François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand: Atala/René. Irving Putter translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men. In Victor Gourevich, editor and translator: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
In the second Discourse, Rousseau sets his task: How to discover what “Man” is, “as Nature formed him,” before he had been “altered in the lap of society” (R124). In society, “all one still finds is the deformed contrast of passion that believes it reasons and the understanding that hallucinates” (R124). The self-obscuring of Man has occurred because “the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all,” self-knowledge (R124). Indeed, “in a sense it is by dint of studying man that we have made it impossible to know him” (R124), since study itself, resulting in the accumulation of knowledge, not only distracts us from attending to the core of human nature but contributes to the mass of conventions in which it is unmeshed. “It is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature” (R125); to do so, experiments will be needed, experiments in which philosophers and sovereigns collaborate. Rousseau offers a thought-experiment to this project, a project that carries on the original philosophic attempts to distinguish nature from convention.
Why bother? Because the ideas of both natural right and natural law depend upon the nature of Man; that right and that law undergird conventional law, the law by which a sovereign might condemn a philosopher or exile a prince. An exile himself, Chateaubriand knows the stakes, and in his Essai Historique, Politique, et Moral, sur les Révolutions Anciennes et Modernes he follows Rousseau in questioning the moral value of civilization.
Rousseau identifies two principles “prior to reason” in human souls: the instinct for well-being and self-preservation; and repugnance to human death or suffering, that is, “the force of natural pity” or compassion (R153), as distinguished, evidently from the conscience that receives the divine grace of caritas, of agape. Natural right derives from these two principles, “rules which reason is subsequently forced to reestablish on other foundations, when by successive developments it has succeeded in stifling nature” (R127). Man is not by nature political or even social, nor is he naturally rational; Aristotle is all wrong about that, as he is when he contends that man naturally desires to know.
How could such a being fall into the state of civil society, with its artificial/conventional hierarchies? There are two types of inequality: natural or physical inequality, which includes qualities of Mind or Soul; and moral or political inequality, which “depends on a sort of convention” and rests on “men’s consent” (R131). In this, Rousseau obviously follows previous modern natural rights philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, but these philosophers, he contends, didn’t get to the core of the matter, as they “spoke of Savage Man and depicted Civil man” (R132). Rousseau’s inquiry will eschew empiricism and “the uncertain testimony of history” (R142), offering instead “hypothetical and conditional reasonings better to elucidate the nature of things than to show their genuine origin” (R132). If, say, scientists could conclusively demonstrate the theory of Darwinian evolution with unquestionable empirical evidence, that would matter little if at all to Rousseau. Why not? Because his task is to identify the moral origin of inequality, not its physical origin. As he instructs himself and his reader, “You will look for the age at which you wish your Species had stopped” ‘evolving’ (R133).
If human beings originally do not differ from other animals in their capacity to reason, how do they differ? They differ in their capacity to imitate other animals. Man has “the choice of fleeing or fighting” (R136). This flexibility or adaptability makes it easier for him to find his subsistence in nature. Original man is hardy, vigorous; what the ascetic laws of Lycurgus’ regime did for Spartans, nature’s ‘regime’ did for original man, who needs no tools, no inventions, to aid in his well-being and survival. Pace John Locke, the state of nature—and Rousseau regards it as the alternative to all political ‘states,’ a state with a regime of its own—is not a condition of scarcity. Nor is original man a fearful being, as per Hobbes, as he surpasses other animals in skill (skill learned from observing and imitating those animals) “more than they do him in strength” (R136). Living dispersed in nature, he has no fear of other men, either, as he seldom encounters them. Rousseau takes as his example the Caribs of Venezuela, secure in the forest.
Natural man never agonizes over death—or life, for that matter. No French or German ‘existentialism’ for him: “the immoderate transports of all the passions, the fatigues and exhaustion of the Mind, the innumerable sorrows and pains” that “constantly gnaw away at men’s souls” are ills “of our own making” within civil society, where we have consented to live packed together, envying, lusting, fighting, and thinking altogether too much (R137). “The man who meditates is a depraved animal” (R137). “As he becomes sociable and a Slave, he becomes weak, timorous, groveling,” in his “soft and effeminate way of life” (R138-39). Machiavelli accuses Christianity of effeminizing modern man, but Rousseau accuses civil society itself, of any kind. Civilization is savagery in the conventional sense of the term: not solitary or poor (except for the exploited lower classes), but nasty and short. Would that it were brutish! Would that men were still savage in the way they once were. His paradox, “the noble savage,” itself recalling Socrates’ paradox, the noble lie, finds its explanation there. Given Rousseau’s rejection of empiricism, the noble savage himself exemplifies a sort of noble lie—a lie if one defines truth exclusively in terms of ‘facticity,’ a truth if one does not.
“Self-preservation being almost his only care,” original, natural, savage man’s “most developed faculties must be those that primarily serve in attack and defense” (R139-40). Those faculties are sight, hearing, and smell, not touch and taste, those senses most refined in civil society. Beyond these physical attributes, unlike other animals, natural man “contributes” to his machine-like natural “operations” as “a free agent” (R140). As long as he employs his freedom to choose between fleeing or fighting, hunting or gathering, and similar actions that contribute to his well-being and self-preservation he remains a good animal. But freedom also enables him to deprave his senses. Man has a moral as well as a physical nature, by which Rousseau means that in man, “the will continues to speak when nature is silent” (R140). Other animals have ‘ideas’ in the Lockean sense of sense-impressions, and can even combine those ideas, but in man not only has freedom but is conscious of his freedom. “It is mainly in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul exhibits himself,” a spirituality not explicable by “the laws of Mechanics” (R141).
With this self-conscious freedom, man has “the faculty of perfecting oneself,” a faculty “distinctive” to his species and “almost unlimited” (R141). Here is “the source of all of man’s miseries,” as the self-perfecting faculty “eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant” (R141). The Machiavellian attempt to conquer Fortuna, the closely related Baconian attempt to conquer Nature, seen in those philosophers who take man’s emergence from the state of Nature as a human triumph to be extended and completed, leads instead to Man’s self-denaturing in a very bad sense, his misery in civil society. Had he lived to see them, Rousseau would have looked upon the invention of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility of human extinction by ‘environmental’ cataclysm as inevitable results of civil society, itself the result of man’s free, but wrong, choices.
We civilized men only seek to know because we want. The more we know, the more we want. The desires of Savage man, by contrast, “do not exceed his physical needs” for food, a female, and rest; his aversions do not go beyond pain and hunger (R142). This being so, “Who fails to see that everything seems to remove from Savage man the temptation as well as the means to cease from being savage?” (R142-43). There are five reasons for this. “His imagination depicts nothing to him; his heart asks nothing of him,” as he has “neither foresight nor curiosity,” never wondering, centering himself in “the sole sentiment of present existence” (R143). He has no need to work and does no sustained work; agriculture (for example) can occur only when the human population has increased, families formed, and settlement instead of natural roaming becomes attractive, attractive because necessary. Savage man engages in no sustained thinking, having no language, only signaling cries; this is Rousseau’s answer to the Biblical claim that the First Man spoke with God. Savage man of course mated, but otherwise led a solitary existence, not forming families. Finally, Savage man experienced no misery, as he was a free being in mind, peaceful at heart, and healthy in body. Civil society has produced exactly the opposite effect. “Almost all the People we see around us complain of their existence and some even deprive themselves of it as far as they are able, and the combination of divine and human Laws hardly suffices to stop this disorder: I ask whether anyone has ever heard tell that it has so much occurred to a Savage, who is free, to complain of life and to kill himself?” (R158).
