Dr. Robert Hickson 17 February 2013

Hilaire Belloc’s View of a Pilgrimage

EPIGRAPH:“Blessed is he that has come to the heart of the world and is humble.” (H.Belloc)1

When Hilaire Belloc was a rumbustious young man in his mid-thirties, and

only a few years after he had completed his journey afoot to Rome, he wrote an

essay entitled “The Idea of a Pilgrimage,” which first appeared in his

memorable 1906 collection of essays Hills and the Sea.2 In this essay are some

insights—even about “the heart of a child”—which will be, I believe, still a

fortifying inspiration for us today, and a deep moral nourishment.

Throughout his essay one finds, in Whittaker Chambers’ words, both a

“reverential memory” and a sense of “historical landscape”3 which fittingly

recall us to consider our own roots. Beginning his essay with a proposed

definition, Belloc says:

A pilgrimage is... an expedition to some venerated place to which a vividmemory of sacred things experienced, or a long and wonderful history ofhuman experience in divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting the soulimpels one. This is, I say, its essence.... [I]t may [even] be a little walk uphill toa neighboring and beloved grave. (229)

He also thinks that, “round the idea of pilgrimage,” there has always

1� Hilaire Belloc, Complete Verse (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1970), p. 79—These words constitute the first line of Hilaire Belloc’s four-line verse, entitled “From the Latin (But Not So Pagan).”2� Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea (London: Methuen & Co. LTD., 1943, the 22nd edition—first published in 1906).The page citations to this essay, on pages 229-234, and to the essay-collection will be in parentheses in the main body of the current article. Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome, published in 1902, is as vivid a record of his spirited and reverential march the previous year from the Moselle Valley in France down to Rome for the Papal High Mass on the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, on 29 June 1901. Dr. P. Chojnowski, once my student, just recalled to me our reading of this essay.3� Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 40 and 40-41. “I hold that a nation’s life is about as long as its reverential memory.” (40); and “‘Ah,’ she said, with a trace of wonder doing duty for obeisance [or pietas] before the greatness with which men have sometimes acted, ‘eine historishe Landschaft’ [i.e., there at the actual place where “George Washington’s Continental Army” crossed the Delaware River on “the cold Christmas Eve, 1776.”]. I call that reverential memory at work. Cold Friday [“my little height” near Westminster, Maryland,”] is [also] part of an historic landscape....I hoped to root them [my own children] in this way in their nation. For I hold that a nation is first of all the soil on which it lives, for which it is willing to die—a soil bonded to those that lived on it by that blood of which a man usually loses a few drops in working any field like Cold Friday.” (40-41)—my emphasis added.

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been “something more than the mere objective”(229)—as in “general worship

you will have noble gowns [vestments], vivid colour, and majestic music...; so

in this particular case of worship [i.e., pilgrimage], clothes, as it were, and

accoutrements gather round one’s principal action.” (229) Thus, he adds:

I will visit the grave of a saint or of a man whom I venerate privately for hisvirtues and deeds, but on my way I wish to do something a little difficult toshow at what a price I hold communion with his resting-place, and also on myway I will see all I can of men and things; for anything great and worthy is butan ordinary thing transfigured, and if I am to venerate a humanity absorbed intothe divine, so it behooves me on my journey to it to enter into and delight in thedivine that is hidden in everything. (129-130)

That is, in the words of Saint Thomas, “Deus est in omnibus rebus, et intime.”

Then, our Belloc becomes more specific:

Thus I may go upon a pilgrimage with no pack and nothing but a stick and myclothes, but I must get myself into the frame of mind that carries an invisibleburden, an eye for happiness and suffering, humour, gladness at the beauty ofthe world, a readiness for raising the heart at the vastness of a wide view [as ofthe Alps], and especially a readiness to give multitudinous praise to God....Thedesire for reality and contact is a kind of humility, this pleasure in it a kindof charity. (230—my emphasis added)

For example, consider his vivid contact with the reality of the sea and

wind, to be glimpsed in his own robust Introduction to Hills and the Sea, where

Belloc speaks of how he and one of his sailing companions made it back under

sail to England, with high risk, from one of their wandering pilgrimages

together on the Continent of Europe. Speaking of these two hearty companions

in the third person plural, Belloc says of their adventurous (and perilous) return

journey in a great wind under sail, as follows:

At another time they took a rotten old leaky boat (they were poor and couldafford no other)—they took, I say, a rotten old leaky boat whose tiller wasloose and whose sails mouldy, and whose blocks [the block and tackle in therigging] were jammed and creaking, and whose rigging frayed, and they boldlyset out together into the great North Sea. It blew a capful, it blew half a gale, itblew a gale: little they cared, ...these cousins of the broad daylight! There wereno men on earth save these two who would not have got her under [a little]trysail and a rag of a storm-jib with fifteen reefs and another: not so theheroes. Not a stitch would they take in [of sail]. They carried all her canvass,and cried out to the north-east wind [called “Eager”].... So they ran before it[the Great Wind] largely until the bows were pressed right under, and it was no

