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Dr. Robert Hickson
23 October 2006
Saint John Capistrano
Belloc's “The
Missioner” and Esto Perpetua – 100 Years Later:
Reverence, Rootedness, and a Sense of
Devastation
Epigraph
“But genius and sanctity do not survive
except by suffering.”
Evelyn Waugh, Monsignor Ronald Knox
(1959)
...
“One had to accept sorrow for it to be
of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in
the world .... A Priest once said to me, 'When you understand
what accepted sorrow means, you will understand
everything. It is the secret of life.'”
Maurice Baring, Darby and Joan (1935)
Introduction
One hundred
years ago, shortly before the manifold devastation of World War
I, Hilaire Belloc wrote “The Missioner” about the gradual
implantation of the Faith in Norway in the Viking days. He also
composed at that time a complementary and more extended essay,
Esto Perpetua (1906), about the historical implantation
of Rome in North Africa after the Punic Wars, and the later
rootedness of the Christian Faith in those lands before it was
lost to the sudden, combative, and permeating Mohammedans.
In this
centenary commemoration of Belloc's Nordic essay and Esto
Perpetua – his longer study and historically informed
travel-book containing cultural and religious reflections on the
former Roman Province of North Africa in the Maghreb – we shall
also come to see the vivid insights of a young man in his
mid-thirties.
But, as was
often the case with him, both in Norway and Barbary, and as in
his later sailing journey, The Cruise of the Nona (1925),
“its underlying feeling is elegiac and sad.”
There is an unmistakably pervasive poignancy and plangency
in his tone, even as his Faith and vivid hope are deeply rooted.
For tragedy is always a human possibility. And there is the
inherent fragility of human life.
Having seen the
Mohammedan devastation and its long-range effects upon former
Christian North Africa, Belloc deeply felt the destruction of
beauty – not only architectural beauty – but also the wasting of
moral beauty and the deeper spiritual beauty of the Faith, which
was only then (1905-1906), and especially through the French
implantations, starting to make a slight, yet still precarious,
recovery and re-conquest on the coasts of the Maghreb. (The
saintly Charles de Foucauld was soon to be killed there during
World War I, in 1916, after his years of selfless missionary
work among the Touaregs and the others, living “the hidden life
of Nazareth” along the edges and in the heart of the desert.)
Belloc's
plangency of soul is often to be found in the stirring tones of
his prose and verse – tones that move the human heart like Homer
and Virgil and yet draw one to the deeper plenitude of the
Faith. For, like Whittaker Chambers later in his own loneliness,
Belloc was a Witness who also knew the trials of loneliness.
The revered
Dominican priest, Vincent McNabb, wrote moving words to Belloc
in 1936 from his own gracious heart, and by way of consolation
to “an old contender” and this salty sailor whom he knew so
well:
You have been a
light-house for almost more than the run of life-times. It has
brought you a certain loneliness amongst the sea and winds. But
your moments of conscious loneliness can hardly be more than
moments when you know – as we must make you know – how many your
light has guided and how many your heroism of accepted
loneliness has heartened. What I personally owe to the
light-house that you are I can only dimly discern but can never
repay.
After Belloc had
lost both his wife, Elodie, on Candlemass 1914 and his
first-born son in World War I, he had also received a letter of
consolation from his beloved confessor. In 1919, Father McNabb
had written: “I often ask God to further you in your great
battles for the poor and for their Master.”
Speaking himself
about the defender of truth in his 1925 book, The Cruise of
the Nona, Belloc wrote:
Reality will confirm
him, and he is not so much testifying to the world as it is
– which is worth nothing – as to Him who made the world, and
Who is worth more than all those things. And, as it seems to me,
a man ought to do this even about the truths not so very
important, but he should observe some proportion between them [i.e.,
the lesser truths] and truths of vital importance.
One of the
truths of vital importance which Belloc had heard directly and
personally from Henry Cardinal Manning himself in 1890 (when
Belloc was only twenty years of age), he never forgot and often
was to reflect upon, until he finally saw its fullness and
varied application. In Belloc's own words, thirty-five years
later, in The Cruise of the Nona:
The profound thing
which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: All human
conflict is ultimately theological .... 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 moral and transcendental
doctrine, was utterly novel to me [at twenty]. 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.
In this
following centenary tribute to Belloc, we propose to consider
his own finely expressed “searchlight-insights” of truth, and to
offer thereby a further elucidation of this great-souled man.
By our viewing
him in and through one of his especially vivid and intimate
books, Esto Perpetua, we hope to reveal the heart of
Belloc a little more. For he truly loved Rome and her rooted
civilization – Pagan and Christian – and her abiding continuity,
and especially the permeating and reverent and rooted
nourishments of the Faith and the culture of the Faith.
But, to enhance
our understanding of Esto Perpetua and of Belloc's own
capaciously understanding heart, we shall also interweave one of
his other essays about Scandinavia and thereby better approach
his 1905-1906 historical and missionary journey to the southern
shore of the Mediterranean. Aiding us by its clarifying
contrasts and counterpoint, this essay itself is significantly
entitled “The Missioner.”
By way of
introduction to this complementary little essay, we shall come
to know how it is written in vividly sacramental prose, and
quietly leads us to consider with gratitude the slowly fruitful
coming of the Faith to Scandinavia. Combining mystery and
concreteness, it memorably depicts a certain missionary journey,
in this case not to North Africa, but up to the far north and
just beyond the frontiers of Roman civilization.
It, too, was a
solitary journey. And the mission gradually took root, though
sometimes precariously. Itself a very intimate essay, “The
Missioner” will prepare us well to savor Belloc's even more
spacious and varied little book, Esto Perpetua, which is
itself essentially about Roma: about Rome and the meaning
of Rome. By way of contrast to other cultures in North Africa,
Esto Perpetua contemplates Rome and her civilization,
and is especially attentive to the implantation of and struggle
for the Faith in the Maghreb (Barbary). It is this adventure
which our Belloc will convey to us, in the longer light of its
military and cultural history and strategic geography, to
include the permeating devastations of Islam: desolation and
isolation which remained long after Mohammedans made their
initial seventh-century cavalry charge out of the desert.
Part I – The Coming of the Faith to the
Frontiers of Europe
Almost ten years
before the later devastation of World War I and during the
consoling reign of Pope Saint Pius X, Hilaire Belloc thus
quietly illuminated the Christian Faith for his readers in an
historical essay on North Africa, and also in his earlier
imaginative missionary essay on the fjord lands of Scandinavia,
the latter of which depicts, not the obdurate Mohammedans, but,
rather, the resistent pagan culture of the “pirate fishermen.”
Through his
variously counterpointed insights and clarifying contrasts,
Belloc also helps us today to be aware of the historical and
persistent enemies of the Christian Faith: those whose dualism
(or occultism) denies the reality of the Incarnation and of the
Holy Trinity. He will also show us how the quiet seeds of the
Faith can touch a human heart, even the heart of “the Old Pilot”
of the marauding Viking fleet who remembered so well the coasts
of Brittany and “the vineyard lands” of the Romans and their
Priests. Grace could build on such a nature and purify his heart
and give him tears of joy.
In his
subsequent, longer book Esto Perpetua, Belloc will
present to us an even larger panorama through his depiction of
the Phoenician, Berber, Pagan-Roman, Christian-Roman, and
Mohammedan-Arab presence in the Maghreb (“Barbary”). He will
show us their specifically distinctive long-range effects and
the special fruitfulness and qualities of the Roman civilization
there – in sharp contradistinction to Islam's heritage of
cultural and spiritual devastation.
Belloc had first
travelled to Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea in 1895, as a man of
twenty-five; he later traveled widely in the Maghreb, largely in
foot, in 1905, as a man of thirty-five, having approached by
ship that Southern Mediterranean coast and appreciating at once
the beauty of the lateen sails and of their graceful sailing
ships. Even later, furthering the collection of material for his
histories and biographies, Belloc returned to the Baltic and to
Scandinavia just before the devastation of World War II. He was
then a man of sixty-eight; it was in 1938. He was soon to lose
another son in World War II, an added sorrow to his capacious
and vivid heart.
