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ANTI-CATHOLIC HISTORY:
HOW IT IS WRITTEN1
By Hilaire Belloc
One of the chief obstacles opposed to the defence
of the Church in modern times is the supposed
authority, each in his particular department, of those
who attack the Church. This is especially true of
Academic Authority, that is, of Authority which
bases itself upon the supposed learning (and sincerity
in teaching) of the universities.
A man with a high official position in the uni
versities is naturally supposed to be well acquainted
with his science, whatever it is, and to be honest in
his exposition of its results. Only a very few men
can enjoy such positions, and to the mass of readers
their conclusions and affirmations seem almost
necessarily true. When, therefore, a Catholic is met
by the statement that Professor So-and-So has said
this or that in Natural Science or in Philosophy,
and especially in History, which plainly damages or
contradicts our Catholic truth, the Catholic layman
is inevitably disturbed. He can reply, “I am no
expert in these matters, but my Faith tells me that
the Church is right and therefore this man must be
wrong. ” But such a reply is of little service against
opponents who of course do not admit the premises,
1 An examination of Prof. Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought,
adapted from an article appearing in the Dublin Review for Jan. 1914.
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and, what is more, it presupposes an attitude of mind
which cannot always be guaranteed. The Catholic
himself is disturbed in his own Faith by statements
made with full Academic Authority and apparently
destructive of that Faith.
This is more particularly the case to-day, because
matters requiring expert knowledge and long study
are being discussed in popular form, and affirmations
based upon such study are being put forward in cheap
books and pamphlets which circulate by the million.
Now it so happens that any particular zeal against
the Catholic Church nearly always leads the zealous
opponent thereof into bad errors of fact and state
ment, and this is more especially the case in the allimportant department of History. But the average
Catholic layman reading popular works upon history,
most of which in the English tongue suffer from an
anti-Catholic bias, is not equipped for the discovery
of their errors. He can but imagine that state
ments proceeding from men of known official position
at the universities are upon the whole true. It is
important that he should learn to mistrust such false
Authority, and to appreciate that not only is the
opponent of the Catholic Church commonly guiltv
of error in his historical statements, but that the
Academic Authority upon which he relies is unsound:
that the writing and teaching of history in our
Protestant universities consists largely in unverified
lepetition of current errors ; that even the plain
duty of accuracy m dates, names, and facts is consi era y neg.ected and all this because those very
academic writers are so certain of their official
position that they fear no external criticism. They
° °ne W11u be comPetent to expose them
save their own colleagues.
I shall here take one typical example of this
�How it is Written
3
kind of University work, and I think I shall be able
to show the reader of what stuff it is composed, how
very little reliance may be placed upon it, and what
a proper contempt he may entertain for its supposed
Authority.
The work which I shall take for my example
unites in a high degree the various characters of
such attacks upon our religion. It is called A
History of Freedom of Thought, and its author is
Professor Bury of Cambridge.
This History of Freedom of Thought is a little
book issued at a shilling. It is issued, therefore,
with the deliberate object of affecting a very wide
and popular circle of readers. It is a book definitely
intended for propaganda.
It forms part of a well-known series (The Home
University Library : Williams & Norgate) whose
whole intention consists in distributing the expert
results of Academic , study to the widest possible
public. It is a series which has done invaluable
work already in many departments of art and of
science.
The book is written by one who holds the highest
possible official position our universities can give.
Professor Bury is the head of the School of History
at the University of Cambridge. He is the official
representative of Academic History in that one of
our two great universities.
It is therefore no artificial choice which I am
making. It is an excellent and typical example of
the kind of thing we have to meet and expose
which I am taking for the purpose of this tract.
I shall first of all show how strongly opposed to
the Catholic Faith, in spirit and in diction, academic
work of this kind is. In so doing, I cannot avoid
perhaps shocking the piety of Catholic readers, for
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Anti-Catholic History :
some of the terms used by the author are frankly
shocking to our piety, and are intended to be so.
But I must quote the sentences in order to establish
my case. Next, I shall show how inaccurate and
unscholarly work of this kind can be.
