Dr.

Robert Hickson

18 September 2012 Saint Joseph Cupertino Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth

The Isolation of the Soul

Epigraphs: Will made the world; Will wounded the world; the same Divine Will gave to the world for the second time its chance; the same human Will can for the last time make its choice. That is the real outstanding peculiarity, or eccentricity, of the peculiar sect called Roman Catholics. And if anyone objects to my limiting so large a conception to Roman Catholics, I willingly agree that there are many who value it so much that they obviously ought to be Roman Catholics. But if anyone says that it is not a fact and history bound up with the Faith of Roman Catholicism, it is enough to refer them to history and the facts. (G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950), p. 236 a quote from one of the essays therein, and modestly entitled The Outline of Liberty, pp. 233-237) ***** Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein [e.g., original sin, sanctifying grace, or the non-irresistibility of divine grace]....The denial of a scheme wholesale is not heresy, and has not the creative power of a heresy. It is of the essence of heresy that it leaves standing a great part of the structure that it attacks. On that account it can appeal to believers and continues to affect their lives through deflecting them from their original characters. Wherefore, it is said of heresies that 'they survive by the truths they retain.' '' (Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938), pp. 4,7) ***** Turgenev, said Yakovlev, says that man is either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote. You [Christopher Trevenen] are a Don Quixote, only you have none of the Spaniard's kindness and humility. If you are a Don Quixote you should be chivalrous. (Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), p. 225) ***** Recently re-reading after many years Hilaire Belloc's last full book, another monument of his own deeper historical study, Elizabethan Commentary (1942), I was especially struck by one of his compassionate, but also piercingly existential comments, hence timely and timeless words, about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. They concerned the true tragedy of her life (born largely friendless on 8 1

September 1542), and also the poignancy of her death: her undeserved punitive death on 8 February 1587 not long before the thereby provoked war and coming of the Spanish Armada in August of 1588, and only some five years after the stark winter death at Tyburn of Saint Edmund Campion himself, the Jesuit Protomartyr of Elizabethan England, on 1 December 1581. Given this fuller context, Belloc says: Isolation is the chief evil of human life and isolation was imposed upon this woman [Mary Stuart] always and everywhere. When [in the forty-fourth year of her life, her last] she made one desperate attempt to be rid of it [i.e., to be rid of this terrible, protracted isolation, a sequestration and exile of almost nineteen years, from 1568 to 1587] that effort was itself fatal to her. 1 But, the death of her rival, Queen Elizabeth Tudor, was to be even more chilling to behold, manifesting, as well, though for different reasons, the isolation of the human soul. For, mortal sin, as Belloc well knew, extinguishes the supernatural life of sanctifying grace in the soul, and also thereby morally isolates the soul from God, after having done its prevarication freely, voluntarily; that is, with that soul's own full and free consent. Mary Stuart, in light of the Four Last Things, could faithfully and modestly say In my end is my beginning; but Queen Elizabeth Tudor's last misery and fear of the Final Judgment, the Final Verdict of Truth, may well have also disclosed her final and impenitent spiritual despair, both a sin against hope and a grave sin against the Holy Ghost a terrible thing to think upon!2 Those who have cherished Hilaire Belloc the man, and especially those who have also read much of Hilaire Belloc's varied prose and verse with an answering heart, will, in this context, recall how often he yearns for, and intimately takes vivid joy in, human companionship and in festive human communion. And, despite his long-tested and firm Catholic Faith, he always (or at least often) feared to be isolated and alone "at the end." And he had the honesty and humility of heart to say so. He also knew the important Catholic doctrine that the grace-filled Gift of Fear (the Donum Timoris), as an infused Gift of the Holy Ghost, was a guard against the dangerous and insidiously prideful, second form of Hopelessness, in addition to sinful Despair: i.e., the sin of Presumption.
1 Hilaire Belloc, Elizabethan Commentary (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1942), p. 158 my emphasis added. 2 See, especially, the chilling first Chapter of Evelyn Waugh's 1935 book on the Jesuit Missionary Priest and Elizabethan Martyr, entitled Edmund Campion; as well as Hilaire Belloc's Chapter XIX Terrible Death in his own book, Elizabethan Commentary, seven years later. Both chapters may fittingly remind the reader of the special meaning of the Latin injunction, Respice Finem! Look to Your End! And sometimes, also, to the sobering death of others, both to how they actually died and how they were even, but not always, prepared to die. (Saint Ignatius of Loyola also encouraged such a meditation often during one's life, and not only during a formal Spiritual Retreat, or the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.)