“Nothing, on the contrary, would have been as miserable as Savage man dazzled by the enlightenment, tormented by Passions, and reasoning about a state different from his own” (R150). In Atala, Chateaubriand will present Chactas, a noble savage who experiences exactly this dazzlement and torment. But for the Savage still in the state of nature, still ruled by nature’s regime, “in instinct alone he had all he needed to live”; today, “in cultivated reason he has no more than what he needs to live in society” (R150). In neither the natural nor the civil state, Rousseau silently suggests, does man need divine revelation. Rousseau does assent to a teaching of the Book of Genesis, that Man’s original condition was a condition of innocence. “Savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good” (R151). But this has nothing to do with obedience to God’s command, expressed in words incomprehensible to a being without language. Rather, it is the calm of the passions and the ignorance of vice that “keep them from evil-doing” (R152). Morally, Savage man recognizes his fellow humans as akin to himself and pities them, “a sentiment that is obscure and lively in Savage man, developed but weak in Civil Man,” the being in which reason, initially supported by natural pity, “turns man back upon himself,” causing him to separate himself from “everything that troubles and afflicts him” (R153). Reason isolates men after human beings in their natural freedom choose the civil state over the natural one, choosing ‘society,’ by giving Man the prudence he needs to protect himself when others are in peril from the very conditions civil society entraps them, and him, in. Natural pity says, “Do your good with the least possible harm to others”; unnatural reason says, “Do unto others as you have them do unto you”; natural pity is the “less perfect but perhaps more useful standard” (R154). Rousseau thus suggests that Jesus’ Golden Rule, presented as divine revelation, really amounts to an abstract and therefore practically unattainable command proposed by the reason which has its origin in natural pity but subverts and revolutionizes the regime of the state of nature in which the sentiment of pity is both right and attainable.
Of the passions Savage man experiences, sexual passion is the most dangerous, as even in his condition of isolation his natural desire for a female might lead to a fight with some competitor. At the same time, this passion is obviously the one most necessary for species preservation and, although the individual Savage man scarcely conceives of species preservation the human species would not have survived without the passion that has neither justification nor prohibition in the mind of the beings that experience it. Savage man experiences sexual passion as a purely physical love; insofar as it is, this passion is natural and good. Civilized man, however, in the grips of unnatural imagination, experiences “moral” love—in fact unnatural and bad—an instrument whereby women “establish their rule” over men, “mak[ing] dominant the sex that should obey” (R155). Once again, Rousseau points to the Caribs, “the most peaceful in their loves and the least given to jealousy” (R156).
What about the “savages” Chateaubriand will present in the Atala and the René? In his first Discourse, the Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau observes that the savages of the Americas are “impossible to tame.” “What yoke could be imposed upon men who need nothing?” (R7n.). They are peoples of “simple and natural polity,” rightly admired by Montaigne (R11). Consistent with his portrayal of Man in the state of nature, Rousseau writes, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, that “the Savages of America almost never speak except when away from home; in his hut everyone remains silent and speaks to his family by means of signs, and these signs are infrequent because a Savage is less restless, less impatient than a European, because he has not as many needs and takes care to attend to them himself” (267n.). Savage man’s roaming issues not from restlessness but from ease, from freedom from the self-exaggerated passions of man in the civil state. In his Essay, Chateaubriand had already diverged from Rousseau, locating restlessness in the natural condition of the human heart. He does not need to ask himself how free, untroubled Savage man chose civil society. Rousseau explains this by citing natural disasters and natural population growth as altering the natural state in such a way as to tempt Savage man to make choices that seem correct to him at the time he makes them, but concatenate into civil societies and their attendant miseries.
Slightly over a year after Chateaubriand published his Essai, he experienced a religious conversion described in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. His brother and sister-in-law had been killed by the Jacobins, a few years before he wrote the Essai. But after his mother died in 1798, followed by a sister, Julie-Marie, in 1799, “I wept and I believed.” The exact character of his conversion has remained a matter of speculation—following as it did from his understanding of religion as a matter of moral sentiment—but it is undeniable that his subsequent writings bear ‘a Christian mark.’ Published propitiously in 1801, the beginning of a new century, his novella Atala was seen immediately as a sign of a literary conversion as well, inspiring a turning of the French intellectual class away from France’s Enlightenment rationalism and toward what would be called Romanticism, a movement often considered to have been inaugurated in European literature by the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. Atala made Chateaubriand an intellectual celebrity; he followed it a year later with the equally influential René. He rightly brought out them out in one volume in 1805, emphasizing their complementarity.
He presents Atala as a story told by a Natchez Indian to a young European, René, then re-told by “the Indians” to himself, “a traveler in far-distant lands” (76). In the Epilogue the narrator identifies the elements of the story: “a portrayal of the people of the hunt and the people of the plow”—Indians living their traditional way of life and Indians living the European way of life, respectively; a portrayal of “religion, the supreme lawgiver to men”; of “the perils of religious ignorance and all consuming fervor set against the light, the charity, and the true spirit of the Gospel”; of “the struggles of passion and virtue in an innocent soul,” the soul of Atala, a Muskogee princess; and of “the triumph of Christianity over the most ardent feeling and the most terrible fear—love and death,” the triumph of agape over eros and Thanatos (76).
Having learned from Rousseau that the state of nature has a regime, the narrator begins by recalling France’s state and France’s regime, its “vast empire in North America” “in days gone by” (17). Louis XIV ruled, somewhat nominally, a portion of an even vaster continent, dwelled in but not yet truly ruled by men. The central feature of North America’s natural regime was the Meschacebe River (pronounced as ‘Mississippi’ by the French), flowing through the center of the center of the continent, “which the inhabitants of the United States call New Eden, while the French have bequeathed to it the gentle name of Louisiana” (17). The Meschabe is central not only to the land but to the waters of North America: “A thousand other rivers, all tributaries of the Meschacebe…enrich it with their silt and fertilize it with their waters” (17). Flowing past “the forest colonnades and the pyramids of Indian tombs,” the Meschacebe “is the Nile of the wilderness” (17), the cradle not so much of a unified civilization as of a set of hunting-and-gathering tribes, often at war with one another. Chateaubriand’s state of nature is not Rousseau’s state of nature. Human beings live in families and tribes within that state. Nature itself consists of tensile dualities. Its heartland river has two currents, the main current flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico, “pushing dead trunks of pines and oak trees down to the sea,” and the two side currents flow upstream carrying “floating islands of pistia and water lilies, their yellow blossoms rising like little banners” (18). The river banks also contrast with one another. On the western side “savannahs spread out as far as the eye can see”; thousands of bison “wander about aimlessly,” one occasionally will find its way to a river island, “his brow crowned with twin crescents,” his jaw decorated by an “ancient muddy beard”; “he might be taken for the god of the river, casting a satisfied eye over the grandeur of his waters and the wild abundance of his shores” (18). Against the “silence and calm” of the prairies, the eastern shore features “trees of every shape, of every hue and every odor” and vines which form “a thousand bowers,” supporting “a host of animals placed by the Creator’s hand”—all “radiat[ing] gladness and life” (18-19). “Everything stirs and murmurs,” and the bears, “drunk with grapes, and reeling on the branches of the elm trees,” celebrate in Dionysian contrast to the Apollonian bison of the west (19).
