"LE GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME"
Chateaubriand's book, _Le Génie du Christianisme_, which originally
bore the significant title _Beautés de la Religion Chrétienne_, marks
the transition from the first to the second stage of the reaction,
because, cold and devoid of real feeling as it is, it is an attempt to
vindicate and rehabilitate authority by means of an appeal to sentiment
and imagination.
It was a defence of Christianity of a perfectly new species, from the
fact that it appealed to imagination, not to faith; to sentiment, not
to reason. It impresses one as being proffered under the conviction
that reason was now inimical to Christianity, and that faith no longer
existed.
The author, not many years before he wrote this work, had been a
free-thinker, indeed a materialist. We have proof of this in some
marginal notes in his own handwriting, discovered by Sainte-Beuve in a
book which had belonged to him. Alongside of the words: "God, matter,
and destiny are one," Chateaubriand has written: "This is my system;
this is what I believe." Alongside of the following sentences: "You
say that God has created you free. That is not the point in question.
Did he foresee that I should fall, that I should be miserable to all
eternity? Yes, undoubtedly. In that case your God is nothing but
a horrible and unreasonable tyrant," we read in the margin: "This
objection is irrefutable, and completely demolishes the whole edifice
of Christian doctrine. But in any case it is doctrine which no one
believes in now."
This is the standpoint of Chateaubriand's youth, but one to which he
did not long adhere. He was too much the born doubter to be able to
hold firmly to even a negative conviction. What there was of faith
in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, namely, its belief in
the steady progress of humanity, was probably what he first rejected,
and on the loss of this conviction quickly followed the loss of all
the rest. He himself attributes his conversion to the influence of
his mother's dying prayer to him to keep to her faith. "I wept and
believed," he says.
Himself converted, or half converted, by means of sentiment, he
now endeavoured to influence others in the same manner. Although
intellectual receptivity for the dogmas of Christianity was no longer
to be looked for, it was surely still possible to arouse sympathy with
its touching, noble poetry. It was an idea characteristic of both the
period and the man, this of transforming the apology for Christianity
into aesthetics. He devotes a whole chapter to the sweet, melodious
music of the church bells. He describes the simple village church,
with its feeling of innocence and peace. He presents us with pictures
and symbols when we expect proofs. Bonald remarked that in books which
were works of reason, such as his own, truth displayed itself like a
king at the head of his army on the day of battle, while in books like
Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ it had more resemblance to a
queen on her coronation day, surrounded with everything magnificent and
beautiful that could be got together. His meaning is that Chateaubriand
aims rather at moving men than at convincing them. In private
conversation he expressed himself more bluntly. He said: "I gave my
pills as they were; he gave his with sugar."
Certainly no book affords a clearer indication of the want of serious
reality in the religious regeneration of the day. Its point of view
is that which men have agreed to call the romantic. It is to the past
it turns, and as the Romanticist is a man of imagination, he sees the
past in an imaginary light. The religion of the Romanticist is a parade
religion, a tool for the politician, a lyre for the poet, a symbol for
the philosopher, a fashion for the man of the world.
Like the German, the Danish, and, at a later period, the French
Romanticists, Chateaubriand loves the mysterious. He begins his
vindication of belief in authority by appealing to men's sense of
mystery in life generally: "There is nothing beautiful or sweet or
great in life that is not mysterious. The most wonderful feelings are
those which at once move and perplex us. Bashfulness, chaste love,
pure friendship, are full of mystery.... Is not innocence, which in
its essence is nothing but holy ignorance, the most ineffable mystery?
Women, the more admirable half of the human race, cannot live without
mysteries." The transition from this to the dogmas of a so-called
revealed religion strikes us as sudden.
De Maistre makes a somewhat similar use of mystery. When he has
shown that such and such a social institution is inexplicable, he
believes that he has proved it to be divine. There is, in his opinion,
no reasonable explanation for hereditary royalty and hereditary
nobility--which is proof sufficient that they exist by the grace of
God. What is there to be said in defence of war? Hardly anything,
thinks De Maistre; consequently war too is a mystery. A little
reflection shows us the necessity of such argument. Authority demands
mystery as its counterpart. Note what Michaud says in the dedication
of his poem, "An Exile's Spring" (_Le printemps d'un proscrit_), 1803:
"Society ought to have its mysterious side as well as religion; I have
always thought that we should at times believe in the laws of our
country as we believe in the commandments of God. In private as well as
in public life there are things which a man does better if he does them
without reflecting upon his reason for acting."
The style of Chateaubriand's work is dazzlingly brilliant. But for
this it would not have created the sensation it did. It contains
descriptions of nature, emotional outbursts, and some few sparsely
scattered thoughts of real value. But all that is of genuine value from
the literary and poetical point of view is to be found in the tales
_Atala_ and _René_, which, according to Chateaubriand's original plan,
were to have formed chapters of the work--where they would have cut a
curious figure among such chapters as those on missionaries and sisters
of mercy. They were, preliminarily, sent out as feelers long before
the main work, and they do not concern us now; we have studied them in
their historical significance in their proper place.[1]
In _Le Génie du Christianisme_ Chateaubriand did not, he has himself
told us, endeavour to prove that Christianity is excellent because it
comes from God, but that it comes from God because it is excellent.
