François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity: Part the Fourth: Worship. Charles I. White translation. Baltimore: John Murphy and Company, 1875.
Aside from their attention to popular superstitions blending elements of pagan ‘nature-worship’ with Christian ceremonies, satirists of Christian practices have aimed much of their vitriol at Christian ceremonies themselves. They intend to deflate Christian beliefs by desacralizing the sacraments, sundering the ties of heart and mind implied in the command, “Do this in remembrance of Me.”
As in the previous section on the liberal arts, Chateaubriand begins his defense with a discussion of music, with Christendom’s distinctive sound, the Church bell. “To us it seems not a little surprising that a method should have been found, by a single stroke of a hammer, to excite the same sentiment, at one and the same instant, in thousands of hearts, and to make the winds and clouds the bearers of the thought of men” (IV.i.1). Thunder, the wind, the sea, the volcano, the waterfall, even “the voice of a whole assembled nation” have sublimity, have grandeur, but they all lack the harmony of bells (IV.i.1). And in its religious significance, bell-sound “has a thousand secret relations with men”—startling “the adulteress in her guilty pleasures,” catching “the ear of the atheist…in his impious vigils,” disturbing “the slumbers of our tyrants” (IV.i.1). “But, in a well-regulated society, the sound of the tocsin, suggesting the idea of succor, filled the soul with pity and terror, and thus touched the two great springs of tragical sensation” while invoking the supreme hope of Christian faith (IV.i.1). “Had bells been attached to any other edifice than to our churches they would have lost their moral sympathy with our hearts” (IV.i.1). But they have been, and so have not.
From hearing, the first among the senses that perceives the Word of God, Chateaubriand turns to the visual, to clerical vestments and Church ornaments. He emphasizes the use of candles in Christian services. Candles “perpetuate the memory of those times of persecution when the faithful assembled in tombs for the purpose of prayer,” “secretly lighting their torch beneath the sepulchral arches” and proceeding to the altar, “where a pastor, distinguished only by poverty and good works, consecrated offerings to the Lord” (IV.i.2). “This was truly the reign of Jesus Christ, the God of the humble and the afflicted”; “never were such exalted virtues seen among Christians as in those ages when, in order to worship the Lord of light and life, they were obliged to secrete themselves in the bosom of darkness and death” (IV.i.2). Fancy clerical dress and church paraphernalia easily invite ridicule from those who target Christianity. Chateaubriand wisely recalls the simpler practices of the early Church.
Words spoken and read combine hearing and seeing. Chateaubriand praises the Latin Mass. “An ancient and mysterious language—a language which changes not with the world—is well adapted to the worship of the Eternal, Incomprehensible, and Immutable Being; and, as the sense of our miseries compels us to raise a suppliant cry to the King of kings, is it not natural to address Him in the most beautiful idiom known to man? that in which prostrate nations once presented their petitions to Caesar?” (IV.i.3). Prayers in Latin “seem to increase the religious sentiment of the people” precisely because they do not understand the words, an “effect of our natural disposition to secrecy” (IV.i.3). The “disquieted soul, little acquainted with its own desires, delights in offering up prayers as mysterious as its own wants” (IV.i.3). In these passages, readers will see why Chateaubriand esteems mystery. It isn’t simply a matter inaugurating the ‘Romantic movement’ in literature, or of willful obscurantism. With Pascal, Chateaubriand understands the limitations of human knowledge. Whether he looks out at nature, up to God, down to Hell, or within, at his own soul, man learns to know that he does not know. The Enlightenment insisted that man could remove the shadows. Chateaubriand replies that too much light may cause man to forget the darkness unreached by the light he generates. To recover the sense of mystery and of wonder will make men less sure of themselves, more ready to rely on God. And if not that, at least not to despise those who do. Rather, to consider Christian mysteries “as the archetype of the law of nature” has nothing in it “revolting to a great mind” (IV.vi.13). “The truths of Christianity, so far from requiring the submission of reason, command, on the contrary, the most sublime exercise of that faculty,” an exercise which should include knowledge of our ignorance (IV.vi.13).
Accordingly, Chateaubriand lauds the simplicity, purity, and luminousness of the Lord’s Prayer—a candle in the darkness that neither denies the presence of darkness nor the possibility of insight. “Christianity, in fact, is at one and the same time a kind of philosophic sect and an antique system of legislation” (IV.i.3). Whether directed at “civil or religious matters, or only to the mere accidents of life,” prayers “have a perfect appropriateness, are distinguished for elevated sentiment, awaken grand recollections, and are marked by a style at once simple and magnificent” (IV.i.3). Christians have found a way to speak to God, whom they know and do not know, whose presence they intuit but whose intentions they cannot know except as He reveals them.
The institution of the Sabbath day marks another limitation—the limitation of human political authority. “Sunday combines every advantage, for it is at the same time a day of pleasure and of religion” (IV.i.4). Since human leisure “is beyond the reach of civil law,” how will it be regulated? (IV.i.4). Given the flawed character of man, to release him from all constraints, even for one day, would be “to plunge him again into a state of nature, and to let loose all at once a kind of savage on society” (IV.i.4). The Sabbath temporarily removes the bond of civil law without removing the bond of religious law. In so doing, it concentrates the worshipper’s mind on the religious law, which the civil law, with its this-worldly penalties, might otherwise obscure. This is why the Christian Sabbath “shocked the enlightened understandings” of the French revolutionaries, men all too eager to plunge the French back into the state of nature, the better to recast them in an image formed by human hands (IV.14). Danton “wanted to separate the French people from all other nations,” rather as God separated light from darkness, “and make it, like the Jews, a caste hostile to the rest of mankind” (IV.i.4). This is Old Testament practice adopted by a false God for a wrongly chosen people. Danton substituted his own sabbath for God’s Sabbath, a “tenth day which had no other honor than that of heralding the memory of Robespierre” (IV.i.4).
