François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity: Part the Fourth: Worship. Charles I. White translation. Baltimore: John Murphy and Company, 1875.

 

 

Aside from their attention to popular superstitions blending elements of pagan ‘nature-worship’ with Christian ceremonies, satirists of Christian practices have aimed much of their vitriol at Christian ceremonies themselves. They intend to deflate Christian beliefs by desacralizing the sacraments, sundering the ties of heart and mind implied in the command, “Do this in remembrance of Me.”

As in the previous section on the liberal arts, Chateaubriand begins his defense with a discussion of music, with Christendom’s distinctive sound, the Church bell. “To us it seems not a little surprising that a method should have been found, by a single stroke of a hammer, to excite the same sentiment, at one and the same instant, in thousands of hearts, and to make the winds and clouds the bearers of the thought of men” (IV.i.1). Thunder, the wind, the sea, the volcano, the waterfall, even “the voice of a whole assembled nation” have sublimity, have grandeur, but they all lack the harmony of bells (IV.i.1). And in its religious significance, bell-sound “has a thousand secret relations with men”—startling “the adulteress in her guilty pleasures,” catching “the ear of the atheist…in his impious vigils,” disturbing “the slumbers of our tyrants” (IV.i.1). “But, in a well-regulated society, the sound of the tocsin, suggesting the idea of succor, filled the soul with pity and terror, and thus touched the two great springs of tragical sensation” while invoking the supreme hope of Christian faith (IV.i.1). “Had bells been attached to any other edifice than to our churches they would have lost their moral sympathy with our hearts” (IV.i.1). But they have been, and so have not.

From hearing, the first among the senses that perceives the Word of God, Chateaubriand turns to the visual, to clerical vestments and Church ornaments. He emphasizes the use of candles in Christian services. Candles “perpetuate the memory of those times of persecution when the faithful assembled in tombs for the purpose of prayer,” “secretly lighting their torch beneath the sepulchral arches” and proceeding to the altar, “where a pastor, distinguished only by poverty and good works, consecrated offerings to the Lord” (IV.i.2). “This was truly the reign of Jesus Christ, the God of the humble and the afflicted”; “never were such exalted virtues seen among Christians as in those ages when, in order to worship the Lord of light and life, they were obliged to secrete themselves in the bosom of darkness and death” (IV.i.2). Fancy clerical dress and church paraphernalia easily invite ridicule from those who target Christianity. Chateaubriand wisely recalls the simpler practices of the early Church.

Words spoken and read combine hearing and seeing. Chateaubriand praises the Latin Mass. “An ancient and mysterious language—a language which changes not with the world—is well adapted to the worship of the Eternal, Incomprehensible, and Immutable Being; and, as the sense of our miseries compels us to raise a suppliant cry to the King of kings, is it not natural to address Him in the most beautiful idiom known to man? that in which prostrate nations once presented their petitions to Caesar?” (IV.i.3). Prayers in Latin “seem to increase the religious sentiment of the people” precisely because they do not understand the words, an “effect of our natural disposition to secrecy” (IV.i.3). The “disquieted soul, little acquainted with its own desires, delights in offering up prayers as mysterious as its own wants” (IV.i.3). In these passages, readers will see why Chateaubriand esteems mystery. It isn’t simply a matter inaugurating the ‘Romantic movement’ in literature, or of willful obscurantism. With Pascal, Chateaubriand understands the limitations of human knowledge. Whether he looks out at nature, up to God, down to Hell, or within, at his own soul, man learns to know that he does not know. The Enlightenment insisted that man could remove the shadows. Chateaubriand replies that too much light may cause man to forget the darkness unreached by the light he generates. To recover the sense of mystery and of wonder will make men less sure of themselves, more ready to rely on God. And if not that, at least not to despise those who do. Rather, to consider Christian mysteries “as the archetype of the law of nature” has nothing in it “revolting to a great mind” (IV.vi.13). “The truths of Christianity, so far from requiring the submission of reason, command, on the contrary, the most sublime exercise of that faculty,” an exercise which should include knowledge of our ignorance (IV.vi.13).

Accordingly, Chateaubriand lauds the simplicity, purity, and luminousness of the Lord’s Prayer—a candle in the darkness that neither denies the presence of darkness nor the possibility of insight. “Christianity, in fact, is at one and the same time a kind of philosophic sect and an antique system of legislation” (IV.i.3). Whether directed at “civil or religious matters, or only to the mere accidents of life,” prayers “have a perfect appropriateness, are distinguished for elevated sentiment, awaken grand recollections, and are marked by a style at once simple and magnificent” (IV.i.3). Christians have found a way to speak to God, whom they know and do not know, whose presence they intuit but whose intentions they cannot know except as He reveals them. 

The institution of the Sabbath day marks another limitation—the limitation of human political authority. “Sunday combines every advantage, for it is at the same time a day of pleasure and of religion” (IV.i.4). Since human leisure “is beyond the reach of civil law,” how will it be regulated? (IV.i.4). Given the flawed character of man, to release him from all constraints, even for one day, would be “to plunge him again into a state of nature, and to let loose all at once a kind of savage upon society” (IV.i.4). The Sabbath temporarily removes the bond of civil law without removing the bond of religious law. In so doing, it concentrates the worshipper’s mind on the religious law, which the civil law, with its this-worldly penalties, might otherwise obscure. This is why the Christian Sabbath “shocked the enlightened understandings” of the French revolutionaries, men all too eager to plunge the French back into the state of nature, the better to recast them in an image formed by human hands (IV.1.4). Danton “wanted to separate the French people from all other nations,” rather as God separated light from darkness, “and make it, like the Jews, a caste hostile to the rest of mankind” (IV.i.4). This is Old Testament practice adopted by a false God for a wrongly chosen people. Danton substituted his own sabbath for God’s Sabbath, a “tenth day which had no other honor than that of heralding the memory of Robespierre” (IV.i.4).

But, say the satirists, is the Mass not absurd? No: “the ceremonial of the mass may be defended by an argument at once so simple and so natural, that it is difficult to conceive how it could have been overlooked in the controversy between the Catholics and Protestants” (IV.i.5). Sacrifice “constitutes the essence of religious worship,” forming a part of all genuine religions (IV.i.5). Among religious sacrifices, “the eucharistic offering is the most admirable, the most mysterious, and the most divine” (IV.i.5). Human sacrifice “belonged to the state of nature, when man was almost entirely merged in the physical order”; animal sacrifices, however, could scarcely “redeem a being endowed with intelligence and a capability of virtue” (IV.i.5). “A victim, therefore, more worthy of the nature of man, was sought after; and, while philosophers taught that the gods could not be moved by the blood of hecatombs, and would accept only the offering of a humble heart, Jesus Christ confirmed these vague notions of reason,” His sacrifice far more than the sacrifice of a body but an “immolation of the passions,” the “sacrifice of moral man” (IV.i.5). That is, the soul-agony of the Passion alone can redeem the sins of man’s passions. 

To those who insist that Jesus was only a man, not a God, Chateaubriand thus prepares an answer on their own terms: “The more deeply we study Christianity, the more clearly shall we perceive that it is but the development of our natural light, and the necessary result of the advancement of society” (IV.i.5). That is, as the natural reasonings of man advanced beyond the state of nature to civil society, and then to higher civilization, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice “daily offered”—the Eucharist—corresponds to humanity’s advance from that state, from the primarily physical to the spiritual (IV.i.5). As the Legislator of His regime, Christ “instituted the eucharist, where under the visible elements of bread and wine he concealed the invisible offering of his blood and of our hearts”—a symbol” which has nothing contrary to good sense or to philosophy” (IV.i.5). 

Christian ceremonies also follow this pattern. Unlike “the ceremonies of paganism,” in Christian ceremonies “all is essentially moral,” actions satisfying a God who cares for “the emotions of virtue in the heart and with the uniformity of sentiment which springs from the peaceful reign of the soul” (IV.i.7). Christian festivals as well invoke harmony, harmony with nature and its seasons, as holy days entwine spirituality with the powerful natural sentiments of family life. In the days before Ascension Thursday, the curé calls villagers to assemble in front of the church, delivering a sermon in which he calls them, repeatedly, “My children” (IV.i.8). 

It was the lack of religiosity and of family feeling that doomed the French revolutionaries’ attempts to establish their own lasting calendar of holidays. “Men, speaking in the name of equality and of all the passions…never have been able to establish one festival,” while “the most obscure saint, who had preached naught but poverty, obedience, and the renunciation of worldly goods, had his feast even at the moment when its observance endangered life”—when “the statue of Marat usurped the place of St. Vincent de Paul” and the revolutionaries renewed persecutions of Christians, persecutions unseen since the days of the Roman emperors (IV.i.9). “Many a pious family secretly kept a Christian holiday,” a remembrance presided over by an “infirm grandfather” who emerged from his room to serve as “the ruling spirit of the paternal mansion” (IV.i.9).”It cannot be doubted that these religious institutions powerfully contributed to the maintenance of morals, by cherishing cordiality and affection among relations” (IV.i.9). How different families became, when the sacrament of marriage and “the sentiments of nature” alike were replaced by “the articles of a contract”—the law now “universally made a substitute for morals” under the regime of the secular republic (IV.i.9). The Christian festivals had linked living families with “our ancestors,” who “had rejoiced at the same season as ourselves”; Christianity “found means to give, from generation to generation, a few happy moments to millions of the unfortunate” (IV.i.9). Bastille Day offers only fireworks to crowds.

