Belloc gives a solid overview history of Europe from a Catholic not the usual secular perspective. This text does not sugar coat mistakes and shows interesting effects of certain heresies up to the early 1900's. Good writing style, I will be reading more of his writing. Check it out.

A short and interesting take on several heresies, particularly Islam and the Reformation from a Catholic apologist who is rightly considered controversial. He tended to slip into redundancy a bit, though many lecture-style books tend to do precisely that. I don't like to see "again" or "as I said earlier" on a page. Even so, Belloc is formidable. He's no Chesterton, but he's formidable.

This is a really good history book that talks about the major heresies that have existed and that still are alive. It gives a lot of information on each, though the author does spend a lot more on the heresies that are still alive and going. I liked it because it contained so much information, but it was also dreading. It was difficult to start and keep reading, but once you get to the interesting part, it becomes easier to read.

Wow this book is quite an amazing read, the last chapter is indeed prophetic, we are living at an addendum to the last chapter of this book. I wish I read this book when I was younger. This book does a great cross-sectional analysis of the historical, socio-cultural, and politico-economic effects that Theology causes; yet it does this analysis in a manner that easy to read for all.

The author also sets out to show the various ways Heresies have related to the Church, the majority of which are emergent from within and spin off into their own deformed or parasitic entity later, but the last chapter shows essentially a new and perhaps even final Heresy which does not come from within but comes from without.

The book reads both like a non-fictional historical and philosophical text, yet has all the riveting adventure of a fictional saga or an epic. Indeed, the Battle here is an unseen battle, a mortal combat for the hearts and minds of all human beings individually and civilization collectively, indeed when reading this book one thought that came to my mind were the words of Jesus, "No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." (Matthew 6:24)

Highly Recommended Read for those who want the Church's View of History and are tired of the biases of Popular Cultures view of Religion in general, but in particular Catholicism.

This book presents as a theological discussion of heresy, but functions more as a historical account of the fallout from them. In that context, it would therefore be nice to have been provided a summary account of what motivated said heresies (the discussion on Islam was lacking in that regard). Nonetheless, what is provided is excellent - particularly the discussions on protestantism and modernism.

Required reading for Truth Seekers. Everyone else should probably avoid.

On the 'Must Have Books' version: the textual errors were so obvious and numerous that I've been convinced to never purchase a book from this publisher, regardless of subject.

Good insight

Bellow writes well about the nuances of heresies and is not afraid to talk about the scandals on his own side as well.

Look up a picture of Hilaire and you will be able to guess his writing style.

See this picture: http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com...

Interesting take on some of the heresies that ultimately changed the world. The book doesn't go too in depth about the different heresies as far as the Catholic Church is concered. It's a brief, yet informative synopsis.

A useful book, but one of the more clearly "hack" pieces that Belloc did. Much of the Modern Attack is stolen from "Survivals and New Arrivals," which is the better book.

Interesting to get Belloc's Roman Catholic viewpoint on, for instance, Calvin.

Hillaire Belloc was a passionate defender of Catholicism, so readers should not expect dispassionate discussions of the movements he examines here: Arianism, Islam, Catharism, Protestantism, and what he calls religious Modernism. The value in this book comes from watching Belloc build his arguments and present them in well crafted prose. Even when the reader disagrees with him it is worth following along.

He begins with the concept of heresy, which he defines as any deviation from Catholic dogma or papal fiat. He gives an example of someone who does not believe in immortality, while holding to the rest of Catholic beliefs.

The man who is certain that he is going to die for good and for all may believe that Jesus of Nazareth was Very God of Very God, that God is Triune, that the Incarnation was accompanied by a Virgin Birth, that bread and wine are transformed by a particular formula; he may recite a great number of Christian prayers and admire and copy chosen Christian exemplars, but he will be quite a different man from the man who takes immortality for granted.” (p. 10)

He expands on this idea and concludes that deviations from accepted practice lead not to minor variations of belief that could be considered personal opinions, but to different Christianities altogether. And since he is a devout believer in orthodox Roman Catholicism, all variations are deficient in practice and theologically in error, and represent mortal danger to salvation.

Arianism was a major contender for leadership of the Christian world during the first centuries A.D., and was the focus of the Council of Nicea in 325 and the Synod of Tyre in 335. The Trinity is not mentioned in the Bible, and the verses used to support it are vague and open to various interpretations. Arianism held that God was One, not Three, and that Jesus Christ was a secondary creation of God. By refusing to accept the trinity, Arianism offered a simpler form of the faith. The Triune idea that God was Three and yet One has always been a problem for believers and potential converts (“So, you’re telling me God sacrificed himself to himself?”), and eventually the Church declared it a Mystery beyond the ken of humankind and told the faithful to stop questioning it.

In discussing it Belloc uses a technique he will employ with the other heresies in this book, the sweeping generalization that sounds plausible but is not backed up by evidence. In this case, “although it began by giving to our Lord every possible honor and glory short of the actual Godhead, it would inevitably have led in the long run into mere unitarianism and the treating of Our Lord at last as a prophet and, however exalted, no more than a prophet.” (p. 21) It is doubtful that any Arian would have accepted that statement.