Three of Hilaire Belloc's non-fictional historical writings Europe and the Faith (1920), How the Reformation Happened (1928), as well as the aforementioned Elizabethan Commentary (1942) published only a year after the heart-shaking death of his youngest son Peter in World War II on 2 April 1941, and not long after the earlier-shattering 1940 Fall of France all momentously examine the theme of loss and the isolation of the human soul, and also look perspicaciously into some of the mysterious causes of such isolation. Let us therefore briefly consider some of these theological, moral, and psychological matters both the the causes and the effects while always remaining rationally and resolutely convinced of their finally irreducible mysterious nature: mysteries of human free will and divine grace and of the purity and integrity of the co-operating human heart. Indeed, that human heart retains, until death, the permanent possibility of voluntary defection from Grace and from God. For, as Catholics believe, God so loved us that He gave us even the capacity, as a created gift and endowment, and the possibility of refusing His love, finally and irrevocably. For, we can only love freely. Of its nature, love cannot be forced. As to his own differentiated historical and theological understanding, Hilaire Belloc begins the final Chapter of his Europe and the Faith with the words, The grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul.3 He was fifty years old when he first published those words, and, then, in the next thirteen pages, he thereby proceeded with his characteristic lucidity and trenchancy to explicate and support his stark overarching contention.4 Moreover, some eight years later, in the final Chapter of his How the Reformation Happened, Hilaire Belloc was to add some further reality-revealing differentiations. That entire last Chapter Chapter VIII entitled The Result 5 would also be worthy of one's attentive, reflective and savored reading. For example, he writes: From 1517-1547-49 may be called the Period of Debate, which is also the period of flux, when the whole quarrel is boiling and nothing has yet crystallised....This Period of Debate or chaotic discussions produced, rather more than half-way through its course (in 1536), a novel instrument, later to prove of the greatest power: the book [Institutes of the Christian Religion] of
3 Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (New York: The Paulist Press, 1920), p. 248 from Chapter X: Conclusion. 4 Ibid, pp. 248-261. 5 Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1985 a reprint of the 1928 first edition), pp. 258-273.

Jean Cauvin (whom we call John Calvin). This Frenchman produced a logical system of theology whereby man could get rid of the [mediating] priest at the expense of free will, reintroduced the old [Determinist, Fatalist] terror of doom, and lent form to the fury which had risen against the Catholic Church. All consistent Protestantism derives from him, and has for its essential conceptions: first, the isolation of the soul, with no intermediaries between itself and its Creator; secondly, the absence of any but one Will in the universe, and, therefore, a universal fate. 6 By way of refreshing contrast to this chilling Calvinist sense of Necessity and the strict absence of Human Free Will as is also the case in the later, papally condemned, Heretical view of the Jansenists, namely that Grace is Irresistible, which thereby empties out all meaning of Human Moral Freedom we have the Catholic view. For, example, we may consider the more spaciously Catholic view of the Russian Orthodox Professor, Yakovlev, who gives eloquent counsel about the Higher Chivalry to Christopher Trevenen, the young English Protagonist in Maurice Baring's unforgettable novel, The Coat Without Seam (1929). To the fiery, partly Irish, partly French, and very idealistic Trevenen, the Russian mentor memorably makes a challenge: Turgenev, said Yakovlev, says that man is either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote. You are a Don Quixote, only you have none of the Spaniard's kindness and humility. If you are a Don Quixote you should be chivalrous. Trevenen replies, Don Quixote, fortunately for him, was mad; but Yakovlev promptly added, He was very sane too. Trevenen's immediate rejoinder was: You mean that I am neither mad nor sane? And Yakovlev's very subtle and deftly soul-searching, terse response was: Neither mad, nor sane enough.7 What an invitation to co-operate freely with God's grace unto true sanity and chivalry and more! Soon after these discerning words to ponder, as spoken by a Russian of deep learning and high culture, Baring presents to us the following narrative passage, wherein Christopher Trevenen, after hearing Yakovlev's wise and serene voice and receiving it so gratefully as an altogether unexpected balm, then quietly gazes at Professor Yakovlev's radiant countenance, as well:
6 Ibid., pp. 261-262 my emphasis added. 7 The emphasis was Baring's own, in the original text of The Coat Without Seams.

