Belloc and the Nature of Belief

Here is another of Belloc's purple passages from The Path to Rome on "the nature of Belief":

"Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indifference. Those who believe nothing but only think and judge cannot understand this. Of its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back and see our home.

"What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme
which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again... But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions.

"And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems changed to us. And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only with his fellows.

"And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the duty of that wrestling.

"But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no keener joy known to man.

"I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes upon the ground...

"There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life--all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to be admired.

"The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things.

"By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, Haec fuit, Haec almae janua sacra domus. Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.

"It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith."

Belloc on the Mass

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm reading Belloc's The Path to Rome, which is full of wonderful purple passages. Here, for example, is what he has to say about "a day one has opened by Mass ... [which is] a source of continual comfort to me".

"This comfort I ascribe to four causes ... and these causes are:

1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent

and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in

the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great

benefit to the body and give it tone.

2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function

of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth)

to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to

catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you

during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular

repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and

judgement.

3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts,

and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness

which both working in one's self and received from others is the true

source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a

short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds

come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.

4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is

that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon

thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment

that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried

right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to

do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can

really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what

is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should

from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark;

one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's

food--and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on

the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and

one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God

put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.

Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said

lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should

do a little work with his hands.

Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if

rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and

spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,

were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and

to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power for some thirty

years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their

inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing,

dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by

force.

Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has

done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have

the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his

Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all

that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship."


Later on, he describes going to Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi and comments approvingly that "the Mass was low and short - they are a Christian people". 


I don't want to draw any facile conclusions but it seems that, for Belloc, "the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue" were not incompatible with the "low and short". For him the Mass could be both "careful" and "rapid".


But all this is to see Belloc with early 21st Century eyes. What really mattered then, as it matters now, was the Mass itself and its "continual comfort".

A New Year Message from Hilaire Belloc

Since everybody else seems to be giving a New Year message, I thought I'd give Belloc a chance.

This is from his 1902 The Path to Rome, which I'm reading at the moment in the wonderful Penguin edition:

"Then I went on my way, praying God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind."