In his essay “The Old Road”, Hilaire Belloc argues that a study of the past not only satisfies natural curiosity but also satisfies a human desire: “it is rather to fulfill a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity.” The study of the past is a “necessity” because it completes and orders a human life and tells a story in which people have an investment and play a part: “our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on a body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed.” This additional dimension relates an individual’s life to a family, to an extended family, to ancestors, and to traditions and customs of previous generations that have left their mark in shaping a person’s life.
“The soul is fed” because a person experiences a sense of belonging, a sense of indebtedness to many others that instills humility. A human being is not an atom in the void, an autonomous individualist with no obligations to the past or responsibilities to the future. He inherits a venerable patrimony to preserve and perpetuate, whether it is ethnic, religious, or cultural. This “appetite” corresponds to man’s desire to know, to learn what Homer called “the knowledge of men and manners” (the discovery of the variety of customs and manners and a recognition of the unity of human nature), to comprehend what philosophers call “the one and the many,” and to comprehend the universal, perennial truths about human nature and the human condition that constitute the timeless wisdom of the human race—what Edmund Burke calls “the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”
For Belloc, the study of the past cultivates certain virtues like “reverence” that establish man’s relationship to age and antiquity. The Roman virtue pietas especially captures the full meaning of this virtue, the virtue of honoring one’s parents, ancestors, and the gods to whom one owes justice in the form of respect, honor, and gratitude expressed in venerable customs and traditions that cherish their memory. Belloc compares the valuable repositories of the past to “echoes which are exactly tuned to whatever is least perishable in us” and to mountains “which seem to rise higher and more awfully into the air as we abandon them across the plains.” As the past becomes more distant and remote, it does not disappear or become nebulous. Something lasting endures: “Perhaps some ultimate reality stands out when the details are obscured.” These ultimate realities are the unchanging nature of things and the moral laws that never alter as the lessons of history repeat themselves, “crimes we know ground under the slow wheels whose ponderous advance we can hardly note during the flash of one human life.”
This historical consciousness inspires attraction and admiration for what is “least perishable in us,” namely, man’s longing for something permanent, unchanging, and rocklike in his transitory life like the everlasting hills. The echoes and mountains of the past with its lasting achievements and monuments provide a rock—a continuity and preservation of the riches of an earlier age offered as a legacy to the next generation in the form of manners, morals, institutions, and wisdom that have passed the test of time. In Death Comes to the Archbishop, for example, Willa Cather also captures the sense of “what is least perishable in us” as Bishop Latour, traveling into the mesa country of New Mexico, marvels at the thought of men living on the top of massive rocks. She writes, “The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it.” As Bishop Latour contemplates in awe the majesty of the mesa as a sanctuary, he naturally remembers the name “rock” Christ gave to Peter as head of the Church and the way the Hebrews also viewed God as their refuge, their rock. The Indian tribe living on the mesa illustrates Belloc’s point: “The Acomas, who must share the universal human yearning for something permanent, enduring, without shadow of change,–they had their idea in substance.”
“The Old Road,” is the tried and true, made by “known tracks” where the pioneers found food, drink, and safety, “a track [that] will save you from false journeys,” one that does not lead to a dangerous precipice or an unfordable river, a way “where there is the best going”—firm land and dry soil that is not treacherous. This road, though sometimes circuitous and longer than short cuts, is the only path that leads to the destination, “for, if you will trust to that path you will find it crosses the ridge at last at the only place where, on the far side, it is passable at all.” These roads lead to culture and civilization, to sacred and glorious places like Jerusalem, Antioch, Athens, and Rome. On these roads traveled not only religion but also “letters, customs, community of language and idea” followed by architecture, commerce, and the flow of information. To travel the footprints and roads of ancestors breathes life and vigor into the heart and soul, the fresh air of “that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil.”
As Belloc explains, not to travel on the old road of tradition, antiquity, and human experience is to lose one’s way, endanger one’s life, and go nowhere. Notice “The New Road” man has traveled from the 1960s to 2015 by abandoning the old paths traveled by generations that led to the everlasting hills and the majestic ocean. The New Road does not travel by the safest path but blindly follows perilous tracks that lead to precipices—to deaths and tragedies like the 58 million children slaughtered in the genocide of abortion, to the destruction of homes and families wounded by divorce, to the deprivation of children in many single-parent household living on welfare, to the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases facilitated by sex education, cohabitation, and contraception, and to the exploitation of children’s innocence by the legalization by same-sex marriage.
The Old Road has a map, landmarks, and worn trails that direct a traveler to places where many people have come and gone for generations, but The New Road is uncharted territory, a labyrinth that leads to no human habitation or civilized city with a rich history. The Old Road has a beginning, middle, and end in which the traveler, aware of precedent, experiences a sense of continuity in following his forbears and participating in a great tradition or perpetuating an ancient way of life known for the abundance of its good works and fruitful accomplishments. The New Road, however, does not go through fertile land, beautiful scenery, majestic mountains, or a great ocean or arrive home. It leads to sterility—a society that does not replace itself, honor traditional marriage, cherish children, or acknowledge a Mother Nature or a Holy God who have given directions on the way to happiness or eternal life.
The Old Road offers much to see and admire by its natural beauty and inspires wonder and awe. Belloc mentions travel on the old road with its plains and shrines as a life-giving, thrilling adventure in which “life would awake again in the blood” and travelers would experience “the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God.” The New Road offers no glimpses of beauty, purity, or sublimity, but only the ugliness of evil, sin, disease, death, and destruction. What is beautiful about the grisly details of abortion? What is romantic about contraception that stifles the gift of self? What is thrilling about cohabitation, a relationship with no promises “till death do us part”? What is pure about exposing children to blatant homosexuality in schools, in the media, in the legalization of same-sex marriage and its adoptions? The Old Road leading someplace offered everything the New Road going nowhere misses—what St. Paul identifies as “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious” (Phillipians 4:8).
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
