Dr. Robert Hickson 2 May 2013Saint Athanasius

Hilaire Belloc’s Canterbury Tale

EPIGRAPHS:

“Then, taking one companion, I set out late in December [1903] to recover andmap out yard by yard all that could be recovered and mapped out of The OldRoad [from Winchester eastward to Canterbury, “the whole of these 120 miles”(100)]....Why did Winchester come to absorb the traffic of the west [ofEngland], and to form a depôt and the political centre of southern England?Why did Canterbury, an inland town, become the goal of this long journeytowards the narrow seas [i.e., to “the Straits of Dover”]?....Winchester andCanterbury being [themselves, perhaps unexpectedly,]...each formed by thesea, and each by similar conditions in the action of that sea.” (Hilaire Belloc,The Old Road, pp. 12, 28, 29, and 63—my emphasis added)

“Thinking these things [specifically about the “great fight” there “between twokings” so long ago, and the trustworthy “hold of a tradition” and those vivid“historical memories of the people...sound...always in spirit”] I went down thehill with my companions, and I reoccupied my mind with the influence ofthat great and particular story of [the martyrdom of] St. Thomas [à Becket],whose shadow had lain over the whole of this road, until in these last fewmiles [before the goal of Canterbury] it had come to absorb it [“my mind”]altogether.” (Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road, p. 276—my emphasis added)

“It has been debated [en route] and cannot be resolved, why these great lines[“of our southern hills,” here the “South Downs” of Sussex]...achieve animpression of majesty. They are not [even] very high....[and yet they have]Something of that economy and reserve by whose power the classic in verseand architecture grows upon the mind....and our own affection can takeroot and grow.” (Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road, p. 179—my emphasis added)

In 1905, just before he entered the House of Commons for four discouraging years (1906-

1910), Hilaire Belloc published a variegated and copious book, entitled The Old Road,1 about his eight-

day journey afoot from Winchester to Canterbury, the latter also being the place where, on the 29th of

December in 1170,2 Saint Thomas à Becket was martyred.

1 Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road (London: Constable and CO LTD, 1952—a reprint of the 1904-1905 first edition). Henceforth, all references to this text will be placed in the main body of the essay, in parentheses.

2 For a reason unknown to me, Belloc’s text mentions a later date than 1170 when, for example, he speaks of “the Great Pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, which arose immediately after his murder in 1174.” (82-83)

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It was indeed a reverent pilgrimage Belloc made in his walking journey—at first with one, and

then later with two companions—and it was also the fruit of much historical and geographical

preparation and archeological study, even amidst the learned antiquarians.

Moreover, that 120-mile exploratory wayfaring to Canterbury during eight winter days—

completed significantly (as we shall see) on the 29th of December—was also a further form of Belloc’s

general historical inquiry and of his specific research into the strategic, nautical and commercial

geography of England—to include an attentiveness to “all the hydrography of south-eastern England”

(259) and its momentous historical implications for the guidance of earlier seaworthy vessels toward

“the place of [their] landing” (31) when first coming into insular England from France and the

Continent. For, as Belloc knew well, also from his own sailing since boyhood, there was (and still is)

the decisive importance of “the choice of entry” (54) to the rocky and shoal-ridden English coast,

especially under certain perilous conditions of the winds and the tides.

However, Belloc’s journey along that partially re-constructed historic “Pilgrim’s Way” (199)

to Canterbury was also an intimate participation in the rooted sanctities of that land—the wells and the

beloved local shrines as well as the sacred altars. At one point, he is even explicit, expansive, and

evocative about this matter, an excerpt from which is the following:

The sacredness of wells is commingled all through Christendom with thatof altars. As for instance in the cathedrals of Chartres, of Nimes, of Sangres,and in St. Nicholas of Bari....At Cheffoi you can see one in full use, rightbefore the high altar and adorned with a sculpture of the woman at thewell [John 4:4-26]. (57—my emphasis added)

Our Belloc begins his narrative by drawing us to reflection and poetic wonder upon those

“primal things which move us” (3) such as those comforting and transforming companions: Fire, a

Roof, Human Voices in the Silence of the Night, a Tower, and, finally, though perhaps less intimately,

the phenomenon and mystery of “The Road” (4). For example,

Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from thefirst exile; only to see such a fire...comforts every man. Again, to hear twovoices outside at night after a silence...transforms the mind. A Roof also, largeand mothering [like a protective cloak or mantle], satisfies us here in thenorth...; so we built in [the] beginning [the roof]: the only way to carry off ourrains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a

