ON COURTESY

Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.

On Monks I did in Storrington fall, 
They took me straight into their Hall; 
I saw Three Pictures on a wall, 
And Courtesy was in them all. 

The first the Annunciation; 
The second the Visitation; 
The third the Consolation, 
Of God that was Our Lady's Son. 

The first was of St. Gabriel; 
On Wings a-flame from Heaven he fell; 
And as he went upon one knee 
He shone with Heavenly Courtesy. 

Our Lady out of Nazareth rode― 
It was Her month of heavy load; 
Yet was her face both great and kind, 
For Courtesy was in Her Mind. 

The third it was our Little Lord, 
Whom all the Kings in arms adored; 
He was so small you could not see 
His large intent of Courtesy. 

Our Lord, that was Our Lady's Son, 
God bless you, People, one by one; 
My Rhyme is written, my work is done. 

~Hilaire Belloc

• See a copy of Belloc's original manuscript On Courtesy dedicated to 'The Prior of Storrington': On Courtesy

Annunciation, by Fra Angelico. Tempera on wood, A.D. 1433-34.
Museo Diocesano, Cortona

MATERIALISM

“… Implicit Materialism―that is, an underlying, unexpressed, conception that material causes explain all things―survives. Men do not commonly say, nowadays, as many did not so long ago, that man is to be explained as a machine or a set of chemical formulae. They no longer, in any great numbers, deny flatly the presence the presence of immaterial factors in the universe. But when they speak of life or death, or when they propose an explanation of anything, they imply, often without knowing it, that all of which they talk is material: that life is a material process, death but the cessation of that process, and that any human occasion―for instance any social development―can be completely understood when it is stated in terms of material things.”

~ Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

DECEMBER

Hoar Time about the house betakes him slow,
Seeking an entry for his weariness;
And in that dreadful company Distress
And the sad Night with silent footsteps go.
On my poor fire the brands are scarce aglow,
And in the woods without what memories press;
Where, waning in the trees from less to less,
Mysterious bangs the hornèd moon, and low.

For now December, full of aged care,
Comes in upon the yea and weakly grieves,
Mumbling his lost desires and his despair;
And with mad trembling hand still interweaves
The dank sear flower-stalks tangled in his hair,
While round about him whirl the rotten leaves.

~Hilaire Belloc

Photo: Hilaire Belloc, at his home in King's Land, Shipley, West Sussex.

ANTI-CHRIST

"WHERE then shall we look for the seed of a New Religion? I should reply, tentatively, in this: the satisfaction of that Messianic mood with which, paradoxically, the despair of the New Paganism is shot. The expectation of better things─the confident expectation of their advent─affects the vileness and folly of our time everywhere. Let an individual appear with the capacity or chance to crystallize these hopes and the enemy will have arrived. For anti-Christ will be a man."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

(Artwork: Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, by Luca Signorelli. Fresco, 1499-1502. Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto)

"The gods of the New Paganism"

"MEN do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."

~ Hilaire Belloc: "Essays of a Catholic" 

Communism

"Under communism we should have all the worst spiritual effects of industrial capitalism extended and emphasized because their tyranny would be universal. . . .When you destroy the family and the sanctity of the individual, when you make war on the tradition of human culture, you are making war on the Image of God. And because you are making war on the Image of God, which is Man, with his human dignity and free will, you find yourself at once at war with God Himself. It is not an accident that communism should produce wholesale massacre, arson, torture, and the destruction of all lovely things. A perverse theory produces perverse acts. The story has been told over and over again but it can never be told too often."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out.

Education

"THE education of a child belongs properly to the parent, and not to the State. The family is prior to the State in right, and this is particularly true of rights over children."

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic

Artwork: Education, 

by Ferdinand Wagner Sr. 

A.D. 1819 – 1881, German

Persecution

"BUT IF I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the Faith is at hand, I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall be at work it will be morning."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

Printing

"PRINTING diffused true knowledge, but it also diffused (and on a far greater scale) false knowledge and unproved irrational affirmation." 

