My Note "On 'The Real World'"

It is a hilarious irony that those who are the most enamoured of this phrase are precisely the same people who are the least interested in reality. Doubly ironic is their obliviousness to this fact.

There are few of us who have reached manhood who do not know how gruelling and ghastly the real world is. But many of us also know that this so cruel world is, in its essence, good: for existence exists and is good. (That statement is, in its skeleton, the proof for the existence of God, by the way. God is Existence. Existence cannot create itself; yet we know existence exists. So there must be an Uncreated Existence.)

Now the Reader, if he knows me and certain facts about me, will not be surprised to learn that I have had the "real world" insult offered to me. It is somewhat like a man's curse issued against another turning back upon himself. There is a great and dreadful irony in it. The reference was, of course, to my religion.

Now the reason I hold my religion is because it is the true one. I am not a Catholic because I hold an opinion to that effect; opinion is naught compared with Truth. I was reading Urquhart's translation of Rabelais this evening and came across these words: "Believe it if you will, or otherwise believe it not, I care not which of them you do, they are both alike to me, it shall be sufficient for my Purpose to have told you the Truth, and the Truth I will tell you." [1] I agree with all of that, except that I do care which you do: though indeed, for my sake, my allegiance is to Truth and to Reality, and not to you. If you want to live in an imaginary world of your own creation, furnished with moral relativism and substituting emotion for thought, and to tell me that gender is a social construct and that (as nearly became, or did it actually become, law in California?) "people are not born male or female," then that is up to you. If you want to be damned then that is up to you; the demons will welcome you; but I love you, and would have it otherwise. "Zeal," as a Saint has said, "springs from love."

It is not my purpose in this Note to provide any of the many converging proofs of the objective truth of Catholicism. I do wish, however, to point out two arguments which I find very strong. They are (1) the eternal hatred of the Catholic Church on the part of Her enemies (with its concomitant the eternal love of Her friends and devotees), and (2) the multiplicity of the character of what I shall call confirmed Catholics. By "confirmed Catholics" I do not mean those who have received that awe-filled Sacrament; I mean (a) those raised Catholic, who left the Church and returned; (b) those brought up Catholic who never the left the Church, but whose Faith was confirmed by the experience of life; and (c) converts (I do not include those contemptible men who "convert" for reasons of politics or expediency), whose sincerity none can question. I shall take these two in their turn.

For the first, I shall take the liberty of a long quotation from the great and holy Hilaire Belloc, in his magnificent book Survivals and New Arrivals: Enemies of the Catholic Church Old and New.



The curious have remarked that one institution alone for now nineteen hundred years has been attacked not by one opposing principle but from every conceivable point.

It has been denounced upon all sides and for reasons successively incompatible: it has suffered the contempt, the hatred and the ephemeral triumph of enemies as diverse as the diversity of things could produce.

This institution is the Catholic Church.

Alone of moral things present among men it has been rejected, criticized, or cursed, on grounds which have not only varied from age to age, but have been always of conflicting and often of contradictory kinds.

No one attacking force seems to have cared whether its particular form of assault were in agreement with others past, or even contemporary, so long as its assault were directed against Catholicism. Each is so concerned, in each case, with the thing attacked that it ignores all else. Each is indifferent to learn that the very defects it finds in this Institution are elsewhere put forward as the special virtues of some other opponent. Each is at heart concerned not so much with its own doctrine as with the destruction of the Faith.

Thus we have had the Church in Her first days sneered at for insisting on the presence of the full Divine nature in one whom many knew only as a man; at the very same time She was called Blasphemous for admitting that a Divine personality could be burdened with a suffering human nature. She was furiously condemned, in later ages, for laxity in discipline and for extravagant severity; for softness in organization and for tyranny; for combating the appetites natural to man, and for allowing them excess and even perversion; for ridiculously putting forward a mass of Jewish folklore as the Word of God, and for neglecting that same Word of God; for reducing everything to reason—that is, to logic, which is the form of reason—and for appealing to mere emotion. Today She is equally condemned for affirming dogmatically the improbable survival of human personality after death, and for refusing to admit necromantic proofs of it—and pronouncing the search for them accursed.

The Church has been presented, and by one set of Her enemies, as based upon the ignorance and folly of Her members—they were either of weak intellect or drawn from the least instructed classes. By another set of enemies She has been ridiculed as teaching a vainly subtle philosophy, splitting hairs, and so systematizing Her instruction that it needs a trained intelligence to deal with Her theology as a special subject.