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man’s eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemy’s watchor the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. Nor are theseemotions a memory or a reversion only...; we craved these things—thecamp, the refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth—before we made them;they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has perished theywill reappear. Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important isThe Road. (3-4)

Characteristically, Belloc then expresses almost an Encomium of the Road, to teach us how to

see again, and to see what we so easily take for granted and, thereby, to draw forth our greater gratitude

and befitting act of thanksgiving. For, he says about “The Road”:

It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned [like the Hearthor Far-Off Tower]; we are slow to feel its influence. We take so much forgranted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it isperpetually to explore even their own country [such as beloved Sussex!] onfoot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhattardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggestthe towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and gives a unity to all thathas arisen along its way. But for the mass [of men] The Road is silent; it is thehumblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and the mostoriginal of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race.It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older thanbuilding and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for theanimals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and,as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made. (4-5—my emphasis added)

Like the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Josef Pieper, Hilaire Belloc teaches us and helps us

to “learn how to see again,” but in his own special way and with his own nuanced tonalities which

somehow make even the Abstract Things intimately concrete—at times even sacramentally so—and

vivid and abidingly memorable. From all these three men, we have learned better how to see and

acknowledge and properly to receive a gift, without taking those benefactions, nor our benefactors, for

granted.

As should now be expected, our Belloc soon relates The Road to Religion—especially to the

Faith and to the Mass:

More than rivers and more than mountain chains [like the Alps], roads havemoulded the political groups of men....Religions, which are the principalformers of mankind, have followed the roads only, leaping from city to city

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and leaving “the Pagani,” in the villages off the road, to a later influence.Consider the series Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Athens and the Appian Way:Rome, all the tradition of the Tuscan highway, the Ligurian coast, Marseillesand Lyons [on the shore of the river Rhone to the north, strenuously “up-stream”]....It was the Road that laid the train [of links of the spreadingChristian Evangelization]. The Mass had reached Lyons before, perhaps, thelast disciple of the apostles was dead.... And with religions all that is built onthem: letters, customs, community of language and idea, have followed theRoad....Architecture follows it, commerce of course, all information; it is evenso with the poor thin philosophies, each in its little day drifts, for choice,down the road. (7-8—my emphasis added)

As a final part of his preparation for the specific—though now partly bypassed, sometimes

completely abandoned—Old Road from Winchester to Canterbury (and its unique sacred location and

memory still), Belloc draws us further on to consider the interrelationship between Sacredness and

Antiquity and The Road, and thereby also reveals more of his own deep heart and sustaining vision:

The sacredness which everywhere attaches to The Road has its sanction in allof these uses [like Letters and the Community of Language and Faith], butespecially in that antiquity from which the quality of things sacred isdrawn....[hence] another desire which led me to the study I have set down inthis book: not only did I desire to follow a road most typical of all that roadshave been for us in western Europe, but also to plunge right into the spirit ofthe oldest monument of the life men led on this island: I mean the oldest ofwhich a continuous record remains. (8—my emphasis added)

Then disclosing to us his sense of being especially nourished by true History—as in a higher

way he was once especially nourished by a High Mass in Narbonne on the High Feast of the Holy

Ghost, on Pentecost3—Belloc speaks of the fostering of objective scholarship and reverent study:

To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost tolive in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimlesstruths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always renderedHistory a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being [actualization]are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface,take on body—[and yet] are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed.Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of a good land [likedear Sussex!]—all these are increased or given [as a Gift, or even as a Grace]by the pursuit of this kind of [historical] learning. Visions or intimations areconfirmed. It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure perpetuallybreeding the only enduring things; it is excellent to see the crimes we know

3 See Hilaire Belloc, Towns of Destiny (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1927), especially his quite unforgettable Chapter 27, entitled “Narbonne,” on pages 223-229.