~Hilaire Belloc: The Crisis of Our Civilization

Nature of the Reformation

"The break-up of united Western Christendom with the coming of the Reformation was by far the most important thing in history since the foundation of the Catholic Church fifteen hundred years before.

"Men of foresight perceived at the time that if catastrophe were allowed to consumate itself, if the revolt were to be successful (and it was successful), our civilization would certainly be imperilled,  and possibly, in the long run, destroyed.

"That indeed is what has happened. Europe with all its culture is now seriously imperilled and stands no small chance of being destroyed by its own internal disruption; and all this is ultimately the fruit of the great religious revolution which began four hundred years ago.

"That being so, the Reformation being of this importance, it ought to form the chief object of historical study in modern times, and its nature should be clearly understood, even if only in outline."

~Hilaire Belloc: Characters of the Reformation, Chap 1. (1936)

Diptych with the Portraits of Luther and his Wife, by CRANACH, Lucas the Elder. Oil on wood; Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.

Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, by CRANACH, Lucas the Younger. Oil and tempera on wood, transferred to canvas,1559; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

The Calvinist Iconoclastic Riot of August 20, 1566, by HOGENBERG, Frans. Copper engraving, 1588; British Museum, London.

Portrait of John Calvin (1509–1564). Oil on panel, c. 1550. (Anonymous)

SAINT THOMAS MORE

"...Saint Thomas More is badly misunderstood; and through misunderstanding him we misunderstand the nature of the English Reformation itself as well as the peculiar and individual greatness of this individual martyr. . .

"He was, I repeat, utterly alone. He had no support from without.

"And what support had he from within? That terrible question we cannot answer with certitude, but we can, I think, with probability. His was not only a skeptical mind, as has been the mind of more than one who has nonetheless suffered death for truth held by faith and not by experience: it was also a mind which had long practice of seeing both sides of any question and thinking anything can be argued; on that particular point of the Papacy he had himself argued sincerely enough on the wrong side. I suggest that the Martyr in his last moments had all the intellectual frailty of the intellectuals, and that at the end his skepticism was still working; but his glorious resolution stood─and that is the kernel of the affair. He had what is called "Heroic Faith"."

~Hilaire Belloc: Characters of the Reformation, Chap. 6.

@ Amazon

"The mountains from their heights"

"And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have never been able to understand─ namely, that if you draw a plan or section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing. One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in one's hand─yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome

Godolphin Horne

Godolphin Horne, Who was Cursed with
the Sin of Pride, and Became a Boot-Black

Godolphin Horne was Nobly Born;   
He held the Human Race in Scorn,   
And lived with all his Sisters where   
His Father lived, in Berkeley Square.   
And oh! the Lad was Deathly Proud!   
He never shook your Hand or Bowed,   
But merely smirked and nodded thus:   
How perfectly ridiculous!
Alas! That such Affected Tricks   
Should flourish in a Child of Six!
(For such was Young Godolphin's age).   
Just then, the Court required a Page,   
Whereat the Lord High Chamberlain   
(The Kindest and the Best of Men),   
He went good-naturedly and took   
A Perfectly Enormous Book
Called People Qualified to Be
Attendant on His Majesty,
And murmured, as he scanned the list   
(To see that no one should be missed),   
'There's William Coutts has got the Flu,   
And Billy Higgs would never do,   
And Guy de Vere is far too young,
And. . . wasn't D'Alton's Father hung?   
And as for Alexander Byng!—. . .   
I think I know the kind of thing,   
A Churchman, cleanly, nobly born,   
Come let us say Godolphin Horne?'   
But hardly had he said the word   
When Murmurs of Dissent were heard.   
The King of Iceland's Eldest Son
Said, 'Thank you! I am taking none!'   
The Aged Duchess of Athlone   
Remarked, in her sub-acid tone,   
'I doubt if He is what we need!'   
With which the Bishops all agreed;   
And even Lady Mary Flood
(So Kind, and oh! so really good)   
Said, 'No! He wouldn't do at all,   
He'd make us feel a lot too small.'
The Chamberlain said, ' . . . Well, well, well!   
No doubt you're right . . . One cannot tell!'
He took his Gold and Diamond Pen   
And Scratched Godolphin out again.   
So now Godolphin is the Boy   
Who blacks the Boots at the Savoy.

