James Hadley Billington was an American academic and author who taught history at Harvard and Princeton before serving for 42 years as CEO of four federal cultural institutions. He served as the 13th Librarian of Congress after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and his appointment was approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate. He retired as Librarian on September 30, 2015.
Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era.
What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority.
The term [revolution] derives from the Latin substantive revolutio, which was unknown in classical Latin but was used in the early Middle Ages by St. Augustine and other Christian writers.
Translated into Italian as rivoluzione in the early Renaissance and then into French and English as revolution, the term initially meant the return of a moving object to its place of origin—particularly the movement of celestial bodies around the earth.
Copernicans used it increasingly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe their unsettling new concept of the earth revolving—axially and orbitally—around the sun.
The new reality they sought was radically secular and stridently simple. The ideal was not the balanced complexity of the new American federation, but the occult simplicity of its great seal: an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid over the words Novus Ordo Seclorum.
The heart of revolutionary faith, like any faith, is fire: ordinary material transformed into extraordinary form, quantities of warmth suddenly changing the quality of substance. If we do not know what fire is, we know what it does. It burns. It destroys life; but it also supports it as a source of heat, light, and—above all—fascination.
