I ordered a copy of Hillaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies after reading Heather’s post on Belloc’s birthday, as I’d been curious about Belloc for some time, and had had no idea where to start.

Let me first address the book itself, as an artifact. I’m grateful that the publishers have brought it back into print, but, honestly, I’ve never seen such a poor job of type-setting. The problem isn’t typographical errors, as such, though there are a number of them; it’s not even the weird line breaks that occasionally occur in the middle of the paragraph, or the way that the left margin migrates. The real problem is with the punctuation. There are many, many spots where, quite clearly, a dash or a colon or a comma is simply missing. It was maddening! If you can find an alternate edition, by all means do.

Now that I’ve gotten that off of my chest…

Heather’s right, the book is politically incorrect. It’s un-PC by modern standards; and unless I miss my guys it was un-PC by contemporary standards as well, and intentionally so. It’s clear they called him Old Thunderer for a reason.

The goal of the book is to discuss five “heresies”, where “heresy” is carefully defined as follows:

Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.

The “complete and self-supporting” scheme is the Catholic Church, and the heresies are movements of thought, and of people, that set themselves up against the Catholic Church. The five “Great Heresies” Belloc discusses are:

• The Arian heresy
• Islam
• The Albigensian heresy
• Calvinism, and Protestantism in general
• Modernism

In each case he discusses the origin of the heresy, the Catholic doctrines it affirms and denies, the effect of the affirmation and denial, and the progress and end of the heresy.

It would be easy to write a blog post on each of these, but for now I’ll confine myself to some general remarks. First, in each case Belloc brings in some historical details with which I was unfamiliar. For example, he attributes the longevity of the Arian heresy to the support of the Roman Army; and the members of the Army were Arians because it set them apart from (and, from their point of view, above) the run-of-the-mill citizens. (Remember that at the time in question, the Army was recruited from the folk of the frontiers, or from outside the Empire entirely.) I’d want to check these details, and I suspect him of over-simplifying, but in general he seems to have things the right way round.

And second, a number of the currents he discusses, especially with regard to Protestantism and Islam, seem prophetic in the light of the headlines of the last decade. I’m thinking, for example, of the on-going disintegration of the main-line Protestant churches in America, and the melt-down of the Anglican communion.

There’s much here to ponder.