François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity, or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion. Charles I. White translation. Baltimore: John Murphy and Company, 1875.
For several generations before Chateaubriand’s lifetime, many French intellectuals and European intellectuals generally had dismissed Christianity as mere propaganda for monarchic regimes and aristocratic civil societies. The Enlightenment inclined toward republicanism, which many Enlighteners expected philosophic materialism to reinforce. But if one denies that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, one might well suppose that fear of violent death is. And one might go further, taking revolutionary terror as effective preparation for the advent of republicanism. Yet the guillotine proved a poor teacher. French republicanism foundered within France, even if the French republican armies fought off the monarchies around them. By the beginning of the new century, a new kind of monarchy had replaced the republic, and its scarcely-pious monarch, Napoleon Bonaparte, made a gesture of reconciliation with the Catholic Church. The new generation of France’s secularist clercs—monarchists and republicans alike—was ready to rethink Enlightenment impieties.
Enter Chateaubriand, author of two successful novellas on America—still an object of fascination among the French, who had come to the aid of the much more propitious American republican revolution, a generation earlier. Published in 1802 and promoted by the Emperor Napoleon, The Genius of Christianity helped (along with Goethe’s Werther) to inaugurate Romanticism, that great rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism, by defending Christianity, especially Roman Catholic Christianity, against its enemies.
Such enemies long predated the Enlightenment. “Ever since Christianity was first published in the world, it has been continually assailed by three kinds of enemies—heretics, sophists, and those apparently frivolous characters who destroy every thing with the shafts of ridicule” (I.i.1). But while “numerous apologists have given victorious answers” to Christianity’s serious-minded attackers, “they have not been so successful against derision,” against the satirists (I.i.1). And so, when the Roman emperor Julian “commenced a persecution, perhaps more dangerous than violence itself, which consisted in loading the Christians with disgrace and contempt” (I.i.1). He stripped the churches of their wealth and prohibited Christians from teaching or even studying “the liberal arts and sciences”; he replaced the institutions of the Christian regime, its hospitals and monasteries, with his own government-controlled works of charity; he even “ordered a kind of sermons to be delivered in the Pagan temples,” hitherto the sites of religious rituals, only (I.i.1). But he and his court sophists also targeted Christian doctrine. “When Julian is serious, St. Cyril proves too strong for him; but when the Emperor has recourse to irony, the Patriarch loses his advantage,” as “Julian’s style is witty and animated,” whereas “Cyril is sometimes passionate, obscure, and confused” (I.i.1). It was only in the generations after Julian’s rule that the Church recovered.
This pattern repeated itself throughout the centuries in which Christendom was challenged. The early Protestants were better literary stylists than their Catholic opponents, although “when Bossuet at length entered the lists, the victory remained not long undecided,” as “the hydra of heresy was once more overthrown” (I.i.1). Clarke and Leibniz were more than a match for Bayle and Spinoza, but in the eighteenth century “Voltaire renewed the persecution of Julian,” with his “baneful art of making infidelity fashionable among a capricious but amiable people,” wittily appealing to self-love against the love of God (I.i.1). “No sooner did a religious book appear than the author was overwhelmed with ridicule, while works which Voltaire was the first to laugh at among his friends were extolled to the skies”; “women of fashion and grave philosophers alike read lectures on infidelity” (I.i.1). “It was at length concluded that Christianity was no better than a barbarous system, and that its fall could not happen too soon for the liberty of mankind, the promotion of knowledge, the improvement of the arts, and the general comfort of life” (I.i.1). The ‘moderns’ began to find merit in the figures of Greek and Roman mythology, even as their often-unacknowledged model, Machiavelli, had held up certain examples of the ‘ancient’ statesmen and generals. Soon, the Enlighteners published their Encyclopédie, “that Babel of science and of reason” (I.i.1). “Men distinguished for their intelligence and learning endeavored to check this torrent; but their resistance was vain” against the scribblings of “the frivolous people who directed public opinion in France” (I.i.1).
Defenders of Christianity against the Enlighteners committed the same mistake that Julian’s critics had made. “They did not perceive that the question was no longer to discuss this or that particular tenet since the very foundation on which these tenets were built was rejected by their opponents” (I.i.1). They now needed “not to prove that the Christian religion is excellent because it comes from God,” the claim Enlighteners denied and ridiculed, “but that it comes from God because it is excellent” (I.i.1); they needed to proceed inductively not deductively, somewhat more along the lines of their modern-scientific opponents, who esteemed proofs founded on experiment. At the same time, Christians made the mistake of taking satirists too seriously and not seriously enough. They failed to see that satire presents a real challenge to religion, which invokes reverence. And “they overlooked the fact that these people are never in earnest in their pretended search after truth; that they esteem none but themselves; that they are not even attached to their own system, except for the sake of the noise which it makes, and are ever ready to forsake it on the first change of public opinion” (I.i.1). Instead of aiming their replies at sophists and satirists, they should have addressed those whom the sophists and satirists “were leading astray” (I.i.1). Christian intellectuals need to show that ‘Christian intellectual’ is no oxymoron—that, “on the contrary, the Christian religion, of all the religions that ever existed, is the most humane, the most favorable to liberty and to the arts and sciences; that the modern world is indebted to it for every improvement, from agriculture to the abstract sciences”; that “there is no disgrace in being believers with Newton and Bossuet, with Pascal and Racine” (I.i.1). Sophistry aims at the head but satire aims at the heart. It was therefore “necessary to summon all the charms of the imagination, and all the interests of the heart” against the satirists and in defense of Christianity because “all other kinds of apologies are exhausted, and perhaps they would be useless at the present day” (I.i.1).
Pascal had already recommended a five-step strategy for addressing individual atheists, and near the conclusion of this book Chateaubriand cites it. First, demonstrate to the atheist that Christianity is “not contradictory to reason”; second, show that it is venerable; third, show that it is respectable; fourth, show that it is “amiable,” exciting in the atheist the wish that it might be true; finally, “prove its antiquity and holiness by its grandeur and sublimity” (IV.vi.13). Chateaubriand writes that he has followed this conversational strategy throughout.
He acknowledges the objection of those who find danger in this. “May there not be some danger in considering religion in a merely human point of view?” (I.i.1). No: Christianity does not “shrink from the light”; it will not “be the less true for appearing the more beautiful” (I.i.1). “Let us banish our weak apprehensions; let us not, by an excess of religion, leave religion to perish” (I.i.1). Lacking “the miraculous rod of religion which caused living streams to burst from the flinty rock,” Chateaubriand will attempt to prepare the minds and hearts of sincere men and women for receiving grace, not to bestow it, which remains the work of the Holy Spirit. With respect to minds, “our arguments will at least have this advantage, that they will be intelligible to the world at large, and will require nothing but common sense to determine their weight and strength”; with respect to hearts, “the Almighty does not forbid us to tread the flowery path, if it serves to lead the wanderer once more to him; nor is it always by the steep and rugged mountain that the lost sheep finds its way back to the fold” (I.i.1).
Accordingly, he divides his book into four parts addressing three main topics: Part One concerns dogma and doctrine; Part Two and Part Three “comprehend the poetic of Christianity,” “its connection with poetry, literature, and the arts”; Part Four concerns Christian worship—Church ceremonies and the clergy (I.i.1). That is, the first and fourth parts address the mind, the central parts appeal to the heart. The first part considers the limitations of the human mind. Against the Enlighteners, Chateaubriand commends modesty to thinkers. The fourth part more ambitiously advances a proof of Christianity’s genius and the likelihood of the truth of its claim to divine revelation.
Respecting dogma and doctrine, Chateaubriand squarely faces the problem of the mysterious in Christianity, the miraculous—what the human mind most readily questions. He isn’t about to try to prove the unprovable. He instead observes that mystery is a commonplace in nature itself. “There is nothing in the universe but what is hidden, but what is unknown,” including man as well as God (I.i.2). To reject mystery, therefore, is irrational, unphilosophic: “It is a pitiful mode of reasoning to reject whatever we cannot comprehend” (I.i.3). The Trinity, for example, “the first mystery presented by the Christian faith, opens an immense field for philosophic study” (I.i.3). The doctrine of three persons, one God, need not involve a logical contradiction. Tertullian remarks that philosophers admit the existence of the Logos; what Christians claim is speech must have a speaker, that “the Word is spirit of a Spirit, and God of God, like a light kindled at another light” (I.i.3). Why then could God as Father not kindle God as Son in the womb of a virgin? “The two”—Father and Son—with “their spirit, form but one, differing in properties, not in number”—in “order, not in nature” (I.i.3).
Redemption too can be made to make sense if one accepts the doctrine of original sin, without which it is difficult to “account for the vicious propensity of our nature continually combated by a secret voice which whispers that we were formed for virtue” (I.i.4). Christ’s willingness to endure the torture of the Cross shows “the perfect model of a dutiful son” and the “pattern of faithful friends” (I.i.4); it is unheard-of in degree but not in kind. Nor is this most supreme of all sacrifices an irrational act; if God created human beings for some purpose, if sin interferes with that purpose, if God did not exterminate sinful or ‘fallen’ beings outright, and if human beings cannot redeem or perfect themselves, God must intervene to correct them as “a natural consequence of the state into which human nature has fallen” (I.i.4). Chateaubriand emphasizes, however, that his apologetic strategy doesn’t require him to lay down a demonstrative proof of Christian doctrine, only to show that “Christianity is not made up of such things as the sarcasms of infidelity would fain have us imagine” (I.i.4). Biblical doctrine “has not its seat in the head, but in the heart; it teaches not the art of disputation, but the way to lead a virtuous life” (I.i.4). And if you think men will live virtuous lives without it, think again; think of the French Revolution. “Long shall we remember the days when men of blood pretended to erect altars to the Virtues, on the ruins of Christianity,” arrogantly proclaiming the “Truth, which no man knows,” and the rule of “Reason, which never dried a tear” (I.i.4). What Christians can claim, against dogmatic atheism, is first, that their doctrine withstands rational tests in the sense that it cannot be disproved by logical argument, and second, that that their doctrine upholds moral decency in civil society far more effectively than any form of ‘secularism’ does.
Christian sacraments can also be defended before the tribunals of head and heart. “The whole knowledge of man, in his civil and moral relations, is implied in these institutions” (I.i.6). Baptism “reminds us of the corruption in which we were born, the pangs that gave us birth of the tribulations which await us in the world,” while offering hope against all those things by “restor[ing] to the soul its primeval vigor” (I.i.6). “Baptism is followed by confession; and the Church, with a prudence peculiar to her has fixed the time for the reception of this sacrament at the age when a person becomes capable of sin, which is that of seven years” (I.i.6). “Without this salutary institution, the sinner would sink into despair,” inasmuch as human friends alone can scarcely be relied upon to hear it. “When nature and our fellow-creatures show no mercy, how delightful is it to find the Almighty ready to forgive!” (I.i.6). Similarly, Holy Communion at the age of twelve admits the youth, no longer merely a boy or a girl, “for the first time to a union with his God”—a strong bond needed to allay the strength of sexual passion (I.i.7). All of the Christian sacraments “exert the highest moral influence, because they were practiced by our fathers, because our mothers were Christians over our cradle, and because the chants of religion were heard around the coffins of our ancestors and breathed a prayer of peace over their ashes” (I.i.7). That is, in its evocation of God as Father and Son, Christianity and its sacraments invoke the natural authority of parents over children. In this way, “the Holy Communion constitutes a complete system of legislation” (I.i.7). “At the time when the fire of the passions is about to be kindled in the heart, and the mind is sufficiently capable of knowing God, [God] becomes the ruling spirit of the youth, pervading all the faculties of his soul in its now restless and expanded state” (I.i.8).