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[like the unjust lootings of monasteries or the avaricious encroachments andoligarchic enclosures of the once-common land] ground under the slowwheels whose ponderous advance we can hardly notice during the flash ofone human life. One may say that historical learning grants man glimpses oflife completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace ofwhatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment. (9—myemphasis added)

For Belloc, moreover, “the chief charm” (9) of such an historical study “lies in mere

antiquity,” for “No one truly loves history,” he says, “who is not more exalted according to the greater

age of the new things he finds.” (9-10) Even when such antiquities are “less observable” and are

indistinct in some of “the details,” there is an “appeal” still, and “in a manner which all know though

none can define it.” (10) About such a mystery, or impenetrability, he affirms something more, and

arguably even deeper:

It is not illusion; perhaps an ultimate reality stands out when the details areobscured. At any rate it is the appeal which increases as we pass further fromthe [pure] memories of childhood, or from a backward vision of thosegroups of mountain [like the Alps in their beauty seen afoot on his own earlier1901 Path to Rome] which seem to rise higher and more awfully into the air aswe abandon them [or merely recede from them] across the plains. Antiquity ofthat degree conveys—I cannot pretend to say how—echoes which are exactlyattuned to whatever is least perishable in us. After the present and manifoldvoice of Religion to which these echoes lead, and with which in a sense they[the echoes] merge, I know of nothing more nobly answering the perpetualquestioning of a man. Nor of all the vulgar follies about us [even in 1905] isany more despicable than that which regards the future with complacency [self-satisfaction, presumption, and sloth], and finds nothing but imperfection inthat innocent, creative, and wondering past which the antiquaries andgeologists have revealed to us. (10-11—my emphasis added).

And, so, the grateful and reverent Belloc wanted eagerly now to climb, for example, “where

they [“such ancestors”] had climbed whence they also had seen [the beauty of] a wide plain,” and he

believed, furthermore, that,

As I [H. Belloc] suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, asthey had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keenerlife would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort [ofway] I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some fewdays the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were alreadyerect, articulate and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity andthe long accumulation of evil. It was perhaps a year ago that I determined to

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follow and piously to recover the whole of that doubtful trail whereby they[our ancestors] painfully made their way from one centre of their common lifeto the sea...[i.e.,] from Hampshire [thus specifically “canalised throughWinchester” (63) and then Canterbury] to the Straits of Dover. (11—myemphasis added)

To sharpen his contrasts with what he himself so deeply cherishes and fosters, Belloc speaks

not only of the repelling “vileness of my own time” (11) amidst complexity and accumulated evil; but

also of the need, for example, “to separate it [“this noble mark,” a certain ridgeline boundary] even in

the mind, from the taint of our time and the decay and vileness which hang like a smell of evil over

whatever has suffered the influences of our great towns.” (179-180—my emphasis added) Hence, it is

even necessary to bypass “here and there” along that historic Old Road to Canterbury “the accursed

new towns spreading like any other evil slime” (190). His visceral language unmistakably reveals his

passion. Indeed his indignant and just detestation concerning what he believes to be the growing sprawl

and devastation of ugliness.

How are we fittingly and briefly to understand how it was so that two inland towns,

Winchester and Canterbury, were “each formed by the sea, and each by similar conditions in the action

of that sea”? (63) Before he answers that seeming paradox, Belloc himself puts forth another question

touching upon “an ancient sanctity beyond history” (65):

What, then, are the common attributes which we can note in Winchester andCanterbury, which would have drawn [even] savage men to their sites, whichtherefore give them their tradition, and from which [distinct traditions] wecan induce the causes of their rival power? (66—my emphasis added)

With his well-informed military sense of Strategic Topography and Logistics, Belloc proposes

the following lucid and convincing explanation, with brilliant succinctness:

Each [inland town] is near the sea, each near a port, or group of ports; in thecase of each, this port, or group of ports, commands one of the two passages tothe Continent, and to the homes of civilised men. In each case the distancefrom the sea is that of a day’s march for an army with its baggage. Disembarkyour men at Southampton or at Dover with the dawn and you hope that night torest secure behind the walls of Winchester or Canterbury. (66-67)

Would that I could closely consider and savor the immediately following four pages (67-70)

for his fuller differentiations and resonant reasoning, but I shall limit it to a few more excerpts:

