 1. Introduction. The Catholic Conscience of History. I say the Catholic Conscience of History. I say the Conscience that is an intimate knowledge through identity, the intuition of a thing, which is one with the knowledge. I do not say the Catholic aspect of history. This talk of aspects is modern and therefore part of a decline. It is false and therefore ephemeral. I will not stoop to it. I will rather do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic aspect of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a Moabitan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these, look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from within. There is no more a Catholic aspect of European history than there is a man's aspect of himself. Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man's aspect of himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For a man's way of perceiving himself, when he does so honestly and after cleansing examination of his mind, is in line with his creators, and therefore with reality. He sees from within. Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the voice of God. Not only does he know by this that the outer world is real, but also that his own personality is real. When a man, though flattered by the voice of another man, yet says within himself, I am a mean fellow, he has a hold of reality. When a man, though maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, my purpose was just, he has a hold of reality. He knows himself. For he is himself. A man does not know an infinite amount about himself, but the finite amount he does know is all in the map. It is all part of what is really there. What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, fit in with what he does know about himself. There are indeed aspects of a man for all others except these two. Himself and God who made him. These two, when they regard him, see him as he is. All other minds have their several views of him, and these indeed are aspects, each of which is false, while all differ. But a man's view of himself is not an aspect, it is a comprehension. Now then so it is with us who are of the faith and the great story of Europe. A Catholic, as he reads that story, does not grope at it from without. He understands it from within. He cannot understand it altogether because he is a finite being, but he is also that which has to understand. The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith. The Catholic brings to history, when I say history in these pages, I mean the history of Christendom, self-knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true, and what other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person. He is not relatively right in his blame. He is absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story. For he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly by its phenomena alone. He sees it all from its center, in its essence, and together. I say again, renewing the terms the Church is Europe, and Europe is the Church. The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins with the development of the Church, in the basin of the Mediterranean. It goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil in which that plant of faith arose. In a way that no other man can, he understands the Roman military effort, why that effort clashed with the gross, asiatic, and emergent empire of Carthage, what we delivered from the light of Athens, what food we found in the Irish and the British, the Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality, what cousinship we claim with a ritual of false but profound religions, and even how the ancient Israel, the little violent people before they got poisoned, while they were yet national in the mountains of Judah, was in the oldest sensation at least central, as we Catholics say, sacred, devoted to a peculiar mission. For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The picture is normal, nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our great story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final. But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of English tongue, suffers from a deplorable, and it is to be hoped, a passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a conspectus of the past. He is compelled to study violently hostile authorities, north German, or English copying north German, whose knowledge is never that of the true and balanced Europeans. He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd, either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his finger upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads, if they are in the English language at least, he finds things lacking which his instinct for Europe tells him should be there. But he cannot supply their place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant of such things, or rather could not conceive them. I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present battlefield of Europe, a large affair not yet cleared concerning all nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent to the faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze, one would think, and which yet no historian explains. The second I deliberately choose as an example, particularly and narrow, and especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury, of which the modern historian makes nothing but an incomprehensible contradiction, but which is, to a Catholic, a sharp revelation of the halfway house between the empire and modern nationalities. As to the first of these two examples, here is at last the great war in Europe. Clearly an issue. Things come to a head. How came it? Why these two camps? What was this curious grouping of the West holding out in desperate alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to victory, apparently inevitable after the breakdown of the Orthodox Russian shell? Where lay the roots of so singular a contempt for our old order, chivalry and morals, as Berlin then displayed? Who shall explain the position of the papacy, the question of Ireland, the aloofness of old Spain? It is all a welter if we try to order it by modern, external, especially by any materialist or even skeptical analysis. It was not climate against climate, that facile, materialist contrast of environment, which is the crudest and stupidest explanation of human affairs. It was not race, if indeed any races can still be distinguished in European blood, save broad and confused appearances, such as Easterner and Westerner, Short and Tall, Dark and Fair. It was not, as another foolish academic theory popular some years ago would pretend, an economic affair. There was here no revolt of rich against poor, no pressure of undeveloped barbarians against developed lands, no plan of exploitation nor of men organized attempting to seize the soil of less fruitful owners. How came these two opponents into being, the potential antagonism of which was so strong that millions willingly suffered their utmost for the sake of a decision? That man who would explain the tremendous judgment on the superficial test of religious differences among modern sex must be bewildered indeed. I have seen the attempt made in more than one journal and book, Enemy and Allied. The results are lamentable. Prussia, indeed the protagonist, was atheist, but her subject provinces supported her exultantly. Catholic Cologne and the Rhine and Tamely Catholic Bavaria. Her main support, without which she could not have challenged Europe, was that very power whose sole reason for being was Catholicism, the House of Habsburg Lorraine, which from Vienna controlled and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav. The House of Habsburg Lorraine was the champion of Catholic organization in Eastern Europe. The Catholic Irish largely stood apart. Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those things are foreign, was more than a part. Britain had long forgotten the unity of Europe. France, a protagonist was notoriously divided within herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious analysis, such as men draw up who think of religion as opinion, will make anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk of democracy as the issue of the Great War may be neglected. Democracy, one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous form of human government, was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy, the despotism of Russia and Prussia. The immense complex of all other great modern states gives such nonsense the lie. People who talk of a struggle for supremacy between the two Teutonic champions, Germany and England, are less respectable still. England is not Teutonic and was not protagonist. The English Cabinet decided by, but the smallest possible majority, a majority of one, to enter the Prussian government never dreamt it would have to meet England at all. There is no question of so single an issue. The world was at war. Why? No man is a historian who cannot answer from the past. All who can answer from the past and our historians see that it is the historical depth of the European faith, not its present surface, which explains all. The struggle was against Prussia. Why did Prussia arise? Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization of the eastern Slavonic planes just failed to meet there in Prussia, the western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was in Hiatus. In that small, neglected area, neither half-civilized from the Byzantine east nor fully from the Roman west, rose a strong garden of weeds, and weeds sowed themselves. Prussia, that is, this patch of weeds, could not extend until the West weakened through Sism. It had to wait till the Battle of the Reformation died down. But it waited. And at last, when there was opportunity, it grew prodigiously. The weed patch overran first Poland and the Germanys, then half Europe. When it challenged all civilization, at last it was master of a hundred and fifty million souls. The end of section one. Section two. Europe and the faith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach. Section two. Introduction Continued. What are the tests of this war? In their vastly different fashions they are Poland and Ireland. The extreme islands of tenacious tradition. The conservators of the past through a national passion for the faith. The Great War was a clash between an uneasy new thing which desired to live its own distorted life anew and separate from Europe, and the old Christian rock. This new thing is in its morals, in the morals spread upon it by Prussia, the effect of that great storm wherein three hundred years ago Europe made shipwreck and was split into two. This war was the largest, yet no more than the recurrent example of that increasing wrestle. The outer, the unstable, the untraditional, which is barbarianism pressing blindly upon the inner, the traditional, the strong, which is ourselves, which is Christendom, which is Europe. Small wonder that the cabinet at Westminster hesitated. We used to say during the war that if Prussia conquered civilization failed, but that if the Allies conquered, civilization was re-established. What did we mean? We meant not only that the new barbarians could not handle a machine, they can, but we meant that they had learnt all from us. We meant that they cannot, continue of themselves, and that they could not. We