That system of legislation follows the Christian to adulthood. Since, when it comes to the governance of sexuality, “there are but two states in life—celibacy and marriage”—Jesus Christ “divided society into two classes, and decreed for them, not political, but moral laws, acting in this respect in accordance with all antiquity,” which also separated priests from rulers, citizens, and subjects (I.i.8). While it is true that Christian clergy were initially permitted to marry, that clerical celibacy wasn’t “definitely established” until the twelfth century, even “from the time of St. Paul, virginity was considered the more perfect state for a Christian.” For those clergy who did not choose to practice celibacy, the small, persecuted, and virtuous early Church communities allowed a married priest to dedicate himself to his duties even as his wife bore him children; his children simply “form[ed] part of his flock” (I.i.8). Moreover, “the Christians of that age had received from heaven a spirit which we have lost,” forming “not so much a popular assembly as a community of Levites and religious women”—all “priests and confessors of Jesus Christ” (I.i.8). “When the number of Christians increased, and morality was weakened with the diffusion of mankind, how could the priest devote himself at the same time to his family and to the Church? How could he have continued chaste with a spouse who had ceased to be so?” (I.i.8). As for Protestants, their priest is “very often a mere man of the world,” and the institution of confession to priests has accordingly been abolished (I.i.8).
The Enlighteners had objected that celibacy depopulates the earth. But, on the contrary, having been born of a virgin, having lived and died as a virgin, Jesus taught us, “in a political and natural point of view, that the earth had received its complement of inhabitants, and that the ratio of generation, far from being extended, should be restricted” (I.i.8). Chateaubriand argues that population excess, not dearth, ruins states. “We resemble a swarm of insects buzzing around a cup of wormwood into which a few drops of honey have accidentally fallen; we devour each other as soon as our numbers begin to crowd the spot that we occupy! By a still greater misfortune, the more we increase, the more land we require to satisfy our wants; and as this space is always diminishing, while the passions are extending their sway, the most frightful revolutions must, sooner or later, be the consequence.” (I.i.8). Celibate clergy have in fact regulated the population growth that has occurred “by preaching concord and union between man and wife checking the progress of libertinism, and visiting with the denunciations of the Church the crimes which the people of the cities directed to the diminution of children.” (I.i.8). Have domestic violence, readily available divorces, sexual ‘liberation,’ and the various forms of child abuse led to villages in which every child is raised well? On the contrary, “every great nation has need of men who, separated from the rest of mankind, invested with some august character, and free from the encumbrances of wife, children and other worldly affairs, may labor effectually for the advancement of knowledge, the improvement of morals, and the relief of human suffering” (I.i.8). As rulers of a family “would not the learning and charity which they have consecrated to their country be turned to the profit of their relatives?” (I.i.8).
Celibacy affirms the dignity of man. It is sublime more than it is beautiful, resisting “the fierce rebellion of the passions” in the human soul (I.i.9). “The learned man it inspires with the love of study; the hermit with that of contemplation; in all it is a powerful principle, whose beneficial influence is always felt in the labors of the mind, and hence it is the most excellent quality of life, since it imparts fresh vigor to the soul, which is the nobler part of our nature” (I.i.9). And for the priest, servant of God as well as man, it is a necessity. The priest “will enjoy the respect and confidence of the people” so long as he remains separate from ordinary civil society, but “he will soon forfeit both if he be seen in the halls of the rich, if he be encumbered with a wife, if he be too familiar in society, if he betray faults which are condemned in the world, or if he lead those around him to suspect for a moment that he is a man like other men” (I.i.9). “Poets and men even of the most refined taste can make no reasonable objection to the celibacy of the priesthood,” a reminder of “the innocence of childhood,” the “sanctity of the priest and of old age,” and of “the divinity in the angels and in God himself” (I.i.9).
Nor does the dignity of celibacy in any way denigrate the sanctity of marriage. “Europe owes…to Christianity the few good laws which it has,” since the canon law, “the fruit of the experience of fifteen centuries and of the genius of the Innocents and the Gregories,” “contains the essence of the Levitical law, the gospel, and the Roman jurisprudence” (I.i.10). Marriage law is the foundation of civil life—the “axis on which the whole social economy revolves”—and under Christianity it symbolizes Christ’s union with the Church (I.i.10). The prohibition of incest, “besides being founded on moral and spiritual considerations,” proves beneficial “in a political point of view, by encouraging the division of property, and preventing all the wealth of a state from accumulating, in a long series of years, in the hands of a few individuals” (I.i.10). Monogamy supports the natural principle of numerical parity between men and women against “the passions of men,” which would ruin the family “by alienating the paternal affections, by corrupting the heart and converting marriage into a civil prostitution” (I.i.10). (More, “the man who has not been the comfort of a first wife…who has not been able to bend his passions to the domestic yoke, or to confine his heart to the nuptial couch…will never confer felicity on a second wife”) (I.i.10). Deluded by passion, men fail to see that “habit and length of time are more necessary to happiness, and even to love, than may be imagined,” that “a man is not happy in the object of his attachment till he has passed many days, and, above all, many days of adversity, in her company” (I.i.10). Christianity’s strict marital law reinforces men where they are weak; “let us not give to matrimony the wings of lawless love; let us not transform a sacred reality into a fleeting phantom,” as you “compare one wife with another, her whom you have lost with her whom you have found,” a “disturbance of one sentiment by another [that] will poison all your pleasures” (I..10). It is not good for the man to be alone because “without woman he would be rude, unpolished, solitary” (I.i.10).
