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 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 that 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). While “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 or 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 distils 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 created 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 man—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 were 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, modest, [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.3). 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.3). “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.3). 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.3). 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.3). “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.3). Only “the spirit of Christianity” can settle them down to solid work (III.iii.3). “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 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.3).

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 elements. “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 glove, 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.” (IIIv.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 they 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. 

 

 

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

 

By the “poetic” of Christianity, Chateaubriand refers to poēsis in the original sense, as human making. The poetic thus encompasses not only poetry as ordinarily defined but literature generally and the fine arts. The Second Part of The Genius of Christianity treats poetry as ordinarily defined, leaving literature and the fine arts for the Third Part. In considering Christian doctrine, Chateaubriand understood his task as primarily defensive, as an effort to show that Christian thought cannot justly be dismissed by atheist satire. In turning to poetry, however, he takes the initiative against the scoffers, rightly confident that Christianity has more than held its own against the works of antiquity and especially against the ‘secularist’ moderns.

“The epic is the highest class of poetic compositions,” comprising the dramatic tragedies and comedies (II.i.1). The epic poem “requires a more universal genius than a tragedy” and a more complete effort on the part of the poet; Sophocles is great, Homer greater (II.i.1). Given epic poetry as the highest standard, how do Christian epic poems stand up to the works of Homer and of Virgil?

In epic poetry, “the first and most important place” should go to “men and their passions,” not to the gods and “the marvelous” (II.i.2). “If Homer and Virgil had laid their scenes in Olympus, it is doubtful whether, with all their genius, they would have been able to sustain the dramatic interest to the end” (II.i.2). What conflict in Olympus cannot be resolved by a mere shake of the chain of being by Zeus? In their theocentricity, therefore, Christians must take care. In writing a divine comedy, for example, Dante risks the tedium of a foregone conclusion. He passes the test, triumphantly: “The beauties of this singular production proceed, with few exceptions, from Christianity; its faults are to be ascribed to the age and the bad taste of the author, despite which he “has, perhaps, equaled the greatest poets in his evocation of “the pathetic and the terrific” (II.i.2). When it comes to these effects, Homer and Virgil have nothing on the Inferno. 

Given the enduring humanism of epic poetry, “a poet ought to adopt an ancient subject, or, if he selects a modern one, should by all means take his own nation for his theme” (II.i.2). This Tasso does in his Jerusalem Delivered, “a perfect model of composition” where “you may learn how to blend subjects together without confusion” and in which the “characters are drawn with no less ability” (II.i.2). Tasso excels the Roman Virgil exactly where one would expect a Roman to succeed more strikingly—in “characters, battles, and composition,” the themes of war and the capacity for architectonics (II.i.2). Yet, tellingly, he never portrays a mother. His talents “possessed more charms than truth, and greater brilliancy than tenderness”; he “almost always fails when he attempts to express the feelings of the heart,” falling “short of the pathos of Virgil,” short of “those pensive graces which impart such sweetness to the sighs of the Mantuan swan” (II.i.2). Tasso composes less adroitly; “his versification, which often exhibits marks of haste, cannot be compared to that of Virgil, a hundred times tempered in the fire of the Muses” (II.i.2). 

Ancient poets “display not, like us, a few brilliant ideas sparkling in the midst of a multitude of commonplace observations, so much as a series of beautiful thoughts, which perfectly harmonize together, and have a sort of family likeness” (II.i.2). But if the ancients excel the moderns in beauty, Christians excel the ancients in sublimity and even grandeur. Milton’s Paradise Lost demonstrates this conclusively. “The infancy of Rome, sung by Virgil, is certainly a grand subject; but what shall we say of a poem that depicts a catastrophe of which we are ourselves the victims, and which exhibits to us not the founder of this or that community, but the father of the human race? Nothing can be more august and more interesting than this study of the first emotions of the human heart.” (II.i.3). Man’s first sentiment, in Milton’s poem, “relates to the existence of a Supreme Being,” while “the first want he feels is the want of a God” (II.i.3). “How sublime is Milton in this passage!” (II.i.3). By contrast, for Milton, Woman’s ruling sentiment is self-love; “she boasts that she is strong enough alone to encounter temptation” (II.i.3). In this, he follows Scripture, which “always” portrays woman “as the slave of vanity”—in modern times, often heroic during the Revolution’s “reign of terror” but whose virtue, under the peace imposed by the rule of Napoleon, “has since fallen a victim to a dance, a dress, an amusement” (II.i.3). In childbirth, woman shows “invincible fortitude against pain” while remaining “weak against pleasure” (II.i.3).

In the Lusiad, Camoëns and in the Messiah, Klopstock have stepped over the line of humanism and into the marvelous. Camoëns may be excused, as he “lived in a barbarous age” and suffered severe misfortune in his own life (“it is not true that a man can write best under the pressure of misfortune,” Chateaubriand observes, drawing on his own experience) (II.i.4). Klopstock can be granted no such defense; “his principal character is the Divinity, and this alone would be sufficient to destroy the tragic effect” in his epic (II.i.4). There are, notwithstanding this, “some beautiful passages” in his poem, and in depicting the marvelous he writes with “richness and grandeur” (II.i.4). “Those spheres inhabited by beings of a different nature from man—the multitude of angels, spirits of darkness, unborn souls, and souls that have already finished the career of mortality—plunge the mind into the ocean of immensity” (II.i.4). But once plunged, can one emerge, returning to the limitations of the human world? In his critique of Klopstock, Chateaubriand perhaps unwittingly foresees the greatness, and the great defect, of a Germany united into one nation-state, lodged in the middle of Europe. Great it will be, but will it find just limits to its dreams?

