François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand: The Genius of Christianity, Part the Second: The Poetic of Christianity. John I. White translation. Baltimore: John Murphy and Company, 1875.
By the “poetic” of Christianity, Chateaubriand refers to poēsis in the original sense, as human making. The poetic thus encompasses not only poetry as ordinarily defined but literature generally and the fine arts. The Second Part of The Genius of Christianity treats poetry as ordinarily defined, leaving literature and the fine arts for the Third Part. In considering Christian doctrine, Chateaubriand understood his task as primarily defensive, as an effort to show that Christian thought cannot justly be dismissed by atheist satire. In turning to poetry, however, he takes the initiative against the scoffers, rightly confident that Christianity has more than held its own against the works of antiquity and especially against the ‘secularist’ moderns.
“The epic is the highest class of poetic compositions,” comprising the dramatic tragedies and comedies (II.i.1). The epic poem “requires a more universal genius than a tragedy” and a more complete effort on the part of the poet; Sophocles is great, Homer greater (II.i.1). Given epic poetry as the highest standard, how do Christian epic poems stand up to the works of Homer and of Virgil?
In epic poetry, “the first and most important place” should go to “men and their passions,” not to the gods and “the marvelous” (II.i.2). “If Homer and Virgil had laid their scenes in Olympus, it is doubtful whether, with all their genius, they would have been able to sustain the dramatic interest to the end” (II.i.2). What conflict in Olympus cannot be resolved by a mere shake of the chain of being by Zeus? In their theocentricity, therefore, Christians must take care. In writing a divine comedy, for example, Dante risks the tedium of a foregone conclusion. He passes the test, triumphantly: “The beauties of this singular production proceed, with few exceptions, from Christianity; its faults are to be ascribed to the age and the bad taste of the author, despite which he “has, perhaps, equaled the greatest poets in his evocation of “the pathetic and the terrific” (II.i.2). When it comes to these effects, Homer and Virgil have nothing on the Inferno.
Given the enduring humanism of epic poetry, “a poet ought to adopt an ancient subject, or, if he selects a modern one, should by all means take his own nation for his theme” (II.i.2). This Tasso does in his Jerusalem Delivered, “a perfect model of composition” where “you may learn how to blend subjects together without confusion” and in which the “characters are drawn with no less ability” (II.i.2). Tasso excels the Roman Virgil exactly where one would expect a Roman to succeed more strikingly—in “characters, battles, and composition,” the themes of war and the capacity for architectonics (II.i.2). Yet, tellingly, he never portrays a mother. His talents “possessed more charms than truth, and greater brilliancy than tenderness”; he “almost always fails when he attempts to express the feelings of the heart,” falling “short of the pathos of Virgil,” short of “those pensive graces which impart such sweetness to the sighs of the Mantuan swan” (II.i.2). Tasso composes less adroitly; “his versification, which often exhibits marks of haste, cannot be compared to that of Virgil, a hundred times tempered in the fire of the Muses” (II.i.2).
Ancient poets “display not, like us, a few brilliant ideas sparkling in the midst of a multitude of commonplace observations, so much as a series of beautiful thoughts, which perfectly harmonize together, and have a sort of family likeness” (II.i.2). But if the ancients excel the moderns in beauty, Christians excel the ancients in sublimity and even grandeur. Milton’s Paradise Lost demonstrates this conclusively. “The infancy of Rome, sung by Virgil, is certainly a grand subject; but what shall we say of a poem that depicts a catastrophe of which we are ourselves the victims, and which exhibits to us not the founder of this or that community, but the father of the human race? Nothing can be more august and more interesting than this study of the first emotions of the human heart.” (II.i.3). Man’s first sentiment, in Milton’s poem, “relates to the existence of a Supreme Being,” while “the first want he feels is the want of a God” (II.i.3). “How sublime is Milton in this passage!” (II.i.3). By contrast, for Milton, Woman’s ruling sentiment is self-love; “she boasts that she is strong enough alone to encounter temptation” (II.i.3). In this, he follows Scripture, which “always” portrays woman “as the slave of vanity”—in modern times, often heroic during the Revolution’s “reign of terror” but whose virtue, under the peace imposed by the rule of Napoleon, “has since fallen a victim to a dance, a dress, an amusement” (II.i.3). In childbirth, woman shows “invincible fortitude against pain” while remaining “weak against pleasure” (II.i.3).
In the Lusiad, Camoëns and in the Messiah, Klopstock have stepped over the line of humanism and into the marvelous. Camoëns may be excused, as he “lived in a barbarous age” and suffered severe misfortune in his own life (“it is not true that a man can write best under the pressure of misfortune,” Chateaubriand observes, drawing on his own experience) (II.i.4). Klopstock can be granted no such defense; “his principal character is the Divinity, and this alone would be sufficient to destroy the tragic effect” in his epic (II.i.4). There are, notwithstanding this, “some beautiful passages” in his poem, and in depicting the marvelous he writes with “richness and grandeur” (II.i.4). “Those spheres inhabited by beings of a different nature from man—the multitude of angels, spirits of darkness, unborn souls, and souls that have already finished the career of mortality—plunge the mind into the ocean of immensity” (II.i.4). But once plunged, can one emerge, returning to the limitations of the human world? In his critique of Klopstock, Chateaubriand perhaps unwittingly foresees the greatness, and the great defect, of a Germany united into one nation-state, lodged in the middle of Europe. Great it will be, but will it find just limits to its dreams?
