Why is this? Excepting Belloc’s more faithful devoteés, why only the quick reference to the now infamous incident when he pulled out his rosary in the British Parliament, and then a matter-of-fact continuation in the monograph onto another topic as if the occurrence can be catalogued as a “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not”? Did not Belloc prognosticate with astonishing accuracy the frenetic and defiant paganism of our day when most at the time were constructing utopian fantasies rooted in Pelagian chimeras? Does not his Pelagian Drinking Song intimate the “howling heretics” of post-Vatican II leftist revisionism? Belloc warned of the imminent exigency associated with the stamina and twentieth-century resurgence of fundamentalist Islam when most in the West presupposed that “it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”¹ Did he not contest and expose H.G. Wells’ very popular The Outline of History as mock history?² In Land and Water, his speculations on the developments of the First World War won accolades from the Times. In his classic The Servile State, is there not an anticipation of that socialist choking of individual liberty as is evidenced in post-war Western governments? Already in 1913 Belloc seemed to see the coming Keynesian model of state control of the economy through money and taxes when he forecasted:

The future of industrial society... is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.³

From a personal viewpoint, and within the narrow latitude of my knowledge of English letters, I would put forward that next to Maritain’s seminal work on the philosophical implications of Luther’s revolt,⁴ Belloc’s thesis of the after-effects of the Reformation, in a socio-political context, were very accurate and not so outlandish as some of his critics have contested.

Admittedly, Belloc did not possess, and was the antithesis to, the almost tranquil, gentlemanly and methodical acumen of perhaps a higher ranking Christopher Dawson. Though this still does not detract from his enormous contribution to Catholic apologetics, whether one defers to him or not. In the early 1970s, James Oliver penned that “Dawson came as a great relief to the generation after Belloc, exhausted by brutal polemics and insensitive dismissals of unchristened but honest motives”⁵. Yet Oliver, I believe, overlooked the fact that Belloc and Dawson were men of different times and social milieus, with dissimilar angles of attack, addressing themselves to differing intellectual audiences. Even in the 1990s we have a distinguished thinker like Pro fessor James Hitchcock who makes quite clear his dissension from Belloc. He described Belloc as:

...like a man with a machine gun — by spraying shots everywhere he inevitably hit some targets, but many of his bullets went astray. He does not seem to have understood how historical judgments are formed, through patient sifting of evidence, and seemed rather to deduce them from his principles.⁶

Yet, I conjecture, Professor Hitchcock, Mr. Oliver and others have placed too much emphasis on the tonality in Belloc’s expositions and from this deduced a kind of deficiency in socio-historical interpretation. The range and multiformity of one’s interests, including the style of one’s writing — be it coldly straightforward or appealing as quicksilver — cannot be the only factors to gauge the aptitude of a thinker (I will return to this).

Moreover, the anti-Semite argument does not work anymore. These accusations come from critics not so much appalled by Belloc’s occasional injurious statements, but by either their secret loathing for Belloc’s clarity in elucidating Catholic truths, the diversity and scope of his knowledge, simple ignorance of his works, hearsay, jealousy, or, of course, that general anti-Catholic sentiment which secularity continuously revels in. Contrary to the standard anti-Semite label, the biographer Michael Coren wrote:

Belloc’s polemics did periodically drift into the realms of bigotry, but he was invariably a tenacious opponent of philosophical anti-Semitism, ostracized friends who made attacks upon individual Jews, and was an inexorable enemy of fascism and all its works, speaking out against German anti-Semitism before the National Socialists came to power.⁷

The issue is now settled.

First and foremost it must be remembered that with Belloc we are dealing with an altogether different species — and it was the nature of his species, metaphysically speaking that is, that made him such an important and singular thinker. Yet it is with this striking nature, when he expressed it by pen or personality, that comes, I believe, the ambivalency surrounding Belloc. For Belloc, pen and personality were fused into one unit, so to speak. He did not write in a disinterested parlance, but in an interested and intense one. One apperceives an anomalous degree of personal involvement in his discourse. Speaking statistically, Belloc was an outlier, a large and loud deviation from the mean value of a lukewarmness. If someone dislikes Belloc’s pen, then automatically does this person dislike Belloc’s personality. True, the pen and personality of any writer are interlinked with one another. With Belloc, however, they were conjoined to a degree more than normal.