Modern France’s Voltaire exhibits the opposite fault. In his time, “Europe, by the happiest of contrasts, exhibited a pastoral nation in Switzerland, a commercial nation in England, and a nation devoted to the arts in Italy” (II.i.5). The France seen in the Henriad not only featured a modern, centralized nation-state endowed with wealth and military prowess, its way of life stood on the borderland between “old manners on the one hand and new manners on the other,” as “barbarism was expiring, and the brilliant age of the great Louis began to dawn” (II.i.5). Voltaire being Voltaire, his epic poem features “little more than nothing” of the marvelous; “if we were not acquainted with the wretched system which froze the poetic genius of Voltaire, we should be at a loss to conceive how he could have preferred allegorical divinities to the marvelous of Christianity,” as He “imparted no warmth to his inventions except in those passages where he has ceased to be a philosopher that he may become a Christian” (II.i.5). He even goes so far as to introduce “his philosophy into heaven,” imagining a “Supreme Being” who judges all religious believers—the “Bonze and the Dervish, the Jew and the Mohammedan”—alike. “Was this to be expected of the muse?” (II.i.5). And overall, Voltaire “is greatly to be pitied for having possessed that twofold genius which extorts at the same time our admiration and our hatred” in its self-contradictory attempts to build up and to throw down, “extol[ling] the age of Louis XIV to the skies, and afterward attack[ing] in detail the reputation of its great men,” then both “prais[ing] and slander[ing] antiquity,” as well (II.i.5). “While his imagination enchants you, he throws around him the glare of a fallacious reason, which destroys the marvelous, contracts the soul, and shortens the sight” (II.i.5). Manly, he still succumbs to the woman’s vice, as “his vanity caused him, throughout his life, to act a part for which he was not formed, and which was very far beneath him. He bore, in fact, no resemblance to Diderot, Raynal, or D’Alembert. The elegance of his manners, the urbanity of his demeanor, his love of society, and, above all, his humanity, would probably have rendered him one of the most inveterate enemies of the revolutionary system. He is most decidedly in favor of social order, while unconsciously sapping its foundations by attacking the institutions of religion.” “His infidelity prevented his attaining the height for which nature qualified him,” making him “an everlasting warning to all those who pursue the career of letters,” a writer whose “contradictions of style and sentiment” resulted from his lacking “the great counterpoise of religion” (II.i.5).

How, then, does Christianity provide such a counterpoise for poets? It does, because Christianity is “a double religion,” one that connects “the nature of intellectual being” with “our own nature,” bringing “the mysteries of the Divinity and the mysteries of the human heart” together, without confusing them (II.ii.1), connecting religion, Divinity, and intellectual being with morality, man, and the heart. “The philosophy of the present day extols polytheism” because it keeps the immoral gods (and, behind them, amoral Fate) separate from the human heart, while “censur[ing] Christianity for having united the moral with the religious force” (II.ii.1 n.1). True, the ancients divinized ‘Justice’ and ‘Wisdom,’ but this gesture at morality was “destroyed, particularly for the people”—as distinct from the aristocrats—by “the worship of the most infamous divinities” (II.ii.1 n.1). For example, “the moral precepts which occur in Homer are almost always independent of the celestial action; they consist merely in a reflection by the poet on the event which is relating or the catastrophe which he describes” (II.ii.1 n.1). Such humanistic morality needs no support from such gods. Christianity, as it were, internalizes religion, which it understands as a support for morality within the human soul itself. This characteristic of Christianity gives a new dimension of drama to poetry. While the comparison of ancient and Christian epic poetry seemed to end in a judgment of parity with respect to what Chateaubriand calls “the marvelous,” the “relations of supernatural things,” Christianity enables poets to present the psychomachia along with the theomachia (II.ii.1).

Chateaubriand shows this in comparing Homer’s Ulysses and Penelope to Milton’s Adam and Eve. The “meeting of Ulysses and Penelope is, perhaps, one of the most exquisite specimens of ancient genius” (II.ii.2). The understated reunion of “a pair who meet again after an absence of twenty years, and who, without uttering any vehement exclamations, seem as if they had parted only the preceding day,” impresses Chateaubriand as beautiful because true (II.ii.2). The ancients are “more simple, more august, more tragic, more fertile, and, above all, more attentive to truth than the moderns,” with “a better taste, a nobler imagination,” and “without affectation of ornament” (II.ii.2). But the simplicity of Homer’s Ulysses bespeaks his “unpolished nature,” whereas Adam “though but just created and without experience, is already the perfect model of man”—noble, majestic, perfectly innocent, “and at the same time full of intelligence” (II.ii.3). It is true that “in the descriptions of the pleasures of love the great poets of antiquity evince at once a simplicity and a chastity that are astonishing,” while modern poets “inflame the senses,” but that is because “it exhibits a beautiful ideal” (II.ii.3). Christian poets understand sin and the sublime effort of overcoming sin. “Penelope and Ulysses remind us of past troubles; Adam and Eve point to impending woes,” knowing that without God’s intervention there can be no happy ending to human life (II.ii.3). Homer ascends from pain to pleasure; Milton descends “from prosperity to tears,” making his readers “more sad, more sensitive, because the heart scarcely pauses on the present, and already anticipates the calamities with which it is threatened,” a condition truer to nature (II.ii.3). 