Modern France’s Voltaire exhibits the opposite fault. In his time, “Europe, by the happiest of contrasts, exhibited a pastoral nation in Switzerland, a commercial nation in England, and a nation devoted to the arts in Italy” (II.i.5). The France seen in the Henriad not only featured a modern, centralized nation-state endowed with wealth and military prowess, its way of life stood on the borderland between “old manners on the one hand and new manners on the other,” as “barbarism was expiring, and the brilliant age of the great Louis began to dawn” (II.i.5). Voltaire being Voltaire, his epic poem features “little more than nothing” of the marvelous; “if we were not acquainted with the wretched system which froze the poetic genius of Voltaire, we should be at a loss to conceive how he could have preferred allegorical divinities to the marvelous of Christianity,” as He “imparted no warmth to his inventions except in those passages where he has ceased to be a philosopher that he may become a Christian” (II.i.5). He even goes so far as to introduce “his philosophy into heaven,” imagining a “Supreme Being” who judges all religious believers—the “Bonze and the Dervish, the Jew and the Mohammedan”—alike. “Was this to be expected of the muse?” (II.i.5). And overall, Voltaire “is greatly to be pitied for having possessed that twofold genius which extorts at the same time our admiration and our hatred” in its self-contradictory attempts to build up and to throw down, “extol[ling] the age of Louis XIV to the skies, and afterward attack[ing] in detail the reputation of its great men,” then both “prais[ing] and slander[ing] antiquity,” as well (II.i.5). “While his imagination enchants you, he throws around him the glare of a fallacious reason, which destroys the marvelous, contracts the soul, and shortens the sight” (II.i.5). Manly, he still succumbs to the woman’s vice, as “his vanity caused him, throughout his life, to act a part for which he was not formed, and which was very far beneath him. He bore, in fact, no resemblance to Diderot, Raynal, or D’Alembert. The elegance of his manners, the urbanity of his demeanor, his love of society, and, above all, his humanity, would probably have rendered him one of the most inveterate enemies of the revolutionary system. He is most decidedly in favor of social order, while unconsciously sapping its foundations by attacking the institutions of religion.” “His infidelity prevented his attaining the height for which nature qualified him,” making him “an everlasting warning to all those who pursue the career of letters,” a writer whose “contradictions of style and sentiment” resulted from his lacking “the great counterpoise of religion” (II.i.5).
How, then, does Christianity provide such a counterpoise for poets? It does, because Christianity is “a double religion,” one that connects “the nature of intellectual being” with “our own nature,” bringing “the mysteries of the Divinity and the mysteries of the human heart” together, without confusing them (II.ii.1), connecting religion, Divinity, and intellectual being with morality, man, and the heart. “The philosophy of the present day extols polytheism” because it keeps the immoral gods (and, behind them, amoral Fate) separate from the human heart, while “censur[ing] Christianity for having united the moral with the religious force” (II.ii.1 n.1). True, the ancients divinized ‘Justice’ and ‘Wisdom,’ but this gesture at morality was “destroyed, particularly for the people”—as distinct from the aristocrats—by “the worship of the most infamous divinities” (II.ii.1 n.1). For example, “the moral precepts which occur in Homer are almost always independent of the celestial action; they consist merely in a reflection by the poet on the event which is relating or the catastrophe which he describes” (II.ii.1 n.1). Such humanistic morality needs no support from such gods. Christianity, as it were, internalizes religion, which it understands as a support for morality within the human soul itself. This characteristic of Christianity gives a new dimension of drama to poetry. While the comparison of ancient and Christian epic poetry seemed to end in a judgment of parity with respect to what Chateaubriand calls “the marvelous,” the “relations of supernatural things,” Christianity enables poets to present the psychomachia along with the theomachia (II.ii.1).
Chateaubriand shows this in comparing Homer’s Ulysses and Penelope to Milton’s Adam and Eve. The “meeting of Ulysses and Penelope is, perhaps, one of the most exquisite specimens of ancient genius” (II.ii.2). The understated reunion of “a pair who meet again after an absence of twenty years, and who, without uttering any vehement exclamations, seem as if they had parted only the preceding day,” impresses Chateaubriand as beautiful because true (II.ii.2). The ancients are “more simple, more august, more tragic, more fertile, and, above all, more attentive to truth than the moderns,” with “a better taste, a nobler imagination,” and “without affectation of ornament” (II.ii.2). But the simplicity of Homer’s Ulysses bespeaks his “unpolished nature,” whereas Adam “though but just created and without experience, is already the perfect model of man”—noble, majestic, perfectly innocent, “and at the same time full of intelligence” (II.ii.3). It is true that “in the descriptions of the pleasures of love the great poets of antiquity evince at once a simplicity and a chastity that are astonishing,” while modern poets “inflame the senses,” but that is because “it exhibits a beautiful ideal” (II.ii.3). Christian poets understand sin and the sublime effort of overcoming sin. “Penelope and Ulysses remind us of past troubles; Adam and Eve point to impending woes,” knowing that without God’s intervention there can be no happy ending to human life (II.ii.3). Homer ascends from pain to pleasure; Milton descends “from prosperity to tears,” making his readers “more sad, more sensitive, because the heart scarcely pauses on the present, and already anticipates the calamities with which it is threatened,” a condition truer to nature (II.ii.3).
