GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY, The. Chateaubriand's
The 'Genius of Christianity' appeared at the moment when Napoleon, having attained almost unchallenged power in a France weary of the political disorders and moral negations of revo lution, was about to give official recognition and restoration to the chastened national church. France had shown abundant practical evidence since 1796 that it was ready for this act, and Chateaubriand's book served at once as its glorification and its justification. It is a bril liant piece of special pleading for, the supreme and uni9ue excellence of traditional Christian ity, rigidly logical in form, systematically analytic in the development of its theme, but based rather on what its author called "a rational instinct of submission to all that was beautiful— religion, justice, equality, liberty, glory° than on reasoned dogmatic conviction. To the France of the Consulate he commended Christianity rather because it was beautiful in its works and ways than because it was true in its teachings. In doing this he laid aside neither his pesimism nor even his underlying scepticism, as is clear from his incorporation in the book of the little half-autobiographical story of Rene, a morbid toying with melancholy. His ambition was rather "to rival Bossuet and ruin Voltaire" than to maintain logical con sistency in a mind, made, as he said, "to be lieve in nothing, not even in itself.*
Christianity, the author contends, has more to convince the mind and satisfy the heart than any other faith; it has contributed more to man's wsthetic enjoyments; it has rendered greater services and benefits. The reasoning is often puerile, but the passionate eloquence is still stirring. The doctrine of divine father hood is supported by such observations as that "domestic animals are born with just enough instinct to be tamed,* that birds migrate just at the season when they are convenient for human food, and that in French the first syllable of the word for hearthstone (foyer) sounds like the word for faith (foi). The three Graces of classical mythology are offered as an adumbration of the Trinity, the con stellation of the Southern Cross as a witness to the Crucifixion. Not much is gained for Christian apologetics by the discussion °whether the divinities of paganism have poetically a superiority over the Christian divinities," but there is a stirring emotional appeal in the cumulative contrasts of pagan and Christian fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, priests, sol diers; of Christian poetry and pagan, and especially of the Bible with Homer. Orator ically notdble are the descriptive passages, leading the mind through the marvels of nature to the acceptance of Divinity, and the remarkable chapters on Christian Missions and the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
'The Genius of
was a revindi cation of the rights of sentiment from the materialism of the encyclopmdists and the Philosophes. Thus it contributed essentially not only to the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in France but to the approaching revival of the more personal forms of writing, especially of lyric poetry and of introspective prose, that literature of "confessions," of whose morbidity Rene was the prototype, which was so characteristic of the young Romantic School. The