Christopher looked at Yakovlev, and envied the Faith that shone like a quiet dream in his large eyes. After all, if it were only a dream, what a comforting dream! The next day Christopher went to London, and the day after he started for Rome.8 Later, on the battlefield in France during World War I, Christopher Trevenen, finally recognizing the operations of Divine Providence and deft traces of Grace in his often wayward and restless life, makes a contrite Sacramental Confession to a French Priest and then sincerely converts to the Catholic Faith. After this revealing religious contrast, we now propose to return to Europe and the Faith (1920) and How the Reformation Happened (1928), in order to consider further how Hilaire Belloc came to understand the deeper causes and effects of The Isolation of the Soul. It will also help us consider the situation of faithful Catholics today, and the true situation of the Catholic Church, as well, both doctrinally and morally, to include the state of health of her authority. For, as the emphatic Subtitle-Motto of Belloc's Europe and the Faith says, Sine auctoritate nulla vita. That is to say, without authority, there is no life. (But, how does one resist the corruptions of authority without thereby subverting the principle of authority? Another befitting challenge that Belloc leaves us with! Especially, as we shall see, when authority itself is sufficiently corrupted so as to be confused with mere force.) In his conclusion to Europe and the Faith, Belloc deftly shifts his explanatory analogies and metaphors, thereby to become more concrete. He says, for example, that the isolation of the soul was the fruit from which all the consequences of the Protestant Reformation proceed, not only those products which are clearly noxious, but also those which, at first, seemed apparently advantageous, and especially in material things.9 The process of separations from the unity of the whole body 10 of European Christendom and from its underlying unity of the Faith was very often gradual; and the long divorce between the non-Catholic mind and reason 11 by which we came to see the fuller disintegrating results and implications of a false philosophy (and religion) was even more gradual. It was a development of sorts over some three hundred years after the first open breach with authority in the early sixteenth century, conveniently placed in 1517. Some countries or groups were more
8 Maurice Baring, The Coat Without Seam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), pp. 225, 226 my emphasis added, unless otherwise indicated. 9 Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith, p. 248. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

readily receptive, and soon definitively received the new stamp 12: for example, the North German Principalities and sundry smaller states of the mountains (notably Geneva), the latter city being a formidable Calvinist stronghold. In Belloc's intermediate summary remarks: The first third of the seventeenth century launches a new epoch. From about that time there go forward upon parallel lines the great spiritual and consequent temporal processes of modern Europe. They have yet [as of 1920] to come to judgment, for they are not yet fulfilled: but perhaps their judgment is near. 13 To aid further our sense of the architecture of his argument, Belloc summarizes keenly these processes filling the last three hundred years [1630-1920 roughly] in six distinct categories, as it were: a rapid extension of physical science and thus also a swift extension of every other form of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable [i.e., largely quantitative entities, or Descartes' own narrow sense of the res extensa] things; the rise ...of what we call today 'Capitalism,' that is, the possession of the means of production by the few, and their exploitation of the many at first in the new Protestant part of Europe but spreading thence in part to the Catholic sections, as well; the corruption of the principle of authority until authority was even confused with mere force; the general... growth of total wealth with the growth of physical science and hence the growing spirit of Mammon; the ever widening effect of skepticism, which...was from the beginning a spirit of complete negation and which led at last to the questioning not only of any human institutions, but of the very forms of thought and of the mathematical truths carried on to the sheer chaos of later [post-Kantian] metaphysicians, with their denial of contradictions [cf. Hegel], and even of being; and, finally, with all these of course we have had a universal mark the progressive extension of despair.14 For sure, as this very protracted process matured, or rather as the corruption deepened, 15 the resultant intellectual skepticism and solipsism and final spiritual despair were too burdensome to bear. Man thus sought more ruses (and self-deceptions) to escape such a tottering pitch of insecurity, 16 and, even moreso, to shun, if possible, the isolation of the soul. Such a man therefore often resorted to irrational and inordinate nationalisms, the idolatry of one's nation. In Belloc's own words:
12 Ibid., p. 250. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., pp. 250-251, 253 my emphasis added, but for one original accentuation in the text, namely the adjective complete. 15 Ibid., p. 251. 16 Ibid.

