the purely symbolic and academic order. What he sees in the river valleys and inns of Europe is symbolic of a great historical effort stamped with the City of God; but what is so stamped is good in itself. If you would understand the past that has made you and grasp something of the spirit of its religion, Belloc urges that you go to Arles, for example; but above all, see Arles. Belloc’s Grizzlebeard, the custodian of tradition, is one with his Sailor, the man of “the five senses.”

If his Grizzlebeard were without a Sailor, Belloc’s traditionalism would have stiffened into something Egyptian, mummified. But since he is of the West himself, of an order which has been eminently practical and concrete as well as visionary, these two remain one. To exemplify the nature of tradition, Belloc finds his best instance to be a seaman’s knot.

If his Sailor had had no Grizzlebeard, then Belloc’s concrete vision and communion with reality would have degenerated into a kind of irrational naturalism. Naturalism is merely an escape into the physical universe, away from burdens which are peculiarly human. It is one of the less healthy offshoots of the fertile tree of Romanticism. Since no man can just wallow in nature for long without reacting in some way, the pure Romantic soon comes up with a view of nature as an irrational force within whose bosom is to be found salvation. The spectacle of D. H. Lawrence comes to mind immediately. The humanist reacts to nature by taming the beast; the Christian humanist tames a Good Beast. But the romantic naturalist attunes himself to the wilderness and finally renounces his social nature. The eighteenth-century City of Man appeared to the early Romantics to be an utter sham. The Age of Reason had run its course, and the intellect had become an intolerable burden. The Romantics tried to escape from their humanity into a physical beyond; having surrendered the reason, they gave themselves up to mythmaking. Mr. Auden has analyzed the peculiar significance of the “sea” and the “desert” for European Romanticism.[33] The “sea” represented the infinite possibilities that urged human nature to break its bond. But this optimism carried within itself the seeds of a subsequent despair. The “desert” represented the possibilities exhausted, the sea dried up. The surrender of the reason and of the corporate wisdom of society ended in giving the spirit over to darkness. The older traditions reminiscent of the Catholic Unity were jettisoned, and the result is known to us all. The Walpurgisnacht orgies under Nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that just missed wiping out the remnants of Western Christian Europe.

Western man for centuries now has lost the key to his own meaning. He has been striving for a long time to break out of the ruins of a City half destroyed at his own hands. Political Liberalism of the old-fashioned Marxian variety grew out of a psychological desire to get away from where man actually found himself. Post-World War II existentialist despair, considered as a socio-historical reality, is a philosophical justification for this urge to break all existing cultural and historical limits. What must be done, at all costs, is to exorcise our common historical heritage, our faith, our corporate memories. A fresh beginning can be the only beginning. This is a presupposition that is operative everywhere, most concretely in the arts, most consciously in philosophy, and most dangerously in religion.

Such is the estrangement modern man has carved for himself. In social and economic life the masses are estranged from their spiritual and cultural past. Politically, techniques forged by Western man himself have alienated him from his ancient freedom. The home, the nation, the Church, the West, the past, roots, origins—these are always wrong, always wicked: only the wilderness of the future promises salvation. The poet has retreated to that uniquely modern place invented in the early nineteenth century—the state of mind called Bohemia. His destiny seems assured when he has pruned away everything reminiscent of the objective order, and when he finds himself alone with his broken soul. Philosophically, the age has had urged on it the clever monstrosity that since consciousness renders to me what is Other than Myself, then my personality is defined by a negation. Theologically, the Barbarian God of the peat bogs has come back with “neo-orthodoxy,” and man is told that he is so utterly other than God that he is in no sense the image of his Creator. The human fabric has been so cut to ribbons that man has been reduced to a nothing that can parade his utter absurdity only by putting on a mask. The clown has come into his own.

Now it is part of the enduring significance of Hilaire Belloc that he saw all of this long ago. He saw it as the enemy of all that Christendom had ever built and loved and believed. He saw it as a unique concentration of evils that separately, one after another, had attacked the Christian City since its inception. He nailed the thing to the wall when he called it the spirit of Barbarism: the spirit that cannot build for itself because it rejects all limit, the essence of finite perfection; the spirit that makes its way in the intellectual world and in that necessary parasite, the world of fashion, by negating all that has gone on before; a spirit that thrives on opposition and rebellion, and that can cheaply dismiss as nothing the common effort of three thousand years.

Belloc is one of the few writers in the English world of the last fifty years who wanted to remain himself, and who desired to stand exactly where he was: a Christian man standing in a tradition whose religion is Catholic and whose origins are in the Roman Order. Because of this, Belloc will never be considered an Intellectual. He should not be so considered. He detested the term. The contemporary Intellectual of the Western World has come out of the same past as Belloc, but he rejects that past as he rejects its religion. That is why the past fifty to seventy-five years of intellectual life have been fevered with experiment—in literature, in philosophy, in politics, in all the arts, and in morals. If some new truth has emerged from it all, and if some beauty has been etched in the darkness, does it not seem as nothing to what has been given up?

Christopher Dawson stated once that the modern soul is at bottom anti-ontological. It hates being. Hilaire Belloc has said that the modern soul hates proportion and limitation. They are both affirming the same truth, because the condition of all being save God is limitation. Integrated Christian humanism accepts the finite goodness that constitutes the nature of man. Out of this affirmation the soul can build of itself a work of art; without this affirmation, man gives himself over to the darkness in the suicide of self-alienation.

These faces are masks of that one Evil that has ever enticed man into the wilderness. Belloc the soldier saw it riding out of the Eastern wastes, trampling under the vineyards and desecrating the shrines of Christian men, giving over the soil to the sands and the mind to an awful simplicity. He saw it rising within the great Universities of Europe, rubbing out the certitudes and the songs of Catholic Men.

His soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit and makes for isolation. There is a passage in Esto Perpetua in which Belloc—once again “Myself”—met a stranger in Timgad, that African town, once Roman and fertile, now empty and given back to the desert. They spoke to one another, and their conversation was the drama of salvation and damnation. Belloc looked on the desert, and he was tempted: the soul seemed nothing, and he thought of those who “see at last that there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.”[36] He felt terror and was less a man. But he turned and went back to the place he had known, and the terror left him, and he was a man once again.