On the premise
that “context establishes and preserves meaning,” we should
further consider the spiritual context of “The Missioner” and
the Maghreb book. For, in the same year in which Belloc had
published another book, An Open Letter on the Decay of Faith
(1906), he wrote with characteristic magnanimity the following
about the permeating and abiding effects of the faithful
followers of Islam itself, as well as and the cultural fruits of
“the God of the Mohammedans,” specifically as they were to be
seen in the monuments and society of North Africa at that time:
Against this vast
permanent and rooted influence we [i.e., modern
attenuated Christians] have nothing to offer. Our designs of
material benefit or of positive enlightenment are to the
presence of this common creed as is some human machine to
the sea. We can pass through it, but we cannot occupy it. It
spreads out before our advance, it closes up behind. Nor will
our work be accomplished until we have recovered, perhaps
through disasters suffered in our European homes, the full
tradition of our philosophy and a faith which shall permeate
all our actions as completely as does this faith of theirs.
Such is the
honesty and magnanimity of Belloc, even towards what he regards
as a false religion. And we shall also see the same magnanimity
in his essay on the Pagan Pirates, “The Missioner.”
With further
reference to the then-recent European return to North Africa,
especially as a Colonial Power, but with a woefully attenuated
Faith, Belloc says:
That no religion
brought by us stands active against their own [Islamic faith] is
an apparent weakness in the reconquest [i.e., “the
reconquest of Barbary”], but that consequence of the long
indifference through which Europe has passed is not the only
impediment it has produced. The dissolution of the principal
bond between Europeans – the bond of their traditional ritual
and confession [i.e., the Mass and the Catholic Faith] –
has also prevented the occupation of Africa from being, as it
should have been, a united and therefore an orderly campaign of
the West to recover its own.
Within the
following decade, World War I was to add to these dissolutions
and further impede the Christian recovery.
On this
centenary of these magnanimous and farsighted missionary
reflections from Esto Perpetua, which are only a
foretaste, let us now consider more closely Belloc's other
religious writings of that time, especially his essay on Viking
Scandinavia and, in contrast to Islam, Norway's own quiet
reception of the then-spreading Christian Faith. We shall
thereby better understand why the much-beloved G.K. Chesterton
himself so deeply cherished Hilaire Belloc, whom he first
memorably met in 1900, only five years after Belloc's trip to
Scandinavia and five years before his roving adventure in North
Africa:
When I first met
Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was
in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more
uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He
talked into the night, and left behind a glowing track of
good things. When I have said that I mean things that are
good, and certainly not mere 'bons mots,' I have said
all that can be said in the most serious aspect about the man
who has made the greatest fight for good things of all men of my
time.
The magnanimous
and gratefully humble Chesterton continues his description of
that unforgettable occasion on which he and Belloc first met:
We met between a
little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant; his arms
and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French
Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which
are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin ....
The little restaurant to which we went had already become a
haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable
views about the South African War [i.e., in opposition to
the British imperial war against the Boers], which was then in
its earliest prestige....
What he brought into
our dream was this Roman appetite for reality and
reason for action, and when he came into the door there
entered with him the smell of danger.
Hilaire Belloc
is, moreover, the only man who has a chapter specifically
dedicated to him, by name, in G.K. Chesterton's own posthumously
published Autobiography. G.K. Chesterton, like Father
McNabb himself, owed so much to Hilaire Belloc.
Five years after
Chesterton and Belloc first met, Belloc was off again sailing to
the North African coast with his “Roman appetite for reality”
and vivid savor of life, during which interval he had also
written “The Missioner,” that imaginative presentation of
the coming of the Faith to a northern frontier of Europe.
After first
meeting Belloc, Chesterton – who was not yet a Catholic (not
until 1922) – probably read his friend's essay, “The Missioner,”
which was first published some time shortly before 1909, the
year when it was presented again to the public in one of
Belloc's fine collections of short essays.
We may well imagine how the heart of Chesterton was touched by
this poetic prose depiction of the slow fruitfulness of the
Faith, as it quietly came to the culture of the Nordic north and
was received by a few ready hearts.
On this
centenary of Esto Perpetua, therefore, it is fitting to
savor a little of this contemporary and preparatory and
religious essay of Belloc's. For it is a truly exquisite one,
marked by reverence, a sense of high mystery, and a feel (and
longing) for human companionship. In “The Missioner,” we may
also see Belloc's pietas, which is itself, properly
understood, a reverent respect for roots. Such a pietas
will prepare us more fully to receive the depths of Esto
Perpetua.
It is important
for us first to note that the narrator – or “the narrative
persona” – of “The Missioner” is not himself in any obvious way
a Roman Catholic, a fact which gives the essay more poignancy
and resonance. The narrator is, rather, a reverent and
dispassionate describer of the quiet coming of an Alien Faith to
the cold northern lands; coming up out of what he calls “the
vineyard lands” and slowly and softly arriving up there amidst
the pagan and polytheist Scandinavians. These Scandinavians,
moreover, dwell “in the fjord lands” and near the open sea; and
they are also called “pirate fishermen” who in certain seasons
“go a-viking” along the Breton Coast to the South, and among the
Roman lands of the Franks.
With his sense
of the sea and a certain epic (or Christian-Homeric) spirit,
Belloc introduces us to the rich resources of the English
language. In his hands, the narrative language deftly combines
sacred mystery and concrete, sensible intimacy in a kind of
“sacramental prose.” It subtly manifests what Chesterton
himself, already in 1917, called “a mystical materialism” as an
abiding mark of the Faith:
A mystical materialism
marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a
body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations
which were its first foes [as in the Heresy of Docetism] it
fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to
cure concrete maladies by concrete substances. Hence the
scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of seed.
All who took their mission from the divine tragedy [i.e.,
the Crucifixion of the Incarnate God] bore tangible fragments
which became the germs of churches and cities.
In “The
Missioner,” too, we may appreciate in a concentrated way this
amplitude and this humble intimacy, in combination. Through
Belloc's modulated words we may come to know the rooted heart of
this good and vivid-souled man of faithful memory, and a man of
enlarging vision whom G.K. Chesterton so deeply and gratefully
cherished as a friend and healing guide.
From the very
outset of “The Missioner,” Hilaire Belloc's sympathetic narrator
frames a scene of hospitality and an atmosphere of warmth and
human companionship:
In one of those great
halls which the winter darkens and which are proper to the
North, there sat a group of men, kindly and full of the winter
night and of their food and drink, upon which for many hours
they had regaled together, and not only full of song, but
satiated with it, so long and so loudly had they sung.
To savor his
prose rhythms, we should read Belloc's sonorous words aloud!
After first
noting their epic boasting – “They all claimed descent from the
Gods, but in various degrees” (261) – and then how “a large fire
smouldered” and “sent up so strong a shaft of rising air as drew
all smoke with it ... whence it could escape to heaven” (261),
Belloc resumes his inviting, and introductory theme of
companionship and festive communion:
I say they were tired
of song and filled with many good things, but chiefly
with companionship. They had landed but recently from the
sea [these Scandinavian pirates!]; the noise of the sea was in
their ears as they so sat round the fire, still talking low, and
a Priest who was among them refused to interpret the sound; but
he said in a manner that some mocked doubtfully, others heard
with awe, that the sea never sounded save upon nights when
the Gods were abroad.
This pagan
priest, we soon discover, was “the priest of a lesser God, but
he was known throughout the fleet of those pirate fishermen
for his great skill in the interpretation of dreams.”
Moreover, “he could tell by the surface of the water in the
nightless midsummer where the shoals were to be
found.”
Building up this
intimate atmosphere and reverent mood, Belloc continues with an
incremental repetition:
He [the Priest] said
that on that night the Gods were abroad, and indeed, the
quality of the wind [like the varied ways of the Holy Ghost]
as it came down the gulf of the fjord provoked such a
fancy, for it rose and fell as though by a volition ...
and ... like a voice ... the wind pitied or appealed or called.
Then a man who was a serf, but very skilled in woodwork,
lying among the serfs in the outer ring beyond the fire
in the straw, called up and said: “Lords, he is right; the Gods
have come down from the Dovrefield; they are abroad. Let us
bless our doors.”
And there
immediately follows something unexpected, as with the coming of
Grace or with the coming of a new friend, who is himself an
external channel of grace coming to us in our need:
It was when he had so
spoken that upon the main gate of that Hall ... came a little
knocking. It was a little tapping like the tapping of a bird. It
sang musically of metal and of hollow metal; it moved
them curiously, and a very young man who was of the blood
said to his father: “Perhaps a God would warn us.”
By way of
further subtle characterization of this group of “pirate
fishermen” and especially of the young ones among them, Belloc
continues with another memorable sketch:
The keeper of the door
was a huge and kindly man, foolish but good for
lifting, with whom by daylight children played, and
who upon such evenings lay silent and contented enough to hear
his wittier fellows. This serf rose from the straw and went to
unbar [the huge door “a large double engine of foot-thick pine
swung upon hinges wrought many generations ago by the
sons of the Gods”]. But the Chief put his hand forward, and bade
him stay that they might still hear that little tapping. Then he
lowered his hand and the gate was swung open.
