I’ve recently done a good deal of reading on the life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte. The man himself is a fascinating and tragic nigh-mythic figure, all the more as the setting he inhabited and contributed to shaping exudes high romance, swashbuckling drama, and an inimitable fusion of the the baroque, the neo-classical and the modern. He is a revolutionary and an emperor, a lover and a fighter, a dreamer and a schemer, an unparalleled conqueror and a disgraced exile. In these tensions, Napoleon so well embodies his age, where what is ancient is curiously recapitulated squarely within what is novel. The pope is present for but does not conduct Napoleon’s coronation, for example. 

But the river of time is constant in its change. The novelty of the Napoleonic age, despite making for such an engrossing backdrop for everything from Austen to Dumas, is in itself not new at all. Military history is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the playing out of strategy and tactics is merely an instantiation of principles and forces which are entirely ubiquitous. Though warfare looked remarkably different in the age of musket and cannon than it had in the ages past of shields and spears, and likewise that age would be supplanted by the era of the machine gun and the rocket, an astute observance of history will not only uncover these temporal distinctions but through so doing will furthermore reveal what is common. Just as an ornithologist would through studying the variation among species of birds no doubt come to an appreciation of what is common to all birds, the student of history should gradually perceive the perennial facts of nature and humanity.

In reading Robert M. Epstein’s Napoleon’s Last Victory, I found that the most basic principles of early modern warfare were really just expressions of what is true of all human activity. Warfare is, much like games are (as I have written on previously), a kind of distillation of certain spiritual realities — that is, those realities which are invisible and fundamental, underlying, penetrating. No doubt, this is one of the reasons war and games evidence such a mutual affinity. They are each respectively a kind of the other. 

American Christians are fond of the term “spiritual warfare,” yet the true salience of the phrase is in that all warfare is spiritual. Napoleon at least implicitly understood this truth through his emphasis on the esprit de corps, literally the “spirit of the body,” the invisible animus which motivates a mass of troops and inspires (that is, breathes) cohesion and momentum. What is predicable of warfare in the spiritual sense is therefore predicable humanly and cosmically of all existence. That is to say, what is true of all things is true of warfare, and what lies beneath the accidental features of war in particular are the spiritual participations which are true of all things generally, and these abstractions invariably bubble up into the realm of praxis.

The first of these truths is, from the pen of Napoleon himself, that, “In the art of war, as in mechanics, time is the great element between mass and power.” The analogy with physical science makes the depth of this axiom apparent. As the saying goes, time is indeed of the essence. It is time which runs the course from action to outcome. Decision, which is the externalizing of the activity of consciousness, the leap from mind to matter, is predicated on time. The virtue of decisiveness itself owes its nature to timeliness. It is not the mere ability to make a decision, which power everybody possesses, but the ability to make a decision at the right time. Given enough time, anyone can make the right decision, hypothetically. The trick is to make it with the time given.

As in war, so in life. Anyone who exercises an overabundance of caution for the sake of a good decision puts the very opportunity for decision at risk. Epstein writes that the essential quality of a good commander is not his tactical acumen, but his nerve, his guts, his boldness to make adaptive decisions exactly as they become necessary.

This evokes the second spiritual truth of warfare, that all decisions are necessarily made on the basis of incomplete information. Epstein says as much of modern warfare and “imperfect intelligence,” but this principle is fundamentally true of the means by which human beings navigate the world. John Vervaeke explicates this fact in the phenomenon he calls “combinatorial explosiveness,” which is the ultimately mathematical principle of reality that in any given scenario, the combination of all conceivable variables in play “explodes” into an infinite and therefore paralyzing field of possible decisions and outcomes. It is therefore a necessary part of all the activities of human consciousness that information must be culled on the basis of relevance, variables must be weighted according to their value, and certain data, context, and hypotheticals must simply go ignored. Every decision a person makes is therefore based on “imperfect intel.” 

The third truth follows, that it is “axiomatic that no plan survives first contact with an enemy.” In warfare, it is generally true that a commander must begin with a plan and often must not end with the same plan. If information is imperfect and incomplete, then it changes shape not only according to what new information is presented or what old intel is corrected, but also as that critical component of time works it over. As decisions are made and acted out in the world, the mind making them enters into a dialectic with its surroundings in which mind and matter mutually affect each other. The world changes how the decisions are made, and those decisions in turn change the world at hand. 

Naturally, the word “spiritual” entails more than simply that which is invisible, as it is also personal. The Scriptures are clear that the heart of “spiritual warfare” is moral, that the great cosmic battle is between the forces loyal to the Good and those opposed. These forces respectively bear upon the physical world in working holiness or horror, teleologically discerned. I believe it was Jordan Hall who recently noted that the spiritual nature of all warfare is evident in that all warfare transforms its combatants, moving them in many ways, but most fundamentally either toward honor and righteousness or pride, hatred, cowardice and the like. 

The aforementioned dialectic of mind and matter therefore begets the dynamic in which the mind also changes itself. It is a well-trodden tenet of ancient wisdom across the globe that each thought, word or deed is not only in itself right or wrong, but works either right or wrong upon the heart and soul of the one responsible. In that regard, it is not merely the case that the mind changes itself, but rather, since this principle transcends it, the mind is changed by something beyond, within, greater and underneath itself. These patterns are the real substance of spirit, the phenomenon which by suffusing otherwise disparate and discrete behaviors draws them together into a directional unity. The battle lines of spiritual warfare are the directions people go.

It is no wonder, then, that Napoleon is popularly caricatured as the archetypal “short man” — yet another internal contradiction of his persona. Nested beneath all the regal airs, pompous and charismatic speeches and pretensions to grandeur is a much smaller figure, a man who is capable of and not infrequently given to fury and desperation, unable to hold together either his marriage or his empire. Ambition is in that sense merely a mask for ravening. The identical referent of those two terms in Napoleon is spiritual, a force which far from being under his own control can be said to possess him. They describe the affect which appears to rise from the person, but in a deeper sense truly drives him from beyond himself. 

To mythologize the man, it must be acknowledged that the appetites of Napoleon largely governed him and, in the end, piloted him to ruin. As Stephen Coote muses, Shakespeare would have found the poetic irony of Napoleon obvious and irresistible. Napoleon thought ambition could lay hold of fate, when in truth his ambition had always been a vassal of fate. The figure of Napoleon didactically proves self-aggrandizement fatally opposed to self-control — the latter well-known to come from only one Spirit, the Spirit whose distinctive patterns come from without to circle around from within, realizing the self and returning it paradoxically to autonomy.

To bubble back up to the particulars of history, Epstein’s scholarly conclusions vindicate this spiritual notion. He ultimately rules that Napoleon’s downfall was a failure to understand how far beyond himself the innovations he effected truly went. Napoleon indeed changed the world, and so those changes came back to look him in the eye. That initial success convinced him erroneously of his thesis of ambition, with which, despite the testimony of Waterloo, he whiled away his days on St. Helena refusing disillusionment. Epstein concludes, “Convinced that his personality and genius could overcome all obstacles, Napoleon was blinded to the changing realities of warfare.” Napoleon was engaged in the spiritual by invoking patterns of change that, in the hands of his enemies, would prove to have force and gravity beyond his control. And until his very end, Napoleon more or less insisted that his final defeat was the fault of everything and everyone but himself.

On one level, then, the allegory of Napoleon for the Christian should call to mind that “the victory that overcomes the world” is “our faith.” Self-reliance, self-righteousness, self-sufficiency, indeed any erstwhile virtue to which self is prefixed is the sure formula of spiritual defeat. Self-abnegation, self-emptying, self-sacrifice are the Way of spiritual triumph. These lie at the root of life. Truly, Napoleon proves in the poetic epic of his life the proverb that “pride goeth before a fall.” Sin crouches in the doorway, and his desire devoured him. The Christian cannot long stave of the loud cries of her faults. They will haunt and accuse indefinitely and mold her into a creature of proud resentment and fear whose end is destruction. She must face them, admit them, acknowledge them in order to then be free from them. The decision to repent is the work of a Spirit far more life-giving, and He impels the one who makes that choice of daily cross-bearing toward Resurrection. The Holy Spirit is not one who merely “possesses,” but who returns, having sanctified, the self surrendered to Him.

So, history, itself a brimming battlefield of perpetually imperfect knowledge, must always be not only summarized, but sermonized. All history is always spiritual, and that fact is rarely unidimensional.