Chateaubriand completes his survey of poetic portrayals of the family by contrasting ancient and Christian fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. Homer’s Priam “displays an admirable mixture of grief, address, propriety, and dignity” (II.ii.4). “With what respectable and sacred skill does the venerable sovereign of Ilium…lead the haughty Achilles to listen, even with composure, to the praise of Hector himself!” (II.ii.4). Enraged by Hector’s killing of his friend, Patroclus, Achilles now hears of a hero whose corpse was mangled, torn apart by dogs and vultures, but died defending “his brothers and the walls of Troy” (II.ii.4). Finally, after speaking of men “to the son of Thetis,” an immortal, “reminding him of the just gods,” Priam “leads him back to the recollection of Peleus,” his human father (II.ii.4). The finest father seen in Homer restores the balance between divine and human. Among the moderns, Voltaire’s tragedy, Zara, presents “a father to contrast with Priam” (II.ii.5). Voltaire himself eschewed his usual satire here and, as he wrote, “endeavor[ed] to introduce whatever appears most pathetic and most interesting in the Christian religion” (II.ii.5). True, Voltaire is no Homer; the scene between Lusignan and his daughter “cannot be compared, either in point of arrangement, strength of design, or beauty of poetry,” to Homer’s dialogue between Priam and Achilles, “but the triumph of Christianity will on that account be only the more complete,” since Lusignan is a father whose blood and sufferings “are blended with the misfortunes, the blood, and the sufferings of Jesus Christ”; he is a ‘type’ of Christ, and the way “the cause of a father and the cause of God are mingled together,” as “the venerable age of Lusignan and the blood of the martyrs exert the authority of religion,” lends him a stature that even Homer’s grieving, prudent, and noble father cannot match (II.ii.5).

With respect to mothers, Chateaubriand compares the Andromache of Homer, Euripides, and Virgil to the Andromache of Racine. “We here propose to open a new path for criticism, by seeking in the sentiments of a pagan mother, delineated by a modern author, those Christian traits which that author may have introduced into his picture without being aware of it himself” II.ii.6). The Andromache of Homer and Virgil is more wife than mother; the Andromache of Euripides only “servile and ambitious” (II.ii.6). “Racine’s Andromache has greater sensibility, is more interesting in every respect, than the ancient Andromache”; she is “a Christian mother”—more “tender” than her ancient counterparts “without being less provident, sometimes forget[ting] her sorrows while embracing her son” (II.ii.6). Why? Because “the ancients bestowed upon infancy no great portion of their attention; they seem to have considered swaddling-clothes and a cradle as too simple for their notice,” while “the God of the gospel alone was not ashamed to speak of the little children, and to hold them up as an example to men” (II.ii.6). The pride of the ancients contrasts poorly with the humility of the Christians. “The Christian submits to the severest vicissitudes of life; but his resignation evidently springs from a principle of virtue, for he abases himself under the hand of God alone, and not under the hand of man. In fetters he retains his dignity; with a fidelity unmixed with fear, he despises the chains which he is to wear but for a moment, and from which Providence will soon release him” (II.ii.6).

With respect to sons, Chateaubriand compares Antilochus, the son of King Nestor and friend of Achilles, with Don Gusman, son of the Christian gentleman Don Alvarez in Voltaire’s Alzire, ou les Américains, a tragedy set in Peru in the years following the Spanish conquest. Homer recounts that Antilochus sacrificed himself to save his father. By contrast, Don Gusman is a rebellious son, who ignores his kindly father’s monitions to bring the Indians to Christianity gently. Instead, Gusman persecutes them; mistakenly believing that the rebel leader, Zamore, has been killed, he marries his wife, a convert. When Zamore returns and mortally wounds Gusman, the Spaniard repents of his religious hatred and forgives his killer. Voltaire’s play aims not so much at attacking Christianity (as he was wont to do, elsewhere) than at taming Christian zealotry. Chateaubriand finds Nestor and Antilochus noble, but “the peace that reigns in the bosom of Alvarez is not the mere peace of nature,” and Gusman’s turn away from persecution and his spirit of forgiveness impress him more than the Greek son’s sacrifice (II.ii.7).

Similarly, with respect to daughters, Chateaubriand finds Zara superior to Euripides’ Iphigenia. Both daughters “devote themselves to the religion of their country,” and their fathers both demand that they sacrifice their love for the sake of that religion; “for a female passionately in love to live and renounce the object of her affections is perhaps a harder task than to submit to death itself” (II.ii.8). But “why should the Greek virgin bow submissive to Jupiter,” a “tyrant whom she must detest”? (II.ii.8). In Euripides’ play, “the spectator sides with Iphigenia against heaven”; “pity and terror, therefore, spring solely from natural considerations” (II.ii.8). Take religion out of it and the play loses none of its force. “In Zara, on the contrary, if you meddle with the religion you destroy the whole” (II.ii.8). Zara loved a man who persecuted Christians. In countermanding her passion, her father imposes a sacrifice of feeling for Christian obligation. “Here Christianity goes farther than nature, and consequently harmonizes better with poetry, which aggrandizes objects and is fond of exaggeration” (II.ii.8). Zara is a martyr not by sacrificing her life for her God but by sacrificing her natural sentiment for Him, and for her father. Christianity “is itself a kind of poetry,” sublime as well as beautiful, “depriv[ing] the poet of none of the advantages enjoyed by antiquity for the delineation of the natural characters,” while “offer[ing] him, in addition, all its influence in those same characters,” thereby “augment[ing] his power by increasing his means, and multiplies the beauties of the drama by multiplying the sources from which they spring” (II.ii.8).

Moving from the “natural” characters within the family to the “social” characters outside it, Chateaubriand considers the priest and the warrior. “Antiquity presented nothing more to the poet than a high-priest, a sorcerer, a vestal, a sibyl” (II.ii.9). The Christian village curate offers the poet much more. He compares the priests seen in Virgil with Racine. Chateaubriand has more sympathy for Virgil than for any other poet of antiquity, finding in him a brother in soul. “May it not be that souls endowed with the finer sensibilities are naturally inclined to complain, to desire, to doubt, to express themselves with a kind of timidity; and that complaint, desire, doubt, and timidity are privations of something?” (II.ii.10). Virgil is first among “the pensive poets,” whose “favorite images…are almost always borrowed from negative objects, as the silence of night, the shade of the forests, the solitude of the mountains, the peace of the tombs, which are nothing but the absence of noise, of light, of men, and of the tumults and storms of life” (II.ii.10). As the poet of these beautifies, Virgil is unsurpassed.