The Enlighteners sometimes maintained the moral superiority of paganism to Christianity. Chateaubriand rejects this claim. Christianity rightly teaches that pride is “the root of evil, that it is intermingled with all the other infirmities of our nature” (I.ii.i). “It beams in the smile of envy, it bursts forth in the debaucheries of the libertine, it counts the gold of avarice, it sparkles in the eyes of anger, it is the companion of graceful effeminacy” (I.ii.1). Politically, it stoked the ruinous imperial ambitions of the Athenians and of Cyrus the Great, “divided the empire of Alexander, and crushed Rome itself under the weight of the universe” (I.ii.1). Pride induces men to “attack even the Deity himself,” often in the name of supposed flaws “in the constitution of society or the order of nature” (I.ii.1). In attacking pride and esteeming humility, in “detect[ing] it in the inner recesses of the heart” and “pursu[ing] it in all its changes,” Christianity concentrates human attention on the taproot of evil.
The ancients rightly praised the virtues of courage, temperance, and prudence (Chateaubriand overlooks justice, the fourth virtue identified by Plato’s Socrates). Yet “none but Jesus Christ could teach the world that faith hope and charity are virtues alone adapted to the ignorance and the wretchedness of man” (I.ii.2). Faith in God, dependence upon Him, brings the power of conviction to bear on human action without the hazard of pride. “In the language of ancient chivalry,” for example, “to pledge one’s faith was synonymous with all the prodigies of honor” (I.ii.2). Aristotle attempts to find the virtuous mean between extremes, “ingeniously placing a virtue between two vices,” but the Christian lawgiver, Jesus, “completely removed the difficulty, by inculcating that virtues are not virtues unless they flow back toward their source—that is to say, toward the Deity” (I.ii.2). “The doctrine which commands the belief in a God who will reward and punish is the main pillar both of morals and of civil government” (I.ii.2).
“Almost as powerful as faith,” hope too is “the partner of power”: “Is a man disappointed in his plans? it is because he did not desire with ardor,” with “that love which sooner or later grasps the object to which it aspires,” the love by which God “embraces all things and enjoys all” (I.ii.3). Hope supplements faith because faith arises from “an external object,” focuses on something “out of ourselves,” whereas hope “springs up within us, and operates externally”; faith is obedience, hope love (I.ii.3). “The Christian, whose life is a continual warfare, is treated by religion in his defeat like those vanquished generals whom the Roman senate received in triumph. For this reason alone, that they had not despaired of the commonwealth.” (I.ii.3).
In charity, religion “has invented a new passion” (I.ii.3). “She has not employed the word love, which is too common; or the word friendship, which ceases at the tomb; or the word pity, which is too much akin to pride: but she has found the term caritas, CHARITY, which embraces all the three, and which at the same time is allied to something celestial,” directing all those sentiments toward the Creator-God, and thus spiritualizing the fraternity the French revolutionaries turned to venom (I.ii.3). “By this [Christianity] inculcates the stupendous truth that mortals ought to love each other, if I may so express myself, through God, who spiritualizes their love, and separates from it whatever belongs not to its immortal essence” (I.ii.3). In so doing, it also works “in close alliance with nature,” with the harmony between heaven and earth, God and man (I.ii.3). “The moral and political institutions of antiquity are often in contradiction to the sentiments of the human soul,” but Christianity, “on the contrary, ever in unison with the heart, enjoins not solitary and abstract virtues, but such as are derived from our wants and are useful to mankind” (I.ii.3). In this last claim, Chateaubriand’s thought retains more than a tincture of Rousseau, ignoring the sinful human nature he had earlier remarked.
He recovers somewhat in his account of moral laws, as distinct from moral sentiments. He is unimpressed with the legal codes designed by other lawgivers—Zoroaster, Minos, Solon, and the like—who offer too many “vague, incoherent, commonplace ideas” (I.ii.4). The philosophers’ efforts are no better: “The sages of the Portico and of the Academy alternatively proclaim such contradictory maxims, that we may prove from the same book that its author believed and did not believe in God; that he acknowledged and did not acknowledge a positive virtue; that liberty is the greatest of blessings and despotism the best of governments” (I.ii.4) Chateaubriand does praise the code propounded by the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws —the “his best work”—but observes that “these precepts were not reduced to practice; we shall therefore refrain from any notice of them” (I.ii.4). (“As for the Koran, all that it contains, either holy or just, is borrowed almost verbatim from our sacred Scriptures.”) (I.ii.4). The laws of Sinai were engraved by God “upon the heart of man,” with all the defects of that heart (I.ii.4). Although first given to the Israelites, it is universal, “the law of all nations, of all climates, of all times” (I.ii.4). By commanding men to love their fathers, God founds His law “on the very constitution of our nature” in full knowledge of “the fickleness and the pride of youth” (I.ii.4). And the eternal character of God’s law follows from the eternal character of God Himself—His name itself, Jehovah, “composed of three tenses of the verb to be united by a sublime combination: havah, he was; hovah, being, or he is; and je, which, when placed before the three radical letters of a verb in Hebrew, indicates the future, he will be” (I.ii.4). Whereas all the other religions of antiquity lost their “moral influence” when their priests and sacrifices disappeared, “it can be said of Christianity alone, that it has often witnessed the destruction of its temples, without being affected by their fall” (I.ii.4).
