Hilaire Belloc on Martin Luther

Martin Luther was born in the year of the great Rabelais (1483) to parents of small position, the son of a miner or woodman.  He was taught his Latin, he entered an Augustinian monastery under some strong emotion (the causes of which are variously given) when he was twenty-three.  He was ordained a priest two years later.

For some reason, which historical research has failed to discover (there is a mass of contradictory myth about it), he visited Rome in 1510 or 1511 – that is, during the Pontificate of Julius II.  Probably, he was sent on some business connected with his monastery or his Order.

There is no contemporary proof that the worldliness of the Roman Court, or of clerical society in Rome, or the abuses thereof (there were plenty of abuses) roused him to any special indignation or had any special effect upon his mind.  Much later, he enlarged upon the shocking state of the city and its rulers, but that was part of a position later adopted.  He read his own excitements of the subsequent controversy and of the populace who inspired him into an earlier experience which had been commonplace enough.  There was nothing to strike him as a novelty.  All Europe knew that Rome.  Its evils and insufficiencies had long been tolerated.

From Rome, then, he returned with no particular mission against it.  He resumed his place at home.  He was a striking preacher, a man of exceptional energy (which, in these young days of his, tended to turn inwards and to grow morbid when it did not grow explosive).  Though far from being one of the Humanists, he had sufficient learning, especially in theology.  He was given the active direction of his monastery and important work in the University of Wittenberg.  He was already in his thirty-fifth year, a man of some local prominence among the Germans; nothing, as yet, to what he became, but, already, a man locally listened to.  In such a situation, he accidentally started the avalanche.

From: How the Reformation Happened by Hilaire Belloc (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1928), pp. 64-66.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a French-born British man of letters, and a committed Roman Catholic.  His defensive Catholicism regarding Luther is palpable in this passage.

 

A Skewed View of Puritanism

Puritanism is a particular form and degree of Protestantism which has specially flourished in England, Scotland, and Wales, but of which there were wide areas throughout the Protestant world, notably in Scandinavia and in Holland.  To be a Puritan is almost exactly the same as to be what the old world used to call a Manichaean.  The Puritan and the Manichee have the same attitude towards the universe; their creeds work out to the same moral and social practice.  But there is one doctrinal difference between them for, while the Manichee believes in an evil principle which works side by side with, and is equal to, the principle of good in the universe, the Puritan, proceeding from Calvin and, therefore, only admitting one will in the universe, makes both evil and good combine in the same awful God who permits and, in a sense, wills evil and, particularly, the sufferings of man.

There is, then, this difference in doctrine between the two, the old heresy which continually reappears throughout the earlier Christian centuries and the new heresy of the sixteenth century.  But, in practice, the effects of the two were just the same, and Puritanism made, of the society which it affected, very much what the Albigenses made of their society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Bulgarian heretics made of theirs in an earlier time still.

The sentiment, rather than the conviction, that the material world is evil and, therefore, that all sensual joy is, in essence, evil, lies at the root of Puritanism.  Joy in the arts, delight in beauty, and the rest of it, are the Puritan’s object of hatred.  He sees them all as rivals to the majesty of God and obstacles which deflect the pure worship of that majesty.

From: Characters of the Reformation by Hilaire Belloc (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1936), p. 183.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a French-born British man of letters.  He was a very close friend of G. K. Chesterton – so close, that their mutual friend George Bernard Shaw referred to them as “Chesterbelloc.”  To understand the quotation above, one must understand that Belloc was a convinced and committed Roman Catholic.