He shows that men have been wrong in despising Christianity, that it
has beautiful, noble, poetic qualities. He does not perceive that, even
if he succeeds in proving in many instances the narrowness of view of
those Encyclopedists whom he is continually attacking, this in itself
is no manner of proof of the divine origin of religion.
The whole work is in reality an outcome of the dislike and contempt
which he had gradually developed for the philosophy and literature of
the eighteenth century. The spirit of this philosophy and literature
now appeared to him to be fatal to all the higher desires and
aspirations of the human soul. The eighteenth century had misunderstood
feeling and poetry. Therefore what it had exalted must be condemned,
and what it had dared to disdain must be exalted. And for what had it
shown greater contempt than for Christianity!
Chateaubriand was not a man of a pious, but of an artistic nature; and
he conceived a fruitful artistic idea. Perceiving that the classic
period in France had reached the term of its natural life, he contended
that the imitation of the works of heathen antiquity ought now to
cease. It had gone on, at least in appearance, for not less than 250
years. Poets had neglected national and religious subjects for those
of ancient mythology; by the end of the eighteenth century they were
not even imitating antiquity, but the seventeenth-century authors of
their own country. Now there had been enough of it; now it was time for
France to dismiss mythology and have a literature inspired by its own
history and its own religion.
In this roundabout way Chateaubriand arrived at his vindication of the
beauty of Christianity, and of its superiority in artistic value to any
of the heathen religions.
The nature of the vindication evidences the nature of the whole
movement which the work inaugurates. Its æsthetic part is preceded by
a dogmatic introduction which, in keeping with the rest of the book,
aims at proving the beauty of the dogmas of Christianity. I adduce a
few examples of the absurd results of this "how beautiful!" style of
reasoning.
Of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper Chateaubriand writes: "We do not
know what objections could be offered to a means of grace which evokes
such a chain of poetical, moral, historical, and supernatural ideas, a
means of grace which, beginning with flowers, youth, and charm, ends
with bringing God down to earth to give Himself as spiritual sustenance
to man." What objection indeed could be offered? None, if all this be
true.
In spite of his æsthetic bias, Chateaubriand sets to work with a good
deal of pedantry. Celibacy, as enjoined on the Catholic priesthood, is
considered first from the moral point of view, and, thus considered, is
denominated the most moral of institutions. A second chapter, with the
somewhat comical title: "Virginity, considered from the poetical point
of view," is devoted to the same subject. It ends with the following
burst of eloquence: "Thus we see that virginity, beginning in the
lowest link of the chain of beings (its significance among animals had
been taken into consideration), makes its way upwards to man, from man
to the angels, and from the angels to God, to lose itself in Him." In
the original edition, as if this were not enough, there was added: "God
is the great solitary, the eternal celibate of the universe." It is
curious that no notice should be taken of His paternal relation to the
second person of the Trinity. But this omission makes the appeal to
the case of the Saviour the more effective. Chateaubriand says: "The
law-giver of Christianity was born of a virgin and died virgin." And to
this he adds: "Did he not intend thereby to teach us that the earth, as
regarded human beings, was now, both for political and natural reasons,
sufficiently populated, and that, far from multiplying the race, we
ought rather to restrict its increase?"
We are struck dumb by finding Malthus's theory of population come
out as the sum and end of this Christian Romanticism. Who would have
believed that there was so much political economy in the Gospels!
On the subject of the Trinity we read: "In nature the number 3 seems
to be the number superior to all others; it is not a product; hence
Pythagoras calls it the number without a mother. Even in the doctrines
of polytheistic religions we here and there come upon a dim intuition
of the Trinity. The Graces chose its number as theirs."
Thus in Chateaubriand's imagination the Trinity is upborne by the three
Graces as Caryatides. In keeping with this is his attempt to prove the
divine origin of the cross from the existence of the constellation, the
Southern Cross.
In keeping with his defence of Christian dogma is such a defence of
the Christian form of worship as the following: "Speaking generally,
we may answer that the rites of Christianity are in the highest degree
moral, if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our
fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian
women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our
parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves." If
argument were required when it is perfectly self-evident that the same
defence may be offered for any religion, we might urge that it is a
very unsuitable one in this particular case, where the object in view
was to induce sons to abjure the anti-Christian beliefs professed by
their fathers.
No less droll are the arguments drawn from natural history to prove the
love displayed in the order of the universe. Chateaubriand writes: "Is
an alligator, is a serpent, is a tiger less loving to its young than a
nightingale, a hen, or even a woman?... Is it not as wonderful as it is
touching to see an alligator build a nest and lay eggs like a hen, and
a little monster come out of the shell just like a chicken? How many
touching truths are contained in this strange contrast! how it leads us
to love the goodness of God!"
Chateaubriand is positively jocose in his attempts to prove the divine
purpose evident in nature. He declares that the birds of passage come
to us at a season when the earth yields no crops on purpose to be fed;
and he maintains that the domestic animals are born with exactly the
amount of instinct required to enable us to tame them.
