Dr.

Robert Hickson

2 May 2013 Saint Athanasius

Hilaire Bellocs Canterbury Tale

EPIGRAPHS: Then, taking one companion, I set out late in December [1903] to recover and map out yard by yard all that could be recovered and mapped out of The Old Road [from Winchester eastward to Canterbury, the whole of these 120 miles (100)]....Why did Winchester come to absorb the traffic of the west [of England], and to form a dept and the political centre of southern England? Why did Canterbury, an inland town, become the goal of this long journey towards the narrow seas [i.e., to the Straits of Dover]?....Winchester and Canterbury being [themselves, perhaps unexpectedly,]...each formed by the sea, and each by similar conditions in the action of that sea . (Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road, pp. 12, 28, 29, and 63my emphasis added) Thinking these things [specifically about the great fight there between two kings 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 the hill with my companions, and I reoccupied my mind with the influence of that great and particular story of [the martyrdom of] St. Thomas [ Becket], whose shadow had lain over the whole of this road, until in these last few miles [before the goal of Canterbury] it had come to absorb it [my mind] altogether. (Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road, p. 276my 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 an impression of majesty. They are not [even] very high....[and yet they have] Something of that economy and reserve by whose power the classic in verse and architecture grows upon the mind ....and our own affection can take root and grow. (Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road, p. 179my emphasis added) In 1905, just before he entered the House of Commons for four discouraging years (19061910), Hilaire Belloc published a variegated and copious book, entitled The Old Road,1 about his eightday journey afoot from Winchester to Canterbury, the latter also being the place where, on the 29 th of December in 1170,2 Saint Thomas Becket was martyred.
1 Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road (London: Constable and CO LTD, 1952a 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, Bellocs 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)

It was indeed a reverent pilgrimage Belloc made in his walking journeyat first with one, and then later with two companionsand 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 29 th of Decemberwas also a further form of Bellocs general historical inquiry and of his specific research into the strategic, nautical and commercial geography of Englandto 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, Bellocs journey along that partially re-constructed historic Pilgrims Way (199) to Canterbury was also an intimate participation in the rooted sanctities of that landthe 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 that of 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, right before the high altar and adorned with a sculpture of the woman at the well [John 4:4-26]. (57my 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 the first exile; only to see such a fire...comforts every man. Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence...transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering [like a protective cloak or mantle], satisfies us here in the north...; so we built in [the] beginning [the roof]: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a 2

mans eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemys watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only ...; we craved these thingsthe camp, 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 they will reappear. Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The 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 Hearth or Far-Off Tower]; we are slow to feel its influence. We take so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country [such as beloved Sussex!] on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass [of men] The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle , but, as I have said, the greatest and the most original 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 than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals 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 concreteat times even sacramentally soand 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 Religionespecially to the Faith and to the Mass: More than rivers and more than mountain chains [like the Alps], roads have moulded the political groups of men....Religions, which are the principal formers of mankind, have followed the roads only, leaping from city to city 3

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, Marseilles and Lyons [on the shore of the river Rhone to the north, strenuously upstream]....It was the Road that laid the train [of links of the spreading Christian Evangelization]. The Mass had reached Lyons before, perhaps, the last disciple of the apostles was dead .... And with religions all that is built on them: letters, customs, community of language and idea, have followed the Road....Architecture follows it, commerce of course, all information; it is even so with the poor thin philosophies , each in its little day drifts, for choice, down the road. (7-8my emphasis added) As a final part of his preparation for the specificthough now partly bypassed, sometimes completely abandonedOld 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 all of these uses [like Letters and the Community of Language and Faith], but especially in that antiquity from which the quality of things sacred is drawn....[hence] another desire which led me to the study I have set down in this book: not only did I desire to follow a road most typical of all that roads have been for us in western Europe, but also to plunge right into the spirit of the oldest monument of the life men led on this island: I mean the oldest of which a continuous record remains. (8my emphasis added) Then disclosing to us his sense of being especially nourished by true Historyas in a higher way he was once especially nourished by a High Mass in Narbonne on the High Feast of the Holy Ghost, on Pentecost3Belloc speaks of the fostering of objective scholarship and reverent study: To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History 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 [like dear 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 are confirmed. It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure perpetually breeding 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.

