A Bit of Belloc

I don’t know how well respected Hilaire Belloc is as an historian, whether he’s simply regarded as a polemicist, a mere popularizer, or whether he is deemed to have legitimate insights that historians take seriously, no matter whether they agree with them all. That said, the following passage from the opening of his Characters of the Reformation, which at the very least is eminently readable, strike me as plausible, though this part of my knowledge is deeply lacking:

The break-up of united western Christendom with the coming of the Reformation was by far the most important thing in history since the foundation of the Catholic Church fifteen hundred years before.

Men of foresight perceived at the time that if catastrophe were allowed to consummate itself, if the revolt were to be successful (and it was successful), our civilization would certainly be imperiled, and possibly, in the long run, destroyed.

That indeed is what has happened. Europe with all its culture is now seriously imperiled and stands no small chance of being destroyed by its own internal disruption; and all this is ultimately the fruit of the great religious revolution which began four hundred years ago.

This seems to me to have some truths to it, though I would wonder whether the original schism from the Eastern Church, or the rise of Islam (did one allow the other to succeed?), were more important. I also wonder whether the Reformation could have been combated effectively or not. He was certainly right about the break-up of the West, though not, perhaps, for the exact reasons he expected. The book was published in 1936, and Belloc lived to see the end of the war which so thoroughly damaged and separated Europe. The irony was that in their attempt to make World War II the war that would end all wars, since the First had failed to do so, the Europeans attempted to create an artificial unity that has been building and, it sounds like, becoming hollowed out from within by the wholesale cultural transformation enabled by multiculturalism.