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A French author, philologist, archeologist, and founder of comparative religion, Ernest Renan (1823-1892) influenced European thought in the second half of the 19th century through his numerous writings.
Ernest Renan grew up in the mystical, Catholic French province of Brittany, where Celtic myths combined with his mother's deeply experienced Catholicism led this sensitive child to believe he was destined for the priesthood. He was educated at the ecclesiastical college at Tréguier, graduating in 1838, and then went to Paris, where he carried on the usual theological studies at St-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet and at St-Sulpice. In his Recollections of Childhood and Youth (1883) he recounted the spiritual crisis he went through as his growing interest in scientific studies of the Bible eventually made orthodoxy unacceptable; he was soon won over to the new "religion of science," a conversion fostered by his friendship with the chemist P. E. M. Berthelot.
Renan abandoned the seminary and earned his doctorate in philosophy. At this time (1848) he wrote The Future of Science but did not publish it till 1890. In this work he affirmed a faith in the wonders to be brought forth by a science not yet realized, but which he was sure would come.
Archaeological expeditions to the Near East and further studies in Semitics led Renan to a concept of religious studies which would later be known as comparative religion. His was an anthropomorphic view, first publicized in his Life of Jesus (1863), in which he portrayed Christ as a historical phenomenon with historical roots and needing a rational, nonmystical explanation. With his characteristic suppleness of intellect, this deeply pious agnostic wrote a profoundly irreligious work which lost him his professorship in the dominantly Catholic atmosphere of the Second Empire in France.
The Life of Jesus was the opening volume of Renan's History of the Origins of Christianity (1863-1883), his most influential work. His fundamental thesis was that all religions are true and good, for all embody man's noblest aspirations: he invited each man to phrase these truths in his own way. For many, a reading of this work made religion for the first time living truth; for others, it made religious conviction impossible.
The defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 was for Renan, as for many Frenchmen, a deeply disillusioning experience. If Germany, which he revered, could do this to France, which he loved, where did goodness, beauty, or truth lie? He became profoundly skeptical, but with painful honesty he refused to deny what seemed to lie before him, averring instead that "the truth is perhaps sad." He remained sympathetic to Christianity, perhaps expressing it most movingly in his Prayer on the Acropolis of Athens (1876), in which he reaffirmed his abiding faith in the Greek life of the mind but confessed that his was inevitably a larger world, with sorrows unknown to the goddess Athena; hence he could never be a true son of Greece, any more than any other modern.
Further Reading
Little has been written in English about Renan. Two of the best studies are by Richard M. Chadbourne: Ernest Renan as an Essayist (1957) and Ernest Renan (1968).
Additional Sources
Mercury, Francis, Renan, Paris: O. Orban, 1990.
| French Literature Companion: Ernest Renan |
Renan, Ernest (1823-92). One of the leading French writers and thinkers of the 19th c. Born in Brittany, he studied for holy orders in Paris, leaving the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1845 as a result of the religious doubts his scientific enquiries had engendered, though he retained both a fascination for religion and a deep regret for his lost faith. He rapidly completed the baccalauréat, licence, and philosophy agrégation, in which he came first. After the February Revolution of 1848 he enthusiastically supported the liberal positions of Lamartine, and drafted his first substantial work, L'Avenir de la science (published only in 1890), which sketched out his romantic vision of progress in nature and society, culminating in a synthesis of science and religion. His doctoral thesis on Averroès et l'averroïsme (1852) was much admired, and he published widely on philology and the history of religion, as well as contributing actively to the intellectual press.
Appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1861, he was suspended after casting doubt on the divinity of Christ in his inaugural lecture. His controversial Vie de Jésus (1863), however, was an enormous popular success, and he followed it over the next 20 years with six further volumes, comprising his major Histoire des origines du christianisme, taking the account as far as Marcus Aurelius. His subsequent Histoire du peuple d'Israël (1887-93) was also acclaimed. Restored to his chair after the fall of the Second Empire, he wrote La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871) to advise on the stern measures he felt were required to restore authority, order, and progress. The Third Republic showed its appreciation in the official honours it showered on him, including election to the Académie Française in 1878. He continued to write trenchantly on matters of current political or philosophical interest, and several of his more important essays were collected as Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (1876). But his work was increasingly tinged with scepticism as to the value of his (or any) intellectual activity. He reviewed his personal and intellectual development in Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (1883), including the account of his loss of religious faith, entitled ‘Prière sur l'Acropole’, which has frequently figured in anthologies.
