1
"(Breat Winters."
LIFE AND WRITINGS OF
ERNEST RENAN
Life and Writings
of
Ernest Renan
BY
FRANCIS ESPINASSE
II
£ondon and felUng-on-Cjf^ne:
THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING GO., LTD
NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE
(All rtghls reserved.)
Zfr^p/'j/? ^/cf^-nnuj
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Renan born at Treguier, 28th February 1823; his parentage;
death of his father, and family difficulties; becomes a ward
of St. Yves, the patron-saint of the widow and the orphan ;
first school-days; the See of Treguier; stories of the
Breton saints ; old Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet
in Paris, and changes effected therein by the Abb6
Dupanloup; Renan, as a promising pupil, recruited for
the Seminary (1838) II
CHAPTER H.
Dfiscription of Renan as a lad by his early friend the Abb^
Cognat; early days at the Seminary; influence of M.
Dupanloup; transferred to branch of the Seminary of St.
Sulpice at Issy ; Renan alarms his professors by his argu-
ments ; goes to St. Sulpice in Paris; begins to waver from
the Faith J takes first steps towards priesthood ; writes to his
friend Cognat to explain his conduct; learns Hebrew and
studies German exegesis under the influence of Le Hir;
extract from the Souvenirs relating to influences of his
new studies ; his sister's help and influence ; confides his
doubts to his friend Cognat; leaves St. Sulpice (i845)»
and finally abandons all intention of entering the priest-
hood ; his character and attitude ; comparison with those
of Voltaire ; influence of his clerical education ; respect for
the Roman Catholic priesthood 22
38^701
; : /\Cp}/TENTS.
CHAPTER III.
PAGE
Renan begins life as tutor in the Quartier Latin (1845) ; friend-
ship with Marcellin Berthelot ; studies assiduously, espe-
cially languages, and wins Volney prize; much impressed
by events of 1848; contributes essays to periodicals;
La LiberU de Penser; first contribution, " The Origin of
Languages"; description of L^Avenir de la Science ; his
criticism of Strauss in article on '* The Critical Historians
of Jesus"; other contributions; acts as temporary professor
at the Lycee of Versailles; appointment on commission
of literary inquiry in Italy and England, and visits those
two countries (1850); obtains post in the Department of
Oriental MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale (1851);
De philosophid peripateticA apud Syros commeniatio his-
torica and Averroes et V Averro'isme ; his sister keeps house
for him ; first acquaintance with Levy the publisher, and
engagement with him 52
CHAPTER IV.
Renan thrives apace ; is now in position to marry ; his wife a
niece of Ary Scheffer, the painter; his sister continues to
live with him ; publishes (in 1855) " General History and
Comparative System of the Semitic Languages " ; theories,
etc , therein propounded ; Renan becomes member of the
Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres; more periodical
literature ; ** Studies of Religious History" and " Ethical
and Critical Essays "; quotation from essay on Calvin ;
essays on *'The Poetry of the Exhibition" and "The
Poetry of the Celtic Races"; quotation from the former;
Renan translates the Book of Job and the Song of
Solomon ; his theory of the authorship of the former; quota-
tions from both . 66
CHAPTER V.
Renan commissioned to explore ancient Phoenicia (May i860) ;
his intimacy with Prince Napoleon and Madame Cornu,
and partial adhesion to the Empire; journey to Syria;
Mission de Phthu'cie; can now realise his wish to visit the
Holy Land ; begins his Life of Jesus ; his sister's affec-
tionate sympathy; she is attacked by fever and dies;
dedication to her of the Vie de Jhus . . . .87
CONTENTS. 7
CHAPTER VI.
PAGE
The College de France; Renan appointed (1857) to the chair
of Hebrew and cognate Semitic languages; his first lecture
on the part played by the Semitic nations in the history of
civilisation; delight of the students, but disapproval of the
clergy; Renan's course suspended; he earns his salary by
giving private lectures; Life of Jesus published in 1863 ; the
miraculous discarded and story reconstructed by the help
of imagination and learning ; general character and scope
of the book; quotation from the closing passage; imme-
diate and immense success of the work ; anger of the
French Roman Catholic Church ; displeasure of the
Emperor ; Renan deprived of his professorship ; offered
a post in the Bibliotheque Imperiale, and declines it;
criticisms on the Life of Jesus by Sainte-Beuve and
Edmond Scherer ; references to it by Prosper Merimee
and George Sand ; Renan's idea of the universe given in
"The Natural Sciences and the Historical Sciences";
his interest in the Higher Education in France . . 92
CHAPTER VIL
Renan goes again to the East at the end of 1864 ; the second and
third volumes of the Origines du Christianisme^ entitled
respectively "The Apostles" and "St. Paul"; his refer-
ence in the preface to criticisms on the Vie de Jesus ; effect
of criticism upon these volumes; his views upon the author-
ship of materials for history of the apostolic age ; description
of early Church ; praises the spirit that presided over its
organisation ; the conversion of St. Paul ; St. Paul's mission
in the Church; verdict on his character . . . .123
CHAPTER VHL
*' Questions of the Time " ; Renan's opinion of the political state
of France ; becomes a candidate for the constituency of
Seine-et-Marne (1869); his anti-revolution policy; fails to
secure election ; result of general election; Renan's article,
"Constitutional Monarchy in France"; is travelling with
Prince Napoleon when the war of 1870 breaks out ; fall of
Sedan ; Renan's comparison of France and Germany, as
CONTENTS,
PAGE
reported by M. de Goncourt ; denies truth of such reports ;
his controversy with Strauss upon the subject of the
war; monitions to his countrymen embodied in **The
Intellectual and Moral Reform of France"; political
views . . . 139
CHAPTER IX.
Renan visits Rome ; writes V Antichrist ; Nero ; analysis of
the Apocalypse ; the revolt of the Jews and its effect on
Christianity ; is invited to attend a Scientific Congress at
Palermo ; gives his observations in " Twenty Days in
Sicily" (1875); accepts invitation to the bi-centenary of
the death of Spinoza (1877) ; his address ; publishes *' The
Gospels and the Second Christian Generation " (1877) ; his
theories of the authorships of the Gospels; interwoven with
history of the Roman Empire ; growth of the authority of
the Bishops of Rome ; the " Miscellanies of Travel and
History"; subjects treated of therein . . . .156
CHAPTER X.
Renan's philosophy of life ; sudden change of theory as to
the moral aims of Nature; the Dialogues Philosophiques ;
•* Caliban," ** Eau de Jouvence," " Le Pretre de Nemi";
' ' L' Abbesse de Jouarre " ; VEglise Chritienne ; theories
of the authorship of the Gospel of St. John ; heresies which
sprang from Gnosticism ; Marcion ; sketch of character and
career of Adrian ; Renan comes to London (April 1880) to
deliver the Hibbert Lectures on Christianity and Rome;
extracts of reminiscences of his visit from the Pall Mall
Budget; his lectures; *' Marcus Aurelius and the end of the
Roman World"; explains the hatred of Marcus Aurelius for
the Christians ; state of the Church at his death ; rise of mon-
asticism ; views of the severance of Church and State, and
the religion of the future; elected to the French Academy ;
address upon Claude Bernard ; subsequent addresses upon
Pasteur and Lesseps; Ecclesiastes; writes the Souvenirs
(PEnfance et dejeunesse to indicate the steps of his mental
and moral growth ; preface to that book ; Renan finds him-
self reconciled to the French Republic ; publishes Nouvelles
Eitttdes d' Histoire Religieuse ; essay on Buddhism ; on
CONTENTS, 9
PAGE
St. Francis of Assisi ; Kenan's popularity ; miscellaneous
lectures and addresses ; is feted at Treguier ;. takes a
house at Rosmapanon ; writes Fetiilles Ditachees ; his
later conceptions of the universe ; Histoire du Peuple
<V Israel (1887-94); difficulty of extracting history from
legend; r/j«w/ of the book 173
CHAPTER XI.
Renan's sufferings, and death on the 2nd October 1892; a
state-funeral ; his remains removed from Montmartre
to the Pantheon ; Renan's character ; his patriotism and
devotion to higher education ; his hatred of controversy ;
personal appearance ; philosophical speculations ; style
and qualities as a writer ; faithfulness to truth . . . 226
LIFE OF RENAN.
CHAPTER I.
[1823-36.]
JOSEPH ERNEST RENAN was, like Chateaubriand
and Lamennais, a native of Celtic Brittany, the
Wales, so to speak, of France. He was born on the
28th February 1823, at Treguier {Cotes du Nord\ a
little town at the southern extremity of a bay and a few
miles from the English Channel, with a harbour fre-
quented by vessels engaged in the coasting trade. The
ancestors of Ernest Renan came, it is supposed, to
Brittany in the great migration thither during the fifth
century from Wales, and one of the migrants was St.
Renan (originally Ronan), a famous Breton saint, after
whom was named, among other places, the town of St.
Renan in Finisterre.
In the registry of births at Treguier Renan's father is
12 LIFE OF
described as a marchand-epicier (retail grocer). But, like
his immediate progenitors, he was also a mariner, the
owner of a coasting vessel and of the house in which
his son was born. The wife managed the shop, a
"general" one, in which, besides groceries, were sold
the miscellaneous articles in demand by seafaring men
and their wives. According to Ernest Renan, one of
the chief characteristics of the Bretons is "idealism
which brings with it a contempt for riches because
generally acquired by ignoble means, and produces an
incapacity for trade and commerce." In this respect the
modern Renans were true Bretons : " they were all as
poor as Job," was the pithy description given of them to
Ernest by his mother. His paternal grandfather was a
"patriot" after the first French revolution broke out.
But though he had then a Uttle money, he refused,
unlike his neighbours, to have anything to do with the
purchase of the confiscated property of the Royalists as
an investment vitiated by its origin. In the ensuing war
with England Ernest's father volunteered for the naval
service, and was taken prisoner by the English. In later
years he was fond of witnessing the drawing of conscripts
by lot, and delighted in reproaching the new recruits
with the contrast between his voluntary and their com-
pulsory enlistment. " In the old days this was not our
way of doing things," and he shrugged his shoulders over
the degeneracy of the times. A "mild and melancholy"
man, he had the true Renan incapacity for business. He
was in his fiftieth year, and had just returned from a long
voyage, when Ernest was born. At his birth things were
going ill with the family. "When you came into the
RE NAN, 13
world," the mother told her son, after she had lived to
see him a distinguished man, "we were so downcast that
I took you on my knees and cried bitterly." Cheerful-
ness, however, was her ordinary mood. Through her
father she had Gascon blood in her veins, and inherited
the joyous Gascon temperament, the very opposite of
that of the sombre Breton. " This complexity of origin,"
Renan says, "is in a great measure the cause of my
apparent inconsistencies. I am of twofold nature; one
part of me laughs, while the other weeps. As there are
in me two men, one of them is always bound to be
contented." He says somewhere that the Gascon
element gained the upper hand in him; but this was in
later years; in earlier he approved himself, it will be
seen, a genuine Breton.
The distress of the Renan family reached a climax with
the disastrous death of its head when Ernest was a child
of five. His father was drowned one dark night while
returning to his coasting vessel from the quay at St.
Malo. The creditors waived their claim to dispose of
the house and shop at Tr^guier in consideration of the
offer made by Ernest's sister, Henriette, a clever and
resolute girl of fifteen, to pay off her father's debts by
degrees. For twenty years, beginning by opening a
school for little boys and girls at Treguier, she added
to her struggles for herself and her family the trying
fulfilment of this self-imposed obligation. Henriette
inherited her father's melancholy, and, while sympa-
thetic, cultivated solitude. She was passionately attached
to her brother Ernest, and afterwards gave him spiritual
guidance as well as material aid. She had been qualified
14 LIFE OF
for teaching through having been tolerably taught French
and church-Latin by one of the ci-devant nuns who had
survived the suppression of the convents during the first
French Revolution.
The death of his father first brought the little Ernest
into a semblance of relations with one of the many saints
revered in Brittany. This was St. Yves, who as a lawyer
pleaded the cause of the poor, and after an ecclesiastical
career received what is said to be the unique honour
bestowed on a lawyer, that of being canonised. He
became the patron-saint of lawyers, and was regarded
in his native district of Treguier as the champion of
the poor, of the widow and the orphan, and as the
great redresser of wrongs. To his chapel near Treguier
came the injured one, and having said to him, "Thou
wert just in thy lifetime; show that thou art so still,"
after this appeal went away with the comfortable though
rather unchristian belief that the enemy prayed against
would die within the year. All the desolate and forsaken
became his wards. The fatherless Ernest was taken by
his mother to the chapel of the saint and was con-
stituted his ward. "I cannot say," Renan wrote long
afterwards, "that the good saint worked marvels in the
management of our affairs, or, above all, that he
endowed me with a remarkable understanding of my
own interests. But I owe him what is better. He
gave me a contentment which passeth riches, and
a good nature which has kept me cheerful until
now."
After various changes of residence, mother, daughter,
and son found themselves again at Treguier. The boy,
RENAN.
15
very intelligent as well as dreamy, had been taught to
read and almost knew T^lemaque by heart when, prob-
ably about the age of eight, he was placed in the
ecclesiastical seminary of his native town, a friendly
priest and his good sister (of her more hereafter) paying
his school-fees, from which slender burden he soon
relieved them by gaining a small scholarship. The
teachers were venerable priests, for whom, long after he
had ceased to believe in their narrow creed, and had
recognised the insufficiency of their programme of
secular instruction, he cherished the warmest and most
grateful regard. They taught him Latin in the old-
fashioned way, ** out of detestable elementary books,
without method, almost without grammar, just as it was
learned in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by Erasmus
and the humanists, who since the time of the ancients
have known it best.'' He was thoroughly grounded in
mathematics. The writing of Latin verses was en-
couraged, but that of French verses was sternly
forbidden. Even Chateaubriand was distrusted, since,
although he had written the Genie du Christianisme^
was he not also the author of such mundane fictions as
Atala and Rene ? The suspicions entertained of Lamar-
tine were still stronger. They doubted the soundness of
his faith and foresaw his ultimate outbreaks. " All these
views did credit to their orthodox sagacity, but the result
was for their pupils a singularly contracted horizon."
What history they learned was from Rollin, and so
rigorously excluded were they from any knowledge of
recent history, that on the eve of the Revolution of 1830,
Kenan knew scarcely anything more of Napoleon and
i6 LIFE OF
the Empire than he gathered from the gossip of the
college-porter. For the rest, Renan says: —
**I learned from my teachers something infinitely more valuable
than criticism or philosophical sagacity. They taught me the love of
truth, respect for reason, and the seriousness of life. This is the
one thing in me which has never varied. I issued from their hands
with a moral feeling so proof against all trials that the jewel might be
rudely handled but could not be tarnished by contact with Parisian
levity. I was so fashioned for the Good, for the True, that it
would have been impossible for me to follow any career not devoted
to incorporeal things. My teachers made me so unfitted for any
and every temporal employment that I was irrevocably stamped for
a spiritual life. That life appeared to me as alone noble; every
lucrative profession seemed servile and unworthy of me. "
Ernest's fellow-pupils were chiefly of the peasant class,
and for the most part learning with an eye to the priest-
hood. They were proud of their bodily strength, and
somewhat contemptuous of femineity and of what they
thought effeminacy. Ernest was a delicate and studious
boy. He did not join in the games of his school-
fellows, and they were given to teasing " Mademoiselle,"
as they scornfully called him. From an early age, indeed,
he preferred the company of little maidens to that of
children of his own sex. Of these damsels, the one who
fascinated him most, and with whom he formed a childish
friendship, was the Noemi charmingly described in his
Souvenirs, She was two years older than himself. Had
it not been for the consciousness of a coming vocation
which ought to detach him from all earthly things, he
would in a few years have fallen in love with Noemi,
before the parting of their paths in life and her prema-
ture death. He held her memory dear, and when he became
RE NAN. 17
a father he called his only daughter Noemi. But thoughts
of love, still less of marriage, could not be harboured by
one destined, as he and his believed, for the priesthood
and cehbacy. " I was a born priest," he says of himself,
and a priest he did become, though it was not in any of
the churches of the nations. Meanwhile, just as melted
wax takes the impression of the seal, his natural devout-
ness took the shape given it by his spiritual pastors and
masters. " Every word of theirs seemed to me an oracle.
Such was my respect for them that, until I was sixteen
and came to Paris, I never doubted the truth of what
they told me."
Beyond the school-walls there was much to minister to
the boy's natural and acquired devoutness, which was
strongly tinged with romanticism. Before the first
French Revolution Treguier was the seat of a bishopric,
and was full of monasteries and convents. The Revolu-
tion swept away the bishopric and much else that was
clerical and monastic. But under the Empire and the
Restoration, Treguier recovered to a great extent its
old ecclesiastical aspect. There was the ancient
cathedral, reconstructed in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and the young Renan passed many a happy
hour in it, especially in its noble cloisters, with their
tombs of knights and dames of the olden time. Outside
Treguier, as elsewhere in Brittany, with its devoutest and
most superstitious of populations, clinging tenaciously to
ancient worships and ways, there were in lonely and desert
places numbers of half-ruined chapels, dedicated to local
saints unknown to the rest of Christendom, and to whom,
worshipping them with strange rites, the Breton peasant
l8 LIFE OF
prayed for a cure of this and the other disease; the clergy
tolerating such practices reluctantly. When Renan wrote
his Soiwe?u'rs, he remembered vividly his emotion when,
through a half-ruined door of one of those chapels, he
gazed at the stained glass or the images of painted wood
which decorated the altar. " The strange and terrible
physiognomies of those saints, more Druid than Christian,
savage, vindictive, haunted me like a nightmare." Most
of them had been real persons, but their biographies
had become the subjects of the wildest of legends. A very
strange one was connected with an incident in Ernest's
own family. He was told how his father, when a child,
had been cured of a fever. On the day appointed he
was taken, before dawn, to the chapel of the saint
from whom the cure was expected. At the same time
came a blacksmith with forge, nails, and tongs. He
lighted his furnace, made his tongs red-hot, and holding
them before the image of the saint, said : " If thou dost
not draw forth the fever from this child, I shall forthwith
shoe thee as I would a horse ! " The saint obeyed
immediately ! Ernest's mother as a Breton liked the
legends of the saints, but as a Gascon she laughed at the
grotesque in them, and when telling them to her eagerly
listening son, she took care to distinguish between what
might be real and what was certainly fictitious in them —
a lesson not thrown away upon him when in after years
he had to deal with legends infinitely more important
and widely accepted than those of the obscure
saints of Brittany. These stories "gave me early,"
Renan says, " a taste for mythology," and some of them
were utilised by him long afterwards when engaged
RENAN. 19
in one of his favourite occupations, that of tracing
the resemblance between the workings of the mythopoeic
faculty in races far apart from each other in space and
time.
But for an unexpected incident Renan would have spent
an obscure and blameless life as a parish priest, or at
highest as a professor in the College of Tr^guier. He was
in his fourteenth year when something which had
occurred in distant Paris substituted for that modest
career one very different.
The old Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, close
to the church of the same name, in the Rue St. Victor,
and one of the poorest quarters of transpontine Paris,
became with Napoleon's re-establishment of Catholicism
in France a training-school for priests of the diocese of
Paris. Through too frequent changes in the principal-
ship, ending in the intermittent and feeble administration
of a valetudinarian, the teaching and discipline of the
seminary had rendered it inefficient for its object, and
the number of pupil-inmates was dwindling accordingly.^
About 1837 the Archbishop of Paris, in order to reform
this state of things, gave the seminary a vigorous Superior
in the person of the Abbe Dupanloup, afterwards the
rather famous Bishop of Orleans. In the prime of life,
and perhaps the most popular preacher in Paris,
ambitious, and a man of the world, he was at that
time an ultramontane and a legitimist, and had been
confessor to the Due de Bourdeaux. But he found
favour in the eyes of Orleanists as well as of legitimists
of distinction, and was admitted to intimacy by the
^ Adolphe Morillon, Souvenirs de Saint-Nicolas (1859), chap. i.
20 LIFE OF
Duchesse de Dino, the high-born Russian wife of Talley-
rand's nephew. One of Dupanloup's greatest achieve-
ments of those years was the successful stroke of spiritual
diplomacy by which he managed to persuade the dying
and long recalcitrant Talleyrand to receive the last
sacraments, and sign a confession of faith. Among
his first endeavours in the administration of the semi-
nary was to provide a classical and literary education
for aspirants to the priesthood, at the expense of the
scholastic and mystical instruction previously given.
But he carried out a still more vital change. He
determined that the seminary should be no longer a
mere training-school' for the priesthood, but that there
should be admitted youths belonging to the wealthy
middle-class, and to the higher class, whose parents
desired them to have, without any view to taking
orders, at once a sound Catholic and a superior classical
and literary education. He was thoroughly successful.
No sooner had he effected these internal reforms than he
was besieged by applications for the admission of boys
belonging to aristocratic families as well as to the
wealthier bourgeotste. Many parents were willing to
pay a high price for the privilege, and their payments
went to aid the education and support of boys of an
inferior social grade who were, or were likely to become,
candidates for the priesthood. These, moreover, were
to be youths of proved or promising ability. To
obtain such the Abb^ Dupanloup sent forth to several
parts of France educational recruiting sergeants, so to
speak. Let Renan tell in his own words the rest of the
story: —
RE NAN. 21
'* In the year 1838,^ as it happened, I won all the prizes of my
class in the College of Treguier. The list of prizes came under the
notice of one of the men of penetration whom the zealous general
employed to recruit for his young army. In a minute my fate was
decided. * Make him come,' said the impetuous Superior. I was
fifteen-and-a-half: we had no time for reflection. On the 4th of
September I was spending my holidays with a friend, at a village
near Treguier. In the afternoon I was sent for in haste. I
remember the return home as if it were " yesterday. I had before
me a country- walk of a league. The pious chimes of the
evening Angelus, spreading from parish to parish, infused into the
atmosphere something of calmness, of sweetness, of melancholy,
\maging the life which I was about to quit for ever. Next day
I started for Paris ; and on the 7th I beheld things as new
to me, as if I had been suddenly flung into France from Tahiti or
Timbuctoo;"
^ Renan himself says, " 1836," a misprint or a slip of the pen.
A few lines further on he was then, he says, fifteen-and-a-half years
old, and he was born in 1823. Moreover,, it is certain (see Morillon,
uhi supra) that the Abbe Dupanloup did not become Superior of
the seminary before the session 1837-38.
CHAPTER II,
[1838-45.]
LJ IS seven years of study, begun with a view to the
priesthood, are described by Renan pretty fully in
his Souvenirs. Moreover, some side-lights on his career
as a Seminarist are thrown by one of his most intimate
friends and fellow-students of those years, who, unlike
Renan, did enter the priesthood. The comments of the
Abb^ Cognat on Renan's reminiscences of his student-
life display a certain acidity, due to Renan's abandon-
ment of his early belief, but in the Abbe's recollections
(given in Le Correspondant during 1883) are embedded
facts and impressions which supplement, in a more or
less interesting way, Renan's own statements. Here, for
instance, is an unflattering sketch of the personal appear-
ance and characteristics of the Breton boy when he
entered the Seminary of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet :
" He looked pale and sickly. His puny frame was sur-
mounted by an enormous head. His eyes, almost always
downcast, were raised only to give sidelong glances.
Timid to awkwardness, pensive to the verge of dumbness,
he seemed a burden to himself," etc. Renan has himself
LTFE OF RE NAN.
23
described his misery on being transplanted from his
quiet home and his mother's side, from Treguier with its
environment of green hills and pleasant fields, to the
school-prison of the Rue St. Victor, with its rigid dis-
cipline and indoors confinement. Home-sickness was
followed by bodily sickness, and but for a fortunate
incident things might have gone very ill with the poor boy.
His chief consolation was to write long letters to his mother,
the loss of whose companionship was his greatest sorrow.
It so happened that the Abbe Dupanloup was deeply
attached to his own mother, whom he visited every day.
All letters written by the pupils were read by masters before
being despatched. The deep affectionateness of one of
Renan's to his mother made an impression on the master
who read it, and he brought it under the notice of the
Abbe Dupanloup. He received it on the evening which
he was wont to devote to commenting, before the
assembled and eagerly listening two hundred pupils, on
the masters' reports and on the school incidents of the
week. Renan had that week been unsuccessful with his
school exercise, and was only fifth or sixth in the order
of merit "Ah," said the Abbe Dupanloup, "if the
subject had been that of a letter which I read this
morning, Ernest Renan would have been first." "Thence-
forth," Renan adds, "he took notice of me. I existed
for him; he was for me what he was for all of us, a
principle of life, a sort of God. One worship was substi-
tuted for another, and weakened considerably my feelings
towards my first teachers."
In the vivifying studies of the place, in the ardour
of emulation, and in the sympathetic communings of the
24 LIFE OF
Abbe Dupanloup with the pupils, Renan soon found
his home-sickness vanish. The studies were purely
literary, but their range was wide, and the Abbe, seconded
by excellent teachers, practised every possible device that
could make school-tasks interesting to the learners. Greek
and Latin were carefully taught, and the classics of
Greece and Rome instructively commented on. History
too, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, had a foremost place
in the school studies along with the great French classics,
Bossuet and Fenelon in particular. " I had finished my
classical studies," Renan says, "without having read
Voltaire, but I knew by heart the Soirees de Saint-
Petersbourg^^^ full of orthodoxy and legitimism. News and
knowledge of what was being said and done in literary
Paris entered the seminary so amply that the war then
raging between the Romanticists and the Classicists was
a frequent theme of the familiar addresses made for
half-an-hour every evening by the Abbe Dupanloup to
the assembled pupils. On this subject the Abbe Cognat
has something rather malicious to say of his old friend
and fellow-pupil a propos of Renan's statement in his
Souvenirs^ that writing exercises on themes not personally
interesting to him was distasteful, and that he gladly
turned from rhetoric to history. According to the Abb^,
Renan was distinguished thus early by a " literary hetero-
doxy," that is, by a passionate preference of the Roman-
ticists to the Classicists. In order to check this devotion,
which was prominently illustrated in the young gentleman's
exercises, one of these was, to the great amusement of
his fellow-pupils, ridiculed by his teacher, who laughed
at what the Abbd calls " the youthful innovator's prose.
REN A IV. 25
pretentious, trivial, and bristling with neologisms."
Further, according to the Abbe, Renan adhered to his
romanticism, but in dudgeon abandoned " the serious
study of letters," and devoted all his energies to history,
in which department, adds this candid friend, "finding
himself in company with rivals less prepared than him-
self, he easily obtained the first place." Certainly to
history he did turn with avidity, and long afterwards he
remembered the delight with which he listened while
his Professor read out striking extracts from the fifth and
sixth volumes of Michelet's History of France, those in
which is told, among other things, the story of Joan of
Arc, and the expulsion of the English from France, where
of all their former possessions Calais alone was left
them.
Of the religious observances of the seminary and the
part which he took in them, Renan says in his Souvenirs
little or nothing. Speaking of the Abbe Dupanloup's
system of education, Renan remarks, " You would have
said that his two hundred pupils were destined to be
poets, authors, orators." But with all his classicism
the future Bishop of Orleans made the most ample pro-
vision for the spiritual needs of those entrusted to his
charge, whether they were destined for the priesthood
or not. A glance at this sphere of things is given by
the severe Abb^ Cognat when commenting on a passage
in the Souvenirs, in which Renan contrasts the simple
austere religion of his priest-teachers at Treguier with
that presented to him at St. Nicolas, "a religion of
calico-print, a piety scented with musk, decked out with
ribbons."
26 LIFE OF
*' If such," says the critical Abbe, '*was M. Kenan's impression
on entering the Seminary in 1838, it must be admitted that he was
an excellent dissembler and played his game skilfully. At chapel,
from the beginning of the service, he took his place among the
most serious and devout. By his piety he even made himself a
place apart in the opinion of his fellow-pupils and his masters. In
this way he did not fail to receive encouragement and distinction.
