Bellocian Anthropology: From Modern Alienation to Christian Integration
I should forget the vileness of my own
times, and renew for some days the better freedom of, that vigorous morning
when men were erect, articulate, and worshipping God. --- Hilaire Belloc
Regardless
of where we may individually stand with regard to Hilaire Belloc’s economic,
historical, and political positions --- I, personally, would say that I am one
with the positions he took in the middle and late part of his career --- there
is something about the Bellocian persona,
his love of wine, his experiences at sea, his rambunctious disregard for
bourgeois sensibility (we think of his “drunken” encounter with William and
Henry James), that makes us hanker for a liberated society (i.e., liberated
from modern “liberty”) in which our own Bellocian personalities could emerge
with all of its life affirming power. We too would like to jump into a swimming
pool in full evening dress. Somehow, it would make us complete.
What
is it about the Bellocian persona
which still appeals to contemporary men? I would venture that the “Bellocian
Man” appeals to readers of this work, because there was something about his view
of the Created Order that answers some of the deepest yearnings our heart and
offers a potential healing, in the form of unification, to minds “bifurcated”
into a functioning “religious self” and a “everyday self” in the apostate,
commercialist, and technological world. He, also, testifies to the necessity,
felt by many in the traditionalist Christian community, of restoring nature in Man so that the supernatural will have a fitting object
to perfect. “Restoring nature,” here, means returning to the anima naturaliter Christiana, a soul
predisposed to the reception of grace; returning to that soul that has the body
as its co-principle in all that it does and experiences.
What
we have spoken of as the “Bellocian Man” is really only Man as he was understood
by the Universal Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. It was this
Thomistic Man that was the embodiment of the balanced Catholic Man of body and
soul, natural and redeemed, which emerged in Western Europe during the great
centuries of Christendom.
How
exactly “Thomistic”? To explain this, there is no better place to turn than
Belloc’s 1912 book The Four Men and
the reflections made on that text by Frederick Wilhelmsen in his 1954 monograph
entitled, Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated
Man. In The Four Men we find a
book whose story extends over the course of 4 days, October 29th to November 2nd.
It is fitting that the story passes through All Hallow’s Eve to the Day of All
Souls, since the whole book is pervaded with a certain “earth-sadness,” an
almost pagan prescience of the passing of things. The story takes place in the
countryside that Belloc knew of as home, the South English countryside, the
land of Sussex. In the beginning of a story permeated with a certain autumnal
gloom, “Myself,” who is most certainly meant to express the persona of Belloc himself, sits in the
inn George, “drinking that port of
theirs and staring at the fire.”[1] Moved by the thoughts of
his youth and his love of the River Arun, he arouses himself and resolves to be
off and to see his home again. It is within this context of “returning home”
that he meets 3 characters that are both expressions of Belloc’s own character,
along with being 3 Classical manifestations of the character of Western
Christian Man as he used to be.[2] In The Four Men, Myself is joined by an old man, but one vigorous
enough to accompany the 3 younger men across the countryside of Sussex. Myself
and “Grizzlebeard,” as he agrees to be called, are joined by a Sailor, a
profound realist and a fellow in the full flood of life, who shows this by
being a singer of songs. The company is completed by a Poet, a man of visions
and no money. They pass through the
Sussex weald regaling one another with stories and songs and speak about the
“Worst and Best Thing in the World.”[3]
What
is happening on one level in The Four Men
is clearly Belloc’s own attempt at a medieval allegory. The three
fellow-travelers are all archetypes expressive of one aspect of Classical
Western Man. Grizzlebeard is the man of wisdom, full of ancient lore, singing
dirges of the race and of the passing of
youth. He is custodian of the household gods, he stands for order, historical
continuity, and he views existence with a realism born of age and worldly
insight. He is Tradition embodied.[4] The Sailor is the adventurer in all men. He
is the romantic who revels in his communion with the physical universe. The
Poet, lean in body and ragged in appearance, is a man who is immersed in his
visions and not at home in the material world of practicality. He belongs to
the eternal company of Poets and Seers. He sees visions and dreams dreams.[5]
What
is most interesting about these 3 fellow-travelers is the fact that they are
meant to be partial manifestations of the life and personality of Myself.[6] They are “Other” and, yet,
through their otherness we come to know Belloc himself. Philosophically
speaking, it is the encounter with Otherness (i.e., the other made into a
philosophical theme), which is the great
question in modern philosophy. When Frederick Wilhemsen wrote his Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man in 1954,
it was the Atheistic Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre that set about urging
Modern Man to realize his destiny by casting out the other selves that he found
in his soul. The Other, all others,
are set over against the self, threatening its existence. To quote Wilhelmsen
in this regard, “the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed at the heart of the
person, menacing it with otherness.[7]
Today,
in our iAge, which creates for many, certainly for our youth, an iWorld, the
Other has been “flattened” and “pressed,” if we should use the Bellocian image
of the pressed grape, by a technologically facilitated internet rendering of
the “world.” It is a world substantially gutted of what the perennial
philosophy knew of as “substantial form,” the very objective whatness of things. It is a quiddity,
a“whatness,” an essence that expresses both the place that this thing occupies
in the whole hierarchy of being and, consequently, what objective meaning it has, coming as that meaning would from the
very heart of Divine Providence. Now beings, separated from them as we are by
our mere cyber “touch,” are judged by their surface appearance and “clicked
away” if the visual impression is not as momentarily enticing. What does
“encounter,” “regret,” “disappointment,” and “longing” really mean in a Social
Network World? The Other no longer challenges, it no longer presents those
partial fulfillments of longing; longing that can only be fulfilled,
ultimately, in the One Other, who has “made us for Himself.”