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The reason [rationale, ratio, logos] of this arrangement [under those then-current conditions of technology and transportation] was as follows: an inlandplace has many advantages over a fortified town on the seashore as a resting-place of an army. It has a better food supply; communication from it radiatesupon all sides, not only from half its circumference (indeed in many ports thereis but one narrow exit along the isthmus of the peninsula or up the valley whichforms its harbour). There is likely to be more wood, a matter of greatimportance for fuel and fortification and sometimes for construction of enginesof war; it will have more fresh water. It may not be a salient, but it is animportant, fact that in early times the population of an inland place would betrained for fighting upon land, and its energies would not be divided by theoccupation of sea-faring; and finally, your inland fortress is liable to but oneform of attack. You may have landed your men after a successful voyage, but,on the other hand, you may have landed them after a hot pursuit [being now anadded peril!]. In the first case it is not a disadvantage to sleep the nightsheltered by walls inland, and in the second case it is a necessity. Rememberingall these things, it is evident that to have your town of refuge within a day’smarch of the landing-place is a condition of its value to you. It is far preferableto reach fortification within the daylight than to pass your first halt under thestrain of partial and temporary defence. (67-68)

Then, Belloc goes on to mention that both towns are “upon rivers”—the Itchen and the Stour

— and “just above the limit to which the [brackish] tide would help” (68) small vessels come upstream,

while still preserving their access to “the fresh water coming down from above.” (68)—“the Itchen,

tumbling along the eastern border of Winchester, and the Stour, on the northern gate of Canterbury.”

(69)

Moreover, each town was Roman, and “from each radiated a scheme of Roman roads,” but

“upon each the history of Roman Britain is silent.”(70) Indeed, each town “upon a river bank”—

Durovernum (Canterbury) and Venta (Winchester)—“first appears recorded in the story of the pirate

invasions and of the conversion of England [the latter starting again from 597 A.D., with the arriving

mission of Saint Augustine, sent by Pope Saint Gregory the Great] after the dissolution of the Imperial

scheme [with the Roman withdrawal of its Legions starting in 410 A.D.].” (70—my emphasis added)

For, as Belloc had earlier reminded us: “Rome, in this frontier province [of Britain] put her capital in

the north, at York, and her principal garrisons in the north also [and, for strategic reasons, not in

Hampshire, Sussex, or Kent].” (65) Nonetheless, despite their seeming unimportance under the Roman

administration, “Canterbury and Winchester, with London, insensibly preponderated.” (65)

By way of summary, and now further touching upon the sacred, Belloc says:

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Such were the two towns which answered each other like peaks over the richbelt of south England. The one the king’s town, the other the primate’s; thepolitical and the ecclesiastical capitals of all those natural and darkcenturies.4....The king in Winchester and the primate in Canterbury, “like twooxen pulled the plough of England.” And each, as was necessary to theperiod, had its great tomb, but not at the same time. Winchester, the capital,had in the Dark Ages its lamp of sanctity [namely, St. Swithin, d. circa 862].In the Middle Ages this focus moved to the east—to Canterbury. There couldbe no rivalry. Winchester created its own saint, St. Swithin, [but] with the[1170] murder of [St. Thomas] à Becket Canterbury [unknowingly] put out thelight of Winchester and carried on the tradition of a shrine; [and] from that timeonwards Winchester declines, while Canterbury survives chiefly as the city ofSt. Thomas. (71—my emphasis added)

(In this context we may also remember—and perhaps even now re-read and more deeply savor

—two timely and timeless fourteenth-century literary masterpieces: William Langland’s Piers

Ploughman; and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—the latter being left unfinished by

Chaucer’s death in 1400, five hundred years (and four) before Hilaire Belloc sat down to compose his

own Canterbury Tale and to remember, especially, the Blessed Martyr, Saint Thomas of Canterbury.)

“We can regard, Winchester, then, and Canterbury,” says Belloc, “as the point of departure and

the termination of the Old Road.” (72) Finally, “it would follow the southern [sunny] slope of the North

Downs until these are cut by the river Stour”; and “from that point the last few miles to Canterbury

would naturally run parallel with, and in the valley of, the little Kentish river.” (72) Thus, the Old Road

went “from the capital of Hampshire to the capital of Kent” (73)—from west to east, and traversing

beloved Sussex en route, with Canterbury being the Pilgrims’s Goal, especially “the Great Pilgrimage

to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, which arose [in 1170] immediately after his murder.” (82-

83).

