BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - IX: THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN
The grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul.
This was its fruit: from this all its consequences proceed: not only those
clearly noxious, which have put in jeopardy the whole of our traditions
and all our happiness, but those apparently advantageous, especially in
material things.
The process cannot be seen at work if we take a particular date--especially
too early a date--and call it the moment of the catastrophe. There was a
long interval of confusion and doubt, in which it was not certain whether
the catastrophe would be final or no, in which its final form remained
undetermined, and only upon the conclusion of which could modern Europe
with its new divisions, and its new fates, be perceived clearly. The breach
with authority began in the very first years of the sixteenth century.
It is not till the middle of the seventeenth century at least, and even
somewhat later, that the new era begins.
For more than a hundred years the conception of the struggle as an
oecumenical struggle, as something affecting the whole body of Europe,
continued. The general upheaval, the revolt, which first shook the West
in the early years of the sixteenth century--to take a particular year,
the year 1517--concerned all our civilization, was everywhere debated,
produced an universal reaction met by as universal a resistance, for three
generations of men. No young man who saw the first outbreak of the storm
could imagine it even in old age, as a disruption of Europe. No such man
lived to see it more than half way through.
It was not till a corresponding date in the succeeding century--or rather
later--not till Elizabeth of England and Henry IV. of France were dead (and
all the protagonists, the Reformers on the one side, Loyola, Neri, on the
other, long dead) not till the career of Richelieu in the one country and
the beginnings of an aristocratic Parliament in England were apparent, that
the Reformation could clearly be seen to have separated certain districts
of our civilization from the general traditions of the whole, and to
have produced, in special regions and sections of society, the peculiar
Protestant type which was to mark the future.
The work of the Reformation was accomplished, one may say, a little after
the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. England in particular was definitely
Protestant by the decade 1620-1630--hardly earlier. The French Huguenot
body, though still confused with political effort, had come to have a
separate and real existence at about the same time. The Oligarchy of Dutch
merchants had similarly cut off their part of the Low Countries from
imperial rule, and virtually established their independence. The North
German Principalities and sundry smaller states of the mountains (notably
Geneva), had definitely received the new stamp. As definitely France,
Bohemia, the Danube, Poland and Italy and all the South were saved.
Though an armed struggle was long to continue, though the North Germans
were nearly recaptured by the Imperial Power and only saved by French
policy, though we were to have a reflex of it here in the Civil Wars and
the destruction of the Crown, and though the last struggle against the
Stuarts and the greater general war against Louis XIV. were but sequels to
the vast affair, yet the great consequence of that affair was fixed before
these wars began. 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 to come to judgment, for they are not yet fulfilled: but perhaps their
judgment is near.
These processes filling the last three hundred years have been as follows:
(1) A rapid extension of physical science and with it of every other form
of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable things. (2) The rise,
chiefly in the new Protestant part of Europe (but spreading thence in
part to the Catholic) of what we call today "Capitalism," that is, the
possession of the means of production by the few, and their exploitation
of the many. (3) The corruption of the principle of authority until it was
confused with mere force. (4) The general, though not universal, growth of
total wealth with the growth of physical knowledge. (5) The ever widening
effect of skepticism, which, whether masked under traditional forms or no,
was from the beginning a spirit of complete negation and led at last to
the questioning not only of any human institutions, but of the very forms
of thought and of the mathematical truths. (6) With all these of course we
have had a universal mark--the progressive extension of despair.
Could anyone look back upon these three centuries from some very great
distance of time, he would see them as an episode of extraordinary
extension in things that should be dissociated: knowledge and wealth, on
the one hand, the unhappiness of men upon the other. And he would see that
as the process matured, or rather as the corruption deepened, all its
marks were pushed to a degree so extreme as to jeopardize at last the very
structure of European society. Physical science acquired such power, the
oppression of the poor was pushed to such a length, the reasoning spirit in
man was permitted to attain such a tottering pitch of insecurity, that a
question never yet put to Europe arose at last--whether Europe, not from
external foes, but from her own inward lesion may not fail.
Corresponding to that terrible and as yet unanswered question--the
culmination of so much evil--necessarily arises this the sole vital formula
of our time: "Europe must return to the Faith, or she will perish."
* * * * *
I have said that the prime product of the Reformation was the isolation of
the soul. That truth contains, in its development, very much more than its
mere statement might promise.
The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of the sane
balance produced by general experience, the weight of security, and the
general will. The isolation of the soul is the very definition of its
unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than
merely complete and confirm human misery.
In the first place and underlying all, the isolation of the soul releases
in a society a furious new accession of force. The break-up of any
stable system in physics, as in society, makes actual a prodigious reserve
of potential energy. It transforms the power that was keeping things
together with a power driving separably each component part: the effect
of an explosion. That is why the Reformation launched the whole series of
material advance, but launched it chaotically and on divergent lines which
would only end in disaster. But the thing had many other results.
Thus, we next notice that 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 the most permanent was a reaction towards
corporate life in the shape of a worship of nationality--patriotism.
You had at one end of the scale an extraordinary new tabus, the erection
in one place of a sort of maniac god, blood-thirsty, an object of terror.
In another (or the same) a curious new ritual observance of nothingness
upon every seventh day. In another an irrational attachment to a particular
printed book. In another successive conceptions: first, that the human
reason was sufficient for the whole foundations of human life--that
there were no mysteries: next, the opposite extravagance that the human
reason had no authority even in its own sphere. And these two, though
contradictory, had one root. The rationalism of the eighteenth century
carried on through the materialism of the nineteenth, the irrational doubts
of Kant (which included much emotional rubbish) carried on to the sheer
chaos of the later metaphysicians, with their denial of contradictions, and
even of being. Both sprang from this necessity of the unsupported soul to
make itself some system from within: as the unsupported soul, in an evil
dream, now stifles in strict confinement and is next dissolved in some
fearful emptiness.
