This nameless but recognizable, yet largely unrecognized, genre, in which La Tentation figures both as typical and outstanding, identifies itself again through its erudition: Flaubert worked on La Tentation for more than twenty-five years, during which time he read through a sizeable library of primary and secondary works on Christianity, Philosophical Paganism, and the history of Late Antiquity. Sometimes it seeks a dialectical reconciliation of the two. The nameless genre tends to be partial although not uncritical with respect to Christianity while refraining from any blanket rejection of Paganism. In this way, La Tentation or Kejser og Galileer or Marius communicates with a related, non-fiction genre that takes up the discussion of Christianity either as apologetics or skeptical polemics, as in François-René de Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme (1801) and Søren Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity (1850), on the one hand, or in Ludwig Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums (1841) and Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863), on the other. The literary representation of Christianity’s founding events or of the emergent Christian order’s formative travails thus frequently furnishes the writer with the opportunity to conduct a critique, by indirection, of modernity, a tendency that joins the purely literary endeavor to the speculative endeavor of historio-philosophy.
The writers who contribute to this nameless strand of often bizarre literary creativity necessarily also take interest in the relation of the Imperial centuries down through the period of Late Antiquity to modernity, which seems to them likewise imperial, fugacious, and overripe. The nameless, promiscuous, un-generic genre nevertheless succeeds in constituting itself through its specific fascination with the breakdown of Classical Civilization and the growth of the successor-civilization that articulated itself through the codification of Christian orthodoxy and the establishment of a new central institution, the Church, with its precepts and rites. The genre has no name it is a hybrid in that it assimilates drama, epic, the novel, the essay, and perhaps even lyric, without distinction and therefore quite promiscuously and un-generically. Gustave Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint-Antoine ou la révélation de l’âme (first version 1848 final version 1874), its sui generis character notwithstanding, belongs in a recognizable, yet largely unrecognized, genre of mid- and late-Nineteenth Century literature that includes, among other items, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1850), Henrik Ibsen’s Kejser og Galileer (1871), Richard Wagner’s incomplete Jesus von Nazareth (1849) and his libretto for Parsifal (1882), Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), General Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880), Anatole France’s Thaïs (1890), and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1895).
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