Some have considered Mr. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) to be one of the most famous and influential Catholic historians of the past two centuries. In 1938, he wrote what many maintain was his greatest book,
The Great Heresies. In that work, he reminded us all of the need to remember our history:
"Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant, in all material affairs at least. We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet made up of modern ironclads and submarines, or a great modern Mohammedan army fully equipped with modern artillery, flying power and the rest. But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Mohammedan Government centred at Constantinople had better artillery and better army equipment of every kind than had we Christians in the West. The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England and of his brother James and of the usurper William III. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history--September 11, 1683." The Great Heresies, Hilaire Belloc, Tan Books and Publishers, Inc. (first published 1938, reprint 1991) , pp. 70-71. (bold and red color added.)
During the course of The Great Heresies, Mr. Belloc discussed what he believed to be the final heresy that the Catholic Church will confront, the "Modern Attack." While reading it, I was shocked and somewhat frightened by Mr. Belloc's description of the Church's final enemy. What he referred to back in 1938 as the time of the "Anti-Christ" was strikingly similar to our present day. I only wished that he was still alive and would be interviewed on EWTN so that more people would hear what he had to say.
This got me thinking and the end result is this faux interview. I did
not interview Mr. Belloc. He has been dead for more than 50 years. Instead, I took chapter 7 of his book, The Great Heresies, and converted it to his responses to my questions. The answers are almost entirely taken word-for-word from Mr. Belloc's book. So as to cause no question, any additions I have made to his response (other than convert parenthesis to dashes) is in
blue. While I have done my best to ensure everything has been typed word-for-word, any errors are with me and not Mr. Belloc or the text.
It is my hope that this interview will get you to read the entire work and purchase a copy or two for your friends and family.
* * * * * *
Niko: These days it seems socially acceptable if not "politically correct" to attack Catholicism and the Church, be it in the press, movies or just daily conversation. Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" or movies such as "The Matrix" have revived the old Gnostic heresy. Is this just my imagination or is something going on?HB:
Well, the Catholic Faith is now in the presence not of a particular heresy as in the past--the Arian, the Manichean, the Albigensian, the Mohammedan--nor is it in the presence of a sort of generalized heresy as it was when it had to meet the Protestant revolution from three to four hundred years ago. The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called "The Modern Attack," is a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith--upon the very existence of the Faith.
Niko: Are you saying that war has been declared on the Catholic Church?HB: The forces now opposed to the Faith design to
destroy. The battle is henceforward engaged upon a definite line of cleavage, involving the survival or destruction of the Catholic Church. And
all--not a portion--of its philosophy.
Niko: But I thought the Catholic Church was to be eternal?HB: We know, of course, that the Catholic Church cannot be destroyed. But what we do not know is the extent of the area over which it will survive; its power of revival or the power of the enemy to push it further and further back on to its last defences until it may seem as though anti-Christ had come and the final issue was about to be decided. Of such moment is the struggle immediately before the world.
Niko: So it's not just my imagination, then, something is going on....HB: The truth is becoming every day so much more obvious that within a few years it will be universally admitted. I do not entitle the modern attack "anti-Christ"--though in my heart I believe that to be the true term for it: No, I do not give it that name because it would seem for the moment exaggerated. But the name doesn't matter. Whether we call it "The Modern Attack" or "anti-Christ" it is all one; there is a clear issue now joined between the retention of Catholic morals, tradition, and authority on the one side, and the active effort to destroy them on the other. The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live. The duel is to the death.
Niko: What can you tell us about this new or, as you put it, modern attack?HB:
Well, we find, to begin with, that it is at once materialist and superstitious. There is here a contradiction in reason, but the modern phase, the anti-Christian advance, has abandoned reason. It is concerned with the destruction of the Catholic Church and the civilization preceding therefrom. It is not troubled by apparent contradictions within its own body so long as the general alliance is one for the ending of all that by which we have hitherto lived. The modern attack is materialistic because in its philosophy it considers only material causes. It is superstitious only as a by-product of this state of mind. It nourishes on its surface the silly vagaries of spiritualism, the vulgar nonsense of "Christian Science," and heaven knows how many other fantasies. But these follies are bred, not from a hunger for religion, but from the same root as that which has made the world materialist--from an inability to understand the prime truth that faith is at the root of knowledge; from thinking that no truth is appreciable save through direct experience.