A guest has
suddenly arrived:
Cold came with it for
a moment, and the night air; light, and as though
blown before that draught, drifted into the hall a
tall man, very young [the Missioner], who bowed to them with a
gesture they did not know [probably a sign of the
Cross!], and first asked in a tongue [Latin!] they could not
tell, whether any man might interpret for him.
By way of
confirmation of the guest's sacred gesture and language, Belloc
presents another vivid nuance:
Then one old man who
was their pilot [of those Viking boats] and who had often run
down into the vineyard lands, sometimes for barter,
sometimes for war, always for a wage, said two or three words in
that new tongue, hesitatingly. His face was wrinkled and
hard; he had very bright but very pale grey eyes that
were full of humility. He said three words of greeting which
he had painfully learned twenty years ago, from
a priest upon the rocks of Brittany, who had also given him
smooth stones wherewith to pray; and with these smooth
stones the old Pilot continually prayed sometimes to the greater
and sometimes to the lesser Gods. His wife had died during the
first war ...; he had come home to find her dead and
sanctified, and being Northern, he had since been also
a silent man. This Pilot, I say, quoted the [Latin] words of
greeting in the strange tongue.
“The old Pilot”
thus welcomes the guest with humility, almost like a Benedictine
Monk, whose ethos of hospitality is “Hospes venit, Christus
venit!” When a guest comes, it should be as if it were
Christ Himself coming!
By way of
further confirmation of the nature of his sacred gesture,
Then the tall young
stranger man advanced into the circle of the firelight and made
a sign upon his head and his breast and his shoulders .... When
he had done this, the Pilot attempted that same sign; but failed
at it, for it was many years since he had been taught it upon
the Breton coast. He knew it to be magical and beneficient, and
he was ashamed to fail.
Before the
fuller welcome of hospitality, the leader of that group of men
needed further discernment:
The Chief of those who
were descended from the Gods and were seated around the fire,
turned to the Priest and said: “Is this a guest; a stranger
sent [Latin, missus], or is he a man come as an enemy
who should be led out again into the night? Have you any
divination?”
Since the pagan
Priest at once admitted his inability to render divination or
any further discernment, the Chief resorted to the old Pilot
himself with his “bright ... eyes that were full of humility”:
He asked the Pilot,
not as a man possessing divine knowledge, but as one who had
travelled and knew the sea, whether he knew this Stranger and
whence he came. To which that Pilot answered: “Captain, I do not
know this young man nor whence he comes, nor any of his tribe,
nor have I seen any like him save once three slaves [like those
three Angles seen by Pope Gregory the Great] who stood in a
market-place of the Romans .... Then these three slaves were
loosened, and they came to the house of the Priest of the Gods
of that country, and they told me the name of the people whence
they sprang. But I have forgotten it. Only I know that it is
among the vineyard lands.”
The old Pilot,
moreover, was himself trustful and openly receptive to this
guest who likely came also from “the vineyard lands”:
I believe this
Stranger to be a man like ourselves, born of a woman, and coming
northward upon some purpose which we do not know. It may be for
merchandise, or it may be for the love of singing and of telling
stories to men.”
Indeed, those
pirate fishermen “saw that he had with him a little intrument
that was not known to them, for it was a flute of metal” and
“with this had he summoned at the gate.”
The pagan
rituals of welcome and gracious hospitality then began:
The Chief then brought
out with his own hands a carven chair, on which he seated the
Stranger, and he put into his right hand a gold cup taken from
the Romans in a city of the Franks, upon which was faintly
carved a cross, and round the rim of which were four precious
stones, an emerald, a ruby, an amethyst, and a diamond; and
going to a skin which he had taken in a Gascon raid, he poured
out wine into that chalice and went down upon one knee as is
proper to strangers when they are to be entertained, and put a
cloth over his arms and bade him drink. But when the young man
saw the cross faintly carved upon the cup and the four precious
stones at the corners of it, he shuddered a little and put it
aside as though it were a sacred thing, at which they all
marvelled. Yet he longed for wine.
With deference
and reverence of bearing and gesture, and with winsome tact, the
Scandinavians respond to their young guest and respect at once
his sense of the sacred:
And they,
understanding that in some way this ornament was sacred to his
Gods, gently took it from him and through courtesy put it aside
upon a separate place which was reserved for honourable vessels,
and poured him other wine into a wooden stoop; and this he
drank, holding out now to one and now to another, but last and
chiefly to their Captain; and as he drank it he drank it with
signs of amity.
In gratitude
“for so much kindness he took his silver flute and blew upon it
shrill notes,” and they were, indeed,
all very sweet, and
the sweeter for their choice and distance one [note] from
another, until they listened, listening every man with those
beside him like one man, for they had never heard such a sound.
Implicitly, it
is as if the “faith that comes from hearing” – “Fides ex
auditu” in Saint Paul's own words – comes to them, now
through hearing the beauty of music, which produced in them a
sort of unity of hearts amidst their diverse responses to grace;
it is as if the music is a channel of actual grace, a prevenient
grace, as it were:
And as he played one
man saw one thing in his mind and one another thing; for one man
saw the long and easy summer seas that roll after a prosperous
boat filled with spoil, whether of fishes or of booty, when the
square sail is taken aft by a warm wind in the summer season,
and the high mountains of home first show beyond the line of the
sea. And another man saw a little valley, narrow, with deep
pasture, wherein he had been bred and had learned to plow the
land with horses before ever he had come to the handling of a
tiller or the bursting of water upon the bows. And another saw
no distinct and certain thing, but vague and pleasurable hopes
fulfilled, and the advent of a great peace and another saw those
heights of the hills to which he ever desired to return.
Who will not
think of Homer when reading such lines of vision and benediction
and repose; and who will not fittingly consider the rooted and
vivid-souled Belloc himself to be a worthy Christian successor
of Homer, especially in such lines of poetic prose? And we feel
it, too, in those following lines which draw us once again back
to “the old Pilot”:
But the old Pilot,
straining with wonder in his eyes as the music rose, thought
confusedly of all he had seen and known [like Odysseus' own old
companion, “Sea Reach,” as he was affectionately named]; of the
twirling tides upon the Breton coast and of the great stone
towns, of the bright vestments of the ordered armies in the
market-places and of the vineyard lands.
The Missioner's
pagan hosts were so joyful that “they begged him play again,”
for they wanted to hear once more this young Stranger-Man of
Vision who could evoke such a Healing of the Memory:
The second time he
played all these men heard one thing: which was a dance of young
men and women together in some country where there was little
fear .... This time they were so pleased that they waited a
little before they would applaud, but the old Pilot, remembering
more strongly than ever the vineyard land, moved his right hand
back and forward with delight as in some way he would play music
with it, and thus by a communication of heart to heart stirred
in that Stranger a new song.
With an
answering heart, he graciously proceeded:
And taking up his
flute for a third time he blew upon it a different strain, at
which some were confused, others happy in their hearts, though
they could not have told you why, but the old Pilot [the one
most responsive to this channel of grace] saw great and gracious
figures moving over a land subject to blessedness; he saw that
in the faces of these figures (which were those of the
Immortals) stood present at once a complete satisfaction and a
joyous energy and a solution of every ill.
It was if the
Old Pilot “with bright eyes that were full of humility” had had
a glimpse, a foretaste, of Beatitude. Together went the music
and the memory and the vision.
The Missioner's
northern hosts were so grateful for what “the Flute Player had
given them” that “they desired to keep him in their company, and
so they did for three full years. That is, the winter long, the
seed time, and the time of harvest; and the next harvest also,
and another harvest more.”
From his special
and intimately sacramental perspective, Belloc continues his
tale:
Now, his Gods were his
own, but he pined for the lack of their worship and for Priests
of his own sort, and when he would explain these in his own
manner some believed him, but some did not believe him.
Then, with more
explicit signs that the Flute Player is himself a Christian
Missioner, the evocative text continues:
And to those who
believed him he brought a man from the South, from beyond the
Dovrefield [in Norway], who baptised them with water: as for
those who would not have this they looked on, and kept to their
own decree: but there was as yet no division among them.
“As yet,” but it
would come – as is always to be expected from the Challenge of
the Faith. Shortly after the third harvest, even though he had
“learned their tongue,” the Missioner was ready to return:
Hearing that the
fleet, which was of twelve boats, would make for Roman land, he
begged to go with it, for he was sick for his own, but first he
made them take an oath that they would molest none, nor even
barter with any, until they landed him in his own land. The
Chief took the oath for them, and though his oath was worth the
oath of twelve men, twelve other men swore with him. In this way
the oath was done.