Chateaubriand completes his survey of poetic portrayals of the family by contrasting ancient and Christian fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters. Homer’s Priam “displays an admirable mixture of grief, address, propriety, and dignity” (II.ii.4). “With what respectable and sacred skill does the venerable sovereign of Ilium…lead the haughty Achilles to listen, even with composure, to the praise of Hector himself!” (II.ii.4). Enraged by Hector’s killing of his friend, Patroclus, Achilles now hears of a hero whose corpse was mangled, torn apart by dogs and vultures, but died defending “his brothers and the walls of Troy” (II.ii.4). Finally, after speaking of men “to the son of Thetis,” an immortal, “reminding him of the just gods,” Priam “leads him back to the recollection of Peleus,” his human father (II.ii.4). The finest father seen in Homer restores the balance between divine and human. Among the moderns, Voltaire’s tragedy, Zara, presents “a father to contrast with Priam” (II.ii.5). Voltaire himself eschewed his usual satire here and, as he wrote, “endeavor[ed] to introduce whatever appears most pathetic and most interesting in the Christian religion” (II.ii.5). True, Voltaire is no Homer; the scene between Lusignan and his daughter “cannot be compared, either in point of arrangement, strength of design, or beauty of poetry,” to Homer’s dialogue between Priam and Achilles, “but the triumph of Christianity will on that account be only the more complete,” since Lusignan is a father whose blood and sufferings “are blended with the misfortunes, the blood, and the sufferings of Jesus Christ”; he is a ‘type’ of Christ, and the way “the cause of a father and the cause of God are mingled together,” as “the venerable age of Lusignan and the blood of the martyrs exert the authority of religion,” lends him a stature that even Homer’s grieving, prudent, and noble father cannot match (II.ii.5).
With respect to mothers, Chateaubriand compares the Andromache of Homer, Euripides, and Virgil to the Andromache of Racine. “We here propose to open a new path for criticism, by seeking in the sentiments of a pagan mother, delineated by a modern author, those Christian traits which that author may have introduced into his picture without being aware of it himself” II.ii.6). The Andromache of Homer and Virgil is more wife than mother; the Andromache of Euripides only “servile and ambitious” (II.ii.6). “Racine’s Andromache has greater sensibility, is more interesting in every respect, than the ancient Andromache”; she is “a Christian mother”—more “tender” than her ancient counterparts “without being less provident, sometimes forget[ting] her sorrows while embracing her son” (II.ii.6). Why? Because “the ancients bestowed upon infancy no great portion of their attention; they seem to have considered swaddling-clothes and a cradle as too simple for their notice,” while “the God of the gospel alone was not ashamed to speak of the little children, and to hold them up as an example to men” (II.ii.6). The pride of the ancients contrasts poorly with the humility of the Christians. “The Christian submits to the severest vicissitudes of life; but his resignation evidently springs from a principle of virtue, for he abases himself under the hand of God alone, and not under the hand of man. In fetters he retains his dignity; with a fidelity unmixed with fear, he despises the chains which he is to wear but for a moment, and from which Providence will soon release him” (II.ii.6).
With respect to sons, Chateaubriand compares Antilochus, the son of King Nestor and friend of Achilles, with Don Gusman, son of the Christian gentleman Don Alvarez in Voltaire’s Alzire, ou les Américains, a tragedy set in Peru in the years following the Spanish conquest. Homer recounts that Antilochus sacrificed himself to save his father. By contrast, Don Gusman is a rebellious son, who ignores his kindly father’s monitions to bring the Indians to Christianity gently. Instead, Gusman persecutes them; mistakenly believing that the rebel leader, Zamore, has been killed, he marries his wife, a convert. When Zamore returns and mortally wounds Gusman, the Spaniard repents of his religious hatred and forgives his killer. Voltaire’s play aims not so much at attacking Christianity (as he was wont to do, elsewhere) than at taming Christian zealotry. Chateaubriand finds Nestor and Antilochus noble, but “the peace that reigns in the bosom of Alvarez is not the mere peace of nature,” and Gusman’s turn away from persecution and his spirit of forgiveness impress him more than the Greek son’s sacrifice (II.ii.7).
Similarly, with respect to daughters, Chateaubriand finds Zara superior to Euripides’ Iphigenia. Both daughters “devote themselves to the religion of their country,” and their fathers both demand that they sacrifice their love for the sake of that religion; “for a female passionately in love to live and renounce the object of her affections is perhaps a harder task than to submit to death itself” (II.ii.8). But “why should the Greek virgin bow submissive to Jupiter,” a “tyrant whom she must detest”? (II.ii.8). In Euripides’ play, “the spectator sides with Iphigenia against heaven”; “pity and terror, therefore, spring solely from natural considerations” (II.ii.8). Take religion out of it and the play loses none of its force. “In Zara, on the contrary, if you meddle with the religion you destroy the whole” (II.ii.8). Zara loved a man who persecuted Christians. In countermanding her passion, her father imposes a sacrifice of feeling for Christian obligation. “Here Christianity goes farther than nature, and consequently harmonizes better with poetry, which aggrandizes objects and is fond of exaggeration” (II.ii.8). Zara is a martyr not by sacrificing her life for her God but by sacrificing her natural sentiment for Him, and for her father. Christianity “is itself a kind of poetry,” sublime as well as beautiful, “depriv[ing] the poet of none of the advantages enjoyed by antiquity for the delineation of the natural characters,” while “offer[ing] him, in addition, all its influence in those same characters,” thereby “augment[ing] his power by increasing his means, and multiplies the beauties of the drama by multiplying the sources from which they spring” (II.ii.8).
Moving from the “natural” characters within the family to the “social” characters outside it, Chateaubriand considers the priest and the warrior. “Antiquity presented nothing more to the poet than a high-priest, a sorcerer, a vestal, a sibyl” (II.ii.9). The Christian village curate offers the poet much more. He compares the priests seen in Virgil with Racine. Chateaubriand has more sympathy for Virgil than for any other poet of antiquity, finding in him a brother in soul. “May it not be that souls endowed with the finer sensibilities are naturally inclined to complain, to desire, to doubt, to express themselves with a kind of timidity; and that complaint, desire, doubt, and timidity are privations of something?” (II.ii.10). Virgil is first among “the pensive poets,” whose “favorite images…are almost always borrowed from negative objects, as the silence of night, the shade of the forests, the solitude of the mountains, the peace of the tombs, which are nothing but the absence of noise, of light, of men, and of the tumults and storms of life” (II.ii.10). As the poet of these beautifies, Virgil is unsurpassed.