And what of the greater fall, the fall of man? Chateaubriand points to the many ancient stories of an ancient period of human happiness followed by “long calamities” (I.iii.1). “It is not to be supposed that an absurd falsehood could have become an universal tradition” (I.iii.1). But of these tales, the Book of Genesis alone “exhibits the genius of the master” (I.iii.1). Given Man’s God-given intelligence and freedom, his God-breathed spirit, God “placed knowledge within his reach” while warning him “that if he was resolved on knowing too much, this knowledge would result in the death of himself and of his posterity” (I.iii.2). “The secret of the political and moral existence of nations, and the profoundest mysteries of the human heart, are comprised in the tradition of this wonderful and fatal tree,” which prompted “the demon of pride” to “borrow the voice of love to seduce” Man, as it was “for the sake of a woman that Adam aspires to an equality with God—a profound illustration of the two principal passions of the heart, vanity and love” (I.iii.2). From then on, “Adam”—red earth—became “Enosh”—fever, pain. And Woman bore her children in pain. Whereas the universe exhibits natural law, a harmony whereby “all the integral parts, all the springs of action, whether internal or external, all the qualities of beings, have a perfect conformity with one another,” and whereby the thoughts of animals “invariably accord with their feelings,” man alone is out of joint, in conflict with himself (I.iii.3). Here, Rousseau is right: “there is a perpetual collision between his understanding and his will, between his reason and his heart. When he attains the highest degree of civilization, he is at the lowest point in the scale of morality; when free, he is barbarous; when refined, he is bound with fetters” (I.iii.3). Nations “exhibit the like vicissitudes” (I.iii.3). Man thus “stands in contradiction to nature,” with “a double character when every thing around him is simple” (I.iii.3). This disequilibrium occurred because “Adam sought to embrace the universe, not with the sentiments of his heart, but with the power of thought, and, advancing to the tree of knowledge, he admitted into his mind a ray of light that overpowered it,” leaving “his whole soul…agitated and in commotion,” rebelling against his judgment, his judgment seeking to restore its rule over his passions”; “in this terrible storm the rock of death witnessed with joy the first of shipwrecks” (I.iii.3).
By extending the notion of a tree of knowledge of good and evil, of morality, to knowledge generally, Chateaubriand subtly distorts the Biblical teaching, probably in an effort to advance a critique of Enlightenment rationalism. In the Bible, once Adam knows, not just intellectually but in his heart, the difference between good and evil, only the punishment of mortality can put a limit on human wrongdoing, and only a Messiah can save and purify him. Considering the more comprehensive aspirations of knowledge entertained by the Enlighteners, Chateaubriand resists their claims by emphasizing the importance of balancing knowledge with feeling, thereby contributing to the formation of ‘Romanticism.’ This commits him to ‘Rousseau-izing’ the heart, to making it more innocent than the Bible (and especially the New Testament) says it is; in effect, he is turning the French revolutionaries’ most cherished philosopher against them and, in that redirection, bringing Rousseau back into his own intended role as an acute critic of the Enlightenment. Romanticism would turn out to result in its own excesses, as Goethe understood early on, witnessing the effects of the example of Werther, his young hero, on European youth. Chateaubriand, witness to the irrational effects of Enlightenment rationalism on the French Revolutionaries, would bridle reason, remarking that, with death, “our lives are not long enough to confer success upon any efforts we could make to reach primeval perfection,” to recreate the Garden of Eden on earth (I.iii.4).
Enlightenment rationalism attacked the Bible on natural-scientific as well as moral grounds. Chateaubriand addresses critiques of Old Testament chronology, denying claims that the human race dates back to a remote antiquity the Bible fails to account for. Civilizations are not the product of some painfully slow historical process. European history proves this. “Scarcely twelve centuries ago our ancestors were as barbarous as the Hottentots, and now we surpass Greece in all the refinements of taste, luxury, and the arts” (I.iv.2). The formation of abstract ideas in language dates back only to the ancient Greeks. Similarly, modern scientists’ claim that the universe itself is far older than the Bible claims should be viewed with suspicion. First, many of the greatest modern scientists have been Christians who accepted the Biblical account of creation. Second, the atheist turn in modern science, whereby the successors of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton “imagined that they held the Deity within their crucibles and telescopes, because they perceived in them some of the elements with which the universal mind had founded the system of worlds,” bespeaks “the vanity of science” to which “we owe almost all our calamities” during “the terrors of the French Revolution” (I.iv.3). Recurring to his interpretation of the Book of Genesis, Chateaubriand asserts, “the ages of science have always bordered on the ages of destruction” (I.iv.3). He dismisses geological evidence of an ‘old earth’ by observing that “God might have created, and doubtless did create, the world with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which it now exhibits” (I.iv.5). Had he not done so, “if the world had not been at the same time young and old, the grand, the serious, the moral, would have been banished from the face of nature; for these are ideas essentially inherent in antique objects,” lending nature to “poetical inspiration” (I.iv.5).