Like Odysseus
yearning to return home, the Missioner was also filled with such
a “nostalgia” (in its full and etymological sense). That is to
say, in him there was a painful yearning to return home.
So they took the Flute
Player for three days over the sea before the wind called Eager,
which is the north-east wind, and blows at the beginning of the
open season; they took him at the beginning of the fourth year
since his coming among them, and they landed him in a little
boat in a seaport of the Franks, on Roman land ....
After that
sudden ellipsis in the text, there also came a sudden
transition, and an unexpected conclusion, which is evocative of
Christ's own Parable of the Sower:
The Faith went over
the world as very light seed goes upon the wind, and no one
knows the drift on which it blew; it came to one place and
another, to each in a different way [like the music and the
varied memories and visions it had educed]. It came not to many
men, but always to one heart, till all men had hold of it.
The cultivated
soul is likened to the cultivated soil. The good soil, as well
as the humble soul (like “the old Pilot” with “eyes that were
full of humility”) received the seed and it was fruitful, both
in nature and in grace.
Until the last
paragraph of “The Missioner,” the narrator had appeared to be
himself a reverent pagan polytheist from the Northern Lands, and
one who respects the sincere pieties of others, and epecially
the pietas of those who came from the vineyard lands of
the Roman Christian Civilization.
After savoring
the text of “The Missioner,” who could forget Belloc's own sense
of reverence and rootedness and the challenge of the Faith? And
a gracious foretaste of plenitude!
Part II – Belloc's Longer Essay on the
Coming and the Loss of the Faith
in the Southern Lands of the Maghreb
Thus it was back
in 1906, now a full century ago – and less than a decade before
the carnage of World War I – when Hilaire Belloc himself was
only thirty-five years of age and still a vigorous traveller,
that he roamed to the southern Frontier of Roman Christian
Civilization; travelling through northwest Africa from the
Mediterranean Coast to the edge of the Sahara Desert, traversing
the plateaus and heights of the Atlas Mountains, where he sought
and saw vivid and elegiac signs of a vanished Roman civilization
and also signs of its continuities and its poignant expressions
of permanence, despite the Mohammedan devastations and neglect.
In 1906, our
Belloc published Esto Perpetua as a commemoration of
those travels of 1905, which included his reflections upon Rome
and its civilization, both pagan and Christian – and its abiding
and still-nourishing deep-rootedness. His Latin title expressed
a soft imperative, as it were, and also a yearning: “Be
Perpetual!” – be permanent and abiding, O Roma; and be still
rooted both in our soil and in our soul. Remain forever – and
nourish us still.
His book, though
usually subtitled “Algerian Studies and Impressions,” is so much
more than that. Modestly claiming to be but a brief historical
essay, it is a discerning reflection on the coming and passing
continuities of various civilizations, especially those that
permeated that section of northern Africa called the Maghreb –
where Saint Cyprian of Carthage and Saint Augustine of Hippo
both memorably dwelt during their influential passage through
this world.
Speaking of a
special part of the Maghreb, namely “that belt of coast upon
which the Atlas [Mountain range] descends” to the Mediterranean,
which is called “the Tell” – “a territory of great luxuriance”
–Belloc says the following concerning these parts and their
historical cities:
Their earth is black,
deep, and fertile: inviting the plough. Such fields fed Utica,
Icosium and Hippo Regius and Caesarea. They remained wild and
abandoned for over a thousand years [after the seventh-century
coming of Islam and its ruinous long-lasting conquest], but
to-day you may see miles of vineyards planted in rows that run
converging to the limits of the plain, where, until the last
generation, no one had dug or pruned or gathered or pressed
since the Latin language was forgotten in these lands. Indeed,
it would be possible for a fantastic [i.e., a romantic
and an imaginative visionary] man to see in this replanting of
the vine a symbol of the joy of Europe returning; for everywhere
the people of the desert have had a fear of wine, and their
powerful legends have affected us also in the north for a time.
But the vine is in Africa again. It will not soon be uprooted.
Such plains, then,
their rivers and their adjacent seaport towns, make up the Tell,
in which the Romans nourished many millions and in which the
most part of the reconstituted province[in 1906, and especially
by the French] will at last build its homes.
By such a bay and
entering such a harbour [very near to where Saint Augustine
lived and taught], whoever comes to Africa reaches land.
Indeed, Belloc
immediately adds:
It is perhaps at Bone,
which stands to half a mile where Hippo stood, that the best
introduction to Africa is offered. Here a mountain of
conspicuous height rules an open roadstead full of shipping
small and large, and fenced round with houses for very many
miles. A far promontory on the eastern side [of that bay] faces
the western mountain, and half protects the harbour from summer
gales. Below the mountain, the plain belonging to this bay
stretches in a large half-circle, marked only here and there
with buildings but planted everywhere with olives, vines
and corn. In the midst of this great flat stands
up a little isolated hill, a sort of acropolis,
and from its summit, from a window of his monastery there,
Saint Augustine, looking at that sea, wrote UBI MAGNITUDO,
IBI VERITAS.
And what a
missionary was Saint Augustine, and with such a capacity for
friendship!
With his
poignant sense of loss, while reflecting with sobriety and
lucidity on the devastation of Saint Augustine's Hippo, Belloc
says:
The town is utterly
gone .... Here was a great town of the Empire. It detained the
host of Vandals, slaves and nomads for a year. It was the seat
of the most famous bishopric of its day, and within its walls,
while the siege still endured, Saint Augustine died [in 430 AD].
It [Hippo] counted more than Palermo or Genoa: almost as much as
Narbonne. It has completely disappeared. There are not a few
bricks scattered, nor a line of Roman tiles built into a wall.
There is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing once disturbed a few
fragments of mosaic, but that is all: they can make a better
show [of Roman remnants] at Bignor in the Sussex weald [of South
England, Belloc's rooted home], where an unlucky company officer
[a Centurion of the Roman Legions] shivered out his time of
service with perhaps a hundred men.
Such is Belloc's
reverence and persistent sense of vanished or remnant Roman
civilization, especially under the devastation and neglect of
Islam.
In the
Introduction to his book, Belloc found himself “in a village
that overlooked the Mediterranean” on its northern shore, and
saw a craftsman shaping and fitting two contrasting emblems for
separate human dwellings “over-sea” to the south; “it was
spring-time, and he was singing.”
The one symbolic emblem which he crafted was a Cross, the second
was a Crescent. Further pondering this striking
contradistinction, Belloc says:
The contrast moved me
to cross the sea, to understand the land upon the further shore,
and to write upon Africa some such little historical essay as
follows.
In his little
book – containing many beautiful drawings by his own gifted hand
– he speaks of “the four changes of Barbary”
– the Phoenician and Punic history; the pagan Roman history; the
Christian Roman conversion and history; and the Mohammend
history and its long-abiding linguistic and religious culture of
some 1200 years.
The land Belloc
desired to understand, initially as a “traveller” and largely on
foot in Northwest Africa, is
that land, shut off
from all the rest between the desert and the sea, which the
Arabs call the Island of the West, the Maghreb, but which we in
Europe for many hundred years have given the name of Barbary.
Belloc was
especially drawn to the seacoast of the Maghreb and its little
bays and towns, that is,
to the shore that runs
... from Tunis and the Gulf of Carthage to Tangier; that was
snatched from Europe in one great cavalry charge twelve hundred
years ago .... The soul and the relief [i.e.,
topography] of the Maghreb, coupled with its story, have
made it peculiar and, as it were, a symbol of the adventures
of Europe.
Indeed, upon
“this great bastion of the Maghreb,” Europe – “our western race”
– “began its own life and entered its ceaseless struggle
against the East” and against this “Eastern Spirit,” this
Oriental “Influence” of Asia “in the states of Barbary.”
Further
clarifying the Maghreb's strategic geography, Belloc says: “It
is at the furthest limit from Asia; it is an opposing shore of
our inland sea; it links Sicily to Spain.”
As it seemed to
Belloc in 1905-1906, the Maghreb “is now at last again in the
grasp of Europe,” some long years after “it fell for the last
time when the Roman Empire declined,” and this still
precarious, recent “reconquest has been the latest fruit
of our recovery.”
Resisting the
easy and falsely fatalistic conclusion that the Maghreb has long
existed “as though it were by some right originally Oriental and
by some destiny certain to remain so,” Belloc saw in the recent
“reoccupation” the slowly fruitful return of Europe.
