Europe and the Faith

“This our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity… will stand only in the mold of the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”

In this work, Hilaire Belloc advances the central truth that the story of Europe is inseparable from the story of the Catholic Church, for the Faith did not adorn the civilization that grew upon the ruins of Rome but animated it, ordered it, and gave it coherence. He writes with the precision of a historian and the assurance of one who knows the nature of his subject, tracing the continuous thread by which the Church carried the substance of the ancient world through the barbarian tempest, preserved its reason and its arts, and bestowed upon a scattered people the unity of Christendom.

The book proceeds with an argument that builds upon itself, chapter by chapter, until the reader perceives the organic connection between doctrine and custom, worship and polity, creed and culture. Belloc treats the Middle Ages not as a dim interval between the glories of antiquity and the triumphs of modernity, but as the age in which Europe most fully knew itself, when the Faith expressed itself in law, in letters, in architecture, and in the very habits of a people conscious of their supernatural destiny.

Europe and the Faith offers a vision of history that refuses to sever the temporal from the eternal and presents the Catholic Church not as an influence among others but as the principle of unity without which Europe becomes unintelligible. For those who desire to understand what Europe was, and what it may yet become if it returns to its foundation, this book provides an argument at once clear, forceful, and enduring.