can. We meant that they have no roots. When we say that Vienna was the tool of Berlin, that Madrid should be ashamed, what do we mean? It has no meaning save that civilization is one and we its family. That which challenged us, though it controlled so much, which should have aided us and was really our own, was external to civilization and did not lose that character by the monarchy. When we say that the Slav failed us, what did we mean? It was not a statement of race. Poland is Slav, so is Serbia. They were two vastly differing states, and yet both with us. It meant that the Byzantine influence was never sufficient to inform a true European state, or to teach Russia a national discipline. The Catholic conscience of Europe grasped this war, with apologies where it was in the train of Prussia, with information where it was free. We saw what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided upon the future, the two alternative futures, which lie before the world. All other judgments were the same. The Catholic conscience of Europe grasped this war, with apologies where it was in the train of Prussia, with information where it was free. We saw what was toward. It weighed, judged, decided upon the future, the two alternative futures, which lie before the world. All other judgments of the war made nonsense. You had, on the Allied side, the most vulgar professional politicians and their rich paymasters shouting for democracy, pedants mumbling about race, on the side of Prussia, the negation of nationality. You have the use of some vague national mission of conquest, divinely given to the various Germans and the least competent to govern. You would come at last, if you listened to such very cries, to see the great war as a mere folly, a thing without motive, such as the emptiest internationals conceived the thing to have been. So much for the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe. He alone can see and judge in this matter. From so recent and universal an example, I turn to one local, distant, precise, in which this same Catholic conscience of European history may be tested. Consider the particular and clerical example of Thomas of Beckett, the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury. I defy any man to read the story of Thomas of Beckett in stubs, or in green, or in bright, or in any other of our provincial Protestant handbooks, and to make head or tail of it. Here is a well-defined and limited subject of study. It concerns only a few years. A great deal is known about it, for there are many contemporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to history. The Catholic may well ask how it is I cannot understand the story as told by these Protestant writers. Why does it not make sense? The story is briefly this. A certain prelate, the primate of England at the time, was asked to admit certain changes in the status of the clergy. The chief of these changes was that men attached to the church in any way, even by minor orders, not necessarily priests, should, if they committed a crime amenable to temporal jurisdiction, be brought before the ordinary courts of the country, instead of left as they had been for centuries. The claim was, at the time, a novel one. The primate of England resisted that claim. In connection with his resistance he was subjected to many indignities. Many things outrageous to custom were done against him. But the pope doubted whether his resistance was justified, and he was finally reconciled with the civil authority. On returning to his sea at Canterbury he became at once the author of further action and the subject of further outrage, and within a short time he was murdered by his exasperated enemies. His death raised a vast public outcry. His monarch did penance for it. But all the points on which he had resisted were in practice waved by the church at last. The civil state's original claim was, in practice, recognized at last. Today it appears to be plain justice. The chief of St. Thomas' Contensions, for instance, that many in orders should be exempt from the ordinary courts, seems as remote as chain-armors. So far so good. The opponent of the faith will say, and has always said in a hundred studies, that this resistance was nothing more than that always offered by an old organization to a new development. Of course it was. It was equally true to say of a man who objects to an airplane smashing in the top of his studio that it is the resistance of an old organization to a new development. But such a phrase in no way explains the business, and when the Catholic begins to examine the particular case of St. Thomas he finds a great many things to wonder at, and to think about, upon which his less European opponents are helpless and silent. I say helpless, because in their attitude they give up trying to explain. They record these things, but they are bewildered by them. They can explain St. Thomas' particular action simply enough, too simply. He was, they say, a man living in the past. But when they are asked to explain the vast consequences that followed his martyrdom, they have to fall back upon the most inhuman and impossible hypotheses that the masses were ignorant, that is as compared with other periods in human history. What more ignorant than today, that the papacy engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm, as though the papacy were a secret society, like modern Freemasonry, with some hidden machinery for engineering such things, as though the type of enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom was the wretched mechanical thing produced now by caucus or newspaper engineering. As though nothing besides such interference was there to arouse the whole populace of Europe to such a pitch. As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place at St. Thomas' tomb, the historian who hates or ignores the faith had and has three ways of denying them. The first is to say nothing about them. It is the easiest way of telling a lie. The second is to say that they were the result of a vast conspiracy which the priests directed and the feeble acquiescence of the maim, the halt, and the blind supported. The third, and for the moment most popular, is to give them modern journalistic names, sham, Latin, and Greek confused, which it is hoped will get rid of the miraculous character, notably do such people talk of auto-suggestion. Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story when he has read all the original documents understands it easily enough from within. He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very important in its special claims, and was probably taken as an isolated action, unreasonable, but he soon gets to see, as he reads, and as he notes, the rapid and profound transformation of all civilization which was taking place in that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out for a principle ill-clothed in his particular plea, but absolute in its general appreciation, the freedom of the church. He stood out in particular for what had been the concrete symbols of the church's liberty in the past. The direction of his actions was everything, whether his symbol was well or ill-chosen. The particular customs might go, but the challenge the new claims of civil power at that moment was to save the church. A movement was afoot, which might have then everywhere accomplished what was only accomplished in parts of Europe four hundred years later, to wit a dissolution of the unity and the discipline of Christendom. St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy. He fought and he resisted in the spirit dictated by the church. He fought for no dogmatic point. He fought for no point to which the church of five hundred years earlier or five hundred years later would have attached importance. He fought for things which were purely temporal arrangements, which had indeed until quite recently been the guarantee of the church's liberty, but which were in his time upon the turn of becoming negligible. But the spirit in which he fought was a determination that the church should never be controlled by civil power, and the spirit against which he fought was the spirit which either openly or secretly believes the church to be an institution merely human, and therefore naturally subjected as an inferior to the processes of the monarchs, or worse, the politician's law. The Catholic sees as he reads the story that St. Thomas was obviously unnecessarily to lose. In the long run, every concrete point on which he had stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing for which he was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the enthusiasm of the populace rose. The guarantee of the plain man's healthy and moral existence against the threat of the wealthy and the power of the state, the self-government of the general church, had been defended by a champion up to the point of death for the morals enforced by the church, are the guarantee of freedom. Further, the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic, with a blind irrational assertion that the miracles could not take place. He is not wholly possessed of a firm and lasting faith that no marvelous events ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot believe that there was a conspiracy of falsehood, in the lack of all proof of such conspiracy. He has moved to a conviction that events so minutely recorded and so amply testified happened. Here again is the European, the chiefly reasonable man. The Catholic pitted against the barbarian skeptic with his empty, unproved, mechanical dogmas of material sequence. And these miracles for a Catholic reader are but the extreme points, fitting in with the whole scheme. He knows what European civilization was before the 12th century. He knows what it was to become after the 16th. He knows why and how the church would stand out against a certain itch for a change. He appreciates why and how a character like that of St. Thomas would resist. He is in no way perplexed to find that the resistance failed on its technical side. He sees that it succeeded so thoroughly in its spirit, as to prevent, in a moment when its occurrence would have been far more dangerous and general than in the 16th century, the overturning of the connection between church and state. The end of Section 2. Section 3. Europe and the Faith. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach. Section 3. Introduction concluded. The enthusiasm of the populace, he particularly comprehends. He grasps the connection between that enthusiasm and the miracles which attended St. Thomas intercession. Not because the miracles were fantasies, but because a popular recognition of deserved sanctity is the later accompaniment and the recipient of miraculous power. It is the details of history which require the closest analysis. I have therefore chosen a significant detail with which to exemplify my case. Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character of the English squires and of their position in the English countryside would have to explain at some length and with difficulty to a foreigner how and why the evils of the English largest states were, though evils, national, just as a particular landlord, case of peculiar complexity or violent, might afford him with a special test. So the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes for the Catholic who is viewing Europe a very good example whereby he can show how well he understands what is to other men not understandable and how simple is to him and how human a process which, to men not Catholic, can only be explained by the most grotesque assumptions as that universal contemporary testimony must be ignored, that men are ready to die for things in which they do not believe, that the philosophy of a society does not permeate that society or that a popular enthusiasm, ubiquitous and unchallenged is mechanically produced to the order of some center of government. All of these absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel, nor is there any but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains it. The Catholic sees that the whole of the Abecid business was like the struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and is compelled to maintain it, such being the battleground chosen by his opponents, upon a privilege inherited from the past. The non-Catholic simply cannot understand it and does not pretend to understand it. Now let us turn from this second example, highly definite and limited, to a third quite different from either of the other two, and the widest of all. Let us turn to the general aspect of all European history. We can here make a list of the great lines on which the Catholic can appreciate what other men only puzzle it and can determine and know those things upon which other men make no more than a guess. The Catholic faith spreads over the Roman world, not because the Jews were widely dispersed, but because the intellect of antiquity and especially the Roman intellect accepted it in its maturity. The material decline of the empire is not co-relative with nor parallel to the growth of the Catholic Church. It is the counterpart of that growth. You have been told Christianity, a word by the way quite unhistorical, crept into Rome as she declined and hastened that decline. That is bad history. Rather accept this phrase and retain it. The faith is that which Rome accepted in her maturity, nor was the faith the cause of her decline, but rather the conservator of all that could be conserved. There was no strengthening of us by the advent of barbaric blood. There was serious imperiling of civilization in its old age by some small and mainly servile infiltration of barbaric blood. If civilization so attacked did not permanently fail through old age, we owe that happy rescue to the Catholic faith. In the next period, the Dark Ages, the Catholic proceeds to see Europe saved against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the Scandinavian. He notes that the fierceness of the attack was such that anything saved something divinely instituted would have broken down. The Mohammedan came within three days' march of tours. The Mongol was seen from within the walls of Tornus on the Seine, right in France. The Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain. There was nothing left of Europe but a central core. Nevertheless Europe survived. In the reflorescence which followed that dark time in the Middle Ages, the Catholic notes, not hypotheses, but documents and facts. He sees the parliaments arising not from some imaginary teutonic root, a figment of the academies, but from the very real and present great monastic orders in Spain, in Britain, in Gaul. Never outside the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic architecture spring high, spontaneous and auto-catholic. First in the territory of Paris and then spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees the new universities, a product of the soul of Europe, reawakened. He sees the marvelous new civilization of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the old Roman society, a transformation wholly from within and motivated by the faith. The trouble, the religious terror, the madness of the 15th century are to him the diseases of one body, Europe, in need of medicine. The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the European body at the Reformation. It ought to be death, but since the church is not subject to mortal law, it is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion and from civilization, none, he perceives, were of the ancient Roman stock, St. Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that struggle, England, not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of Europe, on Holland, North Germany, and the rest. He is anxious to see whether Britain will fail the mass of civilization in its ordeal. He notes the keenness of the fight in England and its long endurance. How all the forces of wealth, especially the old families, such as the Howards and the merchants of the City of London, are enlisted upon the treasonable side. How, in spite of this, a tenacious tradition prevents any sudden transformation of the British polity or its sharp severance from the continuity of Europe. He sees the whole of North England rising, cities in the south standing siege. Ultimately he sees the great nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut off, apparently, forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food upon which they had fed. Side by side with all this, he notes that next to Britain, one land only that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or miraculous, preserves the faith, and as Britain is lost, he sees side by side with that loss, the preservation of Ireland. To the Catholic reader of history, though he has no Catholic history to read, there is no danger of the foolish bias against civilization, which has haunted so many contemporary writers, and which has led them to frame fantastic origins for institutions, the growth of which are as plain as an historical fact can be. He does not see in the pirate raids which desolated the eastern and southeastern coast of England in the sixth century, the origin of the English people. He perceives that the success of these small eastern settlements upon the eastern shores, and the spread of their language westward over the island, dated from their acceptance of Roman discipline, organization, and law, from which the majority, the Welsh to the west, were cut off. He sees that the ultimate hegemony of Winchester over Britain, all grew from this early picking up of communications with the continent, and the cutting off of everything in this island saved the south and east from the common life of Europe. He knows that Christian parliaments are not dimly and possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly monastic in their origin. He is not surprised to learn that they arose first in the Pyrenean valleys during the struggle against the Mohammedans. He sees how probable or necessary was session origin just when the chief effort of Europe was at work in the Reconquista. In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally before the Catholic reader. He is not tempted to that succession of theories, self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of novelty, which has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the past. Above all, he does not commit the prime historical error of reading history backwards. He does not think of the past as groping towards our own perfection of today. He has in his own nature the nature of its career. He feels the fall and the rise, the rhythm of a life which is his own. The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century or the fifteenth. Shrines are not odd to him nor oracles. And if he is the supplanter, he is also the heir of the gods. The end of section three, the end of the introduction. Section four, Europe and the Faith. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach. Section four, chapter one, What Was the Roman Empire? The history of European civilization is the history of a certain political institution which united and expressed Europe and was governed from Rome. This institution was informed at its very origin by the growing influence of a certain definite and organized religion. This religion it ultimately accepted and finally was merged in. The institution having accepted the religion, having made of that religion its official expression and having breathed that religion in through every part until it became the spirit of the whole was slowly modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new soul. It re arose and still lives. This institution was first known among men as Republica. We call it today the Roman Empire. The religion which informed and saved it was then called, still is called, and will always be called, the Catholic Church. Europe is the Church. And the Church is Europe. It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth, whether it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or to a man who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as would a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental Pagan, the contemporary atheist, some supposed student in some remote future, reading history in some place from which the Catholic faith shall have utterly departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our civilization will therefore be wholly alien, would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped today by the Catholic student who is of European birth, the truth that Europe and the Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who do not grasp it, or do not admit it, are those writers of history whose special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church or who have a traditional bias against it. These men are numerous. They have formed in the Protestant and other anti-Catholic universities a whole school of hypothetical and unreal history in which, though the original workers are few, their copious are innumerable, and that school of unreal history is still dogmatically taught in the anti-Catholic centers of Europe and of the world. Now our quarrel with this school should be not that it is anti-Catholic. That concerns another sphere of thought, but that it is unhistorical. To neglect the truth that the Roman Empire with its institutions and its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization. To forget or to diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its maturity a certain religion to conceal the fact that this religion was not a vague mood but a determinant and highly organized corporation to present in the first century some non-existent Christianity in place of the existing church to suggest that the faith was a vague agreement among individual holders of opinions instead of what it historically was, the doctrine of a fixed authoritative institution. To fail to identify the institution with the institution still here today and still called the Catholic Church to exaggerate the insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside the Empire and did nothing to modify its spirit to pretend that the Empire or its religion have at any time ceased to be that is to pretend that there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the present of Europe. All these pretensions are parts of one historical falsehood. In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is nothing which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire or is not demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it. In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic our building materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut stone our cooking, our staple food and drink