I have not forgotten with what an envious eye I saw my friend
among the dignitaries of the Fraternity of the Holy Virgin, which
was established in the Seminary, when I myself had as yet, and with
great difficulty, attained the modest grade of aspirant in that pious
institution. And it was not only at chapel where, like another
Eliakin, invested with the linen alb, 'decked out with ribbons' the
colours of the Virgin, he discharged the envied functions of chorister,
that M. Renan figured as the fervid disciple of a * religion of
calico-print,' — during play-hours, at class-time, and everywhere, he
appeared to be animated by a feeling of sincere devoutness. I have
had the curiosity to consult the honourably-mentioned exercises in
which were given the best of those produced in each class from
1838 to 1 84 1, and I was not surprised to find among several other
religious compositions of Ernest Renan a hymn in Greek verse to
the Virgin. I add a detail apparently trifling, yet characteristic : M.
Renan never neglected to introduce a cross into his signature."
Nevertheless, when he left the Seminary of St. Nicolas
du Chardonnet a great change had been worked in the
young Renan.
** For three years," Renan writes, '* I was subjected to a profound
influence which effected a complete transformation of my being.
M. Dupanloup had literally transfigured me. He had evolved a
quick and active intelligence out of the poor little provincial torpidly
encased in his shell. Certainly there, was something wanting to
this education, and as long as I had to put up with it my mind
always felt a void. There were wanting positive science, the idea
of a critical search after truth. That superficial humanism for three
years condemned my reasoning faculty to inertia, while at the same
time destroying the original simplicity of my faith. My Christianity
underwent a process of great diminution; nevertheless, there was
nothing in my mind which as yet could be called doubt. Every
year, with the holidays, I went to Brittany. In spite of more than
one perturbation, I found myself again wholly what my first teachers
had made me, in regard to religion at least."
With the close of his studies at St. Nicolas, Renan
stood at the parting of the ways. Of his fellow-pupils
who had arrived at the same stage, many embraced
a secular career. Many also, bent on becoming priests,
resolved to continue their studies in a purely ecclesiastical
seminary, and among them were Renan and his then
young friend, afterwards the Abbe Cognat.
The Seminary of St. Sulpice, which Renan now entered
as an aspirant to the priesthood, had a branch establish-
ment at Issy, near Paris. Here the student devoted two
years to "philosophy" before receiving a mainly theolo-
gical training at headquarters in Paris. Life at Issy was
very different from that led at the Seminary St. Nicolas.
The students being young men from eighteen to twenty-
four, and having selected from choice a sacred vocation,
nothing of the discipline known at St. Nicolas was
enforced on them, and they did not abuse the liberty
allowed them. Moreover, anything like emulation
was sternly discouraged; intellectual modesty and self-
reprpssion were among the things chiefly encouraged.
For the varied literary culture of St. Nicolas was sub-
stituted scholasticism, a Cartesianism mitigated a la
Bossuet, and further modified by the psychology of
'Thomas Reid and the Scottish School, with lectures on
physics, natural history, and physiology. Renan's favourite
28 LIFE OF
reading was in Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke. He
was an ardent student, spending the recreation-hours in
reading and meditation, and during his two years at Issy
never once availing himself of the permission frequently
given to visit Paris. The results of his studies and
meditations he has summarised thus : —
" The vivid attraction which philosophy had for me did not blind
me to the uncertainty of its results. I early lost all confidence in
the abstract metaphysics which claims to be a science outside
all other sciences, and able to solve by itself alone the highest
problems of humanity. The basis of my nature was the scientific
spirit. ... I had received from my first teachers in Brittany
a pretty deep mathematical education. Mathematics and physical
induction have ever been the fundamental elements of my intel-
lect, the only stones of my mental masonry which have never
changed position and which always avail me. What of general
natural history and of physiology I learned initiated me into the
laws of life, I perceived the insufficiency of so-called spiritualism.
The Cartesian proofs of the existence of a soul distinct from the
body always appeared to me to be very weak. Thenceforward I
was an idealist, and not a spiritualist in the usual meaning of the
word. An eternal yf^r/, an endless metamorphosis seemed to me to
be the law of the world. Nature appeared to me as a whole in which
there is no room for special creation, and in which consequently
everything is in course of transformation. How was it that such a
conception, already tolerably clear to me, of a positive philosophy,
did not expel from my mind scholasticism and Christianity? It was
because I was young, inconsequent, and lacking the critical spirit.
I was kept back by the example of such a number of great intellects
with so profound an insight into nature, which nevertheless had
remained Christian. I thought above all of Malebranche, who
celebrated the mass all his life, while holding and expressing as to
the providential government of the world ideas little different from-
mine. . . . Indeed, I cannot say that my Christian belief was in
reality diminished. My faith was destroyed by historical criticism.
RE NAN. 29
not by scholasticism or philosophy. The history of philosophy and
the kind of scepticism by which I was attacked retained me in
Christianity rather than repelled me from it. ... A certain modesty
kept me back. That question of questions, the truth of the Christian
dogmas and of the Bible, never obtruded itself on me. I admitted
revelation in a general sense, like Leibnitz and Malebranche.
Certainly my philosophy of the Jieri was heterodoxy itself, but I
did not follow out its consequences. After all, my teachers were
satisfied with me."
Nor had these excellent men — to whose piety, ethical
purity, and kindness of heart Renan does due justice — any
reason to be dissatisfied with him. He appeared to them
a modest and devout, an intelligent and studious young
man, in whom anything which they could have wished to
be otherwise was an over-devotion to study, since this
might somewhat unfit him for the active duties of the
priesthood. At Issy, according to his friend Cognat,
his piety was more fervent than ever; at chapel and in
the religious exercises of the place he appeared absorbed in
prayer, and he was a fervent communicant. His teachers
had not the slightest suspicion of what was passing half
unconsciously in the depths of his mind until it was
suddenly revealed to one, the most keen-sighted of them,
and the shock which it gave him was felt as vividly by
Renan himself Among the privileges enjoyed by the
young seminarists of Issy was a considerable liberty of
discussion, although the theological teaching given was
of the most dogmatic orthodoxy. Every Sunday the
students assembled to hear theses defended and im-
pugned. At other times one of the most silent of the
community, Renan appears to have been generally an
impugner, and his aggressive attitude made the Professor
30 LIFE OF
already referred to keep a vigilant eye on the champion
who thus delighted in contesting the positions of
orthodoxy. On one occasion — Renan does not say what
was precisely the subject of the thesis which he attacked
— he put his objections so forcibly, and the replies to
them were so feeble, as to produce symptoms of amuse-
ment among the auditors. The Professor present on the
occasion was alarmed, and abruptly closed the discussion.
In the evening he took Renan aside, and spoke earnestly
to him, in the strain to be expected, about reliance on
reason as being unchristian and so forth. He reproached
the young man with his love of study. This perpetual
seeking after truth — what is the good of it } " All that
is essential has been already found. It is not knowledge
that saves souls.'' And then, adds Renan, "gradually
exciting himself," he said, in a passionate tone, "You
are not a Christian ! "
This terrible apostrophe was to the sensitive and
conscientious young man like a thunderbolt falling at
his feet. All night long he kept repeating to himself
the fateful words. Next day he confided his agonised
thoughts to the principal of the Issy establishment, who
was also his confessor, an old and extremely amiable
ecclesiastical gentleman, much attached to Renan. He
took the matter rather lightly, and was even a little
displeased with the plain-spoken Professor for having
troubled the conscience of one for whose spiritual
condition he, as Renan's confessor, was responsible.
His comfortable and comforting theory was that a
young man's theological doubts were of little import-
ance unless they were persisted in, and that they dis-
REAGAN. 31
appeared when the duties of the priesthood and a definite
career were entered on. After the incident Renan found
him more affectionate than ever. Another trusted Pro-
fessor took the matter calmly, and only admonished
Renan not to allow his faith in Christianity to be dis-
turbed by "objections of detail." The upshot was a
decision that when Renan had finished his two years
course of "philosophy" at Issy, he should proceed to
headquarters, the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, and by
following the prescribed course of theological and cognate
studies qualify himself for the priesthood. Renan without
demur accepted the decision, and acted on it so far as to
proceed to St. Sulpice, with what result will be seen
further on. But when nearly forty years afterwards he
wrote his Souvenirs he admitted the penetration of the
Professor who had read him more accurately than Renan
had read himself. He regretted that he had not profited
by the warning indirectly given him, and had not
resolved on abandoning the career which a residence at
St. Sulpice pledged him to adopt. He even fancied that
if, with his love for physiology and the natural sciences,
he had studied them persistently he might have arrived
at some of the results which were obtained by Darwin,
and of which in those early years, he avers, glimpses
were vouchsafed to him.
To St. Sulpice Cognat accompanied Renan, with
whom he remained for several years afterwards, and
had been for several years before, on terms of close
and confidential intimacy. It is Cognat who discloses
concerning his friend's arrival and residence at St. Sulpice
several significant facts to which Renan in his Souvenirs
32 LIFE OF
has made no reference. When a Seminarist left Issy for
St. Sulpice he was preceded by some written remarks, in
which his old teachers, for the benefit of his new teachers,
commented on his character and conduct. In this
document the Superior of the Issy Seminary, who is
represented by Renan as having treated his doubts so
lightly, indicated to the head of the St. Sulpice Seminary
certain undefined but dangerous intellectual tendencies
as having been detected in Renan, a careful supervision
of whom was recommended. The suggestion was acted
on, but with no other result than the knowledge that the
young man was a model Seminarist, answering questions
in his class without displaying the slightest taint of
heresy, gentle to his fellow-students, respectful to his
teachers, and earnestly devoted to study. In discharging
one function, indeed, which was assigned to him, doubtless
as a preparative for the active duties of the priesthood, he
seems to have broken down. He was commissioned to
catechise the young people of the parish of St. Sulpice,
but he did this with so little satisfaction to his superiors
that they relieved him of the duty. Cognat adds as a
proof of Renan's humility that he accepted his super-
session without complaining and as warranted by the
circumstances. The precise cause of his failure is not
given, nor is it hinted, at least by Cognat, that it was due
to any exhibition of heterodoxy. Renan was punctual and
earnest in his public devotions, and there was nothing in
his conduct to make his superiors suspicious of his
sincerity. But in the inmost recesses of his mind he
was beginning to be greatly disquieted by a doubt whether
his theory of the universe, and certain conclusions at
KENAN.
33
which he \Yas arriving concerning the dogmas of Roman
CathoHcism, could be honestly reconciled with the
assumption of even the slenderest ecclesiastical functions.
He accepted the tonsure and took those minor orders
which did not pledge him to celibacy, or advance him
further than the threshold, so to speak, of the priesthood.
But if he remembered rightly w^hat was his consciousness
at the time, it was with vital reservations that he went thus
far. A year or two later, in one of those letters to his
friend Cognat, which are deeply interesting contributions
to Kenan's spiritual autobiography, and of which further
use w^ill be made hereafter, he thus described his feelirgs
when he took his first step towards the priesthood : —
** At the moment when I advanced to the altar to receive the
tonsure, terrible doubts were already working within me. But I
was pushed forward, and was told that it is always good to obey.
Therefore I went forward. But I call on God to bear testimony to
the inmost thought which possessed me, and to the vow which I
made in the depths of my heart. I took for my portion the truth
which is the hidden God. I consecrated myself to its quest ; re-
nouncing for its sake whatever is only profane, whatever can turn
man away from the holy and divine destination to which his nature
summons him. It was thus that I heard nature speak, and my soul
assured me that I should never repent of my promise. And, my friend,
I do not repent of it, and constantly with perfect happiness I repeat
the delightful and pleasant words, Domimis pars (*The Lord is
the portion of mine inheritance,' etc., Psalm xvi. 5), and I believe
myself to be thus quite as agreeable to God as he who pro-
nounces them with a vain heart and a frivolous mind. Only in
one event will they be a reproach to me, and that is if, prostituting
my mind to vulgar cares, I should allow my life to be shaped
by one of those gross motives which suffice the common herd,
and should prefer meaner enjoyments to the holy pursuit of truth
and beauty. Until that happens, my friend, I shall recall without
3
34 LIFE OF
regret the memory of the day on which I pronounced those words.
Man can never be so sufficiently assured of the course of his thoughts
as to swear fidelity to this or that system, which for the time being
he may regard as the true one. All that he can do is to consecrate
himself to the service of Truth, whatever she may be, and to incline
his heart to follow her wherever he thinks that he sees her, and
this though at the cost of the most painful sacrifices."
A touching apologia for a momentary lapse from per-
fect truthfulness. When, however, it came to taking
sub-deacon's orders, which pledged to celibacy and bound
irrevocably to the service of the Church, Renan recoiled,
though pressed to take the step by his spiritual director
at St. Sulpice, who doubtless thought that if that hap-
pened the young man would succeed in stifling his
doubts and scruples. To a young friend at Treguier,
who after some hesitation had taken orders, Renan,
in March 1845, between two and three years after his
admission to St. Sulpice, and just entering his twenty-
third year, thus unbosomed himself when announcing
what proved to be a fateful decision : —
" Nothing would be wanting to my happiness were it not for the
deeply distressing thoughts by which my mind is tormented, and
which increase at a frightful rate of progression. I have quite
decided not to enter the sub-diaconate at the next ordination. No
one will think that singular, since my age would compel me to
allow an interval to elapse between my first and second ordination.
After all, what does the opinion of others matter to me? I must
accustom myself to brave it, so that I may be prepared for any
and every sacrifice. Many a cruel moment do I pass. This Holy
Week, above all, has been for me a painful one, since whatever
snatches me from my ordinary course of life submerges me again in
anxiety. I console myself by thinking on Jesus, on him so beauti-
ful, so pure, so ideal in his sufferings, whom under every hypothesis
REN AN, 35
I shall always love. Even did I arrive at abandoning Him, that
ought to please Him, for it would be a sacrifice to conscience, and,
God knows, a costly one. You, I think, will understand it. Oh I
my friend, how little is man free to choose his destiny. Here i^
a child who acts only from impulse and imitation, and yet it is at
such an age that he is made to stake his whole life. A power
higher than himself enmeshes him in indissoluble toils, silently
carries on its work, and before he has begun to know himself he is
bound he knows not how. At a certain age he awakes, he wishes
to act. Impossible ! He is bound hand and foot in a network
from which no extrication is possible. It is God himself who holds
him fast. The merciless opinion of others converts the fancies of
his childhood into an irrevocable decree, and will laugh at him if
he desires to be done with the toy which amused his earliest years.
Ah ! if it were only the general verdict ! But all the dearest ties are
in the tissue of the net which surround him, and he must tear out
half his heart if he is to liberate himself from it. How often have I
wished that man at his birth were either wholly free or wholly with-
out freedom ! He would be less to be pitied if he were born like
the plant, unalterably attached to the soil which is to nourish it.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? How is all
this to be reconciled with the supreme government of a Father ?
Mysteries are these, my friend. Happy he who has to fathom
them only in speculation.
**For me to tell you all this, you must indeed be my friend. I
need not ask you to preserve silence. You understand that my
mother must be tenderly dealt with. I would rather die than cause
her a moment of pain. O God, shall I have strength to give duty
a preference over her ? I commend her to you. "
Externally, there was nothing to betray the terrible con-
flict, thus touchingly described, which was raging in the
young man's breast. He performed all his duties, and
took part in the services of the Church as punctually as
ever. Even Cognat was not taken into his confidence.
On the evening before Cognat's own consecration to the
36 LIFE OF
subdiaconate, the two, he reports, had a long and
serious conversation. Renan, indeed, advised his friend
to pause before taking a step that was irrevocable, and
which, with changing opinions, he might regret. But
Cognat did not then suspect the real ground of this
advice. " Nothing," he says, " in my relations with M.
Renan had prepared me for it. In truth, he had never
confided to me his doubts respecting the very foundations
of Christianity." The time, however, was at hand when
they were to be not only confided to Cognat, but to
sever Renan's connection with St. Sulpice, to the great
astonishment and sorrow of his teachers there, most
worthy and amiable men, on whose excellent qualities of
head and heart he bestow^ed afterwards the amplest
recognition, and whose misfortune rather than fault, it
was that their training and position had made them
spiritually narrow-minded.
Hebrew, as the language of the Old Testament, formed
part of the instruction given at St. Sulpice to its budding
theologians. The principal of the establishment, a very
aged as well as amiable ecclesiastic, and, like all his col-
leagues, rigidly orthodox, delivered lectures on Hebrew,
while a much more erudite Semitic scholar, M. Le Hir,
taught the class of Hebrew grammar. Renan, who says
of himself that he was born a philologist as well as a
priest, was one of the most eager and diligent of Le
Hir's pupils. So promising a student was he that when
in course of time the aged principal surrendered the
Hebrew lectureship to Le Hir, he gave over the class of
Hebrew grammar to Renan. To his great surprise he
was offered by the authorities, when he entered on his
RE NAN, 37
new and congenial duties, a salary of three hundred
francs (;£i2). The unworldly young man thought the
sum so extravagant that he declined the offer, and with
difficulty was brought to accept a hundred and fifty
francs (a modest ;^6) for the purchase of books.
Naturally he contracted an intimacy with Le Hir, like
himself a Breton, under whom he prosecuted his higher
Hebrew studies, and who taught him Arabic and Syriac.
It so happened that Le Hir had familiarised himself
with modern German exegesis, so much of which was
heterodox. But while it enriched his knowledge it never
influenced his orthodoxy. What Le Hir found in German
exegesis compatible with Catholic orthodoxy he appro-
priated; what he found incompatible he rejected utterly,
not without indignant protests. It was only natural
that such a pupil of such a teacher should be curious
to know at first hand something of German exegesis,
samples of which doubtless abounded in the ample
library which Le Hir amiably placed at Renan's dis-
posal. But for a knowledge of the kind that of German
was indispensable. Renan set to work to learn it, and with
the aid of a fellow-seminarist from Alsace he mastered it.
In his intense curiosity to know what had been discovered
in Germany respecting the Bible he grappled first of
all with German exegetics. Strauss's famous Leben
fesu, it may be noted, had been published some ten
years before. The results of his new studies were to
Renan a revelation. Here is his own account of it, given
retrospectively in the Souvenirs : —
"Literature was so secondary a matter, in the midst of the
burning inquiry which absorbed me, that at first I paid little
38 LIFE OF
attention to it"— that is, to German non-theological literature.
*' Nevertheless I was sensible," in that literature, "of the pres-
ence of a new kind of genius, very different from that of our
seventeenth century. I admired it all the more that I could
see no bounds to it. I was struck by the peculiar intellectualism of
Germany at the end of the last century and during the first half of
this. I thought myself entering a temple. There indeed was what
I was seeking for, the reconciliation of a highly religious with the
critical spirit. Now and then for a moment I regretted that I was
not a Protestant, so that I could be a philosopher without ceasing
to be a Christian. . . .
*' In point of fact, everything is true in a book which is divine in
its origin. In such a book there must be no contradictions, since two
contradictions cannot at one and the same time be both of them
true. Now the attentive study which I gave to the Bible," read in
the light thrown on it by German exegesis, ** while it revealed to
me historical and aesthetic treasures, also proved to me that it was
no more than any other ancient book free from contradictions,
inadvertences, mistakes. There are to be found in it fables,
legends, traces of a wholly human authorship. It is no longer
possible to maintain that the second part of Isaiah is by Isaiah.
The book of Daniel, which all who are orthodox attribute to the
time of the captivity, is an apocryphal work composed in the year
169 or 170 before Jesus. Christ. The book of Judith is an historical
impossibility. The ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses cannot be
maintained, and to deny that several portions of Genesis have a
mythical character is to be compelled to treat as narratives of events
which actually happened, the accounts, for instance, of the terrestrial
paradise, of the forbidden fruit, of Noah's ark. But you cannot be
a Catholic if on a single one of these points you depart from the
traditional statement. What becomes of the miracle so very much
admired by Bossuet, Cyrus named two hundred years before his
birth? What becomes of the fifty weeks of years on which are
based the calculations of Bossuet's Histoire Uiiiverselle^ if the por-
tion of the book of Isaiah in which Cyrus is named was actually
written in the time of that conqueror, and if the pseudo-Daniel was
a contemporary of Antiochus Epiphanes ? According to orthodoxy,
RE NAN. 39
it is obligatory to believe that the books of the Bible are
the handiwork of those to whom the titles attribute them.
The mildest Catholic teaching respecting inspiration forbids the
admission that the sacred text contains any pronounced error, or
any contradiction even in matters which concern neither faith nor
morals."
The crisis was near at hand in the autumn of 1845,
six months after he wrote to a young friend at Treguier
the letter from which an extract has been given
(ante, p. 34). Renan spent his holidays, as usual, at
Treguier with his much-loved mother, who began
sorrowfully to suspect, without understanding, what
was passing in his mind. He had so distanced
spiritually his old teachers, the good priests of Tre-
guier, that he found it difficult to converse with them,
and they, too, had glimpses of the change which
had come over him. He was far removed from the
influences of St. Sulpice, and from his spiritual director
there, who, to his avowal of doubt, had replied much in
the same way as that of the principal of the Issy seminary,
" Temptations against the faith ! Pay no attention to
them ! go straight on ! " advising him by way of cure to
take those sub-deacon's orders from which it has been
seen Renan recoiled.
The extracts which have just been given from the
Souvenirs are interesting in themselves, and as a calm
retrospect forty years later of those two years of inward
struggle, a period which he called at the time one of devo-
tion to the study of Hebrew and the Old Testament. But
far more valuable to those interested in Renan's character
and career are the letters which he wrote while his in-
4o LIFE OF
ternal struggle was proceeding and was ending. They
are diffuse and sometimes a little rambling, but they
mirror wdth perfect accuracy the varying emotions pro-
duced in Renan by that conflict between Faith and
Doubt which in modern times has raged in many a
mind, but which oOv'^. knows not to have been anywhere
else than in Kenan's letters of 1845-46 recorded with
such fidelity and transparent clearness. Several men
and women of letters in our own country have made
the conflict the theme of works of fiction, or of prominent
episodes in them. But whatever may have been the
ability, the knowledge of the questions at issue, as well
as of human nature, shown in their delineations, they
must yield in interest to the transcript from stern and pain-
ful reality given in Kenan's correspondence. This is not
a novel-hero made to think and speak for the amusement
or the excitement of miscellaneous readers. Kenan's
letters are not products of literary art, the skilfully con-
trived efl*usions of an imaginary character, the figments
of a novelist's brain, but the genuine utterances, given
in the strictest confidence, and not in the slightest
degree meant for publication, of a living man in travail
and in sore trouble, beset by the direst perplexities, in-
ternal and external.
By those who have followed thus far Kenan's bio-
graphy, the extract about to be given from one of his
letters will need no elucidation unless in the case of the
tutorship in Germany. This connects itself with the
story of his sister, of whom nothing has been said in
these pages since they chronicled the old life at Treguier,
and to whom Renan makes but few and scanty references
RE NAN. 41
in i\\Q Souvenirs J though in the preface to it, and while
palliating this reticence in regard to her, he speaks of her
as the " person who has had the greatest influence on my
life." On leaving Tr^guier she became a teacher and
then a school-mistress in Paris, but finding her position
distasteful she accepted a situation as governess in a
family in Poland. She paid, with her pupil, frequent
visits to Germany, and acquired a strong taste for
German philosophical speculation. The result w^as a
deep sympathy with her brother's efforts to shake himself
free from the shackles of Catholicism. In her letters she
warmly encouraged him to be done with Christian dogma,
so that in the step which he was contemplating he had
the earnest approval of his dear and cultivated sister
to counterbalance, in some degree at least, the regret-
ful anticipations of their simple-minded mother. As at
once a provision for him, if he decided on abandoning
an ecclesiastical career, and to give him a domicile in
the country to the literature and philosophy of which he
owed so much, she procured him the offer of the tutorship
in Germany incidentally referred to in the following letter.
The offer, it will be seen, was not ultimately accepted.
It was during his sojourn at Treguier in the autumn of
1845 — his last sojourn there for many a long year — when
the thought of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood
had become intolerable to him, that for the first time he
confided his doubts to his friend Cognat, who was startled
and saddened by the unexpected disclosure.
'* My dear Friend, — Few events of importance have occurred,
but many reflections and emotions have been crowding in upon me
since we parted. I yield to the need which I feel of imparting them
42 LIFE OF
to you all the more willingly that there is no one here to whom I
can confide them. Doubtless, with my mother by my side, I am
not alone, but how many things there are on which my affection for
her bids me be silent, and which, after all, she would not be able
to understand.
"There has been no fact of importance to advance the solution of
the great problem which so justly absorbs me. I have learned
nothing new, unless it be the enormity of the sacrifice which heaven
was about to exact from me. A thousand vexations which I did
not anticipate have complicated my situation and made me feel that
the course which my conscience dictated was opening before me an
abyss of suffering. To make you understand them I should have to
enter into long and painful details ; suffice it to tell you that the
obstacles about which we have sometimes talked are nothing com-
pared to those which have suddenly started up before me. To
make light of a verdict on me which will be a very severe one, to
pass through long years of painful life to arrive at a doubtful goal,
was already much, but it was not to be enough. God further com-
mands me to pierce with my own hand a heart on which all the
affection of my own has been poured out. In me filial love had
absorbed all the other affections of which I was capable, and which
God has not called on me to feel. Besides, there were between my
mother and myself quite special ties connected with a thousand
delicate things which can be only felt, not expressed. Well ! there
it is that God has fixed the most painful of my sacrifices. Germany
is all that hitherto I have spoken of to her, and that has been enough
to distress her deeply. O vton dieu, what will happen when
Her caresses make me unhappy, her fine dreams of her son a priest,
of which she is always speaking to me, and which I have not the
courage to contradict, make me feel broken-hearted. There she is,
quite close to me, while I am writing you these lines. Ah ! if she
knew ! I would sacrifice everything to her except my duty and my
conscience. Yes, if to spare her this pain, God asked me to extin-
guish my thinking-power, to condemn myself to a simple and vulgar
life, I would consent. But is it in the power of man to believe or not
to believe ? I wish that I had the power to stifle the faculty which
compels investigation : that is the faculty which has made me miser-
RE NAN.
43
able. Happy the children in spirit who all their lives do nothing
but sleep and dream ! Around me I see pious and simple-minded
men, to make whom virtuous and happy Christianity has sufficed,
but I have observed that not one of them possesses the critical
faculty; let them thank God for that.
" Here I am made much of and caressed more than I can tell you.
Ah ! if they knew what is pressing in my heart. Sometimes I
tremble at the sight of a kind of hypocrisy in my behaviour, but I
have seriously argued the matter out with my conscience. God pre-
serve me from scandalising these simple people !
"When I consider in what an inextricable net God has enmeshed
me, then I am visited by the thought of fatalism, and often as I may
thus have sinned I never doubted my Father who is in heaven, nor
his goodness. On the contrary, I have always thanked Him, and was
never nearer Him than in those very moments. The heart learns
only by suffering, and I think, like Kant, that God is only learned
through the heart. At that time, too, I was a Christian, and I have
sworn always to be one. But is Catholic orthodoxy critical ? Ah !
if 1 had been born in Germany, and a Protestant. That would have
been the proper place for me. Herder was really a bishop-super-
intendent of the Lutheran consistory at Weimar, — assuredly he was
just a Christian ; but in Catholicism one must be orthodox. It is
inflexible, and not to be reasoned with. . . .
" I continue to have the courage to go forward with my thinking.
Nothing will make me abandon this occupation, even though I were
forced to appear to sacrifice to it the acquisition of my daily bread.
To support me at this critical moment God kept in reserve for me a
genuine even^ of importance, intellectually and morally, I have
studied Germany, and studying it I felt myself entering a temple.