The general thesis of the little book (it is less
than 250 small pages of large print) is as follows :
That reasonable inquiry upon the fate of the soul
and the nature of things was common to Pagan
antiquity : That there arose a maleficent institution,
which we know by the name of the Catholic Church,
and which institution was opposed to inquiry and
to the use of reason in these matters : That this
institution, gradually gaining ground in the so-called
‘ ‘ conversion ” of the Pagan world, extinguished the
use of reason, compelled men to a blind acceptance
of absurdities, and darkened the human mind, in
Christian Europe at least, for something like a
thousand years : That this disaster was alleviated
towards the end of the Middle Ages by some
stirrings of a renewed interest in truth : That
during the last four hundred years, as the Power of
the Church has been gradually weakened until it has
almost disappeared, the human mind has recovered
its native vigour and freedom, and has returned to
the healthy use of reason in its inquiry into all the
great and doubtful problems of philosophy.
There is nothing original about that thesis. It
is the commonplace of all those who oppose the
Catholic interpretation of history.
What I am concerned to show is, first, the strong
spirit of animosity in which that thesis is presented,
ne*t> the gross lack of accuracy and scholaruT Y
vitiates or destroys all the supposed
Authority ” of its exponent.
Here, then, are a few passages in which the anti
�How it is Written
5
Christian standpoint of this Academic Authority is
particularly emphasized apart from historical state
ments. I would beg the reader to note them, for
they are not unconnected with that violence in state
ment which leads such writers into their errors of
fact as well as of doctrine.
Upon page 25 we have the conception of the
creation of the Universe by Almighty God labelled
“ fantastic. ” Upon page 37 the difficulties of
accepting at once a God and the existence of
Evil are presented as insoluble. Upon page 40
we are requested to consider the Persons of the
Blessed Trinity “with some eminent angels and
saints discussing in a celestial smoke-room the
alarming growth of unbelief in England, and then,
by means of a telephonic apparatus, overhearing
a dispute between a Freethinker and a parson.”'
Upon page 50, to receive the “Kingdom of
Heaven” “like a little child” is to “prostrate your
intellect.” Upon page 52 the Christian Millennium
inaugurated by Constantine’s Edict is one in which
‘ ‘ reason was enchained and thought was enslaved. ”
Upon pages 63 and 64 the doctrines of Sin, Hell,
and the Last Judgment form “a solid rampart
against the advance of knowledge.” And upon a
preceding page the Faith defended by the Inquisi
tion is “nonsense.” Three pages later (67), we
again get the refrain that in the most Christian
centuries ‘ ‘ reason was enchained in the prison which
Christianity had built around the human mind.”
While upon page 72 the Faith becomes “a misty
veil woven of credulity and infantile naivete which
hung over men’s souls and protected them from
understanding either themselves or their relation to
the world.” At the opening of Chapter VI. upon
page 127, Christian theology is full of “ incon*
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Anti-Catholic History:
sistencies, contradictions and absurdities,” and upon
page 137 another Authority quoted (a French
Protestant by the way) “shows that the Christian
dogmas are essentially unreasonable. ” Four pages
further another person (this time a Cambridge don)
“examines the chief miracles related in the Gospels
and shows with great ability and shrewd common
sense that they are absurd.” Upon page 156 the
French Church was ‘ ‘ a poisonous sewer ” which the
Deists or Atheists of the eighteenth century were
right to attack. Upon page 160 Hume “ shows ”
that the arguments “adduced for a personal God
are untenable.” Kant, upon page 175, is lectured
for “ letting God in at a back-door,” and is told that
he has failed. Upon page 181 Darwin “drives a
nail into the coffin of Creation and the Fall of Man.”
Upon page 182 it is discovered that if any intelligence
had to do with the designing of the world it must
have been 1 ‘ an intelligence infinitely low. ” And
just before the end of the book, upon page 249, we
are re-assured that ‘ ‘ Reason now holds a much
stronger position than at the time when Christian
theology led her captive. ”
And so forth—we all know the kind of thing.
The eighteenth century was full of it, and much of
it survives in our own day, especially with those of
an older generation who are still among us. It is
an inevitable accompaniment, of course, to such
sentences that we have the Christian scheme described
as “mythology”; that we hear of the “delusive
conviction of our Lord and His Apostles as to the
approaching end of the world; that the Blessed
Sacrament is “ a savage rite of eating a dead god ”
(page 189). Conclusions of this kind and adjectives
suitable to them abound in the little work, and I
really need waste no more space in setting forth the
�How it is Written
7
first point which I have promised to lay before my
readers.