informs the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower, the well, the road, the canal in expression the alphabet the very words of most of our numerous dialects and polite languages the order of still more the logical sequence of our thought all spring from that one source. So with implements the saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel, the file, the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the ladder all these we have from the same origin. Of our institutions it is the same story the divisions and subdivisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province the fixed national traditions with their boundaries the emplacement of the great European cities the routes of communication between them the universities, the parliaments, the courts of law and their jurisprudence all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire our well spring. It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it is to limit the ladder and so to make it a merely human thing the accusation would be historically valueless in any case for in history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural but with a sequence of proved events in the natural order but if we leave the province of history and consider that of theology the argument is equally baseless every manifestation of divine influence among men must have it's human circumstance of place and time the church might have risen under divine providence in any spot it did as a fact spring up in the high Greek tide of the leaven and carries to this day the noble Hellenic garb it might have risen at any time it did as a fact rise just at the inception of that united imperial Roman system which we are about to examine it might have carried for it's ornaments and have had for it's sacred language the accoutrements and the speech of any one of the other great civilizations living or dead of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies as a matter of historical fact the church was so circumstance in it's origin and development that it's external accoutrement and it's language were those of the Mediterranean that is of Greece and Rome of the empire now those who would falsify history from a conscious or unconscious bias against the Catholic church will do so in many ways some of which will always prove contradictory of some others for truth is one an error disparate and many the attack upon the Catholic church may be compared to the violent continual but incohate attack of the barbarians upon some civilized fortress such an attack will proceed now from this direction, now from that along any one of the infinite number of directions from which a single point may be approached today there is attack from the north, tomorrow an attack from the south their directions are flatly contradictory but the contradiction is explained by the fact that each is directed against a central and fixed opponent thus some will exaggerate the power of the Roman empire as a pagan institution they will pretend that the Catholic church was something alien to that pagan thing that the empire was great and admirable before Catholicism came weak and despicable upon its acceptation of the creed they will present the faith as creeping like an oriental disease into the body of a firm western society which it did not so much transform as liquefy and dissolve others will take the clean contrary line and make out a despicable Roman empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous and vigorous barbarians Germans of course possessing all manner of splendid pagan qualities which usually turn out to be 19th century Protestant qualities these are contrasted against the diseased Catholic body of the Roman empire which they are pictured as attacking others adopt a simpler manner they treat the empire and its institutions as dead after a certain date and discuss the rise of a new society without considering its Catholic and imperial origins nothing is commoner for instance in English schools than for boys to be taught that the pirate raids and settlements of the 5th century in this island were the coming of the English and the complicated history of Britain is simplified for them into a story of how certain bold, sea-faring pagans full of all the virtues we ascribe to ourselves today first devastated then occupied and at last of their sole genius developed a land which Roman civilization had proved inadequate to hold there is again a conscious or unconscious error conscious or unconscious, pedantic or ignorant according to the degree of learning and him who propagates it which treats of the religious life of Europe as though it were something quite apart from the general development of our civilization there are innumerable textbooks in which a man may read the whole history of his own a European country from say the 5th to the 16th century and never hear of the blessed sacrament which is as though a man were to write of England in the 19th century without daring to speak of newspapers and limited companies warped by such historical enormities the reader is at a loss to understand the ordinary motives of his ancestors not only do the great crises in the history of the church obviously escape him but much more do the great crises in civil history escape him to set right then our general view of history it is necessary to be ready with a sound answer to the prime question of all which is this what was the Roman Empire? if you took an immigrant coming fresh into the United States today and let him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since the Civil War if you gave him of the Civil War itself a partial confused and very summary account if of all that went before it right way back to the first colonists you were to leave him either wholly ignorant or ludicrously misinformed and slightly informed at that what then could he make of the problems in American society or how would he be equipped to understand the nation of which he was to be a citizen to give such a man the elements of civic training you must let him know what the colonies were what the war of independence and what the main institutions preceding that event and created by it he would have further to know soundly the struggle between north and south and the principles underlying that struggle lastly and most important of all he would have to see all this in a correct perspective so it is with us in the larger question of that general civilization which is common to both Americans and Europeans and which in its vigor has extended garrisons as it were into Asia and Africa we cannot understand it today unless we understand what it developed from what was the origin from which we sprang what was the Roman Empire at the end of section 4 section 5 Europe and the Faith this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe and the Faith Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach section 5 chapter 1 continued the Roman Empire was a united civilization the prime characteristic of which was the acceptation absolute and unconditional of one common mode of life by all those who dwelt within its boundaries it is an idea very difficult for the modern man to seize accustomed as he is to a number of sovereign countries or less sharply differentiated and each separately colored as it were by different customs a different language and often a different religion thus the modern man seized France French speaking with an architecture, manners, laws of its own, etc he saw till yesterday north Germany under the Prussian hegemony German speaking yet with another set of institutions and so forth when he thinks therefore of any great conflict of opinion such as the discussion between aristocracy and democracy today he thinks in terms of different countries Ireland for instance is democratic England is aristocratic and so forth again the modern man thinks of a community however united as something bounded by and in contrast with other communities when he writes or thinks of France he does not think of France only but of the points in which France contrasts with England north Germany, south Germany, Italy, etc now the men living in the Roman Empire regarded civic life in a totally different way all conceivable antagonisms and they were violent were antagonism within one state no differentiation of state against state was conceivable or was attempted from the Euphrates to the Scottish Highlands from the North Sea to the Sahara and the Middle Nile all was one state the world outside the Roman Empire was in the eyes of the imperial citizen a sort of waste it was not thickly populated it had no appreciable arts or sciences it was barbaric that outside waste of sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the frontiers or so to speak more accurately something of an irritation but that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of the menace of a foreign power it was merely the troubles of preventing a fringe of imperfect predatory and small barbaric communities outside the boundaries causing harm to a vast, rich, thickly populated and highly organized state within the members of these communities principally the Dutch, Frisian, Renish and other Germanic peoples but also on the other frontiers the nomads of the desert and in the west Islanders and mountaineers, Irish and Caledonian were all tinged with the great empire on which they bordered its trade permeated them we find its coins everywhere its names for most things became part of their speech they thought in terms of it they had a sort of grievance when they were not admitted to it they perpetually begged for admittance they wanted to deal with the empire to enjoy its luxury now and then to raid little portions of its frontier wealth they never dreamt of conquest on the other hand the Roman administrator was concerned with getting barbarians to settle in an orderly manner on the frontier fields so that he could exploit their labor with coaxing them to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies or when there was any local conflict with defeating them in local battles taking them prisoner and making them slaves I have said that the mere number of these exterior men German, Caledonian, Irish, Slav, Moorish, Arab, etc. was small compared with the numbers of civilization and I repeat in the eyes of the citizens of the empire their lack of culture made them more insignificant still at only one place did the Roman empire have a common frontier with another civilization properly so called it was a very short frontier not one twentieth of the total boundaries of the empire it was the eastern or persian frontier guarded by spaces largely desert and though a true civilization lay beyond that civilization was never of great extent nor really powerful this frontier was variously drawn at various times but corresponded roughly to the plains of Mesopotamia the Mediterranean peoples of the Levant from Antioch to Judea were always within that frontier they were Roman the mountain peoples of Persia were always beyond it nowhere else was there any real rival rivalry or contact with the foreigner or even this rivalry and contact though the persian war is the only serious foreign or equal war in the eyes of all rulers from Julius Caesar to the 6th century counted for little in the general life of Rome the point cannot be too much insisted upon nor too often repeated so strange is it to our modern nodes of