Whatever I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful,
and affecting. Yes, O my soul, German thought is a treasure,
the continuation of Jesus Christ. The morality of the German
thinkers enchants me. How strong they are and how mild ! I
believe that it is thence the new Christ will come to us. I regard
this apparition of a new spirit to be a fact analogous to the birth of
Christianity in all but the difference of form. But this difference
matters little, for it is certain that when the fact which is to renovate
44 LIFE OF
the world returns, it will not in the manner of its accomplishment
resemble that which has already taken place. . . .
" Yes, that Germany gives me transports of delight, less in its
scientific achievements than in its ethical spirit. The ethics of
Kant are far superior to his logic and metaphysics; and yet we
French have not had a word to say about them. That is easily under-
stood ; the men of to-day are without a moral sense. France seems to
me more and more pledged to do-nothingism in the great work which
is to renovate the life of humanity." ... In France, "Jesus Christ
is nowhere to be found. I have been tempted to think that he
would come to us from Germany, not that I imagine that his coming
will be that of an individual, it will be that of his spirit, and when
we say ' Jesus Christ ' we mean of course to denote less an individual
than a spirit of a certain kind, that of the Gospel. Nor do I mean
that this apparition will involve either a reversal or a discovery ;
but Jesus Christ neither reversed nor discovered. One must be a
Christian, but one must not be orthodox. What we must have is a
pure, an unadulterated Christianity. "
Such a passage calls to mind the hopes which, some
fifteen years before Renan wrote thus, Carlyle, after
quitting Presbyterian orthodoxy and the Scotch kirk, had
based on the higher literature of Germany, as " the be-
ginning of a new revelation of the God-like."
And time pressed. Renan would soon have to return
to St. Sulpice and make up his mind to do one thing or
the other. " It is with unspeakable terror," he wrote to
Cognat, " that I see the approach of the end of the holi-
days, an epoch when I must translate into most decisive
action the most indeterminate of internal states of mind.
It is this complication of external and internal that makes
the whole cruelty of my position." If he gave up a
clerical career, what was he to do ? For practical life he
felt unfitted. Loni^ afterwards, when he had rubbed
RENAN. 45
shoulders with the world for many years, a friend told
him, and he admits told him truly, that he thought like a
man, felt like a woman, and acted like a child. It is a
characteristic illustration of the spiritual sensitiveness of
this child in the ways of the world, that he is found, in the
same letter to Cognat, expressing his dread lest, even if
he were successful in practical life, contact with his asso-
ciates might destroy, he said, "the purity of my heart
and my conception of life," as he thought it ought to be
led. " And even," he added, " if I were sure of myself,
can I be sure of the environment which acts so fatally on
all of us?" He was almost tempted to complain of the
Deity for having placed " a poor child " in his then pre-
dicament. " It matters not," he continued, " I love him,
and am persuaded that all he has done is for my good,
in spite of the contradiction of facts. . . . Courage lies in
this — no one but myself can make me do evil." A true
and brave thought, which served him in good stead at
this great crisis of his probation, and afterwards.
A fortnight later than the letter to Cognat describ-
ing the conflict which was raging within him, he
addressed another to his spiritual director at St. Sulpice.
It was merely a calmer and more formal restatement
of what he had said to Cognat, and therefore need
not be quoted. The duties of the tutorship in Germany
could not be entered on until the following spring, and
he was unwilling to pass at St. Sulpice the months that
must intervene until spring came. The scheme which he
favoured was to spend in Paris a year of studious freedom,
the conditions of which he left undefined, and during
which he could come to some definite conclusion as
46 LIFE OF
well as take his university degrees. On arriving at St.
Sulpice at the beginning of October (1845), he was
forced to act precipitately on the decision which he had
already formed. He was told that he had ceased to
belong to St. Sulpice, and had been appointed to a
Carmelite establishment which had just been founded
by the Archbishop of Paris. Of course this appointment
had to be refused, and reticence was now impossible.
All was told. After the letter to his Director the
authorities of St. Sulpice were not astonished at Renan's
defection from the faith, and Le Hir kindly gave him good
advice as to his future studies. Renan had an interview
with his former principal of the St. Nicolas seminary,
the Abbe Dupanloup, and appears to have confided to
him more fully than to any one else his doubts as to
the truth of Christianity. The Abb^ knew nothing of
German exegesis, but after having heard ^11, he told
Renan plainly that his was a total loss of faith, that he
had ceased to belong to the Church, and that he ought
not for a single day longer to pass himself off as a cleric.
To the Abb^ Dupanloup's honour, be it added, that
otherwise he behaved to Renan with fatherly kindness.
When Renan was working at his Souvenirs, he had before
him a little note which the Abbe wrote to him just as he
was leaving St. Sulpice for ever. "Are you in want of
money?" it ran; "in your situation that would be very
natural. My poor purse is at your disposal. I wish
that I could offer you something much more valuable.
My offer, one very natural, will not, I hope, hurt your
feelings." Renan declined the offer with thanks, for his
good sister, to aid him in taking the step which his con-
REIVAN, 47
science dictated, and which she approved, had sent him
out of her Httle savings 1 200 francs (nearly ;^5o).^ One of
the Directors of St. Sulpice, who, unhke the Abb^ Dupan-
loup, did not think Renan irrevocably lost to the Church,
recommended him to a situation in a preparatory school
annexed to the College Stanislas. It suited him in
every respect but one, but that one constituted a vital
objection. He had to make externally an open pro-
fession of clericalism. After a brief trial, for conscience'
sake he threw up the appointment, though not without
regret, and abandoned the clerical garb for ever.
As a critic of the history of Judaism and Christianity
Renan was destined to be the French successor of
Voltaire. But, as often happens, even with royalty, the
procedure of the successor was very different from that of
him whom he succeeded. Much of this result was due
to the different idiosyncrasies of the two men, but much
also to the difference in the influences brought to bear on
them in early life, and to the fact that Voltaire lived
before the first French Revolution, while Renan arrived
at manhood after a third one. Voltaire was by nature
1 Renan himself says little or nothing of any spiritual influence
exerted on him at this time by his sister; but in this connection,
Mrs. Crawford, of Paris, gives, in an interesting article on Renan
{Fortnightly Review for November 1892), some details, apparently
furnished by the Abbe Icard, the only one of Renan's St. Sulpice
teachers then alive, and a nonagenarian. Renan at St. Sulpice is
said to have *' received letters from his sister, and books of German
philosophy that she smuggled in to him. The Abbe Icard, who
never saw her, deems her to have been a tool of Satan. She had
plunged into the philosophical movement of Germany, a country
she often went to stay in with her pupils."
48 LIFE OF
sceptical, ambitious, pushing, thirsting for literary fame,
fond of the good things of this world, and bent on
gaining a fair share of them. Renan was by nature
believing, docile, modest, disinterested, and his most
powerful aspiration was to prove all things and hold fast
that which is true, without any hankering after worldly
success or fear of worldly failure. Voltaire received his
early education from the Jesuits, and always spoke
gratefully of them, and appreciatively of their worth as
men and as teachers. But he was a scoffer when he
went to the College Louis le Grand, and he remained
a scoffer when he left it. He seems never to have
been visited by any spiritual emotion derived from
the Christian religion, and in early manhood he was
thrown, indeed he cheerfully threw himself, into the
dissolute and incredulous society of the Regency, and of
the age of Louis XV. His first pleadings for the free
expression of thought, in the sphere not merely of
theology but of philosophy and science, were treated as
crimes, and he who might have been merely a frondeur
was exasperated into a rebel. It was the bigotry of
the orthodox that obstructed his meritorious attempts to
diffuse a knowledge of the now universally accepted
discoveries of Newton, and that threatened him with
the direst penalties for even a temperate promulgation
of the truths of Natural Religion. What wonder if he
turned on his persecutors, and, when purchasing for
himself a kind of uneasy exile in Switzerland, proclaimed
without reserve his disbelief in their dogmas, denied the
authority of the books on which these were founded, and
resolutely, if unfortunately, shut his eyes to the good
RENAN, 49
that had been worked in the world when orthodoxy
swayed the best intellects and hearts, as well as the
ignorant and superstitious masses ? It is not when your
enemy attacks you, when he has his hands upon your
throat, and is bent on choking the life out of you,
that you are likely to reflect on what may be his excellent
qualities, or on the benefits which in former years he may
have conferred on society! Renan, on the other hand,
from childhood lived, moved, and had his being in the
Christian religion. The services of the Roman Catholic
Church, its public and private worship, devout medita-
tion on the transcendent holiness and beautiful character
of the Founder of Christianity, had been his joy and
support. His ultimate rejection of the dogmas of the
Romish Church did not alter his view of that char-
acter, or impair his knowledge of the good done by
Christianity in the past and the present. He could
reverence Christianity without believing in its supernatural
origin, just as in a lower degree he reverenced Buddha
without believing in the legends which had grown around
his birth and biography. Voltaire^s character and circum-
stances unfitted him to form a right estimate of Chris-
tianity and its saints and martyrs; while for the formation
of such an estimate Renan was excellently fitted by his
character and circumstances. Where Voltaire had over-
turned, Renan reconstructed, and gave the new structure
a shape that commended itself to very many rational and
thinking men. And if Renan's rejection of the dogmas of
orthodoxy procured him a host of enemies, he was far
more fortunate in his age than Voltaire had been in his.
Even under the Second Empire Renan could speak his
4
so LIFE OF
mind freely in books and periodicals, if not officially in
the lecture-room. The worst that the bigots could do to
him was to bombard him with virulent pamphlets, and
these never disturbed his peace of mind, or in the least
fettered his freedom, personal and intellectual. In
regard to the expression of opinion, three French re-
, volutions made the absolutism of Napoleon III. a very
different one from that of Louis XV, Renan reaped
fame and profit by saying, without let or hindrance, what
Voltaire, even in his mildest and least aggressive moods,
could say only by bringing into play the machinery of
secret printing-presses and surreptitious distribution,
while running the risk of having his works confiscated
and burned by the public executioner in his own country,
and of seeing those w^ho promoted their circulation
subjected to the severest pains and penalties which
French bigotry could inflict.
Kenan's training in exclusively ecclesiastical seminaries
not only enabled but induced him to do justice to the
Roman Catholic priesthood. From early boyhood to
early manhood he was constantly associated with priests,
and never once, he says, did he find scandal associated
with any of them. From the humble priests of Tr^guier to
his highly cultivated teachers at St. Nicolas, at Issy, and
at St. Sulpice, all were the best of men, and at St.
Sulpice, in particular, "there was virtue enough," he
declared, " to govern the world," if such a world as ours
could be governed by virtue. From first to last an
austere morality, based on religion, was strenuously
inculcated on Renan by all his teachers, and when he
gave up rehgion, at least religion as taught by them, the
REN AN. 51
morality continued to abide with him like a second
nature.
"St. Sulpice," he says, "had left on me so powerful an impres-
sion that for years I remained a Sulpician as regards not belief
but morals. That excellent education had given my docile nature
an indestructible tendency. Faith disappearing, morality remains.
My programme for long was to surrender as little as possible of
Christianity, and to preserve all of it that can be practised without
faith in the supernatural. I sorted out in some fashion the virtues
of the Sulpician, discarding those which connect themselves with
a positive belief, and retaining those which a philosopher can
approve."
The training which Ren an had received was not only
fruitful for the world, but invaluable to himself, sud-
denly emancipated as he was from all control, and left to
his own devices in such a city as Paris.
CHAPTER III.
[1845-52.]
YVTITH the opening of November 1845, and having
^^ shaken from off his feet the dust of orthodoxy,
Renan accepted the modest position of tutor in a board-
ing-house of the Quartier Latin, in which were domiciled
pupils of the neighbouring Lyc^e, called after Henry IV.
He was boarded and lodged gratis^ but received no
salary. " I had," he says, " a little room, and took my
meals with the pupils. My duties occupied me for
scarcely two hours out of the twenty-four, and I had
therefore a great deal of time for work. I was com-
pletely satisfied." Not a whisper of complaint at this
meagre and forlorn-looking existence ! In one of his last
letters to Cognat, his intimacy with whom was soon to be
dissolved by his altered views, he speaks of fits of melan-
choly, springing not from his poverty but from his spiritual
and personal isolation, and from the grief of his mother at
his abandonment of a clerical career. But happier moods
intervened. "Since my sacrifice was completed," he
wrote, " and in the thick of troubles which were greater
than would be readily believed, and which perhaps a false
delicacy forces me to conceal from every one, I have
LIFE OF RE NAN. 53
tasted an inward peace unknown at epochs of my life
apparently more serene.'' In the course of a year he
began to wonder that he could ever have believed what
he had believed. He consoled by little artifices his dear
mother, who fancied his position even more difficult than
it was, and that he must be suffering intolerable hardships.
By degrees he convinced her, moreover, that he was as
good and affectionate a son as ever, and the wound in
her heart was healed. Then there was always the loving
sympathy of his kind sister to cheer and encourage him, and
last, not least, the enjoyment of a pure and true friend-
ship was vouchsafed him in that rather dreary domicile
in which he spent, he says, three years and a half.
His new friend was Marcellin Berthelot, seven years
Renan's junior, who was studying at the Lycee Henri
IV., and has since risen to eminence as a chemist and a
public man. Young Berthelot was devoted to science
without any ulterior object, a disinterestedness very con-
genial to Renan, and the closest intimacy sprang up
between junior and senior. Each was interested in his
friend's pursuits. Berthelot taught Renan chemistry
among other things, and Renan tried to teach him
Hebrew, but devotion to the laboratory impeded his
progress. Berthelot's father was a Galilean Christian
of the old school, but the son's slender remains of
orthodox faith vanished in the course of a little com-
mune with Renan. "After the first months of 1846,"
he says, " the clear scientific view of a universe in which
no volition superior to that of man acts in any appreciable
fashion became the immovable anchor from which we
never wandered." His sister's love and Berthelot's
54 LIFE OF
friendship were sunshine on the path of the struggling
and brave young Renan.
Apart from these sources of happiness, work, steady
and manifold, was Kenan's chief, nay, only enjoyment.
He had to study for his academic degrees, to improve his
knowledge of languages, especially the Semitic, and to read
far and wide in pursuance of what he already regarded as
the one great object of his life — that of making clear to
himself, and possibly to others, the origin and develop-
ment, irrespectively of any supernatural revelation or
intervention, of the Jewish and Christian religions.
Christianity had sprung out of Judaism, and Hebrew
being the language in which mainly the Old Testament
was written, that and the cognate Semitic forms of
speech had naturally an irresistible attraction for the
young inquirer. From another point of view Renan
saw in the history of languages the history of the mind
of man, and that, therefore, philology, especially com-
parative philology, might be of the highest philosophical
importance. Bopp's Comparative Grammar of the Indo-
Germanic Languages probably suggested to him the execu-
tion of a work on the comparative history as well as grammar
of the Semitic languages which he had been studying
ardently at St. Sulpice, and after he left it, under ex-
cellent professors. His first laurels were won in the field
familiar to him, and in the following way: — Volney,
though best remembered by his Ruins of Empires, was
also a zealous philologist. He aimed at originality, and
among his philological schemes was one ingenious but
impracticable, the establishment of a universal alphabet for
all languages. Eastern and Western. He bequeathed to
RE NAN. 55
the French Institute a yearly prize of 1200 francs (;£48)
to be given to the author of the best essay on his favourite
linguistic problem. It was found that the competitors
were few, and their productions unsatisfactory, so the
subject of the prize was altered to one for the best
philological essay, especially in the department of com-
parative grammar. Renan competed for the prize to be
given in 1847, and he won it. I do not know that his
prize essay was ever published, but it was the germ
of his great work on the history of the Semitic lan-
guages, of which more hereafter. ^ The ability dis-
played in the prize essay led to a friendship with, and
opened to Renan the lectures of, Eugene Burnouf, the
Professor of Sanscrit at the College de France, and
one of the greatest of modern Orientalists. Burnouf
initiated Renan into a knowledge of the older Indian
literatures, religions, and mythologies. With the chief
Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, and
much of what had been written on them, Renan was
already familiar. Burnouf 's lectures opened up to him
a new world of thought and imagination. At this point,
it may be mentioned, the Souvenirs close, and the rather
fitful light which they throw on Renan's career is hence-
forth w^anting.
The events of the Revolutionary year, 1848, made of
course a great impression on the susceptive Renan, and
led him to take a deep interest in the political and
social movements to which the rise of a second French
^ Max Muller and Bopp were in subsequent years among the
distinguished philologists who competed for, and won, the Volney
prize.
56 LIFE OF
republic gave a sudden impulse. The year was a busy
one for him. During much of it he was occupied
with an essay on a subject proposed for competition
by the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres,
into whose transactions, so often utilised by Gibbon
in his great work, had been poured, as into a reservoir,
the results of the erudite research of successive gener-
ations of French scholars. The subject was "The
history of the study of the Greek language in the
West of Europe from the end of the fifth to that of
the fifteenth century." This finished, he had to prepare
for the "aggregate competition'' in philosophy in the
autumn. He won the prize for the essay, and came out
first in the "philosophy" examination, two feathers more
in the young man's cap !
1848 was also the year of the first of Renan's many
contributions to the periodical literature of his country.
Some of them are of considerably more mark than is
usual with the initial efforts of young authors. The
most noticeable are contained in an interesting peri-
odical, La Liberie de Penser (Freedom of Thought),
which was founded in 1848 somewhat on the lines of
the then long-established Revue des Deux Mondes^
but paying more attention to philosophy and theology.
As in the case of his fellow-contributors, among whom
was Jules Simon, Renan's articles were signed. His
first contribution was " The Origin of Languages," which
was reprinted separately at the time, and, considerably
expanded, re-appeared in volume-form in 1857. Accord-
ing to the theory defended in the essay, and developed
in the volume with additional wealth of illustration.
RENAN,
57
language was neither a supernatural gift from the Creator
nor gradually developed, but came into being, grammar
as well as roots, simultaneously with man. As we know
nothing of the first man or men, the theory can neither
be proved nor disproved, and it is not supported by
what we do know, or can surmise, of early man.
The Revolution of February 1848 was followed by the
frightful and sanguinary insurrection of the June of the
same year. Great was the ferment which the chaotic
state of France, political, social, and intellectual, pro-
duced in Renan's at once ardent and contemplative
mind. The result was that he spent the last months
of 1848 and the first of 1849 in composing a book,
into which he threw all the notions on the philosophy
of life, and on the past, present and future of society,
which much meditation, enriched by already vast reading,
had yielded him. In July 1849 he contributed to La
Liberie de Fenser an article on the " Intellectual Activity
of France in 1849," ^^e editor of the periodical intimating
in a note that the article was part of a volume, LAvenir
de la Science (The Future of Science), which was to
appear in a few days. But the book thus promised was^
not pubHshed until 1890, forty years after the announce-
ment; the reason for the long delay will be explained
hereafter. The Avenir de la Science remained in 1890
to all intents and purposes the same work as when it
came from its author's pen. so long before. It teems
v/ith reflections and suggestions on almost every subject
of human interest, with illustrations furnished by almost
all the literatures of almost all ages. It was an extra-
ordinary work, especially to have come from a young
58 LIFE OF
man of five-and-twenty. Its philosophy was already that
which he inculcated during most of the remainder of his
life, and will often have to be reproduced in these pages,
but some references must be made to it at the stage now
reached of Renan's mental development. Society, he
proclaimed, in opposition to the socialists, was not to
be reformed by attempts to correct the unequal distribu-
tion of wealth, but by the universal diffusion of intellectual
and moral culture. Man was not made for earthly enjoy-
ment. Let us bring about a state of things in which
wealth must appear insignificant and secondary, and
culture, becoming a religion, will satisfy all the legitimate
wants of humanity. But if all are to be philosophers, who
is to do the daily work of the world ? Let manual labour be
adjoined to philosophy and intellectual culture. Spinoza
polished spectacle glasses ; a still more singular illustra-
tion to have suggested itself to a young French scholar,
" Robert Burns, while following the plough, sang in the
furrows, like a lark." The world was to be reformed
by science ; that is, by knowledge in the widest accepta-
tion of the word. The old religions had vanished, but
the new religion of science had more to give than the
most venerable beliefs. "In my childhood and first
youth I tasted the sweetest joys of the believer, but,
and I say it from the bottom of my soul, such joys
were nothing to those which I have felt in the pure con-
templation of the beautiful and the passionate search
after truth." This was the new heaven and the new
earth announced by the young enthusiast in his garret.
Already he was flinging out one of those audacious
phrases which, viewing the cosmos and its soul as not
RENAN. 59
actually being but merely becoming, he was often to use
in later life. " The universal work of all that lives is to
make God perfect." This to ordinary mind unimaginable
enterprise was to be effected by Reason, and Reason, in
Renan's view, was first ascending her throne with the
Revolution of 1848. Alas, for the young man's fond
expectations! With 1851 came the presidency of Louis
Napoleon, and with 1852 the Second Empire.
But for a biographer of Kenan the most important of
his contributions of 1848-49 to La Liberie de Fenser was
his article on "The Critical Historians of Jesus" ("Les
Historiens critiques de Jesus," reprinted in Etudes dHis-
wire Religieuse, 1857). Here he is seen already preparing
himself for his own Vie de Jesus, He pronounces Strauss's
book to be at bottom an attempt to apply to the Gospel
narratives the philosophy of Hegel, of which Renan gives
in a page or two, so far at least as is needed for his
purpose, an admirably luminous account. Strauss's
theory was that most of the incidents recorded in the
Gospels are mythical, mere crystallisations of floating
notions in the Jewish mind of what the Messiah,
looked for before the birth of Jesus, was expected to
be and to do, Renan, on the other hand, m.aintains
that such a theory is not justified by the state of the
Jewish mind at the birth of Christ, and he discriminates
with great acuteness between the circumstances in which
mythical theories are permissibly applicable and those in
which they are not. In many cases he would prefer to
"myth," a product of pure imagination, the term
"legend," denoting a nucleus of truth round which fabu-
lous matter has accreted.
6o LIFE OF
To sum up: —
" Strauss shows himself a rather unphilosophical historian when he
neglects to explain how Jesus came to be regarded by those among
whom he lived as an adequate realisation of the Messianic ideal.
. . . There is one fact which can only have been the effect of a
powerful individuality — namely, the appearance of the new doc-
trine, the impulse which it gave, the spirit of sacrifice and devoted-
ness which it succeeded in inspiring."
Then follows the decidedly interesting passage in
which the method of Kenan's own Vie de Jesus was
adumbrated : —
*' It may be affirmed that if the composition of the life of Christ,
written in a scientific manner, had been undertaken by France,
better endowed than Germany with the feeling of practical life and
less inclined to substitute, in history, ideas for the action of the
passions and of individualised characters, she would have displayed
a method of greater precision, and in avoiding to transfer the
problem, as Strauss has done, into the domain of abstract specula-
tion, she would have made a much nearer approach to the truth."
Some of these articles attracted so much attention that
from time to time in 1849 they were republished separ-
ately. The same year distinction was conferred on an
essay, which displayed minute and curious erudition,
contributed to the semi-ofificial Journal de V Instruction
Fublique^ elucidating by means of the Semitic languages
some points in the pronunciation of Greek. With the
prizes which he had won, and his striking literary work,
Renan was quite a notable young man only four years
after he had crept, sorrowful and solitary, into that little
room in the Quartier Latin. He was offered a chair in
some provincial college, but he declined exile from Paris.
RENAN. 6i
For a few months of 1849 he acted as substitute for a
friend who was professor of philosophy at the Lyc^e of
Versailles. It is significant of Kenan's caution as an
oral instructor of youth at this stage of his career that
his friend having begun a course of lectures on the being
and attributes of God, and leaving Renan to continue
them, he avoided treatment of this thorny subject,
especially as the Lycee was a government institution,
and gave instead a course of lectures on aesthetics,
having a deep feeling for art in all its chief departments.
Renan was rising in the estimation of "men of light
and leading.'' Among those whom his abilities, scholar-
ship, and industry had made his friends, was the erudite
Victor Le Clerc, with whom Renan afterwards collaborated
in the massive work, Hisioire Litteraire de la France au
xiif' siecle^ begun by the Benedictines. The 'friendship
of Le Clerc, and his own reputation, contributed to
obtain for him a new and public honour. Among the
admirable aids to struggling and meritorious scholarship
provided by French institutions was the system of
Missions of literary and scientific exploration at home
and abroad, the members of which were appointed by
the Ministry of Public Instruction, a system zealously
developed when the ministers were such men as Guizot,
Villemain, and Cousin, and continued by their successors.
Towards the close of 1849, on the recommendation of
Victor Le Clerc, the Academic des. Inscriptions drawing
up the needful instructions, Renan was appointed one
of a commission of two ordered on a roving tour of
exploration among the libraries, public and monastic, of
Italy. His chief duty was to report on curious unedited
62 LIFE OF
Syriac and Arabic manuscripts which he might come
across, but he was also to keep his eyes open to any
iroiivaille of literary or historic interest which might be
utilised for the Histoire Litteraire de la France. Not
only among dusty manuscripts, but enjoying the new
world of art opened up to him, he spent much of 1850
in Italy, and subsequently some months in England, to
which apparently his mission was extended. In his
report to the Minister of Public Instruction he declared
that his Oriental " finds " in the manuscript department
of the British Museum far exceeded all those which he
had lighted on in Italy. In all probability it was the
skill which these reports displayed him to possess in the
manipulation and knowledge of Oriental manuscripts,
that led to his appointment (in 185 1) to a post in
the department of Oriental MSS. in the Bibliotheque
Nationale, no longer, of course, du Roi.
A private as well as a public object guided Renan in
these assiduous and multifarious explorations. For his
degree of Doctor of Letters (the " Doctorat ^s Lettres "),
which would complete his academic status, he had to
compose two theses, one in Latin, the other in French.
The materials for both were dihgently accumulated during
his foreign mission, and both were published in 1852
with his acquisition of the Doctor's degree. That in
Latin was quite a small volume, though full of smelted
Oriental learning, De philosophid peripafetica apud Syros
commentatio hisiorica^ in which was abundantly proved
a favourite theory of Renan's that the knowledge of
Aristotle, and indeed of anything else Hellenic, pos-
sessed by the mediaeval Arabs, was wholly derived from
RENAN, 63
Syriac translations. The other and French thesis, the
far more elaborate work which first gave Renan a
place among the most erudite of European scholars, was
Averroes et P Averrdisme. Renan was attracted to this
twelfth-century sage of Mohammedan Spain (Dante gave
him a few words of appreciation in the Inferno) as a
philosopher who, to a partial reproduction of Aristotle
and his commentators, based on Arabic versions of
Syriac translations from the Greek, added doctrines of
his own and founded a school of advanced thought,
which for several centuries exerted a great influence
on European speculation. Strange phenomena and
phases of thought had always an attraction for Renan,
whose intellectual inquisitiveness was unbounded, and
his volume is full of curious information respecting
the philosophical and other sects of mediaeval Moham-
medanism and the interaction of Averroism and scholas-
ticism. The range of erudition and the knowledge of
the history of mediaeval philosophy in Europe displayed
by Renan are enormous, and he treats the abstrusest
questions with an ease and animation which make the
book instructive and interesting to students of the arcana
of thought, and, it must be admitted, to them alone.