The true republic isn’t the one so celebrated. “Religion crowns her pious work in honor of the dead by a general ceremonial, which recalls the memory of the innumerable inhabitants of the grave—that republic of perfect equality where no one can enter without first doffing his helmet or crown to pass under the low door of the tomb” (IV.i.12). And “religion alone can give to the heart of man that expansion, which will render its sighs and its loves commensurate with the multitude of the dead whom it designs to honor” (IV.i.12). With the funeral mass, the Christian republic of the dead welcomes souls into the greater Kingdom of God. 

Tombs provide the infrastructure of that republic. “Religion received birth at the tomb, and the tomb cannot dispense with religion” (IV.ii.1). The Egyptians saw this; “in Egypt you can scarcely move a step without meeting with emblems of mortality” (IV.ii.2). It was there that Greek philosophers voyaged “to acquire knowledge respecting the gods,” passing on the way the tomb of Homer (IV.ii.2). “Ingenious antiquity could imagine that the shade of the poet still recited the misfortunes of Ilium to the assembled Nereids, as in the soft and genial night of Ionia he had disputed with the sirens the prize of song” (IV.ii.2). And in China, then still an outpost of antiquity in a modernizing world, the people “have an affecting custom” of “inter[ring] their relatives in their gardens,” reintegrating them into life, keeping them close to their families (IV.ii.3). Among the Pacific Islanders, the Otaheites do not bury their dead but place them in a cradle “covered with a canoe turned upside-down—an emblem of the shipwreck of life” (IV.ii.5). 

Still, “we feel that [the Christian] tomb alone is worthy of man,” for “the monument of the idolater tells you of nothing but the past,” whereas “the Christian speaks only of the future,” of the soul’s ascension to Heaven (IV.ii.6). In desecrating such tombs, and especially the tombs of their kings, and in robbing the graves, the French revolutionaries unwittingly reviled the future even as they attempted to obliterate the past, the ‘ancien‘ regime. This “was tantamount to a conspiracy to overturn the world, not to leave in France one stone upon another, and to advance over the ruin of religion to the attack of all other institutions” (IV.ii.8). The result? The revolutionaries themselves “fell into the pits which themselves had dug, and their bodies were left with Death as pledges for those of which they had plundered him” (IV.ii.8).

Perhaps nothing in Christendom attracted the jibes of satirists more than Christian priests, to whom no folly or vice went unattributed. Chateaubriand begins with the first Christian priest, Jesus of Nazareth, establishing His divinity as plausible if not of course demonstrable. Son of a carpenter, a Nazarene, “selecting his disciples from among the lowest of peoples,” demanding nothing but sacrifices from them and from all subsequent converts, He prefers the slave to the master, the poor to the rich, the leper to the healthy man” while despising “power, wealth, and prosperity” and ends his life in agony and ignominy, naked and nailed to a cross, which then became a symbol of self-sacrificial worship (IV.iii.1). “He overthrows the prevalent notions of morality, institutes new relations among men, a new law of nations, a new public faith,” convincing men of his divinity and prevailing over the religion of the Caesars and, eventually, existing religions throughout the world (IV.iii.1). “No! if the whole world were to raise its voice against Jesus Christ, if all the powers of philosophy were to combine against its doctrines, never shall we be persuaded that a religion erected on such a foundation is a religion of human origin” (IV.iii.1).

His character has not been questioned, even by His “bitterest enemies,” and “no philosophers of antiquity,” no patriarchs of the Church itself, have achieved His moral perfection (IV.iii.1). “Christ alone is without blemish; he is the most brilliant copy of that supreme beauty which is seated upon the throne of heaven” (IV.i.1). At the same time, he exemplifies not happiness but sorrow and agapic love, “never manifest[ing] any sign of anger except against insensibility and obduracy of soul” (IV.iii.1). “If the purest morality and the most feeling heart—if a life passed in combating error and soothing the sorrows of mankind—be attributes of divinity, who can deny that of Jesus Christ?” (IV.iii.1).

Being human, no subsequent priest has neared Christ’s perfection. Hence they more readily invite charges of hypocrisy couched in mockery. Chateaubriand defends Christian priests against their critics, beginning with the regime of the assembly of men under God, the Church.

“We will venture to assert that no other religion upon earth ever exhibited such a system of benevolence, prudence, and foresight, of energy and mildness, of moral and religious laws” (IV.iii.2). Whether promoting “arts, letters, science, legislation, politics, institutions (literary, civil, and religious), foundations for humanity” in efforts organized by its upper ranks, or delivering “the blessings of charity and humanity” by means of the village priests, the Church “answers, by its different degrees, all our wants” (IV.iii.2). Of the main kinds of clergy—secular and regular—Chateaubriand must take special care in justifying the secular priests’ way of life, which requires them to mingle with the world. Initially, “all Christendom was poor,” priests no less so (IV.iii.2). But as men recovered from barbarism and civilization advanced, “it would have been unreasonable” for the secular priests “to remain poor,” inasmuch as “they would have lost all consideration,” lost “their moral authority,” among an increasingly affluent population (IV.iii.2). As for the pope, he became “a prince, that he might be able to speak to princes”; similarly, the bishops gained “equal footing with the nobles” in order to “instruct them in their duties” (IV.iii.2). “Raised above the necessities of life” by revenues derived from tithing, secular priests could move among the rich, “whose manners they refined” and among the poor, whom they “relieved by [their] bounty” and “consol[ed] with [their] example” (IV.iii.2). [1]

Secular priests have done some of their most meritorious work among the rural poor. “The peasant without religion is a ferocious animal,” lacking “the restraint of education or of human respect”; “the possession of property has taken from him the innocence of the savage” (IV.iii.2). Yet “he is transformed into a new creature by the hand of religion,” “his propensity to betray…converted into inviolable fidelity, his ingratitude into unbounded attachment, his distrust into implicit confidence” (IV.iii.2). The parish priest, in exhibiting “the charity of Jesus Christ, [has] made them one of the most respectable classes of the nation” (IV.iii.2). “Which of us, with all our boasted philanthropy, would like, in the depth of winter, to be wakened in the middle of the night to go to a considerable distance in the country for the purpose of attending a poor wretch expiring upon straw?” (IV.iii.2).

The regular priests, who have joined one of the religious orders, taking vows of poverty, charity, and obedience, trace their origins to the prophet Elias, who fled a then-corrupt Israel for the mountains. The line goes through the prophets to John the Baptist and Jesus, “who often retired from the world to pray amid the solitude of the mountains”; following them, the “celebrated saints of Thebais filled Carmel and Lebanon with the highest works of penance” (IV.iii.3). With all of these men, “divine harmony mingled with the murmur of the streams and of the cascades” (IV.iii.3). Later, in Western Europe, an early monastic community was founded by Charlemagne at Roncevaux “on the very spot where the flower of chivalry, Roland of France, terminated his glorious achievements” (IV.iii.3). Such were the communities that saved classical culture from the barbarians “as from a second deluge”; eventually, “the first anchorets by degrees descended from their eminences, to make known to the barbarians the word of God and the comforts of life” (IV.iii.3). And the monasteries are still needed. “When the evils of a barbarous age disappeared, society, which is so ingenious and so effective in its means of tormenting man, knew well how to invent a thousand other sources of misery, which drive us into solitude! How often does disappointment, treachery, and profound disgust, make us wish to escape the world!” (IV.iii.3). We have hospitals for attending to diseases of the body: “Why should not religion have its institutions for the health of the soul, which is much more liable to disease, and whose sufferings are much more poignant, much longer, and much more difficult to be removed?” (IV.iii.3). More, some people are simply ill at ease in the world, “persons of such excellent qualities that they cannot find in the world congenial spirits with themselves, and are thus doomed to a kind of moral virginity or eternal widowhood. It was particularly for these solitary and generous souls that religion opened her peaceful retreats.” (IV.iii.3).

Accordingly, the monastic regime ordains an ascetic and contemplative way of life. The Enlighteners, “either from ignorance or prejudice, despise these constitutions under which such a number of cenobites have lived for so many centuries”—a “contempt [which] is anything but philosophical” (IV.iii.4). If he would study them candidly, the philosopher will find in the monasteries an important moral and political phenomenon: “The more the legislator combats the propensities of nature the more he insures the duration of his work,” at least in small communities (IV.iii.4). And indeed the philosopher should know better, recalling the ancient philosophic sects and the regime of the Spartans. “Most of these religious laws display an astonishing knowledge of the art of governing man,” realizing something of the republic Plato’s Socrates could only found in speech (IV.iii.4). 

