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Hilaire Belloc
As a historian, Belloc felt his work ". . . should above all explain: It should give ‘the how and the why.’ It is the business of history to make people understand how they came to be; what was the origin and progress of the state of which they form a part; what were the causes that influenced each phase of change from the beginning almost to our own time." Taken from A Shorter History of England.
Belloc's most well known and lengthy work on the subject of the crusades was his 1937 book, The Crusades, which sought not only to examine the reasons for their calling, but also the cause of their initial success and later failure. He also addressed the issue of the crusades in a number of other works on related topics. For example, in his work titled The Great Heresies [link provided below], Belloc provided a defense of the Albigensian Crusade as well as an examination of the militancy of Islam from which he argued for the necessity of the crusades.
When in the heart of the Middle Ages it looked as though again Islam had failed, a new batch of
Mongol soldiers, "Turks" by name, came in and saved the fortunes of Mohammedanism again
although they began by the most abominable destruction of such civilization as Mohammedanism
had preserved. That is why in the struggles of the Crusades Christians regarded the enemy as
"The Turk"; a general name common to many of these nomad tribes. The Christian preachers
of the Crusades and captains of the soldiers and the Crusaders in their songs speak of "The Turk"
as the enemy much more than they do in general of Mohammedanism. In spite of the advantage of
being fed by continual recruitment, the pressure of Mohammedanism upon Christendom might have
failed after all, had one supreme attempt to relieve that pressure upon the Christian West succeeded.
That supreme attempt was made in the middle of the whole business (A.D. 1095-1200) and is called
in history "The Crusades." Catholic Christendom succeeded in recapturing Spain; it nearly succeeded
in pushing back Mohammedanism from Syria, in saving the Christian civilization of Asia, and in cutting
off the Asiatic Mohammedan from the African. Had it done so perhaps Mohammedanism would have
died. But the Crusades failed. Their failure is the major tragedy in the history of our struggle against
Islam, that is, against Asia_against the East.
[Taken from The Great Heresies- Chapter on The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed]
Belloc was known as an influencial Catholic intellectual. He included among his greatest friends the writer and thinker G.K. Chesterton, and never shied away from public debate. For example, Belloc’s exchanges with H. G. Wells over the latter’s publication of The Outline of History was one of the most controversial and notorious academic battles of the twentieth century. Ava Maria Professor Joseph Pearcy has described the Belloc-Wells confrontations as follows.
Belloc objected to his adversary’s tacitly anti-Christian stance, epitomized by the fact that Wells had
devoted more space in his "history" to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than he had given to
the figure of Christ. But it was the underlying philosophy of materialistic determinism in Wells’s
History that was most anathema to him. Wells believed that human "progress" was both blind
and beneficial-unshakeable, unstoppable, and utterly inexorable. History was the product of invisible
and immutable evolutionary forces that were coming to fruition in the twentieth century. Human history
had its primitive beginnings in the caves but was now reaching its climax in the modern age with the
final triumph of science over religion. The emergence of science from the ashes of "superstition"
heralded a new dawn for humanity, a brave new world of happiness made possible by technology.
Obviously, such an approach precluded any serious or objective consideration of the great ideas that
had forged human history, since in Wells’s view, these ideas were shaped by the superstition and
ignorance that had been superseded by humanity’s progress toward modernity.
Wells’s "outline" had been, to Belloc, like a red rag waved at a bull. Belloc charged, accusing Wells
of prejudiced provincialism, claiming that "in history proper" Wells "was never taught to appreciate
the part played by Latin and Greek culture and never introduced to the history of the early Church."
Furthermore, he suffered from "the very grievous fault of being ignorant that he is ignorant": "He has
the strange cocksuredness of the man who knows only the old conventional textbook of his schooldays
and mistakes it for universal knowledge" (quoted in Michael Coren, The Invisible Man: The Life and
Liberties of H. G. Wells, Jonathan Cape, 32). The controversy reached a conclusion and a climax in
1926, when Belloc’s articles refuting Wells’s history were collected into a single volume and published
as A Companion to Mr. Wells’s "Outline of History." Wells responded with Mr. Belloc Objects, to
which Belloc, determined to have the last word, replied with Mr. Belloc Still Objects. At the end of
the controversy, Belloc claimed to have written over 100,000 words in refutation of the central
arguments in Wells’s book. As such, Belloc could be likened not so much to a charging bull as to a
biting bulldog that refuses to let go.
[Taken from Joseph Pearcy Past Present Hilaire Belloc: Seeing History with Eyes Wide Open]
[Continued...]
Additional Articles on Hilaire Belloc
Joseph Pearcy Past Present Hilaire Belloc: Seeing History with Eyes Wide Open - Catholic Answers
Hilaire Belloc Catholic Authors
Hilaire Belloc The Alliance of Literary Societies
Ian Boyd Hilaire Belloc: the myth and the man The Tablet December 2003
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen Hilaire Belloc: Defender of the Faith CERC
Online Books by Hilaire Belloc
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: Europe and the Faith (Gutenberg text)
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: First and Last (Gutenberg text)
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: The Great Heresies (text files at EWTN)
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (Gutenberg text)
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: On Something (Gutenberg text)
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: The Path to Rome (Gutenberg text)
Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953: Survivals and New Arrivals (HTML at EWTN)
Online Poetry by Hillaire Belloc
Hillaire Belloc- Poetry Archives
(c) Andrew Holt, December 2005- Permission is given for electronic copying and distribution in print for educational and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.