Ernest Renan

French writer

• Born: February 28, 1823
• Birthplace: Tréguier, Côtes-du-Nord, France
• Died: October 2, 1892
• Place of death: Paris, France

Renan’s writings encompass the areas of religion, history, science, and morality. His controversial biography of Jesus Christ illustrates his ongoing theme of resolution of contradictions by emphasizing the problem of reconciling the historical and the spiritually divine Jesus.

Early Life

Joseph-Ernest Renan (ree-nahn) was born in a town in Brittany that was in many respects a religious center. His youth was shaded by a veil of devout Roman Catholicism, to which he, in accordance with his mother’s most intense wishes and his own strong inclinations, was committed. His father, Philibert, was a grocer and seaman. His mother, Magdelaine Féger, was widowed when Ernest was five years old, her husband having drowned—it has not been determined whether accidentally or otherwise—at sea. Ernest Renan had a brother, Alain, born in 1809, and a sister, Henriette, born in 1811. His sister was profoundly influential in his life, and his attachment to her is lyrically expressed in Ma Sœur Henriette (1895; My Sister Henrietta , 1895), which was initially published in a limited edition of one hundred copies in 1862 as Henriette Renan: Souvenir pour ceux qui l’ont connue (Henriette Renan: a remembrance for those who knew her) and reprinted posthumously.

From 1832 to 1838, Renan was a student at the Ecclesiastical School in Tréguier, while his sister, having failed to establish a private school for girls, accepted a teaching position in Paris. In 1838, Renan moved to Paris and studied rhetoric at the seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet. After three years, he moved to the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineux outside Paris, where his study of philosophy began to bring about his wavering in religious faith. His sister, with whom he was to maintain an ongoing correspondence, had moved, during this time, to Poland, where she found employment as a governess. From Issy-les-Moulineux, he moved in 1849 to the parent seminary of Saint-Sulpice and entered upon his study of theology.

In his academic progression from rhetoric to philosophy to theology, the normal pattern of seminary education in France, Renan developed a devotion to literature, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sense of alienation in his separation, first, from Brittany and, later, from his mother. He remained firmly within his faith, however, and in 1844 became a tonsured cleric in evidence of his call to the priesthood. After a year, he came to realize that he lacked belief sufficient to this vocation, and his rationalism and scientific propensity led him to abandon the ecclesiastical for the secular life. His sister Henriette supported him in his decision and commended his firmness of purpose and strength of will.

Renan then set his life’s course toward reconciling the two worlds that, as he assured his mother in her disappointment, were not, to his mind, separate. The world of Jesus (the world of religion) and the world of science contradicted each other but were not mutually exclusive. To his own way of thinking, he had departed from Jesus so as to be better able to follow Jesus.

Life’s Work

In 1845, at the age of twenty-two, Renan, believing that his own emotions and his own thoughts were his God, became a tutor, an ultimately successful candidate for the baccalauréat and licence (roughly equivalent to the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States), a friend of the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, and a student of the Semitic languages (of which he was soon to become a professor).

Two years later, Renan won the Volney Prize for his essay on the history of the Semitic languages. His friendship with the scientist, which proved to be lifelong, and his own predilection for science, along with his Semitic studies, adumbrated his major contributions to intellectual history and to the history of ideas; these are his Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863-1882; The History of the Origins of Christianity , 1890) and L’Avenir de la science (1890; The Future of Science , 1890). Renan completed his work on The Future of Science in 1849, three years before the publication of his doctoral dissertation, Averroès et l’Averroïsme (1852). Segments of the text of The Future of Science appeared in journals, periodicals, and other of his books, but its full publication, with only minor revisions of the original, materialized only two years before his death.

One of the primary focuses of The Future of Science is criticism, a subject that Renan had initially expounded in his Cahiers de jeunesse (1845-1846; youthful notebooks). Renan’s views on criticism as an intellectual activity anticipated much of the direction that was to be taken by post-World War II critical theorists. For him, true criticism was universal in character and was decidedly not to be limited to literary criticism and even more decidedly not to be identified with judgment and measurements against standards of form and composition.

Renan believed that beauty was open-ended and not subject to the closure that is implied by the concept of an absolute. He saw criticism as a creative use of the powers of interpretation and a conceptual conjunction of history, topography, philosophy, and morality. Like the deconstructionists of the twentieth century, he disregarded the demarcations of disciplines and sought to reconcile the disciplines through comparativism, eclecticism, and synthesis; comparison served him in science, literature, and religion as the great tool of criticism. The Future of Science begins with the simple statement, “Only one thing is necessary.” The one thing proves to be, after all syntheses have been unified, science as that religion that comprises human feeling and human thought.

