La naissance de la conscience chrétienne chez Chateaubriand : l’essaisur les révolutions et le génie du christianisme
(2009)
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- (en) This work aims to offer an overall image of the Romantic Christianity, of its expectations, promises and differences to the dogmatic norm. It assumes as a starting point a synthetic and revealing case study: the analysis of Chateaubriand’s religious dispositions in two fundamental moments of his intellectual and spiritual evolution, the exile in England and the Essai sur les révolutions (ER - 1797), a testimony of religious doubt, as well as his return in France and the Génie du christianisme (GC - 1802), a symbol of the birth of the apologist’s Christian conscience. An ambitious topic that has required a deductive analytic approach resorting to instruments of theological, historical, cultural and philological applicability: a short presentation of the overall image of a Christian conscience, based on the rules of faith postulated by the Nicene Creed (325-381); the analysis of the Christian dispositions of the late Enlightenment, as shown in the two major apologetic types of this period, the aesthetic apologetics and the utilitarian apologetics; the study of the types of Providence and of the conceptual transformation in Chateaubriand’s above-mentioned works; finally, the validation of the obtained results, following an incursion in the contemporary German milieu that has allowed us to form a system of similarities between the French apologist and other Romantics, such as Schleiermacher, Novalis of Hölderlin, due to a certain Zeitgeist, to a common mental form that unites the members of a paradigm of thought. The first part of our thesis is centered on the “humanization of the theological speech” (K. Barth) at the end of the 18th century, a phenomenon that is articulated on the difference between the theological and the historical norm of a Christian conscience, 1. between the faith in a dynamic form of absolute, in a God that is holy (hb. kadosh), transcendent and unique, incarnated in the Christ Redeemer, as stated in the Nicene Symbol of faith, and 2. the exclusive concern of both aesthetic and utilitarist apologists about the mundane advantages of Christianity, namely the practice of elevated feelings, of public morality and of democratic spirit. The main stages of the interiorisation of the absolute (1730 – M. Huber, 1760 – Rousseau and ethical theology, 1780-1800 – the preeminence of aesthetic theology: Mgr. de La Luzerne, J.B. Duvoisin, A. Lamourette, J. G. Hamann and F. H. Jacobi) are presented in terms of signs which indicate the “paradigm shift” that occurred in the late Enlightenment and are finally correlated with Chateaubriand and the German Romantics’ choices. The conceptual and discursive analysis of the divine categories in Chateaubriand’s works has allowed us to detect three main types of Providence whose presence is unequally divided: Necessity, the Stoic anankê, designated as the Providence with an Unchangeable Face, is a divine category that appears only in the ER; the immanent, negative, Romantic God, designated as the Providence with a Changing Face is Chateaubriand’s favorite hypostasis in the ER and appears only indirectly in the GC; the Christian God, designated as the Hidden God (Deus absconditus) or the Providence with a Hidden Face, according to the biblical tradition, is the main divine category in the GC. The dynamics of these types of Providence indicates, at first, the evolution of Chateaubriand’s Christian conscience: if in the ER the apologist favors other divine categories than the Deus absconditus, in the GC, he shows his utmost confidence in the Christian Providence and in the space it governs. Moreover, the GC contains the first signs of transcendence (the presence of the titles traditionally given to Jehovah, the images of an infinite and all-powerful Creator) that indicate the emergence of the conscience of absolute in1802. The occurrences of the historical figures and of the Incarnation of the holy God in the ER and in the GC show nevertheless Chateaubriand’s failure to conceive a God that is contained and to offer an accurate interpretation of the Christian absolute. The syncretism of the Deus absconditus’ historical signs as well as the Arian perspective used in the two types of Christ images (the Christ that is noble and the Christ that is a friend of the entire humanity) indicate the absence of a clear Christian conscience. The Romantic vision of the sacred that can be noticed in Chateaubriand’s adherence to an uncontained, infinite God, is symptomatic of a static paradigm that opposes itself to a diachronic reading of the divine theophany and to the explicit recognition of the holy God’s uniqueness. Chateaubriand’s middle position in the ER and in the GC is not however singular in Romanticism. The reluctance to admit explicitly the existence of the holy God and to impose a historical determination to this divine category is common in the late Enlightenment. The same conceptual deficiencies appear in Schleriemacher’s Reden über die Religion (1799), in Novalis’s catholic apology Christenheit oder Europa (1799), or in Hölderlin’s christological poems (Friedensfeier – 1801, Patmos –1802, Der Einzige – 1802). Schleiermacher’s pantheism questions the divine aseity; Hölderlin becomes the spokesman of a world that is divided between unity and syncretism, two indisputable signs of an incomplete interpretation of the holy God. The theandrical problems provoked by the frequent use of images of the Christ viator are relevant to the same extent: the Mittler’s divinity is not enough to reconcile the finite and the infinite; the substantial indetermination of Novalis’s Christkind indicates a profound ignorance of the Deus revelatus; Hölderlin’s Reconciler does not benefit from the singular divinity of the Christian Messiah. In this context, Chateaubriand’s evolution appears to be nothing but a certainty: in 1802, he starts having the conscience of the absolute, which indicates an emerging Christian conscience. However, this case study doesn’t offer only the simple perspective of the apologist’s personal choices, but also that of the highly emotional and agreeable Romantic Christianity, articulated on the need of individualism, of tolerance and of a manifold world that organizes itself and becomes acceptable apart from the presence of a demanding and standardizing supernatural. Through their religious dispositions, Chateaubriand, Schleiermacher, Novalis et Hölderlin confirm the aesthetic turning point of the 1760s that questions the metaphysical resorts of the universe and announces the new philosophical stage that revives, completes and even transcends the ideal of the Enlightenment: the absolute triumph of subjectivity and the emergence of “absolute freedom” (cf. Hegel, « die Idee der absoluten Freiheit »).
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Mite, D. (2009). La naissance de la conscience chrétienne chez Chateaubriand : l’essaisur les révolutions et le génie du christianisme. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/128648