Genius of Christianity
And the Darkness of Rome
Francois Rene de Chateaubriand was an exile of the French Revolution. He spent the tumultuous 1790s in England, where he wrote his reactionary masterpiece The Genius of Christianity, or Beauties of the Christian Religion, published in 1802. The tome counts among the greatest works of apologetics ever accomplished. As implied by the title, it concentrates on showing the reader all the beauty and cultural uplift that Christianity has produced. Rather than going for intricate logical proofs or for any singular decisive argument, Chateaubriand heaps up a veritable mountain of evidence, offering the atheist a death by a thousand cuts.
The great debt
Here are a few choice quotations to set the stage.
“Every religion has its mysteries. All nature is a secret. The Christian mysteries are the most sublime that can be; they are the archetypes of the system of man and of the world.”
Some of his arguments are very Lewisian:
“Morality of itself proves the immortality of the soul. Man feels a desire of happiness and is the only creature who cannot attain it; there is consequently a felicity beyond the present life; for we cannot wish for what does not exist.”
His analysis of the sacraments is poignant:
“God has established only two social sacraments, if we may be allowed this expression, because, in reality, there are but two states in life – celibacy and marriage.”
With atheism he has no patience:
“Atheism can benefit no class of people: neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman, whose beauty and sensibility it mars. Religion speaks of the grandeur and beauty of man. Atheism is continually setting the leprosy and plague before our eyes.
“In the abominable worship of atheism, human woes are the incense, death is the priest, ”
Christian literature is superior to secular:
“In literature, characters appear more interesting and the passions more energetic under the Christian dispensation than they were under polytheism. The latter exhibited no dramatic feature, no struggle between natural desire and virtue. The ancients founded their poetry on Homer, while the Christians found theirs on the Bible, and the beauties of the Bible surpass the beauties of Homer.”
Philosophically the faith is impeccable:
“The truths of Christianity, so far from requiring the submission of reason, command, on the contrary, the most sublime exercise of that faculty. Christianity, which has been characterized as the religion of barbarians, is so truly the religion of philosophers, that Plato may be said to have almost anticipated it.
“What the brightest geniuses of Greece discovered by a last effort of reason is now publicly taught in every church; and the laborer, for a few pence, may purchase, in the catechism of his children, the most sublime secrets of the ancients.”
To Christianity mankind is indebted for
“The worship of one only God.
The more firm establishment of the belief in the existence of that supreme Being.
A clearer idea of the immortality of the soul, and also of a future state of rewards and punishments.
A perfect virtue, which alone is equivalent to all the others: Charity.
A political law and the law of nations, unknown to the ancients, and, above all, the abolition of slavery.
Who is there but must be convinced of the beauty and grandeour of Christianity? Who but must be overwhelmed with this stupendous mass of benefits?”
What if paganism had persisted?
Among the most harrowing parts of the book is the sledgehammer Chateaubriand wields against paganism. Chesterton tends to paint a noble picture of Rome, but Chateaubriand pushes the supposedly noble Romans from their pedestal.
He offers a grim view of Augustus, pointing out that the first emperor attained his power through crimes, while raining under hypocritical virtue. “Incapable of being a great man, he determined to acquire the character of a fortunate prince.”
The corrupt manners of the Romans were set in deep, and they were unable to change them for the better. And their manners ultimately directed the course of the empire. “Neither Titus, nor Antoninus, nor Marcus Aurelius could change the groundwork under them; by nothing less than a God could this be accomplished.”
Chateaubriand argues that the Romans were a fundamentally corrupt people, as it wouldn’t be possible to sink into such consistent national vices without a natural perverseness and an an innate defect of the heart. Even when Rome had virtues, they were unnatural. “The first Brutus butchered his sons, and the second assassinated his father.”
While Rome was a free city it was indeed frugal, but that was only because it was poor. She was brave only because she was born a sword in hand, and got her beginnings as a den of criminals. “She was ferocious, unjust, avaricious, luxurious: she had nothing admirable but her genius. Her character was detestable.”
To the base character Chateaubriand adds the corrupt manners. Even the noblest of Romans like Cato the Younger were detestable in their relationships. Cato did not mind prostitution, and he even gives off pregnant wife for another man to marry for the sake of a political game. Then, after the new wealthy husband had died, Cato took his former wife back, together with the great wealth she had just inherited. Cicero in turn gets rid of his wife in order to marry his ward Publia. Tiberius sinks into a life of deepest degeneracy on Capri. Nero marries a man and becomes his “wife”.