Belloc saw the simplicity and intellectual appeal of Arianism as a weakness, not a strength. For him, Mystery was its own justification.

rationalistic efforts against the creed produce a gradual social degradation following on the loss of that direct link between human nature and God which is provided by the Incarnation. Human dignity is lessened. The authority of Our Lord is weakened. He appears more and more as a man – perhaps a myth. The substance of Christian life is diluted. It wanes. What began as Unitarianism ends as Paganism.” (p. 30)

The next heresy Belloc discusses is Islam, which he calls Mohammedism, and to the extent that his book is known today, it is because of this section. The Great Heresies was published in 1938. The Ottoman empire had collapsed, and the Western powers controlled much of its former territory, and additional lands from Iran west all the way to the Atlantic ocean. When Islamic civilization was thought of at all by Europeans, it was seen as backward and irrelevant to modern societies.

Millions of modern people of the white civilization – that is, the civilization of Europe and America – have forgotten about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.” (p. 51)

Belloc had great respect for Islam, recognized its historical significance and repeatedly warned his readers that it had all the attributes necessary to rise again and challenge Christianity. He had studied its origins and spread and understood that its success was a result not just of religious fervor, but of its acceptance of new idea, incorporation of the best of other civilizations, and emphasis on unity and fairness. He makes a remarkable comparison: Christianity, which had sunk into a dark age of ignorance and superstition, was seen as backwards like 1930s Russia, while Islam was the powerful, dynamic equivalent of modern Germany.

He also understood that Islam would always be a part of the world.

Islam is indestructible because it was founded on simplicity and justice. It has kept those Christian doctrines which are evidently true and which appeal to the common sense of millions, while getting rid of priestcraft, mysteries, sacraments, and all the rest of it. It proclaims and practices human equality. It loves justice and forbids usury. It produces a society in which men are happier and feel their own dignity more than in any other. That is its strength and that is why it still converts people and endures and will perhaps return to power in the near future. (p. 54)

As an apologist for Roman Catholicism, Belloc could only label it as a threat, but his understanding of and sympathy for Islam is the most insightful part of this book, and political leaders would have been wise to listen to him. He also seemed to see a future that most of his contemporaries would have dismissed as ridiculous: “It has always seemed to me possible, and even probably, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.” (p. 69)

If his discussion of Islam is this book at its best, his chapter on Catharism is Belloc at his intellectual weakest. The Cathars were a Manichean sect, believing that there is a good god and an evil one, in eternal conflict, and that each individual must take a stand for light or darkness.

In Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, he discusses Zoroastrianism, another form of Manicheanism, in words which could equally describe Catharism:

By picturing the world as the scene of a struggle between good and evil, the Zoroastrians established in the popular imagination a powerful supernatural stimulus and sanction for morals. The soul of man, like the universe, was represented as a battleground of beneficent and maleficent spirits; every man was a warrior, whether he liked it or not, in the army of either the Lord or the Devil; every act or omission advanced the cause of Ahura-Mazda or of Ahriman. It was an ethic even more admirable than the theology—if men must have supernatural supports for their morality; it gave to the common life a dignity and significance grander than any that could come to it from a world-view that looked upon man (in medieval phrase) as a helpless worm or (in modern terms) as a mechanical automaton.

And so the Catholic church, sensing a rival for the hearts and souls of men and women, not to mention for their money, exterminated them. Pope Innocent III used the power of the crusade to offer plenary indulgences to anyone who helped slaughter the Cathars. During this fighting occurred one of the most horrific incidents of the Middle Ages. After capturing Béziers on 21 July 1209, the Papal legate Arnaud Amalric was informed that there were loyal Catholics among the captured townspeople, and when asked what to do with them said, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” (“Kill them all. God will know his own.”)

You will find none of this is Belloc’s chapter on the Cathars, which he reports as the Church Triumphant crushing a vile heresy. He attributes to Catharism an existential threat to the Catholic church far beyond its actual power, confined as it was to southern France, where its believers had lived in harmony with their Catholic neighbors. “It seemed certain that the tide would be turned and that the Albigensian cause would win. With its victory the kingdom of France would collapse, and the Catholic Cause in Western Europe.” (p. 86)

Belloc’s next chapter, on Protestantism, is odd because he writes about it as if it were a failed heresy, headed for extinction like Arianism. What he means is that after the revolutionary fire went out of it with the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it lost its intellectual vigor and subsided into an accommodating pseudo-Christianity.

within the Protestant culture, where there was less definite doctrine to challenge, there was less internal division but an increasing general feeling that religious differences must be accepted; a feeling which, in a larger and larger number of individuals, grew into the, at first, secret but later avowed attitude of mind that nothing in religion could be certain, and therefore that tolerance of all such opinions was reasonable. (p. 94-95)

Belloc, naturally, abhorred the view that that it was possible for good people to be willing to accept unsanctioned beliefs and philosophies. For him there could be only the One, and anyone not in full accord with the Catholic church was in error and in danger of damnation. He does make a good point, though, about revolutions. Many of them start as reforming movements but become more violent and more inclined to demand wholesale changes. “There appear among the revolutionaries an increasing number who are not so much concerned to set right the evils which have grown up in the thing to be reformed, as filled with passionate hatred of the thing itself – its essential, its good, that by which it has a right to survive. (p. 102)

He is also honest enough to note that there were good reasons for the anger against the Church which led to the Reformation. He fully understood that corruption was eating away at the heart of Roman Catholicism, which had become too rich and too secular, earning the contempt of peasants and nobles alike. Nevertheless, he saw Luther’s and especially Calvin’s rebellions as desecrations of the One True Faith.