To the dualities of these “primeval fields of nature,” men have added their own dualities. The French settled in Biloxi and New Orleans, allying with the Natchez, “an Indian nation with formidable powers in those territories” (19). Chactas is a survivor of those times, now an elder of 73 “whose age, wisdom, and vast knowledge of life made him the patriarch of the wilderness beloved of all” (19). As “a primitive and tender harmony” fills the west bank of the Meschacebe, so ‘Chactas’ means “harmonious voice”; at the same time, “like all men, he had acquired his great virtue at the cost of suffering” (19); for Chateaubriand as for Burke, there is the beautiful but also the sublime, and for Chateaubriand the beautiful comes at the cost of the struggle of sublimation. In the wars between the French-Natchez alliance and the “the powerful Muskogees of the Floridas,” the young Chactas had lost his father and himself was wounded (22). “Oh, Why could I not then have descended to the land of souls! I would have avoided all the sorrows awaiting me on earth. The spirits willed it otherwise.” (22). He would go on to be “held prisoner in the galleys of Marseilles through a cruel injustice,” never specified, then “set free and later presented to Louis XIV” at Versailles” (20). “He had spoken with the great men of the age and had been present at the celebrations of Versailles, the tragedies of Racine, and the funeral orations of Bossuet”—a “savage [who] had beheld society at the pinnacle of its splendor” (20).
Having long since returned to his homeland, Chactas tells his story to René, a young Frenchman who arrived in Louisiana in 1725, “impelled by passion and sorrow,” by his own experience of the sublime (20). René asked to be admitted to the Natchez as a warrior; “Chactas questioned him closely, and, finding him unshakeable in his resolution, adopted him as his son and gave him as a wife an Indian girl” (20). He does so in honor of the French, for “in spite of the many injuries” he had suffered at their hands, “he loved them,” remembering Fenelon, “who had once been his host,” and wishing to “render some service to the countrymen of such a righteous man” (20). No Christian, Chactas instead exhibits the classical virtue of magnanimity and the Indian (and Homeric) virtue of hospitality, which Chateaubriand had described in the closing chapter of the Essai. On his first hunt with the Natchez, René asks Chactas to relate “the story of his adventures” (21). The story has four parts. The first centers on the Indian way of life and is titled “The Hunters.”
Chactas tells René, “I see in you the civilized man who has become a savage; you see in me the savage whom the Great Spirit has (I know not for what purpose) chosen to civilize” (22). This duality sets up a sort of Rousseauian thought-experiment: “Having entered life’s path from opposite ends,” “we must have had a totally different view of things” (22). “Which of us has gained or lost more by this change of position?” (22). That question will be answered, insofar as it is answered, only at the conclusion of René.
After fighting that losing battle to the Muskogee, Chactas arrived as a refugee in St. Augustine, where an old Castilian named Lopez befriended him, sparing him the fate of being shipped to a mine in Mexico. But, as Rousseau would have predicted, “after spending thirty moons in Saint Augustine, I was overcome by a strong distaste for the life of the city” (23). At the age of 20, in the year 1672, he “was wasting away”; he tells Lopez, who has been a father to him, “You can see for yourself, I shall die if I do not go back to my Indian life” (23). In tears, knowing the danger the young man will face if he falls “into the hands of the Muskogees,” Lopez replies, “Go, son of nature! Go back to man’s freedom. I do not wish to rob you of it”(22). With that, “Lopez prayed to the God of the Christians, whose faith I had refused to embrace, and we parted sobbing” (23). Like Chateaubriand, Lopez understands nature as Rousseau understands it, as the Eden of human freedom, while knowing that nature’s dualities bring forth war, sublimity, realities in need of Christian sacrificial grace. The story of Chactas encompasses all three of the ‘races’ then living in southeastern North America: the Indians (themselves divided into two principal nations), the French, and the Spanish. Early in that story, it is the Spaniard who speaks and acts as a Chateaubriand.
Chactas was indeed captured by the Muskogee and condemned to death by burning. A Muskogee woman, Atala, befriended him; although Chactas initially mistakes her for the “Maiden of Last Love,” the one in Indian practice was “sent to the prisoner of war to charm his grave” (25). She is no such person but a Christian, wearing a golden crucifix, a maiden of agapic love who takes pity on him and falls in love with him, regretful that “my religion separates me from you forever,” but choosing to aid the “wicked heathen,” nonetheless (25).
Chactas is a savage, but no Rousseauian savage. “What enigmas men are when they are buffeted by passions! I had just abandoned the kindly Lopez, I had exposed myself to every danger for the sake of my freedom, and now, in an instant, a woman’s glance had changed my desires, my intentions, my thoughts! Forgetting my country, my mother, my cabin, and the horrible death awaiting me, I had become indifferent to all that was not Atala. I was powerless to rise to a man’s mature reason, for I had suddenly sunk into a kind of childishness,” needing “someone to take care of my sleeping and feeding needs” (29)—a sort of return to nature experienced not as independence, as freedom, but as infantile dependence. The encounter of Savage man with woman results not in mere mating but in love; Rousseau would of course reply that Chactas is no true Savage, having already been exposed to civilization by the Spaniard, and indeed by the Natchez’s French allies before that.
The lovers escape into the forest, and to “some vague far-away harmony permeating the depths of the woods,” “as though the soul of solitude were sighing through the entire expanse of the wilderness” (29). They overhear a young Seminole singing a song as he goes to ask a girl to marry him, and then a Seminole mother weeping over the grave of her infant child, saying, “Happy are those who die in the cradle, for they have known only the smiles and kisses of a mother!” (31). Love and motherhood: Atala herself seems to be “yielding to nature,” but prays “a fervent prayer to her mother and to the Queen of Virgins” to counter its spell (31). As Chateaubriand had written in the Essai, Chactas now tells René: “I have marveled at that religion which, in the forests, in the very midst of all the privations of life, can lavish untold blessings on the unfortunate. It is a religion which sets its might against the torrent of passions and alone”—alone—suffices “to subdue, though they be stirred by every circumstance,” which in the case of the lovers includes “the seclusion of the woods, the absence of men, and the complicity of the shadows” (31). Atala, a “simple savage girl,” seemed to him not so much noble as “divine” as she “offer[ed] prayers up to her God for an idolatrous lover,” “radiat[ing] immortal beauty” (32).
The Muskogee recapture them. Christianity nearly saves Chactas, anyway. Christian missionaries to the several Indian nations had persuaded them “to substitute a rather mild form of slavery for the horrors of the stake,” and while the Muskogee “had not yet adopted this custom,” some of them “had declared themselves in favor of it” (32-33). The tribal council deliberates. One side wants him tortured and executed, so as not to “alter the customs of our ancestors”; a matron, speaking for the women, rejoins, “Let us change the customs of our ancestors when they are destructive,” since we can use Chactas as a slave to “cultivate our fields” (34). The Muskogee are hunters, but agriculture, along with Christianity, has begun to filter in. This duality of savagery and civilization stays his execution but would not have prevented it, as the men, guardians of tradition, prevailed.