Even though he continuously thought that “our reoccupation seems
assured,” he also saw the very great challenge, because
during the many
centuries of our decline and slow resurrection, the
countries [of Barbary] were first cut off so suddenly and
so clean from Christendom, next steeped so long and so
thoroughly in an alien religion and habit of law [i.e.,
the Sharia and its Courts and Legal Scholars].
Belloc was
especially attentive to the permanent challenge of “the old
dominion of the East and of the religion that made them:
of the united civilization that has launched them over all its
seas, from east of India to south of Zanzibar and right out here
in the western place [i.e., the Maghreb] which we are
so painfully recovering.”
This lateen sail in its beauty – “the gift of Islam” – was for
Belloc also “evidence of their conquering energy,” when the
Arabs left their deserts and took to the sea.”
For, he adds,
With such a sail they
drove those first fleets of theirs which gave them at once the
islands and the commerce of the Mediterranean. It was the sail
which permitted their invasion of the northern shores and the
unhappy subjection of Spain.
A persistent
theme in Esto Perpetua is “why [and how, again and again]
Asia streched out towards it [i.e., the Mediterranean and
its harbours] in order to learn, and attempted (but
always failed) to absorb it.”
For, Belloc says: “it is easy to see how this great surrounded
water nourished the seeds of our [European]
civilization: why all the influences we enjoy here in the
north came upwards to us from its harbours.”
“At one point
things alien to us” – i.e., alien to “Europe, which
is ourselves” – “impinge upon this sea,”, that is, the
Mediterranean.
These alien things, “alive with the essence of the Asiatic
spirit: with the subtlety, the yielding and the
avarice of the Phoenician cities,” were to be seen and felt
not only along “the long Levantine coast” and “the delta of the
Nile from which Egypt looked but jealously against rivals whom
she despised or ignored;” but also later in the Maghreb itself,
especially in the commercial and maritime city of Carthage.
Indeed,
the first attack which
Europe was to suffer came not from the sands [like the later
Mohammedans], but from its own sea, and the first conquerors of
the Maghreb were the Phoenicians.
As was the case
with later manifestations of “the Asiatic Spirit,” so, too, here
with the Phoenicians:
This people were
Orientals ...; but they had, as it were, specialised upon one
notable character of their race, which is to accumulate
wealth by negotiation, and to avoid [especially in
their governing Plutocracy] as far as may be the labour of
production. To no other family of men has toil appeared
to be a curse save to that of which the Phoenicians were
members; nor are fatigues tolerable to that family save those
endured in acquiring the possessions of others and in levying
that toll which cunning can always gather from mere industry.
Furthermore,
after these Asiatics developed “travel by sea,” it “became for
many centuries their monopoly and gave them the carrying [i.e.,
trade and seaborne freight] of the world and the arbitrament
of its exchanges” and when they pushed into remote areas
they were “passionate especially for metals, but carefully
[i.e., cunningly] arranging that there should arise
between the nations whom they exploited or served no such direct
bond as would exclude their own mediation.”
That is to say,
they wanted to be – and strategically manipulated to become –
the indispensable intermediaries! (As in Belloc's
charming later satire, The Mercy of Allah (1922), here,
too, one is to think of other Semitic peoples and their own
contemptuous ways and means of dealing with “the nations,”
especially so as to accumulate “the wealth of nations”!)
With greater
explicitness and emphasis, our Belloc later says:
There was something in
the temper of Asia that was intolerable to the
western people. They saw it always ready to give way and then
to turn and strike [like a serpent]. They detested its
jealous and unhappy rites. Its face was hateful and seemed
dangerous to them. The two great struggles, at the close of
which Rome [i.e., the pagan Roman civilization] destroyed
as one destroys a viper, were conducted against members of the
same family, Carthage and Jerusalem [in the three Punic Wars and
in the 70 AD Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple,
respectively].
In the case of
Carthage, the “final act of Rome was accomplished within a
hundred and fifty years of the Nativity.”
It was only very near the beginning of the Christian era,
therefore, that
the Roman habit took
root in Africa, [and] a century more before the Maghreb was held
by any complete organisation. By the middle of the fifth century
the Vandals had come to ruin it [in the process of which, in 430
AD, Saint Augustine died within the besieged walls of Hippo].
There were, therefore, but little more than three hundred years
during which Rome was to bring up this land into the general
unity of Western Europe. There is no other portion of the
world Rome governed, not even Southern Gaul, where her genius is
more apparent. In that short interval of daylight – a
tenth of the known history of the Maghreb – Rome did more than
had Carthage in seven hundred years and more than was Islam to
do in seven hundred more.
The effects of
Islam, however, went deeper and were even longer lasting, for
Africa was finally
invaded, not by dull barbarians staring at the City [of Rome]
and humble before her name, but by a brilliant cavalcade
which galloped, driven forward by high convictions. The
Arabs came in the seventh century, like a sort of youth
contemptuous of the declining head of Rome. Barbary, then, I
repeat, was swept into the Arabian language and religion in one
cavalry charge [not from the sea, but this time out of the
desert], and that language and religion not only became
immediately the masters of its people, but had twelve hundred
years in which to take root and make a soil. For about five
hundred years, from a little after the birth of Our Lord to the
close of the sixth century our [Christian-Roman] culture had
been universal among the Berbers [nomadic horsemen like the
ancient ally of Scipio Africanus, Massinissa]. In the last three
centuries the Faith was dominant. But rebellion was in them
[still, as of old], and when the Arabs came the whole edifice
suddenly crumbled.
Once again, like
the encroachment of Islam today, we encounter Europe under
the challenge of Asia:
Asia, which had first
sailed in by sea [with the Phoenicians] and had been destroyed,
or rather obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the
desert; Asia was like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage,
and then, after a breathing-space, makes entry by another ....
The Maghreb our test of sovereignty [hence the protection
and control of our internal and external borders] had admitted
the Phoenician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been
thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came,
and did no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred
the final anarchy a little; they were at once absorbed. But
the tenacity by which Gaul, Britain, Spain and the Rhine
were to slough off the memories of decay and to attain to their
own civilisation again ... – that tenacity was not in the
nature of Barbary.
(And, Belloc
accentuates, “Let it be noted that in Africa every heresy arose.
That Africa admitted the Vandals by treason, and even when
Africa accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided its history.”)
As in the
earlier experience of these Numidian horsemen with Pagan Rome
before the Mohammedans came:
The Berbers were not
destined to preserve their Roman dignity. Something barbaric in
them, something of the boundaries, of the marches, planted
in these men ... a genius for revolt.
Then, “in the
seventh and eighth centuries, when all the remainder of the west
had fallen, ... this southern shore of the Mediterranean was
overwhelmed, and, what is more, persuaded” by Islam.
The roots of their Faith, perhaps, were too shallow. And bereft
of its “living waters.”
The Berber
“horsemen of Numidia” could more easily mix with and understand
the ways of the Arab, in whose “ornaments the half-tamed
tribesmen recognised an old appetite for splendour”; and the
Bedawin-Arab “invaders themselves were nomads, and even on the
shore of the Maghreb, where men had abandoned the nomadic habit
[unlike in “that nomadic part ... [which was] thickest towards
the desert from which the invasion came”], the instinct of
roving still lingered.”
Even on the coast!
Resorting again
to the images and metaphors of “soil” and “implantation” and
“rootedness,” Belloc says:
Islam, therefore, when
it first came in, tore up [i.e., extirpated] what
Rome had planted as one tears up a European shrub planted
in the friable soil of Africa. The Bedawin, as they rode,
bore with them a violent and simple creed. And here, again, a
metaphor drawn from the rare vegetation of this province can
alone define the character of their arrival. Their
[Islamic] Faith was like some plant out of the solitude;
it was hard in surface; it was simple in form; it
was fitted rather to endure than to grow. It was
consonant with the waterless horizons and blinding rocks from
which it had sprung.
With respect to
this immediate conquest and victory of the Mohammedans in the
Maghreb, Belloc makes a trenchant a fortiori argument:
It was only here,
in Africa [as distinct from their incursions “in Syria and in
Asia [i.e., Asia Minor] and in Spain”], that their
victory was complete. Therefore it is only here, in
Africa, that you see what such a victory meant, and
how, when it was final, all power of creation disappeared.
More
specifically and as a vivid example, he shows what the culture
of Islam did in the destruction of trees and, generally, in “the
fall of the woods”:
Here Islam worked
itself out fully: its ignorance of consequence, its absolute and
insufficient assertion, its lack of harmony with the process and
modulation of time, its Arabian origin, are all apparent in the
destruction of trees. If the rainfall is as abundant as ever,
it is not held, for the roots of the trees are lacking,
and if it be true that trees in summer bring rain of themselves
by their leaves, then that benefit is also gone .... Here ...
where now are stretches of ugly earth quite bare, the
legionaries [of Rome] saw meadows. At any rate the trees have
gone.
