In _Le Génie du Christianisme_ Chateaubriand did not, he has himself told us, endeavour to prove that Christianity is excellent because it comes from God, but that it comes from God because it is excellent.
He shows that men have been wrong in despising Christianity, that it has beautiful, noble, poetic qualities. He does not perceive that, even if he succeeds in proving in many instances the narrowness of view of those Encyclopedists whom he is continually attacking, this in itself is no manner of proof of the divine origin of religion.
The whole work is in reality an outcome of the dislike and contempt which he had gradually developed for the philosophy and literature of the eighteenth century. The spirit of this philosophy and literature now appeared to him to be fatal to all the higher desires and aspirations of the human soul. The eighteenth century had misunderstood feeling and poetry. Therefore what it had exalted must be condemned, and what it had dared to disdain must be exalted. And for what had it shown greater contempt than for Christianity!
Chateaubriand was not a man of a pious, but of an artistic nature; and he conceived a fruitful artistic idea. Perceiving that the classic period in France had reached the term of its natural life, he contended that the imitation of the works of heathen antiquity ought now to cease. It had gone on, at least in appearance, for not less than 250 years. Poets had neglected national and religious subjects for those of ancient mythology; by the end of the eighteenth century they were not even imitating antiquity, but the seventeenth-century authors of their own country. Now there had been enough of it; now it was time for France to dismiss mythology and have a literature inspired by its own history and its own religion.
In this roundabout way Chateaubriand arrived at his vindication of the beauty of Christianity, and of its superiority in artistic value to any of the heathen religions.
The nature of the vindication evidences the nature of the whole movement which the work inaugurates. Its æsthetic part is preceded by a dogmatic introduction which, in keeping with the rest of the book, aims at proving the beauty of the dogmas of Christianity. I adduce a few examples of the absurd results of this "how beautiful!" style of reasoning.