Why do such regimes flourish, for so long? “The unhappiness of man proceeds chiefly from his inconstancy, and from the abuse of that free will which is at once his glory and his misfortune, and will be the occasion of his condemnation” (IV.iii.4). Human “disquietude,” lamented by earlier by Pascal and later by Tocqueville, issues in “a wretchedness which cannot be removed until some superior power fix[es] [a person’s] mind upon only one object” (IV.iii.4). We see this in the mechanic, “more happy than the rich man who is idle, because he is engrossed with a work which effectually shuts out all foreign desires and temptations to inconstancy” (IV.iii.4). The perpetual vows imposed on the Spartans by Lycurgus and on the Cretans by Minos accomplished the same thing, as do the vows of the monks. Protected against “the illusions of the world,” the regime of the monastery “deprives us at most of a few years of freedom” in exchange for “banish[ing] regret and remorse the remainder of our days” (IV.iii.4). “The soul that is calm and cheerful would soon lose its joyful tranquility amid the troubled spirits of the world” (IV.iii.4). And unlike the regimes founded by Lycurgus and Minos, the regime of the monastery binds its members by their own consent, a vow which “offers to the heart a compensation for the terrestrial love which it sacrifices,” an “alliance of an immortal soul with the eternal principle” that alone offers human beings “true greatness” (IV.iii.4). Rousseau is right to say that man is born free, wrong to suppose that happiness consists in pursuing one’s own will; the novitiate “swears to make God the object of his love, and, as is the case with the Divine Being, he creates for himself by his own act a necessity to do so,” a necessity that puts his or her soul in line with the necessity set out for human salvation and genuine happiness (IV.iii.4).

The way of life of the monastic regime consists not of the illusions generated by the Enlightenment project but of “mystery, solitude, silence, and contemplation,” all directed toward a better apprehension of the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit (IV.iii.5). In this, no social obligation is neglected, as each monastery serves as a node of illumination and refuge, worldwide without being ‘worldly.’ “People talk of philanthropy; the Christian religion is philanthropy itself,” its monasteries offering refuge to lost travelers, to exiles, to the distressed (IV.iii.5). With it, “Jesus Christ has restored to us the inheritance of which we were deprived by the sin of Adam,” since for the Christian “there is now no unknown ocean or deserts”; he “will everywhere find the hut of thy father and the language of thy ancestors” (IV.iii.5).

Moreover, “these rigorous orders of Christianity were schools of active morality, instituted in the midst of the pleasures of the age, and exhibiting continually to the eyes of vice and prosperity models of penance and striking examples of human misery,” a magnificent misery betokening the sublime victory over human passion (IV.iii.6). While “it is usually the task of the living to encourage their departing friends,” a monk on his deathbed “summons his companions and even his superiors to works of penance” (IV.iii.6). In this, he embodies the Christian regime itself, a religion that “has drawn from the tomb all the morality that underlies it” (IV.iii.6). Had man “remained immortal after the fall, he would never perhaps have been acquainted with virtue” (IV.iii.6), never needing to concentrate his mind and heart on the need for it, and especially the need for charity or agapic love. “In the performance of these pious duties” that flow from that love, “the sweat has often been seen to flow from the brow of these sympathizing monks and to trickle upon their robes, making them forever sacred, in spite of the sarcasms of infidels” (IV.iii.6). Even in the face of “the lowest depths of misfortune,” when a man found guilty of a capital crime stands on the scaffold, next to “the avenging sword” of justice stands the “man of peace,” offering “pity and hope” and even absolution to him who is about to die, whether innocent or guilty but repentant (IV.iii.6).

Nor do regular priests confine themselves to the monasteries. “The ancient philosophers themselves never quitted the enchanting walks of Academus and the pleasures of Athens to go, under the guidance of a sublime impulse, to civilize the savage, to instruct the ignorant, to cure the sick, to clothe the poor, to sow the seeds of peace and harmony among hostile nations; but this is what Christians have done and are still doing every day” (IV.iv.1). From France, the Jesuit Order had sent missionaries to the Levant, China, Guinea, and the Antilles, but Chateaubriand is especially interested in their mission to Paraguay. When the Jesuits arrived, the Spanish had not yet “extended their devastations” there” (IV.iv.4). “In the recesses of its forests the missionaries undertook to found a Christian republic and to confer at least upon a small number of Indians those blessings which they had not been able to procure for all”—one of “the noblest designs that ever entered into the heart of man” (IV.iv.4). At the Jesuits’ request, the Spanish crown granted liberty to any indigenes who converted to Christianity—much to the displeasure of the Spanish colonists. When some of the priests were “massacred and devoured by the savages,” other priests would perform the funeral rites, singing the Te Deum “over the grave of the martyr” (IV.iv.4). This so “astonished the barbarian hordes” that they began to listen to the message of the remaining priests. As it happens, “the savages of that region were extremely sensible to the charms of music”; caught “by this pious snare,” this “foretaste of the social virtues and of the first sweets of humanity,” they more and more began to approach the Jesuits in peace (IV.iv.4). “Thus the Christian religion realized in the forests of America what fabulous history relates of an Orpheus and an Amphion—a reflection so natural that it occurred to the missionaries themselves” (IV.iv.4). 

Perhaps as much to band together against feared Portuguese slave traders operating out of nearby Brazil, thirty members of the Guarani tribe joined with the Jesuits to found “that celebrated Christian commonwealth which seemed to be a relic of antiquity discovered in the New World,” an act “confirm[ing]under our own eyes the great truth known to Greece and Rome—that men are to be civilized and empires founded, not by the abstract principles of philosophy,” as the Enlighteners suppose, “but by the aid of religion” (IV.iv.5). Armed and trained, the Guarani defended themselves successfully against the slavers, thereby “afford[ing] an example of a state exempt both from the dangers of a wholly military constitution, like that of Lacedaemon, and the inconveniences of a wholly pacific community, such as that of the Quaker. The great political problem was solved. Agriculture, which sustains, and arms, which preserve, were here united. The Guaranis were planters, though they had no slaves, and soldiers without being ferocious—immense and sublime advantages, which they owed to the Christian religion, and which neither the Greeks nor the Romans had ever enjoyed under their system of polytheism. In every thing a wise medium was observed.” (IV.iv.5). The regime was a republic rather more in Plato’s sense than in the Roman, much less the American or the French; it was ruled by the Jesuits, whom the Guaranis “justly regarded as a kind of divinities,” taking the place of Plato’s philosopher-kings in the never-to-be-realized ‘city in speech.’ Such a regime could, however, be realized in practice by Christianity, whereby the Guarinis’ longstanding “spirit of cruelty and vengeance,” along with “the grossest vices which characterize the Indian tribes, were transformed into a spirit of meekness, patience, and chastity” (IV.i.5). Lawsuits were unknown, as was private property, and the citizens “enjoy[ed] the advantages of civilized life without having ever quitted the desert,” experiencing “a happiness unprecedented in the world,” Il Cristianesimo felice (IV.iv.5).

Several decades later, the Christian republic was destroyed by Portuguese and Spanish secularists, now in full-throated ‘Enlightenment’ mode in Europe, where the Jesuit order was suppressed in 1757. “Infidelity triumphed at the sight of Indians consigned in the New World to an execrable servitude, all Europe re-echoed its pretended philanthropy and love of liberty!” (IV.iv.5). Today, “the simple Christians of Paraguay, now buried in the mines of Potosi,” where they work as slaves but “doubtless adoring the hand which has smitten them,” working to win “a place in that republic of the saints which is beyond the reach of the persecutions of men” (IV.iv.5). As for the Jesuits, “they have always maintained that liberty is an imprescriptible right of the Christian,” a point that English Protestants in their own colonies acknowledge backhandedly by “defer[ring] the baptism of the Negro until the hour of death,” in an attempt “to conciliate cupidity and conscience” (IV.iv.7). It is the ‘enlightened’ French imperialism, with its “vain, boasting philanthropy,” which “has ruined everything” in its New World colonies, where the slaves revolted violently (IV.iv.7). 

Having traveled to North America, Chateaubriand readily tells the history of French and English dealings with the Hurons and the Iroquois. “Witty, gay, and sprightly, yet deceitful, brave, and eloquent, elated with success, dispirited by adverse fortune, and governed by their women,” with “more honor than patriotism,” the Hurons were the Athenians of the North American nations (IV.iv.8). “Politic, taciturn, and demure, burning with the desire of dominion, capable of the greatest vices and of the most sublime virtues, sacrificing everything to the welfare of their country,” the Iroquois were the Spartans (IV.iv.8). It is almost needless to add that, “by a natural instinct,” the Hurons allied with the French, the Iroquois with the English (IV.iv.8), although over the years both played the European colonists against the other. As with the Spanish in Paraguay, “France owed almost all her success” in New France “to the Jesuits,” failing there because the secular administrators interfered with the priests’ “good intentions” (IV.iv.8). “I myself met one of these apostles of religion amid the solitudes of America,” a “tall, venerable man” with whom he discussed the priest’s sufferings there, and also the sufferings of the French during the Revolution (IV.iv.8). “Those to whom a priest is an object of hatred and ridicule will rejoice in these torments of the confessors of the faith,” blaming them on priestly “fanaticism” (IV.iv.8). “With disdainful pity they will ask, What business had these monks in the wilds of America?” (IV.iv.8). Chateaubriand answers, “They went merely in obedience to the injunction of that Master who said to them, ‘Go ye and teach all nations'” (IV.iv.8).  The “simplicity and heroism” of Christian missionaries is “a just subject of pride for Europe, and in particular, for France, which furnished the greatest number” of them (IV.iv.9). He is confident that “never will men of science, dispatched to distant countries with all the instruments and all the plans of an academy, be able to effect what a poor monk, setting out on foot from his convent, accomplished singly with his rosary and his breviary” (IV.v.9).