Renan's thought was compendious, eclectic, and flexible, rather than systematic. Outside his historical works he preferred to adopt the more open dialogue format, which enabled questions to be raised without necessarily reaching conclusions. This lent itself well to discussion of the major problem of how to reconcile the evident triumph of the natural sciences with the deep-seated desire for the consolations of religion. Trained as both a scholar and a priest, Renan felt the conflict personally and strove for a solution which would recognize the worth of both. He formulated a loi des trois états, drawing on both Comte's Positivism and Hegel's dialectic, and suggesting that human development passed from an early spontaneous and intuitive syncretism, expressed as religion, to a later reflective and rational analysis, expressed as science, and finally to a synthesis of these in a higher unity, combining scientific knowledge with imaginative sympathy in an esprit de finesse. Ultimately, the progress of humanity would raise it to the perfection of God.
Renan rejected the supernatural as well as most forms of metaphysics, and championed the scientific method which he saw as encompassing and superseding philosophy. In particular, he regarded philology, his own speciality, as the science of humanity, since in studying the history of the human mind, philology revealed consciousness to be the product and goal of the history of the universe. This also confirmed for Renan that the final end of evolution is the realization of the Ideal, or God, who in an almost pantheistic sense can then be seen to be drawing the universe towards His own self-realization. It followed that men had a moral duty to promote the growth of consciousness, which was identified as a moral good. Renan recuperated many Christian practices in this light, as forerunners of the true religion of science. He also felt it important to offer the common people an accessible moral and religious framework which would guarantee social order.
Towards the end of his life, recognizing that his philological work was being superseded by others, and that his moral aspirations were unworkable, he adopted a more ludic and even cynical stance which stressed the value of sensual pleasures. Celebrated during his lifetime, Renan has been criticized for his ambiguity, self-indulgence, and conservatism, and his reputation has never regained its former peak, though many aspects of his work have informed later French thought.
— Michael Kelly
Bibliography
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Ernest Renan |
Bibliography
See biographies by H. W. Wardman (1964) and R. M. Chadbourne (1968); studies by R. M. Chadbourne (1957) and V. V. Gaigalas (1972).
| Quotes By: Ernest Renan |
Quotes:
"I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life."
"To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed."
"The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death."
"As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost."
"Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?"
"Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him."
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Ernest Renan
| Wikipedia: Ernest Renan |
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Ernest Renan (28 February 1823 – 12 October 1892) was a French philosopher and writer, devoted to his native province of Brittany. He is best known for his influential historical works on early Christianity and his political theories.
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He was born at Tréguier in Brittany to a family of fishermen. His grandfather, having made a small fortune with his fishing-shack, bought a house at Tréguier and settled there, and his father, captain of a small cutter and an ardent republican, married the daughter of Royalist tradesmen from the neighbouring town of Lannion. All his life, Renan felt conflicted between his father's and his mother's political beliefs.[citation needed] He was five years old when his father died, and his sister, Henriette, twelve years his senior, became the moral head of the household. Having in vain attempted to keep a school for girls at Tréguier, she departed and went to Paris as teacher in a young ladies' boarding-school.
Ernest, meanwhile, was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native place. His school reports describe him as "docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough". While the priests taught him mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. Renan's mother was half Breton. Her paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan used to say that in his own nature the Gascon and the Breton were constantly at odds.
During the summer of 1838, Renan won all the prizes at the college of Tréguier. His sister told the doctor of the school in Paris where she taught, and he gave news to FAP Dupanloup, who was involved in organizing the ecclesiastical college of St Nicholas du Chardonnet, a school in which the young Catholic nobility and the most talented pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to be educated together, with the idea of creating friendships between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup sent for Renan, who was only fifteen years old and had never been outside Brittany. "I learned with stupor that knowledge was not a privilege of the church ... I awoke to the meaning of the words talent, fame, celebrity." Religion seemed to him wholly different in Tréguier and in Paris. The superficial, brilliant, pseudo-scientific Catholicism[citation needed] of the capital did not satisfy Renan, who had accepted the austere faith of his Breton masters.
During 1840, Renan left St Nicholas to study philosophy at the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineaux. He entered with a passion for Catholic scholasticism. The rhetoric of St Nicholas had wearied him, and his serious intelligence hoped to satisfy itself with the vast and solid material of Catholic theology. Thomas Reid and Nicolas Malebranche first attracted him among the philosophers, and, after these, he turned to Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Herder. Renan began to see an essential contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith he professed, but an appetite for truths that can be verified restrained his scepticism. "Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth; I am eager for mathematics," he wrote to Henriette. Henriette had accepted in the family of Count Zamoyski an engagement more lucrative than her former job. She exercised the strongest influence over her brother.
