Reading as an Act of Homage

Can reading be considered as “an act of homage”? At first blush, this seems a strange question. We regularly read for the sake of leisure and learning, but aside from overtly religious pursuits — such as Lectio Divina, proclamation of the Word of God, studying theology and chanting of the Divine Office — the surface answer seems to be no. Certainly, it is hard to conceive of reading a Twitter feed, the Google search page, advertisements, pulp fiction, or the like, as acts of homage. Acts of penance . . . perhaps! Despite the place which reading occupies in my daily round, I do not remember ever having previously entertained this question. My reflections are spurred by a re-reading of an intriguing passage by the Trappist Thomas Merton (1915–1968) in one of his early writings, Thoughts in Solitude.

Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality He has created or the greater Reality which He is. It is also an act of humility and reverence towards other men who are the instruments by which God communicates His truth to us . . . . Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape . . . . [they] reduce us to despair by the sheer weight of their emptiness. They entertain us like the lights of city streets at night, by hopes they cannot fulfill.¹

While acknowledging that some reading brings weariness, noise, and emptiness (for like other human endeavors it is touched by the effects of original sin) Merton contends that it “ought to be an act of homage.” His evaluation of the relationship between reading, reality and “the greater Reality” of God is an instance of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s counsel to “find God in all things.” Significantly, Merton underscores that humility is required to see ourselves and things as they are. For no matter how traveled, learned, accomplished, cultured, or talented we may be (or not be), all of us are beggars of the most provincial sort relative to the richness of existence and, especially, the One Who Is. Humility consists in recognizing the chasm between our poverty and this richness, between the utter givenness of our existence and the lavishly infinite generosity of the Giver.² In the memorable words of Catherine of Siena, “I am she who is naught, and He is the One Who Is.” Of course, specifying “how” our awareness of this chasm informs the enterprise of reading is a subtle, complex topic exceeding the limits of this article. Here I merely hazard a word or two about how my reading of a life of Hilaire Belloc moved me to “homage” as I pondered the twin realities of fellowship and sacramentality.

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) was, in his turn, a scholar, soldier, and sailor, a president of the Oxford Union, a parliamentarian, a prodigious and pugnacious writer, a proud Roman Catholic, an inveterate traveler and debater, and a husband and father. Like many writers, he claims that much of what he wrote was out of financial necessity rather than joy. His immense and varied literary output includes novels, lectures, pamphlets, essays, poetry, newspaper and journal articles, historical biographies, social commentary, and a personal journal of his walking pilgrimage to Rome. He so closely collaborated with G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) on personal, religious, literary, artistic, intellectual, and political matters that their chief public adversary, the witty Irishman of letters, George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), coined the term “the Chesterbelloc” to capture the symbiotic character of their relationship.

Initially, I read Joseph Pearce’s biography Old Thunder to understand who Belloc was relative to Chesterton. By the end of my read, I was shot through with wonder about the English Catholic revival of which these men were a part, their dedication to social justice articulated as distributism, the link between Belloc and a formative influence in my own thought, St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890), and the manner in which lasting insights about faith, truth, beauty, goodness, and justice are achieved through, manifested in, and upheld by, such fellowship. I marveled at how creative endeavors are necessarily personal but, ultimately, not atomistic; and at how the most creative of personal labor sustained by such fellowship is, finally, not literary, but spiritual. Belloc’s estimation of Chesterton’s place in English literature aptly fits himself.

In the appreciation of a man rather than of a writer virtue is immeasurably more important than literary talent and appeal. For these last make up nothing for the salvation of the soul and for an ultimate association with those who should be our unfailing companions in Beatitude; the Great Company. Of that Company he now is; so that it is a lesser and even indifferent thing to determine how much he shall also be of the company, the earthly and temporal company, of the local and temporarily famous.³

Belloc’s life is a litany in praise of sacramentality. Taking St. Ignatius’ advice to heart, he found God in all things — not like the pantheist or new age creation spiritualist, but like a Catholic. He loved the created order (whether nature itself, or its greatest boast, the human person) for its beauty and goodness and its capacity to speak about and, at some level, mediate an encounter with the living God without ever confusing or reducing the latter to the former. Among his works we find The Path to Rome (his personal favorite), which is an account of his pilgrimage on foot to the home of Roman Catholicism, and The Four Men, which is an account of what Pearce terms his “secular pilgrimage conveying a soul’s love for the soil of his native land. Home, like Rome, was ‘a holy place’ and The Four Men is full of spiritual premonitions and of ‘the character of enduring things amid the decay of time.’” As Belloc wrote,

And as a man will paint with a peculiar passion a face which he is only permitted to see for a little time, so will one passionately set down one’s own horizon and one’s fields before they are forgotten and have become a different thing. Therefore, it is that I have put down in writing what happened to me now so many years ago . . . Sussex, did I not know that you, who must like all created things decay, might with the rest of us be very near your ending. For I know very well in my mind that a day will come when the holy place shall perish and all the people of it and never more be what they were. But before that day comes, Sussex, may your earth cover me, and may some loud-voiced priest from Arundel, or Grinstead, or Crawley, or Storrington, but best of all from home, have sung Do Mi Fa Sol above my bones.⁴

In view of his sacramental sensibility, it is not surprising that critics consider “Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine” (1928) as, perhaps, his finest; or, that the neophyte politician supported a Private Members Bill to permit private brewing against the wishes of party brass. Belloc’s unswerving attachment and unwavering commitment to the things of the earth, like his Sussex home, ‘King’s Land, was surpassed only by love of his wife, Elodie, and of his Catholic Faith. As a young man, without promise of success and in the face of an initial rebuff, he followed Elodie across the ocean to California to court her. Lack of funds meant that he had to traverse North America by every means imaginable. After her death, he always kissed her door as a gentle sign that their love had survived the grave and pierced the veil.

As a bi-lingual, English Catholic, proudly born of a French father near Paris, he campaigned for a seat in Parliament against an opponent who conjured up the double demons of religious prejudice and xenophobia. Belloc ignored the advice of local clergy, arranged a public meeting on the grounds of a Catholic school, and addressed the overflowing audience saying: “Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”⁵

That Hilaire Belloc was a man of unusual faith and letters whose life has been skillfully set forth by his biographer made it relatively easy to suggest how reading about him, at times, constitutes an act of homage. As I entered the drama of his life, our horizons fused: my second-hand experience of his friendships and his sacramental vision led me to embrace him and, in turn, to exalt in the One whose image and likeness he reflected. In the process, I caught a glimpse of him, of others I knew and had come to know, and even, on occasion, of what I am called to be. In this instance, Merton’s words are sterling: “Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality He has created or the greater Reality which He is. It is also an act of humility and reverence towards other men who are the instruments by which God communicates His truth to us.”