In Further Defense of Belloc

I was grateful for Love2Learn Mom's earlier post about Belloc. He does seem to get a lot of negative press, which I think is very unfortunate. All men have faults, and Belloc's strengths seem to be largely overlooked. I particularly admire him for his absolutely extraordinary faith. Apparently his relationship with God was never charged with emotionalism. Rather, one could almost say that his whole life was a dark night of the soul. He said that if he weren't a Catholic he would be an atheist, but that he was a Catholic because Catholicism was real and true.

I can't even begin to express how awed I am by this faith of his. Through sheer will he kept to the Faith, and kept to it strongly, even when he felt nothing. Some people, particularly those who seem to put a huge emphasis on an emotional relationship with God, would take this to mean that he didn't love. Quite the contrary. Lack of emotion doesn't mean lack of love. Rather, I think, it is the great love of loyalty, of fidelity in the face of everything, of a strong fortitude.

That was a bit of a passionate sidetrack, so excuse me. My original intent was to give you a quote from A.N. Wilson's biography of Belloc, in an attempt to show Belloc's truly beautiful character. It's a tragic bit, concerning the death of his wife Elodie:

The next day, her body was carried down to the hall at King's Land where it lay surrounded by candles. Neighbours and friends came to pray beside it. Belloc wandered upstairs again and along the narrow corridor to her room. He glanced round once more at her dressing table, at her clothes, at her bed with its scarlet coverlet. It had always been a dark room, its small windows preventing it from getting much sunlight. He came out of the room and turned the key in its lock. From that moment, Elodie's bedroom was sealed up forever. So, too, was her little parlour downstairs. No one entered them again in Belloc's lifetime. Nor would he ever pass that bedroom door without pausing to kiss it or trace upon it the sign of the cross. And this he did for the next forty years.

--from Hilaire Belloc: A Biography by A.N. Wilson

The Path to San Francisco...

One of the things I like about the recent name change on this blog is that *I*, the quiet behind-the-scenes moderator, get to post interesting tidbits once in awhile. Here's my first - one I simply had to pass along the minute I saw it - especially given some slightly negative press that Belloc's had here in the past...

Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments tells this story about Chesterton’s friend Hillaire Belloc: “It seems that when Belloc was serving as a young man in the French army, he met an American woman with whom he fell passionately in love. Once discharged from the army, Belloc sold his beloved complete set of the works of Cardinal Newman to scramble up the money for boat fare across the Atlantic. He landed in New York, and walked across the continent to San Francisco, supporting himself by manual labor. When he arrived at the young lady’s door in California, he proposed to her on the spot. She agreed. It was a long engagement — they were married seven years later, when she was 25 and he was 26. Read those last sentences again, carefully. Unfortunately, their happy marriage was broken by the early death of Mrs. Belloc, at age 43; and Belloc had already lost a son in World War I, and would lose another in World War II. But whatever you may say about the man’s writings and his polemical opinions, Belloc lived.”

hat-tip Semicolon Blog