But, say the satirists, is the Mass not absurd? No: “the ceremonial of the mass may be defended by an argument at once so simple and so natural, that it is difficult to conceive how it could have been overlooked in the controversy between the Catholics and Protestants” (IV.i.5). Sacrifice “constitutes the essence of religious worship,” forming a part of all genuine religions (IV.i.5). Among religious sacrifices, “the eucharistic offering is the most admirable, the most mysterious, and the most divine” (IV.i.5). Human sacrifice “belonged to the state of nature, when man was almost entirely merged in the physical order”; animal sacrifices, however, could scarcely “redeem a being endowed with intelligence and a capability of virtue” (IV.i.5). “A victim, therefore, more worthy of the nature of man, was sought after; and, while philosophers taught that the gods could not be moved by the blood of hecatombs, and would accept only the offering of a humble heart, Jesus Christ confirmed these vague notions of reason,” His sacrifice far more than the sacrifice of a body but an “immolation of the passions,” the “sacrifice of moral man” (IV.i.5). That is, the soul-agony of the Passion alone can redeem the sins of man’s passions.
To those who insist that Jesus was only a man, not a God, Chateaubriand thus prepares an answer on their own terms: “The more deeply we study Christianity, the more clearly shall we perceive that it is but the development of our natural light, and the necessary result of the advancement of society” (IV.i.5). That is, as the natural reasonings of man progressed beyond the state of nature to civil society, and then to higher civilization, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice “daily offered”—the Eucharist—corresponds to humanity’s advance from that state, from the primarily physical to the spiritual (IV.i.5). As the Legislator of His regime, Christ “instituted the eucharist, where under the visible elements of bread and wine he concealed the invisible offering of his blood and of our hearts”—a symbol in “which has nothing contrary to good sense or to philosophy” (IV.i.5).
Christian ceremonies also follow this pattern. Unlike “the ceremonies of paganism,” in Christian ceremonies “all is essentially moral,” actions satisfying a God who cares for “the emotions of the heart and with the uniformity of sentiment which springs from the peaceful reign of the soul” (IV.i.7). Christian festivals as well invoke harmony, harmony with nature and its seasons. The more holy holidays entwine spirituality with the powerful natural sentiments of family life. In the days before Ascension Thursday, the curé calls villagers to assemble in front of the church, delivering a sermon in which he calls them, repeatedly, “My children” (IV.i.8).
It was the lack of religiosity and of family feeling that doomed the French revolutionaries’ attempts to establish their own lasting calendar of holidays. “Men, speaking in the name of equality and of all the passions…never have been able to establish one festival,” while “the most obscure saint, who had preached naught but poverty, obedience, and the renunciation of worldly goods, had his feast even at the moment when its observance endangered life”—when “the statue of Marat usurped the place of St. Vincent de Paul” and the revolutionaries renewed persecutions of Christians, persecutions unseen since the days of the Roman emperors (IV.i.9). “Many a pious family secretly kept a Christian holiday,” a remembrance presided over by an “infirm grandfather” who emerged from his room to serve as “the ruling spirit of the paternal mansion” (IV.i.9).”It cannot be doubted that these religious institutions powerfully contributed to the maintenance of morals, by cherishing cordiality and affection among relations” (IV.i.9). How different families became, when the sacrament of marriage and “the sentiments of nature” alike were replaced by “the articles of a contract”—the law now “universally made a substitute for morals” under the regime of the secular republic (IV.i.9). The Christian festivals had linked living families with “our ancestors,” who “had rejoiced at the same season as ourselves”; Christianity “found means to give, from generation to generation, a few happy moments to millions of the unfortunate” (IV.i.9). Bastille Day offers only fireworks to crowds.
The true republic isn’t the one so celebrated. “Religion crowns her pious work in honor of the dead by a general ceremonial, which recalls the memory of the innumerable inhabitants of the grave—that republic of perfect equality where no one can enter without first doffing his helmet or crown to pass under the low door of the tomb” (IV.i.9). And “religion alone can give to the heart of man that expansion, which will render its sighs and its love commensurate with the multitude of the dead whom it designs to honor” (IV.i.9). With the funeral mass, the Christian republic of the dead welcomes souls into the greater Kingdom of God.
Tombs provide the infrastructure of that republic. “Religion received birth at the tomb, and the tomb cannot dispense with religion” (IV.ii.1). The Egyptians saw this; “in Egypt you can scarcely move a step without meeting with emblems of mortality” (IV.ii.2). It was there that Greek philosophers voyaged “to acquire knowledge respecting the gods,” passing on the way the tomb of Homer (IV.ii.2). “Ingenious antiquity could imagine that the shade of the poet still recited the misfortunes of Ilium to the assembled Nereids, as in the soft and genial night of Ionia he had disputed with the sirens the prize of song” (IV.ii.2). And in China, then still an outpost of antiquity in a modernizing world, the people “have an affecting custom” of “inter[ring] their relatives in their gardens,” reintegrating them into life, keeping them close to their families (IV.ii.3). Among the Pacific Islanders, the Otaheites do not bury their dead but place them in a cradle “covered with a canoe turned upside-down—an emblem of the shipwreck of life” (IV.ii.5).
