THE GREAT HERESIES (QUOTES)

Below are some quotes from H. Belloc's book THE GREAT HERESIES. Published by Tan Books & Publishers.


"Heresy means, then, the warping of a system by ‘Exception’; by ‘Picking out’ one part of the structure and implies that the scheme is marred by taking away one part of it, denying one part of it, and either leaving the void unfilling or filling it with some new affirmation.” (pg. 2)

“The reasons that men combat heresy is not only, or principally, conservatism—a devotion to routine, a dislike of disturbance in their habits of thought—it is much more a perception that the heresy, insofar as it gains ground, will produce a way of living and a social character at issue with, irritating, and perhaps mortal to, the way of living and the social character produced by the old orthodox scheme.” (pg. 4)

“Because heresy, in this particular sense (the denial of an accepted Christian doctrine) thus affects the individual, it affects all society, and when you are examining a society formed by a particular religion you necessarily concern yourself to the utmost with the warping or diminishing of that religion. That is the historical interest of heresy. That is why anyone who wants to understand how Europe came to be, and how its changes have been caused, cannot afford to treat heresy as unimportant.” (pg. 5)

“Communism is as much a heresy as Manichaeism. It is the taking away from the moral scheme by which we have lived of a particular part, the denial of that part and the attempt to replace it by an innovation. The Communist retains much of the Christian Scheme—human equality, the right to live, and so forth—he denies a part of it only.” (pg. 8)

“As all heresies necessarily breathe the air of the time in which they arise, and are necessarily a reflection of the philosophy of whatever non-Catholic ideas are prevalent at the moment they arrive, Arianism spoke in the terms of its day.” (pg. 18)

“No one else except the [Roman] Army had any physical power. There could be no question of resisting it by force, and it was in a sense the government. Its commander-in-chief was the absolute monarch of the whole state. Now the Army went solidly Arian.” (pg. 25)

“But for the Army, Arianism would never have meant what it did. With the Army—and the Army wholeheartedly on its side—Arianism all but triumphed and managed to survive, even when it represented little more than the troops and their chief officers.” (pg. 25)

“The Army went Arian because it felt Arianism to be the distinctive thing which made it superior to the civilian masses, just as Arianism was a distinctive thing which made the intellectual feel superior to the popular masses.” (pp. 25-6)

“Such a revolution had never been. No earlier attack had been so sudden, so violent or so permanently successful. Within a score of years from the first assault in 634 the Christian Levant had gone: Syria, the cradle of the Faith, and Egypt with Alexandria, the mighty Christian See. Within a lifetime half the wealth and nearly half the territory of the Christian Roman Empire was in the hands of Mohammedan masters and officials, and the mass of the population was becoming affected increasingly by this new thing.” (pg. 41)

“... [Mohammed], like so many other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification.” (pg. 44)

“Islam was the one heresy that nearly destroyed Christendom through its early material and intellectual superiority.” (pg. 49)

“The Mohammedan temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and bloodthirsty. It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from whom it differed. It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the high Christian culture about it. It still so regards it even today.” (pg. 50)

“One of the reasons that the breakdown of Christendom at the Reformation took place was the fact that Mohammedan pressure against the German Emperor gave the German Princes and towns the opportunity to rebel and start Protestant Churches in their dominions.” (pg. 65)

“...[T]he name of Lepanto should remain in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the half dozen great names in the history of the Christian World. It has been a worthy theme for the finest battle poem of our time, ‘The Ballad of Lepanto,’ by the late Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.” (pg. 70)

“But I ask the question in the sense, ‘Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake off the domination of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?’ The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralyzed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.” (pg. 73)

“Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude towards the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines—the very structure of our society is dissolving.” (pg. 76)

“In place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow, have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.” (pg. 76)

“Wine was evil, meat was evil, war was always absolutely wrong, so was capital punishment; but the one unforgivable sin was reconciliation with the Catholic Church. There again the Albigensians were true to type. All heresies make that their chief point.” (pg. 91)

“Muret [a town in France] is a name that should always be remembered as one of the decisive battles of the world [It occurred on September 13, 1213.]. Had it failed, the campaign would have failed. Bouvines would probably never have been fought and the chances are that the French monarchy itself would have collapsed, splitting up into feudal classes, independent of any central lord.” (pg. 94)

“[Albigensiansim] had been destroyed at dreadful cost; a high material civilization had been half ruined and memories of hatred which lingered for generations had been founded. But the price had been worth the paying, for Europe was saved. The family of Toulouse was re-admitted to its titular position, and its possessions did not fall to the French crown until much later. But its ancient independence was gone, and with it the threat to our culture which had so nearly succeeded.” (pg. 96)

“National and racial feeling took advantage of the confusion [immediately prior to the ‘flood’] in movements like that of the Hussites in Bohemia. Their pretext against the clergy was a demand for the restoration of the cup at Communion to the laity.” (pg. 108)

“Now the most difficult thing in the world in connection with history, and the rarest of achievement, is the seeing of events as contemporaries saw them, instead of seeing them through the distorting medium of our later knowledge. We know what was going to happen; contemporaries did not.” (pg. 110)

“The Papal Courts, though their evils have been much exaggerated, were recurrent examples, of which the worst was that of [Pope] Alexander VI’s family, a scandal of the first magnitude to all Christendom.” (pg. 114)

