Everyman on Pilgrimage: The Best of Belloc

Spurred by David Deavel's essay, Mr Pearce offers his own views of The Path to Rome, which he considers 'arguably the best work of literature that Belloc ever wrote'.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

David Deavel’s fine essay on Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome, published here on July 26^th, has prompted me to offer my own musings on this magnificent book, which is arguably the best work of literature that Belloc ever wrote. This is not merely my view but Belloc’s also. He inscribed in his own personal copy of the book, six years after its first publication in 1902, that “Alas! I never shall so write again!” These words take on the mark of prophecy when we see how Belloc continued to consider The Path to Rome his finest book, never altering his judgment irrespective of the numerous volumes he would write in the following decades. Writing to an American friend, Carl Schmidt, in 1930, he declared that his novel, Belinda, was “certainly the book of mine which I like best since I wrote The Path to Rome”. It is clear, therefore, that the “best of Belloc” is to be found on the path to Rome.

On the literal level, The Path to Rome is simply and ostensibly a factual account of the author’s pilgrimage to Rome in 1901. Setting off on foot from Toul, in France, Belloc journeys through the valley of the Moselle, heading for Switzerland and then, traversing the Alps, to Italy. Travelling with him, mile by mile and page by page, as he trudges the 750 miles to the Eternal City, we see Europe at the turn of a new century, over a century ago, through the eyes of a poet besotted with its beauty. We see it through the lens of a historian who understands the living majesty of Europe’s past. We see it through the faithful heart of a Catholic who beholds a vision of the Europe of the Faith in which the present is seen to be in vivid and vibrant communion with the past. This would be enough, in itself, to warrant our reading of the book. After all, who would not want to step back in time to follow the indefatigable Belloc, step be step, on a pilgrimage through Europe, with Belloc himself as our guide. One is tempted, indeed, to see this as a pilgrimage made in heaven.

This understanding of the book’s literal dimension does not, however, do justice to the metaphorical and metaphysical dimensions, which transform The Path to Rome into a work of mystery and mysticism, in which Belloc, like Dante in The Divine Comedy, is transfigured into Everyman, an image and figure of all of us, on our respective pilgrimages through life. Belloc, as the archetypal pilgrim, is homo viator, whose journey towards the Eternal City of Rome is symbolic of the journey of each of each of us towards the Eternal City of God. In this sense the journey becomes a metaphor for life itself and the quest for Rome becomes the quest for Heaven. It is no wonder, therefore, that The Path to Rome is a work of humility and awe, of gratitude and hope, of faith and love. But, like us, it is also carnal. It is incarnational. Its flesh, mystically communing with, and exiled from, heaven, is also rooted in the earth. It is pithy and earthy, anecdotal and tangential; it is simultaneously prayerfully reverent and playfully irreverent. It is a faith loved and lived within the constraints of the fallible and fallen nature of the author. And as for the author’s motivation for writing the book, Belloc inscribed in his own personal copy that “I wrote this book for the glory of God”.

My own deep love for The Path to Rome, which is evident in the foregoing elegy and eulogy, has been rekindled by my reading of the whole book to those who have subscribed to the Inner Sanctum of my personal website. Reading for fifteen minutes for each week’s recorded podcast, it has taken us fifty-six weeks to reach Rome. We finally arrived this week, more than a year after we set off from Toul. By contrast, it took Belloc only twenty-two days to cover the 750 miles, averaging around thirty-four miles a day, almost entirely on foot. Having completed this re-reading of the work, I am well prepared to teach it online to high school students who register for my six-week course on The Path to Rome for Homeschool Connections and I relish the prospect of bringing the timeless wisdom of this classic to a new generation of readers.

As for the book itself, it retains it freshness. From the pregnant poignancy of Belloc’s superb preface, with its delightful combination of the wistful and the whimsical, to the dash and dare of the wonderful poem that serves as the book’s, and the pilgrim’s, conclusion, The Path to Rome takes the reader on a journey into himself and out of himself, a voyage of discovery in which home and exile are interwoven in a mystical dance of contemplation. In its pages we discover the Europe of the Faith, which was, and is, the heart of Christendom, and the Faith itself, which was, and is, the heart of all.