The new isolation of the soul compelled the isolated soul to strong vagaries. The soul will not remain in the void. If you blind it, it will grope. If it cannot grasp what it appreciates by every sense, it will grasp what it appreciates by only one. On this account in the dissolution of the corporate sense and of corporate religion you had successive idols set up, worthy and unworthy, none of them permanent. The highest and most permanent was a reaction towards corporate life in the shape of a worship of nationality patriotism. 17 All of this sprang from this necessity of the unsupported soul to make itself some system from within [as well as a blind submission to some external, but often enrapturing collective]: as the unsupported soul, in an evil dream, now stifles in strict confinement and is next dissolved [often with a wanton self-abandonment] in some emptiness. 18 Once again, in other words, says Belloc: But since humanity cannot repose in such a stage of anarchy, we may well believe [even in 1920] that there is coming, or has already begun, yet another stage, in which the lack of corporate support for the soul will breed attempted strange religions: witchcrafts and necromancies. 19 For, after this breaking up of foundations, at least for the moment, we are in a stage of complete negation.20 Moreover, the next process we note is....the process of increasing knowledge, which is also due to the isolation of the soul and, in the absences of faith, demonstrable things are the sole [seeming] consolation. 21 And, indeed, what is more: It is the mark of modern insufficiency that it can conceive of no other form of certitude save certitude through demonstration, and therefore does not, as a rule, appreciate even its own unproved first principles.22 But, ironically as well as tragically, these authors of discovery and persistent inquiry through measurable and fixed physical knowledge come to find out that discovery alone does not create joy and that a great knowledge can be used ill. 23 With the unity of Europe broken, the yet further extension of physical science came to pass, but it consequently came to pass at a totally accelerated... pace. And the destruction of that [European] unity also just as totally [as did the
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Ibid., pp. 252-253 my emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 253-254 my emphasis added. Ibid., p. 254 my emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 254-255, 255. Ibid., p. 256 my emphasis added. Ibid.

acceleration of pace] threw the movement [i.e., the progression in physical science and in the use of instruments] off its rails.24 That is, the pace of the changes amidst the actual disunity produced a grave disproportion and imbalance, and even a frenzied and demented one. Some lesser things show forth an hypertrophy, as it were, while the better things and the higher human faculties (like an unexercised muscle in a cast) do subtly and gravely atrophy. In connection with this [unbalanced, disproportionate] release of powerful energies through the isolation of the soul, says Belloc, the rapidly advancing knowledge does certainly have some irrevocable consequences, but such consequences are only evil through an evil use, that is, through an evil philosophy.25 However, some of those consequences also have an apparently contradictory, and certainly supplementary effect: the [unexpected] setting up of unfounded external authority amidst, otherwise, so much intellectual skepticism and paralyzing moral doubt. 26 For example: Men under the influence of skepticism have come to accept almost any printed matter, almost any repeated name, as an authority infallible and to be admitted almost without question. They have come to regard the denial of such authority as a sort of insanity, or rather they have in most practical affairs, come to be divided into two groups: a small number of men, who know the truth, say upon a political matter or some [high] financial arrangement, or some unsolved problem [like who assassinated the president, and why? or who conducted those strategic irregular-warfare raids domestically?]; and yet a vast majority, which accepts without question an always incomplete, a usually quite false statement of the thing because it has been repeated in the daily press and vulgarized in a hundred books.27 Before moving on to the last topic Capitalism Hilaire Belloc speaks, in general, about the result of the long divorce between the non-Catholic mind and reason 28 and how, as of 1920, it had had such a profound effect upon the modern world although now, in 2012, we see all-too-many signs of this same divorce among professed Catholics themselves. For some time now, things that should be divorced are not divorced; and things that should not be divorced are divorced: a sure mark of deep disorder. Even in 1920, as Belloc saw it:
24 25 26 27 28 Ibid., pp. 256-257 my emphasis added. Ibid., p. 257 my emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 257-258. Ibid., p. 258 my emphasis added.

