Christianity and the Liberal Arts

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.