Atala breaks with the tradition, rescuing him. To Chactas’ grateful attempt to deify her (“You are a spirit, you have come to me, and I am speechless before you”), she demurs with a simple and naturalistic explanation: She bribed the medicine man and got his would-be executioners drunk (38). She has acted with justice more than charity: “I had to risk my life for you, since you had given up your own for me,” effectively delaying his escape from his captors by bringing her along in the forest (38). This time, they exercise natural prudence, heading north, not west to the Meschacebe in the direction of his nation, where the Muskogee will expect them to go.
In their flight they cannot escape the dualities which divide both of their souls, and each from the other. To be sure, they “bless Providence,” which “places hope deep in hearts sore with sorrow and makes virtue spring from the bosom of life’s miseries” in Christians and heathens alike (40). But “the constant struggle between Atala’s love and religion, her unrestrained tenderness and the purity of her ways, the pride of her character and her deep sensitivity, the loftiness of her soul in essential things and her delicacy in the little ones—everything made her an incomprehensible being” to Chactas (41). She prays to God but also sings “of the lost homeland,” a song whose refrain is “Happy are they who have never seen the smoke of the stranger’s celebrations and have sat only at the festivals of their fathers!” (42). But to the pull of agapic, patriotic, and familial love (“she seemed anxious to appease” the “angered shade” of her Christian mother), she feels the push of a love that strengthened “with every passing moment” (43). “Atala’s strength was beginning to fail her, and the passions weakening her body seemed about to overcome her resistance” (43). She nonetheless holds out, appealing not to Christian chastity, a virtue issuing from a religious sentiment Chactas cannot be expected to feel, but to his patriotic honor, adjuring him to remember that “a warrior is bound to his country” (43). “What is a woman beside the duties you must fulfill?” (43).
It is at this point of stasis that Chactas interrupts his story to advise René with some decidedly un-Rousseauian wisdom. “If you dread the agitations of the heart, beware of solitude. Great passions are solitary, and when you take them out into the wilderness”—as René evidently has done—you “are setting them into their very own sphere” (43). For all its beauty, its harmony, the state of nature has its torments. “O dreadful, sublime Nature, were you no more than a device contrived to deceive us, and could you not for an instance conceal a man’s joys in your mysterious horrors?” (46) The lovers’ sorrows in nature ended only “by chance,” as pagan Chactas puts it (43).
Before that happens, Atala answers a perplexity. Her mother had given her Christian witness to Atala, but who had brought Christianity to her? Her father, she tells Chactas, was not a native of Florida, “the land of the palms” (45). Pregnant with both Atala and the Holy Spirit, Atala’s mother had returned to her people, and her mother had “obliged her to marry the magnanimous Simaghan,” the king of the Muskogee (45). Again, the ‘ancient’ and in this case Indian parallel to Christian charity is magnanimity: to Atala’s mother’s offer to suffer punishment for adultery, Simaghan correctly observes that she hasn’t committed adultery against him. “You have been sincere and have not dishonored my couch,” and so “the fruit of your body shall be my fruit” (45). She knows only that her natural father was named Lopez, whom Chactas at once recognizes as the man who had been a father to him in St. Augustine. They are in this sense brother and sister.
“The fraternal affection which had come upon us, joining its love to our own love, proved too powerful for our hearts” (46). They embrace, and “I held my bride in my arms by the light of the flashing thunderbolts and in the presence of the Eternal” in a “nuptial ceremony, worthy of our sorrows and the grandeur of our passion”—a wedding solemnized under the regime of “sublime Nature” (46). But “an impetuous bolt of lightning, followed by a clap of thunder, furrowed the thickness of the shadows, filled the forest with fire and brimstone, and split a tree apart at our very feet”—sublimity indeed, a suggestion of Hell within nature itself (46).
Christianity then intervenes. “There in the ensuing silence we heard the ringing of a bell,” which can only betoken a church, a mission church. “An aged recluse,” bearing a lantern, emerges from the shadows (47). This Christian Diogenes has been seeking persons no abstract philosophic truth. His dog had picked up their scent when the storm began and he has been trailing them. “God be praised in all his works!” he exclaims. “His mercy is great indeed, and His goodness is infinite!” (47). Atala venerates him, telling him that she is a Christian, that “Heaven has sent you to save me” (47). As for Chactas, “I could scarcely understand the hermit,” as “such charity seemed to far superior to mortal man that I thought I was in a dream” (47). As an Indian, however, he praises the man’s courage in braving the lightning strikes. “‘Fear!” replied the father with a kind of intense fervor, ‘shall I fear when men are in peril and I can be useful to them! Surely I would be a most unworthy servant of Christ!'” (47). When Chactas admits that, unlike Atala, he is no Christian, Father Aubry admonishes him: “Young man, have I asked you your religion? Christ did not say, ‘My blood shall wash this man and not that one'” (47). Atala has gone from a natural father to an adoptive father to a Christian father; Chactas has gone from a natural Indian father who was killed in battle to an adoptive Spanish father whom he left to return to his fatherland, into the presence of a Christian father, whose Father is in Heaven, the Kingdom of God that the settlement named for St. Augustine prefigured.
The lovers now emerged from the regime of the hunters and the regime of nature to the regime of “The Tillers”—the second part of Chactas’ story. He begins with a portrait of its founder. With his “simple and sincere” face—passing Rousseauian muster—Father Aubry “did not have the lifeless, indistinct features of a man born without passions: plainly his days had been hard, and the furrows on his brow revealed the rich scars of passion healed by virtue and by the love of God and man”—Christlike (49). “Everything about him possessed something strangely calm and sublime,” as Christian sublimity culminates in peace (49). “Whoever has seen Father Aubry, as I have, wending his solitary way in the wilderness with his staff and his breviary, has a true idea of the Christian wayfarer on earth” (49). He lived in a cave with his crucifix and “the book of the Christians,” solitary except for a symbolic, “tamed snake” (49) and perhaps, unnoticed by Chactas, the Holy Spirit. To the scars of passion “heathen Indians” had added scars to his body, but “the more they made me suffer the dearer I held them” (50). As pagan Chactas had responded to unjust punishment with the crown of the classical virtues, magnanimity, so the Christian Father Aubry responded to it with agape.
Father Aubry’s solitude is purposeful, no burden forced upon him by Providence or by Fate. “When I arrived in this region,” he told Chactas and Atala, “I found only wandering families with fierce customs and a pitiful way of life” (50). Without settlement, they had no state, no political community; they had a regime—customs and a way of life—but it was miserable, not idyllic, no state of nature according to Rousseau. “I have given them an understanding of the word of peace, and their customs have gradually grown gentler” (50). With the Word replacing the sparse sign language of Indians, he did not neglect their material well-being; “I have tried to teach them the basic arts of life, not taking them too far, and still preserving for these good people the simplicity which brings happiness,” as Rousseau recommends (51). But like many other founders, “I have been afraid of hampering them by my presence, and so I have withdrawn to this grotto, where they come to consult me” (51). The founder must leave, or at least distance himself, lest the people for whom he has founded a new regime come to depend excessively on him, fail to learn to think and act in accordance with their rulers, their institutions, their way of life, all in accord with its purpose.
