Le Génie du christianisme Reading Order

Le Génie du christianisme, ou Beautés de la religion chrétienne (The Genius of Christianity, or Beauties of the Christian Religion, 1802) by François-René de Chateaubriand is one of the most influential books in French literary and religious history — a vast apologetic work in five parts that argues for Christianity not on theological grounds but on aesthetic ones: the Christian religion is beautiful, it has produced the greatest art, literature, and architecture of Western civilization, and this beauty is evidence of its truth. The work was published on Easter Sunday 1802, immediately after Napoleon's Concordat with the Pope restored Catholicism as the state religion of France, and its timing made it a sensation: it seemed to announce the restoration of Christian culture after the anti-clerical excesses of the Revolution, and it was read as a cultural and political manifesto as much as a religious argument. Le Génie du christianisme included, as illustrations of the beauty of Christian literature and feeling, the tales Atala and René, which were thus first published as part of a religious apology before being separated and republished independently. The work is less read today as theology than as a document of Romantic aesthetics — the idea that beauty and religious experience are intimately related, that the arts point toward the transcendent, and that a culture that destroys its religious roots destroys its artistic roots as well.