But “however exquisite the beauty of Virgil’s verse may be, Christian poetry exhibits something superior” (II.ii.10). It is true that “in the soft and tender scenes…Virgil bursts forth in all his genius”; and in his pensiveness, his melancholy, Virgil again wins the palm, as Racine “lived too much in society, and too little in solitude,” the court of Louis XIV refining his taste and giving him “the majesty of forms,” nonetheless “placed him at too great a distance from nature and rural simplicity,” incapable of writing anything like the Eclogues (II.ii.10). “Virgil is the friend of the solitary, the companion of the private hours of life” (II.ii.10). Still, as a Christian, Racine “is in general superior…in the invention of character”—Christianity being the religion that attends to the individual person in its relation to the personal God. “We feel greater admiration” for Virgil, “greater love” for Racine; “the sorrows depicted by the first are too royal; the second addresses himself more to all ranks of society,” and while “the characters of tragedy ought to be taken from the upper ranks alone of society” because they elevate our attention beyond the banalities of our own lives, the “distresses” suffered by tragic heroes and heroines “ought to be common” (II.ii.10). It is to these sorrows the Christian priest brings the balm of his sympathy, reminding the great of their debt to God. No ancient poet can bring such a priest onto the stage because no such priest existed in antiquity.

The warrior of antiquity was a hero; the warrior of Christendom is a knight. The characters of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered “appear to us superior to those of the Iliad” (II.ii.11). “What a vast difference, in fact, between those knights so ingenuous so disinterested, so humane, and those perfidious, avaricious, ferocious warriors of antiquity, who insulted the lifeless remains of their enemies—as poetical by their vices as the former were by their virtues!” (II.ii.11). Christian morality is superior to the morality of polytheism, and this gives Tasso “an important advantage” over Homer (II.ii.11).

How so? Chateaubriand begins by identifying two kinds of “the beautiful ideal”—physical and moral (II.ii.11). Both are “the offspring of society” not of the “state of nature” (II.ii.11). Whereas the songs of savages “merely aim…at giving a faithful representation of what they see” in the nobility and simplicity they find around them (“you find in them no marks of bad taste”), “they are monotonous, and the sentiments which they express never rise to heroism” (II.ii.11). Homeric Greece has already risen above natural life. “In proportion as society multiplied the wants of life,” poets of this early civil society learned to select from this more complex palette, precisely because they intended to present those objects “susceptible of a more beautiful form, or produced a more agreeable effect,” rejecting those objects which, though desired, were not so susceptible (II.ii.11). Unlike poets in the state of nature, poets in civil society can ‘go wrong,’ select poorly; for them, the beautiful was now an ‘ideal’—something to be discovered and ‘put together’ out of multiple elements, many of them unsuitable, ugly, base—whether in physical form or morally. Only man is “susceptible of being represented more perfect than nature, and, as it were, approaching to the divinity”—an “admirable proof of the grandeur of our destiny and the immortality of the soul” (II.ii.11). 

It is Christianity that moral beauty, precisely as the sublime, as the surpassing of sinful human nature, comes to the forefront of poetry. In war, this “constitutes the beauty of the ages of chivalry, and gives them a superiority over the heroic as well as over modern times” (II.ii.11). “Polytheism furnishes no means of correcting barbarous nature and supplying the deficiencies of the primitive virtues,” whereas modernity, in its characteristic form of idealism, an expression of its ambition to conquer nature, has become “too remote from nature and from religion in every respect,” blocking poets from “faithfully depict[ing] the interior of our families, and still less the secret of our hearts” (II.ii.11). “Chivalry alone presents the charming mixture of truth”—the beauties of nature and perhaps also reality of human sinfulness—and “fiction “—the exclusion of vice in the representation of the ideal knight, Tasso’s Godfrey (II.ii.11). “Thus, while we see Tasso merged in nature for the description of physical objects, he rises above nature for the perfection of those in the moral order” (II.ii.11). 

At best, antiquity could culminate in Virgil’s “philosophic hero,” Aeneas, a man without vice—sober, moderate, what the French call un homme sérieux. But Aeneas’ “purely moral virtues are essentially frigid; they imply not something added to the soul, but something retrenched from it; it is the absence of vice rather than the presence of virtue” (II.ii.12). By contrast, “the religious virtues” in Christianity “have wings”—the wings of agape. “They are highly impassioned, anxious to do good” and “not content with abstaining from evil” (II.ii.12). In “the activity of love” the knight proves always faithful; he never lies; he is poor and therefore without self-interest; charitable, he “traveled throughout the world, assisting the widow and the orphan”; he exhibited the “sensibility and delicacy” of a Christian; he had “the valor of modern heroes,” taught by the religion which holds “that the merit of a man should be measured not by bodily strength, but by greatness of soul” (II.ii.12). Hence, “though certain to meet death, he has not even a thought of flight”—a valor that “has become so common” in Christendom “that the lowest of our private soldiers is more courageous than an Ajax, who fled before Hector, who in his turn ran away from Achilles” (II.ii.12). And this says nothing of the clemency Christian knights show to the vanquished, far removed from the rage of Achilles, who drags Hector’s corpse round and round the grieving city of Troy. While ‘ideal,’ such Christian virtues are not “a purely poetical invention” (II.ii.12). “There are a hundred instances of Christians who have resigned themselves into the hands of infidels wither to deliver other Christians, or because they were unable to raise the sum which they had promised” (II.ii.12).

