There can be no doubt that Hilaire Belloc was temperamentally a skeptic, at least throughout a good part of his career. It is a skepticism which follows on his classical humanism. To be integrated in earthly existence is to conceive both the possibility of an eternal destiny and the threat of the opposite. To be at home in this world is to recognize the composite nature of man. The human soul is not a Platonic idea, but the act of a body rendered human by its union with the soul. To be fully aware of this, and only the man who attends to the reality of the earthly part of himself is so aware, is to experience a _sense_ of annihilation before the inevitability of death. This is not philosophy, but it is an attitude which is unmistakably human. If to be myself is to be fully a man, then when I cease to be a man at the moment of death, I shall cease to be myself. Aristotle never got clear of this problem, which can be called the threat of classical alienation: the final alienation of man should he cease to be. “Death ... shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys.”[20] Final classical alienation, let it be insisted once again, becomes a more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved. Since alienation is never affirmed, but is emotionally grasped as a possibility along with the hope for personal immortality, classical man feels no sense of guilt simply in being himself. If he is alienated in the end, it will be too late for guilt. Temporal classical guilt results from man’s ceasing to be what he can be, and this defines the nature of tragedy. Modern alienation, on the contrary, is an alienation existing within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is alienated. Hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference defining his existence. He is almost ashamed to be. Classical humanism is basically insufficient, since man cannot achieve, of himself, the fullness of his dignity. Threatened from without by death, the humanist’s integrity is attacked from within by the wounds of sin that divide him from himself. Belloc never romanticized man, and he is so conscious of the _fact_ of sin that his historical judgments frequently seem cynical. In a short story called “The Opportunity,” he writes of three men that “each of these ... being a man, had a worm at his heart, eating it out.”[21] Courage excepted, the classical European humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final questions.