But “however exquisite the beauty of Virgil’s verse may be, Christian poetry exhibits something superior” (II.ii.10). It is true that “in the soft and tender scenes…Virgil bursts forth in all his genius”; and in his pensiveness, his melancholy, Virgil again wins the palm, as Racine “lived too much in society, and too little in solitude,” the court of Louis XIV refining his taste and giving him “the majesty of forms,” nonetheless “placed him at too great a distance from nature and rural simplicity,” incapable of writing anything like the Eclogues (II.ii.10). “Virgil is the friend of the solitary, the companion of the private hours of life” (II.ii.10). Still, as a Christian, Racine “is in general superior…in the invention of character”—Christianity being the religion that attends to the individual person in its relation to the personal God. “We feel greater admiration” for Virgil, “greater love” for Racine; “the sorrows depicted by the first are too royal; the second addresses himself more to all ranks of society,” and while “the characters of tragedy ought to be taken from the upper ranks alone of society” because they elevate our attention beyond the banalities of our own lives, the “distresses” suffered by tragic heroes and heroines “ought to be common” (II.ii.10). It is to these sorrows the Christian priest brings the balm of his sympathy, reminding the great of their debt to God. No ancient poet can bring such a priest onto the stage because no such priest existed in antiquity.
The warrior of antiquity was a hero; the warrior of Christendom is a knight. The characters of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered “appear to us superior to those of the Iliad” (II.ii.11). “What a vast difference, in fact, between those knights so ingenuous so disinterested, so humane, and those perfidious, avaricious, ferocious warriors of antiquity, who insulted the lifeless remains of their enemies—as poetical by their vices as the former were by their virtues!” (II.ii.11). Christian morality is superior to the morality of polytheism, and this gives Tasso “an important advantage” over Homer (II.ii.11).
How so? Chateaubriand begins by identifying two kinds of “the beautiful ideal”—physical and moral (II.ii.11). Both are “the offspring of society” not of the “state of nature” (II.ii.11). Whereas the songs of savages “merely aim…at giving a faithful representation of what they see” in the nobility and simplicity they find around them (“you find in them no marks of bad taste”), “they are monotonous, and the sentiments which they express never rise to heroism” (II.ii.11). Homeric Greece has already risen above natural life. “In proportion as society multiplied the wants of life,” poets of this early civil society learned to select from this more complex palette, precisely because they intended to present those objects “susceptible of a more beautiful form, or produced a more agreeable effect,” rejecting those objects which, though desired, were not so susceptible (II.ii.11). Unlike poets in the state of nature, poets in civil society can ‘go wrong,’ select poorly; for them, the beautiful was now an ‘ideal’—something to be discovered and ‘put together’ out of multiple elements, many of them unsuitable, ugly, base—whether in physical form or morally. Only man is “susceptible of being represented more perfect than nature, and, as it were, approaching to the divinity”—an “admirable proof of the grandeur of our destiny and the immortality of the soul” (II.ii.11).
It is Christianity that moral beauty, precisely as the sublime, as the surpassing of sinful human nature, comes to the forefront of poetry. In war, this “constitutes the beauty of the ages of chivalry, and gives them a superiority over the heroic as well as over modern times” (II.ii.11). “Polytheism furnishes no means of correcting barbarous nature and supplying the deficiencies of the primitive virtues,” whereas modernity, in its characteristic form of idealism, an expression of its ambition to conquer nature, has become “too remote from nature and from religion in every respect,” blocking poets from “faithfully depict[ing] the interior of our families, and still less the secret of our hearts” (II.ii.11). “Chivalry alone presents the charming mixture of truth”—the beauties of nature and perhaps also reality of human sinfulness—and “fiction “—the exclusion of vice in the representation of the ideal knight, Tasso’s Godfrey (II.ii.11). “Thus, while we see Tasso merged in nature for the description of physical objects, he rises above nature for the perfection of those in the moral order” (II.ii.11).
At best, antiquity could culminate in Virgil’s “philosophic hero,” Aeneas, a man without vice—sober, moderate, what the French call un homme sérieux. But Aeneas’ “purely moral virtues are essentially frigid; they imply not something added to the soul, but something retrenched from it; it is the absence of vice rather than the presence of virtue” (II.ii.12). By contrast, “the religious virtues” in Christianity “have wings”—the wings of agape. “They are highly impassioned, anxious to do good” and “not content with abstaining from evil” (II.ii.12). In “the activity of love” the knight proves always faithful; he never lies; he is poor and therefore without self-interest; charitable, he “traveled throughout the world, assisting the widow and the orphan”; he exhibited the “sensibility and delicacy” of a Christian; he had “the valor of modern heroes,” taught by the religion which holds “that the merit of a man should be measured not by bodily strength, but by greatness of soul” (II.ii.12). Hence, “though certain to meet death, he has not even a thought of flight”—a valor that “has become so common” in Christendom “that the lowest of our private soldiers is more courageous than an Ajax, who fled before Hector, who in his turn ran away from Achilles” (II.ii.12). And this says nothing of the clemency Christian knights show to the vanquished, far removed from the rage of Achilles, who drags Hector’s corpse round and round the grieving city of Troy. While ‘ideal,’ such Christian virtues are not “a purely poetical invention” (II.ii.12). “There are a hundred instances of Christians who have resigned themselves into the hands of infidels wither to deliver other Christians, or because they were unable to raise the sum which they had promised” (II.ii.12).