Passionate in the way agape may be called a passion, “Christianity has changed the relations of the passions by changing the basis of vice and virtue” (II.iii.1). Unlike “the religions of antiquity,” Christianity “is a heavenly wind which fills the sails of virtue and multiplies the storms of conscience in opposition to vice” (II.iii.1). For the ancients, humility was a vice, and pride was confused with magnanimity or greatness of soul, whereas for Christians “pride is the first of vices and humility the chief of virtues” (II.iii.1). Agapic love has no fear of lowliness; for the Christian, courage and humility conjoin and magnanimity or greatness of soul becomes “poetic generosity”—a “species of passion (for to that length it was carried by the knights) to which the ancients were utter strangers” (II.ii.1). Similarly, agape lends to friendship a new foundation, showing us the “twofold nature” of our friend and of ourselves, “the good and bad of our heart” (II.iii.1). In so doing, we learn “that two men may be perfect friends” while “incessantly, in some way, attract[ing] and repel[ling] one another; they must have genius of equal power, but of a different kind; contrary opinions, but similar principles; different antipathies and partialities, but at the bottom the same sensibility; opposite tempers, and yet like tastes; in a word, great contrasts of character and great harmonies of heart” (II.iii.1). In courage, in magnanimity, and in friendship alike, Christians find in “the virtuous sentiments on earth” a “foretaste of the bliss that is reserved for us” after death—a bliss that ancient polytheism, with its dreary Hades awaiting the souls of the dead, could never hope for (II.iii.1). 

Voltairean modernity accuses Christianity of “strip[ping] life of its enchantments” by “revealing to us the foundations upon which rest the passions of men,” all of them tinctured in nature by sin (II.iii.1). The moderns would debase the imagination “by allowing it to indulge in unbounded curiosity” (II.iii.1). Like all true poets, Christianity in fact has only “drawn the veil of doubt and obscurity over things which it is useless to know; and in this it has shown its superiority over that false philosophy which is too eager to penetrate into the nature of man and to fathom the bottom of every thing” (II.iii.1). In concentrating its attention on “sounding the abysses of the heart,” such philosophy sinks into those abysses, “transfer[ring] the reasoning spirit to the passions,” leading us “to doubt of every thing generous and noble,” thereby “extinguish[ing] the sensibilities, and, as it were, murder[ing] the soul” (II.iii.1). 

Thanks to Christianity, the eros of the ancients differs fundamentally from the love of the moderns. “That mixture of the senses and of the soul—that species of love of which friendship is the moral element—is the growth of modern times,” as Christianity moved “to purify the heart,” finding “means to transfuse spirituality even into the passion that seemed least susceptible of it” (II.iii.2)—all to the benefit of poets and novelists. (Clementina, in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, “is one of those masterpieces of composition of which antiquity affords no example” [II.iii.2].) Chateaubriand first considers “impassioned love,” the love seen in modern civil society, and pastoral or “rural” love (II.iii.2). Each has been transformed by Christianity.

Impassioned love “ravages the soul in which it reigns,” becoming “its own illusion, its own insanity, its own substance” outside “the gravity of marriage” and “the innocence of rural manners” (II.iii.2). It is a passion enabled by leisure, seen and felt “only in those ranks of society where want of employment leaves us oppressed with the whole weight of our heart, together with its immense self-love and its everlasting inquietudes” (II.iii.2). Virgil’s Dido feels “a secret fire circulat[ing] in her veins”; “indiscretions begin, pleasures follow, disappointment and remorse succeed,” and she is soon forsaken by her lover (II.iii.3). But she can only pray to Cupid and to Aeneas, both of whom enticed and then betrayed her, and then to “the places that had witnessed her transports,” in a vain effort at supporting herself “by animating the insensible objects” around her (II.iii.3). Persons divine and human do not care, while remembered settings cannot. Racine’s Phèdre, by contrast, amounts to “a Christian wife” set by the dramatist in ancient Greece (II.iii.3). She is jealous because Christianity valorizes fidelity; she fears hellfire because she knows even death won’t remove her pain. Christianity gives Racine the capacity to depict “a gradation of feeling, a knowledge of the sorrows, the anguish, and the transports of the soul, which the ancients never approached” in “a mixture of sensuality and soul, of despair and amorous fury” (II.iii.3). She is no ‘ancient’ but a “reprobate Christian,” a “sinner fallen alive into the hands of God; her words are the words of the self-condemned to everlasting tortures” (II.iii.3). 

If Phèdre suffers a more exquisite soul-torture than Dido could feel, “Christianity proves a real balm” for the wounds Cupid’s arrows inflict (II.iii.4). “It lulls our woes, it strengthens our wavering resolution, it prevents relapses by combating the dangerous power of memory in a soul scarcely yet cured,” shedding around us the “peace, fragrance, and light” of agape, which never dies, never betrays, never debauches (II.iii.4). And so Richardson’s heroines can “show that mankind are truly happy only in proportion as they listen to the dictates of conscience and follow the path of duty” because the novelist could imagine them out of “the rich resources of his own mind, from the study of the Bible, and a quick insight into human nature and human character” (II.iii.4). Richardson “has been justly styled ‘the great master of the human heart,’ ‘the Shakespeare of Romance,'” whose long novels give him the space needed “to develop the springs of human action, and to give a distinct view of the progressive, various, and complex movements of the human mind” (II.iii.4). Little wonder that modern ‘secularist’ readers neglect them. [1] 

The correspondence between the twelfth-century theologian and logician Peter Abelard and his brilliant student, then lover, Eloise is no novel, but rather illustrates the poetic character of erotic love between Christians in reality, with no need for imaginative embellishments. After Eloise became pregnant, the lovers married under the auspices of Eloise’s uncle, Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame, who then betrayed their secret in order to ruin Abelard. Eloise escaped to a convent and Fulbert had his rival castrated by a hired gang. Both lovers took holy orders, beginning the long series of letters. “Give Racine To Eloisa for an interpreter, and the picture of her woes will be a thousand times more impressive than that of Dido’s misfortunes, from the tragical effect, the place of the scene, and a certain awfulness which Christianity throws around objects to which it communicates its grandeur. It would be impossible for antiquity to furnish such a scene, because it had not such a religion.” (II.iii.5). “Dido loses only an ungrateful lover. How different the anguish that rends the heart of Eloisa,” who must “choose between God and a faithful lover whom she has involved in misfortunes”—the “God of Sinai,” a “jealous God” who “insists on being loved in preference” (II.iii.5).

