Lewis and Belloc
The September/October edition of Gilbert Magazine features am interview with Peter Milward, S.J. Milward has been around awhile, as evidenced by this great Lewis anecdote: "Long before I went up to Oxford in 1950, I had been a devout fan of C.S. Lewis, and I had read everything of his I could lay my hands on. But when I first set eyes on him, at one of our guest nights at Campion Hall, I was so disappointed. Here was a chubby, red-faced man with the head of an egg. I couldn't believe this was the intellectual ascetic of my devout imagination. Mine was exactly the reaction of Debra Winger as Joy Davidman in the movie, 'You don't look like Lewis!" But as I went on to attend all his lectures in the School of English, I soon changed my mind. Here was the best of the lecturers Oxford had to afford, standing head and shoulders over all others. Here was a truly great man."
Unfortunately, Oxford wasn't always so good to great men. In a wonderful introduction to Hilaire Belloc in the current issue of Gilbert Magazine, Dale Ahlquist wrote:
In spite of his prodigious intellect and mastery of the language and letters and facts, Belloc was denied a chair at Oxford for the simple reason that he was Catholic and did not embrace the official “Whig” version of history. According to the Whig historians, the English Reformation was a popular movement against the oppressive institution of the Catholic Church. Belloc, however, stood for the idea that the revolt against the Church came from the aristocracy, and was led from the top down. The common people were devout Catholics. They were not the ones who seized the monasteries. It was princes and nobles and merchants who stole the Catholic faith from the English people.
Belloc argued that it was the Catholic Church that built Europe and the Protestant Reformation that began the process of destroying Europe. He said that Catholic Europe represented all the “beauty and right-living and tradition which inspired and maintained Christendom: the soul of the West.” He said famously, “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe.” A lot of people hate that sentence. They hate that idea. But they have also watched the steady decline of Europe through the last few centuries, as Catholicism has steadily disappeared from it. Belloc bluntly warned, “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.”