~Hilaire Belloc

"Under what form of government is the state of man at its best?"

"THE TRUTH that Dr. Jowett gave me came thus. He asked me the political question which was uppermost in his mind, and which he believed all young men should consider. It was, "Under what form of government is the state of man at its best?" I answered as all young men should  answer, "A Republic," to which he answered gently in his turn, "You cannot have a Republic without Republicans." Now that, for terseness and truth and a certain quality of "revelation," was worthy of Aristotle. It is the full answer, historical and moral, to every honest man who desires, as most honest men do, democracy, and who wonders why it is so hard to attain. But I have never considered that answer; and I think that if I had not heard these half dozen words I might never have considered it.

"Democracy, that is, the government of the community by the community: a State where in a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power: a State in which office alone commands, and not being clothed with office─that is the ideal at the back of every man's mind who cares for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left of private honour. It is simplest put by saying democracy is the noblest form of government. But the moment you begin to deal with men, you find in varying degree, according to the human material handled, a difficulty in the direction of such an affair. You have experience of the wickedness and folly of men, and if you add to such growing experience the vast experience of history, you find that, save in some few, and those small, communities, the ideal of democracy must breakdown in practice; and that so far from enjoying the noblest of social conditions, men in great States are soon suffering the basest forms of control by the rich. That is because most men, though intimately desiring a republic, are not republicans: when you have great numbers, those worthy of democracy are few. In the same way most men, though individually desiring peace within, have not the control of themselves which makes such peace possible.

"So much for the Master's excellent platitude.

"It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things, should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came. To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic State; that even in small States it needs a peculiarly admirable and rare temper in the human material of them. But this conviction came slowly, and all started from those few words.

"And what has all this to do with the sailing of the sea? Nothing, save that it is during the sailing of the lonely sea that men most consider the nature of things."

~Hilaire Belloc: "The Cruise of the 'Nona'."

(Artwork: Seascape at Cayeux, by DUPRÉ, Jules. Oil on canvas, c. 1870. Private collection)

"All human conflict is ultimately theological"

"THERE IS another form of impressing the truth, and testifying to it, and doing good by it, which is the dogmatic assertion of truth by the old and the experienced and the revered, to the young. It is out of fashion, it is invaluable. I can myself testify to two such experiences which stand out supreme among many many hundreds in my own early life. I am afraid they may seem trivial to my readers; I can only say that for myself they were as strong as any great joy or pain could be. One was a sentence which Cardinal Manning said to me when I was but twenty years old. The other was one which the Master of my College, Dr. Jowett, of Balliol,
said to me when I was twenty-two years old.

"The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: 'all human conflict is ultimately theological'.

"It was my custom during my first years in London, as a very young man, before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he would receive me; and during those brief interviews I heard from him many things which I've had later occasion to test by the experience of human life. I was, it may be said, too young to judge things so deep as sanctity and wisdom; but, on the other hand, youth has vision, especially upon elemental things; and Manning did seem to me (and still seems to me) much the greatest Englishman of his time. He was certainly the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who, in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, pre-eminent in will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept the Faith. Not only did his powerful mind discover, but his powerful will also insisted upon all the difficult consequences of such an acceptation. He never admitted the possibility of compromise between Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict, and gloried in it.

"This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered) "that all human conflict was ultimately theological": that is, that all wars and revolutions and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in morals and Transcendental doctrine, was utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I would have almost said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight: with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action; so extended that it covered the whole.

"It is, indeed, a truth which explains and co-ordinates all one reads of human action in the in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. Men talk of universal peace: it is only obtainable by one common religion. Men say that all tragedy is the conflict of equal rights. They lie. All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that doctrine is but a private, individual affair, creating mere opinion. Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the State;  and every State is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.