“There was no concerted attack on the Catholic Faith. Even those who were most instinctively its enemies (Luther himself was not that) and men like Zwingli (who personally hated the central doctrines of the Faith and who led the beginning of the looting of the endowments of religion) could not organize a campaign. There was no constructive doctrine abroad in opposition to the ancient body of doctrine by which our fathers had lived, until a man of genius appeared with a book for his instrument.... This man was a Frenchman, Jean Cauvin (or Calvin)....” (pp. 114-115)

“Though the iron Calvinist affirmations ... have rusted away, yet his vision of a Moloch God remains; and the coincident Calvinist doctrine to material success, the Calvinist antagonism to poverty and humility, survive in full strength. Usury would not be eating up the modern world but for Calvin nor, but for Calvin, would men debase themselves to accept inevitable doom; nor, but for Calvin, would Communism be with us as it is today, nor, but for Calvin, would Scientific Monism dominate as it (till recently) did the modern world, killing the doctrine of miracle and paralyzing Free Will.” (pp. 115-116)

“...[B]ut the Protestant business, though its doctrine has disappeared, has borne permanent fruit. It has divided the white civilization into two opposing cultures, Catholic and anti-Catholic.” (pg. 116)

“In the only department that counts, in the mind of man, the effect of the religious wars and their ending in a drawn battle was that religion as a whole was weakened. Increasingly men began to think in their hearts, ‘One cannot arrive at the truth in these matters, but we do know what worldly posterity is and what poverty is, and what political power and political weakness are. Religious doctrine belongs to an unseen world which we do not know as thoroughly or in the same way.’” (pg. 127)

“[After the Reformation,] Usury was practiced everywhere, but in the Catholic culture it was restricted by law and practiced with difficulty. In the Protestant culture it became a matter of course. The Protestant merchants of Holland led the way in the beginnings of modern banking; England followed suit; and that is why the still comparatively small Protestant nations began to acquire formidable economic strength.” (pp. 128-129)

“The French Revolution was an anti-clerical movement, and Napoleon, who was its heir was not himself a believing and practicing Catholic and cannot be said to have returned to the Faith until his death-bed. Nor, for all his genius, did he clearly perceive that difference of religion is at the root of differences in culture, for the generation to which he belonged had no conception of that profound and universal judgment.” (pg. 132)

“[In the early 1900’s, p]olitically there was no reaction towards the old strength of the Catholic Culture; it was rather the other way. ... The divisions within the Catholic culture itself grew worse than ever. ... Great tracts of the peasantry were losing their ancestral faith; and with the decline of religion went a decline of taste in architecture and all the arts—and worst of all in letters. The old French lucidity of thought began to grow confused. There was no revival of Spain, and in Italy, what with anti-clerical and Masonic Parliamentary power and the differences between the various districts, yet another province of Catholic culture grew weaker.” (pp. 136-7)

“They [i.e. the Protestants] might all combine in despising the Catholic culture, but they could not preserve unity among themselves.” (pg. 140)

“There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals. But there never has been and never can be or will be a general Christian religion professed by men who all accept some central important doctrines, while agreeing to differ about others.” (pg. 144)

“[therefore, t]here is no such thing as a religion called ‘Christianity’....” (pg. 144)

“Whether we call it ‘The Modern Attack’ or ‘Anti-Christ’ it is all one; there is a clear issue now joined between the retention of Catholic morals, tradition & authority on the one side, and the active effort to destroy them on the other. The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live. The duel is to the death.” (pp. 144-5)

“Anyhow, there you have the Modern Attack in its main character, materialist, and atheist; and, being atheist, it is necessarily indifferent to truth. For God is Truth.” (pg. 147)

“But there is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others.” (pg. 147)

“The better dupes, the less vicious converts to the enemy, talk vaguely of ‘a readjustment, a new world, a new order’; but they do not begin by telling us, as in common reason they should, upon what principles this new order is to be raised. They do not define the end they have in view.” (pg. 147)

“When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves.” (pg. 150)

“Communism (which is only one manifestation, and probably a passing one, of this Modern Attack) professes to be directed towards a certain good, to wit, the abolition of poverty. But it does not tell you why this should be good; it does not admit that its scheme is also to destroy other things which are also by the common consent of mankind good; the family, property (which is the guarantee of individual freedom and individual dignity), humor, mercy, and every form of what we consider right living.” (pg. 147)

“Now Communism is full slavery.” (pg. 151)

“We came, before the Church was founded, out of a pagan social system in which slavery was everywhere, in which the whole structure of society reposed upon the institution of slavery. With the loss of the Faith we return to that institution again.” (pg. 152)

“the Church will not disappear, for the Church is not of mortal stuff; it is the only institution among men not subject to the universal law of mortality. Therefore we say, not that the Church may be wiped out, but that it may be reduced to a small band almost forgotten amid the vast numbers of its opponents and their contempt of the defeated thing.” (pg. 156)

“The Mohammedan struggle was a very close thing; it nearly swamped us; only the armed reaction in Spain, followed by the Crusades, prevented the full triumph of Islam.” (pg. 159)

“There are not many churches; there is one. It is the Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal enemy on the other. The lists are set.

“Thus are we now in presence of the most momentous question that has yet been
presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon
which the whole future of our race will turn.” [The End]. (pg. 161)