It will be admitted without any further labouring
of the point that the Academic Authority I am deal
ing with is in opposition. He is a clear example
of such Authority in action against the Catholic
Church.
Well, let us next examine how far that Authority
is genuine ; in other words, how far this Academic
Authority is an Authority at all.
Authority in this connection obviously depends
upon a presumption of scholarship. That is, the
Academic personage is presumed from his very
position to have had special opportunities for in
formation, to have accumulated a great number of
facts and conclusions inaccessible to the ordinary
man from lack of leisure and training, and to be
putting forward these facts and conclusions with
accuracy. He has no other source of Authority.
He does not pretend to revelation or to special
inspiration. If it can be shown that he is not
writing good history but bad history, then his pre
sumed Authority disappears, and his opposition to
the Church is of no more weight than that of any
other ill-informed or inaccurate man.
Good history means accurate history, and accuracy
in historical writings is of three kinds.
First, and least important perhaps, is the accuracy
that can be tested by established books of reference,
and more certainly by a comparison of the historian’s
work with the documents upon which it is admittedly
founded ; accuracy in dates given, in the exact
wording of quotations, and in all matters of that
kind.
Errors in these may be mere slips of the pen or
mere carelessness in proof reading, or, what is graver,
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Anti-Catholic History:
a lapse of memory. Even so, they vitiate history
and mislead the reader.
But they may also be something more. These
errors may, if they occur in sufficient number, or
are of their nature presumably due to ignorance and
not to neglect, or are made upon matters sufficiently
grave or presumed to be of common knowledge to all
expert historians, be proof of a fundamental lack of
scholarship. They may show a book to be not only
slipshod, but written without any sufficient prepara
tion or knowledge.
In other words, we can cite such errors as a proof
of thoroughly bad history according to—
(tz) the number of such errors.
If I write a short account of Queen Victoria’s;
reign with one hundred dates in it, and fifty of those
dates are wrong, that is not mere carelessness. It
is ignorance, and it is proof of my incapacity to write
on the subject at all.
(Q The inherent probability of error.
For instance, if I find a man saying that Queen
Victoria came to the throne in 1873, it
obviously
a printer’s error for 1837’; but if I find him saying
that war broke out between France and Germany
in April 1869, that is inexcusable. No man can write
July so that it looks like April, or 1869 so that it
looks like 1870, and it is exceedingly unlikely that
he would write either the month or the year wrong
by a mere slip of the pen. There is no subcon
scious action to account for such a mistake, and one
can only put it down to ignorance.
Q) The grossness of the error.
One may excuse a man for not looking up some
tiny point, or for having looked it up in some in
accurate book of reference ; but there are certain
great fixed dates in history which everybody ought
�How it is Written
9
to know, certain main facts and names with which
everybody should be acquainted, and when an
historian goes hopelessly wrong on those, one has a
right to give a loud cry. As, for instance, if a man
mentioning the Boer War shows, even by a single
allusion, that he thought the Boers were Englishspeaking, or black. Or again, if one writing on
the Bible should show by a chance phrase that he
thought it to be all by one hand.
Second, and of greater importance in the matter
■of accuracy and therefore of good history, is accuracy
in proportion, that is in the relation of one state
ment to another.
Thus, if an historian describing the Boer War
•omits or makes little of the presence of a large
element in the Cape sympathetic with the Boers, or
tells us nothing of the widespread voluntary enlist
ment in England at the beginning of the struggle,
or does not emphasize the loose formation and
peculiar method of fighting of the enemy, he is,
whether from bias or from ignorance, writing bad
history.
Every one of the facts stated may be
perfectly accurate, and yet the truth may be hidden,
or even reversed, in the process of telling. This
kind of bad history is often to be discovered in
the way in which an historian will pervert the
meaning of a document by not mentioning or by
not sufficiently emphasizing some one of its provi
sions. For instance, one might say of the great
Reform Bill of 1832 that it destroyed the popular
franchise in many towns, and was for long opposed
by that great and typically national man, the Duke
of Wellington. But to say only those two things
about it would be to mislead the reader altogether,
for the Duke of Wellington’s opposition was personal,
and later was withdrawn ; and while popular fran-
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Anti-Catholic History:
chise was destroyed in some towns, the franchise as a
whole was intended to be, and was, both more widely
extended and based upon a more popular principle
than it had been, being specially designed to include
the new great towns of industry which had hitherto
been excluded. Or again, a man might quote in
great detail Mr. Gladstone’s speeches and letters
against Home Rule, casually adding at the end of
his description, “later he greatly modified these
views.” Such an arrangement and proportion would
be a thorough perversion of history.