For examples of pastoral love in ancient and Christian poetry, Chateaubriand selects Ovid’s tale of Cyclops and Galatea, comparing it to Saint-Pierre’s then-celebrated novel, Paul et Virginie. Ovid retells (and embellishes) the story of the unrequited love of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, for the sea-nymph, Galatea. Polyphemus discovers her in the arms of the mortal, Acis, then crushes his rival with a boulder. The story ends, characteristically, with a metamorphosis, whereby Galatea transforms Acis into a river-god. It cannot be numbered among the more touching pastoral poems, even by ‘ancient’ standards. Saint-Pierre sets his lovers in unspoiled Mauritius, where they meet as children. Rousseauian in many ways, the novel nonetheless is “full of allusions to the Scriptures” and the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, which “shed their spiritual beauty over the work” (II.iii.6). In the end, Virginie “dies for the preservation of one of the principal virtues enjoined by Christianity,” modesty; “it would have been absurd to make a Grecian woman die for refusing to expose her person,” but “the lover of Paul is a Christian virgin, and what would be ridiculous according to the impure notions of heathenism becomes in this instance sublime,” the culmination of a story that “none but a Christian could have related” (II.iii.6).

The Christian religion is itself a passion, one called “fanaticism” by “the present age” of self-described Enlightenment (II.iii.8). To understand it as a passion “supplies the poet with immense treasures”: the dramatic struggle with other passions; its seriousness, given its claim to be the rightful ruling passion of all souls; its “eternal beauty,” for which “Plato’s disciples were so anxious to quit the earth” (II.iii.8). But there is no permissible suicide for Christians; unlike the “Athenian philosophers,” they are commanded to “remain in the world in order to multiply their sacrifices, and to render themselves more worthy, by a long purification” or sanctification, “of the object of their desires” (II.iii.8). There is nothing more poetic, in Chateaubriand’s sense, nothing more sublime, than the glory of martyrdom. St. Jerome leaves Rome, retreats to the forests of Jordan, where “he fights hand-to-hand with all his passions,” his only weapons “tears, fasting, study, penance, and, above all, love” (II.iii.8). Sublime not beautiful, he worships “the divine beauty” and begs for the grace of comfort from the Person who alone possesses it. For poetry that evokes the Christian passion one turns not so much to Racine but to Corneille and especially to his portrayal of Polyeuctes, with his “greatness of soul,” his dignity, his “divine enthusiasm” (II.iii.8).

Tocqueville must have read Chateaubriand’s final chapter on Christian passion with particular care. There now exists, Chateaubriand writes, “a state of the soul which, we think, has not been accurately described” (II.iii.9). Prior to the development of the strong passions, it haunts modern civilization. With their printing presses and high rates of literacy, modern nations possess far more books than any civilization of the past. These give us “knowledge without experience”; they disillusion us “before we have enjoyed”; our desires remain but their objects seem pointless (II.iii.9). Thanks to the multitude of poems and novels, “our imagination is rich, abundant, and full of wonders but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms” (II.iii.9). “The heart turns a hundred different ways to employ the energies which it feels to be useless to it” (II.iii.9).

“The ancients knew little of this secret inquietude, this irritation of the stifled passions fomenting all together” (II.iii.9). There was not even a word for ‘boredom’ among men absorbed in political life. “The business of the forum and of the popular assemblies engaged all their time, and, left no room for this tedium of the heart” (II.iii.9). For their part, women managed the household—hard, physical work for the poor, and for the rich consuming the energies spent in constant attention and care. As men and women lived separate but all-consuming lives, men’s passions were not “softened by the mixture of theirs,” made “uncertain and delicate” in a way that “render[s] the marks of the masculine character less distinct” (II.iii.9). Without such intense hopes and fears respecting life after death, men were also less disposed by religion “to meditation and desire,” to the “inexhaustible abstractions and meditations” attendant to a religion that exhibits “the twofold picture of terrestrial griefs and heavenly joys,” hearts filled with “present evils and distant hopes” (II.iii.9). Modern souls that have abandoned Christianity, ardent though they may be, “have no monastery to enter, or have not the virtue that would lead them to one”; “they feel like strangers among men”—alienated, a later generation would say—gripped by a “culpable sadness” or melancholy “which springs up in the midst of the passions, when these passions, without object, burn themselves out in a solitary heart” (II.iii.9). [2]

If Christianity gives poets a better field in the human soul than either antiquity or modernity, did the ancient poets not benefit from the richness the regnant mythology imparted to the natural world? Did it not infuse nature with what Chateaubriand has called “the marvelous”?

It did so infuse it, but to the detriment of poetry. I know “the weight of authority” bears down against me, Chateaubriand admits, but mythology in fact “circumscribed the limits of nature and banished truth from her domain” (II.iv.1). The ancient poets couldn’t see nature’s scenery through the crowd of gods, satyrs, and nymphs, “the ridiculous divinities of fabulous times” (II.iv.1). As a result, “the poetry which we term descriptive was unknown throughout all antiquity”; scenery, the seasons, “the variations of the sky and weather” seldom find a voice to praise them (II.iv.1). There is no James Thompson in Greek antiquity. By “peopling the universe with elegant phantoms,” the ancients “banished from the creation its solemnity, its grandeur, and its solitude” (II.iv.1). To see those dimensions of nature, one needs the Creator-God, the One who “has imparted his immensity to nature,” and a man who finds himself in but never entirely of nature, separated from his, and its, Creator, even as he feels His care for him (II.iv.1). More than most men of his time, Chateaubriand had felt this, having traveled in America. “Penetrate those forests…coeval with the world. What profound silence pervades those retreats when the winds are hushed!” (II.iv1). The Christian poet, alone with nature, with no thoughts Pan or the Nereids, finds in nature’s immensities “an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls,” “which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fullness of joy in the presence of its Author” (II.iv.1). “Hitherto solitude had been looked upon as frightful, but Christianity found in it a thousand charms” (II.iv.3). 

