Bilington again: The nationalist ideal spread throughout Europe through Napoleon, “the first ruler to base a political regime exclusively upon the nation . . . the most powerful purely national symbol that any nation has had.” Poles and Italians were inspired by the French example; Spaniards and Prussians cultivated their own nationalist movements in opposition to Napoleon. Billington comments, “By the end of his career Napoleon’s grande armee had in effect supplanted the revolutionary grande nation . That army was two-thirds foreign by the time of its decisive defeat in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ in 1813 by a coalition of nationalists he had awakened throughout Europe.”
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
The trouble with blogging …
The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax.…