The first thing is this: that the Protestant movement, which had begun as something merely negative, an indignant revolt against the corruption and worldliness of the official Church, was endowed with a new strength by the creation of Calvinism, twenty years after the upheaval had begun. ... It is the spirit of Calvin which actively combats Catholicism wherever the struggle is fierce. It is the spirit of Calvin that inhabited dissident sects and that lent violence to the increasing English minority who were in reaction against the Faith. (p. 107-108)

He is certain that Protestantism will eventually falter and wither away in the face of Catholic majesty. “This internal strength the Protestant culture retained on into modern times and has only now begun to lose it, through the gradually disintegrating effect of a false philosophy.” (p. 117) And, commenting on Luther’s tenet that people must read and interpret the Bible for themselves, “the spiritual basis of Protestantism went to pieces through the breakdown of the Bible as a supreme authority. This breakdown was the result of that very spirit of skeptical inquiry upon which Protestantism had always been based.” (p. 125)

There is a final, short chapter on Modernism. Belloc believes that rational inquiry leads to skepticism and ultimately to atheism. He sees modern man as adrift, alienated, and easy prey for godless doctrines which seem to have all the answers, and which will lead only to more suffering. “That same force which ignores human dignity also ignores human suffering. (p. 138)” He summarizes by saying “There you have the Modern Attack in its main character, materialist, and atheist; and, being atheist, it is necessarily indifferent to truth. For God is Truth.” (p. 132)

He closes the book with what is known in formal logic as a False Dichotomy, by asserting that the only choices are either to the destruction of the Church or a return to it, heart and soul. He does not appear to have ever contemplated any middle ground where people could live their beliefs and engage in the world while accepting that others believe differently, but then, he could never see any value in lives lived outside of total submission to Papal authority.

of two things one must happen, one of two results must become definite throughout the modern world. Either the Catholic Church (now rapidly becoming the only place wherein the traditions of civilization are understood and defended) will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and, so far as public appreciation goes, to silence; or the Catholic Church will, in this case as throughout the past, react more strongly against her enemies than her enemies have been able to react against her; she will recover and extend her authority, and will rise once more to the leadership of civilization which she made, and thus recover and restore the world. (p. 139)

Belloc was a significant force in his day, a prolific and hugely popular author. He is not much read now, because his worldview was so locked into his own time and place that there is nothing universal about it, nothing which recognizes and integrates itself into a changing world.

Another eye opening history from a very readable writer. Hilaire Belloc was half English, half French, a one time MP and a prolific writer known as "the man who wrote a library". Fortunately he did so in small volumes often broken down into self-contained chapters or essays, and wrote them very well, not only in content and structure but also with great wit and precision of language. (The size of his works belie the wealth of fact and insight they contain.)

'The Great Heresies' whilst not a book that by it's title would seem of interest or import to the average person, is by value of it's content enjoyable and informative. The five Heresies which Belloc considors are issues upon which the history of the World hinged, and so in explaining them he explains in part something of the world today, and how and why it is as it is when it could have been extremely different. His considoration of Islam (back in the late 1920's early 1930's) seems almost prescient or prophetic when read today. Though of course it was due to his historical knowlege and clear thinking, and a rejection of the confident attitude of racial and cultural superiority of his time. He clearly predicted that Islam would once again gain in strength and influence to be an important force in the world.

Adam Shaw's earlier review, though it could be said to be mostly true is misleading and less than helpfull. Yes Hilaire Belloc was Catholic, and very proud of the fact. He wrote as a Catholic, not hiding his bias and making no false claims to being impartial or without prior opinion, thus allowing all his readers to follow his thoughts with open eyes and a questioning mind. He was not afraid of holding a position and defending it, not afraid of debate, as his life well shows. If you are bigotted enough not to read him because of his Faith he himself would have been glad you have nothing to do with him. He was angry about many things as any rational man or woman who truely looks at the world around them will be, whatever time they live in. He was especially angry about the unadmitted and unacknowledged anti-Catholic bias in the officailly accepted Whig version of History. So much of his Historical work was (and still is) a reply to it from someone on the other side of the debate about what happened in the past to bring us to the present, and how and why.

Bare in mind whilst reading that he was a man of his time, before political correctness and the timidity of openly declared personal opinion which it has been one of it's fruits. Though free of many of the prejudices of his day, like anyone he was not free of them all, remember; nor are you. Also remember that Catholic enfranchisement was an issue not so far in the past as it is today and was one on which people had very strong views.

If i have not been clear above, i clearly state now that I thoroughly recommend this book.