thought and so essentially characteristic of the first centuries of the Christian era and the formative period during which Christian civilization took its shape men lived as citizens of one state which they took for granted in which they even regarded as external there would be much grumbling against the taxes and here and there revolts against them but never a suggestion that the taxes should be levied by any other than imperial authority or imposed in any other there was plenty of conflict between armies and individuals as to who should have the advantage of ruling but never any doubt as to the type of function which the emperor filled nor as to the type of universally despotic action which he exercised there were any number of little local liberties and customs which were the pride of the separate places to which they attached but there was no conception of local differences being antagonistic to the one life of the one state that state was for the men of that time the world the complete unity of this social system was the more striking from the fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and liberties but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions of religious practices and of dialects of the thought of the empire there were two Greek and Latin and in every department of human life there coexisted this very large liberty of individual and local expression coupled with a complete and as it were necessary unity binding the whole vast body together complete emperor might succeed emperor in a series of civil wars together the office of emperor might even be officially and consciously held in commission among four or more men but the power of the emperor was always one power his office one office and the system of the empire one system it is not the purpose of these few pages to attempt the full answer to the question of how such a civic state of mind came to be but the reader must have some sketch to grasp its nature the old Mediterranean world out of which the empire grew had consisted before that empire was complete say from an unknown most distant past to 50 BC in two types of society there stood in it as rare exceptions states or nations in our modern sense governed by a central government which controlled a large area and were people by the inhabitants of many towns and villages of this sort was ancient Egypt but there were also surrounding that inland sea and such great numbers as to form the predominant type of society a series of cities some of them commercial ports most of them controlling a small area from which they drew their agricultural subsistence but all of them remarkable for this that their citizens drew their civic life from felt patriotism for were the soldiers of and paid their taxes to not a nation in our sense but a municipality these cities and the small surrounding territories which they controlled which I repeat were often no more than local agricultural areas necessary for the sustenance of the town were essentially the sovereign powers of the time community of language, culture and religion might indeed bind them in associations more or less strict one could talk of the Phoenician cities of the Greek cities and so forth but the individual city was always the unit city made war on city the city decided its own customs and was the nucleus of religion the god was the god of the city a rim of such points as the central Mediterranean wherever it was habitable by man even the little oasis of the Serenian land with sand on every side but habitable developed its city formations even on the western coast of the inland oceans which received their culture by sea from the east such city states though more rare dotted the literal of Algeria province and Spain before our lord was born this moral equilibrium was disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian Alexander the Greek city states had just been swept under the hegemony of Macedon when in the shape of small but invincible armies the common Greek culture under Alexander overwhelmed the east Egypt the Levant Latoral and much more were turned into one Hellenized the separate cities of course survived and after Alexander's death unity of control was lost in various and fluctuating dynasties derived from the arrangements and quarrels of his generals but the old moral equilibrium was gone and the concentration of a general civilization had appeared hence forward the Syrian the Jew the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes for the first 10 years hence are the very earliest names of Christian things bishop, church, priest baptism, Christ Greek names hence all our original documents and prayers are Greek and shine with a Greek light nor are any so essentially Greek and ideal as the four Catholic gospels meanwhile in Italy one city by a series of accidents so since we have only later accounts and they are drawn from the city's point of view only became the chief of the city states in the peninsula some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to taxation and to the acceptation of its own laws many it protected by a sort of superior alliance with many more its position was ill-defined and perhaps in origin had been a position of inequality but at any rate a little after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this city had in a slower and less universal way begun to break down the moral equilibrium of the city states in Italy and had produced between the Appians and the sea and in some places beyond the Appians a society in which the city state though of course surviving was no longer a foreign part of a larger and already definite scheme the city which had arrived at such a position and which was now the manifest capital of the Italian scheme was Rome the end of section 5 section 6 Europe and the Faith this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org Europe and the Faith by Hilaer Bellach section 6 chapter 1 concluded Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went a rival development very different in its nature but bound to come into conflict with the Roman it was also extending this was the commercial development of Carthage Carthage of Phoenician that is 11teen and Semitic Colony had its city life like all the rest it had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had shown for conquest for alliances and in general for a spread of its spirit but for the domination of its laws and modes of thought the purpose of Carthage was to enrich itself not indirectly as do soldiers who actually achieve riches but as one consequence of the pursuit of arms but directly as do merchants by using men indirectly by commerce and by the exploitation of contracts the Carthaginians occupied mining centers in Spain and harbors wherever they could find them in the western Mediterranean he employed mercenarian troops he made no attempt to radiate outward slowly step by step as does the military type but true to the type of every commercial empire from his own time to our own the Carthaginian built up a scattered hodgepodge of dominion bound together by what is today called the command of the sea that command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it wholly but such a power could not coexist with the growing strengths of Marshal Italy Rome challenged Carthage and after a prodigious struggle which lasted to within 200 years of the birth of our lord ruined the Carthaginians power 50 years later the town itself was destroyed by the Romans and its territory turned into a Roman province so perished for many hundreds of years there is illusion that the merchant can master the soldier but never had that illusion seemed nearer to the truth than at certain moments in the duel between Carthage and Rome the main consequence of this success was that by the nature of the struggle the western Mediterranean with all its city-states with its half civilized Iberian peoples lying on the plateau of Spain behind the cities of the literal the corresponding belt of south France and the cultivated land of northern Africa fell into the Roman system and became, but in a more united way what Italy had already long before become the Roman power or if the term be preferred the Roman confederation with its ideas of law and government was supreme in the western Mediterranean and was compelled by its geographical position to extend itself inland further and further into Spain and even the consequence to the world into Gaul but before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage the eastern Mediterranean had also begun to come into line this western power the Roman thus finally established occupied Corinth in the same decade as that which saw the final destruction of Carthage and what had once been Greece all the Alexandrian or Grecian east Syria, Egypt followed the Macedonian power in its provinces came to depend upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates annexations and occupations which two generations or so before the foundation of the Catholic Church had made Rome though her system was not yet complete the center of the whole Mediterranean world the men whose sons lived to be saw that the unity of the world was already achieved the world was now one and was built up of the islands the peninsulas and the literal of the inland sea so the empire might have remained and so one would think it naturally would have remained a Mediterranean thing but for that capital experiment which has determined all future history Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul Gaul, the mass of which lay north continental, exterior to the Mediterranean Gaul, which linked up with the Atlantic and the North Sea Gaul, which lived by the tides Gaul, which was to be the foundation of things to come it was this experiment the Roman conquest of Gaul and its successes which opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the world it was a revolution that unity and completeness had no parallel something less than a hundred small Celtic states particularly civilized but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the Mediterranean were occupied, taught and as it were converted into citizens of this now united Roman civilization it was all done so to speak within the lifetime of a man the link and cornerstone of western Europe between the Mediterranean the Atlantic and the Channel accepted civilization in a manner so final and so immediate that no historian has ever quite been able to explain the phenomena Gaul accepted almost at once the Roman language the Roman food the Roman dress and it formed the first and a gigantic extension of Roman culture the dominant and enduring example of that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay Gaul led to Britain the Iberian Peninsula after the hardest struggle which any territory had presented was also incorporated by the close of the first century after the incarnation when the Catholic Church had already been obscurely founded in many a city and the turn of the world's history had come the Roman Empire was finally established in its entirety by that time from the Syrian desert to the Atlantic from the Sahara to the Irish Sea and to the Scotch Hills to the Rhine and the Danube in one great ring fence there lay a secure unquestioned method of living incorporated as one great state this state was to be the soil in which the seed of the church was to be sown as religion of this state was to