Leaving Atala behind, the men leave the grotto to visit the mission village. On the way they pass oaks carved with verses from “an ancient poet, named Homer, and a few maxims of an even more ancient poet, called Solomon” (52). “There was a strange and mysterious harmony between this wisdom of the ages, these verses overgrown by moss, this old hermit who had engraved them, and these aged oak trees which served as his book” (52). It is the harmony of ‘Athens and Jerusalem’—but really of Greece before Athens, the Greece of the old religion, the old gods and heroes, and of Jerusalem before Jesus. The verses show that wisdom transcends times and places, written as it is in the book of Nature and embroidered by living nature. This is how Chactas understands Father Aubry, at this point. But in the village itself, at mass the next morning, “I cannot doubt that the great mystery was fulfilled when we prostrated ourselves, and that God descended to earth, for I felt him descend in my heart” (54). He experiences this not as an occasion for weeping but as joy.
The village of “the tillers” includes not only farms but property (with surveyors to delineate it and arbitrators to settle disputes over it), forges to shape the inorganic fruits of the earth, and wood-choppers who clear the land to be farmed and mined. “I wandered in delight amid these scenes, and they grew even lovelier with the thought of Atala and the dreams of joy gladdening my heart. I marveled at the triumph of Christianity over primitive culture. I could see the Indian growing civilized through the voice of religion. I was witnessing the primal wedding of man and the earth, with man delivering to the earth the heritage of his sweat, and the earth, in return, undertaking to bear faithfully man’s harvests, his sons and his ashes” (55). Chateaubriand answers Rousseau by recalling the curse of Adam and showing the way to a Christian Sparta, not the Lycurgian Sparta Rousseau prefers but the only Spartan regime that can civilize without the harshness of the warrior ethos. “I have given them no law,” Father Aubry explains. “I have taught them only to love one another, to pray to God, and look forward to a better life, for in these simple teachings are all the world’s laws” and, one might add, all God’s laws, according to the Founder of the Christian Regime. Father Aubry calls it “this kingdom of God” (56). As for Chactas, “I felt the superiority of this stable, busy life over the savage’s idle wandering” (56). “How joyous my life had been could I have settled with Atala in a hut by those shores!” (56).
But “fortune” or “fate” has played with him in a different way (56). The third part of Chactas’ story, titled “The Drama,” recalling the colliding dualities of nature in its mode of sublimity, recounts the end of Chactas’ “dream of happiness” (57). Returning to the grotto, they did not see Atala “hasten[ing] out to greet us” (57). Stricken with “a strange terror,” Chactas dared not enter the grotto. “How weak he is whom passions buffet, how strong the man who rests in God!” (57). Father Aubry entered the cave. Chactas could only find “my strength again” when he heard Atala’s moaning; natural pity overcame natural fear. Atala was seriously ill. “Transfixed as though by a thunderbolt”—parallel to the thunderbolt that interrupted the lovers in the forest—Chactas stood motionless before her (57). The thunderbolt therefore betokened God’s or nature’s warning, setting a barrier to eros, a passion which does not limit itself.
Father Aubry then made a mistaken diagnosis and spoke a mistaken prophecy; priest and kingly founder, he was no prophet; Christlike, he was no Christ. “This is probably nothing more than a fever caused by fatigue. If we resign ourselves to God’s will, He will take pity on us.” (57). Atala knew better. She now made her confession. No one had expected her to survive for long after a painful childbirth. “My life was given up for lost, and to save me from death, my mother vowed to the Queen of Angels that, if I were spared, my virginity would be consecrated to her. That was the fatal vow which is now forcing me to my grave!” (58). When her mother died, she asked and received Atala’s vow of obedience to that vow made by her mother at her birth. She consoled her by saying that in accepting “the virgin’s veil, you give up only the cares of the cabin and the mortal passions which distressed your mother’s bosom,” and warned her that “I gave my word for you in order to save your life, and if you do not keep my promise, you will plunge your mother’s soul into everlasting woe” (58-59). The Christian religion therefore has proven “at once my sadness and my joy”: “O Chactas, you see now what has made our fate so grim!” (59). She could neither keep her vow nor abandon it. This is the sublimity of Christianity, which demands of its converts unattainable perfection of a new set of virtues beyond those of the ancients, a sublimity nature itself shows forth when it is not beguiling men and women with its beauty, its harmony.
Chactas evidently had converted to Christianity, but Atala’s confession turned him to a crisis of faith. “A curse on the oath which robs me of Atala! Death to the God who chokes off nature! Priest man, why did you ever come to these forests?” (59). Father Aubry had the Christian answer for that. “To save you, to subdue your passions and prevent you, blasphemer, from drawing down on your head the wrath of Heaven!” (59). How much have you really suffered, compared to me, much less to Christ? “Where are the marks of your suffering? Where are the injustices you have borne? Where are your virtues which alone could give you some right to complain? What service have you rendered? What good have you done?” (59-60). To these unanswerable questions he added an observation: “You offer me but your passions, and you dare censure Heaven!” (60). Only having suffered as long as I have done, only having worked as I have worked, will you understand “that you know nothing, that you are nothing, and that there is no punishment, however severe, no suffering, however terrible, which the corrupt flesh does not deserve to suffer” (60). To the one thing Socrates says he knows Father Aubry added the one thing that Job learns. Chactas could only ask forgiveness, which Father Aubry immediately granted, as God grants forgiveness for his own sins.
He turned to attend Atala’s spiritual suffering, what she described to Chactas as the “terrible contradiction” in her soul between obedience to her mother and “remorse for not having been yours” (61). Father Aubry taught her that this “extreme passion” is “not even natural, and therefore it is less guilty in the eyes of God, because it is an error of the mind, rather than a vice of the heart,” a product of her “impulsive imagination,” which “has given you needless alarm about your vows” (60). This means that Christianity answers Rousseau’s critique of the imagination, which he considers an excrescence of civilization, with its own kind of correction. “Religion does not exact superhuman sacrifices,” even if it does command superhuman perfection of virtues (61). Christianity’s “genuine feelings and temperate virtues are far loftier than the impassioned feelings and extreme virtues of so-called heroism” (61). Here Father Aubry could offer recourse to the formal ruling institutions of the Catholic Church regime, whose priests can, in the name of the forgiving God, “absolve you of your vows which are not permanently binding,” enabling Atala to “end your days beside me with Chactas as your husband” (62).
This only sharpened Atala’s suffering. It was too late. She must die “the very moment I learn I might have been happy” (62). She wasn’t sick; she had poisoned herself, and Indians know which poisons have no anti-toxins. As Chactas raged “with bursts of frenzied fury known only to savages,” Father Aubry, “with marvelous tenderness, hurried between brother and sister, lavishing on us infinite care” with a “faith [that] lent him accents even more tender and burning than our own passions” (63). Throughout the day into evening, “Spreading numbness gripped Atala’s limbs, and her hands and feet began to grow cold” (63). Why is it that Chateaubriand makes Atala’s death by poison reminiscent of Socrates’ death by poison? She is young; Socrates is as old as Father Aubry. She is a faithful Christian, Socrates a philosopher who never heard of Christianity. Her “primitive education and the lack of necessary teaching [had] brought on this calamity, as “you did not know that a Christian may not dispose of his life as he wishes” (64). She had the one thing most needful to her salvation, the Christian Spirit, but had lacked the Christian civilization offered by the Christian regime on earth, the Christian ecclesia or assembly, the Church. Atala has now learned a wisdom that, in Christian eyes, must far surpass both that of Socrates and of Rousseau, knowing not only herself as a child of God but knowing the wisdom of God. To know the wisdom of God is not of course to have divine wisdom in its entirely; a Christian will therefore remain humble in a way unlikely in a philosopher, ancient or modern. The ancient philosopher’s humility rested in the natural self-knowledge expressed in the confession, ‘I know that I do not know.’ The modern philosopher is considerably less humble, insisting, ‘I know that I can know, and someday will know.’ Rousseau’s proud humility says, ‘I know that knowledge itself is an impediment to knowledge, but I can overcome it.’