Still, “we feel that [the Christian] tomb alone is worthy of man,” for “the monument of the idolater tells you of nothing but the past,” whereas “the Christian speaks only of the future,” of the soul’s ascension to Heaven (IV.ii.6). In desecrating such tombs, and especially the tombs of their kings, and in robbing the graves, the French revolutionaries unwittingly reviled the future even as they attempted to obliterate the past, the ‘ancien‘ regime. This “was tantamount to a conspiracy to overturn the world, not to leave in France one stone upon another, and to advance over the ruin of religion to the attack of all other institutions” (IV.ii.8). The result? The revolutionaries themselves “fell into the pits which themselves had dug, and their bodies were left with Death as pledges for those of which they had plundered him” (IV.ii.8).
Perhaps nothing in Christendom attracted the jibes of satirists more than Christian priests, to whom no folly or vice went unattributed. Chateaubriand begins with the first Christian priest, Jesus of Nazareth, establishing His divinity as plausible if not of course demonstrable. Son of a carpenter, a Nazarene, “selecting his disciples from among the lowest of peoples,” demanding nothing but sacrifices from them all subsequent converts,” He “prefers the slave to the master, the poor to the rich, the leper to the healthy man” while despising “power, wealth, and prosperity” and ends his life in agony and ignominy, naked and nailed to a cross, which then became a symbol of self-sacrificial worship (IV.iii.1). “He overthrows the prevalent notions of morality, institutes new relations among men, a new law of nations, a new public faith,” convincing men of his divinity and prevailing over the religion of the Caesars and, eventually, existing religions throughout the world (IV.iii.1). “No! if the whole world were to raise its voice against Jesus Christ, if all the powers of philosophy were to combine against its doctrines, never shall we be persuaded that a religion erected on such a foundation is a religion of human origin” (IV.iii.1).
His character has not been questioned, even by His “bitterest enemies,” and “no philosophers of antiquity,” no patriarchs of the Church itself, have achieved His moral perfection (IV.iii.1). “Christ alone is without blemish; he is the most brilliant copy of that supreme beauty which is seated upon the throne of heaven” (IV.i.1). At the same time, he exemplifies not happiness but sorrow and agapic love, “never manifest[ing] any sign of anger except against insensibility and obduracy of soul” (IV.iii.1). “If the purest morality and the most feeling heart—if a life passed in combating error and soothing the sorrows of mankind—be attributes of divinity, who can deny that of Jesus Christ?” (IV.iii.1).
Being human, no subsequent priest has neared Christ’s perfection. Hence they more readily invite charges of hypocrisy couched in mockery. Chateaubriand defends Christian priests against their critics, beginning with the regime of the assembly of men under God, the Church.
“We will venture to assert that no other religion upon earth ever exhibited such a system of benevolence, prudence, and foresight, of energy and mildness, of moral and religious laws” (IV.iii.2). Whether promoting “arts, letters, science, legislation, politics, institutions (literary, civil, and religious), foundations for humanity” in efforts organized by it upper ranks, or delivering “the blessings of charity and humanity” by means of the village priests, the Church “answers, by its different degrees, all our wants” (IV.iii.2). Of the main kinds of clergy—secular and regular—Chateaubriand must take special care in justifying the secular priests’ way of life, which requires them to mingle with the world. Initially, “all Christendom was poor,” priests no less so (IV.iii.2). But as men recovered from barbarism and civilization advanced, “it would have been unreasonable” for the secular priests “to remain poor,” inasmuch as “they would have lost all consideration,” lost “their moral authority,” among an increasingly affluent population (IV.iii.2). As for the pope, he became “a prince, that he might be able to speak to princes”; similarly, the bishops gained “equal footing with the nobles” in order to “instruct them in their duties” (IV.iii.2). “Raised above the necessities of life” by revenues derived from tithing, secular priests could move among the rich, “whose manners they refined” and among the poor, whom they “relieved by [their] bounty” and “consol[ed] with [their] example” (IV.iii.2). [1]
Secular priests have done some of their most meritorious work among the rural poor. “The peasant without religion is a ferocious animal,” lacking “the restraint of education or of human respect”; “the possession of property has taken from him the innocence of the savage” (IV.iii.2). Yet “he is transformed into a new creature by the hand of religion,” “his propensity to betray…converted into inviolable fidelity, his ingratitude into unbounded attachment, his distrust into implicit confidence” (IV.iii.2). The parish priest, in exhibiting “the charity of Jesus Christ, [has] made them one of the most respectable classes of the nation” (IV.iii.2). “Which of us, with all our boasted philanthropy, would like, in the depth of winter, to be wakened in the middle of the night to go to a considerable distance in the country for the purpose of attending a poor wretch expiring upon straw?” (IV.iii.2).
The regular priests, who have joined one of the religious orders, taking vows of poverty, charity, and obedience, trace their origins to the prophet Elias, who fled a then-corrupt Israel for the mountains. The line goes through the prophets to John the Baptist and Jesus, “who often retired from the world to pray amid the solitude of the mountains”; following them, the “celebrated saints of Thebais filled Carmel and Lebanon with the highest works of penance” (IV.iii.3). With all of these men, “divine harmony mingled with the murmur of the streams and of the cascades” (IV.iii.3). Later, in Western Europe, an early monastic community was founded by Charlemagne at Roncevaux “on the very spot where the flower of chivalry, Roland of France, terminated his glorious achievements” (IV.iii.3). Such were the communities that saved classical culture from the barbarians “as from a second deluge”; eventually, “the first anchorets by degrees descended from their eminences, to make known to the barbarians the word of God and the comforts of life” (IV.iii.3). And the monasteries are still needed. “When the evils of a barbarous age disappeared, society, which is so ingenious and so effective in its means of tormenting man, knew well how to invent a thousand other sources of misery, which drive us into solitude! How often does disappointment, treachery, and profound disgust, make us wish to escape the world!” (IV.iii.3). We have hospitals for attending to diseases of the body: “Why should not religion have its institutions for the health of the soul, which is much more liable to disease, and whose sufferings are much more poignant, much longer, and much more difficult to be removed?” (IV.iii.3). More, some people are simply ill at ease in the world, “persons of such excellent qualities that they cannot find in the world congenial spirits with themselves, and are thus doomed to a kind of moral virginity or eternal widowhood. It was particularly for these solitary and generous souls that religion opened her peaceful retreats.” (IV.iii.3).