develop this state is still present underlying our apparent complex political arrangements as the main rocks of a country underlie the drift of the surface its institutions of property and of marriage its conceptions of law its literary roots of rhetoric of poetry of logic are still the stuff of Europe the religion which it made as universal as itself is still and perhaps the end of section 6 the end of chapter 1 section 7 Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Belock this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Belock section 7 chapter 2 what was the church in the Roman Empire so far I have attempted to answer the question what was the Roman Empire we have seen that it was an institution of such and such a character but to this we had to add that it was an institution affected from its origin and at last permeated by another institution this other institution had and has for its name the Catholic Church my next task must therefore be an attempt to answer the question what was the church in the Roman Empire for that I have not yet touched in order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in the place of a man living in a particular period from whose standpoint the nature of the connection between the church and the empire can best be observed and that standpoint in time is the generation which lives in the first century and on into the latter half of the third century say from AD 190 to AD 270 it is the first moment in which we can perceive the church as a developed organism now apparent to all if we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the growing church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard of we can get no earlier view of it as part of the society but at this time also that many documents survive I shall show that the appearance of the church at this time from 150 to 240 years after the crucifixion is ample evidence of her original constitution a man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius living through the violent civil wars has exceeded the peace of the Antonines surviving to witness the extreme old age to perceive the promise though not the establishment of an untrammeled Catholicism it had yet to pass through the last and most terrible of the persecutions would have been able to answer our question well he would have lived at the turn of the tide a witness to the emergence apparent to all society of the Catholic Church let us suppose him the head of a senatorial family a relatively small class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the municipal government of the city beneath him he would be accustomed to a large class of citizens free men but not senatorial beneath these again his society reposed upon a very large body of slaves in what proportion these three classes of society would have been found in a town like Lyons in the second century we have no exact documents in our society that the majority would certainly have been of the servile class free men less numerous while senators were certainly a very small body they were the great landowners of the neighborhood and we must add to these three main divisions to other classes which complicate our view of that society the first was that of the freed men the second was made up of perpetual tenants nominally free in legal theory bound to the wealthier classes the freed men had risen from the servile class by the sole act of their masters they were bound to these masters very strongly so far as social atmosphere went and to no small extent in legal theory as well this preponderance of a small wealthy class we must not look upon as the stationary phenomena it was increasing the outstanding feature of all imperial society in the fourth and fifth centuries when the Roman Empire became from pagan Christian the mark of the world was the possession of nearly all its soil and capital apart from public land by one small body of immensely wealthy men the product of the pagan empire it is next important to remember that such a man as we are conceiving would never have regarded the legal distinctions between slave and free as a line of cleavage between different kinds of men it was a social arrangement and no more most of the slaves were indeed still chattel bought and sold many of them were incapable of any true family life but there was nothing uncommon in a slave being treated as a friend in his being a member of the liberal professions acting as a tutor as an administrator of his master's fortune or a doctor certain official things he could not be he could not hold any public office of course he could never plead and he could not be a soldier this last point is essential because the Roman Empire though it required no large armed force in comparison with the total numbers of its vast population for it was not a system of mere repression no such system has ever endured yet could only draw that armed force from a restricted portion of the population in the absence of foreign adventure or civil wars the armies were mainly used as frontier police yet small as they were it was not easy to obtain the recruitment required the wealthy citizen we are considering would have been expected to find a certain number of recruits for the service of the army he found them among his bound free tenants and enfranchised slaves he was increasingly reluctant to find them and they were increasingly reluctant to serve later recruitment was found more and more from the barbarians outside the empire and we shall see on a subsequent page how this affected the transition from the ancient world to that of the dark ages let us imagine such a man going through the streets of lions at the meeting of the curia he would salute and be saluted as he passed by many men of the various classes I have described some those slaves he would greet familiarly others though nominally free and belonging to his own following or accompanied it may be presumed by a small retinue some of whom might be freed men of his own some slaves some of the tenant class some in legal theory quite independent of him and yet by the economic necessities as he passed through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a variety of services no creed dominated the city even the local gods were now but a confused memory a religious ritual of the official type was to greet him upon his entry into the assembly but in the public life of the city no fixed philosophy no general faith appeared among the many buildings so dedicated two perhaps would have struck his attention the one the great and showy synagogue where the local Jews met upon their Sabbath and the other a small Christian church the first of these he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an alien colony in some great modern city he knew it to be the symbol of a small reserved unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout the empire the empire had trouble with it in the past but the trouble was long forgotten the little colonies of Jews had become negotiators highly separate from their fellow citizens already unpopular but nothing more with the Christian church it would be otherwise he would know as the administrator we will suppose him a pagan that this church was endowed that it was possessed a property more or less legally guaranteed it had a very definite position of its own among the congregations and corporations of the city peculiar and yet well secured he would further know it as an administrator and this would more concern him for the possession of property by so important a body would seem natural enough that to this building and the corporation of which it was a symbol were attached an appreciable number of his fellow citizens a small minority of course in any town of such a date the first generation of the third century but a minority most appreciable and most worthy of his concern from three very definite characteristics in the first place it was certainly growing in the second place it was certainly even after so many generations of growth a phenomena perpetually novel in the third place and this was the capital point it represented a true political organism the only subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the empire if the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in this description let him retain this point it is from the historical point of view the explanation of all that was to follow the catholic church in Lyons would have been for that senator a distinct organism with its own officers its own peculiar spirit its own type of vitality which if he were a wise man he would know was certain to endure and to grow even if he were but a superficial and unintelligent spectator he would recognize as unique like a sort of little state the catholic church included all classes and kinds of men and like the empire itself within which it was growing it regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it with its own sphere the senator the tenant the freed man insofar as they were members of this corporation were equally bound to certain observances did they neglect these observances the corporation would expel them or subject them to penalties of its own he knew that though misunderstandings and fables existed with regard to this body there was no social class in which its members had not propagated a knowledge of its customs he knew and it would disturb him to know that its organization though in no way admitted by law and purely what we should call voluntary was strictly very formidable here in Lyons as elsewhere it was under a monarchial head called by the Greek name of the Episcopos Greek was a language which the cultured knew and used throughout the western or latin part of the empire to which he belonged the title would not therefore be the Greek title of presbyter the name of the official priest sacked under this monarchial head of the organization or then would the Greek title Diaconos which title was attached to an order just below the priests which was comprised of the inferior officials of the clerical body he knew that this particular cult like the innumerable others that were represented by the various sacred buildings of the city had its mysteries its solemn ritual and so forth the officials of its body might alone engage and which the mass of the local Christians for such was their popular name attended as a congregation but he would further know that this scheme of worship differed wholly from any other of the many observances around it by a certain fixity of definition the catholic church was not an opinion nor a fashion nor a philosophy it was not a theory that the Christian body corporate based on numerous exact doctrines extreme jealousy of its unity and of its precise definitions and filled as it was with no other body of men at that time with passionate conviction by this I do not mean that the senator so walking to his official duties could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one who was attached by tradition inherited from his father he would guess and justly guess that this rapidly growing body counted very many members who were indifferent and some perhaps who were ignorant of its full doctrine but the body as a whole in its general spirit and especially in the disciplined organization of its hierarchy did differ from everything rounded in this double character of precision and conviction no dogma as we should say today taken for granted in the lines