To depopulate the lands and seas of their imagined divinities in no way diminishes the Christian’s sense of the marvelous. The gods of the ancients “shar[ed] our virtues and our vices,” being “but a species of superior men” (II.iv.4). Even the “abstract” God of the Christian philosophers, “so admirably delineated by Tertullian and St. Augustine,” is “far superior to the Theos of Plato,” being the Creator, not a mere demiurge (II.iv.4). And the personal, jealous, loving, hating, wrathful Father God addressed by the Christian poets, his compassionate Son, along with loving Mother of God, the saints and the angels, care for man, never leading him “to any idea of depravity and vice,” as the pagan deities did (II.iv.4). As for the demons, who do just that, the denizens of Hell war with those of Heaven in a war in which the stakes are higher for us, and which poets therefore conceive more vividly, than any palace revolution in Olympus. And even considered without the immortals who surround them, Jupiter’s majesty cannot match the majesty of Jehovah, who needs only to say “Let there be light” for there to be light (II.iv.5).

Jupiter and the other “deities of polytheism” are generally human-all-too-human (II.iv.6). “If they happened to oppose each other, it was only in the quarrels of mortals They were soon reconciled by drinking nectar together.” (II.iv.6). Christianity’s irrevocable distinction between good and evil, with “spirits of darkness incessantly plotting the ruin of mankind, and spirits of light solely intent on the means of saving them,” “opens to the imagination a source of numberless beauties” (II.iv.6), and Christian poets have yet fully to avail themselves “of all the stores with which the marvelous of Christianity is capable of supplying the Muses” (II.iv.7). “Philosophers may laugh at the saints and angels; but had not the philosophers themselves their demi-gods,” the heroes of antiquity? (II.iv.7). Pythagoras calls his readers to honor them and, while “under polytheism sophists sometimes appeared more moral than the religion of their country, among us, never has a philosopher, however extraordinary his wisdom, risen higher than Christian morality” (II.iv.7). And insofar as the existence of angels suggests a sort of polytheism, it is a polytheism purged of sin in conflict with the horde of demons, wholly evil, with Satan their anti-Christ tyrant. Dante, Tasso, and Milton have shown how master poets can frame new, truer, and greater epic poems from these beings. Their only limitation is the indescribable beauty of Heaven, where the “unbounded felicity” of life proves “too much above the human condition for the soul to be touched by it” (II.iv.16).

Chateaubriand concludes his comparison of ancient and Christian poetry by setting Homer’s epics against the Bible. With the Bible, even satirists often hold back. “Those who do not believe in the authenticity of the Bible nevertheless believe, in spite of themselves, that there is something more than common” in it (II.v.1). There is, after all, “not a situation in life for which we may not find in the Bible a text apparently dictated with an express reference to it” (II.v.1). How implausible, and how risible, then, can it be? For the poet, this goes beyond the Bible’s substance, which comprehends the origin of the world and “the prediction of its end,” “the groundwork of all human sciences,” a survey of political regimes and states, moral conduct “applicable in prosperity and adversity, and to the most elevated as well as the most humble ranks of life” (II.v.1). The Bible also provides the best models of the principal literary styles: from history (Genesis, Deuteronomy, Job), to sacred poetry (the Psalms, the books of the prophets), to what might be called sacred rhetoric—the evangelical or gospel style (II.v.2). 

In its historical books, the Bible features something unmatched in antiquity. Not only do the words of the Book of Genesis combine sublimity and majesty with simplicity in a way even Homer cannot rival, it (and the other historical books) speaks simply of a matter: “The history of the Israelites is not only the real history of ancient days, but likewise the type of modern times,” as “each fact is of a twofold nature”—the Israelites being “a symbolical epitome of the human race, representing in its adventures all that has happened and all that ever will happen in the world,” including prefigurations of Christ Himself and His work (II.v.2). 

Reserving his discussion of Biblical poetry for his chapter on the parallels between the Bible and Homer, Chateaubriand contrasts the sacred rhetoric of the New Testament with its ancient counterpart. “Here the sublimity of the prophets is softened into a tenderness not less sublime; here love itself speaks; here the Word is really made flesh” (ii.v.2). And in so doing, that Word, in the enfleshed Person of Jesus, chooses for the head of the Church Peter, “the very one among his disciples who had denied him” (II.v.2). “The whole spirit of Christianity is unfolded in this circumstance. St. Peter is the Adam of the new law; the guilty and penitent father of the new Israelites,” who follow “a religion of mercy” as well as of judgment (II.v.2). At once a masterpiece of concision and of truth, the Gospel surpasses all the fine but merely human speeches of antiquity, from those of Demosthenes to those of Cicero. 

In its poetry, too, the Bible excels the epics of Homer. A people “who, by a remarkable combination, unite primitive simplicity with a profound knowledge of mankind,” the Israelites had a language to match: “concise, energetic, with scarcely any inflection in its verbs, expressing twenty shades of a thought by the mere apposition of a letter” (II.v.3). “A nation of an imitative and social genius—a nation elegant and vain, fond of melody and prodigal of words,” the Greeks also developed a language equally fitting to their character “in its intricate conjugations, in its endless inflections, in its diffuse eloquence” (II.v.3).