Rome’s was also a Culture of Death. Children exposed, abortion prevalent, divorce a commonplace, contraception the rule rather than the exception. Birth rates in free fall. But they added to the sexual wantonness a well developed taste for slaughter as a spice of life. After a Roman had had enough of his whores, he would enjoy the spectacle of lions devouring his fellow man.
“What sort of a people must that have been who stationed disgrace both at the entrance and at the exit of life, and exhibited upon a stage the two great mysteries of nature – to dishonor at once the whole work of God?”
Their grand Laws devolved into pathetic legalism. It was common to kill hundreds of people of all ranks, of every age and sex, on the slightest suspicion of the emperor – perfectly legally. What’s more, the abject relatives of the victims all assisted in these slaughters, celebrated the deaths of their loved one, and then kissed the ring of their monarch.
We are told of the 9 year old daughter of the famed Sejanus refusing to celebrate the killing of her father. She requested to be whipped instead. On her way to prison she was raped by the executioner before he strangled her. This here was the Roman Law.
Later generations have foolishly praised the Roman indifference towards death. Suicide is always the norm for people of corrupt morals: a man reduced to a the instincts of an animal dies with the same lack of care. The Roman’s stoic attitude towards death was driven by the stifling of all moral feeling.
The fact that Romans had to suffer tyrants is thus only natural: a consequence of moral corruption. The baseness of a people naturally leads to tyranny, and tyranny then goes on to amplify the baseness. Because moral sense was deadened, only force could make the society function. The moral state of things further necessitated the slave economy – only naked force could make people work.
Furthermore, “the slaves were as depraved as their masters, they shared the same pleasures and the same disgraces. They had the same religion of the passions, which destroyed every hope of a change in the principles of morality.” When there is no great moral power to draw from, a great coercive power is required. Each master was a supreme judge in himself. This micro-despotism kept the slaves in place and “compensated by chains for the deficiency of the moral religious force.”
Slavery also corrupted the social and moral incentives. A slave nation (whether actual or spiritual) is afraid of educating the human race. Instead it is prone to feeding our base desires and sinking us into stagnancy. It encourages the sensual part of man, while neglecting the cultivation of the soul.
Christianity is a religion of free men because of this singular fact: it fuses morality with religion. Their separation inevitably leads to slavery, first mental and later physical. This process we can surely witness around us.
The life of the spirit was starving. Roman polytheism was of no help – if anything the infamous gods only further rewarded degeneracy. “Arts began to decline, and philosophy served only to spread impiety, which left the idols intact for the vulgar, but produced new crimes of atheism in the mighty.”
Chateaubriand notes that there appears to be a natural connection between degeneracy and calamity.
“May we not suppose that God has so combined the physical and moral order of the universe that a subversion of the latter necessarily occasions a change in the former, and that great crimes naturally produce great revolutions?”
What would have happened had Christianity not arrived like a New Ark, to save mankind from the new deluge of degeneracy? Where would knowledge have been stored if not in the monasteries? Would sexual morals ever have improved and the culture ever have turned from death to life?
Admitting all this pushes us to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is indeed the Savior of the World, and not only in the spiritual sense, but also in the material sense. Even in purely historic and human terms, his life on earth was the most important event in history, because the degenerate world only began to heal because of the spread of his Gospel.
The precise timing of his coming was crucial: a little earlier and his commands and morals would not yet have been felt to be absolutely necessary. The sense of urgency would not have sufficed. And had he come a little later, the anointed one would have been born amid a ruin and a wasteland.
The linchpin
If there is a silver lining to all this, it is to count our blessings:
“Let us no more complain of the present state of society. The most corrupt people of modern times is a people of sages in comparison with the pagan nations.”
Though of course we should keep in mind Chateaubriand did not know what the following 200 years have wrought…
Yet the point stands: theirs was a moral infancy compared to the Christian society that emerged after the fall of paganism. If we must live among ruins, at least now they are Christian ruins.
While Chateaubriand doesn’t go spend much time on logical arguments, he does end his book with one. After piling up scores of evidence and giving us cautionary examples from paganism, he feels confident that he has sufficiently demonstrated the genius of Christianity, and that an attentive reader is now capable of following his logic:
Christianity is perfect. Men are imperfect.
A perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect source.
Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men.
If Christianity is not the work of men, it can have come from none but God.