of his time save among the Christians the pagan masses were attached without definite religion to a number of customs in social morals they were guided by certain institutions at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men, land and goods patriotism the bond of smaller societies and the conception of a universal empire this Christian church alone represented a complete theory of life to which men were attached as they had hundreds of years before been attached to their local city with its local gods and intense corporate local life without any doubt the presence of that church and of what it stood for would have concerned our senator it was no longer negligible nor a thing to be only occasionally observed it was a permanent force and what is more a state within the state the end of section 7 section 8 Europe and the Faith this is the LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Europe and the Faith section 8 chapter 2 continued if he were like most of his kind in that generation the Catholic church would have affected him as an irritant its existence interfered with the general routine of public affairs if he were as a small minority even of the rich already were in sympathy with it though not of it it would still have concerned him he was the only exceptional organism of his uniform time and it was growing this senator goes into the curia he deals with the business of the day it includes complaining upon certain assessments of the imperial taxes he consults the lists and sees there it was the fundamental conception of the whole of that society men drawn up in grades of importance exactly corresponding to the amount which each possessed he has to vote perhaps upon some question of local repairs the making of some new street or the establishment of some monument probably he hears of some local quarrel provoked he is told by the small segregated Christian body and he follows the police to report upon it he leaves the curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts of his many farms what deaths of slaves there have been what has been the result of harvest what purchases of slaves or goods have been made what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenetry for the army and so forth such a man was concerned one way or another with perhaps a dozen large farming centers or villages and had some thousands of human beings dependent upon him in this domestic business he hardly comes across the church at all it was still in the towns it was not yet rooted in the countryside there might possibly even at that distance from the frontiers be rumors of some little incursion or other of barbarians perhaps a few hundred fighting men come from the outer Germanies had taken refuge with Roman Garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of neighboring barbarians or perhaps they were attempting to live by pillage in the neighborhood of Garrison and the soldiers had been called out against them he might have from the hands of a friend in that Garrison a letter brought to him officially by the imperial post which was organized along all the great highways telling him what had been done to the marauders or to the suppliants how to some had after capture been allotted land to till under conditions nearly servile others perhaps forcibly recruited for the army but never for a moment have suggested to him any coming danger to the society in which he lived he would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably literary and there would have been an end of his day in such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the small Catholic body in a then pagan city and we should remember if we are to understand history that by this time it was already the phenomena which contemporaries were also beginning to note most carefully that is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local affairs including the Catholic church in his city would have struck such a man at such a time if we use our knowledge to consider the empire as a whole we must observe certain other things in the landscape touching the church and the society around it in the first place there had been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic friction breaking out between the imperial power and this separate voluntary organism the Catholic church the church's partial secrecy its high vitality its claim to independent administration were the superficial causes of this speaking as a Catholic we know that the ultimate causes were more profound Catholic was a conflict between Jesus Christ with his great foundation on one hand and what Jesus Christ himself had called the world but it is unhistorical to think of a pagan world opposed to a Christian world at that time the very conception of a pagan world requires some external manifest Christian civilization against which to contrast it there was none such of course for Rome in the first generation of the third century the church had around her a society in which education was very widely spread intellectual curiosity very lively a society largely skeptical but interested to discover the right conduct of human life and tasting now this opinion now that to see if it could discover a final solution it was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to speak of its luxury or its cruelty a cruel man could be cruel in it without suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian training would render natural to our ideas but a merciful man could be and would be merciful and would preach mercy and would be generally applauded it was a society in which there were many aesthetics whole schools of thought and contemptuous of sensual pleasure but a society distinguished from the Christian particularly in this that at bottom it believed man to be sufficient to himself and all believe to be mere opinions here was the great antithesis between the church and her surroundings it is an antithesis which has been revived today today outside the Catholic Church there is no distinction between opinions and faith it is more than sufficient to himself the church did not and does not believe man to be sufficient to himself nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the doors to full knowledge or full social content it proposed and proposes its doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of faith it differed from or was more solid then all around it in this hypothesis affirmed concrete historical facts instead of suggesting myths and treated its ritual of mysteries as realities instead of symbols a word is to the constitution of the church all men with an historical training know that the church of the years 200 to 250 was what I have described it an organized society under bishops and what is more it is evident that there was a central primacy as well as local primacy in various other great cities but what is not so generally emphasized is the way in which Christian society appears to have looked at itself at that time the conception which the Catholic church had of itself in the early third century can perhaps best be approached by pointing out that if we use the word Christianity we are unhistorical Christianity is a term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post reformation writer it connotes an opinion or a theory a point of view an idea the Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception upon the contrary they were attached to its very antithesis they were attached to the conception of a thing of an organized body instituted for a definite end disciplined in a definite way and remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine one can talk in speaking of the first three centuries of Stoicism or Epicureanism or Neoplatonism but one cannot talk of Christianism or Christism indeed no one has been so ignorant or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases but the current phrase Christianity used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in the third century is intellectually the equivalent of Christianism or Christism and I repeat it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea it connotes something historically false something that never existed let me give an example of what I mean four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in Carthage in the year 225 they are all men of culture all possessed of the two languages Greek and Latin well read and interested in the problems and half solutions of their skeptical time one will profess himself materialist and will find another to agree with him there is no personal God certain moral duties must be recognized by men for such and such utilitarian reasons and so forth the host is not of that opinion he has been profoundly influenced by certain mysteries into which he has been initiated that is symbolical plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high seclusion before members of a society sworn to secrecy he has come to feel the spiritual life as the natural life around him he has curiously followed and often paid at high expense the services of necromancers he believes that in an initiation which he experienced in his youth and during the secret and most vivid dramas or mystery in which he then took part he actually came in contact with the spiritual world such men were not uncommon the declining society of the time was already turning to influences of that type the host's conviction his odd and reticent attitude towards such things impress his guests one of the guests, however a simple, solid kind of man not drawn to such vagaries says that he has been reading with great interest the literature of the Christians he is in admiration of the traditional figure of the founder of their church he quotes certain phrases especially from the four Orthodox Gospels they move him to eloquence and by their poignancy and illuminative power have an effect upon his friends he ends by saying for my part I have come to make it a sort of rule to act as this man Christ would have had me act he seems to me to have led the most perfect life I ever read of and the practical maxims which are attached to his name seem to me a sufficient guide to life that he will conclude simply is the groove into which I have fallen and I do not think I shall ever leave it let us call the man who has so spoken feroleus would feroleus have been a Christian would the officials of the Roman Empire have called him a Christian would he have been in danger of unpopularity where Christians were unpopular would Christians have received him among themselves as part of the strict and still somewhat secret society would he have counted with any single man of the whole empire as one of the Christian body the answer is most emphatically no no Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as coming within his view no imperial officer in the most violent crisis of one of those spasmodic persecutions which the church had to undergo would have troubled him with a single question no Christian congregation would have regarded him as in any way connected with their body opinion of that sort Christism had no relation to the church how far it existed we cannot tell for it was unimportant in so far as it existed it would have been on all fours with any one of the vague opinions which floated about the cultured Roman world now it is evident that the term Christianity used as a point of view a mere mental attitude would include such a