And the Faith
was not held in the heart, either, when the test came.
Insufficient rootedness there was for the seeds of the Faith.
Later, Belloc
adds these poignant words; as he “went on through the night
towards Timgad” keeping in mind “the sharp and recent memory of
the [Roman] ruins of Lamboesis”:
The Romans had once
thoroughly possessed and tilled this land: the scrub had once
been forests, the shifting soil ordered and bounded
fields; but the Mohammedan sterility had sunk in so deeply
that one could not believe that our people had ever been
here.
With these
considerations in his heart, all else, even
those ruins of
Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe came back into my
mind. The full rivers and the fields which are to us a
natural landscape are but a made garden and are due to
continuous tradition, and I wondered whether, if that
tradition were finally lost, our sons would come to see, in
England as I saw here in the night of Africa, vague
little hills without trees and drifts of mould and sand
through which the rain-bursts would dig deep channels
at random.
All culture, not
just agriculture, requires discipline and cultivation and
attentiveness. Like the Faith itself, cultus always
produces and fosters cultura.
As an instance
of the warm humor as well as the more personal irony which
pervades Esto Perpetua, we may consider just one of the
early twentieth-century attempts at “French Afforestation” and
the barriers which the tenacious French were to encounter:
This lack of trees the
French very laboriously attempt to correct. Their chief obstacle
is the nature of that religion which is also the hard
barrier raised against every other European thing which may
attempt to influence Africa to-day. There was a new grove
planted some ten years since in a chosen place. It was
surrounded with a wall [i.e., a protective wall], and the
little trees were chosen delicately and brought at a great
price, and planted by men particularly skilled. Also,
there was an edict posted up in those wilds (it was
within fifty miles of the [Sahara] desert, just on the hither
side of the Atlas [mountains]) saying that a grove had been
planted in such and such a place and that no one was to hurt
the trees, under dreadful penalties. The French also ...
gave a reason for what they did, pointing out that trees had
such and such an effect on the climate – the whole in plain
clear terms and printed in the Arabic script. There was,
however, a Mohammedan who, on reading this, immediately saw in
it an advertisement of wealth and pasture. He drove his
goats for nearly fifteen miles, camped outside the wall
and next day lifted each animal carefully one by one into
the enclosure that they might browse upon the tender shoots
of the young trees. “Better,” he thought, “that my goats
should fatten than the mad Christians should enjoy this tree-fad
of theirs which is of no advantage to God or man.” When his last
goat was over two rangers came, and, in extreme anger,
brought him before the magistrate, where he was asked what
reason he could give for the wrong thing he had done. He
answered, “R'aho, it was the will of God. Mektoub,
it was written” or words to that effect.
In
contradistinction to this narrative of shortsightesness and
religious determinism, Hilaire Belloc, as in “The Missioner,”
leads us once again to a sacramental sense of life – that sense
of the vivid combination of the spiritual with the material. In
this case, he speaks of the geographical and artistic setting of
a former Roman municipality and its outdoor theater:
In the heart of the
Tell, behind the mountains which hide the sea, yet right in the
storms of the sea [blowing up the valleys], in its clouds and
weather stands a little town which was called Calama in the
Roman time and is now, since the Arabs, called Guelma.
Moreover, Calama
(Guelma) is at “the centre of that belt of hills” near the
beautiful seacoast of the Mediterranean Sea, and is itself both
“a survival” and “a promise”:
A broad valley, one of
the hundreds which build up the complicated pattern of the
Mediterranean slope, lies before the platform upon which
the [old Roman] fortress rose. A muddy river nourishes it, and
all the plain is covered with the new farms and vineyards
– beyond them the summits and shoulders [of the mountains] that
make a tumbled landscape everywhere along the northern
shores of Africa guard the place whichever way one turns.
From the end of every street one sees a mountain.
If a man had but
one day in which to judge the nature of the [old Roman]
province, he could not do better than come to this town upon
some winter evening when it was already dark, and wake next
morning to see the hurrying sky and large grey hills lifting up
into that sky all around catching the riot of clouds. It is high
and cold: there is a spread of pasture in its fields and a
sense of Europe in the air .... Its site is a survival
from the good time when the Empire packed this soil with the
cities of which so great a number have disappeared: it
is also a promise of what the near future may produce,
a new harvest of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in
the refounding of such municipalities that the
tradition of Europe will work upon Africa and not in
barren adventure southward [to the Sahara Desert] towards
a sky which is unendurable to our race [i.e., to
our European culture] and under which we can never build
and can hardly govern.
Speaking then of
the rooted “permanence of Rome,” Belloc says:
Here [at Calama], as
throughout the Empire, the impression of Rome is as
indefinable as it is profound, but one can connect some part
of it with the magnitude of the stones [of the Roman
architecture] ... and with the double evidence of extreme
antiquitiy and extreme endurance ... so many
centuries visibly stamped upon the stone [of “the citadel”], and
able to evoke every effect of age but not to compel decay. This
nameless character which is the mark of the Empire [still
present in the Maghreb], and carries, as it were, a hint of
ressurection in it, is as strong in what has fallen as in
what stands.
And, what is
more,
Nor
do any of these fragments suggest the passing of an
irrecoverable good, but rather its continued victory.
To see so many witnesses small and great is not to
remember a past or lost excellence, but to become part of it
and to be conscious of Rome all about one to-day. It is
a surety for the future to see such things .... where
this perpetuity and this escape from Time refresh the
traveller with peculiar power.
But, on the
evidence to be seen in the Maghreb Province of 1905-1906, the
Mohammedan could not even make good use of the surviving Roman
fragments, since “the decay of Islam [like the earlier-mentioned
“sterility of Islam”] had left him aimless:”
He could not build or
design. He could not cut stone or mould brick. When he was
compelled to enclose his pasture [with old carved stones], the
only material he could use was the work of the old masters [the
carvers of the Roman stones] who had trained his fathers but
whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered only in the vague
name of “Roum” .... It is with a lively appreciation that one
notes how all he did is perishing or has perished. The poor
binding he [the Mohammedan peasant] put in has crumbled. The
slabs slope here and there. But the edges of those
[Roman] stones, which are twenty times older than his effort,
remain. They [the peasant's fence of carved Roman stones]
will fall again and lie where he found them; but they and the
[Roman] power that cut them are alike imperishable.
Indeed, says
Belloc:
There is one great
note in the story of our race which the least learned man can at
once appreciate with keen eyes looking everywhere for antiquity
.... That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries [of
our Christian era].
As Saint
Augustine had said: “Ubi magnitudo, ibi veritas”!
And, like
Augustine himself, Belloc has those “keen eyes” so attentive to
the beauty of form and to the splendor of order.
Preparing us to
consider more closely the fuller setting and the manifold
aids to the senses to be found at the site of the Old Roman
theater of Calama, Belloc first deals with the matter of
landscape, in general:
It has been said that
men of antiquity had no regard for landscape, and that those
principal poems [like those of Homer and Vergil] upon which all
letters repose betray indifference to horizons and distant views
[as of the Alps]. The objection is ill-found, for even the
poems show through their admirable restraint the same
passion we feel for hills, and especially for the hills of
home [like the beloved hills of Belloc's Sussex]; they speak
also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an
Homeric man desired, as he journeyed [homeward to Ithaca to see
his wife, Penelope, and young son, Telemachas], to see far-off
the smoke rising from his own fields and after that to die. But
much stronger than anything their careful verse can give
us of the appetite for locality is the emplacement of their
buildings [such as the outdoor theater at Taormina to be
seen with joy on the eastern coast of Sicily!].
Like “the spirit
which built a certain temple into the scenery of a Sicilian
valley,” where all of the light and lines of the topography
converge and “the shrine becomes the centre of the picture, and,
as it were, of a composition;” so, too can we appreciate this
same spirit and form in Calama: “this antique consciousness
of terrestrial beauty.”
For, “upon an edge of the high town” of Guelma (Roman Calama),
“the site of the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal:”
The side of a hill was
chosen .... so that the people and the slaves upon the steps
could have a worthy background for their plays ....
Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the
half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of
the Tell stood always up behind the scene, and the
height not only of those summits but of the steps above the
plain [“down sharply ... below”], enhanced the words that
were presented. We have to-day no such aids to the senses.