H. W. Wardman recognizes in The Future of Science the idea that “philosophy is a human science born of the union of philology and historical sympathy,” and this prompts him effectively to conclude that Renan’s philosopher is “a kind of seer fitted by his insight into human nature to take over from the Church the spiritual leadership of mankind.” Philology, according to Renan, is “the science of the products of the human mind.”

Renan’s notion of history is an extension of Victor Cousin’s concept of the three ages: a primary age informed by religion without science, a secondary age informed by science without religion, and a final age informed by both religion and science. The historical process is the development of the divine. In the final age, the development will have been concluded and God will be manifestly whole. The future of science, then, is the fulfillment of religion, that is to say, God.

Renan’s masterwork was a seven-volume study, The History of the Origins of Christianity . The first of these volumes, Vie de Jésus (1863; The Life of Jesus , 1864), is the most famous and is the work for which Renan is best known. At the time of its publication, Renan had been married to Cornélie Scheffer for seven years, had become the father of two girls, the first having died eight months after birth, and had, in 1861, lost in death his sister Henriette, to whose soul he dedicated this work.

The life of Jesus, according to Renan, is the focal event of world history; it brought about the spiritual revolution that was the culmination of seven centuries of Jewish history and that in the subsequent three centuries would be established as a religion. This entire period of one thousand years is presented by Renan as embracing the origins of Christianity.

Renan depicts Jesus as a superior, indeed a sublime, person but not as a god. His Jesus let his followers believe that he was God as he taught them the ways to fulfill their subjectivity. He holds that Jesus’ immediate followers and their successors invented, in belief and desire, the Resurrection:

The life of Jesus ends, as far as the historian is concerned, with his last sigh. But so great was the mark he had made in the hearts of his disciples and several devoted women that for a few more weeks he was alive to them and he consoled them.

This passage from chapter 26 is representative of the secular Jesus whom hosts of Renan’s critics rejected and protested against. The whole of chapters 26 and 27 was, for example, among the exclusions from the French Book Club’s ornately bound and illustrated 1970 abridgment of The History of the Origins of Christianity. The Christian clergy and laity assailed the book for its profanation and its author’s apostasy. Literary critics frowned upon the idyllic and romantic Galilee that it painted and upon its overly genteel characterization of Jesus. The book became an international best seller, however, going through eight printings in the first three months of its publication.

The second volume of The History of the Origins of Christianity appeared in 1866; it is a historiography of the Apostles, from 33 to 45 c.e., and an investigation into the continuing apotheosis of Jesus by way of visionary presumption, amplification of legend, and adaptation of mythical traditions. His third volume, La Vie de saint Paul (1869; Saint Paul , 1869), dedicated to his wife, who had accompanied him in his retracing of the travels of his subject, is replete with the topography and accoutrements of epic. Saint Paul is here reminiscent of the Homeric Odysseus: a man of action and purpose.

The fourth volume (1873), following the New Testament’s book of Revelation as Renan’s second and third volumes follow, respectively, the book of Acts and the Pauline Epistles, studies Emperor Nero as the Antichrist. The fifth volume (1877) expatiates upon the second Christian generation and the production of the first four books of the New Testament, the basis of his life of Jesus. He applauds Matthew and Mark as the genuinely divine increment of Christianity, berates Luke as special pleading, and sees John as fraudulent save for its recounting of various of Jesus’ teachings. (Only nine of this volume’s twenty-seven chapters are included in the above-mentioned French Book Club edition.) The sixth volume (1879) details the defeat of Gnosticism and Montanism and the establishment of the Orthodox Christian church. The concluding volume (1881) centers on Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180) and the end of the ancient world.

From 1888 to the year of his death, Renan published three of the five volumes of his last historical opus, Histoire du peuple d’Israël(History of the People of Israel , 1888-1895), the last two volumes of which were published posthumously in 1893. He looked upon this work as his completion of the history of Christianity’s origins and as his exposition of the Jewish “subsoil” of Jesus’ roots. The ten books of this work trace the development of Jewish monotheism, messianism, and religious mission—a development that entailed the sacrifice of nationalistic power to spiritual identity.

Renan died on October 2, 1892, from pneumonia and cardiac complications. Although his death was painful, it came after he had gained personal satisfaction from completing his life’s work.

