Hilaire Belloc, RIP

When Belloc ran for Parliament in 1906, his campaign manager begged him not to mention his Catholicism--so Belloc proclaimed during one of his speeches (when heckled for being a "Papist"): "Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This (taking a rosary out of his pocket) is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being your representative." Of course, he was elected.

What a lion of the Faith! Hilaire Belloc died on July 16, 1953, eleven days shy of his 83rd birthday.

As Frederick Wilhelmson said of Belloc:

Born and baptized in the Church, a Catholic from childhood, his love and appreciation of the Faith came to him when young, but it came somewhat slowly. Of his inner life he tells us very little. French on his fathers side, Belloc it must be remembered did his military service in the French artillery, thus delaying his entrance into Oxford when he finally made up his mind to remain an Englishman. His spoken French remained that of a rough cannoneer. Latin European culture was the air he breathed in his youth and to which he returned whenever he could, even sailing across the channel to replenish his reserves of wine.

Were I to seek one scriptural passage which sums up Bellocs vision of the Faith, it would be: By their fruits ye shall know them (Mt 6:30). Aided here by a powerful visual imagination which was brought to bear in his many military histories, Belloc could see the Church at work down the ages and he adored what he saw. The Church made Europe and in so doing quickened the old Roman Order, in disrepair but by no means destroyed by the Germanic tribes from the north. All our typical Western institutions were either created by Catholic men from out of nothing or were inherited from our pagan forefathers and then quickened from within by the yeast of Christianity. Although the terms incarnational and eschatological were not current in Belloc's lifetime, he is a prime instance of a man with an incarnational understanding of religious truth. Belloc looked for blessings everywhere, and the whole of Christendom was for him an immense network of actual graces.

In addition to the book pictured above, TAN Books/St. Benedict's Press publishes several of his 153 or so books. A Path to Rome, The Servile State, and Characters of the Reformation are among my favorite works by Belloc! May he rest in peace. He is buried at Our Lady of Consolation Church in West Grinstead, Sussex.

Them's Fightin' Words!--"Is Belloc Best Forgotten?"

Based on a reading of A.N. Wilson's biography of Hilaire Belloc, Father Alexander Lucie-Smith asks that question in a Catholic Herald article:

. . . I once lived with a priest who loved to preach on the subject of “Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe”; and yet Belloc himself is nowadays neglected.

Mr Wilson’s excellent biography tells us why in terms that are rapidly understandable. Belloc was cursed with the necessity of making money all his life, and consequently wrote far too many books, most of which were hurried productions, indeed not written at all, but dictated. In this he sounds like that other most prolific author, Dame Barbara Cartland. Belloc could turn out a book in a week. He was a constant traveller too, and how he got any time to do any reading remains unclear. His history books are very thin on fact and solid research, and long on argument, and the arguments, one gets the impression, are repeated again and again.

Father Lucie-Smith also does not admire Belloc's Path to Rome, which I have mentioned before, and did admire. I do think the headline unfortunate--its one thing to say that his works might not stand the test of time, but to assign the man to oblivion is a little harsh. I do believe that Frederick Wilhelmson and Joseph Pearce, and Father McCloskey would disagree--and the owner of the Hilaire Belloc blog would definitely disagree!

I have enjoyed reading Belloc's Path to Rome twice, and know that much of his work on English and French history, while not up to the standard of profession history, has been proved correct in his interpretation of events. I believe it was Father Vidmar in his book on English Catholic historians writing about the English Reformation who said that Father Hughes and the later revisionists provided the footnotes and rigorous research Belloc neglected. Frederick Wilhelmson concurs:

Time prohibits my detailing Belloc’s revolution in English historical writing. Suffice it to say — and this is said formally and altogether without rhetorical emphasis — that one man, Hilaire Belloc, turned the whole writing of British history around. Since Belloc, nobody can get away with understanding the Reformation as the work of high‑minded souls bent on liberty and democracy, noble souls who brought England out of the darkness of Catholic superstition and medieval obscurantism. Others footnoted Belloc and traded on his vision. They did well in doing so, but the vision was his — as was the persecution of silence that followed on his work.