Later in his narration, Belloc adds some details of import, speaking of the violence at least

emotionally initiated by King Henry II and then grimly enacted by five henchman against the

Archbishop himself late in the daylight in the Canterbury Cathedral on Tuesday, 29 December 1170:

4 Belloc had earlier said, with a few more details: “For six or seven hundred years the two towns were the peculiar centres of English life. Winchester was a capital longer than London has been; Canterbury ruled the religion of this island for over nine hundred and forty years.” (64—my emphasis added) Moreover, “after the official machinery of Rome...had disappeared [after 410 A.D.], these two [towns] rose pre-eminent at the very entry to the Dark Ages and retained that dual pre-eminence until the great transition into the light, the Renaissance of civilisation at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth.” (64—my emphasis added)

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When the Church [after its own purifying reforms between 1050 and 1150]was most determined to fashion a new world [in the late twelfth century], andto give it a philosophy, and when that task was at its most difficult, from thenecessary quarrel between the Soul and the State: that is, between thingseternal, personal, inward, and things civic, communal [i.e., in the ambiguousoverlap of the strictly spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, namely, thecanonical and technical “boundary” realm of the “mixta”]—when the worldwas fully engaged in such a tangle outward, and the nerves of men, citizens andChristians, were wrought as are those of antagonists in a wrestling match, therefell this blow. For the first time in all these centuries (and at what a time)violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the knot. At once, and as italways must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. Allthe West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and à Becket’s tombbecame, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom. (89-90—my emphasisadded).

And, thus, the Christian population of Christendom—to include “the Christian enthusiasm of

the Spaniards conquering Islam”(91)—“all these sent their hordes to converge on Winchester, and

thence find their way to Canterbury.” (91) That is to say:

The whole year [every season] came at last to see the passing and re-passing ofsuch men. It was on the 29th of December that St. Thomas had been struckdown. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for fifty yearsthe damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the pilgrims: thesame weather in which we [three companions] ourselves traversed it during thejourney of exploration which is the subject of this work. (91—my emphasisadded)

What is more,

With the jubilee the body [of St. Thomas] was translated in the flush of earlysummer, and the date of this translation (the 7th of July) became the new andmore convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the habitof such a journey had now [after but 50 years] become so general that everyseason saw some example of it. The spring, as we know from Chaucer [d.1400], the winter as we know from the traditional dates preserved upon thecontinent, the summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: andthere must have been a constant return past the stubble and the newplough of the autumn. (91-92—my emphasis added)

One aiding factor for these growing incentives and robust initiatives was “the directness of the

Old Road” between Winchester and Canterbury, which certainly “reconstituted its use for the purpose

of these pilgrimages;” but, Belloc is also convinced that “it was also that peculiar association of

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antiquity and of religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing.” (92—my emphasis

added) Indeed, he says, “the same force of antique usage and affection which, in a past beyond all

history, had lent their meaning to rocks and springs upon the public way, re-flourished;” (92-93—my

emphasis added) Then, more personally (and impishly), he takes delight in declaring:

And once again, to the great pleasure of myself who write of it now, and ofall my readers who love to see tradition destroying calculated things, themomentum of generations overcame [triumphed]. The pilgrimage saved theroad. (93—my emphasis added)

As his own Pilgrimage afoot comes gradually to its end, Hilaire Belloc will have some more

surprises for his attentive and receptive reader:

The way [the last portion of it] was clear and straight like the flight of a bolt [atype of short arrow, as are those shot from a crossbow]; it spanned a steepvalley, passed a windmill on the height beyond, fell into the Watling Street[“that road of a dreadful antiquity” (277) and the path west to London]..., andwithin a mile turned sharp to the south, crossed the bridge [over the riverStour], and through the Westgate led us into Canterbury. (277)

While actually going through that Westgate, the three companions had decided, so humanly, to

take a wheeled vehicle, “the omnibus” that “stood” there as if waiting for them in the Watling Street:

“Upon this [omnibus] we climbed, and feeling that a great work was accomplished, we sang a song. So

singing, we rolled under the Westgate, and thus the journey ended.” (277) The physical journey, that is.