Indeed, the great battle about to be engaged between chaos and order will turn largely upon this form of suggestion, this acceptation of an unfounded and irrational authority.29 Such, also, are the manipulative multi-media psycho-techniques still in operation, although now the sophistic propaganda has additional access to advanced technologies of subtle perception management such as psycho-neuro-linguistics hence conducting a deeper type of deception that sabotages trust. Of the major consequences of the Reformation, there is one other long-range development which we must certainly not omit. Belloc himself prefers to end his final chapter of the book with a consideration of the phenomenon of Capitalism (which he almost always puts in quotation marks), although he does not consider Capitalism and its universal evil to be the prime obstacle to right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now intolerable modern strains. 30 For, the deeper theological-ecclesiastical and philosophical matters are, for Belloc (as, likewise, for his mentor Cardinal Manning), unmistakably paramount, as well as ultimate. However, his incisive summary of the Phenomenon of Capitalism is also a trenchant recapitulation of many of the deeper, essential matters he has already discussed, inasmuch as: What is called Capitalism arose directly in all its branches from the isolation of the soul. That isolation permitted an unrestricted competition. It gave to superior cunning and even to superior talent an unchecked career [also its protective governments and national or private-consortium banks]. It gave every license to greed. And on the other side it broke down the corporate bonds whereby men maintain themselves in an economic stability [i.e., without the enervating and uprooting combination of insufficiency and insecurity, as he had earlier so far-sightedly articulated in The Servile State (1912), even before World War I]. Through it there arose...a system under which a few possessed the land and the machinery of production, and the many were gradually dispossessed. The many thus dispossessed could only exist upon doles meted out by the possessors, nor was human life a care to these. The possessors also mastered the state and all its organs hence the great National Debts which accompanied the system: hence even the financial hold of distant and alien men upon subject provinces of economic effort: hence the draining of wealth not only from increasingly dissatisfied subjects over-seas, but from the individual producers of foreign independent states. The true conception of property disappears under such an arrangement, and you naturally get a demand for relief through the denial of the principle of ownership altogether....Capitalism,
29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. my emphasis added.

and the ideal inhuman system (not realizable) called Socialism, both spring from one type of mind and both apply to one kind of diseased society.31 In fresh conceptual language, Hilaire Belloc had already seen, what is now more obvious: the False Alternatives and the False Dialectic between Capitalism and Socialism hence, also, Capitalism's dialectic with so-called Communism and its Doctrine of DIAMAT (Dialectical Materialism). Looking back to how it started and viewing the gradually cumulative fruits, Hilaire Belloc thus comes, from his vantage point in 1920, to say: 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, [Sine auctoritate nulla vita] loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and 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...will stand only in the mold of the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.32 What would Belloc say today? And where stands the Catholic Church truly today, and in her proper proportions? With all of her current and long-sustained Pastoral-Diplomatic Ambiguities and Equivocations, with all her manifest Syncretistic Ecumenism and an Indifferentist-Protestanized Sense of Tolerance and Religious Liberty (as distinct from the traditional and well-founded concept of Libertas Ecclesiae), and with the added Old-Testament Judaizing Propensities and Poltrooneries (Propter Metum Iudaeorum?), now what? What does she now stand for, sine Dolo without Guile?! Without Doctrinal Ambiguity? To what extent, for example, are Defined Dogmas still Irreformable Doctrines? Hilaire Belloc conveys a few more, very important insights in the last chapter of his book,
31 Ibid., pp. 258-259 my emphasis added. 32 Ibid., p. 260 my emphasis added.

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How the Reformation Happened, a text which we have already quoted. It was published in 1928 one year before the already feared, later widespread economic crash of 1929, and just eight years after he had first published Europe and the Faith. When he specifically spoke of the Reformation's results, he said: Its results were twofold: its effect upon character, and the consequent effect upon external life. The effect of the Reformation on character was, where it succeeded, to isolate the soul. On this [effected and effective isolation] two important consequences follow.33 The first consequence was that the corporate quality of society was shaken and a process of disintegration took place; and the corporate sense...was gradually, though only very gradually, dissolved.34 Concurrently, and as a consequence of this, too, individual energy was released and the principle of competition emerged more and more along with the sinister force of morally and legally legitimated Usury that is, the taking of profit on an unproductive loan, a system which drains wealth from the many or the few and gives preponderant power to capital while now newly regarding the taking of interest on an unproductive loan as legitimate, normal and even beneficent and no longer, as in the Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, done by subterfuge as a thing known to be evil.35 After the inner fruit, the achieved effect upon character to isolate the soul, we also see, through Belloc's eyes, how these twin forces of competition and usury gave special economic and financial advantages to the gradually spreading Protestant culture of Europe. 36 Indeed, he says: The Protestant States, notably England and Holland, begin a more active banking and trading, and a more intensive production, which later grows into what is called to-day Industrial Capitalism. 37 But, with bearing on today's theological and doctrinal situation in the Catholic Church as well, Belloc then, very importantly, examines the second consequence of the isolation of the soul after the shaken and gradually dissolved corporate quality of society and the consequent release of individual energy: namely subjectivism in philosophy.38 His patient differentiations are very clear and he builds upon them gradually, in order to impart more forcefully and justly, I think, the longer33 Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, pp. 265-266 my emphasis added. 34 Ibid., p. 266. 35 Ibid., pp. 266-267 my emphasis added, but for the emboldened adjective unproductive in the original text.