Accordingly, the Bible is “more solemn,” Homer “more lively” (II.v.3). “The simplicity of Scripture is that of an ancient priest, who, imbued with all the sciences, human and divine, pronounces from the recess of the sanctuary the precise oracles of wisdom,” while Homer’s simplicity “is that of an aged traveler, who, beside the hearth of his host, relates all that he has learned in the course of a long and chequered life” (II.v.3). Biblical hospitality is similarly spare. The guest’s needs are met but “no questions are asked him” and “he stays or pursues his journey as he pleases” (II.v.3). In Greece, he receives a luxurious welcome in return for a full account of his journey. “Take notice that the unknown guest is a stranger with Homer and a traveler in the Bible. What different views of humanity! The Greek implies merely a political and local idea, where the Hebrew conveys a moral and universal sentiment.” (II.v.3).

Biblical narrative, its use of Hebrew, also contrasts with Homeric narrative. “The narrative of the Bible is rapid, without digression, without circumlocution; it is broken into short sentences, and the persons are named without flattery” (II.v.3). Not so in Homer, who interrupts his story with “digressions, harangues, description of vessels, garments, arms, and scepters, by genealogies of men and things” (II.v.3). Israelite society was “much nearer to the state of nature than that sung by Homer”; all the selfish passions are awakened in the characters of the Odyssey, whereas they are dormant in those of Genesis” (II.v.3).

Whether describing person or things, the Bible selects one defining trait, whereas Homer inclines to prolixity and to detail. The Bible deploys metaphor, Homer simile. In approaching the sublime, the Bible makes it “burst upon you like lightning, and you are left wounded by the thunderbolt before you know how you were struck by it” (II.v.3). Homer instead builds up to the sublime, “arriving by degrees to its acme” (II.v.3). 

All of these contrasting traits may be seen in the Bible’s story of Joseph’s return to his father when laid next to Homer’s reunion of Ulysses and Telemachus. Homer compares “the sobs of Telemachus and Ulysses with the cries of an eagle and her young”; the Bible simply tells us, “He fell upon Benjamin’s neck, and kissed him, and wept; and Benjamin wept also, as he held him in his embrace.” Chateaubriand remarks, “Such is the only magnificence of style adapted to such occasions” (II.v.3). 

 

 

 

Note

1. Among the Americans in Chateaubriand’s century, the great Chief Justice, John Marshall, was also called “that great master of the human heart” by one of his colleagues on the Supreme Court. A judge, like a novelist, needs to know the abysses of the heart and to avail himself of the power to pull himself away from those abysses, to judge what he has seen there with justice and clemency, by the standard set by the Gospels.
2. Chateaubriand almost undoubtedly takes this theme from Pascal, who regards human restiveness as endemic to the post-lapsarian human soul as such. For his part, Chateaubriand’s kinsman and attentive reader Alexis de Tocqueville gave the theme a new articulation in Democracy in America, especially as seen in II.ii.13. While acknowledging that human restiveness has characterized human life as such since its beginning, or near its beginning, he finds that democracy—that is, equality of social conditions, not the political regime seen, most conspicuously, in ancient Greece—has intensified it. In aristocratic societies, all men have their place, and seldom leave it. In democratic societies, however, while there is little of the war of all against all that Hobbes thought he saw in the state of nature, there is a competition of all against all, as men jostle to satisfy their natural desire for well-being. Thus Americans are “grave and almost sad in their pleasures,” always in a hurry to satisfy them but never savoring them but always striving for more. If in aristocratic societies men struggle to maintain and sometimes to enhance their rank, under democracy “men will never found an equality that is enough for them”; social equality is a will-o’-the-wisp, a thing that stays just ahead of your reach for it. This leads democratic man to “melancholy,” as Chateaubriand experienced, after the political and social upheaval of the French Revolution, and beyond that to “disgust” and even to “madness.” (II.ii.13). With Pascal and Chateaubriand, Tocqueville calls this restiveness a vice. But in the America of the 1830s and 1840s, with its vast, unsettled territories in the West, it is an advantage, not the danger it is in Europe. It lends American society “a superabundant force, an activity that never ends,” one that “can bring forth miracles” of industry and commerce (II.ii.6 and II.ii.19). In this, it is noteworthy to observe, Americans are not mere materialists; “they love the sensation” of striving “as much as the gain” (II.ii.9). They also find a refuge from this restiveness in their homes, among their families, a place Europeans, with their disordered domestic morals, cannot find it.                                                                                                                                            The late Peter Augustine Lawler was the scholar who showed why Tocqueville listed Pascal as an influence equal to that of Rousseau (Lawler: The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993). It may be said that Chateaubriand provides a link between Pascal and Tocqueville. For Chateaubriand, modern atheism is the agent that aggravates human restiveness, for Tocqueville democracy. Chateaubriand associates modern atheism with the Enlightenment and the sometimes violent democratic forces it unleashed; Tocqueville ascribes the origin of democracy to the advent of Christianity itself, social equality’s effects then magnified by the establishment of the modern, centralized state, which completed the felling of the grand aristocratic oak. Both Chateaubriand and Tocqueville seek to find a role for the virtues of aristocracy in this modern, egalitarian world. In The Genius of Christianity, Chateaubriand evidently seeks to find the springs of the aristocratic spirit of self-government and magnanimity in Christianity by showing that there are indeed still things ‘above’ us, resistant to the leveling spirit of satirists. Tocqueville might concur, although he would caution that Christianity, with its doctrine of the equality of men under one God, pulls human societies toward democracy even as it retains many of the merits of the aristocratic society in which it originated.                                              

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 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 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 doctrine that withstands rational tests in the sense that they cannot be disproved by logical argument, and that upholds moral decency in civil society far more effectively than ‘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 parent 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 it, 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 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 fault which are condemned in the world of if he lead thos4e 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 as 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 form 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 “best of his works”—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 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,” its 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 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 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 curing 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 arb of mildness, an air of falsehood and rapacity a thousand times more hideous than their fury itself.” (V.vi.149). 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 political life that is well-ordered. “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 apprehending 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 whose citizens “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 to “to excess,” committing crimes under its sway, whereas 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.

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 confirms 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 form 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

1. 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).