But, not yet, the interior journey—Belloc’s own spiritual journey and intimate reflections. For

he was now to experience, somewhat unexpectedly, the presence of absence:

There was another thing to be duly done before I could think my task was over.The city whose name and spell had drawn to itself all the road, and the shrinewhich was its core remained to be worshipped. The cathedral and the masteryof its central tower stood like a demand; but I was afraid, and the fear wasjust. I thought I should be [would be] like the men who lifted the last veil inthe ritual of the hidden goddess, and having lifted it found there was nothingbeyond, and that all the scheme [like “smells and bells” without the RealPresence] was a cheat; or like what those must feel at the approach of deathwho say there is nothing in death but an end and no transition. I knew whathad fallen upon the original soul of the place [the Cathedral and the Shrinewhen it was still Catholic, before the Heretics and sacrilegious Iconoclastscame]. I feared to find, and I found, nothing but stones. (277-278—my

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emphasis added)

After all this way and sacrifice, there was a terrible presence of absence. (Belloc’s beloved

friend, G.K. Chesterton, especially in his The Everlasting Man, likewise well understood the yearnings

and final futilities of ancient Paganism, to include, especially, the sad half-lines and noble yearnings of

the poet Virgil and his own eloquently plangent sense of the “nequiquam” (the despairing sense of

being “in vain”).)

In this poignant context, we recall, as well, the piercing words of the Catholic Church’s Latin

Hymn and Dirge chanted at a Requiem Mass, a line of the traditional mourning found in the Dies Irae:

“Tantus Labor Non Sit Cassus”—“May so much labor (so much suffering) not be in vain.” Christ’s,

too.

However, as our Belloc approaches the end of his book, he displays his own magnanimity and

humility in combination, once again—and he expresses his mystical views now in more concrete ways.

For example, as he “stood considering” the cathedral “and especially the immensity of the tower,” he

made a revealing contrast, having seen it first afar off and then up close:

Even from a long way off it had made a pivot for all we saw; here closer by itappalled the senses. Save perhaps once at Beauvais [with its soaring interiorspace], I had never known such a magic of great height and darkness. It wasas though a shaft of influence had risen enormous above the shrine: the last ofthe emanations which the sacred city cast outwards just as its sanctity died.(278—my emphasis added)

Indeed, he continues, elegiacally:

That tower...was the last thing in England which the true Gothic spirit made. Itsignifies the history of the three centuries [circa 1170-1470] during whichCanterbury drew towards it all Europe [all Christendom]. But it stands [now]quite silent and emptied of every meaning [the presence of absence], tragicand blind against the changing life of...those activities of light [eternal] thatnever fail or die as do all things intimate and our own [mortal activities, too],even religious. I received its silence for an hour, but without comfort andwithout response [without an answering heart]. It seemed only an awfulterminal to that long way I had come. [He spoke, however, not for his twoother companions here.] It sounded the note of all my road [“that great andparticular story of St. Thomas, whose shadow had lain over the whole of thisroad” (276)]. (278-279—my emphasis added)

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There was then for Belloc a note of spiritual weariness, “the droning voice of extreme,

incalculable age” (279)—like the long and objective burden of unrepented sin:

As I had so fixed the date of this journey, the hour and the day were the dayand the hour of the murder [i.e., Tuesday, late in that minatory afternoon’sapproaching winter darkness]. The weather was the weather of the same dayseven hundred and twenty-nine years before [sic]: a clear cold air, a clean sky,and a little wind. I went into the church and stood at the edge of the northtransept, where the archbishop fell, and where a few Norman stones lend amaterial basis for the resurrection of the past. It was almost dark. (279—myemphasis added)

“In such an exact coincidence” of time and weather and twilight, Belloc had hoped—imagined

—to “see the gigantic figure, huge in its winter swaddling, watching [with vigilance] the door [of the

Cathedral] from the cloister, watching it unbarred at his command [to grant entrance to those who

would murder him].” (279-280)

And, even more dramatically and imaginatively, Belloc then describes the detailed historical

events and flagitious acts then perpetrated by the killers—and he still hoped, in his pietas, to have had

then an Apparition, an intimate Vision, of St. Thomas himself, making himself vividly and memorably

present there to his receptive and responsive gratefulness. Regrettably, Belloc was not granted that

grace, as he evocatively reports, in his restrained conclusion:

“But there was no such vision. It seems that to an emptiness so utter [the presence of such

total absence] not even ghosts can return.” (280—my emphasis added) The emptiness that has

cumulatively come, that is, from the earlier disloyal, and largely still impenitent, Defection from the

Catholic Faith.

