For better or worse, these are quotes from Belloc....
Introduction on Heresy
"Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein" (p. 7).
"It is of the essence of heresy that it leaves standing a great part of the structure it attacks" (p. 9).
"We are what we are today mainly because no one of those heresies finally overset our ancestral religion, but we also are what we are because each of them profoundly affected our fathers for generations, each heresy left behind its traces, and one of them, the great Mohammedan movement, remains to this day in dogmatic force and preponderant over a great fraction of territory which was once wholly ours" (p. 12).
Scheme of This Book
"I propose in what follows to deal with the main attacks upon the Catholic Church which have marked her long history....
1. The Arian;
2. The Mohammedan;
3. The Albigensian;
4. The Protestant;
5. One to which no specific name has as yet been attached, but which we shall call for the sake of convenience 'the Modern'" (pp. 14 - 17).
The Arian Heresy
"The movement for denying the full Godhead of Christ and making Him a creature took its title from one Areios (in the Latin form Arius), a Greek-speaking African cleric rather older than Constantine, and already famous as a religious force some years before Constantine's victories and first imperial power" (p. 28).
"In all their various forms and under all their technical names (Monophysites, Monothelites, Nestorians, the names of the principal three—and there were any number of others) these movements throughout the Eastern or Greek half of the Empire were efforts at escaping from, or rationalizing, the full mystery of the Incarnation" (p. 35)
The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed
"Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further....those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was—not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing....that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified" (p. 43).
"We have just seen what was the main cause of Islam's extraordinarily rapid spread; a complicated and fatigued society, and one burdened with the institution of slavery; one, moreover, in which millions of peasants in Egypt, Syria and all the East, crushed with usury and heavy taxation, were offered immediate relief by the new creed, or rather, the new heresy. Its note was simplicity and therefore it was suited to the popular mind in a society where hitherto a restricted class had pursued its quarrels on theology and government" (p. 46).
"It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past" (p. 51).
"There was one critical moment when it looked as though the scheme would succeed. A huge Mohammedan armada fought at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth against the Christian fleet at Lepanto. The Christians won that naval action, and the Western Mediterranean was saved. But it was a very close thing, and the name of Lepanto should remain in the minds of all men with a sense of history as one of the half-dozen great names in the history of the Christian world" (p. 66).
"Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history—September 11, 1683" (p. 67).
"under the English mandate the forcing of an alien Jewish colony upon Palestine has raised the animosity of the native Arab population to white heat" (p. 73).
The Albigensian Attack
"this permanent trouble of the human mind has swollen into three great waves during the Christian period, of which three the Albigensian episode was only the central one. The first great wave was the Manichean tendency of the early Christian centuries. The third was the Puritan movement in Europe accompanying the Reformation, and the sequel of that disease, Jansenism" (p. 77)
"all the extravagances which you find hovering round Manicheism or Puritanism wherever it appears. Wine was evil, meat was evil, war was always absolutely wrong, so was capital punishment; but the one unforgivable sin was reconciliation with the Catholic Church" (p. 84)
What was the Reformation?
"Though the immediate fruits of the Reformation decayed, as had those of many other heresies in the past, yet the disruption it had produced remained and the main principle—reaction against a united spiritual authority—so continued in vigor as both to break up our European civilization in the West and to launch at last a general doubt, spreading more and more widely" (pp. 89-90).
"Everything has a cause, and every cause has another cause behind it, and so on. The abandonment of Rome by the Papacy, soon after 1300, did weaken the structure of the Church but was not in itself fatal. It is better, in seeking the main starting point, to take that awful catastrophe, the plague called today 'the Black Death' (1348–50)" (p. 95)
"I must here reiterate for purposes of clarity, the very first thing for anyone to realize who wants to understand the religious revolution which ended in what we call today 'Protestantism.' That revolution, which is generally called 'The Reformation,' fell into two fairly distinct halves, each corresponding roughly to the length of a human life. Of these the first phase was not one of conflict between two religions but a conflict within one religion; while the second phase was one in which a distinct new religious culture was arising, opposed to and separate from the Catholic culture" (p. 100).
"Though the iron Calvinist affirmations (the core of which was an admission of evil into the Divine nature by the permission of but One Will in the universe) have rusted away, yet his vision of a Moloch God remains" (p. 105)
"By the middle of the seventeenth century, as I have said, a long lifetime after the first fighting had begun in France, there was a general agreement throughout Europe for each party to stand upon its gains, and the religious map of Europe has remained much the same from that day to this, that is from about 1648–49 to our own time" (p. 109).
"All this corporate property was either directly connected with the Catholic Church, or so much part of her patronage as to be under peril of loot wherever the Catholic Church was challenged. The first act of the Reformers, wherever they were successful, was to allow the rich to seize these funds" (p. 110).
"this universal robbery of the Church, following upon the religious revolution, which gave the period of conflict the character it had. It would be a great error to think of the loot of the Church as a mere crime of robbers attacking an innocent victim" (p. 110).
"In that part of Christendom which had broken away, the new Protestant ministers and bishops, the new schools, the new colleges, the new hospitals, enjoyed not a tenth of what the old endowments had yielded" (p. 111).
"on account of this permanent division, men were coming to regard religion itself as a secondary thing" (p. 115).
"the great, the chief, example of what was happening through the break-up of the old Catholic European unity, was the rise of banking. Usury was practiced everywhere, but in the Catholic culture it was restricted by law and practiced with difficulty" (p. 117)
"in the Protestant culture difference of opinion and skepticism were commonplaces. Men took them for granted. They led less and less to personal animosities and civil division" (p. 117).
"the English institution of Parliament which had arisen and was maintained under aristocratic conditions by a governing class, was imitated everywhere. It was utterly unsuited to societies with a strong sense of human equality, but such was the prestige of England that men copied English institutions upon every side" (p. 121).
"This was the general cause of the Protestant decline, but its action was vague and hard to grasp; on the particular causes of that decline we may be more concrete and certain. For one thing, the spiritual basis of Protestantism went to pieces through the breakdown of the Bible as a supreme authority" (p. 124).
"There was also another example of the spirit of Protestantism destroying its own foundations, but in a different field—that of social economics. Protestantism had produced free competition permitting usury and destroying the old safeguards of the small man's property—the guild and the village association" (p. 125).
"It nearly always happens that when you get rid of one evil you find yourself faced with another hitherto unsuspected; and so it is now with the breakdown of the Protestant hegemony. We are entering a new phase, 'The Modern Phase,' as I have called it, in which very different problems face the Eternal Church and a very different enemy will challenge her existence and the salvation of the world which depends upon her. What that modern phase is I shall now attempt to analyze" (p. 127).
The Modern Phase
"See what has happened for instance to the word 'logic,' to the word 'controversy'; note such popular phrases as 'No one yet was ever convinced by argument,' or again, 'Anything may be proved,' or 'That may be all right in logic, but in practice it is very different.' The speech of men is becoming saturated with expressions which everywhere connote contempt for the use of the intelligence. But the Faith and the use of the intelligence are inextricably bound up" (p. 138).
"either we of the Faith shall become a small persecuted neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle-cry, 'Christus Imperat!'" (p. 139)
"The future is not decided for men by public vote; it is decided by the growth of ideas. When the few men who can think best and feel most strongly and who have mastery of expression begin to show a novel tendency towards this or that, then this or that bids fair to dominate the future" (p. 143).
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