In addition to the missionary orders, Christians also extended Christendom by means of its military orders, including the Knights of Malta, the Teutonic orders, and the Knights of Calatraya and St. Jago-of-the-Sword. These orders animated “the age of chivalry,” which Chateaubriand calls “the only poetical period of our history” (IV.v.1). These “chaste heroes and warriors who talk of nothing but love” defended Europe from the Turks at Rhodes, causing the Emperor Suleiman to lose “one hundred thousand men before its walls” before forcing the knights to retreat to Malta, where they made a successful stand against Muslim aggression (IV.v.1). In northern Europe, the Teutonic order subdued several barbarian tribes, “oblig[ing] them to embrace a social life and to attend to agricultural pursuits” (IV.v.3). And in Spain the knights fought the Moors, “another enemy still more dangerous, perhaps, than the Turks and the Prussians, because fixed in the very center of Europe” (IV.v.3). “Several times on the point of enslaving Christendom,” the Moors practiced polygamy and slavery and, “in their despotic and jealous disposition,” posed “an invincible obstacle to civilization and the welfare of mankind” (IV.v.3). Thanks to the firm bonds of their Christian vows, the Knights of Caltraya and St. Jago-of-the-Sword “formed associations of men who swore to spill the last drop of blood for their country” and pursued the Muslims to the Middle East itself in an attempt to defeat an empire that ranged from the walls of Vienna in the West to those of Delhi in the East (IV.v.3). So long as chivalry remained under the influence of the Catholic Church, it proved “a most powerful auxiliary for the advancement of civilization,” but once it became, “at a later period,” the “embodiment of a worldly principle,” aiming “solely at the exaltation of material beauty” and of the martial spirit of dueling, “it introduced an imaginary and independent principle of honor outside of the duty imposed by the divine law” (IV.iv.3).

In its original form, chivalry was fostered by an education both Christian and aristocratic. A youth who aspired to knighthood took a position of page in the castle of a baron. “Here were inculcated the first lessons of fidelity to God and the fair sex,” the latter often in the person of the baron’s daughter, whom he was allowed to adore under her father’s vigilant eye (IV.v.4). “Excited by love to valor, the page practiced the manly exercises which opened for him the way to honor”: hunting, falconry, horsemanship, maneuvers in full armor (IV.v.4). After completing his service, he became an esquire, with “religion always presid[ing] over these changes” (IV.v.4). He attended the knight’s table in times of peace, his weapons in times of war; finally, he was himself “admitted to the honors of knighthood” (IV.v.4). “The disinterestedness of the knights—the elevation of soul which acquired for some of them the glorious title of irreproachable—shall crown the delineations of the Christian virtues” (IV.v.4).

Chateaubriand concludes The Genius of Christianity with an account of the services Christian clergy and Christianity itself have rendered to mankind. Given Christianity’s “many admirable institutions” and “inconceivable sacrifices,” he “firmly believe[s] that this merit alone of the Christian religion would be sufficient to atone for all the sins of mankind” (IV.vi.1)—a decidedly heterodox, not to say heretical claim according to Christianity itself, as Chateaubriand likely understands, but one that may blunt the ire of anti-religionists. Thinking of them, he immediately exclaims, “Heavenly religion, that compels us to love those wretched beings by whom it is calumniated!” (IV.vi.1).

Christendom is “a vast republic,” marbled throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa (IV.vi.1). Hundreds of millions of souls have been touched by it, practicing the virtues Christianity commends for eighteen hundred years. Its leading institutions, apart from the Church offices themselves, are hospitals and schools; it has promoted the fine arts and sciences, agriculture, the rule of law, artisanship, manufacturing, and commerce. Contra Machiavelli, it has improved politics and government while fostering international understanding.

Its hospitals embody the “exclusively Christian virtue,” charity, a virtue “unknown to the ancients” (IV.vi.2). [2] “The primitive believers, instructed in this great virtue, formed a general fund for the relief of the poor, the sick, and the traveler”; “this was the commencement of hospitals” (IV.vi.2). The ancients dealt with the poor and the sick with “two methods”: infanticide and slavery (IV.vi.2). But there is “no wretchedness beyond the sphere of [Christian] love” (IV.vi.2).

After alleviating human suffering, the next benefit of Christianity is enlightenment—a term which Chateaubriand readily contests with the philosophes. “Christians were not afraid of the light, since they opened to us the sources of it,” preserving “those precious stores which they had collected at the hazard of their lives among the ruins of Greece and Rome” (IV.vi.5). Further, “all the European universities were founded either by religious princes, or by bishops or priests, and they were all under the direction of different Christian orders,” making France preeminently “a Christian Athens” (IV.vi.5). “After a revolution which has relaxed the ties of morality and interrupted the course of studies, a society at once religious and literary would apply an infallible remedy to the source of our calamities” (IV.vi.5). The Benedictines and Jesuits were “profound scholars,” and the Jesuits ordered their society with particular care for education. After training a candidate for ten years in order “to ascertain the bent of his genius,” then assigning him to hospital service and a pilgrimage “to accustom him to the sight of human afflictions, and to prepare him for the fatigues of the missions,” he was assigned an appropriate task (IV.vi.5). Those whose “qualities…are calculated to shine in society” were placed in a capital city, introduced at court and among the great” (IV.vi.5). But those with a “genius adapted to solitude” were employed in a library; those with “a luminous understanding, a correct judgment, and a patient disposition” became college professors, while those who “displayed talents for governing men” would be sent to rule in Paraguay (IV.vi.5). When the Jesuits were suppressed in Europe, a half-century before Chateaubriand wrote, “learning sustained an irreparable loss” and education “never perfectly recovered” (IV.vi.5).

Respecting the fine arts and sciences, the Church not only educated youth and conducted research into antiquities, it rewarded scholars and scientists, taking “the lead in the general solicitude for the promotion of knowledge” (IV.vi.6). “Those who represent Christianity as checking the advancement of learning manifestly contradict all historical evidences,” as “in every country, civilization has invariably followed the introduction of the gospel”—unlike “the religions of Mohammed, Brama, and Confucius, which have limited the progress of society and forced man to grow old while yet in his infancy” (IV.vi.6). Indeed, “most of the discoveries which have changed the system of the civilized world were made by members of the Church”: gunpowder, the telescope, bombshells, the mariner’s compass, and clockwork (IV.vi.6).

Christian clergy introduced a more general practice of agriculture to our barbaric European ancestors. “Almost all the grants made to the monasteries in the early ages of the Church consisted of wastes which the monks brought into cultivation with their own hands” (IV.vi.7). Their example “undermined those barbarous prejudices” of warrior societies “which looked with contempt upon the art of agriculture” (IV.vi.7). “The peasant learned in the convent to turn up the glebe and to fertilize the soil. The baron began to seek in his fields treasures less precarious than what he procured by arms” (IV.vi.7).

Barbarian Europe was lawless, and therefore without secure modes of travel. Without roads or inns, “her woods…infested by robbers and assassins,” Europe found in “religion alone, like a massive column rising from the midst of Gothic ruins,” “shelter and a point of communication to mankind” (IV.vi.8). Monks formed companies of bridge-builders, post-houses and roads. With the development infrastructure, pilgrimages became possible, drawing “all ranks of people from their homes” in a movement that “powerfully contributed to the progress of civilization and letters” (IV.vi.8). “There was not a pilgrim that returned to his native village but left behind him some prejudice and brought back some new idea” (IV.vi.8). Even the wars of the crusades extracted the well-rooted peasant from his land. “If we could recall to life one of those ancient vassals whom we are accustomed to represent to ourselves as stupid slaves, we should, perhaps, be surprised to find him possessed of more intelligence and information than the free rustic of the present day” (IV.vi.8).

Contra Machiavelli and his philosophe followers, “nothing is more at variance with historical truth than to represent the first monks as indolent people who lived in affluence at the expense of human superstition” (IV.vi.9). While the religious order might acquire wealth, “the lives of the monks individually was one of great self-denial” (IV.vi.6). They were fully engaged in the mechanical arts, manufacturing, and commerce—far from the “pious sluggards” of Enlightenment satire (IV.vi.9). 

The Church also promoted civil and criminal law. It made sense to rulers to employ priests as mediators in disputes, as “they were a kind of natural justices of the peace,” so much so “that the religious spirit operated at a thousand points and in a thousand ways upon the law” (IV.vi.10). The priests’ “spirit of mildness and impartiality” regarding “things which did not regard their order or themselves individually” made them well-disposed for all matters in what “is termed administration,” inasmuch as the Church’s own legislation, the canon law, derived from “moral principles in preference to political considerations” (IV.vi.10). Charity, forgiveness, and the practice of sanctuary all lent to priestly mediators a sense of equity that moderated the rigor of law. The Dominicans, for example, denounced “the cruelties of the Spaniards in the New World” (IV.vi.10). “As our civil code was framed in a barbarous age, and the priest was then the only individual who possessed any learning, he could not fail to exert a happy influence upon the laws and impart a knowledge which was wanting to those around him,” taking from the canon law such principles as the refusal to condemn a person in absentia, who has no lawful means of defending himself, barring accusers and judges from bearing witness against a defendant, barring “great criminals” from being accusers, and requiring more than one witness in a criminal case (IV.vi.10).