Passionate in the way agape may be called a passion, “Christianity has changed the relations of the passions by changing the basis of vice and virtue” (II.iii.1). Unlike “the religions of antiquity,” Christianity “is a heavenly wind which fills the sails of virtue and multiplies the storms of conscience in opposition to vice” (II.iii.1). For the ancients, humility was a vice, and pride was confused with magnanimity or greatness of soul, whereas for Christians “pride is the first of vices and humility the chief of virtues” (II.iii.1). Agapic love has no fear of lowliness; for the Christian, courage and humility conjoin and magnanimity or greatness of soul becomes “poetic generosity”—a “species of passion (for to that length it was carried by the knights) to which the ancients were utter strangers” (II.ii.1). Similarly, agape lends to friendship a new foundation, showing us the “twofold nature” of our friend and of ourselves, “the good and bad of our heart” (II.iii.1). In so doing, we learn “that two men may be perfect friends” while “incessantly, in some way, attract[ing] and repel[ling] one another; they must have genius of equal power, but of a different kind; contrary opinions, but similar principles; different antipathies and partialities, but at the bottom the same sensibility; opposite tempers, and yet like tastes; in a word, great contrasts of character and great harmonies of heart” (II.iii.1). In courage, in magnanimity, and in friendship alike, Christians find in “the virtuous sentiments on earth” a “foretaste of the bliss that is reserved for us” after death—a bliss that ancient polytheism, with its dreary Hades awaiting the souls of the dead, could never hope for (II.iii.1).
Voltairean modernity accuses Christianity of “strip[ping] life of its enchantments” by “revealing to us the foundations upon which rest the passions of men,” all of them tinctured in nature by sin (II.iii.1). The moderns would debase the imagination “by allowing it to indulge in unbounded curiosity” (II.iii.1). Like all true poets, Christianity in fact has only “drawn the veil of doubt and obscurity over things which it is useless to know; and in this it has shown its superiority over that false philosophy which is too eager to penetrate into the nature of man and to fathom the bottom of every thing” (II.iii.1). In concentrating its attention on “sounding the abysses of the heart,” such philosophy sinks into those abysses, “transfer[ring] the reasoning spirit to the passions,” leading us “to doubt of every thing generous and noble,” thereby “extinguish[ing] the sensibilities, and, as it were, murder[ing] the soul” (II.iii.1).
Thanks to Christianity, the eros of the ancients differs fundamentally from the love of the moderns. “That mixture of the senses and of the soul—that species of love of which friendship is the moral element—is the growth of modern times,” as Christianity moved “to purify the heart,” finding “means to transfuse spirituality even into the passion that seemed least susceptible of it” (II.iii.2)—all to the benefit of poets and novelists. (Clementina, in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, “is one of those masterpieces of composition of which antiquity affords no example” [II.iii.2].) Chateaubriand first considers “impassioned love,” the love seen in modern civil society, and pastoral or “rural” love (II.iii.2). Each has been transformed by Christianity.
Impassioned love “ravages the soul in which it reigns,” becoming “its own illusion, its own insanity, its own substance” outside “the gravity of marriage” and “the innocence of rural manners” (II.iii.2). It is a passion enabled by leisure, seen and felt “only in those ranks of society where want of employment leaves us oppressed with the whole weight of our heart, together with its immense self-love and its everlasting inquietudes” (II.iii.2). Virgil’s Dido feels “a secret fire circulat[ing] in her veins”; “indiscretions begin, pleasures follow, disappointment and remorse succeed,” and she is soon forsaken by her lover (II.iii.3). But she can only pray to Cupid and to Aeneas, both of whom enticed and then betrayed her, and then to “the places that had witnessed her transports,” in a vain effort at supporting herself “by animating the insensible objects” around her (II.iii.3). Persons divine and human do not care, while remembered settings cannot. Racine’s Phèdre, by contrast, amounts to “a Christian wife” set by the dramatist in ancient Greece (II.iii.3). She is jealous because Christianity valorizes fidelity; she fears hellfire because she knows even death won’t remove her pain. Christianity gives Racine the capacity to depict “a gradation of feeling, a knowledge of the sorrows, the anguish, and the transports of the soul, which the ancients never approached” in “a mixture of sensuality and soul, of despair and amorous fury” (II.iii.3). She is no ‘ancient’ but a “reprobate Christian,” a “sinner fallen alive into the hands of God; her words are the words of the self-condemned to everlasting tortures” (II.iii.3).
If Phèdre suffers a more exquisite soul-torture than Dido could feel, “Christianity proves a real balm” for the wounds Cupid’s arrows inflict (II.iii.4). “It lulls our woes, it strengthens our wavering resolution, it prevents relapses by combating the dangerous power of memory in a soul scarcely yet cured,” shedding around us the “peace, fragrance, and light” of agape, which never dies, never betrays, never debauches (II.iii.4). And so Richardson’s heroines can “show that mankind are truly happy only in proportion as they listen to the dictates of conscience and follow the path of duty” because the novelist could imagine them out of “the rich resources of his own mind, from the study of the Bible, and a quick insight into human nature and human character” (II.iii.4). Richardson “has been justly styled ‘the great master of the human heart,’ ‘the Shakespeare of Romance,'” whose long novels give him the space needed “to develop the springs of human action, and to give a distinct view of the progressive, various, and complex movements of the human mind” (II.iii.4). Little wonder that modern ‘secularist’ readers neglect them. [1]
The correspondence between the twelfth-century theologian and logician Peter Abelard and his brilliant student, then lover, Eloise is no novel, but rather illustrates the poetic character of erotic love between Christians in reality, with no need for imaginative embellishments. After Eloise became pregnant, the lovers married under the auspices of Eloise’s uncle, Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame, who then betrayed their secret in order to ruin Abelard. Eloise escaped to a convent and Fulbert had his rival castrated by a hired gang. Both lovers took holy orders, beginning the long series of letters. “Give Racine To Eloisa for an interpreter, and the picture of her woes will be a thousand times more impressive than that of Dido’s misfortunes, from the tragical effect, the place of the scene, and a certain awfulness which Christianity throws around objects to which it communicates its grandeur. It would be impossible for antiquity to furnish such a scene, because it had not such a religion.” (II.iii.5). “Dido loses only an ungrateful lover. How different the anguish that rends the heart of Eloisa,” who must “choose between God and a faithful lover whom she has involved in misfortunes”—the “God of Sinai,” a “jealous God” who “insists on being loved in preference” (II.iii.5).
For examples of pastoral love in ancient and Christian poetry, Chateaubriand selects Ovid’s tale of Cyclops and Galatea, comparing it to Saint-Pierre’s then-celebrated novel, Paul et Virginie. Ovid retells (and embellishes) the story of the unrequited love of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, for the sea-nymph, Galatea. Polyphemus discovers her in the arms of the mortal, Acis, then crushes his rival with a boulder. The story ends, characteristically, with a metamorphosis, whereby Galatea transforms Acis into a river-god. It cannot be numbered among the more touching pastoral poems, even by ‘ancient’ standards. Saint-Pierre sets his lovers in unspoiled Mauritius, where they meet as children. Rousseauian in many ways, the novel nonetheless is “full of allusions to the Scriptures” and the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, which “shed their spiritual beauty over the work” (II.iii.6). In the end, Virginie “dies for the preservation of one of the principal virtues enjoined by Christianity,” modesty; “it would have been absurd to make a Grecian woman die for refusing to expose her person,” but “the lover of Paul is a Christian virgin, and what would be ridiculous according to the impure notions of heathenism becomes in this instance sublime,” the culmination of a story that “none but a Christian could have related” (II.iii.6).
The Christian religion is itself a passion, one called “fanaticism” by “the present age” of self-described Enlightenment (II.iii.8). To understand it as a passion “supplies the poet with immense treasures”: the dramatic struggle with other passions; its seriousness, given its claim to be the rightful ruling passion of all souls; its “eternal beauty,” for which “Plato’s disciples were so anxious to quit the earth” (II.iii.8). But there is no permissible suicide for Christians; unlike the “Athenian philosophers,” they are commanded to “remain in the world in order to multiply their sacrifices, and to render themselves more worthy, by a long purification” or sanctification, “of the object of their desires” (II.iii.8). There is nothing more poetic, in Chateaubriand’s sense, nothing more sublime, than the glory of martyrdom. St. Jerome leaves Rome, retreats to the forests of Jordan, where “he fights hand-to-hand with all his passions,” his only weapons “tears, fasting, study, penance, and, above all, love” (II.iii.8). Sublime not beautiful, he worships “the divine beauty” and begs for the grace of comfort from the Person who alone possesses it. For poetry that evokes the Christian passion one turns not so much to Racine but to Corneille and especially to his portrayal of Polyeuctes, with his “greatness of soul,” his dignity, his “divine enthusiasm” (II.iii.8).
Tocqueville must have read Chateaubriand’s final chapter on Christian passion with particular care. There now exists, Chateaubriand writes, “a state of the soul which, we think, has not been accurately described” (II.iii.9). Prior to the development of the strong passions, it haunts modern civilization. With their printing presses and high rates of literacy, modern nations possess far more books than any civilization of the past. These give us “knowledge without experience”; they disillusion us “before we have enjoyed”; our desires remain but their objects seem pointless (II.iii.9). Thanks to the multitude of poems and novels, “our imagination is rich, abundant, and full of wonders but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms” (II.iii.9). “The heart turns a hundred different ways to employ the energies which it feels to be useless to it” (II.iii.9).
“The ancients knew little of this secret inquietude, this irritation of the stifled passions fomenting all together” (II.iii.9). There was not even a word for ‘boredom’ among men absorbed in political life. “The business of the forum and of the popular assemblies engaged all their time, and, left no room for this tedium of the heart” (II.iii.9). For their part, women managed the household—hard, physical work for the poor, and for the rich consuming the energies spent in constant attention and care. As men and women lived separate but all-consuming lives, men’s passions were not “softened by the mixture of theirs,” made “uncertain and delicate” in a way that “render[s] the marks of the masculine character less distinct” (II.iii.9). Without such intense hopes and fears respecting life after death, men were also less disposed by religion “to meditation and desire,” to the “inexhaustible abstractions and meditations” attendant to a religion that exhibits “the twofold picture of terrestrial griefs and heavenly joys,” hearts filled with “present evils and distant hopes” (II.iii.9). Modern souls that have abandoned Christianity, ardent though they may be, “have no monastery to enter, or have not the virtue that would lead them to one”; “they feel like strangers among men”—alienated, a later generation would say—gripped by a “culpable sadness” or melancholy “which springs up in the midst of the passions, when these passions, without object, burn themselves out in a solitary heart” (II.iii.9). [2]
If Christianity gives poets a better field in the human soul than either antiquity or modernity, did the ancient poets not benefit from the richness the regnant mythology imparted to the natural world? Did it not infuse nature with what Chateaubriand has called “the marvelous”?