It was not mathematics but philology which was to settle Renan's gathering doubts. His course completed at Issy, he entered the college of St Sulpice in order to take his degree in philology prior to entering the church, and, here, he began the study of Hebrew. He realized that the second part of Isaiah differs from the first not only in style but in date, that the grammar and the history of the Pentateuch are later than the time of Moses, and that the Book of Daniel is clearly written centuries after the time in which it is set. Secretly, Renan felt himself denied the communion of saints, yet desired to live the life of a Catholic priest. The struggle between vocation and conviction was won by conviction. During October 1845, Renan left St Sulpice for Stanislas, a lay college of the Oratorians. Still feeling too much under the domination of the church, he reluctantly ended the last of his associations with religious life and entered M. Crouzet's school for boys as a teacher.
Renan, educated by priests, was to accept the scientific ideal with an extraordinary expansion of all his faculties. He became ravished by the splendour of the cosmos. At the end of his life, he wrote of Amiel, "The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe." The certitudes of physical and natural science were revealed to Renan during 1846 by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, then a boy of eighteen, his pupil at M. Crouzet's school. To the day of Renan's death, their friendship continued. Renan was occupied as usher only during evenings. During the daytime, he continued his researches in Semitic philology. During 1847, he obtained the Volney prize, one of the principal distinctions awarded by the Academy of Inscriptions, for the manuscript of his "General History of Semitic Languages." During 1847, he took his degree as Agrégé de Philosophie - that is to say, fellow of the university - and was offered a job as master in the lycée Vendôme.
Within his lifetime, Renan was best known as the author of the enormously popular Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus).[1] This book was first translated into English during 1863 by Charles E. Wilbour and has remained in print for the past 145 years.[2] Renan's Life of Jesus was lavished with ironic praise and criticism by Albert Schweitzer in his book Quest of the Historical Jesus.
The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any other man, and that the Bible could be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused much controversy, and enraged many Christians.[3][4][5][6]
Renan was not only a scholar. In his book on St. Paul, as in the Apostles, he shows his concern with the larger social life, his sense of fraternity, and a revival of the democratic sentiment which had inspired L'Avenir de la science. During 1869, he presented himself as the candidate of the liberal opposition at the parliamentary election for Meaux. While his temper had become less aristocratic, his liberalism had grown more tolerant. On the eve of its dissolution, Renan was half prepared to accept the Empire, and, had he been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he would have joined the group of l'Empire liberal, but he was not elected. A year later, war was declared with Germany; the Empire was abolished, and Napoleon III became an exile. The Franco-Prussian War was a turning-point in Renan's history. Germany had always been to him the asylum of thought and disinterested science. Now, he saw the land of his ideal destroy and ruin the land of his birth; he beheld the German no longer as a priest, but as an invader.
In La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), Renan tried to safeguard France's future. Yet, he was still influenced by Germany. The ideal and the discipline which he proposed to his defeated country were those of her conqueror-- a feudal society, a monarchical government, an élite which the rest of the nation exists merely to support and nourish; an ideal of honour and duty imposed by a chosen few on the recalcitrant and subject multitude. The errors of the Commune confirmed Renan in this reaction. At the same time, the irony always perceptible in his work grows more bitter. His Dialogues philosophiques, written in 1871, his Ecclesiastes (1882) and his Antichrist (1876) (the fourth volume of the Origins of Christianity, dealing with the reign of Nero) are incomparable in their literary genius, but they are examples of a disenchanted and sceptical temper. He had vainly tried to make his country obey his precepts. The progress of events showed him, on the contrary, a France which, every day, left a little stronger, and he roused himself from his disbelieving, disillusioned mood and observed with interest the struggle for justice and liberty of a democratic society. His mind was the broadest of the age. The fifth and sixth volumes of the Origins of Christianity (the Christian Church and Marcus Aurelius) show him reconciled with democracy, confident in the gradual ascent of man, aware that the greatest catastrophes do not really interrupt the sure if imperceptible progress of the world and reconciled, also, if not with the truths, at least with the moral beauties of Catholicism and with the remembrance of his pious youth.
