ABSTRACT
It is a noticeable feature of nationalist writings in this period that language used to describe the spirit of the nation often echoes phrases which express the nature, attributes and agency of the divine Word. There were those, such as S. T. Coleridge in England, who directly represented Christ, the Logos, as 'the Symbol of the Unity of the Nation'.114 For many others the link between Word and Nation was not so much conceptual as psychological, emotional, and spiritual. The Logos of Christian theology, from at least the time of Origen, has been represented as Creator, Revealer and Redeemer. The nation, as portrayed by nationalist writers of this period, is not only the creative genius of the spirit of the people, but has, we shall see, a revelatory and redemptive role. Michelet, for example, compares the flawed understanding of the Logos in the Middle Ages with the truer incarnation of the Word following 1789 as the 'God in whom men recognize and love one another', that is, as the nation, the 'PATRIA" (1846, III. 223).