We have no such alliance of the air and the clouds with
our drama .... The last centuries of the Empire had all these
things in common: great verse inherited from an older
time, good statuary, plentiful fountains, one
religion [Catholic Christianity], and the open sky.
Therefore its memory has outlasted all intervening time,
and it itself the [Christian] Empire (though this truth is as
yet but half-received), has re-arisen [with at least some
growing “hints of resurrection”].
Such is “the
presentness of the past.” Such is Belloc's memoria fidelis
– his memory faithful to the truth and goodness and beauty of
the past – the past which is still so intimately present to him,
and through him, to us lesser men.
Recalling the
magnitude of the first four centuries of the Christian era,
Belloc candidly acknowledges that
To establish the
character of the [Roman-Christian] Empire [i.e., in “the
process of its conversion”] and its creative mission is the less
easy from the prejudice that had so long existed against the
action of religion, and especially of that religion which
the Empire embraced as its cataclysm approached. The
acceptation of the creed [the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene
Creed] is associated in every mind with the eclipse of
knowledge and with a contempt for the delights which every mind
now seeks. It [the Christian Creed] is often thought the
cause, always the companion, of decay, and so far has
this sentiment proceeded that in reading books upon Augustine or
upon Athanasius one might forget by what a sea and under what a
sunlight the vast revolution [of the Catholic Faith] was
effected .... The vague overwhelming and perhaps insoluble
problems which concern not a city but the whole world, the
discovery of human doom [i.e., judgment,
accountability, the final verdict of Truth] and of the nature
and destiny of the soul, these occupied such minds [such as
the Church Fathers, Doctors, and the Saints] as would in an
earlier time have bent themselves to simpler and more feasible
tasks than the search for finality .... The Empire at its
end, when it turned to the contemplation of eternity,
broadened much more than our moderns – who are enemies of
its religious theory – will admit. The business which
Rome undertook in her decline was so noble and upon so
great a scale that when it had succeeded, then, in spite of
other invasions, the continuity of Europe was saved .... These
first four centuries ... formed our final creed.
And these
intimate and differentiated Dogmas of the Faith are
ever-fruitful and permanent irreformable doctrines.
In his Chrismas
1923 letter of encouragement to Monsignor Ronald Knox, Hilaire
Belloc very self-revealingly wrote the following personal words:
A chief function [or
indispensable mission for us of the Faith], most admirable, was
the bearing of witness .... Those who bear witness do so
at a vast and enduring cost. It is an act of unique value and of
proportionate excellence and pain. It [i.e., bearing
witness to the truth and the Faith of the Church] is of the
heroic and receives reward in a different character from all
other, and carefully hidden from their recipients till their day
comes. For it is in the nature of such witnessing that it looks
into the dark and is burdened. I respect [it], I would,
if I could, follow it, more than any other
action of men. This act is a confirmation of the
Faith in others and in all, at the expense of one's
own self. It is the most real, enduring, and endless of the
sacrifices. It is militant, expects nothing, and is paid at last
in coin corresponding to its permanence of effect and
magnitude of service .... Once a man begins to bear witness
to the Faith he is bound to a task ... and he is bound to the
abominable absence of human sustenance by applause, by
recognition, by the support of a native air [as in the
case of “The Missioner”]. I believe that those early ones whom
we call today the Martyrs, the witnesses, were lonely enough and
exhausted at the end; for they gave all they had, all any man
has, which is home.
The last words
of Our Lord to us, just before His Ascension, were: “you shall
be my witnesses [Latin testes; Greek martyres]
... even to the very ends of the earth” (Acts of the Apostles
1:8).
Bearing further
witness to the Faith himself, Belloc leads us to another inland
town slightly to the south of ancient Calama, the fortified
remnant Roman town of Constantine perched high on “the Rock of
Cirta,” upon which is to be found the ancient “centre round
which nature and history have grouped the four changes of
Barbary.”
At the foot of the Rock of Cirta's several long precipices, and
through a steep gorge, there runs a stream called “Runnel.” This
town is located far into “the Tableland,” or the high plateau
between the Great Atlas and the Little Atlas (the latter range
of mountains being closer to the sea, to the north):
It is this stream
which has made on the Rock of Cirta ... a habitable fortress and
a town; the town called Constantine.
Moreover, “the
name Cirta given it by these horsemen of Numidia” long ago “was
the name of their universal mother,”
whom they honored in this very special location:
Such sites are very
rare. Luxemburg is one, a stronghold cut off by similar
precipitous valleys. Jerusalem is another. Wherever they are
found the origin of their fortress goes back beyond the
beginning of history, they are tribal and their record is
principally of war. So it is with Cirta .... Permanence and
continuity are to be discovered here only among the cities
of Africa [in the Maghreb]; and its landscape and
character of themselves impress the traveller with a
certitude that here [in Constantine] will be planted
on into time the capital of the native blood: too far removed
from the sea for colonisation or piracy to destroy it: too well
cut off by those trenches of defense to be sacked and overrun:
too peopled and well watered to decay.
Then Belloc will have us better feel the
“full history of the town”
and to consider what has been lost or destroyed, and, more
importantly, what of the human spirit has been preserved. We
shall come to see a certain continuity of the human spirit and
the yearnings of the human heart which are memorably expressed
in Latin on the epitaphs still to be found there, even after the
iconoclastic fury of the Moslems. “Ingemuerunt Dryades”
said one inscription, written “in memory of a priestess of Isis
who was so gracious and who so [well and so fully] served the
divinities of the woods” that, when she died, the Dryads
themselves wept and mourned.In such a context, even two words could so touch the
heart of Belloc.
In this Roman
town, Belloc also notes a certain “presence of absence,” the
absence of the full culture of the Faith. For, says he and with
poignancy, that it came to pass that “The manifold aspect
of the Divine was forgotten: there were no shrines nor priests
to rear them.”
Nonetheless, he
adds, “from the beginning of the Italian [Pagan] influence till
the time of the [Christian] martyrs” one could still perceive
there in “the record of the epitaphs” that self-revealing “slow
change of the mind,” namely “that sort of content which
the acceptation of the Creed was to bequeathe to succeeding
time,” “the spirit ... [of refreshment] transforming the
African soil [and soul]”: “the spirit that made Saint Cyprian,”
bishop and martyr.
In “the august
and reasonable Latin” inscriptions that are still to be seen in
the chronological sequence of pagan and Christian epitaphs in
this still existing and once famous fortress-city of
Constantine, there is also to be found, says Belloc, “a
rediscovery of ourselves” – “and as you read you feel about
you the air of home.”
Such was the
refreshment, restoration and repose which he gratefully and
unexpectedly found, which is all expressed so well in that
liturgical, Christian Latin word: Refrigerium.
However, looking
about him, he also saw how “Islam destroyed with fanaticism” all
the images – “the figures of animals and men;” and how
“the barbarian creed conceived or implanted a barbarian
fear of vines” – yes, even a fear of “Bacchus young, ... and
gentle old Silenus”!
Throughout
Belloc's reverent travels so full of pietas – in his
reference and respect for one's roots – he was always poignantly
aware of “the wound that Europe suffered by the Mohammedan
invasion,” and this wound was even “more marked” and “more
apparent” there in the monuments and culture of the Maghreb,
where one could truly feel “the long eclipse of our race.”
(That Mohammedan
conquest, it will be remembered, had first come and spread in
the late-seventh and early-eighth century. Belloc's poignant
reflections came to him some 1200 years later, in the early
twentieth century. Indeed, it was a long eclipse.)
Belloc's own
very moving, elegiac considerations keenly perceived, in
contrast to the slow fruitfulness of Christianity (as was seen
in “The Missioner”), the effects of an entirely different, very
rapid – and profoundly uprooting – Islamic “missionary effort”:
The Mohammedan
invasion [had come] which everywhere destroyed, or rather
abandoned, a Roman endeavor [even the beautiful Aqueduct
still to be seen near Cherchel!]. The neglect which was
native to the Arab, the sharp breach which he made in
tradition, ended Caesarea [that very lovely Roman coastal
city].
Moreover, nearby
a certain very stately Roman Aqueduct, there still stands “a
little town,” which only “barrenly preserves a memory” of the
presence of Rome. It stands there, says Belloc, as if “to
emphasize the retreat of the empire.”
This beautiful (and once plentiful) Aqueduct – which was
“something the Arab could not waste” – “still stands and carries
an aspect of endurance which is the more awful”; indeed, “it
appals one because it it quite alone and the multitude [of life
and persons] who gave it meaning has disappeared,” leaving it
thereby, so to say, “fixed forever in an intangible isolation” –
the loneliness of its graceful arches still to be vividly
cherished – and standing still after “the fifteen hundred years
of its abandonment.”