With his return from his continental mission Renan's
good sister appears to have made up her mind to devote
herself entirely to her brother. They set. up house
together in Paris in a little domicile at the bottom of a
garden. Many years afterwards, when Renan's merits and
fame procured him admission to the French Academy,
the colleague, who, as usual on these occasions, addressed
him an elaborate welcome, reminded him of their
64 LIFE OF
acquaintance in those early days. " I see you again," he
said, "in a little garden-house of the Rue du Val de
Grace, where the maternal care of a sister, capable of all
devotedness, had procured for you a shelter at a decisive
hour of your youth. You passed a part of your days
in the Biblioth^que Nationale. The whole evening was
consecrated to work. Far on into the night the light of
your lamp told the passers-by of the persistence of your
laborious vigils. A skilful and intrepid tenderness satis-
fied all your needs, without requiring from you any
exertion that could distract your studies, and spared you
even the care of material things." Of what still more
striking self-sacrifice Henriette Renan w^as capable will
be seen a little further on. Nor was her usefulness to him
confined to household affairs. She was a Mary and a
Martha in one. She seems to have revised what he
wrote, and to have exerted a wholesome influence on his
mode of composition. She advised him to cultivate
simplicity of style and to check that love of irony to
which he was prone, and in which during his later years
he indulged too often and too much. •
The book on Averroes and Averroism was the first
w^ork of any kind from Renan's pen w^hich was pubHshed
by Michel Levy, who became one of the foremost of
French publishers, who until his death remained Renan's
sole publisher, and who was followed in that function by
his brothers and successors in business. Of his first
connection with Michel L^vy, Renan gives in his
Souvenirs an account which is interesting, but which
would be more instructive if, with a provoking reticence
or negligence not uncommon in his references to
RENAN, 65
himself, he had not omitted to give, even approxi-
mately, the date of the following incident. He was still
in a garret, he says, when one fine day he received a
visit from Levy, who was a stranger to him. He had
not until then fancied that he could make money by
writing. To his great surprise Levy offered to publish
any of his future books, and to republish his contribu-
tions to periodicals. Renan might have looked coldly
on the overture, but Levy having brought with him a
stamped agreement by which Renan constituted his
visitor his sole publisher on certain terms, Renan con-
sented. In course of time Levy voluntarily offered to
make his terms more favourable to Renan, who says that
his publisher, he had reason to believe, did not lose by
the bargain. L^vy can scarcely have lost by Aver roes
et r Averrdisme^ for, devoid as it was of anything like
actuality, and in manner and matter "caviare to the
general," it went in course of time to a third edition.
CHAPTER IV.
[1852-60.]
YVTHILE continuing to lay up among the Oriental manu-
scripts of the Biblioth^que new stores of Oriental
and other lore for his great book on the Semitic languages,
Renan became, in intervals of graver work, what the
French call a publicist, and a distinguished one. Accord-
ing to his own account, having still on his hands the Avenir
de la Science^ only a slight fraction of which had been
printed in La Liberie de Penser^ he showed it to his
friend Augustin Thierry, who strongly dissuaded him
from publishing it. Silvestre de Sacy, son of the great
Orientalist, and very influential in the councils of the
Journal des Debats, tendered him the same advice. They
further advised him to give from time to time in the
Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Debats
such small doses of the work as could be swallowed
by the French public, to whom the whole volume would
be inevitably distasteful. Renan took their advice, the
more cheerfully that the lapse of a few years had
considerably chilled some of his hopes of 1848. He
attached himself the more keenly to the great fortnightly
and the great daily organ of moderate liberalism in
LIFE OF RE NAN. 67
France, because just as he began to contribute to them
came Louis Napoleon's conp d'etat of 2nd December
1 85 1, and Renan was disgusted by the attitude on that
day of the people of Paris, whom he saw enjoying rather
than otherwise the blow dealt at public liberty.
Between the salary of his post in the Bibliotheque
Nationale (so soon to become Imperiale) and the income
which he derived from literary work, Renan found himself
in a position to marry. The lady of his choice was a
niece of the famous painter, Ary Scheffer, and a daughter
of his brother Henri, also an artist. Mademoiselle
Scheffer was, perhaps fortunately, a Protestant. Renan's
biographers assign 1856 as the date of the marriage.
By more than one of them a touching story is told in
connection with the event. For several years Renan's
devoted sister Henriette had shared his dom.icile, sym-
pathising with and aiding his studies, and making his
home attractive; — Sainte-Beuve says that it was to her
that he owed his first acquaintance with Renan, an
acquaintance which ripened into intimacy. When her
brother told her of his contemplated marriage, she showed
so much grief at the thought of ceasing to have him all
to herself, that he generously declared his intention to
remain single for her sake. Mademoiselle Renan out-
vied her brother in generosity. She rushed to Made-
moiselle Scheffer and begged her not to give up Renan.
It was the sister who now did her utmost to bring about
the union, the thought of which had at first pained her
so much. The marriage took place and proved a very
happy one; two children were born of it, a son and a
daughter. Henriette Renan appears to have remained
68 LIFE OF
in the home of her wedded brother, and was by his
side until her death.
In 1855, the year before the date assigned to his
marriage, appeared what was until then Kenan's opus maxi-
mum^ his " General History and Comparative System of
the Semitic Languages " {Histoire Gen er ale et Systeme
Co7iipare des Langues Shnitiques), a very important ex-
pansion of the essay which had gained him the Volney
prize. A second volume was to have done for the com-
parative grammar of the Semitic languages, dealt with
in the first volume, what Bopp had done for the Indo-
. Germanic languages, but no second volume ever appeared.
The volume which did appear received the honour of
being crowned by the Institute, and excited the atten-
tion not only of scholars qualified to estimate the
erudition displayed in it and to pronounce on the
value of its conclusions, but of others. A knowledge
of one of these conclusions was diffused among culti-
vated readers everywhere. Renan elaborated in the
volume his favourite theory that the essential differences
in race and language between Indo-Europeans (or, as
they are now called, Aryans) and Semites were accom-
panied by a fundamental difference in their way of regard-
ing the universe. The Semitic races were by nature
monotheistic: the Indo-European were polytheistic. The
latter from the first deified the powers of Nature; the
former detached the Deity from the universe, and their
characteristic formula is the first verse of Genesis —
" In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth." The three great monotheistic religions, the
Jewish, the Christian, and the Mohammedan were of
RENAN, 69
Semitic origin, and no member of the Indo-European
family had ever embraced monotheism except through
a member of the Semitic family. It was not by reflec-
tion but by following an instinct of head and heart
that the Semites were monotheists. On the other hand,
they had neither philosophy nor science, neither mythology
nor epic poetry. The faculties which beget mythology
also beget philosophy, and India and Greece produced the
richest of mythologies side by side with the profoundest
systems of philosophy. The poetry of the Semites was
entirely subjective. They lacked creative imagination.
The epic, a product of mythology, and the drama are
unknown to them, and in fiction they get no further
than the apologue. Monotheism made painting and
the plastic arts repugnant to them. They have not
founded great polities like the Greeks and Romans, or
organised great empires like the Persians. Society with
the Semite was an affair of the tent and the tribe. In
short, their characteristics are chiefly negative. But
their one great positive characteristic outweighs all their
deficiencies. Mankind owes monotheism to the Semites,
— a debt of incalculable value. The popular acceptance
of this striking theory of Renan was accompanied, how-
ever, by statements from experts strenuously controvert-
ing it. The objections urged against it then have been
strengthened by others which the progress of knowledge,
especially of Assyriology, has suggested. Renan, while
defending his theory in the main, slightly modified it, as
will be seen hereafter.
His history of the Semitic languages procured Renan,
at the early age of thirty-six, the honour of being elected
70 LIFE OF
a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles
Lettres, in succession to Augustin Thierry, who, old and
blind, had been assisted by Renan in his historical re-
searches, and who introduced him to the Revue des Deux
Mondes,
From 185 1 to i860, when there was a new departure
in his career, Renan contributed more or less steadily
to the Journal des Debats and the Revue des Deux
Mondes^ and in both cases found himself in distinguished
company. So select was the public addressed by the
Debats that Silvestre de Sacy (son of the Orientalist),
a fastidious as well as accomplished gentleman of the old
school, told Renan to write as if he were only to have
five hundred readers ! The exclusiveness of the Revue was
of a very different kind. Buloz, its founder, proprietor,
and editor, was a hard-headed and hard-fisted man of
business, not at all cultivated, but with a quick eye for
what he thought would suit the readers of his periodical.
"A deux cent lieues de cet imbecille de Buloz*' (Two
hundred leagues away from that fool of a Buloz) is the
heading of one of the private letters of Alexandre Dumas
pere I The first paper which Renan presented to Buloz
was an elaborate study on Buddha, Buddhism, and the
Buddhists, themes the mastery of which he had begun
under his much-prized teacher Eugene Burnouf. Buloz
read the paper and rejected it, declaring it to be
impossible that there could be such silly people as
the Buddhists ! The essay remained in Renan's desk
until 1884, when he published it in his Nouvelles Etudes
d^Histoire Reiigleuse, in the preface to which he told
the story of its rejection. But this was a solitary rebuff.
RENAN. 71
Many of Kenan's contributions to the Revue dcs Deux
Maudes and to Sh^ Journal des Debats were collected and
republished in his " Studies of Religious History" {Etudes
d' Histolre Religieuse^ 1857), and some more of them in
his " Ethical and Critical Essays " {Essais de Morale et
de Critique^ 1^59)-
These essays, both as they appeared and when col-
lected, procured for Renan a very much larger circle
of readers and admirers than his works on Averroes
and the Semitic languages. The range of subjects was
extraordinary, from the religions of antiquity, the primi-
tive grammar of India, the history of the people of Israel,
Mohammed and Mohammedanism, to Feuerbach and
the neo-Hegelians, and the future of Metaphysics and of
Religion; from the Lives of the Saints to Calvin and
Channing; from the poetry of the Celtic races 10 the
poetry of the Paris Exhibition of 1855, while interspersed
were critico-biographical sketches of such men as Cousin,
Augustin Thierry, and Lamennais. " He who brings
much,'' says the theatre-manager in Faust, " brings some-
thing to every one," and the cultivated reader must be
fastidious indeed who does not find something to interest
him in these essays of Renan. His graceful and pellucid
style had a flexibility that fitted it for the expression of
all thought and all emotion. Renan had the faculty of
making his subject, whether it were one for narrative or
disquisition, perfectly clear to himself, and his wealth and
felicity of expression rendered it delightfully clear to his
readers. Religious themes are those which he treats
most congenially, for with him religion in all its phases
and developments was the truest expression of the
72 LIFE OF
individual and the national mind. One of the most
interesting of the essays is on the history of the
people of Israel, and is based on Ewald's well-known
work. Renan always maintained that the universe had
become more and not less grand and beautiful with
the passing away of the old mythologies, — the "fair
humanities of old religion," — and the substitution for
them of rigid, scientific law. In the same spirit he begins
his essay on the history of the people of Israel by throw-
ing down the gauntlet to the orthodox, and declaring his
conviction that in destroying the old accepted notions,
as to both the inspiration of the Old Testament, and
the authorship and dates of the books contained in
it, modern criticism has enhanced, not diminished, their
value : " Jerusalem has issued more brilliant and beauti-
ful than before from the work, seemingly destructive, of
modern science. The pious narratives with which our
childhood was cradled have become, thanks to a sane
interpretation of them, lofty truths, and it is we who
see Israel in its real beauty, it is the critics who are
justly entitled to say, Stantes erant pedes nostfi in atriis
tuts, Jerusalem ! "^
The essay on Calvin is perhaps in those two volumes
that which gives the best notion of Renan's con-
scientious attachment to truth in the formation of
his judgments, and of his catholic appreciation of
men against whom his own intellectual and ethical
prepossessions would naturally prejudice him. No
^ The Authorised Version makes a future of what in the Vulgate
is a past tense. ** Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem !"
(Psalm cxxii. 2).
RENAN, 73
personal and theological characteristics could be more
antagonistic to Renan than those of Calvin. Calvin
was harsh, austere, vindictive, a relentless persecutor,
the preacher of predestination, in fact, everything that
Renan was not. Yet see how fair the French free-thinker
of the nineteenth century is to the French fanatic
of the sixteenth! After cataloguing Calvin's faults of
character, and some of his tyrannical acts, Renan pro-
ceeds thus: —
*' The inevitable result of the character and position of Calvin
was intolerance. Whenever man allows himself to be domin-
ated by an idea which he believes to be truth so complete,
absolute, and evident that whoso does not embrace it is either
blind or culpable, he is necessarily intolerant. At the first glance
there is a strange inconsistency in Calvin's demand for liberty
of thought and speech for himself and his, while refusing it
to others. But in reality the matter is quite a simple one. He
believed otherwise than the Catholics did, but he believed quite as
firmly as they. What is very erroneously regarded as the essence of
nascent Protestantism, freedom of belief, the right of the individual
to construct for himself his own religious symbol, was scarcely
thought of in the sixteenth century. No doubt the appeal of the
Church to Scripture could not but ultimately bring profit to criticism,
and in that sense the first reformers were veritably the ancestors of
free-thought. But they were so without their knowledge and without
their will. . . . And what was Calvin's tyranny at Geneva to the
contemporary persecutions of his fellow-Protestants in France under
Francis I., the voluptuary and sceptic who had not even Philip II. 's
excuse, that of believing, but who from mere motives of secular
policy sanctioned a sanguinary, and worse than sanguinary, perse-
cution ? Let us remember the state of excitement in which the fer-
vent disciple of the Reformation must have lived when there came
to him from Paris, from Lyons, from Chambery, etc., news of the
tortures endured by those of his religion. History has not sufficiently
insisted on the atrocity of these persecutions, and on the resignation,
74 LIFE OF
the courage, and the serenity of the sufferers. Pages are there
worthy of the first ages of the Church, and I do not doubt that
a simple and instructive narrative of those sublime struggles, com-
piled from the documents and correspondence of the period, would
equal in beauty the ancient martyrology. During those times of
trial and probation the voice of Calvin attains a fulness and a lofti-
ness which are truly admirable. His letters to the martyrs of Lyons
and of Chambery, and to the female prisoners of the Chatelet, seem
like an echo from the heroic periods of Christianity, like pages
extracted from the writings of TertuUian or Cyprian."
In the Critical and Ethical Essays there are two, in
close juxtaposition, which offer a contrast not only
very striking but singularly characteristic of Renan.
The one is on "The Poetry of the Exhibition" ("La
Poesie de I'Exposition," that of Paris in 1855), the
other on " The Poetry of the Celtic Races." This last
is the only composition in which Renan deals with a
theme which must have been very dear to him as a
Breton, for Brittany was, and is, one of the chief homes
of Celtic song, and of romantic as well as of monastic
and other ecclesiastical legend. The most recent re-
searches, indeed, tend to confirm the theory that the
cycle of Arthurian legend was born in Brittany, and there
King Arthur still lives in the minds and memories of
the people, as is testified by an interesting anecdote of
Renan's own telling. In 1887, thirty years after the
period in his biography now arrived at, he delivered an
address of welcome to the members of a Welsh Archaeo-
logical Association, who, in the course of a trip to Brittany,
paid him a visit there. "You come from Lannion,"
not very far from Treguier, and a region famous as the
scene of the mythical Arthur's exploits — "you come,"
RE NAN.
75
he said to his guests, " from Lannion, my mother's native
town. I shall now give you a reminiscence of that little
town, which was told me by your great poet Tennyson.
In the course of an excursion in Brittany he spent a
night at Lannion. On leaving he asked his hostess for his
bill. * Oh ! nothing, Monsieur,' was her answer. * It was
you who sang of our King Arthur ! ' " It shows how
strongly ecclesiastical was Kenan's bent in boyhood that
while the earlier section of his Souvenirs teems with legends
of Breton saints which impressed his youthful mind, he
says nothing of King Arthur, of the many other secular
legends of Brittany, or of its abundant popular songs.
In his riper years, however, of severance from the
Catholic Church he revelled in Lady Charlotte Guest's
Mabinogion^ in the stores of Celtic literature accumulated
by Welsh scholars, and of Breton legends and songs
collected by Villemarque. In the essay on Celtic
poetry, which perhaps suggested to Matthew Arnold,
who calls it "beautiful," his volume On the Study of
Celtic Literature^ Renan dilates lovingly on the charac-
teristics of the Celts as reflected in their poetry, and with
the pride of race exults over the profound influence
which it exerted on the early literature of Europe. If
genius and enthusiasm could achieve such a feat the
Celt has been rehabilitated by Renan.
The essay on the Paris Exhibition of 1855 is the most
emphatic of Renan's numerous protests against the ex-
aggerated estimate of the value attached in our age to
the products of mechanical and manual industry, and
against the worship of what, obliged to borrow an English
phrase, he calls "the comfortable." Renan had too
76 LIFE OF
much good sense not to see that the ancients were
altogether wrong in regarding as ignominious one of
the most honourable and estimable of all things, labour.
Nor does he for a moment deny that "when industrial
progress raises the lower classes to a higher level, and
brings the nations nearer to each other, it subserves a
religious and ethical purpose, and is therefore worthy of
respect."
'* The mistake lies not in proclaiming industry to be excellent
and useful, but in exalting it beyond measure, and in attaching too
much importance to perfecting its processes. If the aim of human
life is well-being, it has been excellently realised in the past without
any of these superfluities. . . . The useful does not ennoble: that
only ennobles which presupposes in man intellectual or moral worth.
Virtue, genius, science, when it is disinterested, and its only object
is to satisfy the desire which leads man to penetrate the enigmas of
the universe, military valour, holiness, all these are things which
correspond with the moral, intellectual, or aesthetic needs of man,
all these can ennoble. . . . But what is merely useful will never
ennoble. On the front of that ephemeral palace, and by the side of
names immortal in science, I see others, no doubt honourable, which
it is wished to inscribe in the livre d^or of glory; they will not
figure in it. Industry renders immense services to society, but they
are services which after all are repaid in money. To every one
his own reward; to the man whose usefulness is of the earth,
earthy, wealth, happiness in the earthly meaning of the word, all
earthly blessings; to genius, to virtue, to glory, nobleness. The
man of genius has a right to only one thing, that life shall not be
made for him impossible or insupportable. The man of utility has
a right to only one thing, that of being rewarded in proportion to
his services. This is so true that the only members of the industrial
order who have really forced their way into the Temple of Glory are
those who have been persecuted or unrecognised. It was supremely
unjust that Jacquard," the ill-fated inventor of the silk-loom which
RENAN, yj
bears his name, "should not have been rich, and because he lived
and died poor glory has been justly decreed to him. In point of
fact, the qualities which make the industrialist do in no way exclude,
but they do not necessarily presuppose a great moral elevation,
and Jacquard's poverty proves more in favour of his character
than even the name of the machine to which his own remains
attached. . . . Far from us be those lamentations of the peevish,
whose sympathies are confined to one epoch or one form of the past,
who persist with a sort of defiance of opinion in calling perversion what
others call progress. Of what use would history be to us if it did
not teach us the greatest caution in distributing praise and blame to
revolutions which are in course of accomplishment, and the last
results of which have not yet been made clear ? Besides, censure
would be here as misplaced as enthusiasm. Our century is tending
neither towards the good nor the bad; it is tending towards medi-
ocrity. Whatever succeeds in our day is mediocre. It cannot be
denied that a great deal of evil has been removed from the world by
a general application to pursuits which, though trivial, are inoffensive
enough. But has this been profitable to what is great in the develop-
ment of man ? Is this hurrying crowd beneath those crystal arches
more enlightened, more moral, more truly religious than people
were two centuries ago? It may be doubted. It does not seem
as if many persons came out of the Palace of the Exhibition better
than they entered it. It must even be added that the object
of the exhibitors would not have been exactly attained if every
visitor had been wise enough to say as he left the building : * What
a number of things there are which I can do without ! ' "
A Strange gospel to preach to luxurious and glittering
Paris in the palmiest days of the Second Empire !
Kenan's Semitic studies had been hitherto devoted
to subjects interesting mainly to scholars. They were
now to contribute to the instruction and enjoyment
of a much wider circle of readers. In 1859 and i860
appeared the translations into his own beautiful French
78 LIFE OF
of two books of the Old Testament, most diverse in
matter and manner, Job and the Song of Solomon.
His French versions of them were preceded by elabor-
ate and elucidatory dissertations. A brief statement may
be given of Renan's view of the authorship and age of
the Book of Job, which by common consent is to be
considered one of the noblest of literary works. Renan
regards the author as a Hebrew, deeply versed in the
wisdom of such Semitic tribes bordering on Palestine
as the Temanites, to whom Eliphaz, one of the chief
interlocutors, belonged — wisdom with which Solomon was
familiar, and to the Idumean reputation for which
Jeremiah bore testimony when he wrote, " Concerning
Edom thus saith the Lord of hosts : Is wisdom no
more in Teman ? is counsel perished from the prudent }
is their wisdom vanished ? '' The scene and personages
of the poem are Idumean, and but for the Hebrew name
by which the Deity is called, and the fact that the book as
we have it is in Hebrew, there is such an entire absence
in it of references to anything specifically Jewish, that
it might have been written by an Idumean sage. As
regards the time at which the Book of Job was written,
Renan refers, on grounds interesting chiefly to experts,
the date of its composition to or about the year 770
before Christ, towards the epoch of Uzziah, King of Judah,
and of Menahem, King of Israel, in the age of Amos, of
Hosea, and of Isaiah. "Rome did not as yet exist,
Greece possessed harmonious songs, but did not know
how to write. Egypt, Assyria, Iran (enclosed in Bac-
triana), India, China, were already old with intellectual,
political, and religious revolutions, when an unknown
RE NAN.
79
sage, who had remained faithful to the spirit of the days
of yore, wrote for mankind that subhme controversy in
which the doubts and sufferings of all the ages were to
find so eloquent an expression."
The writer of the Book of Job believed no longer
in the old patriarchal theory, which associated worldly
prosperity with goodness, and inflicted earthly penalties
on the evil-doer. This theory broke down, according to
Renan, when the Semites came into contact with, and to
some extent adopted, an alien and corrupt civilisation,
about ten centuries before Christ. "Then were seen
fortunate scoundrels, tyrants rewarded, robbers borne in
honour to the tomb, whilst the just man was despoiled
and reduced to beg his bread." The feeling of injustice
created by such a state of things might have been silenced
if the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and of
a future state of rewards and punishments, had been
firmly held. But with the Semites " man after death
descended to Sheol, a subterranean abode which it is often
difficult to distinguish from the tomb, and in which the
dead retained a vague existence analogous to that of the
Manes of Greek and Roman antiquities, and, above all,
to that of the shadowy beings of the Odyssey.''
" For a moment, now and then, Job seems to uplift the veil of
beliefs that are to come. He hopes that God will give him in
Sheol a place apart, where he will remain in reserve until he returns
to life. He knows that he will be avenged, and, overleaping death
in his vivid intuition of future justice, he declares that his skeleton
will behold God. But these flashes of light are always followed by
the profoundest gloom. The old patriarchal conception returns and
weighs upon him with all its weight. The spectacle of man's
8o LIFE OF
misery, the destruction worked by nature, that horrible indifference
of death striking down alike the just man and the sinner, the happy
and the unfortunate, bring him again to despair. In the epilogue
he simply falls back on the theory which he tried for a moment to
overleap. Job is avenged. His fortune is restored to him doubled.
He dies old and full of days."
Renan thinks that in this way the problem is not
solved. The close of the poem is but a return to the
old patriarchal theory, worldly prosperity rewarding the
just man, — a doctrine against the truth of which all that
Job has said and all experience protest. The problem,
indeed, is, according to Renan, insoluble.
*' There are problems which we cannot solve, but which we can
transcend. The destiny of man is one of them. Those whom it
holds fast perish. The secret of life is to be reached by those
alone who know how to stifle the sadness within them, how to do
without hope, how to silence those enervating doubts which arrest
the progress of only the feeble-minded and of epochs of weariness.
What matters the reward when the work done is so beautiful that
it holds within itself the promise of the infinite ? . . .
" Three thousand years have passed since the problem exercised the
sages of Idumea, and in spite of the progress of the philosophical method
' the problem cannot be said to be a step nearer solution. Regarded
from the point of view of individual rewards and punishments, it is
with an energetic denial that God will for ever visit the clumsy
apologists who desire to defend Providence on that hopeless basis.
The shock felt by the Psalmist on beholding the peace of the sinner^
Job's wrath at the prosperity of the wicked, are in all ages justifiable
feelings. But we have learned that which neither the Psalmist nor
the author of the Book of Job could understand, that which could
be revealed only by the sequence of schools of thought following
each other, by the blending of races, by a long education of the
moral sense. It is, that beyond the chimerical justice which the
superficial common sense of every age has been desirous of finding
RE NAN. 8 1
in the government of the universe, we find a far higher law and regu-
lating tendency, without a knowledge of which human affairs are no-
thing more than a tissue of iniquity. The future of the individual
man has become no clearer, and perhaps it is well that a veil should
cover for ever truths which have a value only when they are the fruit
of a heart that is pure. But there is one word, pronounced neither
by Job nor his friends, which has acquired a lofty significance and
value. Duty, with its incalculable philosophical consequences, by
imposing its authority on all, resolves every doubt, reconciles every
contradiction, and serves as a foundation on which to reconstruct
what reason destroys or allows to crumble away. Thanks to this
revelation which has in it nothing equivocal or obscure, we declare
that he who chooses the Good is the true wise man. He will be
immortal, for his works will live in the ultimate triumph of justice,
the sum of the divine work which is accomplished by humanity.
Humanity produces the divine as the spider spins its web. The
march of the world is enveloped in darkness, but its progress is
towards the divine. While the wicked, the silly, or the frivolous
man will wholly die, in the sense that he will leave nothing to the
general result of the labour of mankind, the man devoted to what-
soever is good and beautiful will participate in the immortality of
that which he has loved. Who is there to-day that lives with as
much of life as the obscure Galilean, who eighteen hundred years
ago cast into the world the sword which divides us, and the word
which unites us ? Thus the works of the man of genius and of the
man of worth alone escape the general decay, for they alone count
for anything in the sum of the acquisitions of the race, and the fruit
of their labours continues to grow even when forgotten by ungrateful
humanity. Nothing is lost. The good done by the most unknown
of virtuous men weighs more in the everlasting scales than the most
insolent triumphs of untruth and of evil. Whatever the form he
may give to his beliefs, in whatever symbol he may choose to
clothe his averments regarding the future, the just man has thus the
right to say with the old patriarch of Idumea, 'For I know that
my avenger liveth, and will appear at last upon the earth. When
my skin shall have fallen into shreds, and my flesh be taken from
me, I shall see God. I shall see him by myself; my eyes, not
6
82 LIFE OF
another's, shall behold him. With waiting my reins are consumed
within me.* " ^
In my humble judgment the patriarch's speech in
Kenan's own version may have more meaning than he
has just assigned to it. But to be virtuous for the sake of
virtue alone, without regard to any reward possibly attend-
ant on it; to avoid evil, without any regard to the punish-
ment possibly awaiting it ; to be content with an immortality
of result, and to pine for no other immortality; — this was
the noble doctrine then taught by Renan to a genera-
tion delivered over to superstition or unbelief. In-
deed, in one of his books Renan makes the curious and
suggestive remark that if goodness inevitably brought
worldly prosperity in its train, mere cunning and
calculation would make the earthiest and most worth-
less of men take to the practice of virtue, as the safest
of speculations and investments. Where, then, would
be the charm and the value of righteousness ?