Accordingly, the monastic regime ordains an ascetic and contemplative way of life. The Enlighteners, “either from ignorance or prejudice, despise these constitutions under which such a number of cenobites have lived for so many centuries”—a “contempt [which] is anything but philosophical” (IV.iii.4). If he would study them candidly, the philosopher will find in the monasteries an important moral and political phenomenon: “The more the legislator combats the propensities of nature the more he insures the duration of his work,” at least in small communities (IV.iii.4). And indeed the philosopher should know better, recalling the ancient philosophic sects and the regime of the Spartans. “Most of these religious laws display an astonishing knowledge of the art of governing man,” realizing something of the republic Plato’s Socrates could only found in speech (IV.iii.4).
Why do such regimes flourish, for so long? “The unhappiness of man proceeds chiefly from his inconstancy, and from the abuse of that free will which is at once his glory and his misfortune, and will be the occasion of his condemnation” (IV.iii.4). Human “disquietude,” lamented by earlier by Pascal and later by Tocqueville, issues in “a wretchedness which cannot be removed until some superior power fix[es] [a person’s] mind upon only one object” (IV.iii.4). We see this in the mechanic, “more happy than the rich man who is idle, because he is engrossed with a work which effectually shuts out all foreign desires and temptations to inconstancy” (IV.iii.4). The perpetual vows imposed on the Spartans by Lycurgus and on the Cretans by Minos accomplished the same thing, as do the vows of the monks. Protected against “the illusions of the world,” the regime of the monastery “deprives us at most of a few years of freedom” in exchange for “banish[ing] regret and remorse the remainder of our days” (IV.iii.4). “The soul that is calm and cheerful would soon lose its joyful tranquility amid the troubled spirits of the world” (IV.iii.4). And unlike the regimes founded by Lycurgus and Minos, the regime of the monastery binds its members by their own consent, a vow which “offers to the heart a compensation for the terrestrial love which it sacrifices,” an “alliance of an immortal soul with the eternal principle” that alone offers human beings “true greatness” (IV.iii.4). Rousseau is right to say that man is born free, wrong to suppose that happiness consists in pursuing one’s own will; the novitiate “swears to make God the object of his love, and, as is the case with the Divine Being, he creates for himself by his own act a necessity to do so,” a necessity that puts his or her soul in line with the necessity set out for human salvation and genuine happiness (IV.iii.4).
The way of life of the monastic regime consists not of the illusions generated by the Enlightenment project but of “mystery, solitude, silence, and contemplation,” all directed toward a better apprehension of the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit (IV.iii.5). In this, no social obligation is neglected, as each monastery serves as a node of illumination and refuge, worldwide without being ‘worldly.’ “People talk of philanthropy; the Christian religion is philanthropy itself,” its monasteries offering refuge to lost travelers, to exiles, to the distressed (IV.iii.5). With it, “Jesus Christ has restored to us the inheritance of which we were derived by the sin of Adam,” since for the Christian “there is now no unknown ocean or deserts”; he “will everywhere find the hut of thy father and the language of thy ancestors” (IV.iii.5).
Moreover, “these rigorous orders of Christianity were schools of active morality, instituted in the midst of the pleasures of the age, and exhibiting continually to the eyes of vice and prosperity models of penance and striking examples of human misery,” a magnificent misery betokening the sublime victory over human passion (IV.iii.6). While “it is usually the task of the living to encourage their departing friends,” monk on his deathbed “summons his companions and even his superiors to works of penance” (IV.iii.6). In this, he embodies the Christian regime itself, a religion that “has drawn from the tomb all the morality that underlies it” (IV.iii.6). Had man “remained immortal after the fall, he would never perhaps have been acquainted with virtue” (IV.iii.6), never needing to concentrate his mind and heart on the need for it, and especially the need for charity or agapic love. “In the performance of these pious duties” that flow from that love, “the sweat has often been seen to flow from the brow of these sympathizing monks and to trickle upon their robes, making them forever sacred, in spite of the sarcasms of infidels” (IV.iii.6). Even in the face of “the lowest depths of misfortune,” when a man found guilty of a capital crime stands on the scaffold, next to “the avenging sword” of justice stands the “man of peace,” offering “pity and hope” and even absolution to him who is about to die, whether innocent or guilty but repentant (IV.iii.6).
