: Hilaire Belloc the Man and His Work by Mandell C Creighton Shanks Edward Chesterton G K Gilbert Keith Commentator - Belloc Hilaire 1870-1953 Criticism and interpretation

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ole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of history is deduced only from a few bones.

The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and expressed itself in the Crusades.

The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.

The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly administered from a centre, with the villein secured in his holding and the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and St. Louis in France.

But the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect on architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little while; it began--almost in the hour of its perfection--to decay; St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his own immediate surroundings, when it was already weakened in the rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the system to which it has given its name was drying up at the roots.

Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To that there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these:

First, the astounding series of catastrophes ... especially in the earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism--these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with associations of evil.

So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at last, after a period of horror, rose in the lesser crest of the Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr. Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.

He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom. But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.

So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions of time came the Revolution.

This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified the effects of that schism.

It has been Mr. Belloc's task and delight to reconcile the principles of the Revolution with his own faith. He would show that the two were opposed only by this intellectual accident or that political blunder: that the dogmas of each are capable of being held by the same mind. And, in the revival of religion in our own times, which "may be called, according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the Catholic renaissance," he sees not only the first and most beneficent result of the principles of the Revolution, but also a sign that the wounds then inflicted are beginning to be healed.

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