From the Book of Job, with its passionate questionings
of destiny, its gloom broken only by a few rare flashes of
lightning, the distance is great to the Song of Solomon,
redolent of Love and Spring. Following the German
^ It may be as well to give the words of Renan*s translation of
the famous passage which has been the theme of unending con-
troversy: — "Car, je le sais, mon vengeur existe et il apparaitra
enfin sur la terre. Quand cette peau sera tombee en lambeaux,
priv^ de ma chair, je verrai Dieu. Je le verrai par moi meme;
mes yeux le contempleront, non ceux d'un autre; mes reins se con-
sument d'attente au dedans de moi." In an explanatory note
Renan adds, "Job surrenders himself to the hope that some day, \
when he is reduced to a skeleton, God will descend to earth \
and avenge Jol) of his adversaries,"
RENAN. 83
critics, especially Ewald, Renan dismisses all the allegorical
interpretations of this unique product of Hebrew genius,
especially that interpretation which resolves the love of
the Shulamite and her swain into an allegory of the
mystic union of Christ and the Church. Many years
before Renan, Ewald had, by ingenious rearrangements
and transpositions of the otherwise perplexing and inco-
herent original, framed out of it a lovely lyrical drama, in
which Renan sees a certain political significance. The
Shulamite, a beautiful rustic maiden from the North, has
l)een carried off by the satellites of Solomon and added to
his harem. He addresses her in language of passionate
admiration, and offers her all that his wealth can bestow;
but in spite of this she remains faithful to her shepherd-
lover, and at last is reunited to him. Ewald's four acts
become five in the hands of Renan, who makes several
alterations in Ewald's rearrangement of the original, and
thus one of the obscurest books of the Old Testament
becomes a most intelligible, interesting, romantic, and
delightful Hebrew vaudeville of true love resisting
temptation and triumphing at last. Renan supposes it to
have been written in Northern Palestine about the middle
of the tenth century B.C., soon after the separation of
Israel from Judah. The Shulamite's rejection of Solomon
and her disdain of the Jerusalemite women who play the
part of chorus in the little drama, harmonise with the
feeling in the new kingdom against the personal extrava-
gance of Solomon, and the exactions which had driven
Israel to revolt. The scene is, of course, laid in Jeru-
salem, but the home of the Shulamite, and most of the
localities mentioned in the poem, are in the northern
84 LIFE OF
kingdom, and its beauty and fertility, with its wealth of
woodland and meadow-land and running w^aters, were
better calculated than the sterile region of the South to
inspire the pastoral poetry with which the Song of Solomon
teems.
To his French version of the Canticle, divided, like an
ordinary drama, into acts and scenes, with the speeches,
as in an ordinary play-book, properly assigned to the
dramatis personcB, and the lyrics to the chorus, Renan
prefixes not only an essay on the plan, the age, and the
character of the poem, but a second French translation
in which the order of the accepted text is preserved.
This was for the benefit of those who might reject
Renan's theory of the dramatic origin of the poem, or
who would like to form a theory of their own, or who
adhered to the orthodox allegorical interpretation. It is
interesting to see Renan in his preface sympathising, and
evidently in all sincerity, with the orthodox, whose
time-honoured beliefs he was here and elsewhere con-
scientiously, but almost regretfully, disturbing. Much in
the tone and tenor of some of his subsequent, and more
important writings, is explained in the following extract
from the preface to his translation and adaptation of
the Song of Solomon. Speaking of those who have
" known the Canticle only through the mystic veil with
which it has been surrounded by the religious conscious-
ness of centuries," he continues : —
" These are the persons to collide with whose habits of thought,
naturally costs me most. Never can one, without a scruple, raise
a hand against those sacred documents on which the hopes of
RENAN. 85
eternity have been founded or supported, or rectify, in the name of
scientific criticism, those mistakes which for ages have consoled man-
kind, have aided it to traverse so many barren deserts, and have
enabled it to conquer truths far superior to those of philosophy. It
is better for men to have hoped for the Messiah than to have
correctly understood such and such a passage of Isaiah, in which they
thought they saw him announced; it is better for them to have believed
in the resurrection than to have correctly read and understood
such and such an obscure passage in the Book of Job, through a belief
in which they asserted their future deliverance" from Sheol. * * Where
should we be if the contemporaries of Christ had been as excellent
philologists as Gesenius? Faith in the resurrection and in the
Messiah have led men to do much greater things than have been done
by the scientific accuracy of the grammarian. But the greatness of
the modern spirit consists in not sacrificing one of the legitimate
needs of human nature to another ; our hopes no longer depend on
the right or wrong interpretation of a text. Besides, every one puts
his belief into a text much more than he extracts a belief from it.
Those who require the authority of Job for their faith in the future
will not believe the Hebrew scholar who exhibits to them his doubts
and his objections. Without troubling themselves about various
readings they will boldly say with humanity : De te^rd surrecturus
sum?- In the same way the Song of Solomon, endeared to so many
devout souls, will remain what it was in spite of our demonstrations.
Like an antique statue, habited like a Madonna by the piety of the
Middle Ages, it will continue to command respect even when the
archaeologist has proved its profane origin. For my part, my object
was not to withdraw the veneration paid to an image which has
become sacred, but to disencumber it of its wrappings, so as to show
it in its chaste nudity to the lover of ancient art."
^ The reference is again to the passage. Job xix. 25. Here,
instead of the Vulgate "I shall arise," the Authorised Version has,
" I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the
latter day upon the earth." The Douay Version is, ** I know that
my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day / shall arise out of the
eartt."
S6 LIFE OF REN AN,
Many men, once attached to the Christian faith, turn
on their old credo and, like Lamennais, rend it when they
have abandoned it. Renan was not one of these.
When he parted from his early faith it was in sorrow not
in anger, and he generally thought and spoke of it with a
regretful reverence, arising from a perfect knowledge of
its value, as held in perfect sincerity by simple-minded
people who, like himself, had received it without
examination.
CHAPTER V.
[1860-61.]
TTHE time was now come when an unforeseen stroke
of good fortune was to hasten the execution of the
great task which had floated before Renan's mind ever
since he left St. Sulpice, and which had acquired con-
sistency during years of preparatory study prosecuted in
the midst of multifarious intellectual and literary labours.
( In the May of i860, the year in which was published his
version of the Song of Solomon, Renan was commissioned
by the Imperial Government to explore the ancient
Phoenicia in search of inscriptions and monuments.
There had been previously a few " finds" of Phoenician
inscriptions in regions where the Phoenicians had settle-
ments; if Phoenicia proper were explored more might be
expected, along with discoveries of memorials and monu-
ments of that interesting people of Semitic speech.
Renan and his colleagues oiXh^ Journal des Dkbats were
Liberals, and had resented the coup cPetat of Napoleon
III. (185 1). But as the years wore on they began to
hope for, and even to believe in, the establishment of
a Liberal empire. With Prince Napoleon (" Plon-Plon"),
88 LIFE OF
whose Liberalism was decidedly advanced, and who
courted the company of men of letters, Renan seems
to have been becoming so intimate as to accompany the
Prince some years afterwards on a yachting tour to Northern
Europe. But the person to whom Renan appears to have
been mainly indebted was a lady, a Madame Cornu,
whose mother had belonged to the household of Queen
Hortense, the mother of Napoleon III., and who herself
was brought up in, and for many years after the downfall
of the First Empire remained a member of, that house-
hold. A year younger than the mfant who was to
become Napoleon III., she and Louis were close friends
from childhood. They played together and learned their
lessons together, and their innocent intimacy survived in
all its strength even after she became a wife, until the
coup d'etat. This she viewed with a repugnance which
estranged her from its author. She is described by
Renan, in an interesting sketch of her, as a woman of
great accomplishments, a thorough Liberal in politics
and religion, whose absorbing desire was to see France
occupying an intellectual primacy in Europe. Partly to
forward this consummation she resumed her intimacy
with her old playmate, now Emperor, and she exerted
over him an influence always directed to promote worthy
objects. (The improvement of the higher education of
France, and the re-establishment of scientific missions
during the closing half of the Second Empire, were largely
due to her, and among these missions was Renan's
to Phoenicia, which, with a heart softened towards the
empire, he accepted, receiving at the same time the Cross
of the Legion of Honour. ")
RE NAN. 89
A rather curious coincidence of circumstances favoured
the success of his Phoenician mission. In the autumn of
i860 there were very serious disturbances in the Lebanon.
That mysterious tribe, the Druses, had been massacring
their old enemies, the Maronites, whom, as they were,
after a fashion, Latin Christians, the French government,
following its traditional policy in Syria, decided on pro-
tecting; and the massacre was followed by a very san-
guinary one of the Christian population of Damascus.
After the usual diplomatic controversy, a French force
landed in August at Beyrout, and was there when Renan
reached it in October. He found himself not only among
his countrymen, but the French general in command told
off little contingents of soldiers to protect his person and
give him manual aid in the conduct of his explorations.
The results of these, and they yielded him much more
in the way of Phoenician memorials and monuments than
of inscriptions, were given to the world in the magnificent
volume, with an accompanying one of plates, the Mission
de Phenicie^ the issue of which began in 1864. The
book is geographical, topographical, historical, ethnologi-
cal, and descriptive, as well as archaeological, and much of
it is interesting to the general reader. From his observa-
tion of two different types among the inhabitants Renan
was confirmed in an old theory of his, that although the
language of the Phoenicians was Semitic, they were
originally Hamitic, and of a race kindred to that of the
population of ancient Egypt. If this were so, Renan's
theory of the monotheism of the Semites would not be
disturbed by the polytheism of the Phoenicians.
But for Renan his Syrian sojourn afforded an episode
90 LIFE OF
of travel far more important to himself and to the
world than his excursions Jn search of inscriptions and
monuments in Phoenicia. He had now the long-wished-
for opportunity to visit the Holy Land, and to famili-
arise himself with the aspects of regions and places
associated for ever with the biography of the Founder
of Christianity. His affectionate and sympathetic sister
had accompanied him and Madame Renan to Beyrout,
and she remained with him when his wife was forced
to return home. It was in his sister's company that
he wrote the first draft of his Life of Jesus, during
a holiday sojourn on a spur of the Lebanon, some
eight hours from Beyrout, and near Byblos, the head-
quarters of the ancient worship of Adonis. She had
listened to the story with sympathy and admiration, and
his Phoenician explorations being finished, both of them
were preparing to return home, when she was struck
down by fever. Almost at the same moment Renan
succumbed to the same disease and lay unconscious by
her side. When, thirty-two hours afterwards, he recovered
consciousness his sister was a corpse. Her memory will
long be kept green by her brother's touching and beautiful
dedication of the Vie de Jesus^ which made its first
appearance a year or two after her death.
" To THE PURE SOUL OF MY SISTER HeNRIETTE,
WHO DIED AT ByBLOS, 24TH SEPTEMBER, 1861.
" In the bosom of God, where thou art resting, dost thou re-
member those long days at Ghazir, when alone with thee I wrote
the pages inspired by the places which we had visited together ?
Thou wast silent by my side, and each page was read and copied
by thee as soon as written, while sea, villages, ravines, and mountains
RENAN, 91
were unrolled at our feet. When the dazzling light gave way to
the innumerable starry host, thy subtle and delicate questions, thy
discreet doubts, led me back to the sublime object of the thoughts
of both of us. One day thou saidst to me that thou wouldst love
the book because it had been written along with thee, and also
because it was a book after thine own heart. If sometimes thou
wert afraid of the narrow judgment which the frivolous might pass
on it, thou wast ever persuaded that the truly devout would end by
taking pleasure in it. Amid these pleasant meditations death struck
at both of us with his wing. At one and the same time the slumber
of fever seized on us ! When I awoke I was alone. Now thou
sleepest in the land of Adonis, near holy Byblos, and the sacred
waters with which the women celebrating the antique mysteries
came to mingle their tears. To me, O kind genius, to me whom
thou didst love, reveal the truths which subjugate death, which
prevent us from fearing it, and which make us almost love it."
Sad and solitary, but restored to health, and carrying
with him the manuscript of the Vie de Jesus in its first
form, Renan returned to France after a twelvemonth's
absence.
CHAPTER VI.
[1861-64.]
T^HE College de France, which is intimately connected
with Kenan's biography, was founded by Francis I.,
who, whatever his faults, was a patron of the Renaissance.
The study of Greek and Hebrew, though the languages
of the Old and New Testaments, was considered by the
University of Paris to be dangerous, as tending to destroy
the authority of the Vulgate, and chairs of Greek and
Hebrew were first instituted in his new college by
Francis I. Subsequent Kings of France added new
chairs to the institution, which, remaining independent
of the University, was allowed considerable liberty of
teaching, and thus attracted eminent men to its chairs
and studious youth to listen to their prelections. The
only control over it was exercised by the government.
After somewhat less than three centuries since its
establishment the teaching of the College de France,
with its twenty-five chairs, embraced nearly the whole
area of modern culture, and the list of its illustrious
professors ranges from Ramus in the sixteenth century
LIFE OF RENAN. 93
to Cuvier, Cousin, Ampere, Burnouf, and Michelet in the
nineteenth.
The chair of Hebrew and cognate Semitic languages
became vacant in 1857 through the death of M. Quatre-
mere, Renan's old teacher. The way in which such
vacancies were filled was the following : — When the
Minister of Public Instruction decided on having the
vacancy filled he asked the whole body of professors
to furnish him with the names of those whom they
thought most fitted for the chair. The authorship of
the History of the Semitic Languages, to say nothing of
his other writings, gave Renan an undoubted claim to be
named as a candidate. ' One of the chief dreams of his
early life was to restore to France the place in the
cultivation of Semitic studies which she had filled until
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when it was
surrendered to Germany and Holland. To attempt this
restoration the way lay through the Chair of Hebrew in
the College de France, and Renan resolved never to
accept any other. Accordingly, on the death of Quatre-
m^re he paid the customary visits to the professors of
the college, and informed them of his aspiration. For
some reason or other several years elapsed before
the Minister of Public Instruction decided on filling
the vacancy, and in the interval the duties of the chair
were performed provisionally. At last the Minister
asked that candidates should be nominated. Both the
professors of the College and the Academic des Inscrip-
tions placed Renan at the head of their lists, and in
January 1862 he was appointed to the chair.
By his brilliant and somewhat daring contributions to
94 LIFE OF
periodicals, of which two collections in volume-form had
been issued and were very popular, as well as by his
versions of, and dissertations on, the Book of Job and
the Song of Solomon, Renan was known to the studious
youth of academic Paris as a foremost champion of
freedom of thought in religious matters. The Imperial
Government, on the other hand, leant upon the Church
and the priesthood; a severe religious orthodoxy was at
least professedly, and in the case of the Empress Eugenie
no doubt sincerely, dominant in high places. This gave
a piquancy to the announcement that Renan's intro-
ductory lecture was to be on the part played by the
Semitic nations in the history of civilisation. On the
2 1 St February 1862, the hall in which the lecture was
delivered was crowded with eager listeners, many of them
young. Renan's thesis was one with which his readers
were already familiar. There was the old contrast
between the Indo-European (Aryan) and the Semitic
races, a contrast, except in one respect, very unfavour-
able to the latter. Monotheism, once more Renan
declared, the Indo-European races owe to the Semitic,
an enormous debt of incalculable value. With the
Roman Empire the myths of paganism had become
mere amusing stories, stripped of all religious or moral
significance. It was then that the civilised world was
confronted by Judaism, with its clear and simple faith in
divine unity. The Jews had a law, a book replete with
an elevated moral sentiment and a lofty religious poetry,
which gave them an incontestable superiority over the
Indo-Europeans. Indeed, it was possible that the world
would have been converted to Judaism had not there
RE NAN, 9$
sprung from it Christianity. Then came the following
passage, the words italicised being those which most of
all shocked the orthodox: —
" In the midst of the enormous fermentation in which the Jewish
nation was steeped under the last of the Asmonseans, the most extra-
ordinary moral event of which history has preserved the memory,
took place in Galilee. A reform of Judaism, one so profound and
so peculiar that it was in truth a complete creation,, was worked by
a man to whom no other can be compared, a vian so great that^
alihongh in this place everything ought to be judged from the
poifit of view of positive science ^ I should not wish to contradict those
who^ struck by the exceptional character of. his work, call him God.
Having attained the highest religious altitude ever reached by man
before him, having arrived at a contemplation of God as standing to
himself in the relation of father to son, devoted to his work with
a complete forgetfulness of everything else and an abnegation of self
which has never been practised on so lofty a scale, Jesus founded
the everlasting religion of humanity, the religion of the spirit,
liljerated from everything belonging to priesthood, to ceremonial,
and to ritual, accessible to every caste, in one word, absolute.
* Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in
this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. . . , The
hour cometh . , . when the true worshipper shall worship the Father
in spirit and in truth.' Constituted was now the fruitful centre from
which for centuries mankind was to derive its joys, its hopes, its
consolations, its motives for righteousness."
Sprung from Judaism and Christianity in the brain and
heart of the Arabian prophet, a third Semitic religion,
the Mohammedan, converted, and in Africa is converting,
large masses of mankind to monotheism. But whatever
its services in the past, Renan from study, and from
personal observation of its working in Syria, had come to
the conclusion that Islam is hostile to science and to
96 LIFE OF
civilisation, and that war must be waged against it " until
the last son of Ishmael shall have died of misery, or shall
have been relegated by terror to the depths of the
desert." "Islam is the most complete negation of
Europe." And to Europe, to Europe alone, Renan
proclaimed, the future belongs. \ The religion which
Europe is to diffuse throughout the world has nothing
to do with ancient dogmas; it means a recognition of
freedom and of the rights of man. In its theological
sense it is to become less and less Jewish, and more and
more the religion of the heart, divorced from any con-
nection with the State. ( Science was to be the religion of^
the head. ^
The lecture delighted the youthful among his hearers.
They saw very clearly that Renan had broken with the
past and present of the Roman Catholic Church, and
indeed with all Christian churches] and that in spite of
his eloquent eulogium on Christianity as the everlasting
religion, he was in reality substituting for it the religion
of science. 'The admirers among his student-hearers, not
content with applauding his lecture, enthusiastically con-
ducted him home in triumph. It was with other feelings
that Renan's deliverance was regarded by the ecclesiastics
who had the ear of the Emperor or of the Empress.
The tone and tenor of his prelection were utterly dis-
tasteful to them ; they looked on it as a gage of defiance
flung in their faces. Two passages in it were obnoxious
to them: the one in which the separation of Church
and State was foreshadowed ; the other, that in which the
Founder of Christianity was spoken of as a "man";
though, as Renan afterwards reminded them, he had on
RENAiY. 97
his side the authority of St. Peter, who, addressing a
Jerusalem audience on the day of Pentecost, had called
Jesus "a man approved of God among you" (Acts ii.
22). Cardinals and bishops had audiences of the
_Empress, and insisted that Renan should be punished.
LFour days after the delivery of the opening lecture
Kenan's course was suspended by authority.
Renan took the suspension with philosophical calm-
ness. He addressed to his fellow-professors of the
College de France a long and admirable defence of him-
self, in which not an angry word escaped him. He
referred to the subject in a letter written at the time to
Mr., now Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, who had made
his acquaintance some years before, and who has given
in an interesting volume,^ memorials of an acquaintance
with Renan which ripened into friendship.
"It is,'' Renan wrote, *'the Emperor whom I most willingly
forgive. Amid the burning passions which rend the country, his
position is one of the most difficult. Every act of his which has a
liberal tendency recoils upon him as a misdemeanour. In nomin-
ating me, in spite of the energetic opposition of the Catholic party,
he acted almost courageously. . . . No other French government
would have done as he did. "
Being suspended, not dismissed, Renan was to receive
his salary until further notice, and he honourably resolved
to earn it. As he told the students at the time, his opening
lecture was exceptional in its subject. For the future he
would confine himself strictly to the special duty of his
chair, that of giving instruction in Hebrew and other
^ Ernest Renan: In Me?noriam. By the Right Honourable Sir
Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, G.C.S.I., F.R.S. (1893).
7
98 LIFE OF
Semitic grammar and philology, and he expected only
a small class of pupils. Now that he was suspended he
invited those who would have attended his class at the
College de France to come to him at his domicile, and
receive the instruction which he was debarred from
giving them officially. The invitation was accepted, and
for years this domiciliary instruction was given. The sub-
sequent story of the chair itself wdll be told further on.
For a year after the suspension from his chair Renan
was busy completing his Life of Jesus. It appeared a
little before the summer of 1863. The book was the
w^ork of a poet and an artist, as much as of a patient and
erudite scholar. To long and thorough study of the
texts had been added personal knowledge of the scenery
and other aspects of the Holy Land, viewed, too, in the
light thrown on it by its ancient describers as it was in
the time of Jesus. The old landscapes were revived on
Kenan's canvas, the village life, the life of the synagogue;
the Jerusalem of the Herods was brought near to us in
the clear mirror of Renan's pages, and the panorama of
Jesus's Palestine was unrolled to the music of a style
incomparable in its union of simplicity and beauty. (_In
accordance with a deep conviction which years before he
had arrived at, and except in the very few cases in which
the marvellous is not necessarily the miraculous, Renan
rejected, with the supernatural element in the birth and
biography of Jesus, the miracles which in the Gospels
he was recorded to have worked. _) On the other hand,
Renan brought into play an imagination capable of
working genuine wonders when aided by a lynx-eyed
as well as far-extending research. The many gaps
RENAN. 99
in the gospel narratives he fills up with marvellous
ingenuity. Out of their contradictions and variations he
evolves a coherent and consistent whole. He gathers
into a focus their scattered rays of light. Their often
vague topography and their hazy chronology, he seems to
rectify with admirable ingenuity. Almost more wonderful
is the skill with which he illuminates his subject by
hints and statements gathered from the most unlikely
sources. Of course he made use of the Old Testament,
and of those Jewish apocalyptic books the composition
of which began after the cessation of prophecy — to say
nothing of the Fathers, of the fragments of ancient and
mostly lost gospels, apocryphal and other, of Talmudic
literature which he had diligently explored with unex-
pectedly successful results, of Philo and Josephus, and
of modern explorations in Palestine. What is still more
unexpected, and to quote only two of the instances of his
successful vigilance, Renan finds in the chronicles of the
Crusaders testimony borne to the retention, in the Middle
Ages, by the Lake of Gennesareth, of 'a reputation for a
piscine wealth as great as when Peter and Andrew and the
sons of Zebedee cast their nets into it before they were
made fishers of men. From a Roman inscription found in
Algeria Renan deduces the remote conclusion that the
soldiers of Pontius Pilate who outraged Jesus so grossly,
were auxiliaries, and, not like the legionaries, Roman
citizens, who would not have been guilty of such
indignities. The fascination of his style tempted some
people, especially the Germans — a nation v^hos^ forte is not
style — to regard Renan as superficial. But he was justly
appreciated by such a scholar as Mommsen, who, says
loo LIFE OF
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, " called him, in conversation
with me as far back as January 1862, a true savant in
spite of his beautiful style ! " From an earnest desire to
figure to himself as flesh and blood realities the person-
ages of his Christian epic, and to give completeness to
the fragmentary Gospel narratives, Renan is often con-
jectural. His pages are full of such expressions as
" perhaps, probably, no doubt," and so forth, and a faint
hint is expanded and transformed into a copious and
confident statement. But these conjectures and ex-
pansions are the handiwork not only of a man of genius
but of one whose great object is to bring with perfect
clearness before himself, and before his readers, the
personages of whom, and the incidents of which, he is
writing. Renan has evidently done his utmost to shake
himself free of prepossessions and prejudices. He has
not, like the heterodox Strauss or the modern orthodox
biographers of Jesus, a preconceived theory to uphold.
He is no advocate, holding and speaking from a brief.
Here really seems to be a man who, treating of one of
the most controverted and difficult as well as the highest
of themes, has no object but the attainment of truth.
Daring though the^_book be, it is not in the slightest
degree polemical. \ More than once, mdeed, Renan
speaks of the pain given him by the thought that he may
possibly be undermining the priceless faith of honest
believers; and he seems perfectly sincere in the expression
of the hope that they will neglect his Life of Jesus, and
leave it to be read only by scholars and thinkers.
To the book Renan prefixed an introduction^n his
authorities. Of course they were chiefly the Four
RENAN, loi
Gospels, but his matured opinions on their genuineness
and value were given in a subsequent volume of the
Origines, and may be reserved until it calls for notice.
To these Gospels had been added one of his own. The
personality of Jesus came out with startling distinctness
as Renan traversed the regions in which the Gospel
history is laid: —
I "Thus it was," he writes, "that the whole of that history, which
I in the distance seemed to hover in the clouds of an unreal world,
— acquired a substantial body and a solidity which astonished me.
The striking agreement between the text of the Gospels and the
localities, the marvellous harmony between the Gospel-ideal and the
landscape which had served it for a frame, came upon me like a
revelation. I had before my eyes a fifth Gospel, mutilated but still
legible, and across the narratives of Matthew and Mark, instead of
an abstract being, who might have been supposed never to have
existed, I saw, living and moving, a human figure worthy of all
admiration."
In the Galilee of Renan's visit he found traces of the
tree-clad, verdant, flowery, fruitful, and populous land
which it was before occupied and made desolate by " the
demon of Islam," nor could this mar the aspects of the
mountains on which Jesus loved to muse, to worship,
and to pray. The race which, with foreign admixtures,
unsophisticated while intelligent, inhabited Galilee in
the olden time was as far superior to the narrow-minded
and bigoted Jews of Jerusalem as its arid environs were
inferior in picturesqueness and beauty to the northern
region in which Jesus was born and bred. He grew to
maturity in constant contact with Nature, and its products
furnished him afterwards with many an illustration of doc-
trine. Almost certainly he knew no language except his
I02 LIFE OF
own, the Aramaic dialect generally spoken in Palestine, but
in that sequestered Nazareth he learned much that Athens
and Rome could not have taught him. From reading
the prophets he learned to value a pure heart and a humble
mind far more than the ritual which he had seen in
operation during his boyish visits with his parents to
Jerusalem. Doctrines of the same kind, taught by such
great Rabbis as Hillel, were orally promulgated in his
time. The Jewish mind was deeply stirred by hopes
and anticipations of the coming of a Messiah, and was
much occupied with attempts to discover, from supposed
Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, in what
form the promised Deliverer would appear. The
mind of the young Jesus was specially impressed by the
Book of Daniel, and the apocalyptic vision in which a
kingdom never to be destroyed was to be set up by God.
The Ancient of Days gave everlasting dominion over all
the nations to " one like the Son of Man," the appella-
tion by which Jesus afterwards loved to call himself.
What were the first steps of Jesus in his prophetic
career, Renan does not venture to conjecture. But he
supposes that the earlier religious conception of Jesus was
that of God as a father. " That is his great original act; in
that he nowise belongs to his race. Nor Jew nor Mussul-
man ever understood this delicious theology of love. The
God of Jesus is not the terrible governor who slays us,
who damns us when it pleases him. The God of Jesus
is Our Father. The God of Jesus is not the unimpartial
despot who has chosen Israel for his people, and protects
them against all the world. He is the God of mankind. "
The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man,
KENAN. 103
these and what follows from them were the themes of the
first preaching of Jesus, and in the Synagogue open to all,
with an audience ready to listen to any one who had any-
thing to say, he found his first pulpit. A group of
sympathetic hearers, men and women, gathered round
him. In his twenty-eighth year he was subjected to-
a new and stimulating influence, that of a man, not of
a book or of current apothegms. He was attracted to
the terrible Baptist declaiming on the banks of the
Jordan. He now learned the effect that could be produced
on the multitude by an earnest preacher. He heard not
only the representatives of the two great religious parties,
Pharisees and Sadducees, told to their faces that they
were vipers, but something like a proclamation of the
doom of Judaism, when they were also told to be proud
no longer of their descent from Abraham, since the very
stones could be turned into children of Abraham.
John's imprisonment taught Jesus what the preacher
of a pure social morality might expect from the powers
of this world. After a sojourn in the desert, John being
thrown into prison, Jesus returned to his native Galilee.
Rejected by the people of Nazareth, his birthplace, he
settled at Capernaum, one of a group of little towns on
the western bank of the Lake of Gennesareth (Lake
of Tiberias, Sea of Galilee), the Windermere of
Palestine. Renan describes, in all its ancient beauty
and picturesqueness, the region in which this ever-
memorable sheet of water lies, and contrasts what it and
its banks were in the time of Jesus with their generally
desolate appearance as Renan saw them under the
withering rule of the unspeakable Turk.
I04 LIFE OF
It was at Capernaum, Renan thinks, that really
'Cgan the public life of Jesus, then on the verge of his
thirtieth yearA His conceptions both of himself and of
the Kingdom of Heaven which he was to found, had
received a great expansion. He was the long-expected
Messiah, and the Father had given him authority over
all terrestrial things. He figured himself to be that
Son of Man to whom God was to delegate the
power of judging the world, and of governing it for
ever. The final catastrophe he proclaimed to be
approaching. This was one form of the advent of the
Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, which
plays so great a part in the discourses of Jesus. But
there was another form of it on which he laid a still
greater stress — "The Kingdom of God is within you."