[like the unjust lootings of monasteries or the avaricious encroachments and oligarchic enclosures of the once-common land] ground under the slow wheels whose ponderous advance we can hardly notice during the flash of one human life. One may say that historical learning grants man glimpses of life completed and a whole ; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment. (9my emphasis 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 are obscured. At any rate it is the appeal which increases as we pass further from the [pure] memories of childhood, or from a backward vision of those groups of mountain [like the Alps in their beauty seen afoot on his own earlier 1901 Path to Rome] which seem to rise higher and more awfully into the air as we abandon them [or merely recede from them] across the plains. Antiquity of that degree conveysI cannot pretend to say howechoes which are exactly attuned to whatever is least perishable in us . After the present and manifold voice 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 perpetual questioning of a man. Nor of all the vulgar follies about us [even in 1905] is any more despicable than that which regards the future with complacency [selfsatisfaction, presumption, and sloth], and finds nothing but imperfection in that innocent, creative, and wondering past which the antiquaries and geologists have revealed to us. (10-11my 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, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort [of way] I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil. It was perhaps a year ago that I determined to 5

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 life to the sea...[i.e.,] from Hampshire [thus specifically canalised through Winchester (63) and then Canterbury] to the Straits of Dover. (11my emphasis 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. (179-180my 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 and Canterbury, which would have drawn [even] savage men to their sites, which therefore give them their tradition, and from which [distinct traditions] we can induce the causes of their rival power? (66my 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 the case of each, this port, or group of ports, commands one of the two passages to the Continent, and to the homes of civilised men. In each case the distance from the sea is that of a days march for an army with its baggage. Disembark your men at Southampton or at Dover with the dawn and you hope that night to rest 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: 6

The reason [rationale, ratio, logos] of this arrangement [under those thencurrent conditions of technology and transportation] was as follows: an inland place has many advantages over a fortified town on the seashore as a restingplace of an army. It has a better food supply; communication from it radiates upon all sides, not only from half its circumference (indeed in many ports there is but one narrow exit along the isthmus of the peninsula or up the valley which forms its harbour). There is likely to be more wood, a matter of great importance for fuel and fortification and sometimes for construction of engines of war; it will have more fresh water. It may not be a salient, but it is an important, fact that in early times the population of an inland place would be trained for fighting upon land, and its energies would not be divided by the occupation of sea-faring; and finally, your inland fortress is liable to but one form 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 an added peril!]. In the first case it is not a disadvantage to sleep the night sheltered by walls inland, and in the second case it is a necessity. Remembering all these things, it is evident that to have your town of refuge within a days march of the landing-place is a condition of its value to you. It is far preferable to reach fortification within the daylight than to pass your first halt under the strain of partial and temporary defence. (67-68) Then, Belloc goes on to mention that both towns are upon riversthe 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.]. (70my 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: 7

Such were the two towns which answered each other like peaks over the rich belt of south England. The one the kings town, the other the primates; the political and the ecclesiastical capitals of all those natural and dark centuries.4....The king in Winchester and the primate in Canterbury, like two oxen pulled the plough of England . And each, as was necessary to the period, 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 eastto Canterbury. There could be no rivalry. Winchester created its own saint, St. Swithin, [but] with the [1170] murder of [St. Thomas] Becket Canterbury [unknowingly] put out the light of Winchester and carried on the tradition of a shrine; [and] from that time onwards Winchester declines, while Canterbury survives chiefly as the city of St. Thomas. (71my emphasis added) (In this context we may also rememberand perhaps even now re-read and more deeply savor two timely and timeless fourteenth-century literary masterpieces: William Langlands Piers Ploughman; and Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Talesthe latter being left unfinished by Chaucers 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 Pilgrimss Goal, especially the Great Pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, which arose [in 1170] immediately after his murder. (8283). 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. (64my 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 . (64my emphasis added)

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], and to give it a philosophy, and when that task was at its most difficult, from the necessary quarrel between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal, personal, inward, and things civic, communal [ i.e., in the ambiguous overlap of the strictly spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, namely, the canonical and technical boundary realm of the mixta]when the world was fully engaged in such a tangle outward, and the nerves of men, citizens and Christians, were wrought as are those of antagonists in a wrestling match, there fell 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 it always must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and Beckets tomb became, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom . (89-90my emphasis added). And, thus, the Christian population of Christendomto 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 of such men. It was on the 29 th of December that St. Thomas had been struck down. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for fifty years the damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the pilgrims : the same weather in which we [three companions] ourselves traversed it during the journey of exploration which is the subject of this work. (91my emphasis added) What is more, With the jubilee the body [of St. Thomas] was translated in the flush of early summer, and the date of this translation (the 7 th of July) became the new and more convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the habit of such a journey had now [after but 50 years] become so general that every season 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 the continent, the summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: and there must have been a constant return past the stubble and the new plough of the autumn. (91-92my 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 9