"The truth Dr. Jowett gave me came to thus." . . (cont. next post).

~Hilaire Belloc: "The Cruise of the 'Nona'."

@ Amazon



Joan of Arc

Excerpt from Joan of Arc
by Hilaire Belloc

Regarding Belloc's book, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen said: "And did he not write the finest panegyric to Saint Joan of Arc — none is better — and do it in an English that matched the French of her own time?"

"ONE SUMMER MORNING when she was thirteen years of age and some months more, she went into the meadows to gather flowers with her companions and they ran races together, till she heard a lad saying, "Your mother needs you." Joan therefore went back quickly to the house, for she was kept subject. But her mother wondered and said she had not summoned her; so Joan went out again from the door into the garden-close and stood there for a moment looking westward towards the near hills. It was noon.

"As she so stood a dazzling light shone by her at her right hand, supplanting the day, and she was overcome with terror; from the midst of the glory, came a Voice which spoke of the Faith and its observance, and at last gave order that she should seek the uncrowned King of France, dispossessed by his foes, and rescue him and crown him at Rheims. At the third summons she saw St. Michael in his splendour and about him the Soldiery of Heaven.

"She was so young, and trembling, that she told no one (save later, secretly, the Priest), but she turned to a new piety as she grew into womanhood, cherishing the poor, and at her prayers continually till her devotion seemed ridiculous to those about her. And she had vowed her virginity to God "so long as it should Him please," but on this also she held her peace.

"The summer past and the winter; her summoning Heralds from beatitude would not let her be, but urged her still. There came Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, who called each other by their names, and who were fragrant, speaking in low and lovely voices and still proclaiming her, and week after week, every two days or three, she lived in this companionship, consecrated, hesitant, impelled. There was the world about her, but there were also These: "I saw them with the eyes of my body, as plainly as I see you now; and when they went away, I would cry. For I wanted them to take me with them," ─ to that Paradise. Yet she still withstood them and was silent. Not till the third year did she yield and speak."

 ℘ Joan of Arc at Amazon

The Free Press and the Official Press

"WHEREVER I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere. What a caricature—and what a base, empty caricature—of England or France or Italy you get in the "Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the "Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general—or really national."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Free Press. (An essay on the manipulation of news and opinion, and how to counter it.)

Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa

LADY and Queen of Mystery manifold
And very Regent of the untroubled sky,
Whom in a dream St. Hilda did behold
And heard a woodland music passing by:
You shall receive me when the clouds are high
With evening and the sheep attain the fold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold.
And this is that in which I mean to die.

Steep are the seas and savaging and cold
In broken waters terrible to dry;
And vast against the winter night the world,
And harbourless for any sail to lie.
But you shall lead me to the lights, and I
Shall hymn you in a harbour story told.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.

Help the half-defeated, House of Gold,
Shrine of the sword, and Tower of Ivory;
Splendour apart, supreme and aureoled,
The Battler’s vision and the World’s reply.
You shall restore me, O my last Ally,
To vengeance and the glories of the bold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.

Prince of the degradations, bought and sold,
These verses, written in your crumbling sty,
Proclaim the faith that I have held and hold
And publish that in which I mean to die.

~Hilaire Belloc

Image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a brief history

Letter from Belloc to Chesterton

Reform Club, Manchester, 
11 Dec. 1907. 

My dear Gilbert, 

I am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though driven to it. I have never written a letter such as I am writing now, though I have desired to write some six or seven since I became a grown man. In the matter we discussed at Oxford I have a word to say which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather, more valuable. All intellectual process is doubtful, all inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that. 

Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus, immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God. 

I recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. If it is here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand. 

I have never written thus─as I say─and I beg you to see nothing in it but what I say. There is no connection the reason can seize─but so it is. If you say "I want this" as in your case to know one way or the other─She will give it you: as She will give health or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed Mother. 

I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it. 