Errors of this kind, errors in proportion and
emphasis, proceed sometimes from bias ; sometimes
from not having read the original documents in
their entirety ; and sometimes from both. But it
will generally be conceded that, when they occur
frequently and affect the whole course of a narra
tion, they destroy the historical authority of the
narrator.
Third, and most important of all, is that kind of
accuracy which may be called ‘ ‘ accuracy in the
spirit of the narration,” that is accuracy as to the
general atmosphere of an event.
This kind of accuracy is, of course, the real test
of good history beyond all others. But it is much
the most difficult both to define and to criticise, and
where it is lacking one must exercise great care in
choosing one’s examples to show that it is lacking,
for it is not a process available to the ordinary
reader. The judgement can only be passed by one
who has covered the same field of historical reading
as has the writer whom he is examining.
Thus we cannot call an historian a bad historian
of the Battle of Waterloo simply because he shows
a great prejudice against the political aims of the
allies and a great sympathy for the political aims
�How it is Written
11
of Napoleon. But if his sympathies lead him to
present the resistance of the British squares in
Wellington’s line to the French Cavalry charges ashalf-hearted and ill-disciplined, he is a bad historian.
In order to write such bad history, it is not necessary
that he should use false language at all or set down
facts which are contrary to the truth. He has but
to modify his adjectives somewhat, or even to ascribe,
without himself vouching for it, certain motives and
a certain mental attitude in his characters, to produce
the desired effect, or to quote adverse opinion without
quoting opinion in favour of the party he is attacking.
Now, if we take these three kinds of inaccuracy
in their order and judge by them the historical value
of Professor Bury’s little book, we shall, I think, be
surprised at the result.
To take the first kind of inaccuracy : inaccuracy
in date and fact and quotation. I have said that the
numbers, the inherent probability, and the grossness
of error, are the three matters which in this connection
we are chiefly concerned with, and I think my
readers will agree, when I have run through certain
examples of this kind of thing in Professor Bury’s
book, that they are not excusable upon any plea of
mere fatigue or over-rapid work. There are too
many of them, and many of them are too serious,
for such a plea to hold.
Remember that I am quoting but a portion of
these howlers, and only such as my own limited
historical learning allows me to discover at a first
reading. Remember, further, that I am taking them
from no more than the first two hundred pages of the
book, which bring us up to modern times. Those
pages are short pages. The little essay is not a book
of reference crammed with facts ; it is a piece of pro
paganda in which the facts stated are comparatively
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Anti-Catholic History:
few, and few also the names referred to (for instance,
there is no mention of Abelard). Yet even upon
so small a scale, and under such partial conditions of
examination, thenumber of positive errors is startling.
frWe have upon page 55 Spain given as the place
of Priscillian’s execution ; it should, of course, be
Treves.
Upon page 56 Simon de Montfort the elder is
confused with his own son and called ‘f the English
man. ”
We have Lyons instead of Vienne given as the
place of Servetus’s imprisonment by the Inquisition
before he got away to Geneva.
Legate and Whiteman, the English dissenters who
were burned by the Anglicans in 1612, are set down
as having suffered in 1611.
The Decree of the Holy Office in the matter of
Galileo is put down to the month of February ; it
was given, as a fact, in March.
The statute De Hceretico Comburendo (p. 59) is
put down to 1400 ; it should be 1401.
The statute of 1677 (same page) is put down to
1676—-a year in which Parliament did not even
meet!
Jeremy Taylor s Liberty of Prophesying is dated
one year wrong.
Hume s Dialogues on Natural Religion were not
published in 1776 J there is an error of three years.
Collins, who died in 1729, is said to have “pub
lished” his Discourse in 1733 (page 141).
. Shaftesbury’s Inquiry appeared first, we are told,
m 1699. As a fact, we first find it printed in 1711.
Voltaire, we are told on p. 153, did not begin
ms campaign against Christianity until after the
middle of the eighteenth century. As a fact, the
first work of Voltaire’s to be publicly burnt for
�How zt is Written
13
attacking the Faith was so burnt in 1734- And so
forth. . . .