This unique experience suffered by the Church, this fact that She alone is attacked from every side, has been appealed to by Her doctors throughout the ages as a proof of Her central position in the scheme of reality; for truth is one and error multiple.

It has also been used as an argument for the unnatural and evil quality of Catholicism that it should have aroused from the first century to the twentieth such varied and unceasing hostility.

But what has been more rarely undertaken, and what is of particular interest to our own day, is an examination of the battle's phases. Which of the attacks are getting old-fashioned? Which new offensives are beginning to appear, and from what direction do they come? Which are the main assaults of the moment? What is the weight of each, and with what success are they being received and thrown back?

I say, this cataloging of the attacks in their order of succession, from those growing outworn in any period to the new ones just appearing, has been neglected. A general view of the procession is rarely taken. Yet to make such an appreciation should be of value. The situation of the Church at any one time can be estimated only by noting what forms of attack are failing, and why; with what degree of resistance the still vigorous ones are being combated; what novel forms of offensive are appearing. It is only so that we can judge how the whole position stood or stands in any one historical period.

Now the historical period in which we have most practical interest is our own. To grasp the situation of the Catholic Church today we must appreciate which of the forces opposing her are today growing feeble, which are today in full vigor, which are today appearing as new antagonists, hardly yet in their vigor but increasing.

As for the Faith itself it stands immovable in the midst of all such hostile things; they arise and pass before that majestic presence:

"Stat et stabit, manet et manebit: spectator orbis." [2]



And there is something wonderful in seeing the Church ever immovable, against the intelligent forces of evil that try to wound Her as much as they can, and the stupid agents of evil who try to destroy Her: who know not that She cannot be destroyed, so feeble is their grasp of the reality of spiritual things.

Secondly, when one examines the nature of those who become Catholics, there is no common thread linking them, none at all, apart from their humanity and their Catholicism. All Catholics, but it is true of converts (and that is to be noted), are about as like to one another as a hairbrush to a glass of water, as the sun to a frog, and as a tweed jacket to a roast potato. I do not mean that there will not be similarities in personality and common interests in golf or art or Romantic poetry or philately or the Renaissance in France or tectonics or the works of Catullus. I mean that there is no such thing as a typical Catholic, whereas there is such a thing as a typical Anglo-Catholic or a typical Calvinistic Methodist or a typical Plymouth Brother.

I find these two things, among twenty thousand others, strong arguments in favour of Catholic truth; and these myriad taken all together I find amount to a certainty.



The Catholic Church is the prime reality of the world.



Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,

But the Church of Jesus constant will remain.



All great States and civilizations come to their end: Carthage, Venice, Rome. There is nothing that endures. But there is one thing which shall endure until the end of time; and it shall endure until the end of time, yes, because Christ has given his promise - but what is a promise? A promise is an assurance of Truth with reference to some act either begun in the future or already begun and continuing into it. A promise coming from Jesus Christ, Who is Truth itself, will not be broken.

I have not endeavoured to prove Catholic truth in this essay; if the Reader cares enough about reality, he may read some Catholic books for himself to find out the Church's dogmas and the reasons behind those dogmas. If he does not care about reality, he will attack the Church anyhow and in any way, "without," as Defoe put it, "knowing whether Popery [be] a man or a horse."

I should wish to emphasize the distinction which must be made between holding a strong opinion to the effect that something is true, and knowing that something is true: as the Catholic knows that his religion is true, and that all other religions, whether they be Muslim or Protestant or atheist, are, precisely insofar as they contradict Catholic truth, false. It is those who are clinging tenaciously to opinion, rather than those with a sure and certain knowledge of truth, who write such charitable remarks as this:



May the faeries at the bottom of your garden keep your milk fresh, the elves under your bed ease your muscles while you sleep and the ignorant fool inhabiting your body wake up to the world soon. [3]



Perhaps people who write such things should read the Pilgrim's Progress, paying particular attention to the character of Mr Worldly-Wiseman. He is very busy these days.

Finally, I pray that all my Readers may have awakened in them an interest in reality. For reality is great and terrible; and reality is much more interesting, also, than the warpings and falsifications of it caused by religious bias. "Reality," it must be said, "is harsh to the feet of shadows." [4]





[1] Rabelais, François, "Garguanta et Pantagruel," tr. Urquhart, Navarre Society Limited Edition, vol. 2, p. 73.

[2] Belloc, Hilaire, "Survivals and New Arrivals," "http://www.ewtn.com/library/answers/surviv.htm"

[3] Glendinning, Robbie, comment on Stuart Abram's link to the Youth Declaration to the UN on abortion and family rights

[4] Lewis, C.S., "The Great Divorce."