Significance

Ernest Renan’s monuments are The Future of Science, The History of the Origins of Christianity, and History of the People of Israel. His other works are many, and they warrant careful study by anyone seriously interested in his contributions to modern thought. These include, apart from other works already mentioned, his correspondence, his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1876-1882; Recollections of My Youth , 1883), his Discours et conférences (1887; speeches and lectures), his philosophical dialogues, and his four philosophical dramas: Caliban, suite de “La Tempête”: Drame philosophique (1878; Caliban: A Philosophical Drama Continuing “The Tempest” of William Shakespeare , 1896), L’Eau de jouvence (1881; the fountain of youth), Le Prêtre de Némi (1886; the priest of Nemi), and L’Abbesse de Jouarre (1886; the abbess of Jouarre).

Renan is an outstanding example of the thinker whose crisis of spirit is resolved by his work. Like the English poet William Cowper (1731-1800), who adjusted to his unshakable belief that he was damned by engaging in constant literary effort, Renan overcame his loss of faith with a creative scholarship that brought him spiritual contentment.

In his spiritual secularism and his universal criticism, Renan was ahead of his time. His attitudes and ideas anticipated those of certain significant twentieth century theologians (for example, Hans Küng), literary artists (Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo), and critical theorists (Michel Foucault and René Girard), but his twentieth century successors not only found broader and more consistent readerships but also outdistanced him in depth and caliber of expression, though not in exquisiteness of prose.

Renan saw himself as a man of two worlds: religion and science. He belongs as well to two different temporal worlds: the nineteenth century, in which his ideas were uncommon and thereby largely unheeded, and the twentieth century, in which his ideas were largely unheeded because they had become commonplace.

Bibliography

Chadbourne, Richard M. Ernest Renan. New York: Twayne, 1968. An admirable and admiring account of the life and works of Renan, touching upon all the qualities that make Renan a “great historian, critic, and artist.” This is one of the finest volumes in Twayne’s World Authors series, and an excellent secondary work on Renan.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ernest Renan as an Essayist. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957. Examines Renan’s contribution to the tradition of French essay-writing. Chadbourne stresses the seriousness of purpose that is to be found in the essays as against the author’s propensity for irony, humor, and open-ended play. Considering that he may have made Renan appear overly serious, Chadbourne corrects the impression in his Ernest Renan.

Gore, Charles. Introduction to The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927. Gore offers an excellent summary of the reception of Renan’s The Life of Jesus by critics, liberals, and orthodox Christians. He also offers a vindication of Renan as a historian whose estimation of the historical value of the New Testament documents had come to be recognized as essentially correct. Gore’s translation, the second into English and the first in international importance, should also be of interest to any reader seeking familiarity with Renan’s most famous work.

Gore, Keith. “Ernest Renan: A Positive Ethics?” French Studies 41 (April, 1987): 141-154. A concise account of Renan’s philosophical adjustment to his break with the Church and to the political situation in France (Second Empire, Franco-Prussian War, Third Republic). In a long footnote, Gore insists, contrary to assertions by H. W. Wardman (in a book written in 1979 in French), that in the ethical sphere, Renan was pragmatic, not metaphysical.

Lee, David C. J. Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith. London: Duckworth, 1996. Focuses on Renan’s decision to abandon the Church for a secular career, examining the conflict inherent in this decision. Lee argues that Renan’s Jesus biography was successful because Renan’s writing featured a religious nostalgia that was common to the literature of his age.

Neff, Emery. The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship to the Writing of History Since Voltaire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947. An appraisal of Renan’s historiography as the work of a man of letters. Informative comparison of Renan’s work to that of Jacob Burckhardt and John Richard Green. Neff makes a case for the long-term worth of Renan’s distinctive and effective style of historical inquiry.

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. Translated by W. Montgomery. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1954. Chapter 13 is devoted to Renan’s The Life of Jesus. Schweitzer calls Renan’s essay on the sources for the life of Jesus “a literary masterpiece” but finds the work inconsistent in its estimate and use of the Fourth Gospel and in its thoroughgoing “insincerity.” Passing attention is accorded to Renan in other chapters.

Wardman, H. W. Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography. London: Athlone Press, 1964. The emphasis in this biography is upon Renan’s life and work in the context of his times. Wardman offers a consistent characterization of Renan, noting, for example, Renan’s fear of his work becoming outdated or being proved wrong by posterity, as well as Renan’s metaphysical anxieties.

Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940. Reprint. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. Places Renan within the revolutionary tradition in Europe. Part 6 of chapter 1 discusses Renan in the context of the decline of the revolutionary tradition and praises The History of the Origins of Christianity as “a masterpiece—perhaps the greatest of all histories of ideas.” Elsewhere in his text, Wilson suggests that Renan’s moral force diminishes in proportion to his urbane tolerance of error and his diplomatic dissimulation.