The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification

Written and published in 1884, Léon Bloy's The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification is an attempt by the author to renew the Cause for Canonization of Christopher Columbus. This is part one of that work. It includes a preface by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. To read this book today feels sometimes like reading a book written only yesterday. Christopher Columbus represents the West and Western Civilization as no other person before him can or ever will. And everyone else, intra or extra muros, those who do not subscribe to that civilization but inherit all its benefits - they are the angry, ingrateful hordes some of whom, quite clearly, do not know what they do, nor what their actions imply. Léon Bloy says it best when he says:

"The prejudice against Christopher Columbus is so tenacious and so strong that the greatest poet in the world, supposing him inspired by the most magnificent of all indignations, would never succeed in overcoming it."

"Doubtless also, he had to believe that that captive world would not be handed over to him without a fight and his heroic soul counted on the God of the oppressed to decide his fortune. But the extraordinary injustice, the unprecedented ingratitude, the indefatigable persistence of misfortunes as he had never seen before and, above all, the supernatural, absolute, implacable insuccess of all his efforts - with the exception of the Discovery, - that there must have strangely astonished his soul, which was unique among the unique!"