Now one might presume that such a man as described would be incapable of objectively approaching history and the affairs of the day, that he would blot out all else that did not dwell within the realm of his own concern. Indeed, open up any one of Belloc’s books and immediately do we encounter a blunt, oratorical and sometimes bombastic discourse. A systematic abruptness is at once discerned and leaves one to query: “Who is this fellow?” Belloc will bluntly write of “the Protestant thing” and “the Manichean thing”; he will refer to members of the British Par liament as “the dull herd” (one of my favorites); he will supply a suite of causes to a particular historical eventuality and then conclude, in triumphal finality, with an “and all the rest of it.” Effectively does Belloc kick his reader in the face. He seemingly appears averse to any counterargumentation. He stands outside your door and bellows: “I am Hilaire Belloc and as such will tell you the truths of Catholicism.” Now at this juncture comes the question: Should one open the door and listen with expectation or must one recoil in disgust and tell him to depart the premises? Or, as is the case with some conservative Catholics, should one only open the door ajar, peek outside, and listen to his thunderous voice as it penetrates and rumbles the household?

Considering the aforementioned, one might, again, assume that Belloc took no heed of what others thought and propounded. Not so. In the preface to his Essays of a Catholic, he confesses otherwise:

I must apologize for the personal tone in each of the papers here printed: I can write no other way, and, indeed, I prefer in reading others to discover myself. It has the advantage in the present case of disengaging any one else of my communion from views I may express. ⁸

Hilary astonishes us once again. Instead of self-extrapolating his views and opinions outwards to make them totally representative and true with no room for counterposition, he rather insists that the personal tone in his writing separates himself from others. I interpret this to mean that Belloc was taking personal responsibility for what he expounded and that he was open to critique of his ideas. It is just the fact that he comes across as a cold blast of wind, that he (more precisely) so much believed in the truths of Catholicism, which has lead many to mistake this as closed-mindedness. To be sure, Belloc was hardheaded. But as his friend Chesterton keenly observed: “A convinced Catholic is easily the most hard-headed and logical person walking about the world today.” ⁹

Because Belloc’s pen and personality were so inseparable, it could be asked what is the definition of personality? Is it akin to what Webster’s New Col legiate Dictionary defines as “the totality of an individual’s behavioural and emotional tendencies?” Though there is something deterministic and vulgar about this definition. Such a view reduces the human person to the level of crass quantity, to a kind of nerve-ending which reacts only to external stimuli, and it seems that many have judged Belloc’s abilities solely upon this type of definition. In other words, they have taken his personal habit of expression for personality only in a quantitative or immanent way. A habit is also a quality, says St. Thomas¹⁰, and personality should also be considered in a qualitative mode. Personality is much more than sensorial tendency. It transcends the moment and as such should be considered in a theological light. And I can think of no better person to define personality in this sense than Fr. George Rutler. Personality is:

...the positive attribute which makes the human an independent subject... that to which all that pertains to it attaches... the vernacular evidence of the speechless soul, the natural expression of the supernatural endowments of will and intellect... irrepressible despite its concealment. ¹¹

I believe that if Belloc’s personality (and thus his pen) are considered in this way, much of that longstanding bewilderment and uneasiness surrounding the status of Belloc in the field of Catholic letters will eventually disappear. Furthermore, a lesson might be learned when reference is made to an observation made by Newman in his Essay on the Development of Chris tian Doctrine. Though Belloc did not explicitly concern himself with doctrine, the passage of time will indicate corruption — in this case, Belloc’s works. Here, I will agree with Aidan Mackey who said that Belloc “was a social and political thinker of considerable power, significance and integrity... he stands amongst the greatest writers of English prose” whose work “will, in time, find its deserved placed in English letters.”¹²

But even if that slight antagonism towards Belloc is still there, it should never be forgotten that he was in a large part responsible for Chesterton’s conversion. If these two men within one communion were able to remain friends throughout their lives — these two diametric personalities I might add — then so can those of us today with different personalities, in that same communion which is called Catholic.

Dr. Michael Morassutti is a writer on culture and works from Toronto, Canada.