All this, the first interior effect of the Reformation, strong in
proportion to the strength of the reforming movement, powerful in the
regions or sects which had broken away, far less powerful in those which
had maintained the Faith, would seem to have run its full course, and to
have settled at last into universal negation and a universal challenge
proffered to every institution, and every postulate. But since humanity
cannot repose in such a stage of anarchy, we may well believe 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.
It may be so. It may be that the great debate will come up for final
settlement before such novel diseases spread far. At any rate, for the
moment we are clearly in a stage of complete negation. But it is to be
repeated that this breaking up of the foundations differs in degree with
varying societies, that still in a great mass of Europe, numerically the
half perhaps, the necessary anchors of sanity still hold: and that half is
the half where directly by the practice of the Faith, or indirectly through
a hold upon some part of its tradition, the Catholic Church exercises an
admitted or distant authority over the minds of men.
The next process we note is--by what some may think a paradox--also due to
the isolation of the soul. It is the process of increasing knowledge. Men
acting in a fashion highly corporate will not so readily question, nor
therefore so readily examine, as will men acting alone. Men whose major
results are taken upon an accepted philosophy, will not be driven by such a
need of inquiry as those who have abandoned that guide. In the moment, more
than a thousand years ago, when the last of the evangelizing floodtide was
still running strongly, a very great man wrote of the physical sciences:
"Upon such toys I wasted my youth." And another wrote, speaking of divine
knowledge: "All the rest is smoke."
But in the absences of faith, demonstrable things are the sole consolation.
There are three forms in which the human mind can hold the truth: The form
of Science, which means that we accept a thing through demonstration,
and therefore cannot admit the possibility of its opposite. The form of
Opinion, which means that we accept a thing through probability, that is
through a partial, but not complete demonstration, and therefore we do not
deny the possibility of the opposite. The form of Faith, where we accept
the thing without demonstration and yet deny the possibility of its
opposite, as for instance, the faith of all men, not mad, in the existence
of the universe about them, and of other human minds.
When acknowledged and defined Faith departs, it is clear that of the
remaining two rivals, Opinion has no ground against Science. That which
can be demonstrated holds all the field. Indeed, 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.
Well, this function of the isolated soul, inquiry and the necessity for
demonstration for individual conviction through measurement and physical
fixed knowledge, has occupied, as we all know, the three modern centuries.
We all are equally familiar with its prodigious results. Not one of them
has, as yet, added to human happiness: not one but has been increasingly
misused to the misery of man. There is in the tragedy something comic also,
which is the perpetual puzzlement of these the very authors of discovery,
to find that, somehow or other, discovery alone does not create joy, and
that, somehow or other, a great knowledge can be used ill, as anything else
can be used ill. Also in their bewilderment, many turn to a yet further
extension of physical science as promising, in some illogical way, relief.
A progression in physical science and in the use of instruments is so
natural to man (so long as civic order is preserved) that it would, indeed,
have taken place, not so rapidly, but as surely, had the unity of Europe
been preserved. But the destruction of that unity totally accelerated the
pace and as totally threw the movement off its rails.
The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older than
the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The doors upon
modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was to enter them,
had been cut off from its fellows. We owe the miscarriage of all our
great endeavor in this field, not to that spring of endeavor, but to its
deflection. It is a blasphemy to deny the value of advancing knowledge, and
at once a cowardice and a folly to fear it for its supposed consequences.
Its consequences are only evil through an evil use, that is, through an
evil philosophy.
In connection with this release of powerful inquiry through the isolation
of the soul, you have an apparently contradictory, and certainly
supplementary effect: the setting up of unfounded external authority. It is
a curious development, one very little recognized, but one which a fixed
observance of the modern world will immediately reveal; and those who
come to see it are invariably astonished at the magnitude of its action.
Men--under the very influence of skepticism--have come to accept almost any
printed matter, almost any repeated name, as an authority infallible and to
be admitted 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 financial arrangement,
or some unsolved problem; and 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.
This singular and fantastic result of the long divorce between the
non-Catholic mind and reason has a profound effect upon the modern world.
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.
Lastly, there is of the major consequences of the Reformation that
phenomenon which we have come to call "Capitalism," and which many,
recognizing its universal evil, wrongly regard as the prime obstacle
to right settlement of human society and to the solution of our now
intolerable modern strains.
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. 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. Through it there arose in England first, later
throughout the more active Protestant nations, and later still in various
degrees throughout the rest of Christendom, 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. Here again, as in the matter of the irrational
tabus and of skepticism, two apparently contradictory things have one
root: Capitalism, 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.
Against both, the pillar of reaction is peasant society, and peasant
society has proved throughout Europe largely coördinate with the remaining
authority of the Catholic Church. For a peasant society does not mean a
society composed of peasants, but one in which modern Industrial Capitalism
yields to agriculture, and in which agriculture is, in the main, conducted
by men possessed in part or altogether of their instruments of production
and of the soil, either through ownership or customary tenure. In such
a society all the institutions of the state repose upon an underlying
conception of secure and well-divided private property which can never be
questioned and which colors all men's minds. And that doctrine, like every
other sane doctrine, though applicable only to temporal conditions, has the
firm support of the Catholic Church.
* * * * *
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,
loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have
inherited, and which 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, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was
formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold
of, the Catholic Church.
Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.
The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.
BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - IX: THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN