The Genius of Christianity

Title page of the 1802 edition

The Genius of Christianity (French: Génie du christianisme) is a work by the French author François-René de Chateaubriand, written during his exile in England in the 1790s as a defense of the Catholic faith, then under attack during the French Revolution. It was first published in France in 1802, after Chateaubriand had taken advantage of the amnesty Napoleon issued to émigrés, which had allowed him to return to his home country in 1800. Napoleon, who had just signed the Concordat with the pope, initially made use of Chateaubriand's book as propaganda to win support among French Catholics. Within five years, he had quarrelled with the author and sent him into internal exile.

In The Genius of Christianity, Chateaubriand defends the wisdom and beauty of Christianity against the attacks on it by French Enlightenment philosophers and revolutionary politicians. The book had an immense influence on nineteenth century culture and not just on religious life. In fact, it might be said its greatest impact was on art and literature: it was a major inspiration for the Romantic movement.

Work

The book emerged from Chateaubriand's attempt to understand the causes of the French Revolution, which had led to the death of many of his friends and family members. Some time in the late 1790s, Chateaubriand had reverted to the Catholic faith of his childhood. He felt that France had lost its way during the Enlightenment period, when leading intellectuals, such as Voltaire, were hostile to traditional religion. In the work, Chateaubriand aims to prove "Christianity comes from God, because it is excellent". With that objective in mind, he is particularly interested in the artistic contributions of the Christian religion, comparing them with ancient and pagan civilizations. The principal theme of the book is that "only Christianity is able to explain progress in arts and letters".

Chateaubriand accuses the writers of the eighteenth century of misunderstanding God. He makes an exception for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had "a shadow of religion". For Chateaubriand, Voltaire is an inferior playwright to Jean Racine because Voltaire was not a Christian.

Structure and contents

Chateaubriand divided Génie du christianisme into four parts:

The original edition of Génie du christianisme also contained two novellas by Chateaubriand, René and Atala, both of them romantic tales about American Indians. The novellas had already been published separately. Together with the related story Les Natchez, which went unpublished until 1827, these books continued to bring fame to Chateaubriand throughout his life.

Influence

Génie du christianisme had a considerable influence on the history of literary and religious ideas in nineteenth century France. Written in a Classical style, but early Romantic in sensibility, it glorified new sources of inspiration, such as Gothic architecture and the great epics of the Middle Ages. Many critics consider Chateaubriand's vivid powers of description have worn better than the strength of his philosophical arguments. As David Cairns writes: "Beyond its specific purpose, Génie du christianisme set a current of sympathy flowing between the author and a whole generation of young French men and women, kindling their imaginations over a wide range of feelings and ideas: the power of the great epic writers, Nature in its immense diversity and grandeur, the poetry of ruins, the spell of the distant past, the beauty of immemorial popular rituals and the haunting melancholy of the music accompanying them, the pangs of awakening consciousness and the perils and ardours of the solitary adolescent soul. More than any other work, it was the primer of early French Romanticism." Besides this, the book served as a model for the renewal of French Catholicism, inspiring numerous authors, including Dom Guéranger and Félicité Robert de Lamennais.

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