The recovery of a lost classic

Those familiar with the French counter-revolution will recognize the Angelico Press republication of The Genius of Christianity: The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion for precisely what it is: The recovery of a lost classic. Along with Joseph de Maistre’s Considerations on France and Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce, Rene de Chateaubriand’s Genius stands as one of the cornerstones of the under-appreciated conservative Gallic tradition. Where de Maistre sought to expose the flaws in the political theories of Voltaire and Rousseau and Bonald brought to light the harm wrought by a revolutionary redefinition of marriage and the family, the Viscount de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) devoted himself to an even more important project: The defense of the Faith.

For just as in 21st-century America, in 18th and early 19th-century France it was fashionable to condemn religion as a force for ignorance and superstition, and to identify progress with secular humanism. As if he were Cato calling for the destruction of Carthage, the Deist Voltaire would repeatedly cry Ecrasez l’infame! to his fellow Frenchmen—that is, he exhorted them to wipe out what he deemed to be the infamous superstition of Catholicism. For his part Rousseau denied the doctrine of Original Sin, and insisted that Christianity was an unsuitable religion for a republic. At its most extreme, Enlightenment rhetoric took the form of this claim paraphrased from a poem by the atheistic and progressive Denis Diderot, inventor of the Encyclopedia: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

As a retort to critics of Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular, Chateaubriand composed a 700-page document which catalogues the myriad Christian contributions to law, government, medicine, morals, art, literature, philosophy, and science. Even in obvious, worldly terms the Gospel has been a blessing to man, argued Chateaubriand—to say nothing of the immortal soul. As Chateaubriand’s argument unfolds, he offers his own account of the rise of infidelity:

At the very time when so many new proofs of the greatness and wisdom of Providence were discovered, there were men who shut their eyes more closely than ever against the light. Not that those immortal geniuses, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Leibniz, and Newton, were atheists; but their successors, by an unaccountable fatality, 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.

Of the luminaries he mentions, only one—Copernicus—was Catholic, yet Chateaubriand is on to something when he emphasizes that none were religious skeptics. Kepler was inspired by faith, and quite explicit about his belief that the Heavens testify to the glory of God; Leibniz devoted much energy to formulating a theological bridge between Protestantism and the Catholic Church; Newton’s obsession with Scripture and prophecy was such that he bore more resemblance to a cult leader than a 21st-century militant atheist.

So the notion that religion has inhibited the advance of science is dispelled by the testimony of history, for “were not a Pope Gregory, who reformed the calendar, a Friar Bacon, probably the inventor of the telescope, Cuza, a cardinal, Gassendi, a priest, either the patrons or the luminaries of astronomy?” Looking even further back, “during those protracted calamities which accompanied and succeeded the fall of the Roman empire, the sciences had no other asylum than the sanctuary of that Church which they now so ungratefully profane.”

Chateaubriand was more a man of letters than of science, however, so he is at his best when expounding upon Christian contributions to literature. The Phaedra of Racine, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and Bossuet’s orations are but some of the underappreciated gems of Christian prose and poetry brought to light by Chateaubriand’s encomium. Needless to say, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost receive extended treatment, as epics believed by the author to match anything produced by Virgil or Homer.

A romantic, Chateaubriand also celebrated the institution of chivalry as one of the Church’s great achievements. While pre-Christian pagans may have been familiar with the virtue of courage, only with the Faith was the warrior fully integrated into a spiritual order and bound by a code of honor and mercy. The Knights of Malta served as a bulwark against Ottoman invasion, the Order of Santiago reconquered Spain from the Moors, and secular knights were the mainstay of kings throughout Europe. All had an identity rooted in the Catholic creed: “The formal law by which the military knights bound themselves to defend the faith, the resemblance between their ceremonies and the sacraments of the Church, their fasts, ablutions, prayers, confessions, monastic engagements, are sufficient evidence that all the knights had the same religious origin.” Those cynics who dwell upon occasions where the knight failed to live up to his high ideals might do well to ask themselves what life would have been like had there been no ideals at all.

Ironically but perhaps not surprisingly, Chateaubriand had himself been something of an unbeliever during his youth, until the shock of revolution prompted him to rethink his faith in the Enlightenment. Over the course of the French Revolution both his wife and his mother were imprisoned, and his brother was sent to the guillotine. Enlisting in the army of exiled French nobles, Chateaubriand saw action at the siege of Thionville, yet his real contribution to the counter-revolutionary cause lay not in his sword but in his pen. In addition to Genius, Chateaubriand also composed the scathing Bonaparte and the Bourbons, which dealt a public relations blow to Napoleon’s regime.

Of all the Francophone counter-revolutionaries Chateaubriand is the one closest to Americans, in more ways than one. He was not so disillusioned with the Enlightenment as to reject liberty as an ideal, and he was critical of reactionary attempts to restrict the press and revoke the extension of suffrage. As a visitor to the fledgling United States he not only made the acquaintance of Iroquois Indians but toured Boston, New York City, and the Niagara Falls. Through the agency of one Colonel Armand—a celebrated French cavalry officer who had helped the American colonials win their bid for independence—Chateaubriand even received a letter of introduction to George Washington. “There is a virtue,” Chateaubriand would write following his dinner with the US president, “in the look of a great man.”

Here and now, needless to say, Washington is as liable to be scorned as a slaveowner as he is to be hailed for greatness, for in post-America gratitude to America’s founders can no longer be taken for granted. Those of us anxious about the spiritual and cultural desolation now afflicting the land Chateaubriand once visited would do well to muse upon one of the French nobleman’s asides about the education of the young:

The vice of the day consists in separating abstract studies rather too much from literary studies. 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 a happy combination of natural and moral science, and above all by the inculcation of religious ideas, that we shall succeed in again giving to our youth that education which of old produced so many great men.

If nothing else, the Viscount is surely correct to observe that true education has less to do with test scores than it does with Christian character.

The Genius of Christianity: The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion
Vicount de Chateaubriand
Angelico Press, 2022
Paperback/Hardcover, 763 pages