It did so infuse it, but to the detriment of poetry. I know “the weight of authority” bears down against me, Chateaubriand admits, but mythology in fact “circumscribed the limits of nature and banished truth from her domain” (II.iv.1). The ancient poets couldn’t see nature’s scenery through the crowd of gods, satyrs, and nymphs, “the ridiculous divinities of fabulous times” (II.iv.1). As a result, “the poetry which we term descriptive was unknown throughout all antiquity”; scenery, the seasons, “the variations of the sky and weather” seldom find a voice to praise them (II.iv.1). There is no James Thompson in Greek antiquity. By “peopling the universe with elegant phantoms,” the ancients “banished from the creation its solemnity, its grandeur, and its solitude” (II.iv.1). To see those dimensions of nature, one needs the Creator-God, the One who “has imparted his immensity to nature,” and a man who finds himself in but never entirely of nature, separated from his, and its, Creator, even as he feels His care for him (II.iv.1). More than most men of his time, Chateaubriand had felt this, having traveled in America. “Penetrate those forests…coeval with the world. What profound silence pervades those retreats when the winds are hushed!” (II.iv1). The Christian poet, alone with nature, with no thoughts Pan or the Nereids, finds in nature’s immensities “an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls,” “which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fullness of joy in the presence of its Author” (II.iv.1). “Hitherto solitude had been looked upon as frightful, but Christianity found in it a thousand charms” (II.iv.3).
To depopulate the lands and seas of their imagined divinities in no way diminishes the Christian’s sense of the marvelous. The gods of the ancients “shar[ed] our virtues and our vices,” being “but a species of superior men” (II.iv.4). Even the “abstract” God of the Christian philosophers, “so admirably delineated by Tertullian and St. Augustine,” is “far superior to the Theos of Plato,” being the Creator, not a mere demiurge (II.iv.4). And the personal, jealous, loving, hating, wrathful Father God addressed by the Christian poets, his compassionate Son, along with loving Mother of God, the saints and the angels, care for man, never leading him “to any idea of depravity and vice,” as the pagan deities did (II.iv.4). As for the demons, who do just that, the denizens of Hell war with those of Heaven in a war in which the stakes are higher for us, and which poets therefore conceive more vividly, than any palace revolution in Olympus. And even considered without the immortals who surround them, Jupiter’s majesty cannot match the majesty of Jehovah, who needs only to say “Let there be light” for there to be light (II.iv.5).
Jupiter and the other “deities of polytheism” are generally human-all-too-human (II.iv.6). “If they happened to oppose each other, it was only in the quarrels of mortals They were soon reconciled by drinking nectar together.” (II.iv.6). Christianity’s irrevocable distinction between good and evil, with “spirits of darkness incessantly plotting the ruin of mankind, and spirits of light solely intent on the means of saving them,” “opens to the imagination a source of numberless beauties” (II.iv.6), and Christian poets have yet fully to avail themselves “of all the stores with which the marvelous of Christianity is capable of supplying the Muses” (II.iv.7). “Philosophers may laugh at the saints and angels; but had not the philosophers themselves their demi-gods,” the heroes of antiquity? (II.iv.7). Pythagoras calls his readers to honor them and, while “under polytheism sophists sometimes appeared more moral than the religion of their country, among us, never has a philosopher, however extraordinary his wisdom, risen higher than Christian morality” (II.iv.7). And insofar as the existence of angels suggests a sort of polytheism, it is a polytheism purged of sin in conflict with the horde of demons, wholly evil, with Satan their anti-Christ tyrant. Dante, Tasso, and Milton have shown how master poets can frame new, truer, and greater epic poems from these beings. Their only limitation is the indescribable beauty of Heaven, where the “unbounded felicity” of life proves “too much above the human condition for the soul to be touched by it” (II.iv.16).
Chateaubriand concludes his comparison of ancient and Christian poetry by setting Homer’s epics against the Bible. With the Bible, even satirists often hold back. “Those who do not believe in the authenticity of the Bible nevertheless believe, in spite of themselves, that there is something more than common” in it (II.v.1). There is, after all, “not a situation in life for which we may not find in the Bible a text apparently dictated with an express reference to it” (II.v.1). How implausible, and how risible, then, can it be? For the poet, this goes beyond the Bible’s substance, which comprehends the origin of the world and “the prediction of its end,” “the groundwork of all human sciences,” a survey of political regimes and states, moral conduct “applicable in prosperity and adversity, and to the most elevated as well as the most humble ranks of life” (II.v.1). The Bible also provides the best models of the principal literary styles: from history (Genesis, Deuteronomy, Job), to sacred poetry (the Psalms, the books of the prophets), to what might be called sacred rhetoric—the evangelical or gospel style (II.v.2).
In its historical books, the Bible features something unmatched in antiquity. Not only do the words of the Book of Genesis combine sublimity and majesty with simplicity in a way even Homer cannot rival, it (and the other historical books) speaks simply of a matter: “The history of the Israelites is not only the real history of ancient days, but likewise the type of modern times,” as “each fact is of a twofold nature”—the Israelites being “a symbolical epitome of the human race, representing in its adventures all that has happened and all that ever will happen in the world,” including prefigurations of Christ Himself and His work (II.v.2).
Reserving his discussion of Biblical poetry for his chapter on the parallels between the Bible and Homer, Chateaubriand contrasts the sacred rhetoric of the New Testament with its ancient counterpart. “Here the sublimity of the prophets is softened into a tenderness not less sublime; here love itself speaks; here the Word is really made flesh” (ii.v.2). And in so doing, that Word, in the enfleshed Person of Jesus, chooses for the head of the Church Peter, “the very one among his disciples who had denied him” (II.v.2). “The whole spirit of Christianity is unfolded in this circumstance. St. Peter is the Adam of the new law; the guilty and penitent father of the new Israelites,” who follow “a religion of mercy” as well as of judgment (II.v.2). At once a masterpiece of concision and of truth, the Gospel surpasses all the fine but merely human speeches of antiquity, from those of Demosthenes to those of Cicero.
In its poetry, too, the Bible excels the epics of Homer. A people “who, by a remarkable combination, unite primitive simplicity with a profound knowledge of mankind,” the Israelites had a language to match: “concise, energetic, with scarcely any inflection in its verbs, expressing twenty shades of a thought by the mere apposition of a letter” (II.v.3). “A nation of an imitative and social genius—a nation elegant and vain, fond of melody and prodigal of words,” the Greeks also developed a language equally fitting to their character “in its intricate conjugations, in its endless inflections, in its diffuse eloquence” (II.v.3).
