Europe and the Faith | Page 2

what he knows to be true and what
other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united European
civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and for acts
which are his own. He himself could have done those things in person.

He is not relatively right in his blame, he is absolutely right. As a man
can testify to his own motive so can the Catholic testify to unjust,
irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European story; for he knows
why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of
Europe externally as strangers. They have to deal with something which
presents itself to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena
alone: he sees it all from its centre in its essence, and together.
I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is
The Church.
The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience which begins
with the development of the Church in the basin of the Mediterranean.
It goes back much further than that. The Catholic understands the soil
in which that plant of the Faith arose. In a way that no other man can,
he understands the Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with
the gross Asiatic and merchant empire of Carthage; what we derived
from the light of Athens; what food we found in the Irish and the
British, the Gallic tribes, their dim but awful memories of immortality;
what cousinship we claim with the ritual of false but profound religions,
and even how ancient Israel (the little violent people, before they got
poisoned, while they were yet National in the mountains of Judea) was,
in the old dispensation at least, central and (as we Catholics say) sacred:
devoted to a peculiar mission.
For the Catholic the whole perspective falls into its proper order. The
picture is normal. Nothing is distorted to him. The procession of our
great story is easy, natural, and full. It is also final.
But the modern Catholic, especially if he is confined to the use of the
English tongue, suffers from a deplorable (and it is to be hoped), a
passing accident. No modern book in the English tongue gives him a
conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study violently hostile
authorities, North German (or English copying North German), whose
knowledge is never that of the true and balanced European.
He comes perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd,
either in their limitations or in the contradictions they connote. But
unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot put his finger
upon the precise mark of the absurdity. In the books he reads--if they
are in the English language at least--he finds things lacking which his
instinct for Europe tells him should be there; but he cannot supply their

place because the man who wrote those books was himself ignorant of
such things, or rather could not conceive them.
I will take two examples to show what I mean. The one is the present
battlefield of Europe: a large affair not yet cleared, concerning all
nations and concerning them apparently upon matters quite indifferent
to the Faith. It is a thing which any stranger might analyze (one would
think) and which yet no historian explains.
The second I deliberately choose as an example particular and narrow:
an especially doctrinal story. I mean the story of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, of which the modern historian makes nothing but an
incomprehensible contradiction; but which is to a Catholic a sharp
revelation of the half-way house between the Empire and modern
nationalities.
As to the first of these two examples: Here is at last the Great War in
Europe: clearly an issue--things come to a head. How came it? Why
these two camps? What was this curious grouping of the West holding
out in desperate Alliance against the hordes that Prussia drove to a
victory apparently inevitable after the breakdown of the Orthodox
Russian shell? Where lay the roots of so singular a contempt for our old
order, chivalry and morals, as Berlin then displayed? Who shall explain
the position of the Papacy, the question of Ireland, the aloofness of old
Spain?
It is all a welter if we try to order it by modern, external--especially by
any materialist or even skeptical--analysis. It was not climate against
climate--that facile materialist contrast of "environment," which is the
crudest and stupidest explanation of human affairs. It was not race--if
indeed any races can still be distinguished in European blood save
broad and confused appearances, such as Easterner and Westerner,
short and tall, dark and fair. It was not--as another foolish academic
theory (popular some years ago) would pretend--an economic affair.
There was here no revolt of rich against