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Immersed in current news, we forget that the past is not really “past” in significant ways. Much of the news of the day is not so new at all. In relation to Islam especially, the past is far from over. We are simply watching it emerge from the hibernation it entered after the formal dissolution of the 600- year reign of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.British writer Hilaire Belloc, writing in the 1930s, put no date on Islam’s re-emergence. But while the West’s attention was elsewhere, he predicted its inevitability: Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all...

In times of evil, prophets who see it in what Ronald Knox called a “clear light” are not necessarily heeded, though they are desperately needed. Such a man was Hilaire Belloc, as Monsignor Knox described him at Belloc’s funeral Mass in 1953. “By derivation,” Knox explained, a prophet “is one who speaks out.” Belloc, the first truly revisionist historian, made it his life’s work to speak out. He warned of the rise of Islam throughout the early years of the 20th century and then between the two world wars, when such prophecy seemed absurd. In 2006 another great prophet, Pope...

The celebrated British apologist and essayist, G.K. Chesterton, had a good friend, Hilaire Belloc, who is now largely forgotten, but whose fame in his day caused George Bernard Shaw to refer to the pair as the “Chesterbelloc.” Among his many interests (such as writing a Foreword to a collection of P.G. Wodehouse short stories!), Belloc wrote a number of books and articles on the subject of economics. One of his most intriguing works was a book entitled The Servile State. In this book, written before the fall of the Russian Tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Belloc...

Brethren, Hilaire Belloc’s apologetic’s classic , The Great Heresies, is now available for download in EPUB format from here. Yours truly did the compilation and conversion. Please, let me know if you have trouble downloading the file. - Download The Great Heresies.

We approach the greatest moment of all. The Faith is now in the presence not of a particular heresy as in the past — the Arian, the Manichean, the Albigensian, the Mohammedan — nor is it in the presence of a sort of generalized heresy as it was when it had to meet the Protestant revolution from three to four hundred years ago. The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called "The Modern Attack," is a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith — upon the very existence of the Faith. And the...

The movement generally called "The Reformation" deserves a place apart in the story of the great heresies; and that for the following reasons: 1. It was not a particular movement but a general one, i.e., it did not propound a particular heresy which could be debated and exploded, condemned by the authority of the Church, as had hitherto been every other heresy or heretical movement. Nor did it, after the various heretical propositions had been condemned, set up (as had Mohammedanism or the Albigensian movement) a separate religion over against the old orthodoxy. Rather did it create a certain separate...

In the heart of the Middle Ages, just when they were working up to their most splendid phase, the great thirteenth century, there arose — and was for the moment completely defeated — a singular and powerful attack upon the Catholic Church and all the culture for which it stood. This was an attack, not only on the religion that made our civilization, but on that civilization, itself; and its general name in history is "The Albigensian Heresy." In the case of this great struggle we must proceed as in the case of all our other examples by first examining...

It might have appeared to any man watching affairs in the earlier years of the seventh century — say from 600 to 630 — that only one great main assault having been made against the Church, Arianism and its derivatives, that assault having been repelled and the Faith having won its victory, it was now secure for an indefinite time. Christendom would have to fight for its life, of course, against outward unchristian things, that is, against Paganism. The nature worshippers of the high Persian civilization to the east would attack us in arms and try to overwhelm us. The...

Arianism was the first of the great heresies. There had been from the foundation of the Church at Pentecost A.D. 291 to 33 a mass of heretical movements filling the first three centuries. They had turned, nearly all of them, upon the nature of Christ. The effect of our Lord's predication, and Personality, and miracles, but most of all His resurrection, had been to move every one who had any faith at all in the wonder presented, to a conception of divine power running through the whole affair. Now the central tradition of the Church here, as in every other...

I propose in what follows to deal with the main attacks upon the Catholic Church which have marked her long history. In the case of all but the Moslem and the modern confused but ubiquitous attack, which is still in progress, I deal with their failure and the causes of their failure. I shall conclude by discussing the chances of the present struggle for the survival; of the Church in that very civilization which she created and which is now generally abandoning her. There is, as everybody knows, an institution proclaiming itself today the sole authoritative and divinely appointed teacher...

What is a heresy, and what is the historical importance of such a thing? Like most modern words, "Heresy" is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things. Today, with most people (of those who use the English language), the word "Heresy" connotes bygone and forgotten quarrels, an old prejudice against rational examination. Heresy is therefore thought to be of...

"Catholic intellectual?" Is that a contradiction in terms? Of course not. It is silly to say so, even though progressives like to float the idea every once in a while when they are having a hard time pushing through one of their favored reforms. The 20th century was, after all, the century of Chesterton, Belloc, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox and Jacques Maritain.In fact, it would be easier to make the case that Catholic intellectuals sometimes spend too much time being intellectuals, too much time with scholarly explorations of the Faith, and not enough with the child-like imagery on their Christmas...

Hilaire Belloc, who lived from 1870-1953, and wrote during most of those years, epitomized the word prolific. Roughly 150 titles are attributed to him, though a few of these are collections of newspaper essays. Some people set out to read everything Belloc ever wrote, which would be a mistake. Belloc was a writer by trade. He wrote to pay his bills. Thus, by his own admission, some of his writing was "hack work." Of course that leaves much that is simply brilliant — and the critic was probably right who said that Belloc may have written bad books, but he...

(Page 71)"Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant.... We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet.... (Belloc warns to not be complacent!)The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was 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...

Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by. One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam's past and predicted, in his book THE GREAT HERESIES, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic revival,...

Same-Sex Marriage and the Living Document March 4, 2004 “According to definition,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “the ideal citizen of this Modern State must be free to act on his individual judgment of morals, must reach conclusions on all matters by private judgment, but must accept the coercion of any law whatsoever when it has been decided by a majority of such individual citizens so concluding.” That about sums it up. The Modern State, now called Democracy, has no moral principles, but we have a duty to obey it anyway. Why? Majority rule, you know. But sometimes the courts overrule the...

Race with the Devil From the Hell of Hate to the Well of Mercy By Joseph Pearce "A sound atheist cannot be too careful of the books that he reads." So said C. S. Lewis in his autobiographical apologia, Surprised by Joy. These words continue to resonate across the years that separate me from the bitterness of my past.  What is true of the atheist is as true of the racist, which is what I was. A hell of hatred consumed my youth. Eventually I stumbled out into the brilliance of Christian day, but, looking back along that path, I...

THE GREAT HERESIES by Hilaire Belloc Chapter Four The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed It might have appeared to any man watching affairs in the earlier years of the seventh century_say from 600 to 630_that only one great main assault having been made against the Church, Arianism and its derivatives, that assault having been repelled and the Faith having won its victory, it was now secure for an indefinite time. Christendom would have to fight for its life, of course, against outward unchristian things, that is, against Paganism. The nature worshippers of the high Persian civilization to the...