One might go on indefinitely quoting errors of
this kind, striking rather for their number in such
few pages than for their individual importance, and
it is conceivable that a defence might be put up for
each : in the one case it is a printer’s error; in
another a slip of the pen ; in a third a confusion
between old style and new style—though that is
hardly excusable. But with all the charity imagin
able, and with the best will in the world to excuse
the book as merely grossly careless, one cannot
explain away by mere carelessness such enormities
as a mistake of twenty years in the death of St.Augustine (page 55); a mistake of nine years
(p. 107) in so well-known and fundamental a date
as that of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Perhaps the most amazing of this cataract of errors
is the blunder about Robespierre upon page 113.
The main dates of the French Revolution are
matters like the dates of the Battle of Hastings or
the Battle of Waterloo. Everyone is supposed to
know them who touches history at all, even in an
elementary fashion. Robespierre’s execution marks
the end of the Terror and the end of all the first
great active phase of the French Revolution. It
took place at the end of July 1794, and the prepara
tion and the celebration of the feast of the Supreme
Being was in the month before. To put it down to
April 1795 (as is done on this page 113) cannot be
a mere slip, for the month is there to prove it. A
man cannot write April for May or June, and in
April 1795 Robespierre had been dead for nearly
nine months.
I have said enough in this connection to show,
without further examination of other errors of the
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sort, that the book and its authority can be destroyed
on this score alone. But there is an even stronger
case when, we turn to the second type of error,
which I have called of graver importance, and in
which we can show that Professor Bury either quotes
documents that he has not read, or, having read
them, deliberately misinterprets them by omission
and by a lack of proportion in his statement
Personally, I incline to think that the very
numerous errors in this category are due to that
common fault in our universities, the quoting of
some modern statement about an original document
which the writer will not be at the pains of look
ing up for himself.
Turn, for instance, to the statement upon page
57, that “The Inquisition was founded by Pope
Gregory IX. about A.D. 1233.” There is a sentence
absolutely typical of the way in which this book
has been written. It was not “ about ” some vague
period or other, it was precisely in the year 1231,
that Gregory IX. incorporated with ecclesiastical
law the Imperial rescripts of eleven and seven years
earlier. It is in that year that you get the phrase
“ Inquisitores ab ecclesia,” etc. It is in the next
year, 1232, that you find a Dominican with the title
of Inquisitor. All that you get for the year 1233
is that it was the date when the system was
established in France.
Turn next to a typical statement on p. 59. It is
as follows —
That the Statute for the Punishment of Heretics
by burning, which was passed under Henry IV.,
was repealed (in) 1533 ; revived under Mary, and
finally repealed under Charles II.
Now see what a brief statement of this sort made
in a popular little book of history for general con-
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15
sumption is intended to convey ! It is intended to
convey that a cruel punishment was made law
during the Catholic Middle Ages ; that it ceased to
be law coincidently with the first efforts of Henry
VIII. against Rome, and with the year that was
the year of definite breach with the Papacy. That
when a Catholic sovereign came back in the person
of Mary Tudor, this cruel punishment was revived
and acted upon ; that finally, much later, England
having become wholly Protestant and the Civil Wars
having produced their effect, it was dropped.
Now the interesting point about this statement is,
that though, as I have said, it contains material
errors, the suggestion of historical falsehood is not
dependent upon those errors. It is perfectly true
that the old Statute was repealed under Henry VIII.
just at the moment when he was breaking from
Rome ; but what Professor Bury happens to leave
out is the fact that coincidently with the repeal of the
old Statute a new Statute (25 H. VIII. cap. 14) was
passed which carefully re-erected the punishment of
burning, and preserved it for thefuture.
It may not be common knowledge with the
popular audience to which Professor Bury addressed
himself, but it is common knowledge to the average
historical student, that heretics were burnt for their
heresy steadily during the Protestant establishment :
Butcher and Parre under Edward VI. ; Wielmacker
and Woort and Hammond and others under Eliza
beth. It is further common knowledge that many
were condemned to be burnt who saved themselves
by recanting, or were saved by deportation, or in
some other fashion. The point is that a Statute
for burning heretics was very vigorously alive, though
it was a renewed Statute and not the original Statute
of Henry IV. Professor Bury’s statement, there-
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fore, is as though one were to say of the English
Poor Law : “ Relief was provided for indigent people
by Statute out of the rates under Queen Elizabeth.
