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Books Like Le Génie du christianisme
Best books to read after Le Génie du christianisme by Chateaubriand
Readers who respond to the Génie du christianisme's argument for Christianity as the source of Western aesthetic greatness and its founding of French Romanticism will find the wider tradition of Romantic Christian apologetics and literary criticism.
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Buy on AmazonAtala
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Atala was embedded within the Génie du christianisme as an example of the kind of Christian literature Chateaubriand was arguing for: reading Atala in the context of the Génie reveals it as a demonstration of the theoretical argument rather than an independent narrative.
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René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Like Atala, René was first published within the Génie du christianisme as a literary example: René is Chateaubriand's demonstration that the 'vague des passions' — the undefined longing of the Romantic soul — is a specifically Christian condition, the result of the aspiration toward the infinite that Christianity cultivates.
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Buy on AmazonLes Martyrs
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Les Martyrs (1809) is the literary demonstration of the Génie du christianisme's argument at epic scale: where the Génie argues theoretically that Christian literature surpasses classical literature, Les Martyrs attempts to prove it by writing a Christian epic in prose that rivals Virgil's Aeneid.
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Buy on AmazonPensées
by Blaise Pascal
Pascal's Pensées (1669), which Chateaubriand cites extensively in the Génie, is the most powerful previous French argument for Christianity as the only adequate response to the human condition: Chateaubriand's aesthetic argument for Christianity develops from Pascal's existential argument.
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Buy on AmazonMémoires d'outre-tombe
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The Mémoires are the autobiography of the man who wrote the Génie du christianisme and contain the account of how Chateaubriand came to write his apology for Christianity: the story of his reconversion to Catholicism in London in 1798, after his mother's death, is one of the Mémoires' most important episodes.
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Buy on AmazonDe l'Allemagne
by Germaine de Staël
De Staël's 1813 work extends the same argument for Christianity's importance to Western culture that Chateaubriand made in the Génie, but from a liberal Protestant perspective: where Chateaubriand argues for Catholic Christianity, de Staël argues that German Protestant Christianity provides the spiritual depth that French classicism lacks.
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Buy on AmazonIn Memoriam A.H.H.
by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Tennyson's elegy (1850) is the English Romantic equivalent of the spiritual project of the Génie du christianisme: where Chateaubriand argues that Christianity provides the only adequate aesthetic and spiritual framework for Western civilization, Tennyson works through the same argument in the face of Victorian doubt and Darwinian challenge.
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Buy on AmazonThe Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis
Thomas à Kempis's fifteenth-century devotional work is the most widely read Christian text after the Bible and the one that Chateaubriand cites most frequently in the Génie: it represents the interior Christian life that Chateaubriand argues is the deepest source of Western aesthetic culture.
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