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range implications of this philosophical, and eventually theological, orientation: Subjectivism means...referring to the individual for the test of truth. There is a sense, of course, in which we must all do that; for instance, a man accepting the authority of reason, or of his senses, or of the Catholic Church, is necessarily exercising an individual judgment. But subjectivism rather signifies that the mind suffering from it (for it is a disease) questions what is corporate and general in authority, and prefers what is particular and isolated. For instance, in the most important matter of all Religion he will take as the test of truth not the corporate authority of the Church, or even of natural religion as expressed by the tradition of mankind, but his own Religious experience, as he calls it. This is so true that the man suffering from subjectivism becomes at last quite blind to the meaning of the word Credo 'I believe.' He confuses Faith with a personal emotion [as in Sentimental Theology], or visual concept. He cannot understand it [Faith] as the acceptation on the word of an Authority, only accepted by reason [not mere emotion], of an objective truth which the individual may, or may not, have experienced as a personal emotion.39 And what is the result of such subjectivism? (Also today, we may wonder, what is the effect among the fastidiously selective, and often quite self-assurededly mature Neo-Catholic NeoModernists?) In the context of the historic Protestant Reformation and its permeating aftermath, Belloc forthrightly says: The result of this [Subjectivism] is that, as the few remaining Catholic dogmas accepted in the Protestant culture are abandoned one by one, society falls spiritually into the same sort of lust into which it fell socially through the same [relativizing] agency; and each man's standards differ potentially from his neighbor's. There supervenes a philosophic anarchy such as that into which we are already plunged; with these results on morals, art [to include architecture], war, building and all the social relations which we see around us. 40 With sad fairness, Belloc adds, that, although the Catholic culture was saved from the full effects of Protestant Subjectivism and Fideism, and from all the other secessionists from Christendom, still yet the remaining Catholic culture was itself wounded. 41 Moreover, the anti36 37 38 39 40 41 Ibid., pp. 266-267. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., pp. 266, 267 my emphasis added. Ibid., p. 269 my emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 269-270. Ibid., p. 271.

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Catholic forces set loose in the sixteenth century in later times especially in France captured the Government, with all the enormous powers a modern Government has of imposing its doctrine upon its subjects [often euphemistically called citizens] by compulsory education and through the action of the Courts.42 That is to say, in other words: drawn from the culture opposed to Catholicism, we see that the initiative lay with them for more than two hundred years and with the added manipulative (and intimidating) instrumentalities of the Secular State before there emerged a few glimpses [as of 1928] that, perhaps, the Tide has turned in Europe; but maybe not, given the growing resurgence, as well, of a strong, permanent, Pagan opposition thereto. 43 But, in any case, says Belloc, a truly faithful Catholic culture...is still, in its general spirit, the test of civilisation.44 As Belloc looked back and sought to recapitulate the general movement of the Reformation and the causes at work,45 he was convinced, as a Catholic, that, in his words: The Revolt was originally and essentially a protest against two things: the spiritual power of the clergy; the financial power of the [Catholic] hierarchy and its chief, the Pope, and of the monastic orders. The two protests were inextricably mixed because the same man who was offended by the exclusive spiritual power was also offended by large revenues drawn from his labor and enjoyed by an institution which in his eyes was no longer fulfilling its functions. In other words, the Reformation was originally an anti-clerical movement much more than it was an anti-doctrinal movement, and so far from being a rationalist movement [nor was the later French Revolution, at root!], it led men away from rationalism [and from the logos itself, in general] into the opposite dependence in [on] a text [Scriptura Sola] and blind acceptance of merely affirmed, though various, unreasoned doctrines.46 An important insight from Belloc's Catholic heart, and from his winsome integrity and sense of proper proportion, is to be seen as it concerns the original spur to the increasingly expanding anticlericalism: But the contrast between what the official Church should have been its holy functions and what the official Church was, shocked men profoundly, and they were quite right to be shocked. In general, the immediate spur which provoked the rebellion was the gross insufficiency of those responsible for the
42 43 44 45 46 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 271, 272. Ibid., p. 270 my emphasis added. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 259 my emphasis added.