This brings Chateaubriand to his version of the argument from design. “Adhering scrupulously to our plan, we shall banish all abstract ideas from our proofs of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and shall employ only such arguments as may be derived from poetical and sentimental considerations—or, in other words, from the wonders of nature and the moral feelings” (I.v.1).
“How could chance have compelled crude and stubborn materials to arrange themselves in such exquisite order” as prevails in the universe? (I.v.2). Is it not only more plausible but also more interesting to think otherwise—to think “that man is the idea of God displayed, and the universe his imagination made manifest“? (I.v.2). And if you admit “the beauty of nature as a proof of a supreme intelligence,” you can now conceive that “motion and rest, darkness and light, the seasons, the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, which give variety to the decorations of the world, are successive only in appearance, and permanent in reality” (I.v.2). The permanent things generate perpetual change. In its “absolute duration,” the “beauties of the universe are one, infinite, and invariable”; by means of its “progressive duration,” the beauties of the universe “are multiplied, finite, and perpetually renewed” (I.v.2). Without absolute duration, “there would be no grandeur in the creation”; without progressive duration or change, the universe “would exhibit nothing but dull uniformity” (I.v.2). And so, for example, “every moment of the day the sun is rising, glowing at his zenith, or setting on the world,” as “the orb of day emits, at one and the same time, three lights from one single substance”—a picture of the trinitarian character of the unitary God (I.v.2).
As with the universe, so too with organic life. The intricate organization of each species of plant and animal, of each individual organism within each species, bespeaks a telos for every one of them and for the whole ‘ecosystem,’ as later writers would call it. Deviations from these patterns strike us as monstrous, but if “some have pretended to derive from these irregularities an objection against Providence,” on the contrary, they manifest Providence: “God has permitted this distortion of matter expressly for the purpose of teaching us what the creation would be without Him” (I.v.3). [1] Similarly, the “instincts” of animals point not to the random chance posited by materialists but to intelligent design. How else would animals know how to do what they do? Recalling the beaver he saw in the forests of North America, Chateaubriand asks, “Who, then, placed the square and the level in the eye of that animal which has the sagacity to construct a dam, shelving toward the water and perpendicular on the opposite side” What philosopher taught this singular engineer the laws of hydraulics, and made him so expert with his incisive teeth and his flattened tail?” (I.v.4). Who taught songs to birds and gave them the ability to construct nests? “Who can contemplate without emotion this divine beneficence, which imparts industry to the weak and foresight to the thoughtless?” (I.v.6). And in this contemplation, in our own delight in birdsong and animal engineering feats, we acknowledge that they sing and work for human beings, too, enjoying our “empire” over nature, which the grace of God did not strip from us, even in cursing Adam (I.v.5).
At the same time, human beings can make themselves monstrous by “follow[ing] the same law as carnivorous animals” (I.v.5). Perhaps glancing at Napoleon, and surely at the likes of Robespierre and Danton, Chateaubriand remarks, “There have been many instances of tyrants, who exhibited some mark of sensibility in their countenance and voice, and who affected the language of the unhappy creatures whose destruction they were meditating. Providence, however, has ordained that we should not be absolutely deceived by men of this savage character: we have only to examine them closely, to discover, under the garb of mildness, an air of falsehood and rapacity a thousand times more hideous than their fury itself.” (I.v.5). It is the consideration of the natural order, in which God has included carnivores, that enables us to recognize the predators among us. Speaking from his own experience, Chateaubriand also finds in Racine a suggestion that the migration of birds amounts to a figure of exile, one of the punishments tyrants inflict, a punishment Racine saw in the displacement consequent to civil wars. Chateaubriand suffered exile at the hands first of the revolutionaries and then of Napoleon—of a regime of ‘the many’ and a regime of ‘the one’—but he distinguishes “the exile prescribed by nature” from “that which is ordered by man” (I.v.7). “Is the mortal, driven from his native home, sure of revisiting it again?” (I.v.7). Rather “let us place all our hope in heaven, and we shall no longer be afraid of exile: in religion we invariably find a country!” (I.v.7).
Nature also provides men with pictures of well-ordered political life. “Sea-fowl have places of rendezvous where you could imagine they were deliberating in common of the affairs of the republic”—Chateaubriand’s version of an image dating back to the Middle Ages, the Parliament of Fowles as conceived by, among other poets, Chaucer (I.v.8). Nor do birds in their ‘political’ character serve only their own poleis. “All the accidents of the seas, the flux and reflux of the tide, and the alternations of calm and storm, are predicted by birds”—the mariners’ ‘stormy petrel,’ the farmer’s robin (I.v.8). “These men, placed in the two most laborious conditions of life, have friends whom Providence has prepared for them. From a feeble animal, they receive counsel and hope, which they would often seek in vain from their fellow-creatures” (I.v.8). Again contrasting the unteleological nature of the modern scientist with the purposeful nature discovered by “the simple heart that investigates [nature’s] wonders with no other view than to glorify the Creator,” Chateaubriand finds ‘scientific’ nature “dry and unmeaning,” nature understood both poetically and practically “significant and interesting” (I.v.8). The understanding of nature he prefers is also more reliable. “While the philosopher, curtailing or lengthening the year, made the winter encroach upon the domain of spring” with his calendar (I.v.8). But “the husbandman had no reason to apprehend that the bird or the flower the astronomer sent him by Heaven, would lead him astray” (I.v.8). His labors, diversions and pleasures are “regulated, not by the uncertain calendar of a philosopher, but by the infallible laws of Him who has traced the course of the sun” (I.v.8).