Niko: As opposed to scripture, which would be divine revelation...HB: It has been well remarked that nothing is more striking than the way in which all the modern quasi-religious practices are agreed upon
this--that Revelation is to be denied.
Niko: Can you give us an example of how this modern attack is taking place?HB: First, we are witnessing a revival of slavery, the necessary result of denying free will when that denial goes one step beyond Calvin and denies responsibility to God as well as lack of power in man--
Niko: Sorry to interrupt, but you said a revival of slavery?HB:
Yes. The two forms of slavery which are gradually appearing and will as time goes on be more and more matured under the effect of the modern attack upon the Faith, are slavery to the State and slavery to private corporations and individuals.
Niko: Give us an example of what you mean by slavery to the State. I mean, after all, slavery was abolished by the XIII Amendment to the US Constitution.HB: When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated. And if it be continued for, say, three generations, it will become so thoroughly established as a social habit and frame of mind that there may be no escape from it in the countries where State Socialism of this kind has been forged and riveted on the body politic. In Europe, England in particular--but many other countries in a lesser degree--has bound itself to this system.
Niko: So you are refering to "the dole" or welfare, as we call it here in the US?HB: Below a certain level of income a man is guaranteed a bare subsistence should he be out of employment. It is doled out to him by public officials at the expense of losing human dignity. Every circumstance of his family is examined; he is even more in the hands of these officials when out of employment than in the hands of his employer when employed.
Niko: What about slavery to corporations?HB: Of modern "wage-slavery" one can only talk by metaphor; the man working at a wage is not fully free as is the man possessed of property; he must do as his master tells him, and when his condition is that not of a minority nor even of a limited majority, but of virtually the whole population except a comparatively small capitalist class, the proportion of real freedom in his life dwindles indeed--yet legally it is there. The employee has not yet fallen to the status of the slave even in the most highly industrialized communities. His legal status is still that of a citizen. In theory he is still a free man who has contracted with another man to do a certain amount of work for a certain amount of pay. The man who contracts to pay may or may not be making a profit out of it; the man who contracts to work may or may not receive in wages more than the value of what he produces. But both are technically free.
Niko: Technically free, perhaps, but still chained to their jobs due to the need for health insurance and the need to repay their thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Interesting. Is this economic based slavery the only sign?HB: These are the first fruits of the Modern Attack on the social side, the first fruits appearing in the region of the social structure.
Niko: It's almost like things were reverting back to as it was before Catholicism was on the scene.HB:
Well, we came, before the Church was founded, out of a pagan social system in which slavery was everywhere, in which the whole structure of society reposed upon the institution of slavery. With the loss of the Faith were turn to that institution again.
Niko: You've told us about the changes in the social system. What else?HB: Next to the social fruit of the Modern Attack on the Catholic Church is the moral fruit; which extends of course over the whole moral nature of man. And throughout this field its business so far has been to undermine every form of restraint imposed by human experience acting through tradition.
Niko: You're talking, of course, about sex.HB:
Those who would point to the modern break-down of sexual morals as the chief effect of the Modern Attack on the Catholic Church are probably in error; for it will not have the most permanent results. Some code, some set of morals, must, in the nature of things, arise; even if the old code is on this point destroyed. But there are other evil effects, which may prove more permanent. Now to find out what these effects may be, we have a guide. We can consider how men of our blood carried on before the Church created Christendom.
Niko: So in looking at the past you can get a glimpse of what the future may bring. What do you see?HB: What we chiefly discover is this: That in the realm of morals one thing stands out, the unquestioned prevalence of cruelty in the unbaptized world. Cruelty will be the chief fruit in the moral field of the Modern Attack, just as the revival of slavery will be the chief fruit in the social field.