Accordingly, the Bible is “more solemn,” Homer “more lively” (II.v.3). “The simplicity of Scripture is that of an ancient priest, who, imbued with all the sciences, human and divine, pronounces from the recess of the sanctuary the precise oracles of wisdom,” while Homer’s simplicity “is that of an aged traveler, who, beside the hearth of his host, relates all that he has learned in the course of a long and chequered life” (II.v.3). Biblical hospitality is similarly spare. The guest’s needs are met but “no questions are asked him” and “he stays or pursues his journey as he pleases” (II.v.3). In Greece, he receives a luxurious welcome in return for a full account of his journey. “Take notice that the unknown guest is a stranger with Homer and a traveler in the Bible. What different views of humanity! The Greek implies merely a political and local idea, where the Hebrew conveys a moral and universal sentiment.” (II.v.3).
Biblical narrative, its use of Hebrew, also contrasts with Homeric narrative. “The narrative of the Bible is rapid, without digression, without circumlocution; it is broken into short sentences, and the persons are named without flattery” (II.v.3). Not so in Homer, who interrupts his story with “digressions, harangues, description of vessels, garments, arms, and scepters, by genealogies of men and things” (II.v.3). Israelite society was “much nearer to the state of nature than that sung by Homer”; all the selfish passions are awakened in the characters of the Odyssey, whereas they are dormant in those of Genesis” (II.v.3).
Whether describing person or things, the Bible selects one defining trait, whereas Homer inclines to prolixity and to detail. The Bible deploys metaphor, Homer simile. In approaching the sublime, the Bible makes it “burst upon you like lightning, and you are left wounded by the thunderbolt before you know how you were struck by it” (II.v.3). Homer instead builds up to the sublime, “arriving by degrees to its acme” (II.v.3).
All of these contrasting traits may be seen in the Bible’s story of Joseph’s return to his father when laid next to Homer’s reunion of Ulysses and Telemachus. Homer compares “the sobs of Telemachus and Ulysses with the cries of an eagle and her young”; the Bible simply tells us, “He fell upon Benjamin’s neck, and kissed him, and wept; and Benjamin wept also, as he held him in his embrace.” Chateaubriand remarks, “Such is the only magnificence of style adapted to such occasions” (II.v.3).
Note
- Among the Americans in Chateaubriand’s century, the great Chief Justice, John Marshall, was also called “that great master of the human heart” by one of his colleagues on the Supreme Court. A judge, like a novelist, needs to know the abysses of the heart and to avail himself of the power to pull himself away from those abysses, to judge what he has seen there with justice and clemency, by the standard set by the Gospels.
- Chateaubriand almost undoubtedly takes this theme from Pascal, who regards human restiveness as endemic to the post-lapsarian human soul as such. For his part, Chateaubriand’s kinsman and attentive reader Alexis de Tocqueville gave the theme a new articulation in Democracy in America, especially as seen in II.ii.13. While acknowledging that human restiveness has characterized human life as such since its beginning, or near its beginning, he finds that democracy—that is, equality of social conditions, not the political regime seen, most conspicuously, in ancient Greece—has intensified it. In aristocratic societies, all men have their place, and seldom leave it. In democratic societies, however, while there is little of the war of all against all that Hobbes thought he saw in the state of nature, there is a competition of all against all, as men jostle to satisfy their natural desire for well-being. Thus Americans are “grave and almost sad in their pleasures,” always in a hurry to satisfy them but never savoring them but always striving for more. If in aristocratic societies men struggle to maintain and sometimes to enhance their rank, under democracy “men will never found an equality that is enough for them”; social equality is a will-o’-the-wisp, a thing that stays just ahead of your reach for it. This leads democratic man to “melancholy,” as Chateaubriand experienced, after the political and social upheaval of the French Revolution, and beyond that to “disgust” and even to “madness.” (II.ii.13). With Pascal and Chateaubriand, Tocqueville calls this restiveness a vice. But in the America of the 1830s and 1840s, with its vast, unsettled territories in the West, it is an advantage, not the danger it is in Europe. It lends American society “a superabundant force, an activity that never ends,” one that “can bring forth miracles” of industry and commerce (II.ii.6 and II.ii.19). In this, it is noteworthy to observe, Americans are not mere materialists; “they love the sensation” of striving “as much as the gain” (II.ii.9). They also find a refuge from this restiveness in their homes, among their families, a place Europeans, with their disordered domestic morals, cannot find it. The late Peter Augustine Lawler was the scholar who showed why Tocqueville listed Pascal as an influence equal to that of Rousseau (Lawler: The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993). It may be said that Chateaubriand provides a link between Pascal and Tocqueville. For Chateaubriand, modern atheism is the agent that aggravates human restiveness, for Tocqueville democracy. Chateaubriand associates modern atheism with the Enlightenment and the sometimes violent democratic forces it unleashed; Tocqueville ascribes the origin of democracy to the advent of Christianity itself, social equality’s effects then magnified by the establishment of the modern, centralized state, which completed the felling of the grand aristocratic oak. Both Chateaubriand and Tocqueville seek to find a role for the virtues of aristocracy in this modern, egalitarian world. In The Genius of Christianity, Chateaubriand evidently seeks to find the springs of the aristocratic spirit of self-government and magnanimity in Christianity by showing that there are indeed still things ‘above’ us, resistant to the leveling spirit of satirists. Tocqueville might concur, although he would caution that Christianity, with its doctrine of the equality of men under one God, pulls human societies toward democracy even as it retains many of the merits of the aristocratic society in which it originated.
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