antiquity and of religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing. (92my 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; (92-93my 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 of all my readers who love to see tradition destroying calculated things , the momentum of generations overcame [triumphed]. The pilgrimage saved the road. (93my 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 [a type of short arrow, as are those shot from a crossbow]; it spanned a steep valley, 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]..., and within a mile turned sharp to the south, crossed the bridge [over the river Stour], 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 journeyBellocs 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 shrine which was its core remained to be worshipped. The cathedral and the mastery of its central tower stood like a demand; but I was afraid, and the fear was just. I thought I should be [would be] like the men who lifted the last veil in the ritual of the hidden goddess, and having lifted it found there was nothing beyond, and that all the scheme [like smells and bells without the Real Presence] was a cheat; or like what those must feel at the approach of death who say there is nothing in death but an end and no transition . I knew what had fallen upon the original soul of the place [the Cathedral and the Shrine when it was still Catholic, before the Heretics and sacrilegious Iconoclasts came]. I feared to find, and I found, nothing but stones. (277-278my 10

emphasis added) After all this way and sacrifice, there was a terrible presence of absence. (Bellocs 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 Churchs Latin Hymn and Dirge chanted at a Requiem Mass, a line of the traditional mourning found in the Dies Irae: Tantus Labor Non Sit CassusMay so much labor (so much suffering) not be in vain. Christs, too. However, as our Belloc approaches the end of his book, he displays his own magnanimity and humility in combination, once againand 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 it appalled the senses. Save perhaps once at Beauvais [with its soaring interior space], I had never known such a magic of great height and darkness. It was as though a shaft of influence had risen enormous above the shrine: the last of the emanations which the sacred city cast outwards just as its sanctity died. (278my emphasis added) Indeed, he continues, elegiacally: That tower...was the last thing in England which the true Gothic spirit made. It signifies the history of the three centuries [circa 1170-1470] during which Canterbury drew towards it all Europe [all Christendom]. But it stands [now] quite silent and emptied of every meaning [the presence of absence], tragic and blind against the changing life of...those activities of light [eternal] that never 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 and without response [without an answering heart]. It seemed only an awful terminal to that long way I had come. [He spoke, however, not for his two other companions here.] It sounded the note of all my road [that great and particular story of St. Thomas, whose shadow had lain over the whole of this road (276)]. (278-279my emphasis added) 11

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 day and the hour of the murder [i.e., Tuesday, late in that minatory afternoons approaching winter darkness]. The weather was the weather of the same day seven 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 north transept, where the archbishop fell, and where a few Norman stones lend a material basis for the resurrection of the past . It was almost dark. (279my emphasis added) In such an exact coincidence of time and weather and twilight, Belloc had hopedimagined 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 killersand 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. (280my 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 fitted with a monstrous trumpet roared out American songs, and to this sound the servants of the inn were holding a ball. Chief among them a woman of a dark and vigorous kind danced with an amazing vivacity [like one of the enticing Bacchae or, perhaps, a lovely Gypsy Siren?], to the applause of her peers. With all 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 wouldnt be a temptation if it werent 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 the Church of God is a visible single universal society, with powers superior to this world, and therefore of right, autonomous. That principle is the negation of the opposite, of the base, ephemeral, thing already passing from Christian life, sometimes called pedantically Erastianism [the subordination of the Church to the State, also called Caesaropapism]; the principle that the divine and permanent is subject to the human and passing power. St. Thomas died for the doctrine, the truth, that the link with eternal things must never be broken under the 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 Bellocs own essay will be found on pages 104-127. References to Bellocs 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. (105emphasis in the original) Our Belloc summarizes his overall judgment from the outset: The life and death of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, may be put in the phrase Constancy and its Fruit. Now the fruit of constancy is not what the constant agent himself immediately desired. This is because man is a subordinate. He cannot fashion the future to his will; he is used by God. Men are used. The purposes of God, which guide the universe, cannot be the purposes of one man. But if that one mans purpose is humble and direct, open and good (which means in unison with Gods purpose), then he would rejoice at 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 what he had desired. It will be found more permanent than what he had desired. He will serve God in a sense unwittingly, though wittingly in purpose. Each man who has achieved, has achieved something other than he intended. Each man who has achieved, has achieved something in the same axis with, along the same direction, as his intention wasin proportion as his intention was good. In the history of Western Europe the episode of the martyrdom at Canterbury is a capital example of constancy. It stands out the more vividly [like the end of The Old Road] because, in that very place, in that very See, the purpose for which St. Thomas died has been conspicuously denied, ridiculed, frustrated, and (locally) destroyed. (104-105my emphasis added) After reading this passage, we may recall Bellocs 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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