Renan's definition of a nation has been influential. This was given in his 1882 discourse Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? ("What is a Nation?"). Whereas German writers like Fichte had defined the nation by objective criteria such as a race or an ethnic group "sharing common characteristics" (language, etc.), Renan defined it by the desire of a people to live together, which he summarized by a famous phrase, "avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore" (having done great things together and wishing to do more). Writing in the midst of the dispute concerning the Alsace-Lorraine region, he declared that the existence of a nation was based on a "daily plebiscite."
Karl Deutsch (in "Nationalism and its alternatives") suggested that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours." This phrase is frequently, but mistakenly, attributed to Renan himself. He did indeed write that if "the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common," they "must also have forgotten many things. Every French citizen must have forgotten the night of St. Bartholomew and the massacres in the 13th century in the South."
During old age, the philosopher contemplated his childhood. He was nearly sixty when, in 1883, he published the autobiographical Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, the work by which he is now best known in France. They showed the blasé modern reader that a world no less poetic, no less primitive than that of the Origins of Christianity exists or still existed within living memory on the northwestern coast of France. They have the Celtic magic of ancient romance and the simplicity, the naturalness, and the veracity which the 19th century prized so highly. But his Ecclesiastes, published a few months earlier, his Drames philosophiques, collected in 1888, give a more adequate image of his fastidious critical, disenchanted, yet optimistic spirit. They show the attitude towards uncultured Socialism of a philosopher liberal by conviction, by temperament an aristocrat. We learn in them how Caliban (democracy), the mindless brute, educated to his own responsibility, makes after all an adequate ruler; how Prospero (the aristocratic principle, or, if we will, the mind) accepts his dethronement for the sake of greater liberty in the intellectual world, since Caliban proves an effective policeman and leaves his superiors a free hand in the laboratory; how Ariel (the religious principle) acquires a firmer hold on life and no longer gives up the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Indeed, Ariel flourishes in the service of Prospero under the external government of the many-headed brute. Religion and knowledge are as imperishable as the world they dignify. Thus, out of the depths rises unvanquished the essential idealism of Renan.
Renan was a great worker. At sixty years of age, having finished the Origins of Christianity, he began his History of Israel, based on a lifelong study of the Old Testament and on the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, published by the Académie des Inscriptions under Renan's direction from the year 1881 till the end of his life. The first volume of the History of Israel appeared in 1887; the third, in 1891; the last two posthumously. As a history of facts and theories, the book has many faults; as an essay on the evolution of the religious idea, it is (despite some passages of frivolity, irony, or incoherence) of extraordinary importance; as a reflection of the mind of Renan, it is the most lifelike of images. In a volume of collected essays, Feuilles détachées, published also in 1891, we find the same mental attitude, an affirmation of the necessity of piety independent of dogma. During his last years, he received many honours, and was made an administrator of the College de France and grand officer of the Legion of Honour. Two volumes of the History of Israel, his correspondence with his sister Henriette, his Letters to M. Berthelot, and the History of the Religious Policy of Philippe-le-Bel, which he wrote in the years immediately before his marriage, all appeared during the last eight years of the 19th century.
Renan died after a few days' illness in 1892, and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris.
Hugely influential in his lifetime, Renan was eulogised after his death as the embodiment of the progressive spirit in western culture. Anatole France wrote that Renan was the incarnation of modernity. One of his greatest admirers was Manuel González Prada in Peru who took the Life of Jesus as a basis for his anticlericalism.
In 1903 a major controversy accompanied the installation of a monument in Tréguier designed by Jean Boucher. Placed in the local cathedral square, it was interpreted as a challenge to Catholicism, and led to widespread protests, especially because the site was normally used for the temporary pulpit erected at the traditional Catholic festival of the Pardon of St Yves. It also included the Greek goddess Athena raising her arm to crown Renan gesturing in apparent challenge towards to cathedral.[7][8] The local clergy organised a protest Calvary sculpture designed by Yves Hernot as "a symbol of the triumphant ultramontaine church."[9]
Renan has been criticised for antisemitism because of his comments on the alleged limitations of the Semitic mentality. Renan claimed that the Semitic mind was limited by dogmatism and lacked a cosmopolitan conception of civilisation.[10] For Renan, Semites were "an incomplete race."[11]
Other comments on race have also proven controversial, especially his belief that political policy should take into account supposed racial differences:
Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor...A race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negros and Chinese, and they rebel... But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well.[12]
This passage, among others, was cited by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism, as evidence of the hypocrisy of Western humanism and its "sordidly racist" conception of the rights of man.[13]
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| Preceded by Claude Bernard |
Seat 29 Académie française 1878-1892 |
Succeeded by Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour |
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