Nor do regular priests confine themselves to the monasteries. “The ancient philosopher themselves never quitted the enchanting walks of Academus and the pleasures of Athens to go, under the guidance of a sublime impulse, to civilize the savage, to instruct the ignorant, to cure the sick, to clothe the poor, to sow the seeds of peace and harmony among hostile nations; but this is what Christians have done and are still doing every day” (IV.iv.1). From France, the Jesuit Order had sent missionaries to the Levant, China, Guinea, and the Antilles, but Chateaubriand is especially interested in their mission to Paraguay. When the Jesuits arrived, the Spanish had not yet “extended their devastations” there” (IV.iv.4). “In the recesses of its forests the missionaries undertook to found a Christian republic and to confer at least upon a small number of Indians those blessing which they had not been able to procure for all”—one of “the noblest designs that ever entered into the heart of man” (IV.iv.4). At the Jesuits’ request, the Spanish crown granted liberty to any indigenes who converted to Christianity—much to the displeasure of the Spanish colonists. When some of the priests were “massacred and devoured by the savages,” other priests would perform the funeral rites, singing the Te Deum “over the grave of the martyr” (IV.iv.4). This so “astonished the barbarian hordes” that they began to listen to the message of the remaining priests. As it happens, “the savages of that region were extremely sensible to the charms of music”; caught “by this pious snare,” this “foretaste of the social virtues and of the first sweets of humanity,” they more and more began to approach the Jesuits in peace (IV.iv.4). “Thus the Christian religion realized in the forests of America what fabulous history relates of an Orpheus and an Amphion—a reflection so natural that it occurred to the missionaries themselves” (IV.iv.4).
Perhaps as much to band together against feared Portuguese slave traders operating out of nearby Brazil, thirty members of the Guarani tribe joined with the Jesuits to found “that celebrated Christian commonwealth which seemed to be a relic of antiquity discovered in the New World,” an act “confirm[ing]under our own eyes the great truth known to Greece and Rome—that men are to be civilized and empires founded, not by the abstract principles of philosophy,” as the Enlighteners suppose, “but by the aid of religion” (IV.iv.5). Armed and trained, the Guarani defended themselves successfully against the slavers, thereby “afford[ing] an example of a state exempt both from the dangers of a wholly military constitution, like that of Lacedaemon, and the inconveniences of a wholly pacific community, such as that of the Quaker. The great political problem was solved. Agriculture, which sustains, and arms, which preserve, were here united. The Guaranis were planters, though they had no slaves, and soldiers without being ferocious—immense and sublime advantages, which they owed to the Christian religion, and which neither the Greeks nor the Romans had ever enjoyed under their system of polytheism. In every thing a wise medium was observed.” (IV.iv.5). The regime was a republic rather more in Plato’s sense than in the Roman, much less the American or the French; it was ruled by the Jesuits, whom the Guaranis “justly regarded as a kind of divinities,” taking the place of Plato’s philosopher-kings in the never-to-be-realized ‘city in speech.’ Such a regime could, however, be realized in practice by Christianity, whereby the Guarinis’ longstanding “spirit of cruelty and vengeance,” along with “the grossest vices which characterize the Indian tribes, were transformed into a spirit of meekness, patience, and chastity” (IV.i.5). Lawsuits were unknown, as was private property, and the citizens “enjoy[ed] the advantages of civilized life without having ever quitted the desert,” experiencing “a happiness unprecedented in the world,” Il Cristianesimo felice (IV.iv.5).
Several decades later, the Christian republic was destroyed by Portuguese and Spanish secularists, now in full-throated ‘Enlightenment’ mode in Europe, where the Jesuit order was suppressed in 1757. “Infidelity triumphed at the sight of Indians consigned in the New World to an execrable servitude, all Europe re-echoed its pretended philanthropy and love of liberty!” (IV.iv.5). Today, “the simple Christian of Paraguay, now buried in the mines of Potosi,” where they work as slaves but “doubtless adoring the hand which has smitten them,” working to win “a place in that republic of the saints which is beyond the reach of the persecutions of men” (IV.iv.5). As for the Jesuits, “they have always maintained that liberty is an imprescriptible right of the Christian,” a point that English Protestants in their own colonies acknowledge backhandedly by “defer[ring] the baptism of the Negro until the hour of death,” in an attempt “to conciliate cupidity and conscience” (IV.iv.7). It is the ‘enlightened’ French imperialism, with its “vain, boasting philanthropy,” which “has ruined everything” in its New World colonies, where the slaves revolted violently (IV.iv.7).
Having traveled to North America, Chateaubriand readily tells the history of French and English dealings with the Hurons and the Iroquois. “Witty, gay, and sprightly, yet deceitful, brave, and eloquent, elated with success, dispirited by adverse fortune, and governed by their women,” with “more honor than patriotism,” the Hurons were the Athenians of the North American nations (IV.iv.8). “Politic, taciturn, and demure, burning with the desire of dominion, capable of the greatest vices and of the most sublime virtues, sacrificing everything to the welfare of their country,” the Iroquois were the Spartans (IV.iv.8). It is almost needless to add that, “by a natural instinct,” the Hurons allied with the French, the Iroquois with the English (IV.iv.8), although over the years both played the European colonists against the other. As in Paraguay, “France owed almost all her success” in New France “to the Jesuits,” failing there because the secular administrators interfered with the priests’ “good intentions” (IV.iv.8). “I myself met one of these apostles of religion amid the solitudes of America,” a “tall, venerable man” with whom he discussed the priest’s sufferings there, and also the sufferings of the French during the Revolution (IV.iv.8). “Those to whom a priest is an object of hatred and ridicule will rejoice in these torments of the confessors of the faith,” blaming them on priestly “fanaticism” (IV.iv.8). “With disdainful pity they will ask, What business had these monks in the wilds of America?” (IV.iv.8). Chateaubriand answers, “They went merely in obedience to the injunction of that Master who said to them, ‘Go ye and teach all nations'” (IV.iv.8). The “simplicity and heroism” of Christian missionaries is “a just subject of pride for Europe, and in particular, for France, which furnished the greatest number” of them (IV.iv.9). He is confident that “never will men of science, dispatched to distant countries with all the instruments and all the plans of an academy, be able to effect what a poor monk, setting out on foot from his convent, accomplished singly with his rosary and his breviary” (IV.v.8).