Every one who so transformed his nature as to make him-
self capable of embodying in act the pure and lofty
morality which Jesus taught, had the Kingdom of God
within him, and might look forward, without fear,
to the final catastrophe which should extirpate evil and
the wicked, and leave nothing but a Kingdom of
Heaven everywhere. / Renan regards the sojourn of
Jesus at Capernaum as the second period, and a very
happy one, of his career, y Here he was surrounded by
the believing disciples from whom he chose his apostles,
and by the devout women, some of whom followed him
until his death. The magnetism of his personality, and
the magic of his words, having gained them over, they
soon recognised in him the superhuman person whom he
represented himself to be, and they did whatever he bade
them. He preached or taught in parables throughout,
RENAN. 105
in the little towns on the banks of the lake, sometimes from
a boat on the lake itself, occasionally on the mountain-side,
without dogma, without ritual; the Sermon on the Mount
being the summary of the doctrine which he taught.
His converts were chiefly among the poor, and he
announced that part of his mission was to preach his
Gospel to them. In them, in the outcast men and
women whom the Pharisees rejected, but who had
accepted him, in publicans and sinners, not in the rich
and powerful, lay his hope. Riches indeed were a need-
less encumbrance, since the great catastrophe was at
hand.r So passed the days of the sojourn at Capernaum ;
Jesus and his ** joyous company of children" being
described by Renan as leading an idylHc life^
A point is now reached at which it seems opportune
to indicate Renan's views on two startling phenomena in
the career of Jesus, one of them the prediction, on the
fulfilment of which he insisted, of the approaching end
and judgment of the world; the other the series of miracles
which he is said to have worked. That Jesus was mis-
taken in predicting the end of the world as then near at
hand, goes without saying. But this mistake had a
powerful effect in strengthening the faith in him, and the
devotion to him, of his disciples who believed in his pro-
phetic accuracy, to say nothing of the generations which,
after his death, awaited his coming with a perfect assur-
ance of its approach. Yet it must be remembered, Renan
remarks, that although Jesus announced the approaching
consummation of all things, he framed a code of ethics
and gave directions to his apostles for continuing their mis-
sion, just as if he believed that the world was to endure.
io6 LIFE OF
"There is no attempting to deny the existence of a contradiction
between the belief in the near approach of the end of the world, on
the one hand, and, on the other, the ethics habitually inculcated by
Jesus, and conceived as if a stable condition of humanity were con-
templated. It was precisely this contradiction which secured the
success of his work. The millenarian alone would have produced
nothing durable ; the moralist alone would have produced nothing
that had potency. Millenarianism gave the impulse, morality made
the future assured. Thus Christianity combined the two conditions
of great successes in this world, a revolutionary point of departure
and the possibility of continuing to live. Whatever is intended to
succeed should supply these two wants, for the world desires at once
lO alter and to last. While announcing an unparalleled subversion
of human affairs, Jesus proclaimed the principles on which for
eighteen hundred years society has reposed."
In dealing with the question of miracles Renan felt
that he was treading on delicate ground. He could easily
have evaded the difficult problem by asserting that the
narratives of miracles in the Gospels did not form any part
of them in their original form, and had been intruded
into them by pious interpolations of the second Christian
generation. Allowance being made for many such in-
terpolations, it is however impossible, Renan declares,
with such testimony as is accumulated in the Gospels, not
to believe that Jesus played the part of a miracle-worker,
and Renan does not believe in miracles at all.\ Since he
thought so it was courageous and candid in him to speak
of Jesus as a "thaumaturgist," for Renan knew both that
the statement would give great offence even to friends, and
that it did not harmonise with the pure and lofty morality
of which he always, except in this case, represents Jesus
to have been a pattern. /But he accompanies his painful
admission with all sorts of reservations, modifications,
RENAN. 107
and palliations. Every religious founder, from Buddha
to Mahomet, is believed by his followers to have worked
miracles. If Jesus had not been supposed to have
worked miracles his mission would have failed. He had
not that knowledge of the laws of nature which every
school-boy now possesses. He believed that his Father
in Heaven had bestowed on him all power over the lower
world, a power which he was even allowed to delegate to
his apostles. Many of his alleged miracles, moreover, were
cures of diseases, and the science of medicine being then
unknown in Judea, it was supposed that, disease being
often regarded as the work of demons in possession of
the bodies of the afflicted, it was part of the functions of a
man of superior sanctity to cure them. In such cases is
it not natural, Renan asks, that the contact of a saintly
personage should so work on the imagination of the
patient as to give him relief? Above all, those who
narrate the miracles tell of the frequent reluctance of
Jesus to attempt them, and on the injunction which he
sometimes lays on those whom he seems to have
cured not to spread abroad the news of their recovery.
On the whole, Renan thinks that if Jesus played the
part of a " thaumaturgist," it was much against his
will.
The third period of the career of Jesus opens with his,
important sojourn in Jerusalem, when he was in his
L thirty-second year, according to Renan's hypothesis.
With faith in himself and his mission growing more
intense with time, Jesus felt ever, greater repug-
nance for the narrow-minded Jews of Jerusalem, for
hypocritical Pharisees and sceptical Sadducees, for a
io8 LIFE OF
formalist priesthood, and for the wrangling disputants
in the Temple, itself polluted by money-changers and
vendors of living things to be offered as sacrifices. \ The
effect produced on him by this visit to Jerusalem was
such, according to Renan, that Jesus now resolved to
break for ever with Judaism and to pronounce the death-
warrant of the Law. Hence the beautiful parable of the
Good Samaritan, hence the memorable close of the
dialogue with the Samaritan woman, already quoted,
hence the scattered indications in his discourses
that, expecting nothing from the Jews as a nation, he
looked to the conversion of the Gentiles. In this frame
of mind, " full of revolutionary ardour " Renan phrases it,
Jesus returned to Galilee, and in the same frame of mind
left his native region for ever to proceed to Jerusalem for
the Feast of Tabernacles, which was celebrated at the
autumnal equinox. Disputes with Pharisees visiting
Galilee were followed by argumentations with the
Pharisees in Jerusalem which issued in their attempt to
stone him. '^During this last period of the life of Jesus
Renan fancies that he sees a change in the demean-
our and disposition of Jesus. ) Jerusalem, which had
neglected him, now persecuted him, and he saw no hope
of the advent of the Kingdom of God unless when he
himself should come in glory to reward his disciples and
to punish those who had rejected him. The tone of the
Sermon on the Mount was changed for one of denuncia-
tion. Renan even speaks of him as a "sombre giant."
His original gentleness disappeared. He was subject to
fits of agonised depression. His disciples themselves
were occasionally afraid of him.
RENAN, 109
"His dissatisfaction with any resistance led him to actions
inexplicable and apparently absurd," such as the denunciation of
the fig-tree for bearing nothing but leaves at a time when it could
not bear fruit. " It was not that his nobleness of nature was on
the wane, but that his struggle maintained in the name of the ideal
against reality became insupportable. Contact with the earth
lacerated and revolted him. He was irritated by the obstacles
which confronted him. His conception of himself as Son of God
became confused and exaggerated. He felt the application of the
fatal law which condemns the idea to fall away as soon as it
attempts the conversion of men. By coming into contact with men
they lowered him to their own level. The tone which he had
adopted could not be kept up for more than a few months. It was
time for death to come and put an end to a situation the tension of
which had become excessive, time for it to come and release him
from the impossibilities of a path which led nowhere, and by
delivering him from too protracted a probation, conduct him,
thenceforth incapable of sin, to celestial serenity."
The remainder of the book contains a narrative of the
intrigues of the enemies of Jesus at Jerusalem and of the
other circumstances which resulted in his death on the
cross. The sad story is vividly told, and is elucidated
from the stores of Renan's extensive knowledge of things
Jewish; but in this case the Gospel narratives, taken
altogether, are ample and continuous, and do not readily
lend themselves to much originality of treatment.
Two points in Renan's later narrative may be touched
on. He suggests, or rather hijqts, not at all acceptably,
that what he regarded as theumaginary resurrection at
Bethany-Vthe report of which as a reality so exasperated
the Jewish hierarchy against Jesus — was a pious fraud
contrived by Mary and Martha to confirm the claim
of Jesus to superhuman power. Then as regards the
no LIFE OF
Eucharistic procedure of Jesus on the occasion of the
Last Supper, Renan takes advantage of the singular
silence on the subject in the account given in the
Gospel of St. John to suggest that it was an ^observance
long practised by Jesus^leaving it to be implied that
on this point the narrative of the Synoptics is redundant.
Such is a brief and meagre outline of Kenan's famous
work, an outline intended to indicate to those who have
not read it his method of dealing with the Gospel narra-
tives, his theory of the spiritual development of Jesus,
and other characteristics of the epoch-making volume
which render it such a contrast to the modern orthodox
biographies of the Founder of Christianity. Finally, in
Kenan's own words, so far at least as I can reproduce
in English his inimitable French, let there be given the
closing passage of the book : —
*' The sublime personage, who still with each day presides over
the destiny of the world, it is allowable to call Divine, not in the
sense that Jesus absorbed all that is divine, but in the sense that it
is he by whom his species has been made to take the greatest step
towards the Divine. Collective humanity presents an assemblage
of mean and egoistic beings superior to the animal only in that their
egoism is more the result of reflection. But in the midst of this
uniform vulgarity there rise towards the sky columns which attest a
nobler destiny. Jesus is the loftiest of those columns which indicate
to man whence it is that he comes and whither he ought to
tend. In Jesus has been concentrated and condensed all that is
good and elevated in our nature. He was not incapable of sin.
The passions which he conquered are those against which we our-
selves make war. No angel of God other than his own righteous
conscience, comforted him. He was tempted by no Satan other than
the satan who is in the heart of each of us. And just as several of
his great characteristics have been lost to us through the defects of his
REN AN. Ill
disciples, so too it is probable that many of his shortcomings have
been concealed. But never was there any one who so much as he
made the interests of humanity predominant in his life over the
pettiness of self-love. Unreservedly devoted to his idea, to it he
subordinated everything, to such an extent that towards the end of
his life the universe itself ceased for him to exist. It was because he
was thus possessed by a heroic will that he conquered heaven.
There never was a man, with perhaps the exception of Buddha,
who to that extent trampled under his feet the family, the joys and
cares of this world. He lived only in his Father and in the divine
mission which he was convinced it was for him to fulfil.
*'It is for us, children ever, condemned to impotence, who work
and do not reap, who will never see the fruit of what we have sown,
it is for us to bend the knee before these demi-gods. They knew
how to do what we know not how to do — they could create, affirm,
act. Will there be a renascence of that grand originality, or will
the world be content henceforth to follow the road opened for us by
those daring creators of the antique ages ? We know not. But
whatever may be the unexpected phenomena of the future, Jesus
will never be surpassed. His worship will unceasingly renew its
youth; his legends will be the source of endless tears; the best of
hearts will be melted by his sufferings ; all the ages will proclaim
that among the sons of men there has not been born one greater
than Jesus."
So closes the first volume of the Origins of Christianity,
the great work which Renan had been, in one way or
another, preparing for many years. The success of the
Life of Jesus was immediate and immense. Five months
after its publication Renan told Sir M. E. Grant Duff that
when the eleventh edition, then being issued, was disposed
of, there would be 66,000 copies m circulation, and that
there were already two German and two Dutch translations
of it, with one Italian. An English translation appeared in
the year of the publication of the original. An eighteenth
112 LIFE OF
edition is before me, and it is credibly reported that of the
work in one way or another half a "million copies have been
circulated. A very numerous class, in France and out of
it, who could not accept the Christology of the orthodox
churches, felt that Christianity and its Founder deserved
other treatment than that received from Voltaire, and
they welcomed Renan's book as an adequate appre-
ciation of the character and career of Jesus with the
discredited supernatural element in his biography ex-
cluded. jEven because Jesus ceased in Renan's pages to
be God, he could be sympathised with and understood
as a man, a unique man, yet one of like passions with our-
selves. What else was required to complete the success of
the book was supplied by the exquisite art displayed in
the portrait of Jesus, in the sympathetic sketches of his
followers, in the picturesqueness of the description of his
and their surroundings, in the charm and music of a
style of magical fascination, and in the new light thrown
on the Gospel narratives by Renan's unwearied vigilance
of research.
But that which constituted for the mass of readers
a powerful attraction, aroused the wrathful indigna-
tion of the orthodox everywhere, and especially of the
Roman Catholic Church in France. Renan's possible
Jesus was preferred by multitudes to the impossible Jesus
of orthodoxy, but the spokesmen of Roman CathoHcism
treated Renan as an arch-blasphemer who had made of
the second person of the Trinity a mere peccable
man. French CathoHcism could not bring Renan
to the stake, but it exhausted the modern methods
of persecution. Archbishops and bishops fulminated
RENAN. 113
against him in their charges, and an innumerable host of
vituperative and sometimes Ubellous pamphleteers de-
nounced him as actually bent on bringing about the reign
of the devil upon earth. One jealously orthodox lady
sent him periodically a missive containing only the brief
warning, " There is a hell ! " These denunciations
continued for months, and though Renan bore them
with silent equanimity, they issued in one result of a kind
more disagreeable to him than the ravings of bigotry. At
Court the Life of Jesus had been received, not with
favour, but with perhaps unexpected toleration. That
pillar of the Roman Catholic Church in France, the
Empress Eugenie, refused to attempt to stop the pub-
lication of the book, and even said to Madame
Cornu, who reported to Sir M. E. Grant Duff the
Imperial lady's remark, " It will do no harm to those
who believe in Christ, and to those who do not it will do
good." But the persistent, the passionate protests of the
Roman Catholic hierarchy told at last on the Emperor,
who looked on the support of the Church as one of the
bulwarks of his throne, and who, as Renan said, never
took a step forward without soon afterwards taking a step
backwards. Renan's free-speaking, in his inaugural lecture
as Professor of Hebrew at the College de France, had led
to his suspension. In deference to the loud and long-con-
tinued clamours against his Life of Jesus, he was now to
be deprived of his chair. Early in June 1864, nearly a
twelvemonth after the appearance of the book, there
appeared in the Moniteur a report addressed to the
Emperor by the Minister of Public Instruction. This
functionary recommended the establishment of a new
8
114 LIFE OF
chair of Comparative Grammar and Philology in the
College de France. The salary of the new chair not
having appeared in the Budget, it was to be furnished
from the funds voted for the chair of Hebrew. This
chair had not been occupied for two years, and the
Minister very ungraciously spoke of the anomaly involved
in the reception of a salary for duties which were not
performed, ignoring the fact that, since his suspension,
Renan had been giving instruction, twice a week, at his
own house, to those who would have attended his prelections
had he been allowed to perform the duties of his chair
at the College de France. As a compensation to the
thus deprived professor the Minister proposed that Renan
should be appointed to the post of assistant-director in
the manuscript department of the Bibliothbque Imperiale,
" where his special erudition would enable him to
render real service to the public." Imperial decrees
followed, embodying the recommendations of the re-
port. This was in effect to deprive Renan of his pro-
fessorship, since it was not legal for an official of the
Biblioth^que Imperiale to be at the same time a professor
in the service of the State. It was impossible for Renan to
accept in silence his virtual dismissal, and the offer of com-
pensation attached to it. He addressed to the Minister a
dignified letter, declining both to resign his professorship
and to accept the new position offered him. He pointed out
that he had really been discharging the duties of his chair.
^He added, with a touch of excusable if rather bitter sarcasm,
"Science measures desert by the results produced, not by
the more or less punctual execution of a regulaition, and if
ever you reproach a scholar with not earning the slender
c
RENAN, 115
sum allotted to him, believe, M. le Ministre, that he will
give you the reply which 1 now give you, following an
illustrious example: Pecunia tua tecum sif^ — a judiciously
abridged version of the Apostle Peter's apostrophe to
Simon Magus, Pecunia tua tecum sit in perditionem^ the
rendering of which in our authorised version, " Thy
money perish with thee " (Acts viii. 20), is not easily,
as in the case of the Vulgate, robbed of its chief sting. In
a few days appears a final Imperial decree, setting forth
that after having been relieved of his professorial func-
tions at the College de France, and appointed to a post in
the Biblioth^que Imperiale, Renan has declined to accept
the post, and asserts that he still retains the first appoint-
ment, therefore his Majesty the Eirperor announces that
Renan's appointment to the Biblioth^que Impdriale is
revoked, and that his appointment to the College de
France remains revoked. Renan was now thrown again
on his own resources. His former post in the great
Bibliotheque he had resigned when appointed to the
Phoenician mission, and thus he had no longer an ofiicial
income. Fortunately, the pecuniary results of his highly
successful Life of Jesus were considerable.
Of course the chiefs of French criticism bestowed on
the Life of Jesus a reception very different from the
long-drawn howl of execration with which it was
greeted by the representatives of French clericalism.
The review of it by Renan's friend, Sainte-Beuve, was
a masterpiece of dexterous and appreciative criticism.
While warmly praising the extraordinary merit of the
book, he asserted that it pleased the sceptics just
as little as the believers. \The effect on members of
ri6 LIFE OF
both these classes, and of a third indefinable one, he
illustrated in reports of confidences (possibly imaginary)
on the subject, bestowed on him by three friends. The first
is an orthodox Catholic, indignant but not abusive. He
maintains that to believe in the tradition of the Church, and
accept the universal assent based on the testimony of the
first and only witnesses of the Christian era, is as rational
as to believe in Renan's numerous hypotheses and
conjectures. The second friend is a sceptic who is
irritated by Renan's transcendent admiration of Jesus,
and complains that if Renan deprives Jesus of his God-
head he makes Jesus a man such as none has ever been,
above humanity, and divine in everything but name.
For his own part the sceptic likes the old Jesus quite as
much as the new. The third friend is a politician and
man of the world, who dilates on the benefits conferred
on society and individuals by the ancient faiths, and thinks
it therefore very dangerous to meddle with them.
The ablest of the criticisms by non-orthodox writers
on the Life of Jesus was that of Edmond Scherer, now
almost as well known in England as Sainte-Beuve. In
a few sentences he thus sums up the characteristic merits
of Renan's book:— )" He has sought for Christ beyond
the religion which bears his name, and the Gospel be-
neath what the Church has founded on it. He has
succeeded in restoring the physiognomy of Jesus, in^
giving us a distinct, living, and verisimilar personality. "_[
But with all his appreciation Scherer is not sparing of
more or less inculpatory criticisms. One of these com-
mends itself specially to English readers of the Life of
Jesus. Renan occasionally delineates Jesus from too
RENAN. tiy
aesthetic a point of view, and even invests him with a
kind of prettiness which one is glad to see censured by a
French critic. The frequent use of the French equivalents
of such adjectives as delicious, delicate, etc., and the
reference to Jesus as "le charmant Docteur," are repugnant
to English taste if not to French. More important are
Scherer's comments on Kenan's treatment of the miracles
of Jesus. Scherer will not admit that ** Jesus lent himself,
though unwillingly, to play the part of a thaumaturgist."
His character, so full of simplicity and candour, so devoid
of personal ambition, refutes Kenan's theory. And why
detach the miracles of Jesus from the great mass of miracles
with traditions of which the history of the world is full?
Protestants accept the miracles of Jesus while they
wholly reject those recorded in the Acfa Sanctorum^
though many of these are very much better attested
than any which figure in the New Testament. And
with regard to the miracles of the Acta Sanctorum Scherer
makes a very acute and pregnant remark. When reading
the lives of some of the greatest of the miracle-working
saints, Scherer observed that the simplest and most un-
pretending of the marvels, mostly cases of what were
more or less diseases of the nerves, are reported by those
v;ho were nearest to the time when the cures were
effected, and that as time rolled on the marvels become
more and more extravagant, in point of fact miraculous,
through the growth around them of legend upon legend.
Look at the miracles of the Gospels from this point
of view and the problem is almost solved. The true
miracles of Jesus were his cures of nervous and mental
diseases, the sufferers from which were supposed in his
ii8 LIFE OF
time to be possessed by demons. Under certain psycho-
logical conditions, under the sway of an intense religious
life, there may have been manifested a curative power
which we cannot in these days study directly, because it
tends more and more to disappear with the growth of
modern civilisation. Admit these so-called miracles, and
reject as legendary all such as the stilling of a tempest or
the resuscitation of the dead. In this connection Scherer
thinks that while rejecting most of the discourses of
Jesus given in the fourth Gospel, Renan would have
done well also to reject the whole of its narrative, with
the exception of the four concluding chapters. In this
way the resurrection of Lazarus would have been rele-
gated to the world of legend, and Renan would not
have been tempted to hint that it was a pious fraud.
Let it be added that a cheap popular edition of the
Life of Jesus, abridged and simplified, was issued in
1864, the year after the appearance of the first, and
that Renan omitted in it the chapter on miracles and the
story of the resurrection of Lazarus.
In the correspondence of two more or less dis-
tinguished contemporaries of Renan in the French
world of letters, I have found some not uninteresting
references, made just after its appearance, to the Life
of Jesus. In one of his Lettres a une Inconnue the
sceptical and cynical Prosper Merimee speaks of the
book as at once " of little and of much importance."
It is a great blow dealt to the Catholic Church. So far
doubtless so good. But then, " the author is so terrified
at his own audacity in denying the divinity " of Jesus,
*' that he loses himself in hymns of admiration and adora-
RE NAN. 119
tion, so that he is left without a philosophic sense with
which to judge the doctrine. However, it is interesting."
The other reference is in a letter of George Sand to
Prince Napoleon, with whom she was on terms of very
friendly intercourse, and who had asked for her opinion
of the book, one which he appears to have greatly
admired. Her remarks on Christianity in the following
passage must be taken in connection with the fact that,
when she wrote, the priesthood and Catholicism, partly
through the patronage extended to them under the
Empire, were regaining, even among the middle classes,
something of their old influence in the country of
Voltaire : — ■
" M. Renan," she writes to her ^^ cher prince," *^has a little
lowered, on one side, his hero in my estimation, while raising him
on the other. I liked to persuade myself that Jesus had never
believed himself to be God, had never proclaimed himself to be
specially the Son of God, and that his belief in an avenging and
penal God was an apocryphal interpolation added to the Gospels.
This, at least, is the interpretation which I had always accepted
and even sought for ; but now comes M, Renan with the results of
deeper, more competent, more strenuous study and examination.
There is no need to be as learned as he is to be conscious in his
work of realities and appreciations forming a whole, and beyond
discussion. Were it only through its colouring and life, a perusal
of the book suffuses a clearer light on the age, the environment, the
man.
" I think then that he has seen Jesus better than we in our
anterior perceptions of him, and I accept the Jesus which he has
given us. Jesus is no longer a philosopher, a savant^ a genius
concentrating in himself what was best in the philosophy and
knowledge of his time; he is a dreamer, an enthusiast, a poet,
a man inspired and simple-minded. _ Be it so. I love him still, but
how small for me is the place which he fills in the history of ideas !
120 LIFE OF
how the importance of his personal work has diminished ! how
much more henceforth is his religion to be sustained by the accidents
of human events than by any of those great historical necessities
rhich we agree, and are a little compelled, to call providential.
, "Let us accept the true, even although it takes us by surprise and
alters our point of view. Verily, then, here is Jesus demolished !
So much the worse for him ; for us, perhaps, so much the better !
His religion has arrived at the point of doing at least as much evil
as it had done good, and since — whether it be M. Kenan's opinion
or not — I am to-day persuaded that it can only do evil, I think that
M. Kenan's book is the most useful that he could have written."
A few lines after this estimate of the Life of Jesus,
George Sand proceeds: — "Have you read the five or
six pages which M. Renan contributed last month to
the Revue des Deux Monies ? I like that article better
than anything which he has written hitherto. It is great,
great! I see, indeed, something to find fault with in
certain of its details; but it is so great that I resist
little and admire much." The piece which thus raised
George Sand's enthusiasm is a letter to Kenan's old
friend, Marcellin Berthelot, entitled "The Natural
Sciences and the Historical Sciences," republished
in Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques (1876). It
j is a stupendous illustration of Renan's favourite doctrine,
I that the universe does not exist in all its plenitude, but
I is ever growing, ever becoming, developing itself from
one unknowable in the direction of another. Carrying
himself in thought backward through innumerable aeons,
he arrives at a point in the illimitable past when the
All^ was a universe of atoms obeying only the laws of
mechanics, but containing the germ of all that was to
follow. The atoms become molecules, the molecules are
RE NAN. 121
aggregated into suns, the suns throw off planets, each of
them having an evolution of its own. Among them is
our Mother Earth, something of the story of which is
told by geology and palaeontology until man arrives.
"Two elements, time and the tendency to progress,
explain the universe. Mens agitat fnolem. . . . Spiritus
inius alitJ^ Given time and progress, what may mankind
not attain to, w^hen science, a child of yesterday, shall
have grown with the growth of millions of aeons? The
universe will differ as much from the world which is now,
as the world which is now differs from that of the time when
neither sun nor earth existed. There will be something
which will be to the actual consciousness of man what
the actual consciousness of man is to the primeval atom.
Knowledge is power. Who knows whether science, in-
finitely developed, will not bring with it infinite power?
A single power will then govern the world; that power
will be science, will be the mind.
** The triumph of mind is the true Kingdom of God. There will
be then a resurrection of us men of the idea who have contributed
to that end. Religion will have been found to be true. Virtue
will be explained. Then will be understood the meaning of that
strange instinct which impelled man, without any thought of self-
interest and reward, to renunciation, to self-sacrifice. The belief
in a God the Father will be justified. Our little endeavour to
forward the reign of the Good and the True will be a stone hidden
away in the foundations of the everlasting temple, but we shall have
none the less contributed to the Divine work. Our life will have
been a part of the infinite life, in which we shall have a place
marked out for us through all eternity."
Some months after the appearance of these soaring
speculations Renan contributed to the Revue des Deux
122 LIFE OF RENAN.
Mondes an essay of quite a practical kind on the
history and future of the Higher Education in France
(" L'Instruction Sup^rieuFe en France, son Histoire et
son Avenir "). Renan maintained that the professorial
system in the Faculties of Letters and Science in the
University of France, fostered a merely superficial know-
ledge. The doors of the lecture-room were thrown open
to the public, who flocked to hear a Cousin, a Guizot,
a Villemain, a Michelet. But what could these dis-
tinguished men give a numerous ancj , miscellaneous
audience but brilliant generalities? Such popular
prelections did not develop a love of study, and their
success encouraged young men to aim at oratorical skill
and neglect research. Without saying a word on his
own grievance, Renan pleaded for the strengthening of
the College de France, for an increase of the number of
professors of high and special subjects presiding over
zealous students who would form schools of research,
and might be encouraged by scholarships to prose-
cute for terms of years studies which are in a worldly
sense unproductive. The French were of Celtic origin,
yet the College de France was without a chair of
Celtic languages and literature, while there was not in
Germany a university, not even a school of a superior
kind, without a specialist who lectured on the ancient
Germanic languages and literatures. In season and out
of season, and however occupied otherwise, Renan
throughout life advocated the improvement of the
higher education of his country on the lines pointed
out, and the much that has been done in that direction
is largely due to his appeals and to his efforts.
CHAPTER Vll.
[1864-69.]
