Le Christ romantique chez Chateaubriand. Comparaison avec Schleiermacher et Hölderlin

Abstract

In his early works, L’Essai sur les révolutions (1797) and Le Génie du christianisme (1802), Chateaubriand puts forward two images of Christ that are characteristic of the romantic paradigm of thought: the noble Christ, prevailing over death, a paragon of self-abnegation and of generosity towards humankind and the caring, gentle Christ, remarkable through his morality, sensitivity and beauty, a response to the spiritual needs of post-revolutionary France. Situated in a different socio-political context that provides nuances, Christ being thus interpreted less according to his social usefulness than to his fundamental role in man’s spiritual progress, Schleiermacher and Hölderlin present the image of a Mediator, superior through his unique vision of the sacred (Speeches on Religion - 1799) or of a Conciliator between the finite and the infinite (Christological Hymns 1799-1802); as in Chateaubriand’s case, these images of Christ are illustrative of the romantic dream of reenchantment of the modern world, liberated of dogmatic constraints, looking for an enlarged, good-natured, mysterious sacred.