In addition to the missionary orders, Christians also extended Christendom by means of its military orders, including the Knights of Malta, the Teutonic orders, and the Knights of Calatraya and St. Jago-of-the-Sword. These orders animated “the age of chivalry,” which Chateaubriand calls “the only poetical period of our history” (IV.v.1). These “chaste heroes and warriors who talk of nothing but love” defended Europe from the Turks at Rhodes, causing the Emperor Suleiman to lose “one hundred thousand men before its walls” before forcing the knights to retreat to Malta, where they made a successful stand against Muslim aggression (IV.v.1). In northern Europe, the Teutonic order subdued several barbarian tribes, “oblig[ing] them to embrace a social life and to attend to agricultural pursuits” (IV.v.3). And in Spain the knights fought the Moors, “another enemy still more dangerous, perhaps, than the Turks and the Prussians, because fixed in the very center of Europe” (IV.v.3). “Several times on the point of enslaving Christendom,” the Moors practiced polygamy and slavery and, “in their despotic and jealous disposition,” posed “an invincible obstacle to civilization and the welfare of mankind” (IV.v.3). Thanks to the firm bonds of their Christian vows, the Knights of Caltraya and St. Jago-of-the-Sword “formed associations of men who swore to spill the last drop of blood for their country” and pursued the Muslims to the Middle East itself in an attempt to defeat an empire that ranged from the walls of Vienna in the West to those of Delhi in the East (IV.v.3). So long as chivalry remained under the influence of the Catholic Church, it proved “a most powerful auxiliary for the advancement of civilization,” but once it became, “at a later period,” the “embodiment of a worldly principle,” aiming “solely at the exaltation of material beauty” and of the martial spirit of dueling, “it introduced an imaginary and independent principle of honor outside of the duty imposed by the divine law” (IV.iv.3).
In its original form, chivalry was fostered by an education both Christian and aristocratic. A youth who aspired to knighthood took a position as page in the castle of a baron. “Here were inculcated the first lessons of fidelity to God and the fair sex,” the latter often in the person of the baron’s daughter, whom he was allowed to adore under her father’s watchful eye (IV.v.4). “Excited by love to valor, the page practiced the manly exercises which opened for him the way to honor” hunting, falconry, horsemanship, maneuvers in full armor (IV.v.4). After completing his service, he became an esquire, with “religion always presid[ing] over these changes” (IV.v.4). He attended the knight’s table in times of peace, his weapons in times of war; finally, he was himself “admitted to the honors of knighthood” (IV.v.4). “The disinterestedness of the knights—the elevation of soul which acquired for some of them the glorious title of irreproachable—shall crown the delineations of the Christian virtues” (IV.v.4).
Chateaubriand concludes The Genius of Christianity with an account of the services Christian clergy and Christianity itself have rendered to mankind. Given Christianity’s “many admirable institutions” and “inconceivable sacrifices,” he “firmly believe[s] that this merit alone of the Christian religion would be sufficient to atone for all the sins of mankind” (IV.vi.1)—a decidedly heterodox, not to say heretical claim according to Christianity itself, as Chateaubriand likely understands, but one that may blunt the ire of anti-religionists. Thinking of them, he immediately exclaims, “Heavenly religion, that compels us to love those wretched beings by whom it is calumniated!” (IV.vi.1).
Christendom is “a vast republic,” marbled throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa (IV.vi.1). Hundreds of millions of souls have been touched by it, practicing the virtues Christianity commends for eighteen hundred years. Its leading institutions, apart from the Church offices themselves, are hospitals and schools; it has promoted the fine arts and sciences, agriculture, the rule of law, artisanship, manufacturing, and commerce. Contra Machiavelli, it has improved politics and government while fostering international understanding.
Its hospitals embody the “exclusively Christian virtue,” charity, a virtue “unknown to the ancients” (IV.vi.2). [2] “The primitive believers, instructed in this great virtue formed a general fund for the relief of the poor, the sick, and the traveler”; “this was the commencement of hospitals” (IV.vi.2). The ancients dealt with the poor and the sick with “two methods”: infanticide and slavery (IV.vi.2). But there is “no wretchedness beyond the sphere of [Christian] love” (IV.vi.2).
After alleviating human suffering, the next benefit of Christianity is enlightenment—a term Chateaubriand for which readily contests with the philosophes. “Christians were not afraid of the light, since they opened to us the sources of us,” preserving “those precious stores which they had collected at the hazard of their lives among the ruins of Greece and Rome” (IV.vi.5). Further, “all the European universities were founded either by religious princes, or by bishops or priests, and they were all under the direction of different Christian orders,” making France preeminently “a Christian Athens” (IV.vi.5). “After a revolution which has relaxed the ties of morality and interrupted the course of studies, a society at once religious and literary would apply an infallible remedy to the source of our calamities” (IV.vi.5). The Benedictines and Jesuits in were “profound scholars,” and the Jesuits ordered their society with particular care for education. After training a candidate for ten years in order “to ascertain the bent of his genius,” then assigning him to hospital service and a pilgrimage “to accustom him to the sight of human afflictions, and to prepare him for the fatigues of the missions,” he was assigned an appropriate task (IV.vi.5). Those whose “qualities…are calculated to shine in society” were placed in a capital city, introduced at court and among the great” (IV.vi.5). But those with a “genius adapted to solitude” were employed in a library; those with “a luminous understanding, a correct judgment, and a patient disposition” became college professors, while those who “displayed talents for governing men” would be sent to rule in Paraguay (IV.vi.5). When the Jesuits were suppressed in Europe, a half-century before Chateaubriand wrote, “learning sustained an irreparable loss” and education “never perfectly recovered” (IV.vi.5).