Finally, Christianity has decisively improved political life. As Cicero understood, and many Enlighteners did not, “the destruction of piety towards the gods” destroys good faith among men and thereby destroys civil society and justice (IV.vi.11). “Let us not deem it a crime in our ancestors to have thought like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch, and to have placed the altar and its ministers in the highest position of social life” (IV.vi.11). Critics of Christianity charge that it has injured liberty and the public good. Chateaubriand denies this, recurring to “general principles” in his rebuttal (IV.vi.11). “Nature,” he begins, generates new things by blending “strength with mildness,” an example of “the general law of contrasts” (IV.vi.11). To employ violence or weakness alone would cause destruction “by excess or by defect” (IV.vi.11). In political life, this would result in either a “bold, impetuous, and inconstant” people or a “weak and timorous one”; in legislating for either kind, a founder must frame a regime that corrects their way of life, giving a “mild, moderate, invariable” regime to the one and an “energetic and vigorous” regime to the other (IV.vi.11). So, for example, theocracy ill-suited the peace-loving Egyptians, who needed military discipline, whereas Numa rightly instituted a civil religion in Rome, “a nation of soldiers”; “he who has no fear of men ought to fear the gods” (IV.vi.11). As a result, Egypt froze in place, by Chateaubriand’s time a prey to Napoleon, whereas Rome, the “queen of the world, owed her greatness” to Numa’s laws (IV.vi.11).

The French are more like the Romans than the Egyptians. “They need no excitement, but restraint. People talk of the danger of theocracy; but in what warlike nation did a priest ever lead men into slavery?” (IV.vi.6). In France, “Christianity was like those religious instruments which the Spartans used in time of battle, and which were intended not so much to animate the soldier as to moderate his ardor” (IV.vi.11). Aristotle recommends the encouragement of a middle class, which can act as a balance-wheel between the few who are rich and the many who are poor. In France, “the clergy acted the admirable part of moderators,” as they “alone possessed information and experience when haughty barons and ignorant commoners knew nothing but factions and absolute obedience” (IV.vi.11). The Church’s “superior knowledge, her conciliatory spirit, her mission of peace, the very nature of her interests, could not fail to inspire her with generous ideas in politics, which were not to be found in the two other orders”; moreover, having “everything to fear from the nobility and nothing from the commons,” she “became the natural protector” of the people, “alternately plead[ing] the cause of the people against the great, and of the sovereign against his factious nobility” (IV.vi.11). When “men unworthy of the name of Christians slaughtered the people of the New World,” the Church condemned “these atrocities,” and although “slavery was authorized by law…the Church acknowledged no slaves among her children” (IV.vi.11). 

Some of the better modern political institutions owe their origin to the Church. The tripartite English regime, with its houses of Lords and of Commons and its monarch, derives not from Germany, as Montesquieu claims, but from the Church; unlike the absolute monarchy of Spain and the “temperate monarchy” of France, England has enjoyed a “mixed monarchy”—really a mixed regime, not unlike that praised by Aristotle, whose political principles were studied by Christian scholars in the ancient manuscripts they saved (IV.vi.11). What Christians first, then moderns generally added was the system of representation, “wholly unknown to the ancients” and first seen in the Church councils, where the supreme pontiff and the prelates were joined by deputies of the lesser clergy (IV.vi.11). 

Most important, Christianity puts all of these civil laws and political institutions under “the spirit of the gospel,” a spirit “eminently favorable to liberty” and to “moral equality” under God—the “only kind of equality that it is possible to preach without convulsing the world” (IV.vi.11). “Christianity is peculiarly admirable for having transformed the physical man into the moral man,” having taken the ancient principles of liberty and equality and applying them “to the mind and consider[ing] [them] with reference to the most sublime objects” (IV.vi.11). As a result, modern nations feature “an internal tranquility” unknown in the ancient regimes, with their “continual slaughter of gladiators” (IV.vi.11). “The meanest of Christians, if a virtuous man, is ore moral than was the most eminent of the philosophers of antiquity” (IV.vi.11), his religion having provided, through the Gospel, the formation of “the genuine Philosopher,” and its precepts “the genuine citizen” (IV.vi.11).

“What would the present state of society be if Christianity had not appeared in the world?” (IV.i.13). The succession of Roman emperors from Augustus to Nero and Claudius gives a fair indication. “A Roman, on quitting the arms of a strumpet, went to enjoy the spectacle of a wild beast quaffing human blood” (IV.vi.13). Little wonder that the barbarians overran the Empire. “What would have become of the world if the great ark of Christianity had not saved the remnant of the human race from this new deluge?” (IV.vi.13). The priests were “the only class amid the conquered nations whom the barbarians respected,” and rightly so (IV.vi.13). Were it not for Christianity, it is “highly probable that…the wreck of society and of learning would have been complete” (IV.vi.13). Philosophy could not have done this, as it “served but to propagate a species of impiety, which, without leading to a destruction of the idols, produced the crimes and calamities of atheism among the great, while it left to the vulgar those of superstition” (IV.vi.13). 

“Religion alone can renew the original energy of a nation” (VI.iv.13). The “initial excess of Christian austerity” was “necessary” to counter “the grossest violations of morality” by “the monsters of barbarity” in the latter decades of Rome (IV.vi.13). Jesus Christ saved the world—spiritually, as the Bible teaches, but even physically, as Enlighteners ought to acknowledge. Christianity is “so truly the religion of philosophers that Plato may be said to have almost anticipated it” (IV.vi.13). And in political life, “the time may perhaps come when the mere form of government, excepting despotism, will be a matter of indifference among men, who will attach themselves more particularly to those simple, moral, and religious laws which constitute the permanent basis of society and of all good government” (IV.vi.13). It is “the doctrine of the gospel” that stands as “the doctrine of a free people” because it combines morality with religion” (IV.vi.13). Let philosophy, then, “with a more enlightened zeal” than that displayed by the Enlighteners, “and with a spirit more worthy of her name, remove those barriers which she proposed to place between man and his Creator” (IV.vi.13). Accordingly, Chateaubriand ends his book with a logical syllogism: “Christianity is perfect; men are imperfect. Now, a perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect principle. Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men. If Christianity is not the work of men, it can have come from none but God. If it came from God, men cannot have acquired a knowledge of it but by revelation. Therefore, Christianity is a revealed religion.” (IV.vi.13).

 

Notes

1. Such arguments did not meet the unanimous approval of Roman Catholic writers between the era of the early Church Fathers and Chateaubriand’s time. Here is Marsilius of Padua: “Let us sum up regarding the activities of nearly all priests or bishops and other ministers of the temple and testify before Christ, invoking his judgment if we lie, that in recent times nearly all the said bishops and others practice almost the exact opposite of what they preach that everyone else should observe according to the gospel. For they smolder for pleasure, vanities, temporal goods and secular principate, and pursue and seize them not by right but by injustice, both secret and open. Whereas Christ and the apostles his true imitator rejected all such things and taught and commanded others to despise them, especially those who must preach the gospel of contempt for this world to others” (Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace, II.xi.6. Annabel Brett translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2. Chateaubriand believes that charity or agapic love “originated in Jesus Christ,” a claim that overlooks its presence throughout the Old Testament (IV.vi.2).

 

 

François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity. Part the Third: The Fine Arts and Literature. 

 

Chateaubriand begins his discussion of Christianity’s effects on the liberal arts with the fine arts—music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. It would be hard to deny that a strong case can be made for the merits of Christian achievement in that realm.

He endorses Plato’s denial that the criterion for judging music is ‘subjective,’ a matter of the hearer’s pleasure. “Pleasure is a matter of opinion which varies according to times, manners, and nations, and which cannot be the beautiful, since the beautiful has an absolute existence” (III.i.1). Since “every institution that tends to purify the soul, to banish from it trouble and discord, and to promote the growth of virtue, is by this very quality favorable to the best music, or to the most perfect imitation of the beautiful,” and if the institution in question is moreover a religious institution, adding a certain mystery to beauty, then Christianity will likely produce very fine music, indeed (III.i.1). “Song is the daughter of prayer, and prayer is the companion of religion” (III.i.1). “In Jesus Christ, [religion] has found humility combined with greatness,” expressing the sorrows and delights of the souls of “the mighty and the weak” alike (III.i.1). And the Christian “delights in solitude,” in composing the songs of a person alone with nature, celebrating nature and its Creator (III.i.1). “Thus the musician who would follow religion in all her relations is obliged to learn the art of imitating the harmonies of solitude. He ought to be acquainted with the melancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to study the sound of the winds in the cloister and those murmurs that pervade the Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery and the vaults of death” (III.i.1). 

It was Christian music that preserved Christianity itself “in the barbarous ages,” and it has been Christian music that “has civilized the savage only by means of hymns,” as seen in the Iroquois “who would not submit” to Christian teaching but “was overcome by her concerts,” the concerts of “the religion of peace” (III.i.1). The Te Deum tamed the hearts of European warriors—savages, as it were, of civilization—when, after the climactic battles of the Thirty Years’ War and the War of the Austrian Succession, “a French army, scathed with the thunderbolts of war, bowed the knee to the flourishes of clarions and trumpets, and joined in a hymn of praise to the God of battles,” each soul “transported,” every soul “experienc[ing] some portion of that rapture which inspired Pindar in the groves of Olympia or David on the banks of the Cedron” (III.1.2). 