For Atala’s sake, Father Aubrey refined Atala’s Christian wisdom with additional knowledge. God “will judge you for your intention, which was pure, and not for your action, which was guilty” (64). And as for her “mortal life,” “how little you lose in losing this world!” Although you have lived in solitude, you have known sorrow; what would you have thought had you witnessed the evils of society, had your ears been assailed, as you set foot on Europe’s shores, by the long cry of woe rising out of that ancient land?” (64-65). Both Rousseau, with his critique of civilization, and the Christian apostles’ critique of ‘this world,’ concur. But why does Father Aubry suppose that Atala would ever see Europe’s shores? It may be that he considers the French and the Spaniards as constituting Europe in the New World. Or it may be that this is Chactas’ own interjection, placed in Father Aubry’s mouth but reflecting the course of his own life, which would bring him to Europe, to the civilization Rousseau abominated.
Perhaps it isn’t the world but “your love you regret losing?” (65). If so, “you might as well weep over a dream” (65). The “heart of man” is full of desires, and desires change; you rely on them (65). The “most beautiful love of all was doubtless that of the man and woman formed by the hand of the Creator,” who provided them a paradise better even than the New Eden of the New World (65). “If they were unable to abide in that happy state,” if they could not tame the snake, “what couple after them will ever be able to do so?” (65). The marriages of “the first-born of men” too were troubled, incestuous marriages whereby “love and brotherly affection were blended in the same heart and the purity of one swelled the delight of the other”; these too were troubled by jealousy, these “holy families from which Christ chose to descend” (65). This is the restlessness Chateaubriand identified in the human soul in the Essai. “If man were ever constant in his affections, if his feelings remained eternally fresh and he could strengthen them endlessly, then solitude and love would surely make him God’s equal, for those are the Great Being’s two eternal pleasures” (66). This is why Man is not God. We see this also in man’s mortality, his life soon forgotten by his family and friends as they get on with their own lives. “So natural is man’s infidelity, so trivial a thing is our life even in the hears of our friends!” (66). She can now be a bride of Christ, the only trustworthy bridegroom and, one notices, as her mother had desired. Atala became calm, and now could pass the Christian message to Chactas. “Heaven may be trying you today,” she told him, “but it is only to make you compassionate for the sorrows of others,” as “the human heart,” like “the trees of the forest,” “do not yield their balm for the wounds of men until they themselves have been wounded by the axe” (67). And she answered the question of Nietzsche, decades in advance of his asking it, the question of whether you would will to live your life over again: “If I were to begin life anew, I would still prefer the joy of loving you a few moments in the hardship of exile to a whole life of repose in my native land” (68).
“I have one last request of you” (69). Since “there is after this life a longer life,” “how terrible it would be to be separated from you forever” (69). Therefore “if you have loved me, learn the lessons of the Christian faith, and it will prepare our reunion” (69). That is, she wanted him to confirm his salvation, of which she was unsure. Chactas’ reply was remarkable, given his apparent prior conversion. “I promised Atala that I would one day embrace the Christian faith” (69). Father Aubry exclaims, “It is time to summon God hither,” and “scarcely had he pronounced these words when a supernatural power forced me to my knees and bowed my head down at the foot of Atala’s head”; “I thought I saw God Himself emerging from the mountainside” (69).
Again interrupting his story, Chactas took out Atala’s crucifix and asked René, more remarkably still, “How can it be that I am still not a Christian?” (70). “What petty motives of politics and patriotism have kept me in the errors of my fathers? No, I will not delay any longer.” (70). He will go to the priest.
In the fourth and concluding part of his story, Chactas relates how Father Aubry consoled him before Atala’s funeral, saying merely, “It is God’s will” and embracing him (71). “Had I not experienced it myself, I would never have believed there could be so much consolation in those few words of a Christian resigned to fate” (71). Chactas promised, “I shall endeavor to grow worthy of the eternal wedding promised me by Atala” (71). Father Aubry prayed to God to “restore peace in this troubled soul, and leave with him only humble and useful memories of his sorrows!” (71). After her burial, he advised Chactas not to stay in the village but to return to his people. “You owe your life to your country” (74). For him, and for Chateaubriand, Christianity need not mean withdrawal from the life of politics in one’s fatherland. It may be that a Christian mission will take a Christian away from his fatherland, as it did for Father Aubry. But Father Aubry founded a new, Christian regime when he arrived in the New World. It may also be that a Christian mission will bring a Christian back to his fatherland, as it does for Chactas and as it did for Chateaubriand himself.
As for his Chactas’ passions, now sorrowful, the same inconstancy that makes eros unreliable, impermanent, causing sorrow, also ends sorrow. Sorrows “must come to an end, because the heart of man is finite” (74). Father Aubry’s answer to Goethe’s sorrowing young Werther, to German Romanticism, is that “we cannot even be unhappy for long,” and therefore ‘Romantic’ suicide is not noble but foolish and wrong. “Such were the words of the man of the rock”—the man of the grotto carved into the mountain and of the Rock of God; “his authority was too great, his wisdom too profound to be questioned” (74). With experience, Chactas has come to know what he then accepted only on authority. “I have never yet met a man who has not been disappointed in his dreams of happiness, nor a heart without its secret wound. The heart most serene in appearance is like the natural well of the Alachua savannah; its surface seems calm and pure, but look down in its depths, and you will discern a great crocodile, nourished in the waters of the well” (75).
In his Epilogue, the narrator relates the sequel to the story of Chactas, told him at Niagara Falls by a descendant of the Natchez who survived the French massacre in 1730, found refuge among the Chickasaw, only to be exiled again by British colonists. The granddaughter of the man she calls “René the European” (80), she confirms that Chactas did receive baptism in the Catholic Church. Both men died in the massacre, René having joined the tribe, marrying a Natchez woman. Father Aubry in his turn died at the hands of the Cherokee, “enemies of the French, [who] invaded his mission, guided by the sound of the bell as it rang to succor travelers” (80). The peaceable Kingdom of God on earth flourished in isolation, perished in its first war, a war brought on precisely by its evangelizing welcome to all passersby. Such are the worldly limitations to the Christian Rousseauian founding.
The founder was captured, tortured, and burned. “Not once could [the Cherokee] draw from him a single cry reflecting shame on his God or dishonor on his country”; on the contrary, “he never ceased praying for his torturers or commiserating with the victims”—the other captives—in “their plight” (80). “To prevent him from talking, the enraged Indians forced a red-hot iron down his throat” and, “no longer able to be of consolation to men, he yielded up his ghost” (80). To suffer torture “stoically” was no novelty to the Cherokee, who had seen many other captives do the same, and whose warriors had themselves done the same under torture. But “they could not help admitting that there was something in the humble courage of Father Aubry which they had never before known, something which went beyond all earthly courage. A number of them were so impressed by his death that they became Christians.” (81). To those who would argue that his founding ended in predictable catastrophe, Father Aubry would likely remark the souls saved as the result of that catastrophe. His kingdom was in, but not of, this world; its purpose pointed beyond this world.