Immediately after these poignant and haunting spiritual words about “an emptiness so utter” in

the current Canterbury Cathedral, Belloc suddenly presents his last paragraph. It is brief and appears to

be somewhat ironic, inasmuch as he returns now with his two companions to the World: to the specious

lures and even to the seemingly attractive musical effervescence of the modern world. Indeed, he shows

himself now to enter into, and commingle with, what at the outset of his book he had called “the

vileness of my own time” (11) and its garishness and loudness. Or, into what he had even more

trenchantly characterized as “the taint of our time and the decay and vileness which hang like a smell of

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evil over whatever has suffered the influence of our great towns” (179-180)—to include, as is likely,

the challenging influence of their immorality and apostasy.

Returning from his protracted silence and extended solitary contemplation within the

Canterbury Cathedral, Belloc renders his concluding words, which touch upon the Hospitable Inn and

Human Companionship of his perduring affection, but now with some jarring notes obtruding:

In the inn, in the main room of it, I found my companions. A gramophone fittedwith a monstrous trumpet roared out American songs, and to this sound theservants of the inn were holding a ball. Chief among them a woman of a darkand vigorous kind danced with an amazing vivacity [like one of the enticingBacchae or, perhaps, a lovely Gypsy Siren?], to the applause of her peers. Withall this happiness we mingled. ( 281).

Such may be an instance of the permanent sensate challenge of the world and the abiding

temptations from “the Fair Face of Deceit.” For, it is certainly true, that a temptation wouldn’t be a

temptation if it weren’t attractive. To include the lure of moral abandonment and spiritual emptiness.

CODA:

Almost three decades after The Old Road (1905), Hilaire Belloc contributed a profound and

searching essay on “St. Thomas of Canterbury” to a learned 1933 anthology, entitled The English Way:

Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman.5 It is fitting to quote only the beginning of his

contribution, and to recommend thus to the reader a close reflective consideration of his entire essay,

wherein he treats of many a “vital principle,” not of such things as are insouciant and shallow, or

merely a “verbal matter.” For, says Belloc:

The principle for which St. Thomas suffered martyrdom was this: That theChurch of God is a visible single universal society, with powers superior to thisworld, and therefore of right, autonomous. That principle is the negation of theopposite, of the base, ephemeral, thing already passing from Christian life,sometimes called pedantically “Erastianism” [the subordination of the Churchto the State, also called Caesaropapism]; the principle that the divine andpermanent is subject to the human and passing power. St. Thomas died for thedoctrine, the truth, that the link with eternal things must never be broken underthe pressure of ephemeral desires, that the control of eternal things cannot, in

5 The English Way (edited by Maisie Ward) (London &New York: Sheed &Ward, 1933). Fourteen authors contributed to this anthology, and Hilaire Belloc’s own essay will be found on pages 104-127. References to Belloc’s later essay will, again, be in the main text above, in parentheses.

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morals, be subjected to the ephemeral arrangements of men. (105—emphasis inthe original)

Our Belloc summarizes his overall judgment from the outset:

The life and death of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, may be putin the phrase “Constancy and its Fruit.” Now the fruit of constancy is notwhat the constant agent himself immediately desired. This is because man is asubordinate. He cannot fashion the future to his will; he is used by God. Menare used. The purposes of God, which guide the universe, cannot be thepurposes of one man. But if that one man’s purpose is humble and direct, openand good (which means in unison with God’s purpose), then he would rejoiceat the fruit of his constancy. Though it should not be that which he had desired,it will be consonant with what he had desired. It will be found larger than whathe had desired. It will be found more permanent than what he had desired. Hewill serve God in a sense unwittingly, though wittingly in purpose. Each manwho has achieved, has achieved something other than he intended. Each manwho has achieved, has achieved something in the same axis with, along thesame direction, as his intention was—in proportion as his intention was good.In the history of Western Europe the episode of the martyrdom at Canterbury isa capital example of constancy. It stands out the more vividly [like the end ofThe Old Road] because, in that very place, in that very See, the purpose forwhich St. Thomas died has been conspicuously denied, ridiculed,frustrated, and (locally) destroyed. (104-105—my emphasis added)

After reading this passage, we may recall Belloc’s earlier words on the stylistic and

substantive marks of the “the classic in verse and architecture,” (179) and we may now fittingly enlarge

his deep insight, in light of his own lucid and cumulatively evocative prose. For Belloc also writes such

prose “with that economy and reserve by whose power the classic in prose grows upon the mind,

and our own affection does thereby take even deeper root and grow.” Such is his constancy and its

fruit.

—Finis—

© 2013 Robert D. Hickson

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