As for the plastic arts, “the first statue which the world beheld was that noble figure of clay animated by the breath of the Creator”; painters and sculptors alike find in Christianity a “beautiful ideal more perfect and more divine than that which arises from a material worship,” one that, in “correcting the deformity of the passions, or powerfully counteracting them…gives a more sublime expression to the human countenance, and more clearly displays the soul in the muscles and conformation of the body” than anything produced by the ancient Greeks and Romans (III.i.3)—as seen, for example, in Michelangelo’s Moses. With respect to subjects, Christian painters can continue to select images from classical mythology; at the same time, they can avail themselves of Christian themes. “The New Testament changes the genius of painting. Without taking away any of its sublimity, it imparts to it a higher degree of tenderness” than the painters of antiquity could express, “holding forth virtue and misfortune to our view” with “the most impressive harmonies,” seen in paintings depicting such themes as the Madonna and Child and the Crucifixion (III.i.4).

Christian architecture has been no less impressive. “Neither so small as the temples of Athens nor so gigantic as those of Memphis,” with its churches Christianity “has reestablished the genuine proportions,” that “due medium in which beauty and taste eminently reside” (III.i.6). And of course the invention of the dome, “unknown to the ancients,” combines “the simplicity and grace” of Greek architecture with “the boldness of the Gothic” (III.i.6). 

“All the splendors of the religious age of France” came together at Versailles (III.i.7). Chateaubriand doubts that the men animated by Enlightenment rationalism—or indeed rationalism of any kind—could have produced the palace there. “Painting, architecture, poetry, and the higher species of eloquence, have invariably degenerated in philosophic ages; because a reasoning spirit, by destroying the imagination, undermines the foundation of the fine arts” (III.i.7). Far from preening itself on claims of progress, that spirit should stop to consider if we are not “losing one of the finest faculties of the mind,” if we are not “going backward” (III.i.7). In Chateaubriand’s post-revolutionary time, the Versailles palace lay in partial ruin, but what remained testified to the greatness of Louis XIV, who “conferred luster on religion, on the arts, and on the army” (III.i.7).

From a critique of reason’s effect on the fine arts, Chateaubriand moves to a consideration of reason rightly understood, and therefore rightly limited—of philosophy understood broadly, including “every species of science” (III.ii.1). “In defending religion, we by no means attack wisdom,” the thing philosophers love (III.ii.1). On the contrary, “genuine philosophy is the innocence of the old age of nations, when they have ceased to possess virtues by instinct, and owe such as they have to reason” (III.ii.1). Christianity rather “enlarges the understanding and tends to expand the feelings” of the philosopher without inhibiting inquiry into nature; after all, “it is not of the elements of his body, but of the virtues of his soul, that the Supreme Judge will one day require an account” (III.ii.1).

“Among the ancients, a philosopher was continually meeting with some divinity in his way; he was doomed by the priests of Jupiter or Apollo, under pain of death or exile, to be absurd all his life” (III.ii.1). In the year 591, for example, the Roman senate “issued a decree banning all philosophers from the city,” and a few years later Cato procured the exile of Carneades, lest (he said) “the Roman youth, acquiring a taste for the subtleties of the Greeks, should lose the simplicity of ancient manners” (III.ii.1). Chateaubriand admits that the Roman Catholic Church has also inveighed against “this or that philosophical discovery”—very notably, with its condemnation of Copernicus—but, “on the other hand, how many ordinances of the court of Rome in favor of these same discoveries might we not enumerate!” (III.ii.1). In any event, the Church soon reversed itself, permitting the Copernican theory to be taught as an hypothesis. Moreover, some of these discouragements have been wise, since “in vain do men perplex their understandings” with “abstract studies” of matters about which “the truth will ever remain unknown” (III.ii.1). 

It isn’t so much science as the superficial acquaintance with science that Chateaubriand opposes. He cites Francis Bacon’s exoteric teaching, “that a slight tincture of philosophy may lead to a disbelief of a first cause, but that more profound knowledge conducts man to God” (III.ii.1). With Bacon, Chateaubriand concerns himself with the moral effect of a little knowledge. “The rock upon which the multitude will invariably strike is pride; you will never be able to persuade them that they know nothing at the moment when they imagine themselves in possession of all the stores of science” (III.ii.1). But this is exactly what the democratization of scientific knowledge under the auspices of ‘Enlightenment’ does. Because “great minds alone can form a conception of that last point of human knowledge,” “almost all wise men have considered philosophical studies as fraught with extreme danger for the multitude”; Locke (for example) shows in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he demonstrates “the limits of our knowledge, which are at so small a distance from us as to be really alarming” (III.ii.1).

Indeed, great minds themselves have their limitations. Precisely because of their extreme precision, “mathematical geniuses…are often wrong in the ordinary affairs of life,” discovering “absolute truths” but stumbling in “morals and in politics,” domains in which “all truths are relative” to circumstances, as Aristotle teaches (III.ii.1). (“It is not equally clear that a good law at Athens is a good law at Paris. It is a fact that liberty is an excellent thing; but ought we, for this reason, to shed torrents of blood to establish it among a people, how unfit soever that people may be to enjoy the blessing?” [III.ii.1].) Mathematical truths are simple, abstracted from direct real-world consequences; moral truths complex and highly ‘consequential.’ Whereas “nothing deranges the compass of the mathematician, every thing deranges the heart of the philosopher” (III.ii.1). Therefore, “he who would introduce mathematical strictness into the social relations must be either the most stupid or the most wicked of men” (III.ii.1). 

This has profound effects on education. Moral habituation and teaching ought to come first, for “to pretend to arrange the understanding of a boy”—his intellectual furniture, as a Lockean might put it—would “amount to the same thing as to pretend to set in order an empty room” (III.ii.1). “First give him clear notions of his moral and religious duties; store his mind with knowledge, human and divine; and when you have bestowed the necessary attention to the education of his heart, when his mind is sufficiently furnished with objects of comparison and sound principles, then place them in order, if you please, by means of geometry” (III.ii.1). Utility, you say, must be served? Very well, then: “One eloquent page of Bossuet on morals is more useful and more difficult to be written than a volume of philosophical abstractions” (III.ii.1). “Let mathematicians then cease to complain, if nations, by one general instinct, give to letters the precedence over the sciences; because the man who has bequeathed to the world one single moral precept renders a greater service to society than the mathematicians who discovered the beautiful properties of the triangle” (III.ii.1). The greatest mathematicians have seen this. Pascal, Leibniz, Descartes, and Newton, “all the inventive mathematical geniuses” of the modern world, “have been religious” (III.ii.1). Unfortunately, “it is natural that ordinary minds, or young and unthinking persons, on meeting with mathematical truths throughout the whole universe…should take them for the principles of things, and not see any object beyond them” (III.ii.1). As a result, “God becomes for them nothing more than the properties of bodies, and the very chain of numbers conceals from their view the grand unity of being” (III.ii.1). [1]

Chateaubriand emphasizes the limitations of empirical science, as well. He has no objection to scientific experimentation: “To reproach chemists with undeceiving themselves by their experiments, would be finding fault with their honesty and accusing them of being unacquainted with the essence of things” (III.ii.2). Scientists do know how to decompose and recompose matter. What they don’t know is how to create it, and “it is this inability to create that always discovers the weak side and the insignificance of man” and even of matter itself, inasmuch as “the united powers of matter are to one single word of God as nothing is to every thing, as created things are to necessity” (III.ii.2). Science is one thing, hubristic science unconstrained by respect for God another. “Behold man in the midst of his labors; what a terrible collection of machines! He whets the steel, he distills the poison, he summons the elements to his aid; he causes the water to roar, the air to hiss, his furnaces are kindled. Armed with fire, what is this new Prometheus about to attempt? Is he going to create a world? No. The end of his work is destruction; all that he can bring forth is death!” (III.ii.2). 

Part of the problem is not so much science as socially and politically organized science. “When science was poor and solitary,” when scientists could only observe nature and write books that set forth remedies for diseases, remedies often supplemented by “sacred hymns, whose words in like manner relieved the sorrows of the soul,” science could do little harm—even if, one might add, it could do little good (III.ii.2). “But when societies of learned men were formed—when philosophers, seeking reputation and not nature, attempted to treat of the works of God without ever having felt a love for them—infidelity sprang up, together with vanity, and science was reduced to the petty instrument of a petty renown” (III.ii.2). This has happened because “abstract studies”—mathematics and empirical science—have been separated “rather too much from literary studies” (III.ii.2). “The one belongs to the understanding, the others to the heart; we should, therefore, beware of cultivating the former to the exclusion of the latter, and of sacrificing the part which loves to the part which reasons. It is by the happy combination of natural and moral science, and above all by the inculcation of religious ideas, that we”—we French, first of all—shall overcome the excesses of the Enlightenment projects and “succeed in again giving to our youth that education which of old produced so many great men” (III.ii.2). 

But can Christianity and philosophy co-exist? Chateaubriand maintains that they can. “A religion which can claim a Bacon, a Newton, a Boyle, a Clarke, a Leibniz, a Grotius, a Pascal, an Arnaud, a Nicole, a Malebranche, a La Bruyère (to say nothing of the fathers of the Church, or of Bossuet, Fénelon, Massillon, and Bourdaloue, whom we shall here consider only as orators), such a religion may boast of being favorable to philosophy” (III.ii.3). This is true of political philosophers, as well. Chateaubriand here cites More—unquestionably a Christian—Locke—who was at pains to appear a Christian—and, quite implausibly, Machiavelli as numbering among the “Christian philosophers” (III.ii.3). Be that as it may, he observes that although recently the French have “made an extraordinary parade of our political knowledge,” acting as if “before our time the modern world had never heard of liberty or of the different social constitutions,” the results have been decidedly unimpressive (III.ii.4). Indeed, Xenophon and Plato wrote on politics with a gracefulness that bespoke their moral bearings, while “our latest philosophers” have divorced politics from morality and religion (III.ii.4). This brings Chateaubriand to his discussion of Christian philosophic moralists, beginning with La Bruyère.