Niko: Given the history of humanity, with over two thousand years of armed conflict, massacre, judicial tortures, horrible executions, the sack of towns and all the rest, I would think that cruelty existed more in the past than today.HB:
There is a capital distinction between cruelty exceptional, and cruelty the rule. When men apply cruel punishments, depend on physical power to obtain effects, let loose violence in the passions of war, if all this is done in violation of their own accepted morals, it is one thing; if it is done as part of a whole mental attitude taken for granted, it is another. Therein lies the radical distinction between this new, modern, cruelty and the sporadic cruelty of earlier Christian times.
Niko: It's just business as usual--HB: The proof lies in this: that men are not shocked at cruelty but indifferent to it. The abominations of the revolution in Russia, extended to those in Spain, are an example in point. Not only did people on the spot receive the horror with indifference, but distant observers do so.There is no universal cry of indignation, there is no sufficient protest, because there is no longer in force the conception that man as man is something sacred. That same force which ignores human dignity also ignores human suffering.
Niko: And how we ignore the millions starving in Africa. As if we could care less....HB: I say again, the Modern Attack on the Faith will have in the moral field a thousand evil fruits, and of these many are apparent today, but the characteristic one, the one presumably the most permanent, is the institution everywhere of cruelty accompanied by a contempt for justice.
Niko: Any other signs of this modern attack on Catholicism other than economic slavery and the indifference to cruelty?HB: The last category of fruits by which we may judge the character ofthe Modern Attack consists in the fruit it bears in the field of the intelligence--what it does to human reason.
Niko: Of all ages, ours is certainly one of technology. I would think its foundation would be human reason.
HB: When the Modern Attack was gathering, a couple of lifetimes ago, while it was still confined to a small number of academic men, the first assault upon reason began. It seemed to make but little progress outside a restricted circle. The plain man and his common-sense--which are the strongholds of reason--were not affected. Today they are. Reason today is everywhere decried.
Niko: In what way?HB: The ancient process of conviction by argument and proof is replaced by reiterated affirmation; and almost all the terms which were the glory of reason carry with them now an atmosphere of contempt. See what has happened for instance to the word "logic," to the word "controversy"; note such popular phrases as "No one yet was ever convinced by argument," or again, "Anything may be proved," or "That maybe all right in logic, but in practice it is very different." The speech of men is becoming saturated with expressions which everywhere connote contempt for the use of the intelligence.
Niko: But how does this effect our Faith?HB:
Faith and the use of the intelligence are inextricably bound up. The use of reason is a main part--or rather the foundation--of all inquiry into the highest things. It was precisely because reason was given this divine authority that the Church proclaimed mystery--that is, admitted reason to have its limits. It had to be so, lest the absolute powers ascribed to reason should lead to the exclusion of truths which the reason might accept but could not demonstrate. Reason was limited by mystery only more to enhance the sovereignty of reason in its own sphere.
Niko: So you are saying without reason there is no Faith?HB: When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned--the two subversions go together--but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time. There is no God. So the words "God is Truth" which the mind of Christian Europe used as a postulate in all it did, cease to have meaning. None can analyse the rightful authority of government nor set bounds to it. In the absence of reason, political authority reposing on mere force is boundless. And reason is thus made a victim because Humanity itself is what the Modern Attack is destroying in its false religion of humanity. Reason being the crown of man and at the same time his distinguishing mark, reason is their principle enemy.
Niko: What do you think will be the end result of this attack? Will it succeed?
HB: The modern attack on the Faith has advanced so far that we can already affirm one all-important point quite clearly: of two things one must happen, one of two results must become definite throughout the modern world. Either the Catholic Church--now rapidly becoming the only place wherein the traditions of civilization are understood and defended--will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and, so far as public appreciation goes, to silence; or the Catholic Church will, in this case as throughout the past, react more strongly against her enemies than her enemies have been able to react against her; she will recover and extend her authority, and will rise once more to the leadership of civilization which she made, and thus recover and restore the world.