How
did Myself and Grizzlebeard, the Sailor, and the Poet encounter the Other? How did
Belloc, the common referent of all 4 Men, encounter the Other of the Created
World and how does that type of encounter offer us hope for a healing of the
divided psyche of Modern Man, even, the Modern Traditionalist Man?
One
really does not have to puzzle over the question of Belloc’s preferred contact
with Otherness. It is expressed best when, in The Four Men, the Sailor baptizes the idealist metaphysician he
meets with a pint of beer “in the
name of the 5 senses.”[8] It is through his 5 senses
that Belloc meets the world and affirms
its goodness, a goodness that simply follows
necessarily from its being. According
to Belloc, “Every pleasure I know
comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives,
and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in
which my senses have no part I know nothing.”[9] It is through the senses,
the long maligned senses that man feeds on being, he is nourished for a while
and then hungers again.
The
encounter between the senses and the sensible world around us is not only
essential for knowing the world as it is in itself, but the Bellocian Man is Aristotelian in being committed
to the proposition that the soul is in potentia
in itself and only becomes actual
when it encounters what is actual in
the world outside the self. Not only is the actuality of the mind of man
dependent upon an encounter with the substantial forms present in the world,
but according to the perennial philosophical tradition, to know the other is, in an intentional
way, to be the Other as Other.
Perhaps this is what we all love about Belloc. In his histories, his humorous
poems, or his wanderings through the countryside of Italy or Sussex, he seems
to give life to the most mundane of things, it is his life and, yet, it is the life of all that he encounters. It is
here that Belloc becomes the Aristotelian-Thomistic Classical man. In order to
know myself, I must first know what is not
myself, that which is truly other. It is in the not-myself that I am
revealed to myself.[10] Every definition tells us
both what a word means and indicates
what the word does not mean. So too
we can only identify ourselves as what we are by acknowledging, with a
courageous and selfless affirmation, the Other , in its beauty, goodness, and
truth.
In
his embrace of the fallen world in affirmation of the goodness of things, we
find Belloc revealing an “almost pagan prescience of the passing of things,” a
mood of the second of November, the Day of the Dead. In The Four Men, Myself awakes “from a dream,” and Grizzlebeard tells
him solemnly that it is the day of parting. The Four Men walk slowly and
silently through the mists until they take “that lane northward which turns
through Redlands and up to the hill of Elstead and its inn.”[11] They then break bread
together for the last time in communion of friendship, and the 3, led by
Grizzlebeard, part company from Myself, who until the very end protests and
urges yet another day of comradeship. To this suggestion, Grizzlebeard replied,
‘There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle however
strong; nor any life however tender and sound; nor any comradeship among men,
however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak,
because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days. But I who
am old will give you advice, which is this --- to consider chiefly from now
onward those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and
the harbors of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful
sea….Then they all turned about and went rapidly and with a purpose up the
village street. I watched them, straining my sad eyes, but in a moment the mist
received them and they disappeared.”[12]
The
Classical Natural Man, the Myself, had met the paradox built into the very
life’s blood of Fallen Man, the more fully does man achieve his earthly destiny
and bring to a certain pitch of perfection and actuality the possibilities
originally latent within him, the more fully is he aware of Death. If a man is
sane, he aims at becoming more and more. The closer one is to the fullness of
natural human actuality, the closer one is to losing it all. Indeed, after
Myself had left the 3, and hurried “into the loneliness of the high Downs” and
having passed “quickly over the burial mounds of the old kings of Sussex,”
“I…felt the full culmination of all the 20 tides of mutability which had thus
run together to make a skerry of my soul. I saw and apprehended, as a man sees
or touches a physical thing, that nothing of our sort remains….I recognized
that I was in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality. Something
had already passed from me….Youth has gone out apart; it was loved and
regretted and no longer possessed….so I went till suddenly I remembered with
the pang that catches men at the clang of bells what this time was in November; it was the Day of the
Dead.”[13]
The
Classical Man, the Bellocian Man of the Affirmation of Wine and of All Good
Things of the Flesh, can only achieve what he seeks due to the fact of the
Incarnation. The God-Man Who took Flesh is the God-Man Who died for Men on
Mount Calvary. Here is another paradox of man’s existence. It was by
sacrificing Himself, that the way was opened for Natural Man to be saved for
eternity by being elevated to the very Life of God himself. Classical Man, the
Man who has taken all that is good to himself, can only be saved if he
selflessly expends all in the service of the Other, especially the Other in the selfless life of
Charity. It was this Life of Charity, only to be found within the Church that
was for Belloc, ultimately, the one beautiful thing. “If someone find a
beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it.
This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of
any act of religion.”[14] It is Belloc’s heart, frolicking
amidst the children of men, which beckons us from our technological
self-absorption, to a renewed childhood of eternal affirmation.
[1]
Hilaire Belloc, The Four Men: A Farrago
(Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1912), p. 3.
[2]
Frederick Wilhelmsen, Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated
Man, a Study in Christian Integration (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954), pp.
8-11.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Ibid., pp. 11-12.
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
Ibid., pp. 12-14.
[7]
Ibid., pp. 16-19.
[8]
Ibid., pp. 13-14.
[10]
Wilhelmsen, pp. 16-19.
[12]
Ibid., pp. 302-303.
[13]
Ibid., p. 305.
[14]
Hilaire Belloc, “The Idea of a Pilgrimage” in Hills and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1906), p.
266.
Comments
Post a Comment