But the Statute was repealed in the first part of the
19th century. ” The actual statements would be true,
but they would convey the exact opposite of the truth.
Upon page 65 we have an almost perfect example
of this fashion in treating documents. Here are the
words: “Chemistry (alchemy) was considered a
diabolical art, and in 1317 was condemned by the
Pope. ”
There is exactly the kind of thing repeated over
and over again by men who do not take the trouble
to look up the original documents. It is utterly
inaccurate and fundamentally bad history, and one
can be perfectly certain that Professor Bury has
never so much as glanced at the original text. He
might have discovered it in the second volume of
the body of Canon law, the Lyons edition of 1779.
It is a decretal issued to protect the public from
fraud, and in particular from the fraud practised by
those who pretended to make gold and silver out of
baser metals. The decretal mentions the habit of
such tricksters as stamped with the hall mark of gold
and silver base metal resembling gold and silver,
which base metal they passed off upon the ignorant,
professing to have manufactured them in their
furnaces. The Pope condemns those who have
cheated in this fashion, not to many years penal
servitude (as a modern Court condemned the other
day a Frenchman who had similarly pretended that
he could make large diamonds), but to the paying
into his treasury of a fine in genuine gold and silver
equivalent to the amount of fraudulent metal they
had passed off on poor and ignorant people. There
is not a word about alchemy as an art being con-
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demned, let alone chemistry or any other form of
research.
Now in this case 1 am perfectly certain that
Professor Bury was acting in good faith, that is,
repeating what he had read in other books without
examination and without verifying his references.
The worse historian he !
Here is yet another example of exactly the same
kind of thing. We are told upon page 91 that
“Alexander the Sixth inaugurated censorship of
the Press by his Bull of the year 1501.”
Alexander VI. did nothing of the kind, as Pro
fessor Bury would have known if he had looked up his
original sources as an historian should. Alexander’s
Bull is a copy, word for word, of Innocent VIII.’s
Bull of four years before, which in its turn was based
upon action taken in the University of Cologne
eight years earlier. Further, Alexander’s Bull only
applied to certain German bishoprics. The first
universal censorship came fourteen years later, in •
1515. That one little statement, then, covering
but a line of type, contains a whole nest of in
accuracies, and of inaccuracies due to the fact that
our historian does not know his materials.
You have the same sort of mistake upon page 94.
The catechism of the Socinians is there ascribed to
the influence of Fausto himself. It is just the kind
of thing that looks as though it should be true ;
only, unfortunately, Fausto did not come into the
movement until after the catechism had appeared.
Two pages later on you have another typical
statement : that Charter of Charles II. given to
Rhode Island in 1663 is mentioned as confirming
the existing constitution of the place and securing to
all citizens professing Christianity a full enjoyment
of political rights. What really happened was that
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Charles II. in sending his charter to Rhode Island
repeated his own decision in favour of universal
toleration. But the colonists were concerned with
nothing save the insignificant quarrels of the in
numerable Protestant sects ; the King ultimately left
it to the Assembly of Rhode Island to decide what
it would do, and when that body issued its rules
(printed in 1719) they excluded Catholics.
It is clear that in all these examples, which I
have taken at random up and down the book, the
writer is doing what we so continually find upon the
part of academic authorities, particularly when they
are indulging in an attack upon the Catholic Church—
he is repeating what some other man of the same
kind has said before him, and that other man is
repeating something that was said before him. He
has not been at the pains of consulting original
authorities ; and the result is valueless and in
accurate history, always wrong and sometimes the
exact opposite of the truth.
When we come to the third and gravest kind of
bad history, that in which the general atmosphere is
falsified, we have, as I have said, a much harder
task than in the case of errors in dates and facts, or
of errors due to omission or ignorance of documents.
Nevertheless, the point is of such importance that
it must be dealt with, and I think it will be found
possible to show by fairly definite examples how
thoroughly the thing he is attempting to describe
has been misunderstood by the writer : how lacking
he is in the preparation necessary to a grasp of his
subject.
Let me take for my first example in this general
matter of “ atmosphere ” Professor Bury’s description
of the mediaeval attitude towards the marvellous,
the miraculous, and evidence in general.