“I am nothing; I am only a simple, solitary wanderer, and often have I heard men of science disputing on the subject of a Supreme Being, without understanding them; but I have invariably remarked, that it is in the prospect of the sublime scenes of nature that this unknown Being manifests himself to the human heart” (I.v.12). At the same time, Chateaubriand finds in the human heart an instinct as powerful as that seen in any animal, an instinct that runs counter to wandering, to the exile imposed by tyrants and their wars. “The instinct with which man is pre-eminently endowed—that which is of all the most beautiful and the most moral—is the love of his native country” (I.v.14). Were this not so, “all mankind would crowd together into the temperate zones, leaving the rest of the earth a desert” (I.v.14). Indeed, misery attaches human beings more firmly to their homelands than prosperity does, as “the profusion of a too fertile soil destroys, by enriching us, the simplicity of the natural ties arising from our wants; when we cease to love our parents and our relations because they are no longer necessary to us, we actually cease also to love our country” (I.v.14). The Eskimo don’t move south. “The heart is naturally fond of contracting itself; the more it is compressed, the smaller is the surface which is liable to be wounded,” as seen especially in “persons of delicate sensibility,” who “prefer to live in retirement,” and even in the not-so-delicate Romans “joyfully sacrificed their lives in her defense” when the republic was small but “ceased to love her when the Alps and Mount Taurus were the limits of her territory” (I.v.14).
Love of country “perform[s] prodigies” because “what sentiment gains in energy it loses in extent” (I.v.14). “We even doubt whether it be possible to possess one genuine virtue, one real talent, without the love of our native country” (I.v.14). Yet although love of country “produced a Homer and a Virgil” in antiquity, “it is the Christian religion that has invested patriotism with its true character” (I.v.14). The ancients carried patriotism to “to excess,” committing crimes under its sway, while “Christianity has made it one of the principal affections in man,” it is not “an exclusive one”—commanding us “above all things to be just,” to cherish “the whole family of Adam, since we ourselves belong to it, though our countrymen have the first claim to our attachment” (I.v.14). Although Machiavelli and others unjustly accuse Christ of “attempting to extirpate the passions,” in fact “God destroys not his own work”; “the gospel is not the destroyer of the heart, but its regulator,” “retrench[ing] all that is exaggerated, false, common, and trivial” and “leav[ing] all that is fair, and good, and true” (I.v.14). The Christian religion, rightly understood, is only primitive nature washed from original pollution,” not the crabbed and enfeebling thing Machiavelli and his innumerable followers pretend it to be (I.v.14).
What links the human heart to the place we were born? “It is, perhaps, the smile of a mother, of a father, of a sister; it is perhaps, the recollection of the old preceptor who instructed us and of the young companions of our childhood; it is, perhaps, the care bestowed upon us by a tender nurse, by some aged domestic, so essential a part of the household; finally, it is something most simple, and, if you please, most trivial—a dog that barked at night in the fields, a nightingale that returned every year to the orchard, the nest of the swallow over the window, the village clock that appeared above the trees, the churchyard yew, or the Gothic tomb”—all intensified by gratitude for the providential hand which placed us there, among those persons and those things (I.v.14).
The final Christian doctrine Chateaubriand defends, the immortality of the soul, also carries evidence for itself in the human heart. If the soul dies with the body, “whence proceeds the desire of happiness which continually haunts us,” never fully satisfied in this life? (I.vi.1). “If every thing is matter, nature has here made a strange mistake, creating a desire without any object” (I.vi.1), a striving for power after power that ceases only in death. No animal betrays such dissatisfaction. “Man…is the only creature that wanders abroad, and looks for happiness outside of himself” (I.vi.1). What is more, human beings alone have a conscience, an inner “tribunal, where he sits in judgment on himself till the Supreme Arbiter shall confirm the sentence,” even while “the tiger devours his prey and slumbers quietly” (I.vi.2). True, there may be “men so unfortunate as to be capable of stifling the voice of conscience,” but why would we take them as models of human nature? (I.vi.2). True, there are “morbid regions of the heart”; they are what Christianity corrects (I.vi.2). “Toward the criminal, in particular, her charity is inexhaustible; no man is so depraved but she admits him to repentance, no leper so disgusting but she cures him with her pure hands” (I.vi.2). Christianity is “a second conscience for the hardened culprit who should be so unfortunate as to have lost the natural one,” and this “evangelical conscience” possesses a power beyond the natural one, “the power to pardon” (I.vi.2) sinful acts the natural conscience has proved too weak to prevent. Christianity prepares the immortal soul for the true happiness unavailable in this life.
A conviction in favor of the immortality of the soul also redounds to this-worldly benefit. “Morality is the basis of society; but if man is a mere mass of matter, there is in reality neither vice nor virtue, and of course morality is a mere sham” (I.vi.3). Again contra Machiavelli, Chateaubriand doesn’t mean to suggest that “religion was invented in order to uphold morality”; this would be to “tak[e] the effect for the cause,” since “it is not religion that springs from morals, but morals that spring from religion” (I.vi.3). Anticipating Dostoevsky, Chateaubriand insists that “men no sooner divest themselves of the idea of a God than they rush into every species of crime, in spite of laws and of executioners” (I.vi.3). Those who posit of ‘religion of humanity,’ a philanthropy constructed “on the ruins of Christianity” left by the French revolutionaries and itself arising “out of the infatuation of the French revolution,” build on sand (I.vi.3). Such a doctrine cannot even extend the span of human life on earth. “What then but nothingness canst thou draw forth from the bottom of thy sepulcher to recompense” a man’s virtue, his sacrifice of immediate pleasure? (I.vi.3). “Are a few grains of dust worthy of our veneration?” (i.vi.3).