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good name [in truth] of the Church.47 We might well regard these honest and humble words as being also very timely, as well as timeless. As a further aid to our own Catholic Witness and courageous Fidelity in the Faith, we may conclude this brief essay by considering Hilaire Belloc's own deeper reflections on the timeless, or immemorial, resistance to the Catholic Faith itself, to include even a permanent hatred for its Authoritative and Irreformable Doctrine (i.e., Dogmas) and for its truly Sacramental Presence, or the Incarnation Continued in time and intimately concrete history. Even as to the true causes of the Protestant Reformation, Hilaire Belloc, at the outset, candidly acknowledges: These forces cannot be fully analysed. No one of the great movements of history can be so analysed, for each includes not only elements beyond any one man's degree of knowledge as an historian, but also elements which are beyond the experience or knowledge of all men: forces outside this world. This is particularly true of the Reformation. You will not discover in mere terrestrial history anything sufficient to account for the catastrophe. All we can do is capitulate the known factors at work, emphasising at the same time the seen forces not proceeding directly from human action or will which presided over the whole. Of the known factors, then, we have [this first factor, which we must emphasise]: There has been opposed to the Catholic Church from its foundation a spirit quite different from mere reaction against what is strong or organised. It is a special personal hatred of the Faith. This spirit invariably appears in every movement of schism or even of criticism. The moment (wherever) the Church is fighting, that malign spirit appears. It has appeared on Calvary; it appears throughout the succeeding centuries; it appeared once after the beginning of the Revolt in the early sixteenth century. 48 This aspect of the Mysterium Iniquitatis must certainly be remembered and resisted today by the Ecclesia Militans, as part of the mystery of sin, which will not be conquered, nor even mitigated, without Grace. This deeper knowledge must assuredly and avowedly be acted upon, and with a growing fullness of the whole range of virtues: i.e., with the contemplative and active virtues, or the cardinal-natural virtues; and also with the infused-supernatural virtues, hence with our further incorporating, in humility and truth, the known indispensability of Divine Grace itself, for our
47 Ibid., p. 260. 48 Ibid., pp. 258-259 my emphasis added.

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persevering (and very grateful) Lives of Grace ad Salutem Aeternam. As the Dominicans have traditionally often put it: Gratia est Gloria Incepta; Gloria est Gratia Perfecta. Indeed, the implied and prerequisite Final Perseverance here is also itself a Magnum Donum a Great Gift as the sixteenth-century Catholic Council of Trent has so fittingly said and dogmatically emphasized. There is no dark spirit (or frigidity) here of the Isolation of the Soul and, in the traditional Catholic understanding, Salvation is a Social Process, not only because of the doctrine of the Communio Sanctorum (the threefold interdependent society of the Church, Militant on Earth, Suffering in Purgatory, and Glorious, and Triumphant, in Beatitude). In any case, we shall all be finally judged by our own lives of practical charity, hence by how many individuals we helped (and strove to help) get into Heaven. That is, into the even more generously abundant life of Vita Aeterna et Beatitudo. I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly. (The comparative adverb in the Latin Vulgate Bible is but one word: abundantius (John 10:10).) In 19 B.C., the Roman historian, Livy, said the following discouraging (and almost hopeless) words, in his General Introduction to his multi-volume, quite lengthy set of histories, namely that Rome had then (just before the Incarnation) descendingly come down to such a point that we can tolerate neither our vices nor their remedies. (Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.) But, that seemingly hopeless and despairing Ancient Pagan World was later said to have been converted by chastity and charity that is, by the purity and love, so selfless and generous and magnanimous, which they had consistently witnessed in the vivid daily lives of the Christians. It could also happen today. Especially through the vivid wholehearted Witness of those who, sub Gratia, are also Fortes in Fide. No easy Mission today, do we agree? and particularly amidst the cacophanous atmosphere and circumambient equivocations of a Church Milquetoast, as distinct from a properly understood Church Militant in its winsome integrity the latter being always indispensably marked with the kindness and humility of Don Quixote, and thus always especially chivalrous: and, even more generously so, unto the higher Chivalry, as with Christ Himself on Calvary; and, as with His mother Maria, not only on Calvary. --FINIS- 2012 Robert D. Hickson

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