�How it is Written
He appears to be persuaded that men in those
times and places where the Catholic Faith was
supreme had lost all sense of the value of evidence
and of the nature of reason. He seems to have
some vague confused picture in his mind of a
besotted society in which men would believe pretty
well anything they were told, and in which no
inquiry could be made into the processes of the
mind or the nature of witness and of truth.
Well, to begin with, if Professor Bury had done
what I suppose no don at our universities ever does,
that is, had read a few lines of St. Thomas in the
original, he would have found the whole argument
against miracles, the whole of the modern feeling
which he himself shares, set out with perfect
lucidity and with extraordinary terseness in the
sixth article of the 105th question of the Summa.
It is St. Thomas’s habit always to put as fully as
possible his opponent’s case before he deals with it,
and that in itself is a mediaeval habit in argument
which moderns have forgotten and would do well
to copy.
But quite apart from his ignorance of this great
text-book of the Middle Ages, the fixed idea that
mediaeval men in general were careless of philosophy
is an astonishing piece of ignorance in which our
author is evidently sunk.
For instance, almost at the outset of his little
effort (on p. 16) we are told that a man in the
Middle Ages hearing of the existence of a city
called Constantinople, and hearing also that comets
were portents signifying divine wrath, would not
have been able to distinguish the nature of the
evidence in the two cases ! Now to say that is not
so much to misunderstand the Middle Ages as to
state something wildly and ridiculously false with
�20
Anti-Catholic History:
regard to them. If ever there was a time which
pushed to excess the habit of definition and of clear
deductive thinking, the establishment of intellectual
categories and the difference between different orders
of ideas, that time was without the faintest doubt
the time between the great awakening of the twelfth
century and the moral shipwreck of the sixteenth.
You are perfectly free to say that this habit of
deductive reasoning was pushed to extremes in the.
Middle Ages: that men wasted their time upon
metaphysical vanities when they should have been
observing phenomena. That is what a good his
torian to whom the Middle Ages were antipathetic
would advance. He would thus show at once that
he knew what the Middle Ages were, and that he
disapproved of them. But to say that the men of
the Middle Ages could not distinguish between
different kinds of intellectual authority, that they
did not concern themselves with exact categories of
thought, is exactly as though you were to say that
Liverpool and Manchester to-day did not concern
themselves with machinery or the production of
material wealth. It is a false statement and bad
history. That misstatement of the whole phase of
our European past is perpetually cropping up in the
book. I have only given one example of it ; 1
might have given twenty.
It is in the same way bad general history to talk
of “the profound conviction” that those who did
not believe in the doctrines of the Church (page 52)
were damned eternally,” and to continue (page 53)
that ‘‘according to the humane doctrine of the
Christians, infants who died unbaptized passed the
rest of time in creeping on the floor of Hell. ”
It is bad history to write that, exactly as it would
be bad history to say “The English Army in 1913
�How it is Written
21
ought to have been stronger ; but then Englishmen
were fools enough to believe that one jolly English
man was worth ten foreigners.” In both cases you
are saying something for which you could easily
quote popular or exaggerated contemporary matter,
and in both cases you are saying something which
shows you ignorant of your historical “ atmosphere.”
The eminent men who preside at the War Office or
over our Foreign Affairs, those who decide, rightly
or wrongly, upon the balance of international forces
known to them and with the whole European situa
tion before them, what the military strength of
Great Britain shall be, these are our authority, and
their decision is the criterion of such things.. They
do not think or say “ one jolly Englishman is worth
ten furriners. ” Their calculation of military ex
penditure is not established upon that basis. Mean
while, it may be true that an exaggeration of the
national strength or an excessive credulity in the
national good fortune may warp the judgement even
of those eminent men. Anyone desiring to prove
the truth of such bad history could quote hundreds
of songs and speeches from the Tub in support of his
contention. He could also probably quote many an
erroneous statement proceeding from men in really
high position. None the less his statement would
be bad history.
It is precisely the same with regard to the Christian
doctrine of eternal damnation, and particularly with
regard to that most difficult of all discussions, the
relation between Faith and Will. But the sentence,
as Professor Bury puts it, is the opposite of the
truth. The ultimate authority of the Church has
never condemned all the unbaptized to eternal
damnation. To say so is simply thoroughly bad
history, and there is an end of it.