Although inferior to his model, Pascal, Jean de la Bruyère surpassed the moralists of the current time. “Irony is his favorite weapon,” which he uses to cut down human pretensions, not to undermine religion, especially in the satiric portraits of his seventeenth-century contemporaries included in his most famous (and then-controversial) work, Caractères  (III.ii.5). “We want a La Bruyère,” since “the Revolution has produced a total change in characters,” making “avarice, ignorance, selfishness appear in a thousand new lights” (III.ii.5)—new material for a new satirist. In the age of Louis XIV, the vices of the eminences La Bruyère targeted “were compounded with religion and politeness,” but “now they are mixed up with impiety and coarseness of manners” (III.ii.5). “At that period they might have been ridiculous; but it is certain that now they are detestable” (III.ii.5); the next La Bruyère would need to sharpen his claws.

As for Pascal himself, Chateaubriand deploys him in a thought experiment based on one of Voltaire’s mots. Voltaire called Pascal “a sublime madman, born a century too early” (III.ii.6). Voltaire is thinking that Pascal would have been much better had he been enlightened, liberated from Christianity. Chateaubriand counters: “One single observation will suffice to show how inferior Pascal the sophist would have been to Pascal the Christian” (III.ii.6). Voltaire speaks for the Enlighteners generally, who assume that “those who have embraced the philosophic opinions” of themselves either denigrate the Christian thinkers of the seventeenth century altogether or, like Voltaire, “allow that age the faculties of imagination, but deny it those of reason,” while congratulating their own eighteenth century as “preeminently the thinking age” (III.ii.6). But if one actually troubles oneself to read Pascal, Leibniz, Bossuet, one “will find that nothing escaped their sight; but that, contemplating objects from a higher standpoint than we do, they disdained the routes which we pursue, and at the end of which their piercing eyes discovered a fatal abyss” (III.ii.6). As Bossuet thundered, atheists cannot even prove the doctrine of “annihilation for which they hope after this life, and which, miserable lot as it is, they are not sure of enjoying” (III.ii.6). 

“What relations, moral, political, or religious, escaped the observation of Pascal?” (III.ii.6). His famous remark, “Man is but a thinking reed,” should satisfy the pessimism of the most confirmed atheist. Eighteenth-century writers who have expatiated on “the power of opinion” in human affairs only follow Pascal, who commented, with irony, that “truth on this side of the Pyrenees may be error on the other” (IIIii.6). (“Montesquieu himself…has often done no more than develop the principles of the Bishop of Meaux” [III.ii.6]). Rousseau, who, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, points to the establishment of private property as the beginning of civil society outside the state of nature rephrases Pascal, who denounced the first assertions of ownership as “the commencement and the image of the usurpation of the whole earth” (III.ii.6).  “What,” Chateaubriand asks, “would have become of that great man had he not been a Christian,” lacking “that curb of religion, which, without restraining our comprehensive views, holds us back from the brink of the precipice”? (III.ii.6). That is, “all the insults which by means of philosophy we have heaped upon human nature”—all the ‘critiques,’ as later generations would say—have been “in a greater or lesser degree derived from the works of Pascal” (III.ii.6). But while taking Pascal’s insights into “the miseries of man” as our own, “we have not known, like him, how to discover the greatness of man” (III.ii.6). As a Christian, Pascal overlooked no aspect of human sin, human degradation. As a Christian, however, he also affirmed that human beings were made not only of clay.

More generally, “We might fill volumes were we to select all the passages favorable to liberty and the love of country which occur to the authors of the seventeenth century” (III.ii.6). The difference between those reformers and ours was that they enacted their reforms “when the advantages of the reform appeared to counterbalance its inconveniences” (III.ii.6). That is, the reformers of the age of Louis XIV exercised prudence, unlike the French revolutionaries, men whose patriotism veered into a too-passionate nationalism. Their Christianity and the practical reason alike gave them a sense of when to stop. “Our superiority” to those earlier reformers “is reduced to some little progress in the natural sciences—a progress resulting from that of time, and by no means compensating for the loss of the imagination which is the consequence of it,” the decline of the arts resulting from the dominance of science (III.ii.6). “It is only with the former” that the human mind, “the same in all ages,” possesses “all its poetic grandeur and moral beauty” (III.ii.6). Imagination untethered by religious constraints and prudence leads to utopian dreams when, if transferred to practice, are written in blood. Imagination guided by Christianity can empower prudential reasoning, which will select from human imaginings the ones that might work well, reject those that may well end badly. Modern scientific experimentalism cannot substitute for prudence in human affairs because the human beings upon which ‘political scientists’ would experiment upon are neither reagents in a test tube nor rats in a maze. If you reject the Christian sense of the integrity, the grandeur, of human nature, you may overlook that. Many have.

In Chateaubriand’s lifetime, philosophers would begin to redefine ‘history’ to mean not simply the narration of the course of events but the course of events itself—a sequence, moreover, that was leading humanity onwards and upwards in a sort of secularist version of divine providence. Chateaubriand takes “the genius of history”—by which he means history in the older sense, historiography—to be “a branch of moral and political philosophy,” an account of “the designs of kings, the vices of cities, the unjust and crooked measures of civil policy, the restlessness of the heart from the secret working of the passions, those long agitations with which nations are at times seized, those changes of power from the king to the subject, from the noble to the plebeian, from the rich to the poor” (III.iii.1)—the story of things that change while remaining fundamentally the same. That is, “the groundwork of the history of time” is eternity, “every thing being referred to God as the universal cause” (III.iii.1). That foundation for history remains “far more noble and far more solid than the other” (III.iii.1). 

The French Revolution illustrated this. “The spirit of God having withdrawn from the people, no force was left except that of original sin, which resumed its empire as in the days of Cain and his race,” waving “the bloody flag over the ramparts of every city” and declaring war “against all nations” (III.iii.1). While “streams of blood flowed in all quarters of France” and atheist “fanaticism swept away all the old institutions,” profaning “the tombs of our ancestors and the rising generation” alike, “a spirit of salvation was protecting” France “against external injury” (III.iii.1). “She had neither prudence nor greatness except on her frontiers; within all was devastation, without all was triumph” (III.iii.1). Chateaubriand can see “no natural principle” in such good fortune; “the religious writer alone can here discover the profound counsels” of God (III.iii.1). “Thus religion seems to lead to the explanation of the most incomprehensible facts of history” (III.iii.1). 

The inferiority of most modern historians to the ancients has two causes: the character of modern nations and the character of modern historians. Even non-Christian religiosity elevates civilizations beyond the human, all-too-human. “The Greeks were particularly remarkable for the greatness of men—the Romans for the greatness of things”; both “traversed the entire scale of the virtues and the vices, of ignorance and the arts” (III.iii.2). Modern nations, however, “do not furnish the historian with that combination of things, that sublimity of lessons, which make ancient history a complete whole and a finished picture” because modern nations are indeed rather as modern political philosophers said all nations are: peoples “suddenly transported from the recesses of the forests and the savage state into the midst of cities and civilization,” having passed through neither “that state in which good manners make the laws, [nor] that in which good laws make the manners” (III.iii.2). Conquered by the Romans, they never experienced the Homeric crucible of heroes and bards or the political foundings effected by some native Romulus, let alone a Moses. The modern nations “established themselves on the ruins of the ancient world”; it was Christianity that enabled the arts and sciences to recover in the “silence and obscurity” of the monasteries, well away from the political chaos surrounding them (III.iii.2). “Christianity is the sheet-anchor which has fixed so many floating nations and kept them in port; but their ruin is almost certain if they come to break the common chain by which religion holds them together” (III.iii.2). And in this there is hope, because “the moral man among us—with his “humanity, modesty, [and] charity”—is “far superior to the moral man of the ancients,” even if he lacks “the doubtful political virtues” of the ancient nations (III.iii.2). “Our reason is not perverted by an abominable religion,” and “we have no neither gladiators nor slaves” (III.iii.2). If our historians have little of the greatness of Greece and Rome to chronicle “let us not envy the Romans their Tacitus if it be necessary to purchase him with a Tiberius!” (III.iii.2) 

The ancient historians themselves excelled the moderns. Herodotus was the poet of history, Xenophon “the father of moral history,” Thucydides of political history; among the Romans, Livy was “the orator of history,” Tacitus the father of “philosophical history” (III.iii.3). Of these, the philosophic school alone worries Chateaubriand. Tacitus, along with his modern followers Machiavelli and Montesquieu, “have formed a dangerous school, by introducing those ambitious expressions, those dry phrases, those abrupt turns”—in a word, dialectical subtleties—which, “under the appearance of brevity, border on obscurity and bad taste” (III.iii.3).