Chactas visited the burned-out village a few years later. The tame snake was the only living survivor; it “came out of the nearby brush, and curled up at his feet” (81). He found the ashes of Father Aubry and Atala, gathered them; the Natchez woman who tells the story has been carrying them with her, and the narrator, Chateaubriand, venerates them as saints’ relics. “Thus passes all that is good and virtuous and sensitive on earth! Man, thou art but a fleeting vision, a sorrowful dream. Misery is thy essence, and thou art nothing save in the sadness of thy soul and the eternal melancholy of thy thought!” (82).
Chateaubriand’s final sentence recalls the last chapter of the Essai. “Hapless Indians whom I have seen wandering in the wildernesses of the New World with the ashes of your ancestors, you who showed me hospitality in the midst of your misery, today I could not return your kindness, for, like you, I wander at the mercy of men, and less fortunate than you in my exile, I have not brought with me the bones of my fathers!” (82).
The Epilogue to Atala leaves unanswered questions, questions about René. Why was René self-exiled in the New World? How did he live during the years between Atala’s death and his own death at the hands of the French?
René at first lived among, but not truly with, the Natchez. “His melancholy nature drew him constantly away into the depths of the woods,” “a savage among savages” (85). His only companions were Chactas and Father Souël, a missionary based at nearby Fort Rosalie. “These two elders had acquired a powerful influence over his heart, Chactas, through his kindly indulgence, and Father Souël, on the contrary, through his extreme severity” (85). Both men “desired to know”: specifically, to know how René had come to live among them. For years he refused to say, but a letter from Europe arrived, and its contents “so increased his sadness that he felt he had to flee even from his own friends” (85). The come to him, “and so great was their tact, so gentle their manner, and so deep the respect they commanded, that he finally felt obliged to yield” (85).
They met on the bank of the Meschacebe. “Tents, half-built houses, fortresses just begun, hosts of negroes clearing tracts of land, groups of white men and Indians, all offering a striking contrast of social and primitive ways in this limited space” (86) betokened the regimes of the New World, past regime conflicts, and regime conflicts yet to come. These conflicts also occur in the human soul, and René told of them in his. “The peace in your hearts,” in his friends’ beautiful souls, mirroring “the calm of nature all about me,” put him to shame, given “the disorder and turmoil,” the sublimity, “of my soul” (86).
He expected them to pity him, “a young man with neither strength nor moral courage, who finds the source of his torments within himself, and can hardly lament any misfortunes save those he has brought on himself” (86). Having “already been harshly punished,” he begged that they temper their condemnation with mercy as they listened to his story.
His mother died in childbirth. His father bestowed his estate to the eldest son, not René, who “was soon abandoned to strange hands,” returning to the family château only once a year (87). “Spirited in temper and erratic in nature,” he “found freedom and contentment only with my sister Amelia,” with whom he shared “tender affinities in mood and taste” (87). In youth he turned to poetry, as befits “a heart of sixteen” (87). His father died, and René tended him on his deathbed; “it was the first time that the immortality of the soul was clearly present before my eyes,” as “I could not believe that this lifeless body was the creator of my thought; I felt it had to come from some other source,” and too, “I hoped one day to join the spirit of my father” (88).
He and Amelia went to live with “some aged relatives,” and he considered entering a monastery, as indeed many younger sons of the aristocracy did (89). But “whether it was my natural instability or a dislike of the monastic life, I do not know, but I changed my plans and decided to go abroad” (90). He did not understand Amelia’s “almost joyful gesture” when she saw him off; “I could not repress a bitter thought about the inconstancy of human affections” (90).
He embarked on an extended Wanderjahr, visiting “the ruins of Rome and Greece, those countries of virile and brilliant memory, where palaces are buried in the dust and royal mausoleums hidden beneath the brambles,” testimony to the “power of nature and weakness of man” (90). Wearying “of searching through graveyards,” he turned to “living races” to see if they “had more virtue and less suffering to offer than those which had vanished” (90). They did not. Workmen building monuments to recently-deceased great men scarcely knew the name of those heroes, and, having “discovered nothing stable among the ancients” he found “nothing beautiful among the moderns,” only the “endless agitations” of his fellow Europeans (89, 92). Even, now, among the Indians, living in the Rousseauian state of nature in which “your needs [are] our only guides,” he had found no rest (93), having brought his modern-civilizational cares with him to the woods, cares that exacerbate the already restless nature of all human beings.
Chactas offered him the advice of the ancients: “You must try to temper your character, which has already brought you so much grief” (93). To moderation he added the appeal of magnanimity; “a great soul necessarily holds more sorrow than a little one” (93). He intended to calm René’s passions and to elevate his soul by having him tell of greatness, the France that Chactas remembered, the France of Louis XIV. René cannot comply. “Alas, father, I cannot tell you about that great century, for I saw only the end of it as a child; it had already drawn to a close when I returned to my land. Never has a more astonishing, nor a more sudden change taken place in a people. From the loftiness of genius, from respect for religion and dignity in manners”—from the France of Corneille and Racine—everything “suddenly degenerated to cleverness and godlessness and corruption”—to Voltaire and Diderot (94). Upon returning to France, his sister continued to avoid him. “I found myself lonelier in my native land than I had been on foreign soil”; “everywhere I was taken for an impractical dreamer” (94). He retreated again to solitude, this time in half-deserted churches. He eventually found even solitude intolerable; “weary of constantly repeating the same scenes and the same thought…I began to search my soul to discover what I really sought” (95). Longing for a woman companion, “a mysterious apathy” gripping him, “I resolved to give up my life” (98). Like Atala, “I was imbued with faith, and I reasoned like a sinner; my heart loved God, and my mind knew Him not” (99).
Amelia, “the only person in the world I had ever loved,” the only one “who could understand me and to whom I could reveal my soul,” returned to him when he alarms her with a letter telling her to make “arrangements about my worldly goods” (99-100). She stayed with him, but her health began to decline and she left a few months later, writing him of her intention to take the veil. She requests his pledge never to kill himself: “Is there anything more pitiful than thinking constantly of suicide? For a man of your character it is easy to die. Believe me, it is far more difficult to live. (102). René now suspected his sister harbored a secret, for “Who was forcing her into the religious life so suddenly?” (103). He agreed to stand in for their deceased father at the altar on the day of her profession, inwardly raging that he would disturb the service, stab himself in the church. But at the ceremony, “so beautiful was she, so divinely radiant her countenance,” that, “overcome by the glorious sorrow of her saintly figure and crushed by the grandeur of religion, I saw my plans of violence crumbling” (106). Feeling himself “bound by an all-powerful hand…instead of blasphemy and threats, I could find in my heart only profound adoration and sighs of humility” (106).
Wrapped in a funeral shroud, Amelia laid herself on the marble slab, an action symbolic of her death to this world, and “the priest began the service for the dead” (107). From under the shroud “a confused murmur emerged”; leaning over her, only René could hear her sister’s confession: “Merciful God, let me never again rise from this deathbed, and may Thy blessings be lavished on my brother, who has never shared my forbidden passion!” (108). At this, “I lost control of my senses”; upon reviving, he learns that his sister, “taken with a violent fever,” had asked never “to try to see her again” (108).
