Bible by rewriting the Odyssey and the Aeneid . Even as Christianity continued to claim a complete monopoly on the transcendental, the Modern Age turned polytheistic—or rather, reverted to the days of divine oligarchy, with the various gods enjoying universal legitimacy (the “Western canon”) but serving as patrons and patriarchs of particular tribes. Dante, Camões, and Cervantes defined and embodied national golden ages, national languages, and national journeys toward salvation. Ethnic nationalism, like Christianity, had a content, and every national Genesis had an author. Cervantes may be the inventor of the modern novel and an object of much reverence and imitation, but only among Spanish- speakers is he worshiped rapturously and tragically, as a true god; only in Spanish high culture must every contender for canonical status take part in the continuing dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. 41 In England, the Age of Shakespeare coincided with, and perhaps ushered in, the Universal Age of Discovery, or the Era of Universal Mercurianism. This was true of all national golden ages, but the English one proved more equal than others because England (along with Holland but much more influentially) became the first Protestant nation, the first nation of strangers, the first nation to replace God with itself—and with its Bard. By being the English national poet, Shakespeare became “the inventor of the human.” The Renaissance met the Reformation, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, “Hellenism reentered the world, and again stood in the presence of Hebraism, a Hebraism renewed and purged.” 42 In this context, the French Revolution was an attempt to catch up by taking a shortcut—an attempt to build a nation of strangers by creating a world of brothers. According to Ernest Gellner, “the Enlightenment was not merely a secular prolongation and more thorough replay of the Reformation. In the end it also became an inquest by the unreformed on their own condition, in the light of the successes of the reformed. The philosophes were the analysts of the under- development of France.” 43 France is the only European nation without a consecrated and uncontested national poet, the only nation for which the rational Man is a national hero. It is “ethnic” as well, of course, with its “ancestors the Gauls” and its jealous worship of the national language, but the seriousness of its civic commitments is unique in Europe. Rabelais, Racine, Molière, and Victor Hugo have failed to unseat Reason and have had to cohabit with it, however uncomfortably. From then on, England and France presented two models of modern nationhood: build your own tribe of strangers complete with an immortal Bard, or claim, more or less convincingly, to have transcended tribalism once and for all. The English road to nationalism was the virtually universal first choice. The