Ruminations on the Fall of Rome
Belloc wrote, “The Catholic Church was the only subsidiary organism that had risen within the general body of the Roman Empire.” Belloc's idea that the Catholic Church was an organism that grew out of the organism of the Empire is important.
Combine this with Belloc's observation (which he emphasized a few times) that the biggest part of the expansion and unification of the Roman Empire “was all accomplished in the lifetime of a long-lived man. Carthage and Corinth fell to Rome in the 140's BC, and Julius Caesar conquered Gaul in the 50's BC."
Although Belloc doesn't say it, it's almost as if he's saying that Divine Providence was in a hurry to get everything into place, so the world would be ready for the spread of Christianity. And although I can't read the mind of Providence, that's what I think happened.
Greek learning provides the tools to understand (though not fully, of course) the reality that is Christ. The Empire provides unification, stability, and communication. The Savior comes. News of the Savior is able to spread because of the unification and stability provided by the Empire. Questions about this odd Reality called Christ are able to be debated and explored with the tools of Greek philosophy (keep in mind, it wasn't until Thomas Aquinas that anyone really understood what God's name as revealed to Moses (“I Am Who Am”) made any sense from a philosophical perspective; it's hard to fathom what people would have thought about the paradox that is Christ, Who, with alarming credibility, actually embodied and carried out previous wild myths about gods coming to earth through virgins).
The faith needs an organism, a host, to survive. The Empire was the organism that allowed it to come into existence and start. The Catholic Church was the subsidiary organism that allowed it, and has allowed it, to continue.
The organism idea is vibrant today, and is accurate, and it does a lot to help Catholics understand themselves today. John Zmirak recently used it in The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Catechism (Crossroad Publishing, New York, 2012), p. 134: "We are grafted into a lively, thriving tree that was planted before our births and will go on growing once we're dead. The plant is the only beanstalk that reaches to heaven. We can climb it or not."