Niko: So the Church will either become a useless and ignored entity or will bring salvation to humanity. Talk about an either/or situation. Is there anything we can do other than "have faith"?HB: That mood of faith has been largely ruined, ruined certainly for the greater part of men, all will admit. So true is this that already a majority--and I should affirm it to be a very large majority--do not know what the word faith means. For most men who hear it, in connection with religion, it signifies either blind acceptance of irrational statements and of legends which common experience condemns, or a mere inherited habit of mental pictures which have never been tested and which at the first touch of reality dissolve like the dreams they are. The whole vast body of apologetics, the whole science of theology (the Queen exalted above every other science) have for the mass of modern men ceased to be. If you but mention their titles you give an effect of unreality and insignificance.
Niko: Although we are seeing a rise in people such as Scott Hahn and Jeff Cavins, so perhaps apologetics and theology are not yet dead. Do you think the Church as we know it will survive?HB: The Catholic observer would deny the possibility of the Church's complete extinction. But he must also follow historical parallels; he also must accept the general laws governing the growth and decay of organisms, and he must tend, in view of all the change that has passed in the mind of man, to draw the tragic conclusion that our civilization, which has already largely ceased to be Christian, will lose its general Christian tone altogether. The future to envisage is a pagan future, and a future pagan with a new and repulsive form of paganism, but none the less powerful and omnipresent for all its repulsiveness.
Niko: Okay, enough of the doom and gloom. What's Catholicism have in its favor?HB:
Well, on the other side there are considerations less obvious, but appealing strongly to the thoughtful and learned in things past and in experience of human nature. First of all, there is the fact that all through the centuries the Church has reacted strongly towards her own resurrection in moments of deepest peril.
Niko: Such as?HB: The Mohammedan struggle,
for example, was a very close thing; it nearly swamped us; only the armed reaction in Spain, followed by the Crusades, prevented the full triumph of Islam.
Or consider the onslaught of the barbarian, of the northern pirates, of the Mongol hordes, which brought Christendom to within an ace of destruction. Yet the northern pirates were tamed, defeated and baptized by force. The barbarism of the eastern nomads was eventually defeated; admittedly very tardily, but not too late to save what could be saved. The movement called the Counter-Reformation met the hitherto triumphant advance of the sixteenth-century heretics and even the Rationalism of the eighteenth century was, in its own place and time, checked and repelled. It is true that it bred something worse than itself; something from which we now suffer, but there was reaction against it; and that reaction was sufficient to keep the Church alive and even to recover for it elements of power which had been thought lost for ever.
Niko: So historically, the Church has been able to defeat her foes. What else?HB: Next, let this very interesting point be noted: the more powerful, the more acute, and the more sensitive minds of our time are clearly inclining toward the Catholic side. They are of course of their nature a small minority, but they are a minority of a sort very powerful in human affairs.
Niko: And you believe this minority can make a difference?HB: The future is not decided for men by public vote; it is decided by the growth of ideas. When the few men who can think best and feel most strongly and who have mastery of expression begin to show a novel tendency towards this or that, then this or that bids fair to dominate the future.
Niko: For example, Mel Gibson and his movie....HB:
The conversions which strike the public eye are continually the conversions of men who lead in thought; and note that for one who openly admits conversion there are ten at least who turn their faces toward the Catholic way, who prefer the Catholic philosophy and its fruit to any others, but who shrink from accepting the heavy sacrifices involved in a public avowal.
Niko: Is this unique to Catholicism or Christianity in general? HB: There is no such thing as a religion called "Christianity"--and there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church's doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals. But there never has been and never can be or will be a general Christian religion professed by men who all accept some central important doctrines, while agreeing to differ about others.
Niko: Thanks for taking time to talk with us. I understand that our readers can either pick up a copy of your book, The Great Heresies, at Amazon.com or find a .txt version at EWTN. Is there anything else you'd like to add, some words of wisdom to end on?HB:
We are now in the presence of the most momentous question that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn.
Niko: Thank you, and God bless.
Posts
