The New Paganism by Hilaire Belloc

I’ve been reading Essays of a Catholic by Hilaire Belloc.  Belloc is like Chesterton in that I have yet to read anything written by either man that did not strike me as brilliant and profound.  The first essay in the book is “The New Paganism”* from which I’ve taken the following quotes…

… a Christian man or society is one that has some part of Catholicism left in him. But when every shred of Catholicism is lost we call that state of things “Unchristian.”

I have found this to be so true… we might not use the word unchristian, but certainly we use words that are interchangeable with it. Even in the protestant faiths, we see slivers of Catholic (universal) Truth that remain to some degree, though I have seen of late some who’ve shredded it entirely and yet claim the title Christian.

…with the attack on faith and the Church at the Reformation, the successful rebellion of so many and their secession from united Christendom, there began a process which could only end in the complete loss of all Catholic doctrine and morals by the deserters.  

Rebellion indeed, for that is what the Reformation was.  Belloc claims that we are today reaching this consummation and that was in 1931 or there abouts. Indeed, so we are even more today… and yet the Church remains, true to the faith she was given.  She is yet a shining beacon, parenting her children through the rocky shoals of this journey, a light to guide those who still seek and treasure truth.  It has been many years since the fathers of the rebellion began their denomination of their faith… how many will be lost because of it? How many will live out their lives in service to God in the desert created for them by their forefathers, so far and yet so close to the bounty God left to sustain His people here in these shadow lands. They do so much despite serving on such scant rations!

…there are, spreading over what used to be the Christian world, larger and larger areas over which the Christian spirit has wholly failed; is absent… …both larger moral and larger physical areas, but especially larger moral areas. There are now whole groups of books, whole bodies of men, which are definitely pagan, and these are beginning to join up into larger groups. It is like the freezing over of a pond, which begins in patches of ice; the patches unite to form wide sheets, till at last the whole is one solid surface. … they are coalescing—to form a corpus of anti-Christian influence. It is not so much that they deny the Incarnation and the Resurrection, not even that they ignore doctrine. It is rather that they contradict and oppose the old inherited Christian system of morals to which people used to adhere long after they had given up definite doctrine.

Is this not what we bemoan regularly in our own society as well as others? In my own life I see quite close at hand a life that embodies this description.  Truly, this life is pagan, yet not pagan with a hope of something better… a new pagan such as Belloc describes in this essay… a pagan who has turned their back on hope, disdained it and chosen paganism, humanism, as their god. 

So often pundits insist that we ‘can’t legislate morality’.  On the contrary, morality is the root of all legislation… what is legislation but the common morality chosen for a group of people to which they are held by penalty? Personally, having seen the various ‘types’ of legislated morality available in the world today, I far prefer the ones that are based upon Christian doctrine.  This is not due primarily to my own faith, so much as it is the preference for the results of that doctrine’s morality taken to it’s conclusion in those given cultures.

What does doctrine have to do with morals? Belloc is succinct.

…morals are the fruit of doctrine.

Belloc goes on to identify the source of this trend… 

The true origin of this attitude of mind in modern times is the powerful genius of Calvin, though those who most suffer his influence would most strenuously deny their subjection to it, partly because they have never read him, much more because they do not see it in their daily papers…

Calvin, then, is at the fountainhead of this new sense of doom. But behind Calvin the fatalist attitude is an attitude as old, of course, as the hills. It is a temptation to which the human intellect has yielded on important occasions from as far back as we can trace its recorded experience and definitions. To the mind in that mood all things are part of an unchangeable process following from cause to effect immutably. 

… that one very powerful agent in producing this mood is the desire to be rid of responsibility.

Denial of man’s free will indulges that desire to be rid of responsibility.  If we deny freedom of will to choose, we deny our own responsibility and can reject every objectionable thing with ‘it’s not my fault…’ This is pervasive in our society even more so today.

…the New Paganism has already begun to produce and cannot but produce more and more a mass of restrictive legislation.  

More restrictive legislation while being more permissive of inhumanity.

It is a paradox, of course, that such restrictive legislation should be bred from a mood which proceeded originally from rebellion against restriction, but the fact is undoubted—it is before all our eyes. With the denial of the will there necessarily appears the questioning of any content to the word “freedom.” In a Christian society you were free to do a number of acts, for some of which you could be punished under Christian laws, for others of which no state or other authority could punish you, but which were opposed to the social atmosphere in which you lived. But the New Paganism will tend, not to punish, but to restrain with fetters; to prevent action, to impose coercive bonds. It will be at issue more and more with human dignity. It has already, in certain provinces (the Calvinist canton of Vaud in Switzerland is an example), enacted what is called “the sterilization of the unfit” as a positive law. It has not yet enacted, though it has already proposed and will certainly in time enact, legislation for the restriction of births. Not only in these, but in many other departments of life, one after another, will this mechanical network spread and bind those subject to it under a compulsion which cannot be escaped.

and…

The battle for right doctrine in theology is always also a battle for the preservation of definite social things (institutions, habits) following from right doctrine; nor is there anything more contemptible intellectually than the attitude of those who imagine that because doctrine must be stated in abstract terms it therefore has no practical application nor any real fruit in the real world of real men. Contrariwise, difference in doctrine is at the root of all political and social differences; therefore is the struggle for or against true doctrine the most vital of struggles. . . .

and… 

The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see.

The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing; the other is declining towards a condition where the society it informs will be blind and deaf, even to the main natural pleasures of life and to temporal truths. It will be incapable of understanding what they are all about.

The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing; all the poetry of the Old Paganism, even where it despairs, has this sense. And you may read in those of its writers who actively opposed religion, such as Lucretius, a fine religious sense of dignity and order. The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.

There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. 

A blog entry can in no way do this essay justice. It is powerful and prescient. Belloc was truly a great historian and a brave man to continue to speak truth when it was unpopular to do so.

Rod Bennet of tremendous trifles  has blogged on Belloc’s writings on the New Paganism as well and his entry is well worth reading.

*an incomplete rendering of the essay (but at least it is partly available online )where perhaps can be read more fully the context of the quotes I’ve taken.