When the Neo-Catholic authors embark on any subject connected with
natural science, they at once become extremely comic. Any one
interested should read (in his review of Bonald's _La législation
primitive_) Chateaubriand's outburst of horror at having heard a little
boy answer his teacher's question: What is man? with the words: A
mammal. And in the same spirit De Maistre repeatedly asserts that the
whole science of chemistry requires to be placed on a different, a
religious basis, or declares his conviction that some honest scientist
will certainly succeed in proving that it is not the moon, but God, who
produces the ebb and flow of the tide, as also that water, which is an
element, cannot be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. He is of opinion
that birds are a living proof of the incorrectness of the law of
gravitation. In this connection one of the characters in his _Soirées
de St. Pétersbourg_ remarks that there is more of the supernatural in
birds than in other animals, a fact witnessed to by the signal honour
shown them in the choice of the dove to represent the Holy Spirit.
That alligators should lay eggs, that birds should fly--such feats are
miracles in the eyes of the Neo-Catholics.
On the dogmatic part of the work follows the æsthetic, which is the
more important. In it Chateaubriand endeavours to prove that "of all
the religions which have ever existed, the Christian religion is the
most poetical, the most human, the most favourable to freedom, to art,
and to literature--that to it the modern world owes everything, from
agriculture to the abstract sciences, from asylums for the unfortunate
to churches built by Michael Angelo and ornamented by Raphael--that
there is nothing more divine than its morality, nothing more beautiful
and noble than its dogmas and its rites--that it favours genius,
purifies taste, approves and stimulates virtuous passion, invigorates
thought, provides poets and artists with the noblest themes, &c., &c."
For two hundred years the great dispute had been going on as to the
comparative superiority of the works of ancient and modern literature.
It had occupied the minds of Corneille and Racine; it had produced the
earliest translations of Greek and Roman poetry; and it had by slow
degrees led the modern mind to recover its self-confidence, after the
first overpowering impression of the grandeur of ancient literature
had worn off. It was this two hundred years' long discussion which
Chateaubriand revived in a new form, namely, as the question of the
value of the Christian religion to poetry and the arts, compared with
that of the old mythologies. In the most remarkable manner he ignores
the fact that the great question in the case of a religion is not
whether or in what degree it is poetical, but whether it has the truth
on its side or not. Very remarkable, too, are the arguments to which
he has recourse to support his assertions! He vaunts, for example, the
æsthetic superiority of the Christian hell to the heathen Tartarus.
Is it not infinitely grander--"poetry of torture, hymns of flesh and
blood"?
He poetically jingles hell's instruments of torture, employs them as
æsthetic rattles for the old, dull children of the new century, and
brings into fashion a sort of drawing-room Christianity, specially
adapted to the requirements of the_ blasés_ upper classes of France. In
the seventeenth century men believed in Christianity, in the eighteenth
they renounced and extirpated it, and now, in the nineteenth, the
kind of piety was coming into vogue which consisted in looking at it
pathetically, gazing at it from the outside, as one looks at an object
in a museum, and saying: How poetic! how touching! how beautiful!
Fragments from the ruins of monasteries were set up in gardens, with a
figure dressed as a hermit guarding them; a gold cross was once more
thought a most becoming ornament for a fashionable lady; the audiences
at sacred concerts melted into tears. Men were touched by the thought
of all the comfort religion affords to the poor and the suffering. They
had lost the simple faith of olden days and now clung to externals,
to the significance of the Catholic church in literature and art, its
influence on society and the state. To make the antiquated principle of
authority look young and attractive they painted it with the rouge of
sentimental enthusiasm; but they only succeeded in making the principle
that had once been so awe-inspiring, ridiculous.
Constant wrote his book on religion in the house of his friend, Madame
de Charrière, Chateaubriand wrote his in the companionship of his
devoted and intimate friend, Madame de Beaumont, who assisted him
by searching for the quotations he required. His mind does not seem
to have been taken up with his work to the exclusion of all mundane
thoughts.
We know how grandiloquently Chateaubriand inveighed during Louis
XVIII.'s reign against the married priests, in what a bitter spirit he
stirred up the royalist and church party against them, how determined
he was that they should be deprived of every sou of their pay, to
punish them for having taken advantage of the laws of the Republic
to marry like other citizens. Yet was not he himself, as the author
of _Le Génie du Christianisme_ (in the preface to which he writes of
himself as "the humble Lévite"), a kind of priest, nay, more than a
common priest? And was not he married, and that, too, without the aid
of a priest? I draw attention to this because it is one of the thousand
signs of something that is to be detected everywhere throughout this
religious reaction, something to which I believe we are justified in
applying, ugly as it is, the word "hypocrisy."
Such, then, is Chateaubriand's book, and such are the circumstances in
which it came into being. To its unprecedented success and enormous
influence it owes an importance greater than its proper due. It was the
book of the moment; it smuggled in, well packed in sentimentality, that
principle of authority which was soon to ascend the throne.
[1] _Emigrant Literature_, pp. 17, 33.
V