man and it is equally evident that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to do with the Christian religion of that day for the Christian religion then as now was a thing not a theory it was expressed in what I have called an organism and that organism was the Catholic church the end of section 8 section 9 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org you're up and the faith by Hilaire Bellock section 9 chapter 2 continued the reader may hear object but surely there was heresy after heresy in a moment claiming the name of Christian whom the Orthodox Church rejected nay some suffered martyrdom rather than relinquish the name true but the very existence of such sex should be enough to prove the pointed issue these sex arose precisely because within the Catholic church exact doctrine unbroken tradition and absolute unity were all three regarded as the necessary marks of the institution the heresies arose one after another from the action of men who were prepared to define yet more punctiliously what the truth might be and to claim with yet more particular insistence the possession of living tradition and the right to be regarded as the center of unity no heresy pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite the whole gist and meaning of a heresy was that it the heresy or he the heresark was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp and to assert his own definition what you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic church asserting and defining a thing and then some time after the heresark denying this definition no heresy comes within a hundred miles of such a procedure what happened in the early church is that some doctrine not yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a man that his final settlement clashes with the opinion of others that after debate and counsel and also authoritative statement on the part of the bishops this man's solution is rejected and an orthodox solution is defined from that moment the heresark if he will not fall into line with the defined opinion ceases to be in communion and his rejection of his own original insistence upon his doctrine are in themselves proof that both he and his judges postulate unity and definition as the two necessary marks of the Catholic truth no early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his opponent you may be right let us agree to differ let us each form his part of Christian society the moment a question is raised it must of its nature the early church being what it was be defined one way or the other well then what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and present everywhere in the first years of the third century let me briefly set down what we know as a matter of historical and documentary evidence the church of this period to have held what we know is a very different matter we may amplify it from our conceptions of the probable according to our knowledge of that society as for instance when we say that there was probably a bishop at Marseille before the middle of the second century or we may amplify it by guesswork and suppose in the absence of evidence some just possible but exceedingly improbable thing as that an important canonical gospel has been lost there is an infinite range for guesswork and heretical but the plain and known facts which repose upon historical and documentary evidence and which have no corresponding documentary evidence against them are both few and certain let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly true of his time Tertullian was a man of about 40 in the year 200 the church then thought as an unbroken tradition years before in Palestine only 130 years before Tertullian's birth had risen again on the third day this man was a known and real person with whom numbers had conversed and Tertullian's childhood men still lived to admit eyewitnesses of the thing asserted this man the church said was also the supreme creator god there you have an apparent contradiction in terms at any rate a mystery is for theory and as fact destined to lead to three centuries of more and more particular definition this man who also was god himself had through chosen companions called apostles founded a strict and disciplined society called the church the doctrines the church taught professed to be his doctrines they included the immortality of the human soul its redemption its alternative of salvation initiation into the church was by way of baptism with water in the name of the trinity father son and holy ghost before his death this man who was also god had instituted a certain right and mystery called the Eucharist he took bread and wine and changed them into his body and blood he ordered this right to be continued the central act of worship of the Christian church a consecration of bread and wine by priests in the presence of the initiated and baptized Christian body of the locality the bread and wine so consecrated were certainly called universally the body of the lord the faithful also certainly communicated that is ate the bread and drank the wine thus changed in the mystery it was the central right of the church thus to take the body of the lord it was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop regarded as directly the successor of the apostles the chief agent of the ritual and the guardian of the doctrine the whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through their bishops held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially one ritual all that is plain history the total proportion of the church in the city of Carthage where Tertullian Rome was certainly large enough for its general suppression to be impossible one might argue from one of his phrases that it was a tenth of the population equally certainly did the unity of the Christian church and its bishops teach the institution of the Eucharist the resurrection the authority of the apostles a very large number of converts were to be noted and to go back to Tertullian the majority of his time by his testimony were recruited by conversion and were not born Christians Satch is known to have been in a very brief outline the manner of the Catholic church in these early years of the third century Satch was the undisputed manner of the church as a Christian or an inquiring pagan was acquainted with it in the years 160 to 200 and onwards I have purposely chosen this moment because it is the moment in which Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale many of the points I have set down are of course demonstrably anterior to the third century I mean by demonstrably anterior proved in earlier documentary testimony that ritual and doctrine firmly fixed our long anterior to the time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common sense but there are documents as well thus we have Justin Martyr he was no less than 60 years older than Tertullian he was as near to the crucifixion as my generation is to the reform bill and he gave us a full description of the mass we have the letters of St. Ignatius he was a much older man than St. Justin perhaps 40 or 50 years older he stood to the generations contemporary with our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone Bismarck and early as he is he testifies fully to the organization of the church with its bishops the Eucharistic doctrine and the primacy of the Roman sea the literature remaining to us from the early first century after the crucifixion is very scanty the writings of what are called apostolic times that is documents proceeding immediately from men who could remember the time of our Lord form not only in their quantity and that is sufficiently remarkable but in their quality too a far superior body of evidence to what we possess from the next generation we have more in the New Testament than we have in the writings after the death of the apostles but what does remain is quite convincing there arose from the date of our Lord's ascension into heaven from say AD 30 or so before the death of Tiberius and a long lifetime after the Roman organization of Gaul a definite strictly ruled and highly individual society with fixed doctrines special mysteries and a strong discipline of its own with the most vivid and absolutely unmistakable and this society was and is called the church I would beg the reader to know with precision both the task upon which we are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing for there is no matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by religious bias the task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of history as it was I am not writing here from a brief of fact I am acting as a witness or a copier not as an advocate or lawyer and I say that the conclusion we can establish with regard to the Christian community on these main lines is the conclusion to which any man must come quite independent of his creed he will deny these facts only if he has such bias against the faith as interferes with his reason a man's belief in the mission of the Catholic church does not move him to these plain historical conclusions any more than they move him to his conclusions upon the real existence doctrine and organization of contemporary Mormonism whether the church told the truth is for philosophy to discuss what the church in fact was is plain history the church may have taught nonsense its organization may have been a clumsy human thing that would not affect the historical facts by the year 200 the church was everywhere manifestly and in ample evidence throughout the Roman world what I have described and taught the doctrines I have just enumerated but it stretches back 170 years before that date and it has evidence to its title throughout that era of youth to see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparently in 200 was rooted in the very origins of the institution 170 years before to see that all this mass of ritual doctrine and discipline starts with the first third of the first century and the church was from its birth the church the reader must consider the dates we know that we have in the body of documents contained in the canon which the church has authorized as the New Testament documents proceeding from men even modern scholarship with all its love of fantasy is now clear upon so obvious a point the authors of the Gospels the Acts and the Epistles Clement also and Ignatius also who had conversed with the apostles may have been deceived they may have been deceiving I am not here concerned with that point the discussion of it belongs to another province of argument altogether but they were contemporaries they said they were contemporaries of in other words their writings are what is called authentic if I read in the four Gospels not only the first three of such of such and such a miracle I believe it or I disbelieve it but I am reading the account of a man who lived at the time when the miracle is said to have happened if you read in Ignatius seven certainly genuine letters of Episcopacy and the Eucharist you may think him a wrong headed enthusiast but you know that you are reading the work of a man who personally witnessed the beginnings of the church you know that the customs, manners, doctrines and institutions he mentions or takes for granted were certainly those of his time that is of the origin of Catholicism though you may think the customs silly and the doctrines nonsense the end of section nine