We have benefitted so much from Belloc's "revolution in English historical writing" that we perhaps take it for granted now.

I disagree with Father Lucie-Smith: Belloc is not best forgotten!

Happy Birthday to You, Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc was born on July 27, 1870 and died on July 16, 1953. I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning to talk about this great Catholic writer at 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central. (Note that July 27 is Matt Swaim's birthday, too. Matt is the producer of the Son Rise Morning Show, broadcasting on the EWTN Radio Network from Cincinnati, Ohio!)

Belloc (Joseph Hilaire Pierre Rene) was born in France; his father was French, his mother English. After his father's death, his mother brought him and his sister Marie to England, where he attended the Oratory School in Birmingham founded by Blessed John Henry Newman. He then served in the French military as required and returned to attend Balliol College at Oxford. He was president of the Oxford Union Debating Society and hoped for a fellowship at All Souls. Belloc married Elodie Hogan in 1896 and they had five children before her death in 1914, one of whom, Louis, died in World War I. Belloc became British citizen in 1902.

Frederick Wilhelmson, author of a study of Belloc titled Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man, A Study in Christian Integration, pubished by Sheed and Ward in 1953, commented on his energy and vigor in another essay:

At my last count, Hilaire Belloc wrote 153 books. The business has to do with vigor, an enormous lust for life, and a willingness to make mistakes. Belloc did not give a damn for what anybody thought of him. He wrote his life of King James II in a hotel on the edge of the Sahara in ten days: “It is full of howlers and is the fruit of liberty.” He walked to Rome as a young man, coming in upon the Appian Way on a mule drawn cart — but with his feet dragging on the road so his vow would not be broken.

His vigor was legendary, and I have mentioned as well his lust for life. Belloc — and this is a key to understanding his role as a Catholic apologist — was a man totally at home in this world, but one who knew it was an illusion to be so at home. There was not a trace of Manicheanism in him, and he called puritanism, in his biography of Louis XIV, an “evil out of the pit”, meaning the pit of hell. A mountain climber, he was even more a sailor. His Hills and the Sea and The Cruise of the Nona are classics. If The Path to Rome is the work of a young genius, rollicking and rolling his way over mountain and valley toward the Eternal City, The Four Men, on the contrary, called by its author “A Farrago”, was penned in solitude mixed with melancholy. Grizzlebeard, the Poet, and the Sailor are all extensions of Myself, and Myself is Belloc. Only when life is lived close to the senses, when the intelligence is engaged immediately on what is yielded to man through the body, is the paradox of sadness in created beauty brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after page of Belloc’s writing is troubled by a deep and troubled gravity, heightened by his profound communion with the things of his world: English inns; old oak‑burnished and sturdy; rich Burgundy and other wines” that port of theirs” at the “George” drunk by the fire with which he began this book; the sea and ships that sail — but, please, “no abomination of an engine”; the smell of the tides. These loves run through Belloc’s essays, recurring themes testifying to a vision movingly poetic in its classic simplicity. His eyes are fixed on the primal things that always nourished the human spirit, on the things at hand.

Unfortunately, Wilhelmson's book is hard to find (fortunately for me, I bought a used copy several years ago!). When Belloc ran for Parliament in 1906, his campaign manager told him not to mention his Catholicism--so Belloc proclaimed during one of his speeches: "Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This (taking a rosary out of his pocket) is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being your representative." I think that story exemplifies Wilhelmson's argument in his book as well as his note that "Belloc did not give a damn for what anybody thought of him".

In honor of his birth, let us raise a glass of fine Burgundy (rouge, bien sur!), since, as Belloc wrote:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

You can hear a recording of him singing for a radio program here.