Ernest Renan (February 28, 1823–October 12, 1892) was a French philosopher and writer, deeply attached to his native province of Brittany.
He is best known for his influential historical works on early Christianity and his political theories.
Early life
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 torn between
his father's and his mother's political beliefs. He was five 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 grounded him in mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. She 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.
In 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 gifted pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to
be educated together, with a view to cementing the bond between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup sent for Renan, who
was only fifteen 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 of the capital did not satisfy
Renan, who had accepted the austere faith of his Breton masters.
In 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 place. She exercised the strongest
influence over her brother, and her published letters reveal a mind almost equal, a moral nature superior, to his own.
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 saw 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 cut off from the communion
of saints, yet desired to live the life of a Catholic priest. The struggle between vocation and conviction was won by
conviction. In 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 broke
the last tie which bound him to the religious life and entered M. Crouzet's school for boys as a teacher.
Scholarly career
Renan, brought up 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 in 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 in the evenings. In the daytime, he continued his researches
in Semitic philology. In 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." In 1847, he took his degree as Agrégé de Philosophie - that is to say,
fellow of the university - and was offered a place as master in the lycée of Vendôme.
Life of Jesus
In his own lifetime, Renan was best known as the author of the hugely popular Vie de
Jésus (Life of 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 sparked a flurry of debate, and enraged the Roman Catholic
Church.
Social ideals
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. In 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 fell, and Napoleon III went into exile. The
Franco-German 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 under the
influence of 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 follow his precepts. He resigned himself to watch her drift towards perdition. 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.
Definition of nationhood
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 summed up in 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." K
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."
Late works
In old age, the philosopher cast a glance at 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 possess that
lyric note of personal utterance which the public prizes in a man already famous. 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. In 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.
Controversies
Statue of Ernest Renan in Tréguier town square
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. 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 it included the figure of Athena.
More recently, 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.[1] For Renan,
Semites were "an incomplete race".[2]
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.[3]
Works
French
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
- Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1855)
- Études d'histoire religieuse (1857)
- De l'origine du langage (1858)
- Essais de morale et de critique (1859)
- Le Cantique des cantiques - translation - (1860)
- Vie de Jésus
(1863)
- Life of
Jesus (English translation)
- Prière sur l'Acropole
- Prayer on the Acropolis (1865)
- Mission de Phénicie (1865-1874)
- L'Antéchrist (1873)
- Caliban (1878)
- Histoire des origines du Christianisme - 8 volumes - (1866-1881)
- Histoire du peuple d'Israël - 5 volumes - (1887-1893)
- Eau de Jouvence (1880)
- Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (1884)
- Le Prêtre de Némi (1885)
- Examen de conscience philosophique (1889)
- La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871)
- Qu'est-ce
qu'une nation? (Lecture delivered on March 11 1882 at the
Sorbonne)
- L'avenir de la science (1890)
Honours
References
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