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human power that saved the [dangerous] gybe. They went tearing andfoaming before it, singing a Saga befitting the place and time. For it was theirhabit to sing in every place its proper song....And they rolled at last into OrfordHaven [on the Suffolk coast in eastern England] on the highest tide that everhas run since the Noachic Deluge [!]; and even so, as they crossed the bar[the outer sandbar and reef] they heard the grating of the keel. (pp. xi-xii—my emphasis added)

But, our Belloc would have us know and well remember, that, despite

the mighty adventures of the way (both out and back!),

It is surely in the essence of a pilgrimage that all vain imaginations arecontrolled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to see theplace where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn,he will not care very much about the niggling of pedants about this or thatbuilding, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture.... If,on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, hewill remember and love it. This is what children do, and to get the heart of achild is the end surely of any act of religion. (230-231—my emphasis added)

In such a temper of mind, the pilgrim “will never let himself...put

himself, so to speak, before an audience in his own mind—for that is pride

which all of us moderns always fall into.” (231—my emphasis) And, what is

more,

Nor does religion exercise in our common life any function more temporarilyvaluable than this, that it makes us to be sure at least of realities, and lookvery much askance at philosophies and imaginaries and academic whimsies.(231—my emphasis)

For, “it is an error that the religious spirit should be so superficial and

so self-conscious as to dominate our method of action” (231-232), not only at

sacred moments and places, but also even when it is more appropriate, that is,

in relaxed ordinary life and in its more hilarious recreations. Then after making

a few piquant comments about those who tend to be always more taut and

solemn, who even rather dourly “go about a common voyage in a chastened

and devout spirit,” while never letting go a little, much less briefly “falling into

every ordinary levity,” he makes an embarrassed, but gracious disclaimer: “I

fear this is bad theology, and I propound it subject to authority.”

Covering himself then a little further, and now more specifically,

Belloc then winsomely says:

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I would rather for the moment that he [the Over-Earnest Man] went off in agay, tramping spirit [though still “haunted by [his sacred] mission”], not over-sure of his expenses, not very careful of all he said or did, but illuminated andincreasingly informed by the great object of his voyage, which is...to loose themind and purge it in the ultimate contemplation of something divine. (232—my emphasis)

However, Belloc admits of exceptions to his general rule, in that there

is “that kind of pilgrimage which some few sad men undertake because their

minds are overburdened by a sin or tortured with some great care that is not of

their own fault.” (232) However, he adds, “even to these a very human spirit

comes by the way [in via, en route], and the adventures of inns and foreign

conversations broaden their world for them and lighten their burden.” (232)

And, thus, as with other men on pilgrimage, “he packs up the meaning of life

into a little space to be able to look at it closely, as men carry with them

small locket portraits of their birthplace [home] or of those they love.” (233

—my emphasis)

Recalling us implicitly to his earlier-described adventurous and

challenging return to Orford Haven and sailing full-sailed in the North Sea

winds, Belloc adds another touch to charm us: “If a pilgrimage is all this

[diversity of contact and trials and general enlargement], it is evident that,

however careless, it must not be untroublesome”! (233—my emphasis added)

Moreover, “it would be a contradiction of pilgrimage to seek to make the

journey short and vapid... to remain as near as possible to what one was at

starting, and to one’s usual rut....That is not the spirit of a pilgrimage at all.”

(233-234)

He draws us then to his conclusion and leads us to his own memorable

path to Rome:

The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready tosmile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way [to hissacred objective], the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits ofthe various cities. And as to the method of doing this4...the best way of all is on

4� Belloc had also given a few alternatives to going “on foot”: “we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly [up] against servants and flattery).” (234)

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foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and theworld on every side, and time to see all. So also I designed to walk, and did,when I visited the tombs of the Apostles [in 1901]. (234)

Now we may have, surprisingly, even a new standard by which to

evaluate both Geoffrey Chaucer’s own variegated pilgrimage in The

Canterbury Tales, and G.K. Chesterton’s apt contrast of a modern pilgrimage

with its earlier fourteenth-century counterpoint. In Chesterton’s own

appreciative book, entitled Chaucer,5 he said, in essence, the following: in the

Canterbury pilgrimage, the varied pilgrims (even the unmistakable rascals)

hung their hats in different homes, but had their heads in the same universe;

whereas, in the modern pilgrimage, the pilgrims often hang their hats in the

same house, but have their heads it different universes. So, too, will it come to

pass when, or if, the Catholic Faith today becomes, more and more, a set of

ambiguities and equivocations, and of clashing dialectical

incommensurabilities.

However, in his own intimate and magnanimous essay on “The Idea of

a Pilgrimage,” Belloc’s words are still a tonic and a balm to the deeply Faithful

Souls of the Catholic Faith. For as Saint Thomas, “the Doctor of Creation (and,

hence, of Createdness),” said: “God is in all things, and most inwardly”—“et

intime.” Also with the in-seeping and deepening-down of His Grace.

--Finis--

© 2013, Robert D. Hickson

5� G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber LTD, 1932).

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