Some philosophers object, arguing that the mind’s energies follow physical age, gaining from infancy to maturity, declining in old age. Chateaubriand responds that correlation isn’t causation. Being insusceptible to extension or division, mind must be essentially different forom matter. Atheists also point to insanity, brain injuries, and fever delirium as proof of their claim that mind is material. But what these phenomena demonstrate isn’t materialism but “a disordered imagination connected with a sound understanding”; such unfortunates “only draw logical conclusions from unsound premises” generated by the disorders they suffer (I.vi.4). Their minds are intact but operate from perceptions deranged by material defects of the brain. Similarly, against Montesquieu’s theory on “the influence of climate upon the mind, which has been alleged as a proof of the material nature of the soul,” Chateaubriand begins his refutation by observing that human beings, unlike all other species of mammals, lives in all regions of the world. It is the human soul which puts itself “in direct opposition to passive nature,” which “sickens and languishes when in too close contact with it” (I.vi.4). The human body languishes in extreme climates principally because the mind becomes dejected when forced to struggle too much against the elements. “It is not the mud that acts upon the current, but the current that disturbs the mud; and, in like manner, all these pretended effects of the body upon the soul are the very reverse—the effects of the soul upon the body” (I.vi.4). They are, as we would say, ‘psychosomatic,’ “a real intellectual dejection, produced by the state of the soul and by its struggles against the influence of matter” (I.vi.4).
Atheists often preen themselves on their supposed hardheaded realism, their ‘utilitarian’ or ‘pragmatic’ astuteness. The honest ones forthrightly claim “that the world belongs to those who possess the greatest strength or the most address” (I.vi.5). The “hypocrites of infidelity,” on the other hand—a “thousand times more dangerous”—feign benevolence, “calling you brother while cutting your throat,” mouthing “the words morality and humanity” (I.vi.5). By contrast, the Christian hero is morally what an old tree presents physically—a “rugged bark” covering the sweetness of maple sugar. And the Christian woman’s days “are replete with joy; she is respected, beloved by her husband, her children, her household; all place unbounded confidence in her, because they are firmly convinced of the fidelity of one who is faithful to her God” (I.vi.5). The atheist woman “spends her days either in reasoning on virtue without practicing its precepts, or in the enjoyment of the tumultuous pleasures of the world,” her “mind vacant and her heart unsatisfied”; she dies “in the arms of a hireling nurse, or of some man, perhaps, who turns with disgust from her protracted sufferings” (I.vi.5).
Very well then, but did not many of the ancients propound the doctrine of the soul’s immortality? True, but “in the Elysium of the ancients we find none but heroes and persons who had either been fortunate or distinguished on earth” (I.vi.6). It has no place for children, slaves, or the poor, who “were banished to the infernal regions” (I.vi.6). Elysium promises only an endless succession of “feasts and dances, the everlasting duration of which would be sufficient to constitute one of the torments of Tartarus!” (I.vi.6). As for the more rarefied versions of the afterlife imagined by Plato and Pythagoras, “in this case, it must at least be admitted that the Christian religion,” which is said to imitate them, “is not the religion of shallow minds, since it inculcates what are acknowledged to have been the doctrines of sages” (I.vi. 6). Further, “a truth confined within a narrow circle of chosen disciples,” such as the students of philosophers, “is one thing, and a truth which has become the universal consolation of mankind is another” (I.vi.6).
In Part One of The Genius of Christianity, Chateaubriand establishes that Christian doctrine may be taken seriously by intellectually and morally serious people, that the teachings of Christianity are neither well nor readily replaced either by the many competing religions, by ancient paganism, or by philosophic ethics. Satires on the alleged absurdities of that doctrine by Enlightenment rationalists prove less persuasive than they seem, since Christianity proves often sustainable in reason but more, admirable in its effects on the human heart, and thus on human conduct.
Note
- And monstrousness itself has its purpose in nature’s overall design. Chateaubriand insists that the Florida “crocodile” has “sometimes proved a stumbling-block to atheistic minds,” who see no purpose for them. On the contrary, crocodiles are “extremely necessary to the general plan” of God, as “they inhabit only the deserts where the absence of man requires their presence: they are placed there for the express purpose of destroying, till the arrival of the great destroyer. The moment we appear on the coast, they resign their empire to us, certain that a single individual of our species will make greater havoc than ten thousand of theirs” (I.v.10). What is more, crocodiles exhibit “some marks of divine goodness,” as when they care for their young, the females guarding not only their own young but sometimes the offspring of another. “A Spaniard of Florida related to us that, having taken the brood of a crocodile, which he ordered some negroes to carry away in a basket, the female followed him with pitiful cries. Two of the young having been placed upon the ground, the mother immediately began to push them with her paws and her snout; sometimes posting herself behind to defend them, sometimes walking before to show them the way.” (I.v.10). And indeed, the “deserts” or “morasses” they inhabit, “however noxious they may seem, have, nevertheless, very important uses. They are the urns of rivers in champagne countries, and reservoirs for rain in those remote from the sea,” “possess[ing],” moreover, “a certain beauty peculiar to themselves,” with “plants, scenery, and inhabitants of a specific character” (I.v.10). And the hurricanes that sweep through the Everglades rip fruits from the trees, “carried by the billows to inhabited coasts, where they are transformed into stately trees—an admirable symbol of Virtue, who fixes herself upon the rock, exposed to the tempest” (I.v.11).
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