Hilaire Belloc - The Crisis Of Civilization

THE CRISIS
OF
CIVILIZATION

BEING THE MATTER OF
A COURSE OF
LECTURES DELIVERED AT
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY,
1937

By
Hilaire Belloc

Copyright 1937 by H. Belloc.

Originally published in 1937 by Fordham University Press, New York.

Reprinted in 1973 by Greenwood Press, a division of Congressional Information Service, 88 Post Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-60965

ISBN: 0-89555-462-3

TAN Books

Charlotte, North Carolina

www.TANBooks.com

1992

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BOOKS BY HILAIRE BELLOC

Available From The Publisher

In This Series

Europe and the Faith

William The Conqueror

The Crusades

How the Reformation Happened

Characters of the Reformation

Essays of a Catholic

The Great Heresies

Survivals and New Arrivals

The Crisis of Civilization

"It was the Faith..."

"It was the Faith which gradually and indirectly transformed the slave into the serf, and the serf into the free peasant. It was the Faith which took the guild, inherited from the Pagan Empire, and set it up for the foundational thing it was during all the great medieval period: the guarantee of freedom. It was the Faith which by its moral atmosphere checked and curbed usurythat usury whereby Pagan Society, before the triumph of the Church, had been thoroughly sapped and which today is sapping us again. It was the Faith which put competition within its bounds and made its limited practice subservient to general well-divided property, where its excess would have divided Society into very many destitute and few possessors. It was the disruption of Catholic unity in Europe which let in all the evils from the extreme of which we now suffer and are in peril of dissolution.

"We cannot build up a society synthetically, for it is an organic thing; we must see to it first that the vital principle is there from which the characters of the organism will develop. You will not be able to set up in a pagan or an heretical or a wholly indifferent society the institutions characteristic of economic freedom; you will not be able to curb competition which alone would be sufficient to destroy such freedom, nor pursue permanently and consecutively any one part of the program. The thing must be done as a whole, and it can be done as a whole only by the ambient influence of Catholicism." ().

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

This work contains the matter of the lectures I delivered at Fordham University between the 16th February and the 18th May, 1937. To put the matter in book form I have arranged it not by single lectures, but by groups into which my thesis naturally falls. That thesis may be discovered in the title I have given to the whole, The Crisis of Civilization. It is an historical presentation of the following effect:

That our civilization, that is, the civilization of Christendom, today occupying Europe, especially Western Europe, and radiating thence over the New World, acting also as a leader or instructor of the other cultures in Asia and Northern Africa, has arrived at a crisis where it is in peril of death. I propose therefore to describe how that civilization arose, upon what main lines it developed, what institutions it produced and depended upon, and when it was at its height. I next propose to show historically how it became disunited and thereby spiritually enfeebled while materially progressing, until at last with the destruction of the moral tradition by which it had existed and was precariously maintained, even while that tradition was weakening, it lost its very principle of life and may therefore, unless we return to that principle, dissolve.

My thesis, in other words, is this:

That the culture and civilization of Christendomwhat was called for centuries in general terms "Europe," was made by the Catholic Church gathering up the social traditions of the Graeco-Roman Empire, inspiring them and giving the whole of that great body a new life. It was the Catholic Church which made up, gave us our unity and our whole philosophy of life, and formed the nature of the white world. That worldChristendomwent through the peril of the barbaric assault from without as also from the victorious pressure of great heresywhich soon became a new religionMohammedanism.

These perils it survived, though shorn of much of its territory; it rearose after the pressure was past to the high life of the Middle Ages, which in the 11th, 12th, and especially the 13th centuries reached a climax or summit wherein we were most ourselves and our civilization most assured. But from various causes of which perhaps old age was the chief, that great period showed signs of decline at the beginning of the 14th century; a decline which hastened rapidly throughout the 15th century. The Faith by which we live was increasingly doubted; and the moral authority upon which all depended was more and more contested. The society of Christendom underwent a heavy strain threatening disruption; it equally became more and more unstable, until at last in the early 16th century came the explosion which had been feared and awaited for so long. That disaster is called in general usage "The Reformation."

From that moment onwards throughout the 16th and 17th centuries and the 18th, on through the 19th, the unity of Christendom having disappeared and the vital principle on which its life depended having become weak or distracted, our culture became a house divided against itself, and increasingly imperiled. This evil fortune was accompanied by a rapid increase in external knowledge, that is in science and the command of man over material things, even as he lost his grasp of spiritual truths. It was the converse of what had happened in the beginning of our civilization, when our religion had saved the ancient world and formed a new culture, though burdened by a decline in science and the arts and material things.

Our increase in knowledge of the externals and in our power over nature did nothing to appease the rapidly growing internal strains of our world. The conflict between rich and poor, the conflict between opposing national idolatries, the lack of common standards and of the fixed doctrines upon which they depend had led up, by the beginning of the 20th century, to the brink of chaos; and threatened such dissension between men as to destroy Society. In this crisis the only alternatives are recovery through the restoration of Catholicism or the extinction of our culture.

Such is the scheme of the series of addresses delivered, and of this book in which the matter of them is put before the reader. I have divided it not according to single lectures, but according to certain groups, five in number, to which the progress of those addresses corresponded.

The first group deals with the Foundation of Christendom by the conversion of the Graeco-Roman Empire just before it failed from despair, but not in time to save it from material decline. That process covers roughly the first five centuries of our era.

The next group deals with the great ordeal wherein civilization was tested and with difficulty emergedwhat I have called The Siege of Christendom, whence arose the corresponding high moment of the True Middle Ages, to be followed by their decline. It is a period of roughly a thousand years, from the 6th to the 15th century inclusive. It falls naturally into three subdivisions: the Siege of Christendom, the High Middle Ages and their Decline.

The third group concerns the Reformation, that is the disruption of our society, and the sowing of those seeds which were later to threaten our very existence; the independence of each separate province of Christendom from the rest, the denial of any common moral authority over them, the affirmation of the Sovereign State owing allegiance to none and free to destroy any of its fellows, and open itself to a similar fate without appeal; the destruction of cooperative social life and the growing tyranny of wealth.