�22
A nit-Catholic History:
I will give a third example. The enormous efforts
culminating in a great war directed against the
Albigensians had, it may be presumed, some great
historical cause. On page 56 we are told what this
cause was: “The Church got far too little money
out of this anti-clerical population. ” There is history
for you !
That the loss of revenue excited a strong material
interest is true enough, but to put it forward as the
main cause of the Albigensian War is childish. It
is as though some future historian, disliking the
Manchester School of Economics, were to describe
its intellectual triumph in the middle of the nineteenth
century in England by saying that John Stuart Mill
and Cobden, as well as Bright and Peel, were cun
ningly calculating the profits they could extort from
the labouring poor. One does hear fantastic ex
aggerations or rather wild distortion of this kind on
the lips of sincere but incapable fanatics ; but to
have them set down in what purports to be sober
history, and from the pen of an historian, would be
to render that history worthless and its author
ridiculous.
I will give before concluding yet another instance
of this major error of “atmosphere” which runs
through the whole book. For the purpose of this
last illustration let me choose the few lines upon
St. Thomas upon page 69.
Every historian knows, or should know, what
the place of St. Thomas is in history. You have
in him one of the very few men who have acted as
the tutors of the human race. The more you differ
from or dislike the man or his doctrines, the more is
it your business as an historian to appreciate his
sea e , or history, like all other forms of present
ment, is a matter of proportion. St. Thomas gave
�How it is Written
23
at once a summary, an expression, and a creative
effort to all that is meant by the Christian intelli
gence, and it is plain historical sense to speak of
him as one speaks of Aristotle, of St. Augustine,
or of Bacon ; just as it is plain common sense to
call Russia or the German Empire a great power,
whether one likes or dislikes their people or govern
ments. It is mere bad history to say, as is here
said upon page 69, that St. Thomas “constructed
an ingenious” system of philosophy, and that “ the
Treatise of Thomas is more calculated to unsettle a
believing mind than to quiet the scruples of a
doubter. ”
It is not bad history because St. Thomas was
not ingenious ; it is net bad history because the
gigantic rational force of St. Thomas is incapable
of suggesting doubts ; on the contrary, St. Thomas
must, or may, like all powerful thinkers, have pro
duced reactions against his own conclusions, and
must and may, like all creative minds, have told
lesser men as much of what they should not have as
of what they should. No, to say that St. Thomas
constructed an ingenious system ” is bad history
because it is ludicrously inadequate.
It is like
describing Julius Caesar as a bald-headed man who
travelled and died prematurely ; or Shakespeare as an
English actor who flourished in the reign of James I.
So much, then, for examples of the false historical
atmosphere running throughout this little essay.
It reaches its culmination, perhaps, in the astound
ing remark that (page 90) the retention of Galileo’s
works upon the Index until 1835 was, during the
intervening centuries, “fatal to the study of natural
science in Italy”; from which one might suppose that
Professor Bury had never heard of Torricelli, let us
say, of Volta, or of Galvani !
�24
A nti- Catholic H1story
What are we to say in conclusion upon a book of
this kind? 1 think no more than to repeat the
opinion I set out at the beginning of these few
pages : the supposed Academic Authority of those
who attack the Catholic Church, as Professor Bury
has attacked it, is usually valueless, because it is
usually inaccurate and bad history. This book
shows in a particularly clear light the kind . of in
accurate and bad history which our universities are
responsible for, and it is not an unfair example of
that sort of pompous self-sufficiency in the modern
academic onslaught upon the Church, which it is the
business of every Catholic to mistrust, and I think
of every sound historical critic to ridicule. If I may
presume to counsel those who cannot make any
special study of history, I would earnestly beg them
to challenge the authority of any historical state
ment they hear which seems to conflict with their
common sense or their Faith, and at their leisure to
examine the original authorities upon which it is
based, and which are now for the most part available
to all.
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY THE CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, LONDON.
n.—June 1914.
�
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Anti-Catholic history: how it is written
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Belloc, Hilaire [1870-1953]
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Place of Publication: London
Collation: 24 p. ; 19 cm.
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Catholic Truth Society
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1914
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RA1526
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Catholic Church
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Catholic Church-Doctrinal and Controversial Works
J.B. Bury