Respecting the fine arts and sciences, the Church not only educated youth and conducted research into antiquities, it rewarded scholars and scientists, taking “the lead in the general solicitude for the promotion of knowledge (IV.vi.6). “Those who represent Christianity as checking the advancement of learning manifestly contradict all historical evidences,” as “in every country, civilization has invariably followed the introduction of the gospel”—unlike “the religions of Mohammed, Brama, and Confucius, which have limited the progress of society and forced man to grow old while yet in his infancy” (IV.vi.6). Indeed, “most of the discoveries which have changed the system of the civilized world were made by members of the Church”: gunpowder, the telescope, bombshells, the mariner’s compass, and clockwork (IV.vi.6).
Christian clergy introduced a more general practice of agriculture to our barbaric European ancestors. “Almost all the grants made to the monasteries in the early ages of the Church consisted of wastes which the monks brought into cultivation with their own hands” (IV.vi.7). Their example “undermined those barbarous prejudices” of warrior societies “which looked with contempt upon the art of agriculture” (IV.vi.7). “The peasant learned in the convent to turn up the glebe and to fertilize the soil. The baron began to seek in his fields treasures less precarious than what he procured by arms” (IV.vi.7).
Barbarian Europe was lawless, and therefore without secure modes of travel. Without roads or inns, “her woods…infested by robbers and assassins,” Europe found in “religion alone, like a massive column rising from the midst of Gothic ruins,” “shelter and a point of communication to mankind” (IV.vi.8). Monks formed companies of bridge-builders, post-houses and roads. With the development of that infrastructures, pilgrimages became possible, drawing “all ranks of people from their homes” in a movement that “powerfully contributed to the progress of civilization and letters” (IV.vi.8). “There was not a pilgrim that returned to his native village but left behind him some prejudice and brought back some new idea” (IV.vi.8). Even the wars of the crusades extracted the well-rooted peasant from his land. “If we could recall to life one of those ancient vassals whom we are accustomed to represent to ourselves as stupid slaves, we should, perhaps, be surprised to find him possessed of more intelligence and information than the free rustic off the present day” (IV.vi.8).
Contra Machiavelli and his philosophe followers, “nothing is more at variance with historical truth than to represent the first monks as indolent people who lied in affluence at the expense of human superstition” (IV.vi.9). While his religious order might acquire wealth, “the lives of the monks individually was one of great self-denial” (IV.vi.6). They were fully engaged in the mechanical arts, manufacturing, and commerce—far from the “pious sluggards” of Enlightenment satire (IV.vi.9).
The Church also promoted civil and criminal law. It made sense to rulers to employs priests as mediators in disputes, as “they were a kind of natural justices of the peace,” so much so “that the religious spirit operated at a thousand points and in a thousand ways upon the law” (IV.vi.10). The priests’ “spirit of mildness and impartiality” regarding “things which did not regard their order or themselves individually” made them well-disposed for all matter in what “is termed administration,” inasmuch as the Church’s own legislation, the canon law, derived from “moral principles in preference to political considerations” (IV.vi.10). Charity, forgiveness, and the practice of sanctuary all lent to priestly mediators a sense of equity that moderated the rigor of law. The Dominicans, for example, denounced “the cruelties of the Spaniards in the New World” (IV.vi.10). “As our civil code was framed in a barbarous age, and the priest was then the only individual who possessed any learning he could not fail to exert a happy influence upon the laws and impart a knowledge which was waning to those around him,” taking from the canon law such principles as the refusal to condemn a person in absentia, who has no lawful means of defending himself, barring accusers and judges from bearing witness against a defendant, barring “great criminals” from being accusers, and requiring more than one witness in a criminal case (IV.vi.10).
Finally, Christianity has decisively improved political life. As Cicero understood, and many Enlighteners did not, “the destruction of piety towards the gods” would destroy good faith among men, and thereby destroy civil society and justice in it (IV.vi.11). “Let us not deem it a crime in our ancestors to have thought like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch, and to have placed the altar and its ministers in the highest position of social life” (IV.vi.11). Critics of Christianity charge that it has injured liberty and the public good. Chateaubriand denies this, recurring to “general principles” in his rebuttal (IV.vi.11). “Nature,” he begins, generates new things by blending “strength with mildness,” an example of “the general law of contrasts” (IV.vi.11). To employ violence or weakness alone would cause destruction “by excess or by defect” (IV.vi.11). In political life, this would result in either a “bold, impetuous, and inconstant” people or a “weak and timorous one”; in legislating for either kind, a founder must frame a regime that corrects their way of life, giving a “mild, moderate, invariable” regime to the one and an “energetic and vigorous” regime to the other (IV.vi.11). So, for example, theocracy ill-suited the peace-loving Egyptians, who needed military discipline, whereas Numa rightly instituted a civil religion in Rome, “a nation of soldiers”; “he who has no fear of men ought to fear the gods” (IV.vi.11). As a result, Egypt froze in place, by Chateaubriand’s time a prey to Napoleon, whereas Rome, the “queen of the world, owed her greatness” to Numa’s laws (IV.vi.11).