This time, for the first time, he “knew what it meant to shed tears for grief which was far from imaginary,” no longer self-imposed and self-exaggerated (109). “I even felt a kind of unexpected satisfaction in the fullness of my anguish, and I became aware, with a sense of hidden joy, that sorrow is not a feeling which consumes itself like pleasure”; “now that my sorrows were real, I no longer wished to die” (109). If “in every land the natural song of man is sad, even when it renders happiness,” the true return to nature must be sorrow, as only in it can man find beauty in sublimity, satisfaction in his natural restlessness (109). Amelia learns this too, in the convent. She writes to him that the regime of the convent—the regular chime of the church bell, the hymns, the waves of the ocean nearby, “the simplicity of my companions, the purity of their vows, the regularity of their life”—all act as “healing balm over my days” (110). Christianity “substitutes a kind of burning chastity in which lover and virgin are at one” (111). The religion of burning chastity parallels the nature of joy in sorrow, stability in restlessness.
The letter René had received came from the Mother Superior at the convent, informing him of Amelia’s death, “a victim of her zeal and charity,” as it was incurred while caring for her sisters, afflicted by a contagious disease. Chactas comforted him in his grief. Father Souël did not.
He had expected pity, and Chactas had wept for him, but in Father Souël’s judgment “nothing in your story deserves the pity you are now being shown” (112). You are in love with your own illusions, dissatisfied with everything, “withdrawn from society, and wrapped up in idle dreams” (113). Melancholy does not make you superior to the world; “only those of limited vision can hate men and life” (113). As Father Aubry had told Atala, your griefs are “absolutely nothing” and your self-isolation in the woods consists only in neglect of your duties (113). Yes, saints have retreated to the wilderness, “but they were weeping and subduing their passions, while you seem to be wasting your time inflaming your own,” a “presumptuous youth” who thinks “man sufficient unto himself” (113). But “solitude is bad for the man who does not live with God,” increasing “the soul’s power while robbing it at the same time of every opportunity to find expression” (113). You have talent, but unless you “devote it to serving [your] fellow men, you will “first [be] punished by an inner misery,” and eventually by God (113). Father Souël’s love for René evinces the toughness of agape but does not extend to a call for conversion. He may have judged this premature.
At this, Chactas smiles, recalling Father Aubry’s rebuke of his own sorrows. “My son, he speaks severely to both of us; he is reprimanding the old man and the young, and he is right…. Happiness can be found only in the common paths” (113). He tells a story of the Meschacebe, which overran its banks, destroying everything around it in a show of its power, only to become troubled at the solitude it had made for itself. “It longed again for the humble bed which nature had prepared for it, and it pined for the birds and the flowers, the trees and the streams which were once its modest companions along its peaceful course” (114). It is a Christian parable, a lesson in humility against ambitions of self-sufficient pride, and also a Rousseauian one, as man’s civilization evidences exactly such an attempt to master nature. The Meschacebe is the human heart.
“René returned to his wife, but still found no happiness. Soon afterwards, along with Chactas and Father Souël, he perished in the massacres of the French and Natchez in Louisiana” (114).
In Atala and René, Chateaubriand attempted to correct the French Romanticism he unintentionally spurred on by those very writings. They answer Rousseau, and even more immediately Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. The Sturm und Drang of the thunderstorm in the forest; the ennui and self-torment, which tempt René to suicide and which goad Werner to commit it; the retreat to village life (for Werther, among German peasants, for René, American Indians); the love triangle (rivaled by a man, Chactas rivaled by God): these are the marks of Rousseauianism turned in on itself, finding misery in souls either too civilized to feel the natural moral sentiments of the savage or perhaps finding that even human nature purged of civil society’s cares can find no rest.
And like Goethe, Chateaubriand came to regret writing in this vein, for the same reason. The natural human capacity for imitation, noted by Rousseau, prevailed in their young readers. Werther touched off the “Werther Fever” in European youth, complete with merchandise and copycat suicides. Goethe denounced the “sickness” of the Romantic movement he had initiated, turning instead to a manly and measured classicism. Chateaubriand eventually wished he had never written either of the books, but especially René, which fostered an affectation of ennui in French youths that, well, bored him. But he also found the ‘ancient’ or ‘classical’ moderation and magnanimity of his Chactas and of the mature Goethe an insufficiently powerful antidote to the sorrows of the modern human soul and its psychic mirror, the rage of murderous revolutionaries. Chactas smiles once, but never laughs, and neither does any other person in these books. There is copious weeping, and a Mississippi forest of exclamation points at the end of sentences, indications of passion. In keeping with this, and again following his thought in the Essai, he would next extend his consideration of the answer offered by religion, writing The Genius of Christianity.
With regard to Rousseau, Chateaubriand endorses several of his principal claims. With him, he holds that civilization, and especially the accumulation of knowledge, obscures the nature of man from men. He also regards the state of nature as a condition of fecundity and abundance, not scarcity; men in the state of nature enjoy freedom of will and hardiness of body. Sexual passion is dangerous, not liberating but enslaving. Savages endure few or none of the agonies civilized men experience; they do not commit suicide. (Atala does so, but only because the contradiction between her love and her religious vow to her mother seems irresolvable; she has been touched by civilization.)
Philosophically and as an artist, Chateaubriand shares Rousseau’s conviction that facticity is not truth, or at least not the whole truth. In his eyes, his fictions are as true as his histories, and his Mémoires combine facts with fictions. A noble lie can be a true reflection of the nature of man.
Chateaubriand departs from Rousseau in placing his savages within civil society, albeit primitive ones. They follow religion, there—worshipping many gods and one Great Spirit—also unlike Savage man according to Rousseau. Chateaubriand’s savages live poorly within the abundance of nature; they see the advantages of agriculture and, when shown how to do it, adopt it. They are not exactly poor in spirit, and indeed rich in natural spiritedness, in war-ready courage, even to the point of enduring torture. Yet they also see the difference between their courage and Christian courage, which goes beyond the endurance of one’s own agony and reaches out to bless the torturer. Some of them esteem that difference, accepting Christianity for their souls along with agriculture for their bodies.
Chateaubriand insists that they need to do this because the physical and psychic ills of man inhere in his nature, even as they are exaggerated by civilization, and especially by modern civilization. Dualities, even antimonies, pervade all of nature, which is both beautiful and sublime, harmonious and stormy. This affects the question of natural right. For Rousseau, natural right consists of bodily well-being and self-preservation along with freedom of the mind and the natural sentiment of pity or compassion. If nature is sublime as well as beautiful, natural right as so conceived will not suffice. Divine right and divine law must supplement natural right and natural law, if human beings can be made to resist destroying one another with envious rage or ruining the foundation of the family with incestuous love, family love carried to its extreme because the passion of love knows no limits—the love seen symbolically in the souls of Chactas and Atala and literally in the souls of René and Amelia.
Chactas wonders, who gains more? The savage who becomes civilized or the civilized man who retreats to the savage life? He, the savage who became civilized, suffered greatly, steadied his soul with the morality of the ancients, took up the responsibilities of civil life. René, the civilized man who yearned for natural simplicity, found solitude miserable; after Father Souël’s reprimand, he too returned to civic life. Both resist the agapic appeal of Christianity. Chactas has experienced the Holy Spirit and received baptism; he seems to have been saved. René, although moved by Christianity, finds no happiness in the civil life he returns to. It may be that Chateaubriand does not think Christianity offers happiness in this life. It surely does not offer life in this life: René, Chactas, Atala, Father Aubry, and Father Souël all die violently, Atala by her own hand, the men by the hands of other men.
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