Hilaire Belloc’s final words of wisdom might enable us to become truly oriented, taking the right path at the right pace to the right place. How do we get to heaven? The answer, it seems, is on foot.
Hilaire Belloc was a man of many talents and a man of many parts. He wrote poetry and prose; he wrote fiction and non-fiction; he wrote for children and for grown-ups. He was a poet, novelist, satirist, historian, political philosopher, Catholic apologist and one of the finest essayists ever to grace the English language. He was a politician and a Member of Parliament, and a soldier and a sailor. He was a husband and a father and for much of his life a grieving widower. Last but not least, and most certainly not least important, he was both a lover of home and a seasoned traveler who was often away from home.
The tension between the rootedness of the love of home and the restlessness of the wayfarer animates much of Belloc’s finest work, especially those hauntingly personal pilgrimages of the soul, The Path to Rome (1902), The Four Men (1912) and The Cruise of the Nona (1925). These three “pilgrimages”, taken together, might be dubbed “travel-farragoes”, in which a linear narrative connected to a journey is interwoven with contemplative musings on the rootedness of the permanent things.
In “The Idea of a Pilgrimage”, an essay published in Hills and the Sea (1906), Belloc writes that a pilgrim is called “to enter into and delight in the divine that is hidden in everything”. He must have “an eye for happiness and suffering, humour, gladness at the beauty of the world, a readiness for raising the heart at the vastness of a wide view, and especially a readiness to give multitudinous praise to God”.
Recalling, no doubt, his own pilgrimage on “the path to Rome” a few years earlier, he emphasized the essential difference in seeing a landscape for oneself from reading reports of it: “The Alps that he sees with his eyes will be as much more than the names he read about… as beauty loved is more than beauty heard of, or as our own taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight are more than the vague relations of others.” In our own day and age, in which most of us spend much of our time viewing virtual reality through the screen of an electronic device, these words about the need to experience reality really, not merely virtually, should be both heard and heeded.
Part of the purpose of a pilgrimage is “the fulfilling of an instinct in us, the realization of imagined horizons, the reaching of a goal”. And yet there is a paradoxical aspect of pilgrimage because the reaching of the goal is never fully satisfying; it is never satisfactory; the goal, once reached, is never the final goal that we seek. “For whoever yet that was alive reached an end and could say he was satisfied? Yet who has not desired to reach an end and to be satisfied?” This paradoxical tension indicates that a “pilgrimage is for the most a sort of prefiguring or rehearsal”. The pilgrimage to a particular place, a particular goal, is a reflection of that greater pilgrimage of man himself, whose journey through life is meant to be a pilgrimage, the goal of which is the attainment of heaven, the only place which is completely satisfactory. All other and lesser pilgrimages are, therefore, a “prefiguring” and a “rehearsal”. They are a microcosmic mirror which reflects man’s macroscopic goal: “Here I start from home, and there I reach a goal, and on the way I laugh and watch, sing and work. Now I am at ease and again hampered; now poor, now rich, weary towards the end and at last arrived at the end. So my great life is, and so this little chapter shall be.” Each pilgrimage that we undertake is a chapter of that greater pilgrimage, a story within the story. The person on a pilgrimage “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 or of those they love”. It’s as though we pack up the meaning of our lives in a spiritual backpack, carrying it with us so that we may feel its weight and know its gravitas.
Although the end of the pilgrimage is the holy place, be it the shrine of a saint in the pilgrimages undertaken in this life, or the heavenly Holy Place at life’s conclusion, the means by which the end is achieved, the pilgrimage itself, is also important. The progress of the body on the appointed journey must be accompanied by the progress of the soul. A pilgrimage “must not be untroublesome”. It must involve discomfort and the embrace of suffering. This differs from the “modern habit” of living life as a mere tourist, a detached observer who travels merely for the pleasure of the trip, with no intention of being changed for the better by the experience. Such travellers refuse the pilgrimage, “for they seem to think … that to remain as near as possible to what one was at starting, and to one’s usual rut, is the great good of travel”.
These mere tourists of life, the seekers of nothing but the pleasure-trip, have lost their way because they have lost sight of the goal and the purpose of the journey through life. “That is not the spirit of a pilgrimage at all,” Belloc writes. “The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human, and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities.” Humility, devotion, being humane and charitable; the joy that sees every detail of the journey with admiration for the human dignity of his neighbours, who are made like he is in the image of God; to look up with joy at the presence of God’s grandeur in the mountain peaks and the sky beyond. To understand civilization in the multifarious cultures of unique nations.
Belloc concludes by insisting that the best way of taking the pilgrimage is to take our time with it. Taking time means slowing down. A pilgrimage should not be rushed, whether it be on a bicycle which is “a little flurried” or, worse still, in a car, which is “luxurious and dangerous”. Perhaps we might add, by way of refining Belloc’s point, that it is dangerous because it is luxurious, comfort being the great corrupter. Such hastiness is the wasting of time that should be taken, not squandered. Against such temptations, Belloc insists that “the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all.”
Belloc’s final words of wisdom might enable us to become truly oriented, taking the right path at the right pace to the right place. How do we get to heaven? The answer, it seems, is on foot.
__________
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is a photograph of the Pilgrimage Church of the Assumption of Mary, Bled, Slovenia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