Yours ever 
              H. Belloc 

My point is: If it is right She knows. If it is not right, She knows. 

"Implicit Materialism"

"Implicit Materialism─that is, an underlying, unexpressed, conception that material causes explain all things─survives. Men do not commonly say, nowadays, as many did not so long ago, that man is to be explained as a machine or a set of chemical formulae. They no longer, in any great numbers, deny flatly the presence of immaterial factors in the universe. But when they speak of life or death, or when they propose an explanation of anything, they imply, often without knowing it, that all of which they talk is material: that life is a material process, death but a cessation of that process, and that any human occasion─for instance any social development─can be completely understood when it is stated in terms of material things."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

"The mob loves a scrap"

"WE must be militant. There were, perhaps, in the past, moments when that spirit was unwise; to-day, it seems to me demanded by a just judgment of the situation. Our society has become a mob. The mob loves a scrap, and it is right."

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic

Communism

"UNDER COMMUNISM we should have all the worst spiritual effects of industrial capitalism extended and emphasized because their tyranny would be universal.  . .  .  When you destroy the family and the sanctity of the individual, when you make war on the tradition of human culture, you are making war on the Image of God, which is Man, with his human dignity and free will, you find yourself at once at war with God Himself. It is not an accident that communism should produce wholesale massacre, arson, torture, and the destruction of all lovely things. A perverse theory produces perverse acts. The story has been told over and over again but it can never be told too often."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out

"The New Paganism"

"MEN do not live long without gods; when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."

~Hilaire Belloc: "Essays of a Catholic."

"The Mohammedan never becomes a Catholic"

"IT [Islam] still converts pagan savages wholesale. It even attracts from time to time some European eccentric, who joins its body. But the Mohammedan never becomes a Catholic. No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine. In view of this, anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a revival of Mohammedan political power, and a renewal of the old pressure of Islam on Christendom."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies.

"The sun shining through"

"YOU are like one examining the windows of Chartres from within by candle-light, and marveling how any man can find glory in them; but we have the sun shining through."

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic

"The demon of unrestricted competition"

"THE GUILD, one might almost say, comes into existence, and has always come into existence, with the object of preventing men from being destroyed by the demon of unrestricted competition, which is only another word for greed."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out

"the Modern Mind"

"WELL, we must hope that intelligence will resume it's rights, even against such; but the prospect is not cheerful. Meanwhile the monstrous apparition of the "Modern Mind" has produced one good among many evils; it has produced a belated Brotherhood of the Intelligent. We of the Faith and the cultured Pagans have a common opponent. A common donkey blocking the car, and needing to be shouldered off the lane into the ditch, breeds fellow-feeling between the Catholic and the clear-minded skeptic. Each feels a peculiar disgust with the "Modern Mind." So we have, at last, allies."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

"To reckon with Islam"

"WE no longer regarded Islam as a rival to our own culture. We thought of its religion as a sort of fossilised thing about which we need no trouble. That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our faith it will rise."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church  (1929)

'What ruin false doctrine can bring'

"IF we could get a full picture of what all that sea-world was in early Christian time and compare it with what we see to-day we should understand what ruin false doctrine can bring "upon the world. The ancient paganism, being a preparation for the Faith, did no such hurt. It was Mohammedanism, the greatest and most virulent of the heresies (and most persistent), which must bear the blame."

~Hilaire Belloc: On Patmos

Islam, a Great Heresy

"THE MOHAMMEDAN attack was a different kind. It came geographically outside the area of Christendom; it appeared, almost from the outset, as a foreign enemy; yet it was not, strictly speaking, a new religion attacking the old, it was essentially a heresy; but from the circumstances of its birth was a heresy alien rather than intimate. It threatened to kill the Christian Church by invasion rather than undermine it from within."

~Hilaire Belloc: "The Great Heresies."

"The book"

"For if men fall into the habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization, the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will be subject, must increase."

~Hilaire Belloc: On the Decline of the Book.

Continue reading here.

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