TTHE great success of his Life of Jesus encouraged
Renan to proceed energetically with the Origins
of Christianity, the second volume of which was to be
devoted to the Apostles. Before writing the biography
of the Founder of Christianity, Renan had been enabled
by his mission to Phoenicia to visit the localities conse-
crated by the presence of Jesus. It was desirable that
before writing the history of the Apostles he should
inspect the localities out of Palestine which had received
missionary visits from one or two of them, and, above all,
St. Paul; and this object Renan could now effect with-
out the aid of the Imperial Government. The Life of
Jesus was issued in 1863; towards the close of 1864
Renan set out for the East. The results of this topo-
graphical pilgrimage are agreeably visible in many a
picturesque sketch of Eastern scenery, European and
Asiatic, many a delineation of the places and people as
known to St. Paul, and often described as they are now
or were when Renan visited them — an interesting con-
trast
124 LIFE OF
Three years after the pubhcation of the Life of Jesus
appeared, in 1866, "The Apostles" (Les Apotres), as the
second volume of the Origines dii Christianisme. Another
three years, and, in 1869, the third volume of the same
great work, " St. Paul," was given to the world. The con-
tents of these two volumes are so closely connected that
they may be fitly included in the same survey. In the
preface to "The Apostles," Renan referred, with great
calmness and dignity, to the chief criticisms on the Life
of Jesus. One of these was the conjectural character
of many of its statements. To this Renan replied that in
such a case, where only the truth of the general effect is
certain, and where, in consequence of the often legendary
character of the documents, much is doubtful, hypothesis
cannot be dispensed with. You cannot reproduce the
reality, but you can do your best to approximate to it.
The writer's conscience may be at rest when he has
presented as certain that which is certain, as probable
that which is probable, as possible that which is possible.
To the reproach, clothed often in most unseemly
language, that in writing his Life of Jesus he had a
polemical object — for instance, that he wished to destroy
the faith of the orthodox believer, Renan replies with
equal calmness and dignity, and even with a touch of
pathos. No such intention was his. He had received
a number of letters asking him what was his intention,
what was his aim. His answer is " the same as that of any
other historian," to discover the truth, and to make it live;
to work at making the great events of the past known as
accurately as possible, and exhibit them in a manner worthy
of them. To shake any one's faith was far from him.
RENAN, 125
On the contrary, he sees regretfully the danger which
lurks in the promulgation of some truths, though the
duty to promulgate them is imperative. What is good
for those whose nobleness preserves them from moral
danger, might, in its application, be hurtful to the ignoble.
*' Great things are the fruit only of rigidly definite ideas, for
the human capacity is limited, and a man absolutely without pre-
judice would be powerless. Let us enjoy the freedom of the sons
of God, but let us guard against complicity in that diminution of
virtue by which society would be threatened if it came to pass that
Christianity were weakened. What should we be without it?
Who will replace such great schools of earnestness and reverence
as St. Sulpice, such a ministration of self-devotedness as that of
the Sisters of Charity ? Can we be otherwise than alarmed by
the aridity of heart and by the littleness which are invading the
world ? Our disagreement with those who believe in positive
religions is, after all, exclusively scientific. In heart we are with
them. We have only one enemy, and he is theirs also, vulgar
materialism, the baseness of the selfish man. . . . Those who cling
to their faith as to a treasure have a very simple method of defend-
ing it. It is to pay no heed to books written in a spirit different
from their own. The timorous do better not to read them."
By one criticism, emanating from his friends as well
as from his enemies, Renan was consciously or uncon-
sciously influenced, and the influence is traceable
throughout the volumes of the Origins published sub-
sequently to the Life of Jesus. This was in his treat-
ment of the miraculous. Always and everywhere Renan
continues to reject the miracle as a historical fact, but
he never again identifies it with a pious fraud, or treats
it as a phenomenon due to conscious imposture. At
the very threshold of his book on the Apostles he is
confronted by a mass of miraculous matter connecting
126 LIFE OF
itself with the resurrection, and the subsequent appear-
ances of Jesus to his disciples. Renan explains it all
as a hallucination, of a kind frequent in ancient and
modern times, a hallucination which hardened into a
sort of genuine belief. Without a belief in the resurrec-
tion Christianity would have died in its cradle. The
greatest religion that the world has seen was based,
according to Renan, on a hallucination of the Magdalene,
one fruitful of a series of hallucinations. " But," he says,
"the material incidents which led to a belief in the re-
surrection were not the genuine cause of the resurrection.
It was love which made Jesus rise again. The love for
him was so potent that a little accident sufficed to build
the edifice of the universal faith."
Renan's chief materials for his work on the Apostles,
and the Apostle of the Gentiles who was added to
them, are of course the Acts of the Apostles and the
genuine Epistles of St. Paul. As regards the Acts,
the position of Renan towards the advanced and
destructive criticism of the Germans is as usual a con-
servative one. Renan thinks that the author of the
Acts is also the author of the third gospel, the same Luke
who was the disciple and companion of St. Paul. The
first twelve chapters of the Acts are full of legendary
matter. The remaining sixteen, narrating the missionary
travels of St. Paul, especially those in which the author
describes himself as an eye-witness, are of very consider-
able historical value. But mudh even of this latter
portion must be read with caution, since on such most
important points as the relations between the Apostles
at Jerusalem and the Apostle of the Gentiles, Luke is
RENAN. 127
in flagrant disagreement with the infinitely more trust-
worthy statements of St. Paul himself in the Epistle
to the Galatians. This Renan attributes to Luke's
desire to play the part of a reconciler in the early
history of the Christian Church, and to minimise, or
indeed to ignore, the controversy between St. Paul and
the, so to speak, official Apostles. For the rest, Renan
considers most of the speeches reported in the Acts
to have been manufactured by Luke. The inferior
character of the manufactured article leads Renan to
estimate highly the genuineness of the speeches of Jesus
reported in the third Gospel, as very far above the
powers of invention displayed by Luke in the Acts.
The Apostles have bid farewell to Galilee, and have
settled at Jerusalem. Peter and John are the most
active of them. Among them is James, the so-called
brother, but more probably the cousin-german of Jesus,
and destined to become, if he was not so already, the
head of the mother church of Jerusalem. All of them
frequent the Temple, and practise the Judaic observances,
differing apparently from ordinary Jews only in the
behef that Jesus was the Messiah, and had been raised
from the dead. With the cessation of the supposed
appearances of Jesus after death, they acquired a
belief in the Holy Ghost as inspiring them : hence
their alleged power of working miracles, their prophesy-
ings, speaking with tongues, and other abnormal mani-
festations of enthusiasm, paralleled, Renan points out,
among Christians in modern times. A common love
for their Master, and a belief in his speedy re-appear-
ance to judge the world, united them in the closest bonds.
128 LIFE OF
and formed them into a community apart, inhabiting a
quarter of their own and having all things -in common.
Whatever their possessions, these were sold, and the
money-proceeds were deposited in a fund, the largest
contributors to which drew no more from it than the
smallest. They took their meals together, and attached
to them the mystical meaning which Jesus had given to
the breaking of bread and the drinking from the cup.
Together they prayed, together they had ecstatic move-
ments and inspirations from above. No dogmatic
disputes disturbed their harmony. Joy was in all their
hearts, and Renan remarks that in no literature is the
word " joy " so often repeated as in that of the New
Testament. " The remembrance of these two or three
first years remained as that of an earthly paradise, which
Christianity will thenceforward dream of aiming to re-
store, and to which it will in vain endeavour to return.
Who in point of fact does not see that such an organisa-
tion could be applicable only to a very small church ?
But later the monastic life will for its own behoof
resume that primitive ideal which the Church Universal
will hardly dream of realising."
The spectacle of this pious and happy community,
aided by a vague propagandism, soon gained it adherents
beyond the little Galilean group which was the nucleus
of a church at Jerusalem. Some of these converts were
" Hebrews," Jews of Palestine, speaking Syro-Chaldaic,
the language of Jesus and the Apostles, and reading the
Hebrew Old Testament. But the majority of the
adherents were Hellenistic Jews and proselytes who
flocked to Jerusalem from the Jewish communities
RE NAN. 129
scattered throughout the Roman Empire. They were
of two classes, one consisting of Jews by race, the other
of Gentile proselytes more or less affiliated to Judaism.
All of them spoke Greek, and used the Septuagint version
of the Old Testament. Through contact with these
Hellenistic converts the Apostles and Galilean disciples,
Renan supposes, gained a knowledge of Greek, which
was indispensable to Christian missionaries operating
beyond the confines of Palestine. Chief among the
earliest converts to Christianity were the proto-martyr
Stephen, Barnabas the Cypriote, and his cousin John
Mark, probably the author of the second gospel.
The administration of the affairs of the Christian
community was wholly in the hands of the Apostles
when something happened that led to the first systematic
organisation known to the early church. The majority
of its members being no longer Galileans, but consisting
of Hellenistic Jews and proselytes, these complained
that their widows were not fairly treated in the dis-
tribution of the funds or goods of the community.
The Apostles accordingly resolved to delegate this part
of their administrative functions to seven just men, chosen
chiefly from among the Hellenists; and the earliest of
Christian orders after the Apostolate was constituted in
the form of the Diaconate. Deaconesses perhaps belong
to a later era, but Renan surmises that they were
appointed "very early" in the history of the Church.
On the Diaconate, and this development of it, Renan is
enthusiastic and eloquent : —
** Admirable is the tact which in all this matter guided the primitive
church. With a knowledge which was profound because it came from
9
I30 LIFE OF
the heart, these good and simple-minded men laid the foundations
of what is pre-eminently great in Christianity — Charity. Nothing
had furnished them with models for such institutions. A vast
ministering organisation of beneficence and of mutual assistance,
for which the two sexes contributed their different qualities and
combined their efforts to alleviate human misery, this is the holy
creation which issued from the labours of these two or three
years. They were the most fruitful in the history of Christianity.
. . . The institutions which are regarded as a later fruit of
Christianity — associations of women, Beguines, sisters of charity,
were among its first creations, the principle of its strength, the
most perfect expression of its genius — in particular, the admir-
able idea of consecrating by bestowing a kind of religious character
on, and by subjecting to a regular discipline, women who are not in
the bonds of matrimony. The word ' widow ' became the synonym
of a religious person devoted to God, and consequently of a
deaconess. In those countries where the wife of four-and-twenty
is already faded, and there is no middle term between the child
and the old woman, it was as if a new life were created for that
half of human kind which is the most capable of devotedness."
The members of the Church of Jerusalem in the
course of two or three years were some thousands in
number. Its peace was disturbed by the Jewish per-
secution of the Christians, which was tolerated rather than
encouraged by the Roman authorities, and which pro-
duced the martyrdom of Stephen, conspicuous among his
murderers being Saul of Tarsus. This persecution dis-
persed throughout Palestine the Christians of Jerusalem,
where, however, the Apostles courageously remained.
At the same time the cenobitic life of the Jerusalem
church came, Renan thinks, to an end. The disper-
sion of all but the apostolic members of the Church led
to missionary effort. Philip evangelised Samaria, whither
he was followed by feter and John. But this propa-
RENAN. 131
gandism was trifling in its area and results compared
with that which was to flow from the sudden and start-
ling conversion of Saul of Tarsus.
In the chapter devoted to that cardinal fact in the
history of the Christian Church, the conversion of St.
Paul, Renan displays to the utmost his imaginative and
descriptive powers. Paul, as he called himself when
he became the Apostle of the Gentiles, was wending
his way to wreak his wrath on the Christians of Damascus.
But doubts as to the righteousness of his persecuting
mission traversed his mind. Was it not possible that
after all he was thwarting the purpose of God ? Perhaps
he bethought him of the wise and benignant warning
against maltreating the apostles which his teacher Gamaliel
had given to the Sanhedrim (Acts v. 38, 39). He had
heard of the appearances of Jesus after death, and may
have believed in them, since in times and countries when
and where the marvellous is accepted, stories of miracles
affect even the opponents of the religion of those who
work the miracles; thus the Mohammedans of to-day are
afraid of the miracles of Elijah, and, like the Christians,
ask for miraculous cures from St. George and St.
Anthony. Paul may have fancied that he beheld the mild
countenance of the Master looking at him with an air
of pity and tender reproach. He was nearing Damascus,
and saw before him the houses, some of which were
tenanted by his intended victims. He had been jour-
neying for eight days, apparently on foot, and fatigue,
always greatest when the journey is ending, overpowered
him. In those regions attacks of fever, accompanied by
delirium, are sudden, and when the attack is over the
132 LIFE OF
sufferer retains the impression of a profound gloom
traversed by flashes of lightning which illuminate images
traced on a background of black. Renan had such an
attack at Byblos, and but for his modern enlightenment
might have taken his hallucinations for visions. After
the same attack he forgot entirely all that had happened
on the day before that on which he lost consciousness.
Thus perhaps St. Paul, suddenly struck to the ground in
a fit of physical exhaustion, combined with mental agony,
may have forgotten what preceded the vision which he
believed that he saw and the words which he believed
that he heard. I spare the reader others of the perhapses
with which Renan seeks to explain the incident which
in its results changed the face of the world. He himself
says, "in such cases the external fact matters little. The
true cause of St. Paul's conversion was his remorse on
approaching the town where he was about to fill the
measure of his misdeeds."
Having preached his new religion with as much energy
as he had thrown into his persecution of its adherents,
Paul after three years visited Jerusalem for the first time
since he left it on his abortive mission to Damascus. This
sojourn at Jerusalem was brief. He was for a fortnight
the guest of Peter; James was the only other apostle
with whom he conferred; and the disciples looked
askance at him as a former persecutor. Renan lays
great stress on the conduct of Barnabas to him now
and hereafter. Barnabas smoothed the way for friendly
commune between Paul and the suspicious disciples at
Jerusalem. "By this act showing wisdom and pene-
tration, Barnabas was of the very highest service to
REN AN 133
Christianity. It was he who divined Paul; it is to him
that the Church owes the most extraordinary of its
founders." Paul was at Tarsus when Barnabas sought
him out and brought him to Antioch (of which as it
was then Renan gives a brilliant description), where the
first great fusion between Jew and Gentile in the Church
took place, and where therefore, most appropriately, the
followers of Jesus were first called Christians. It was at
Antioch that Paul and Barnabas resolved on the earliest
of those missions to the Gentile as well as Jew which were
the starting-point in the conversion of the world to
Christianity. Antioch was then the third city of the
Roman Empire, being inferior to Rome and Alexandria
alone. The Church of Antioch was not only superior
in numbers to the Church of Jerusalem, but as that into
which Gentiles were first admitted on a large scale,
setting an example elsewhere, it exerted a dominant
influence on the develppment of the new religion. The
control of the Churches remained nominally with the
mostly Judaising apostles at Jerusalem, and notably
with James, whom Renan regards as little else than a
Pharisee. But, in spite of their opposition, Paul carried
out the nobler and more comprehensive policy, the
failure of which would have prevented the development
of Christianity into a universal religion, and have made it
a mere appendix to Judaism. In two of the concluding
> chapters of the volume on the Apostles, Renan points
out how circumstances favoured the missionary enter-
prises undertaken by Paul and Barnabas. The Roman
Empire, which was the one arena of their operations,
had on the whole destroyed those national institutions
134 LIFE OF
of the subject provinces which would have constituted
a formidable obstacle to the spread of Christianity
among the Gentiles. The Jewish settlements, numerous
throughout the Empire, w^re so many fields in which
the Christian missionaries could sow the seed of the
new religion, rarely without some success. Among the
mass of Gentiles, monotheism and a system of practical
ethics, as embodied in Judaism, were proving so much
more attractive than the old immoral polytheism, that
Judaism was making converts, even among the higher
classes of Rome itself. All that was good in Judaism
w^as offered by Christianity, with a great deal more
which Judaism could not offer; and for the reception
of Christianity as preached by Paul there was not needed
that preliminary rite which was a stumbling-block to
many otherwise disposed to embrace the Jewish mono-
theism.
The volume on St. Paul, the sequel to The Apostles,
takes up his story at the departure with Barnabas from
Antioch to enter on the first of his great missionary
journeys. Renan dedicated the volume to his wife, who
had accompanied him during his journeys in the foot-
steps of the Apostle of the Gentiles. "Together we
have seen,'' he wrote, " Ephesus and Antioch, Philippi
and Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth, Colossi and Lao-
dicea. Never pn those difficult and dangerous routes
did I hear thee murmur; never in our journeyings any
more than in the free pursuit of truth didst thou say to
me * halt ! ' " This personal exploration of the regions
and places visited by St. Paul gives a peculiar charm
to Renan 's narrative of the self-appointed Apostle's three
RE NAN. 135
missionary journeys, a narrative expanded from the Acts,
and from indications in the epistles of Paul himself.
But deeply interesting as is Renan's narrative, illuminat-
ing as it does the career of the Apostle by innumerable
descriptive touches, and by side-lights projected from a
vast erudition on the intellectual, moral, social, and
political condition of the populations among whom Paul
laboured, there is, as Renan views it, something still
more important in Paul's missionary career than its
exhibition of boundless energy and zeal, than the trials
and sufferings which he bore not only patiently but joy-
fully, than the frequent romance of the incidents, than
the statistical results of his proselytisings. Lesser men
might have founded churches. The names of the
founders of the churches of Rome and Antioch themselves
are unknown The actual number of permanent con-
verts to Christianity made by Paul is computed by Renan
to have been little more than a thousand, though the seed
sown by him was increased in time a thousand-fold.
Following in this matter Baur, Renan seeks to impress
on his readers the conviction that Paul's greatest achieve-
ment was the severance, not indeed completed in his
time, but begun by him, the definite severance of Judaism
from Christianity.
When Paul returned to Antioch after his first mission-
ary journey, the peace of the flourishing church of that
city was disturbed (Acts xv. i) by "certain men which
came down from Judsea," who insisted that circum-
cision was necessary to salvation. Paul was strenuously
opposed to this narrow theory, and it was decided that
the apostles and elders at Jerusalem should be consulted
136 LIFE OF
on the question. Thither accordingly he proceeded with
his follower, the uncircumcised Titus. Renan describes
the state of things at Jerusalem in his usual animated and
conjectural way, maximising, as is his wont, the contrast
between the Judaising James and the anti-Judaismg Paul.
According to the Acts, the result was a compromise. The
Judaisers made the concession that so far as Gentile con-
verts were concerned, circumcision was not to be enjoined.
So far the victory was with Paul, and for the present the
Christian Church was spared a schism which might have
proved fatal to it. But, according to Renan, founding
on a statement in the Epistle to the Galatians (ii. 12), the
old controversy broke out again at Antioch more seriously
than ever, and in spite of the compromise supposed to
have been agreed on. This time "certain came from
James," and relighted the controversy. Before their
arrival, Peter " did eat with the Gentiles," but after that
arrival " he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them
which were of the circumcision." *' The other Jews " ap-
proved of his action, and with them even the loyal Bar-
nabas. Of Peter on this occasion Paul says, "I withstood
him to the face." With these incidents, Renan opines,
there began a division, which lasted for a century, of the
Christian Church into two parties, that of Paul and that
of the Judaisers. Nay, more, from the whole argument
of the Epistle to the Galatians, Renan draws the
inference that the agents of the party of Jerusalem
began, on quitting Antioch, a series of attempts to
destroy the authority of Paul among the very churches
which he himself had founded. Circular-letters were
despatched written in the name of the apostles, warning"
REN AN 137
the faithful against Paul, and Renan goes the length of
supposing it possible that the denunciatory epistle of Jude
may have been one of these circular-letters ! Paul, after
his death, is mostly forgotten or ignored, Renan thinks,
until the third century, when he becomes, and during
the two succeeding centuries remains, the founder of
Christian theology. Forgotten again during the Middle
Ages, he revives with the Reformation and shapes the
theology of Luther and Calvin.
Renan's final verdict on Paul is unsatisfactory. He is
greater throughout the volume than in the closing
chapter. Justice had been done to his commanding
personality, to his missionary zeal, to his singular com-
bination of independence with a readiness to make
concessions when they were useful to the cause, while
resolute to make none when an essential principle was at
stake. It is disappointing to be told that Paul may say
what he pleases, he is inferior to the other apostles. He
was, we are further told, proud, rude, given to self-asser-
tion, to believing that he was always in the right, to
adhering to his own opinion, and so on. But had he
been other than he was, had he been one of those meek
and saintly persons like St. Francis of Assisi and the
author of the Imitation of Christy whom Renan actually
sets above him, he would have succumbed to the apostles
who had been the personal followers of Jesus, he would
not have resisted their Judaising tendencies, he would
not have " withstood" Peter " to the face," he would not,
as Renan felicitously says, have "torn to pieces the
strangling swaddling-clothes of infant Christianity, and
proclaimed it to be no mere reform of Judaism, but to be
138 LIFE OF RENAN,
what it was, a religion complete in itself, existing by
itself." Paul had not, like the official apostles, ever
heard the words of the Master, but what is there in the
epistles of Peter, or John, or James, or Jude, so Christ-
like as that chapter on charity in the first epistle to the
Corinthians, which Renan admits to be, " in the whole
literature of Christianity, the only page that can be com-
pared to the sayings of Jesus."
CHAPTER VIII.
[1869-71.]
T^HE publication of the volume on St. Paul was pre-
ceded by that of "Questions of the Time" {Ques-
tions Contemporaines\ a collection of contributions to
various periodicals, some of the most important of which
have been already referred to. In the preface to the
volume Renan did what he had never or seldom done
before — he spoke his mind on the political state of
France. A crisis was evidently approaching. The policy
of the Emperor, Napoleon III., was changing again, and
for the worse. Acting for a time against the wishes of
the adventurers who were his coadjutors in the coup
d'Stat and his councillors afterwards, the Emperor had
again succumbed to their influence and to that of the
priesthood. The party which in 1868 had the ear of the
Emperor, is described and censured by Renan in his
preface, as that which insisted on the Pope's unqualified
retention of the temporal power, which wished to under-
mine the new Ising lom of Italy, and, making itself still more
dangerous, insisted that France ought to have had some
territorial compensation for her inertia after Sadowa and
I40 LIFE OF
her connivance at the formation of a North German
confederation under the hegemony of Prussia. The retro-
gressive tendencies of the Imperial pohcy, especially on
the Papal question, of course increased the exasperation
of the French Liberals at the personal government of
Napoleon III. and the triumph of the most reactionary
of his supporters. When there came the general election
of May 1869, the Liberals made a dead-lift effort to
increase the number, then very small, of their represen-
tatives in the Corps L^gislatif.
Renan had no love for the Empire, but he believed
that it could not be overturned without a revolution, and,
by two decades older than when he wrote LAvenir de la
Science^ of revolutions, in his view necessary evils at the best,
he thought that France had had enough. The Empire had
at least lasted nearly twenty years, and appeared to have
taken root. If its personal government could be trans-
formed into a constitutional one, Renan was ready to
support it. He had great hopes, moreover, of the
advanced Liberalism of Prince Napoleon, with whom
his intimacy had been steadily growing, and who much
admired him. Indeed, it was a standing reproach
of the clerical journals against the Prince that for
a series of years he was Renan's fellow-guest at an
annual dinner given by Sainte-Beuve on Good Friday,
when the company feasted instead of fasting! Renan
shared in the general excitement created by the political
situation, and became a candidate for the electoral dis-
trict, chiefly rural, of Seine-et-Marne, a department with
which he had no local connection beyond having some-
times spent in it a holiday. Canvassing and addressing
RENAN. 141
meetings formed a new sphere of action for the refined
and rather secluded scholar, who while immersed in the
bustle of electioneering was correcting the proofs of his
volume on St. Paul. In the forefront of his electoral
manifesto, placarded on the walls of their villages, the
electors read the emphatic words — " No Revolution !
No War! Progress! Liberty!^' which show that he
feared the results producible by the appeals of the
Chauvinists of the time — and they were to be found
out of as well as in the ranks of the Imperialists —
to the national susceptibilities of the French and
their jealousy of the new strength of their old
enemies the Prussians. It was doubtless a fear of this
kind which led him to say sadly, in the dedication of
St. Paul to his wife: — "In our youth we have seen
melancholy days, and I fear that long before we die
destiny will show us more of them. Several enormous
errors are dragging our country to the abyss, and
those who are warned against them reply with a smile."
Instead of advocating the revolution aimed at by the
Republican party, Renan asked for such a development
of the established state of things as, without disturbance,
would enable the country to carry out its will and to
effect profound reforms. Instead of encouraging the
Chauvinist spirit he called for a reduction of the army,
for a termination of the state of armed peace, and for a
shortening of the term of service (then nine years)
with the colours. He declared himself opposed to
distant expeditions (Mexico, Cochin-China), and ready
to vote for the immediate evacuation of Rome by the
French soldiers, whose bayonets supported the temporal
142 LIFE OF
sovereignty of the Pope. He was for a strict parlia-
mentary control over the Budget, and a great develop-
ment of popular education. He was for liberty of the
press and of association. As regarded religion, he would
leave the priest master in his chapel, but without political
or municipal influence, and Renan pronounced in
favour of the separation of Church and State at a more
convenient season. The most formidable of Renan's
competitors were a Government candidate, and a Repub-
lican who was recommended to the electors by Jules
Simon and Hippolyte Carnot. The seat was won by
the Republican with 10,484 votes, the Government
candidate coming next with 9167, and Renan last with
6886. He was twitted during the election with his
court connections, which meant, I suppose, his intimacy
with Prince Napoleon. His reply to the taunt was more
candid than prudent : " How do you expect me to defend
your interests if I systematically avoid seeing the persons
who control them ? " The story is told that the Emperor
expressed regret to Renan for his failure, and that he
replied, "If your Majesty had withdrawn your candi-
date, I should have succeeded."
The result of the general election was to treble the
numerical strength of the Liberal opposition, and this
was partly due, perhaps, to the previous mitigation by
the Emperor of the severe restrictions on the liberty of
the press. The Emperor began to waver, and as the
year wore on he made some concessions in the direction
of parliamentary modifications of his system of personal
government. Renan took advantage of the opportunity
to contribute to the Revue des Deux Mondes an article on
RENAN. 143
" Constitutional Monarchy in France " {La Monarchic
Constitutminelle en France)^ the gist of which was that he
doubted whether a republic could firmly establish itself
in France, that the general election of May had shown
the French resolved to have done with the mere
" simulacrum of parliamentary government " given them
by Napoleon, and that quite possibly he would give
them the reality instead of the semblance. A step in
that direction was taken by the appointment of Emile
Ollivier to the direction of affairs in January 1870. In
April a new constitution, allowing a parliamentary initia-
tive in legislation, was granted by the Emperor, and
approved by the plebiscite of May. On the nation the
result of the plebiscite had a very calming effect. The
legislative body, invested with its new power of initiation,
was busy with all sorts of Liberal measures, when sud-
denly the Empress, the hierarchy, the heads of the
military party, gained a victory over the hesitating
Emperor. In the July of 1870 France found herself at
war with Germany, and the beginning of the end was at
hand.
Some time previously in that year, in accordance with
the changed spirit of the Imperial regime^ Renan was
on the point of being restored to his chair at the College
de France. At the Easter of 1870 Sir M. E. Grant Duff
says, '* I took Sir John Lubbock to see him, and he
said to us, * I am going to begin my lectures as Luis
de Leon did when he resumed his, after having been
silenced for years by the Inquisition, with the words,
* As I was observing at our last meeting.'" But
some obstacle intervened, and it was only when the
144 LIFE OF
Second Empire had fallen that Kenan's restoration
took place. After the plebiscite, and its confirma-
tion of the concession of something like constitutional
government, so little expectation was there, even among
those near the throne, of an approach to war, that Prince
Napoleon started, with Renan for a companion, on a long
tour to the far north. On the 19th of August, 1870,
when Renan knew that all was lost, from his little
country house at Sevres he wrote to Sir M. E. Grant
Duff the letter from which I translate the following
sentences: —
**You knew perhaps that six weeks ago I made with Prince
Napoleon a little tour in Scotland, to Aberdeen, Inverness, and
Banff. I need not tell you that I thought often of you, and that on
asking numbers of times I found that you were not in those
latitudes. The Prince, too, was very anxious to make your
acquaintance.
