Europe and the Faith | Page 7

France. The Scandinavian savage poured into the mouths of all the
rivers of Gaul, and almost overwhelmed the whole island of Britain.
There was nothing left of Europe but a central core.
Nevertheless Europe survived. In the refloresence which followed that
dark time--in the Middle Ages--the Catholic notes not hypotheses but
documents and facts; he sees the Parliaments arising not from some
imaginary "Teutonic" root--a figment of the academies--but from the
very real and present great monastic orders, in Spain, in Britain, in
Gaul--never outside the old limits of Christendom. He sees the Gothic
architecture spring high, spontaneous and autochthonic, first in the
territory of Paris and thence spread outwards in a ring to the Scotch
Highlands and to the Rhine. He sees the new Universities, a product of
the soul of Europe, re-awakened--he sees the marvelous new
civilization of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the old
Roman society, a transformation wholly from within, and motived by
the Faith.

The trouble, the religious terror, the madnesses of the fifteenth century,
are to him the diseases of one body--Europe--in need of medicine.
The medicine was too long delayed. There comes the disruption of the
European body at the Reformation.
It ought to be death; but since the Church is not subject to mortal law it
is not death. Of those populations which break away from religion and
from civilization none (he perceives) were of the ancient Roman
stock--save Britain. The Catholic, reading his history, watches in that
struggle _England_: not the effect of the struggle on the fringes of
Europe, on Holland, North Germany and the rest. He is anxious to see
whether Britain will fail the mass of civilization in its ordeal.
He notes the keenness of the fight in England and its long endurance;
how all the forces of wealth--especially the old families such as the
Howards and the merchants of the City of London--are enlisted upon
the treasonable side; how in spite of this a tenacious tradition prevents
any sudden transformation of the British polity or its sharp severance
from the continuity of Europe. He sees the whole of North England
rising, cities in the South standing siege. Ultimately he sees the great
nobles and merchants victorious, and the people cut off, apparently
forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food upon which
they had fed.
Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land only
that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or miraculous,
preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side by side with that
loss the preservation of Ireland.
To the Catholic reader of history (though he has no Catholic history to
read) there is no danger of the foolish bias against civilization which
has haunted so many contemporary writers, and which has led them to
frame fantastic origins for institutions the growth of which are as plain
as an historical fact can be. He does not see in the pirate raids which
desolated the eastern and southeastern coasts of England in the sixth
century the origin of the English people. He perceives that the success
of these small eastern settlements upon the eastern shores, and the
spread of their language westward over the island dated from their
acceptance of Roman discipline, organization and law, from which the
majority, the Welsh to the West, were cut off. He sees that the ultimate
hegemony of Winchester over Britain all grew from this early picking

up of communications with the Continent and the cutting off of
everything in this island save the South and East from the common life
of Europe. He knows that Christian parliaments are not dimly and
possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly monastic in their origin; he
is not surprised to learn that they arose first in the Pyrenean valleys
during the struggle against the Mohammedans; he sees how probable or
necessary was such an origin just when the chief effort of Europe was
at work in the Reconquista.
In general, the history of Europe and of England develops naturally
before the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to that succession of
theories, self-contradicting and often put forward for the sake of
novelty, which has confused and warped modern reconstructions of the
past. Above all, he does not commit the prime historical error of
"reading history backwards." He does not think of the past as a groping
towards our own perfection of today. He has in his own nature the
nature of its career: he feels the fall and the rise: the rhythm of a life
which is his own.
The Europeans are of his flesh. He can converse with the first century
or the fifteenth; shrines are not odd to him nor oracles; and if he is the