Generally, the French moderns write better memoirs than narratives. “The Frenchman, in all ages, even while yet a barbarian, was vain, thoughtless, and sociable” (III.iii.4). An “inquisitive observer of details” who “must always be on the stage himself,” memoirs “leave him at full liberty to follow the bent of his genius,” telling us how he advised the prince (III.iii.4). “In this manner his vanity gratifies itself” and indeed “his solicitude to gain credit for ingenious ideas often leads him to think well” (III.iii.4). The problems arise when he attempts to see the big picture, the sweep of events. “Compelled in this case to generalize our observations, we fall into the spirit of system,” readymade thought that spares one the need to think for oneself (III.iii.4). The private lives of French literati, with their restless passions “and their days miserably devoted to the gratification of vanity,” leave them little time to cultivate “the tranquility of mind” necessary to cultivate habits of serious, independent thought (III.iii.4). “Romans in genius,” with their admiration for the grandeur of things, they are “Greeks in character”—tossed, “like ships without ballast, by the vehemence of all the passions, one moment in the skies, the next in the abyss” (III.iii.4). Only “the spirit of Christianity” can settle them down to solid work (III.iii.4). “We have no doubt that Voltaire, had he been religious, would have excelled at history”; Philip de Commines, a modern Plutarch, Charles Rollin, “the Fénelon of history,” and Bossuet (“who has formed a juster estimate of human things?”) share “the spirit of Christianity,” which enables them to see both the grandeur and the misery of human events and of the characters of those men and women who come to light in their course (III.iii.4).

The name of Bossuet brings to mind the art of rhetoric. “Here is one of the profoundest triumphs of our religion” (III.iv.1). The ancients knew only judicial and political eloquence; it is to the Christian gospels that the world owes moral eloquence. “Cicero defends a client; Demosthenes combats an adversary, or endeavors to rekindle the love of country in a degenerate people; both only know how to rouse the passions” (III.iv.1). But Christian eloquence aims higher; “by opposing the movements of the soul” instead of inflaming them, “by appeasing all the passions, she makes them listen to her voice” (III.iv.1). This gives Christian eloquence an “evangelical sadness,” that “majestic melancholy,” unique to it, a meditative character entirely lacking in the speeches of the ancients (III.iv.1). “The Christian religion has alone founded that great school of the grave where the apostle of the gospel imbibes instruction,” understanding that “real existence begins not until death,” and therefore refusing “to squander the immortal intellect of man on things of a moment” (III.iv.1). Compare the Christian orators of France or of any country at any time with the speakers at the French Convention, and you will see that the revolutionaries “displayed only mutilated talents, and scraps, as it were of eloquence, because they attacked the faith of their forefathers, and thus cut themselves off from all the inspirations of the heart” (III.iv.1). The revolutionary orators could take a seemingly great theme and make it small; Bossuet, in his oration on the Duchess of Orléans, could take the “slender foundation” of a funeral oration for a princess and build “one of the most solid and splendid monuments of his eloquence,” setting out “to display the misery of man by his perishable part, and his greatness by the immortal parts of his being” (III.iv.4).

In the age called enlightened, “one would scarcely believe to what a degree good morals depend on good taste, and good taste on good morals” (III.iv.5), as seen in the improvement of Racine’s taste as he became “more religious,” and as “the impiety and the genius of Voltaire discover themselves at one and the same time in his productions by a mixture of delightful and disagreeable subjects” (III.iv.5). The mind and the heart influence one another mutually; “he who is insensible to beauty [is] also blind to virtue” (III.iv.5). The atheist writer “excludes infinity from his works,” “confin[ing] his intellect within a circle of clay,” finding “nothing noble in nature,” only cycles of corruption and regeneration (III.iv.5). He finds in man nothing more than a future corpse, his country’s traditions barren of wisdom or any other merit. Pace, Machiavelli, but “religion is the most powerful motive of the love of country”; “with what respect, in what magnificent terms, do the writers of the age of Louis XIV always mention France” (III.iv.5). By taking nature as God’s creation, the religious man opens himself to “the natural sentiments which attach us to the land of our nativity,” sentiments which in turn become “the habit of his heart” (III.iv.5). Despising the imagination and its works, modern atheists “have recourse to a contracted philosophy,” an analytic philosophy, “which goes on dividing and subdividing all things, measuring sentiments with compasses, subjecting the soul to calculation, and reducing the universe, God himself included, to a transient subtraction from nothing” (III.iv.5). “Thus, the eighteenth century is daily fading away in the perspective, while the seventeenth is gradually magnified, in proportion as we recede from it; the one grovels on the earth, the other soars to the skies” (III.iv.5).

This harmonization of God, nature, and man distinguishes Chateaubriand from the modern philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli, continuing through Bacon and (by Chateaubriand’s time) culminating in the Enlighteners, all of whom urged statesmen and scientists alike to master Fortuna, to conquer nature. On the contrary, Chateaubriand contends, if man, in becoming civilized, “advanc[ed] farther and farther from his origin, he would have become a sort of monster: but by a particular law of Providence, the more civilized he grows the nearer he approaches to his first state; and to this cause it is owing that science, carried to its highest pitch, is ignorance, and that the perfection of the arts is nature” (III.v.2). With its empirical and analytical bent, often founded on impersonal mathematic abstraction, science by itself makes man worse. This is the (as it were) founding error of modernity, which concludes that nature, little more than matter in motion, deserves nothing more than to be ruled by man, and that man himself is nothing more than a cleverer piece of the self-jostling mass. The personalism and the beauty of artistry pulls against these scientistic claims and confirm the teachings of religion, especially of Christianity. When the savages of northern Europe encountered the civilized Romans, that “depravity of taste” seen in barbarism resulted. The barbarians eventually conquered decadent Rome. This occurred because “on the one hand, the savage, applying himself to the arts, could not carry them to a degree of elegance, while the social man had not simplicity enough to follow nature alone” (III.v.2). Only the Christian “recluses,” the “desert saints” who followed “that delicate and sure religious taste which never deceives when nothing foreign is blended with it, have selected,” first in Europe but by now “in every region of the globe, the most striking situations for the erection of their monasteries,” recovering human civilization (III.v.2). Chateaubriand’s intention, then, is to retrieve European and French civilization from its re-barbarization at the hands of the Enlighteners and the revolutionaries who followed them.

And so he directs his readers’ attention to ruins, the ruins of Christian civilization toppled and burned by the revolutionaries. “All men take a secret delight in beholding ruins” (III.v.3). Their frailty reminds us of our own. They were great, but have been reduced to our own littleness. They invoke the desert landscapes where the saints hid. They even remind us of the Christian martyrs, up to and including “the mysterious sufferings of the Son of man” (III.v.5). “And ye holy hermits, who, to secure a place in happier regions, exiled yourselves to the ices of the pole, ye now enjoy the fruit of your sacrifices; and if, among angels, as among men, there are inhabited plains and desert tracts, in like manner as ye buried your virtues in the solitudes of the earth, so ye have doubtless chosen the celestial solitudes, therein to conceal your ineffable felicity!” (III.v.5). Without their belief in a world beyond this one, would those saints—would Chateaubriand—preserve the remnants of the arts of Christendom, defend them against the triumphant barbarism? It is a question that would become ever more poignant in the centuries that ensued, when scientistic barbarism and tyranny advanced, and in some respects continue to advance.

This in turn moves Chateaubriand from “the physical harmonies of religious monuments and the scenes of nature” to “the moral harmonies of Christianity” (III.v.6). He recurs to the first topic he took up among the liberal arts, music, bringing out the greater harmony music suggests. Against the jibes of Enlighteners, he begins by defending the “popular devotions” seen among Christians, ridiculed as superstitions by modern scientists, “opinions and practices of the multitude which are neither enjoined nor absolutely prohibited by the Church,” beliefs that “are, in fact, but harmonies of religion and of nature” (III.v.6). “When the common people fancy that they hear the voices of the dead in the winds when they talk of nocturnal apparitions, when they undertake pilgrimages to obtain relief from their afflictions, it is evident that these opinions are only affecting relations between certain scenes of nature, certain sacred doctrines, and the sorrows of our hearts. Hence it follows that the more of these popular devotions a religion embraces, the more poetical it must be; since poetry is founded on the emotions of the soul and the accidents of nature rendered mysterious by the intervention of religious ideas.” (III.v.6). In this, “the vulgar are wiser than philosophers,” at least modern philosophers (III.v.6). “Antiquity, wiser than we, would have forborne to destroy these useful accordances of religion, of conscience and morality” (III.v.6). Ancient philosophy, the love of wisdom, began in wonder and took care never to rid itself, or society, of it; having redefined wisdom as the knowledge afforded by modern science, Enlighteners no longer wonder. At most, they are merely curious, and in evangelizing for their science they re-barbarize humanity along with themselves. They intend to be useful, but however “philosophy may fill her pages with high-sounding words,” it will never win the devotion of the people the philosophers intend to better. “By your incessant declamations against superstition, you will at length open a door for every species of crime” (III.v.6). 

How so? As “the common man” “shakes off the influence of religion, he will supply its place with monstrous opinions”; “while affecting to despise the Divine power, he will go to consult the gypsy, and, trembling, seek his destinies in the motley figures of a card” (III.v.6). G.K. Chesterton would write that when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing; he believes in anything. Chateaubriand wrote it first. “He who believes nothing is not far from believing every thing; you have conjurors when you cease to have prophets, enchantments when you renounce religious ceremonies, and you open the dens of sorcerers when you shut up the temples of the Lord” (III.v.6). 

 

 

Note

1. It might be well to question the presence of Descartes on Chateaubriand’s list of Christian mathematical geniuses; the Cartesian ‘God’ looks suspiciously like the immanent and impersonal God of the mathematicians.