This beautiful
form, which Belloc himself has with his own hand elegantly drawn
in his book, is also a sort of trenchant metaphor for “the
presence of absence”: the presence of the absence of Rome. The
presence of the absence of the Living Waters of Rome and the
Faith!
For Belloc, this
symbolic Aqueduct, so isolated and so neglected there in the
Maghreb, constitutes a representative example of “Rome arrested,
as it were – its spirit caught away and its body turned to
stone.”
Rome's animating
soul had left the graceful body – anima forma corporis.
And, this abandoned, gracious embodiment of culture and
long-neglected relic have now truly and altogether petrified.
Belloc was a “Fruit Inspector.” He saw the fruits of Islam. He
had likewise seen the effects of the “Punic religion” and of the
ever-encroaching “Asiatic spirit” and its “enduring challenge”
to Europe and the Faith – most especially the “enduring
challenge” of “the Mohammedan.”
(It is still so today.)
For, in his
varied and intimate travel afoot in the Maghreb out to the “iron
boundary” and “barrier” of the Sahara Desert, Belloc had seen
many a “true Arab” – that is to say, what the French call “'An
Arab of the Great Tent.'”
One such Arab horseman whom he saw was not at all a European,
“but a rider of that race which makes one family
from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic.”
After Belloc's
final view from a hill down upon the desert, he “had then seen a
limit beyond which men of my sort cannot go, and I was content
to leave it to those others who will remain for ever the enemies
of our Europe” – such as that same “true Arab .... on a horse
going up before me into the hills, with the snow of Aurès [in
the high Atlas Mountain Range] above him, and between us a tall
palm.”
And, says Belloc:
As I watched him and
admired his stately riding, I said to myself: “This is how it
will end; they [“for ever the enemies of our Europe”] shall
leave us to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-towns,
and we will leave them to their desert here beyond the hills,
for it is their native place.”
(Would that this
were altogether so! But, in 2006, a hundred years later, our
mutual encroachments and the consequent deracinations and
religious-cultural conflict have increased.)
Belloc also met
on his long journey “a fierce Moor of gigantic stature and
incredible girth” as well as “a poor Arab and old ... in [whose]
face there was a deep contempt for Christendom.And then there was yet another face, a very haunting
face. He truly was “a Stranger,” “a man of a kind I had not met
in Africa before” and whose “face could be seen inspired with a
peculiar power.”
But, “it was his eyes that gave him so singular and ... so
magical an influence.”
In this vivid
context, after leaving the haunting Roman ruins of Timgad,
Belloc says:
Here, so near the
waste places where men cannot live, [and] alone with such a
companion [i.e., this Mohammedan], I felt afraid.
We walked along together slowly for a few paces; his sentences
were shorter than my replies, and were spoken low, and full of
what he and his [Arab “race which make one family”] call wisdom,
but I, despair.
Further
describing this Arab of “peculiar power” and haunting
expression, Belloc says: “His lips ... had in their firm outline
something of high sadness” and the expression in his eyes
“arrested me, for it had an expression of immense horizons;” and
“his whole features recalled those which tradition gives
to the makers and destroyers of religion.”
Moreover, he says:
The very short
dialogue we had together influenced me in my loneliness
for a whole day .... but I listened to him for the sake of
the tones of his voice: these had a sort of laugh in them
when he added that I should be glad to get back to water, to
trees and to men.
By way of
confirmation, it was likewise about himself that Belloc later
wrote these very words, words which reveal so much of his heart,
as a man “of the Faith” and “the Latin Order” and as a “poor
heir of the Catholic Church”:
I would advance it to
be true that the soul is supported by all sacramental things;
that is, by all unison of the mind and the body upon a proper
object; and that when great architecture and glorious
colour and solemn music, and the profound
rhythms of the Latin tongue, and the ritual of
many centuries, and the uncommunicable atmosphere of age,
all combine to exalt a man [of a humble heart] in his
worship, he is made greater not less. He is supported. He is
fed.
Well do I know that
the greatest of visions have come to men in small rough
huts of stone, round in shape, piled by their own hands above
the Western seas of Ireland or in the Hebrides. And I know very
well that these men scaled heaven.
I know also that men
similarily isolated in the deserts between the Nile and
the Red Sea perceived our final inheritance and were admitted
into divine company.
There is no necessity
of any aid from the senses, and the greatest of those who
were adepts in the search for heaven did, upon the
contrary, withdraw themselves from all influence of the senses
when they most desired the satisfaction of the
Praegustatum – the foretaste of that for which we
were designed [i.e., for Beatitude]: our home.
But
I can not boast to be of such a kind, and on my poor level
it is landscape, the sea, human love, music, and the rest, that
help to make me understand; and in their absence I
am very empty indeed.
To return to the
closing incidents in Esto Perpetua, we again hear Belloc
speak of the Stranger and his disturbing, foreboding words there
near the edge of the desert. Answering Belloc's question “What
other danger can there be?” the Stranger responded darkly:
He answered that many
who saw the desert learnt more that they desired to learn. I
knew very well what he meant for I had heard many men maintain
that what was eternal must be changeless, and that what was
changeless must be dead. And I had noted how men who had
travelled widely were more simple in the Faith [with an
oculus simplex and thus, says Christ, with a corpus
lucidum!] if they had chiefly known the sea; but, if
they had chiefly known the desert, more subtle and
often emptied of the Faith at last: the Faith dried up
out of them as dews [also an image of Grace!] are dried up
out of the sand on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen
mornings.
He himself now
recalls the isolation and loneliness of the old Roman city of
Timgad – the ruins where is to be found, and still so “physically
present, ... a desolation so complete that measure
fails it.”
And, from these ruins Belloc had just come on foot in his long
march to the desert. In this mood, he listens again to the tones
and words of this mysterious Stranger:
He said that in the
desert the stars were terrible to man, and as he spoke of the
endless distances I remembered the old knowledge (but this
time alive with conviction) how great nations [without the
humility and Grace and the merciful magnanimity of the Faith],
as they advance with unbroken records and heap up experience,
and test life by their own past, and grow to judge exactly
the enlarging actions of man, see [in their Despair] at
last [horribile dictu!] that there is no Person in
destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves.
Their Faiths turn to legend [in their Apostasy],
and at last they enter the shrine whose God has
departed and whose Idol is quite blind.
Stopping “at the
edge of a little wood,” after their talk together for less than
twenty minutes, both of them, says our Traveller, looked down
“at the plain below us, and the salt dull valley and the dead
town; the broken columns and the long streets of Timgad.”
Then they parted and, says Belloc, “When he had left me the
oppression of his awful intensity and of his fixed unnatural
reason began to fade:”
Then I turned and went
up into Atlas and as I went I was in two minds, but at
last tradition conquered and I was safe in my steadfast
instincts, settling back as settles back with shorter and
shorter oscillations some balanced rock which violence
had disturbed. The vast shoulder of Aurès [in the snow-capped
Atlas Range of Mountains above him] seemed worthy of awe, but
not of terror [like the desert and its spirit]. I made
companion of the snow, and I was glad to remember how many
living things moved under forest trees.
After he had
seen “the last of the oases under the Atlas upon the edge of the
wild” Sahara Desert, and “with the snow of Aurès above him” once
again, Belloc, like the Christian Missioner to Norway, desired
to return home.
On Belloc's
return march from the desert and toward the sea, and to a
welcoming harbor-town, he sees, finally, a little refuge:
I saw a Christian
house after so many miles and days. I went in at once, [and]
drank wine ... for I was tired of this land. I was hurrying
to get back [and without the help of “the Old Pilot” with
“bright eyes that were full of humility”] to reasonable
shrines, and to smell the sea.
Again, when soon
he was enroute home, aboard a little ship, Belloc says, “I drank
in my soul to her destiny” – i.e., the destiny of Europe
and the Faith – “although I had no wine (for I had
drunk it long before...)!
Then, by way of
a Grateful Apostrophe, addressing Europe and the Faith – Roma
in her fullness – he said to himself – and with his
characteristic elegiac tone, but also with a rooted hope – the
following words:
Remain forever. We
pass .... But do you remain for ever. What happens to this
[precarious and vulnerable] life of ours, which we had from you,
Salvâ Fide,
I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken away. They
say that nations perish and that at last the race itself shall
decline; it is better for us of the Faith that you are
preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of
this world.
Roma, esto
perpetua!
“Être
catholique, c'est tout.”
--FINIS--
© 2006 Robert Hickson
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