The French are more like the Romans than the Egyptians. “They need no excitement, but restraint. People talk of the danger of theocracy; but in what warlike nation did a priest ever lead men into slavery?” (IV.vi.6). In France, “Christianity was like those religious instruments which the Spartans used in time of battle, and which were intended not so much to animate the soldier as to moderate his ardor” (IV.vi.11). Aristotle recommends the encouragement of a middle class, which can act as a balance-wheel between the few who are rich and the many who are poor. In France, “the clergy acted the admirable part of moderators,” as they “alone possessed information and experience when haughty barons and ignorant commoners knew nothing but factions and absolute obedience” (IV.vi.11). The Church’s “superior knowledge, her conciliatory spirit, her mission of peace, the very nature of her interests, could not fail to inspire her with generous ideas in politics, which were not to be found in the two other orders”; moreover, having “everything to fear from the nobility and nothing from the commons,” she “became the natural protector” of the people, “alternately plead[ing] the cause of the people against the great, and of the sovereign against his factious nobility” (IV.vi.11). When “men unworthy of the name of Christians slaughtered the people of the New World,” the Church condemned “these atrocities,” and although “slavery was authorized by law…the Church acknowledge no slaves among her children” (IV.vi.11).
Some of the better modern political institutions owe their origin to the Church. The tripartite English regime, with its houses of Lords and of Commons and its monarch, derives not from Germany, as Montesquieu claims, but from the Church; unlike the absolute monarchy of Spain and the “temperate monarchy” of France, England has enjoyed a “mixed monarchy”—really a mixed regime, not unlike that proposed by Aristotle, whose political principles were studied by Christian scholars in the ancient manuscripts they saved (IV.vi.11). What Christians first, then moderns generally added was the system of representation, “wholly unknown to the ancients” and first seen in the Church councils, where the supreme pontiff and the prelates were joined by deputies of the lesser clergy (IV.vi.11).
Most important, Christianity puts all of these civil laws and political institutions under “the spirit of the gospel,” a spirit “eminently favorable to liberty” and to “moral equality” under God—the “only kind of equality that it is possible to preach without convulsing the world” (IV.vi.11). “Christianity is peculiarly admirable for having transformed the physical man into the moral man,” having taken the ancient principles of liberty and equality and applying them “to the mind and consider[ing] [them] with reference to the most sublime objects” (IV.vi.11). As a result, modern nations feature “an internal tranquility” unknown in the ancient regimes, with their “continual slaughter of gladiators: (IV.vi.11). “The meanest of Christians, if a virtuous man, is ore moral than was the most eminent of the philosophers of antiquity” (IV.vi.11), his religion having provided, through the Gospel, the formation of “the genuine Philosopher,” and its precepts “the genuine citizen” (IV.vi.11).
“What would the present state of society be if Christianity had not appeared in the world?” (IV.i.13). The succession of Roman emperors from Augustus to Nero and Claudius gives a fair indication. “A Roman, on quitting the arms of a strumpet, went to enjoy the spectacle of a wild beast quaffing human blood” (IV.vi.13). Little wonder that the barbarians overran the Empire. “What would have become of the world if the great ark of Christianity had not saved the remnant of the human race from this new deluge?” (IV.vi.13). The priests were “the only class amid the conquered nations whom the barbarians respected,” and rightly so (IV.vi.13). Were it not for Christianity, it is “highly probable that…the wreck of society and of learning would have been complete” (IV.vi.13). Philosophy could not have done this, as it “served but to propagate a species of impiety, which, without leading to a destruction of the idols, produced the crimes and calamities of atheism among the great, while it left to the vulgar those of superstition” (IV.vi.13).
“Religion alone can renew the original energy of a nation” (VI.iv.13). The “initial excess of Christian austerity” was “necessary” to counter “the grossest violations of morality” by “the monsters of barbarity” in the latter decades of Rome (IV.vi.13). Jesus Christ saved the world—spiritually, as the Bible teaches, but even physically, as Enlighteners ought to acknowledge. Christianity is “so truly the religion of philosophers that Plato may be said to have almost anticipated it” (IV.vi.13). And in political life, “the time may perhaps come when the mere form of government, excepting despotism, will be a matter of indifference among men, who will attach themselves more particularly to those simple, moral, and religious laws which constitute the permanent basis of society and of all good government” (IV.vi.13). It is “the doctrine of the gospel” that stands as “the doctrine of a free people” because it combines morality with religion” (IV.vi.13). Let philosophy, then, “with a more enlightened zeal” than that displayed by the Enlighteners, “and with a spirit more worthy of her name, remove those barrier which she proposed to place between man and his Creator” (IV.vi.13). Accordingly, Chateaubriand ends his book with a logical syllogism: “Christianity is perfect; men are imperfect. Now, a perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect principle. Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men. If Christianity is not the work of men, it can have come from none but God. If it came from God, men cannot have acquired a knowledge of it by revelation. Therefore, Christianity is a revealed religion.” (IV.vi.13).
Note
- Such arguments did not meet the unanimous approval of Roman Catholic writers between the era of the early Church Fathers and Chateaubriand’s time. Here is Marsilius of Padua: “Let us sum up regarding the activities of nearly all priests or bishops and other ministers of the temple and testify before Christ, invoking his judgment if we lie, that in recent times nearly all the said bishops and others practice almost the exact opposite of what they preach that everyone else should observe according to the gospel. For they smolder for pleasure, vanities, temporal goods and secular principate, and pursue and seize them not by right but by injustice, both secret and open. Whereas Christ and the apostles his true imitator rejected all such things and taught and commanded others to despise them, especially those who must preach the gospel of contempt for this world to others” (Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace, II.xi.6. Annabel Brett translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Chateaubriand believes that charity or agapic love “originated in Jesus Christ,” a claim that overlooks its presence throughout the Old Testament (IV.vi.2).
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