' ' What a storm, dear friend, has come on us since then ! What
an attack of mental alienation ! What a crime ! The greatest
pang I ever felt in my life was when at Tromsoe," the port of
Hammerfest, northernmost of European towns, "we received the
dismal telegram informing us that war was certain and would be
immediate. I confess that I thought the danger of war averted
for years, perhaps for ever. The future of France appeared to
me depressing and commonplace, but such a cataclysm I did not
suspect. When he started the Prince had not a shadow of appre-
hension. What has happened has seemed to him, as to me, the
result of a sudden attack of madness."
A few weeks more and the news of the catastrophe
of Sedan reached Paris. Edmond de Goncourt describes
in his well-known Journal a melancholy gathering of
friends at an hotel where he and they were wont to
RENAN, 145
dine. He found Renan alone (the approach of the
German army to besiege Paris had driven him from
Sevres), reading a newspaper and making gestures of
despair. Others of the party arrive, Berthelot among
them, and nothing is talked of but the great catastrophe,
the impossibility of resistance, the incapacity of the
new Repubhcan Government of National Defence, the
alleged cruelties of the Prussian victors. Some one
ascribed the defeats suffered by the French to the use
of arms of precision as not suited to the French tempera-
ment. To fire and then employ the bayonet was needful
for the French soldier, otherwise he was paralysed. To
be made a machine did not suit him. Hence the
superiority of the Prussians. Whereupon Renan took
up his parable and spoke of the superior intelligence
and work of the Germans in all the departments which
he had studied. It was not surprising that in the art
of war, which, after all, is an inferior but complicated
art, they should have always attained superiority. "Yes,
Messieurs," he concluded, " the Germans are a superior
race." " Oh, oh ! " exclaimed the rest of the party in
protest. "Yes, much superior to us," Renan rejoined
with animation. " Catholicism cretinises the individual.
Education by the Jesuits or by the Brethren of the
Ecole Chretienne checks and represses all virtue of
the highest kind, while Protestantism develops it." At
last Goncourt himself exclaims, "It is all over then.
Nothing remains for us but to educate a generation for
vengeance." "No, no," cried Renan, rising from the
table, with his face flushed, " not vengeance, — perish
France, perish the Fatherland. There is above both
10
146 LIFE OF
the Kingdom of Duty, of Reason." He was interrupted
by a shout from the whole table, " There is nothing
above the Fatherland." Goncourt then describes Renan
as pacing round the table, waving his arms, reciting
in a loud voice fragments of Scripture, and declaring
that everything was to be found there.
Some ten years afterwards Renan declared publicly and
emphatically, but in general terms, that Goncourt's reports
(for there are several) of his prandial and post-prandial
talk are not to be trusted. In his perfectly natural and
legitimate indignation at the practice of printing during
the life-time of the speakers their free-and-easy conversa-
tions at the dinner-table, he added some strong and con-
temptuous language respecting the delinquent. . But, to
say the truth, it is clear that in reporting Renan's con-
versations in the company of their common friends,
Goncourt is often satisfactorily accurate. The proof
is that he reports thoughts as expressed, and phrases
as used by Renan which years afterwards made their
reappearance in Renan's writings. In the words attri-
buted above to Renan, except the " Perish France,
perish the Fatherland," there is really nothing that
Renan did not say subsequently in print Goncourt had
no grudge against Renan, though occasionally showing
signs of impatience with his exalted manner of express-
ing himself in the very mixed society of the dinner-table.
While the Commune was supreme in Paris, Goncourt
reports Renan as protesting, "with justice and eloquence,"
against the want of courage of the parliamentary repre-
sentatives of Paris in not stirring a finger against the
shameful rule of the Commune.
RE NAN, 147
" He said that they ought to have gone about in the city, and,
addressing groups, have made them offer resistance. He said that
if he had been honoured by the mandate of his fellow-citizens he
would not have failed in what he called a duty, I should have
wished, he added, to show myself among them, carrying on my
back something that would have spoken to their eyes, something
that would have been a mark, a sign, a language, something like
the yoke which the prophet Isaiah or Ezekiel bore upon his
shoulders."^
How characteristic this last remark !
At the end of April, 187 1, sick of the scene which
Paris presented, Renan left it for Versailles. There, in
deep depression of mind, he wrote the startling " Philo-
sophical Dialogues " {Dialogues Philosophiques\ which he
did not publish until five years later. Of them more here-
after. In 1870-71 Renan was engaged in a contro-
versy with Strauss (whom he always calls " The Master "),
so that nothing might be wanting to the sorrow with
which he had witnessed the war destroy all his hopes
of an intellectual alliance between France and Germany
in the cause of spiritual freedom and the highest
culture. The author of the Leben Jesu had sent Renan
the volume of lectures on Voltaire, which Strauss
read before the Princess Alice of England and Hesse
and her little court. Renan, in acknowledging the
reception of the book, praised it highly, and expressed
his deep sorrow at the war, which boded ill for the hoped-
for intellectual alliance of France and Germany. Strauss
made this expression of regret the text for a long letter
to Renan, written a fortnight before Sedan, but when
the triumph of the German arms was virtually achieved.
^ See Jeremiah xxviii. 10.
148 LIFE OF ^
Nothing more friendly to Renan personally than the
tone of the letter, but nothing more disagreeable to
Renan as a Frenchman than its tenor. Strauss sketched
the history of the claim of France to the primacy of
Europe from the time of Louis XIV. onwards. To
maintain its political primacy France, under its successive
rulers down to Napoleon III., had endeavoured to weaken
Germany, to keep it disunited, and until the time of
Frederick the Great the old German Empire had per-
mitted France to annex sHces of German territory. The
primacy of France was now destroyed by the overwhelm-
ing victory of Germany. The war had been wantonly
begun by France, and to defend itself against future
attacks of the kind, Germany, reunited, would take back
the German provinces filched from her by France. The
French had many excellent qualities, but their great fault,
a thirst for glory, and for domineering over other nations,
had been fostered by circumstances, and especially by the
two Napoleons. Guarantees against French ambition
must be exacted. Then and only then could there be
any talk of a friendly union between France and
Germany for the promotion of culture and the arts of
peace.
In due course (the siege of Paris had just begun)
Renan replied. While admitting that France had
been to blame in going to war, which he attributed to
the Emperor, not to the nation, he laid stress on the
assent of Napoleon III. to the results of the Prusso-
Austrian war of 1866, as constituting a claim to more
consideration than he had received from Prussia. The
loss which the world would sustain by the annihilation
RENAN. 149
of France, and the gain to the world from a European
intervention to prevent her dismemberment, were in-
sisted on. As one biographer of Jesus writing to
another, Renan concluded with a little homily on the
forgiveness of injuries enjoined in the Gospel. *' That
which admits to Valhalla excludes from the kingdom of
God. Have you remarked that neither in the beatitudes,
nor in the Sermon on the Mount, nor in the Gospels,
is there a w^ord giving a place to military virtues among
those which gain the kingdom of God ? "
Strauss took up his pen and wrote a rejoinder, still
personally friendly in tone, but in tenor even more drastic
than his former letter. Whatever the folly of their
governors, the French themselves were lovers of peace,
were they ? How came it then that Renan's pacific
countrymen had been claiming for fifty years the left
bank of the Rhine, and that after Sadowa, which cost
them not a soldier nor an inch of territory, they
demanded compensation? As to the annihilation of
France, which Renan predicted as the result of her
loss of Alsace and Lorraine, Strauss replied that they
were German provinces which had been taken from
Germany, and that if Germany had survived the loss of
them so surely might France. To Renan's proposal of
a Congress to settle the terms of peace, Strauss opposed
recollections of the Congress of Vienna, which imposed
on Prussia fetters not broken by her until 1866.
Renan's second reply to Strauss is a very clever and
suggestive lecture on the danger of pushing too far the
application of the principle of nationalities, involved in
Strauss's argument. That principle is only a hundred
ISO LIFE OF
years old. In the days of yore the transfer of a province
from one sovereign to another v^^as a mere transfer of
soil, the inhabitants were for the most part indifferent to
the change. It is not so now. One nation has no
right to keep in subjection to it another nation against
that other nation's will. Hence, Renan says, French
Liberals were for the Venetians and the Lombards, against
Austria; for Bohemia and Hungary against the centralisa-
tion of Vienna, for Poland against Russia, for the Greeks
and Slavs of Turkey against the Turks. But the claim
of Germany to annex, say Alsace, is not founded on any
wish of the inhabitants to be separated from France; on
the contrary, they are powerfully attached to France.
Alsace is to be annexed to Germany because it is German
by language and race. If a country is to be dismembered
on such a pretext, where is such a policy to end ? Let
Germany look to it. Prussia has never assimilated
Posen as France has assimilated Alsace. Renan
threatens Germany with the Pan-Slavic movement,
which is a natural accompaniment of the Germanic
movement. France might have been Germany's ally
against Pan-Slavism; but henceforth, in consequence of
the policy of Prussian statesmen, France will for long have
no other objective than the re-conquest of her lost
provinces. The policy forced on her will be to foment
the ever-growing hatred of the Slavs for the Germans, to
encourage Pan-Slavism, and to minister unreservedly to
Russian ambition, — a prophecy of Renan's which has
since acquired a certain significance. With Renan's
rejoinder the controversy closed. Renan respected Strauss
too much to harbour any rancour against him. Only
RENAN, 151
the year after the termination of the controversy he
prefixed an amiable introduction to a French translation
of essays by Strauss.^
Having vindicated before the foreigner what he
regarded as the rights and claims of France, Renan,
with considerable courage, proceeded to address some
very frank monitions to his countrymen on the errors of
their past and on the necessity for amending them. In
187 1, the year of the Treaty of Peace between France and
Germany, Renan published " The Intellectual and Moral
Reform of France " {Refor7ne Intellectuelle et Morale de la
France). Its thesis was that France might become great
again, and profit by her very fall. The work included an
interesting sketch of French history from earlier to the
latest times. For the restoration of France to her place
among the nations, Renan recommends her to follow the
example of her Prussian conquerors after Jena, and to
^ The one personal reproach, and it was delicately expressed,
which came from Kenan's pen during the controversy, was well
deserved by Strauss. He had published his correspondence with
Renan, so far as it had then gone, for the benefit of German soldiers
wounded in the war. In the last letter to his "illustrious master,"
Renan thus gently twits him in regard to that proceeding : — * ' Heaven
preserve me from raising a quibble in connection with literary
copyright ! Moreover, the act to which you may have made me
contribute is an act of humanity, and if my poor prose has succeeded in
procuring a few cigars to those who plundered my little house at Sevres,
I thank you for having furnished me with an opportunity for making
my conduct conform to some of those precepts of Jesus which I take
to be the most authentic. But certainly if you had allowed me to
publish a product of your pen, never, oh never, should I have
thought of issuing an edition of it for the benefit of our Hotel des
Invalides " — the Chelsea Hospital of Paris.
152 LIFE OF
think of nothing but internal re-organisation and reform.
There must be, to begin with, universal military service
as in Germany. Prussia, moreover, owed her triumph also
to her king and to her aristocracy. Renan dreamt of
the re-establishment of royalty in France, of a young king,
earnest and austere, supported by a patriotic aristocracy,
and summoning to his councils men devoted to the work of
reform. Renan's dream was not destined to be realised,
but a French noblesse did in some measure survive, and at
one time it seemed as if royalty might have been restored
in France but for the fanatic obstinacy of the Count
de Chambord, though the rule of Henri Cinq,
founded on divine right and leaning on the Roman
Catholic Church, would surely have been very little
relished by Renan. Universal suffrage he distrusted
thoroughly; it had given France Napoleon III. and all
the mischiefs that followed from his rule, yet it could not
be revoked. To improve its operation Renan recom-
mended a system of double election. This would give
80,000 electors, to be divided into electoral colleges, one
for each department. Their members were to be chosen
for fifteen or twenty years, which would ensure stability,
and as they would be the flower of the electoral popula-
tion, the local aristocracy, the local notables, their probity
could be relied on. Then there was to be a second
chamber, of whom thirty members out of three hundred
and sixty were to be survivors of ancient families, after a
historical and critical investigation of their pedigrees, and
their seats were to be hereditary. The others, members
only for life, were to be elected partly by the depart-
mental councils-general (a still existing institution some-
RENAN. 153
what analogous to our County Councils), fifty by the
head of the State, the upper house would itself elect
thirty. The hundred and twenty or thirty remaining
members would represent the great interests and organisa-
tions of the country. The army and navy would send
marshals and admirals; the magistracy, the teaching
bodies, the ministers of religion would send their
heads. Each class of the Institute, each industrial
corporation, each Chamber of Commerce would con-
tribute a member. So would each great town with more
than a population of 100,000, Paris having four or five.
Such an Upper Chamber, Renan opined, would represent
whatever in the State possessed individuality; it would be
a " body truly conservative of all rights and of all Hberties."
^' Two bodies thus formed would contribute to Liberal
progress and not to revolution." In consideration of
certain peculiarities of the French character, as he politely
phrased it, Renan even went so far as to propose the
non-publication of parliamentary debates, which would
avert prolixity and declamation, and what we call
" Buncombe " oratory. If France was to reform itself
and prepare for revanche, it should not waste its
strength in parliamentary contests. " Prussia would not
have effected its regeneration after Jena if it had adopted
the practice of parliamentary life. It went through forty
years of silence, w^hich contributed in a marvellous
degree to temper the character of the nation '* — quite a
Carlylean deliverance! On the other hand, with a
Parliament dumb, so far as the outer world was con-
cerned, Renan allowed the utmost liberty to the press,
but was doubtful of extending it to the clubs.
154 LIFE OF
One of the most singular passages in Kenan's dis-
quisition is that in which he pleads for extensive
colonisation of a purely military kind. After his ex-
perience of the Commune he was no longer, as in the
days of his parliamentary candidature, opposed to "distant
expeditions." Men who created disturbances at home
could be both usefully and congenially employed abroad.
" A nation which does not colonise is irrevocably doomed
to socialism, to the war of rich and poor." The spectacle
of civilised nations conquering each other is horrible,
but the regeneration of inferior by superior races is "in
the providential order of humanity." The man of the
people is in France much more of a fighter than an
artisan. Rather than work he fights, behind barricades
or otherwise. Decant, Renan says with the utmost gravity,
this "devouring activity" of the French ouvrier into
countries which, like China, call for foreign conquest; a
curious monition when viewed in the light of contemporary
events. Nature has made the Chinese a race of work-
men, gifting them with wonderful manual dexterity, but
leaving them without a sense of honour. "Give them
a just government and they will be satisfied. The
European race is one of masters and soldiers; let it
conquer and rule the labouring races, the Chinaman, the
negro, the fellah. Every one of our revolutionists is
more or less a soldier who has missed his vocation, a
being intended for a heroic life, and one whom you set
to work in an occupation contrary to his race, a bad
workman, too good a soldier. Now, the kind of life
which drives our workers to revolt is happiness to a
Chinaman, to a fellah, who are not in the least military."
RE NAN. T55
This plan for the cure or prevention of socialism possessed,
at the time when it was broached, a certain audacious
originality. Whether consciously or not, his countrymen
have since then been busily putting in practice Renan's
recommendation.
CHAPTER IX. -
[1871-78.]
T7OUR years elapsed between the publication of 5/. Paul
and, in 1873, that oi L^ Antechrist (The Antichrist),
the fourth volume of the Origines. Renan prepared him-
self for its composition by a journey to Rome, and an
exploration of such of the localities of the Eternal City
as were associated with its early Christian Church, the
persecution of which by Nero, the Antichrist, contributed
largely to the production of the Apocalypse ascribed to
St. John. Renan received an enthusiastic welcome from
his friends and admirers in Rome. Such a reception
given to the author of the Vie de Jesus in the capital
of Roman Catholic Christendom, so scandalised the
faithful and irritated the Pope, that the Holy Father
issued an allocution in which Renan was denounced as
" the European blasphemer ! "
Nowhere in Renan's writings more than m LAntechrist
is there a greater exhibition of his power as a dramatic
historian and a vivid portrait-painter, and of his singular
skill in seizing in the huge mass of literature, even
though often apocryphal, to be read and ransacked,
whatever could give life and colour to his narrative.
LIFE OF RENAN. 157
With the opening of the volume St. Paul reappears,
a captive at Rome. While still harassed by the rivalry
and enmity of the Judeo-Christians, the great apostle
is represented as preaching in his chains success-
fully to the Gentiles, and for a time made happy by
the gifts and sympathy of the churches which he had
founded far away, such, for instance, as that of Philippi.
Renan even supposes him to have been joined at Rome
by Peter, who then visited it for the first time, and who,
though inclining to the Judaic form of Christianity so
distasteful to Paul, is represented as heartily admiring
the Apostle of the Gentiles and readily following in his
footsteps. Renan thus rejects the tradition dear to the
Roman Catholic Church that Peter's arrival in Rome
preceded that of Paul by nearly twenty years, while at
the same time he repudiates a favourite Protestant
theory that Peter never visited Rome at all. From the
social isolation w^hich they practised, from their refusal
to join in the Pagan worship, the Christians were un-
popular at Rome, all the more so from the success of
their propaganda. In the popular imagination they
were guilty of crimes such as those which were ascribed
to the unfortunate and cruelly persecuted Jews of the
Middle Ages. It needed only a pretext to make the
Roman Christians victims of a persecution, and three
years after Paul's arrival there such a pretext was afforded
by the burning of Rome. Renan accepts the tradition
that if Nero was not, as is possible, the actual author of
the fire, he encouraged it when it had begun, in order to
gratify his insane vanity by building on the area of the
conflagration a new Rome which would be called after
158 LIFE OF
him, or at least to provide himself with a site for a new
, palace of his own. In the matter of their temples and
other ancient memorials the Romans were highly con-
servative, and even a despotic emperor had to respect
their conservatism. No law of expropriation could have
cleared the spaces on w^hich Nero dreamt of carrying out
his architectural plans; the great fire of Rome did more
for him in this way than any law could have done.
Renan portrays with wonderful skill and vigour, as
if he had borrowed for the nonce the pen of Victor
Hugo, the character and career of Nero, his colossal
vanity developing a preternatural imbecility and jealousy,
to which ministered the cruelty of a savage and brutal
inventiveness unparalleled in the history of man. Renan
gives in all their horrible detail the varied atrocities of
the massacre, the cunningly devised, the unutterable
tortures and outrages to which the Christians of Rome,
young and old, male and female, were subjected by
Nero on the plea that they, the most innocent and harm-
less of his subjects, had been the incendiaries of Rome.
Renan supposes that Peter and Paul perished in that
Reign of Terror of July- August a.d. 64, and that the
Apostle John, if he had accompanied his brother Peter
to Rome, escaped and fled to Ephesus, where he
laboured to Judaise the churches of Asia Minor.
Four years after the perpetration of his atrocious
massacre Nero came to his dismal end. The monster,
there is no doubt, was popular with the lower classes of
Rome, principally because he had ministered to their
insatiable appetite for public games and shows. This
popularity encouraged belief in a report that he was not
RE NAN. 159
dead, but had taken refuge with those old enemies of
Rome, the Parthians, and would return at the head of an
eastern army to punish his enemies. The report that
their persecutor was to re-appear victorious, spread con-
sternation among the Christians. A false Nero even
established himself at Cythnos, one of the Cyclades.
At Rome all was in confusion. Otho was disputing the
empire with Galba. The crisis would perhaps end in the
dreaded restoration of Nero. The advent of Antichrist
seemed at hand. This fear, in Renan's theory, inspired
the author of the oldest book (apart from the epistles) of
the New Testament, and the only one, without exception,
the date of which can be definitely fixed. Towards the
close of January a.d. 69 was launched what is known to
us as " The Revelation of St. John the Divine."
Renan gives an analysis of the Apocalypse, with long
passages of it translated into felicitous French, quotations
more needed in France than in England, where almost
every house contains a copy of the Bible in the verna-
cular. His analysis is accompanied by a commentary
which is generally ingenious (the identification of the
Beast and his number 666 with Nero had been effected
before Renan), and in which episodes of the book are
elucidated by references to contemporary events, pesti-
lences, physical portents, volcanic eruptions, and so forth.
The whole spirit of the Apocalypse is Judaic, according to
Renan, who sees St. Paul distinctly aimed at in such de-
nunciations as those hurled in the second chapter against
*'them which say they are apostles but are not," "which
say they are Jews and are not," " that hold the doctrine
of Balaam, who taught ... to eat things sacrificed
i6o LIFE OF
unto idols." As to the vexed question of the authorship,
Renan thinks it " probable " that it was the work of the
Apostle John, or that at least it was accepted by him,
and addressed under his patronage to the churches of
Asia. Renan gives, evidently from personal observation,
a picturesque description of Patmos and its environ-
ment, as less suited to the composition of a work of the
gloomy grandeur of the Apocalypse, than to a " delight-
ful romance like Daphnis and Chloe, or to the pastoral
poetry of a Theocritus and a Moschus."
Many pages of L^ Antichrist are devoted to the revolt
of the Jews, with its sanguinary episodes of reciprocal
massacre, and to the finale of the struggle, the siege and
destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. Renan's very
vivid narrative of these occurrences is varied by life-like
sketches of Vespasian and Titus, and by a skilful delinea-
tion of the career, and a discriminating estimate of the
character, of Josephus, in which it is shown that in his
narrative he often sacrifices truth to the wish to stand
well with his later patrons among the conquerors of his
country. The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple
Renan considers highly favourable to Christianity. If
the Church of Jerusalem, which extorted from Paul him-
self concessions to Judaism, had with its heads remained
grouped around the Temple, it would have continued to
be the preponderant Christian organisation, to have kept
up a war against the liberal and comprehensive policy of
Paul, and to have claimed to exact from Christian con-
verts the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, and the re-
pulsive rite of circumcision. The incidents of the Jewish
rebellion drove the surviving relatives of Jesus, and
RE NAN. I6l
the heads of the church of Jerusalem, to take refuge
beyond the Jordan, and the destruction of Jerusalem
prevented them from returning to it. The catastrophe
which befell the Holy City made possible the severance
of Christianity from Judaism. "The Temple once
destroyed, the Christians think no more of it. For them
Jesus will now be all in all."
The volume on the Antichrist off his hands, Renan
set to work on another to be devoted largely to the early
history of the Gospels. In the trying summer of 1875
his health broke down, and he resolved on a voyage for
its recovery. Just then he received, and accepted, an
unexpected invitation to attend a Scientific Congress at
Palermo. The literary result was the charming paper,
" Twenty Days in Sicily " ( Vingt jours en Sicile)^ which
he contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes. Renan's
quick glance took in everything, beauty and grandeur in
scenery, archaeological remains, ancient and mediaeval,
church architecture of the time of the Norman occupation,
yet modelled on the style of the Mohammedan mosque,
a certain unity of national character evolved out of
the fusion of the most diverse races, Sicanians and
Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans,
French, Germans, Spaniards, Neapolitans. The people he
liked, and he was not at all of the opinion of the foreign
observer who, being consulted on the reforms needed to
improve the country, suggested, as the one necessary, " an
inundation which would reach the summit of Etna, and
clear Sicily of the Sicilians." The malpractices of the
Sicilians, their addiction to the vendetta, and to brigand-
age, Renan ascribed to bad government in general and
1 62 LIFE OF
to a defective administration of justice in particular. He
praises their good-heartedness, their enthusiasm, and
above all, their intellectual quickness. At Girgenti, built
on the site of the ancient Agrigentum, he found held in
remarkable honour the memory of its illustrious citizen,
that mysterious and mystical philosopher, Empedocles. A
statue of him stands by the side of that of Victor Em-
manuel. In the nomenclature of public places the name of
Empedocles figures as largely as that of Garibaldi himself.
Renan regards the ancient sage as having, to some extent,
anticipated Newton, Darwin and Hegel, but admits that
the local popularity of Empedocles is also due to his
success in overthrowing the aristocracy of Agrigentum.
The little harbour of Girgenti, from which Sicilian
sulphur is, or was, largely exported, is called Porto
Empedocle, Renan visited the sulphur-mines, the opera-
tions at which, like everything else in Sicily, were of
primitive simplicity. He saw with pity a number of
children, each with a lamp attached to his brow, being
let down three or four hundred yards into the mines.
Thence they brought up the raw material which w^as
carried on asses' backs to the places where the sulphur was
extracted. " What toil might be spared," he exclaims,
" by a windlass and some rails ! " This is, perhaps, the
only philanthropic remark on a matter of industrial detail
to be found in all Renan's writings.
Renan's reputation was European, and in 1877 he
received and accepted another invitation to deliver at
the Hague an address in connection with the movement
then proceeding, under the auspices of Dutch royalty,
to celebrate the bi-centenary of the death of Spinoza.
RE NAN. 163
In his fine address he dwelt on the purity and simplicity
of Spinoza's character, the unworldliness of the man who
philosophised, not only contentedly, but cheerfully, on two-
pence halfpenny a day. Renan pronounced him "the first
saint whom the modern philosophy of reason had pro-
duced." The Judaism which gave him birth cast him
out. "It is the way with religious communions, the
cradles of so much that is good. They claim to imprison
for ever the life which has had a beginning in them.
We hear the egg charging with ingratitude the chicken
which has escaped from it. The egg at its own time
was necessary. Then it becomes a hindrance : it must
be broken." Parted from the synagogue, Spinoza devoted
himself for twenty years to meditation on the idea of
God. He saw that the infinite could not be subjected
to limitations, that the Divinity is all or nothing. On
Spinoza's so-called Pantheism, in which the universe is
regarded as one substance, with two attributes, thought
and extension, Renan touches rather hghtly. The modern
distaste for systems, and abstract formulas, prevents,
he opines, an absolute acceptance of the propositions
which, Spinoza believed, contained the secret of the
universe. But, whatever his shortcomings, — he lived
in an age when physiology and chemistry were in their
infancy, an age in which reflection, even as developed by
Descartes, was too exclusively mathematical and mechani-
cal, — Spinoza had been pronounced by Goethe, Schelling,
and Hegel, " the father of modern thought."
In the same year (1877) was issued the fifth instalment
of the Origines, " The Gospels and the Second Christian
Generation " (" Les Evangiles et la Seconde Generation
i64 LIFE OF
Chr^tienne"). In the introduction to the Vie de Jesus,
Renan had necessarily said something respecting the
origin, characteristics, and comparative value of the Gos-
pels. The new volume contains his matured opinion on
the Synoptic Gospels, leaving his final word on the Gospel
of St. John to be spoken in a subsequent sixth volume.
The heads of the Jerusalem Church who took refuge
beyond the Jordan, at Pella, and in the adjacent
province of Batanea, called themselves Ebionites and
were strict followers of the law, differing only from
ordinary Jews in that they believed Jesus to be the Mes-
siah, and anticipated his second coming. It was among
them, cherishing as they did memories of the sayings and
doings of the Master, that a written Gospel first arose.
This was the "Gospel according to the Hebrews," of
which, much altered from its original form, and there-
fore rejected ultimately by the Church, only fragments
survive. The Gospel of the Hebrews was written in
Syro-Chaldaic, the language of its compilers and of
Jesus; Renan assigns the date of its composition to
A.D. 75 or thereabouts. From the Greek Gospels,
which followed and supplanted it, it was distinguished
by the prominence given in it to the Apostle James.
But it is not likely that this Syro-Chaldaic Gospel
reached the far-off Western Church. For this Church a
Greek Gospel was needed, and the want was supplied by
Mark, about a.d. 76. Mark had been the disciple of
Peter, whom he followed, it is supposed, to Rome, and
probably there he compiled his gospel, after the death of
Peter, from whom he had learned much that he wrote
of the sayings and doings of the Lord. Renan adheres
RENAN. 165
strongly to the view that Mark's is the oldest of the
Greek gospels, and that, as an historical document, it is
greatly superior to the others.
The gospel of Mark was, however, meagre in its
reports of the sayings of Jesus. To supply this, its chief
deficiency, the Gospel called St. Matthew's was com-
piled. In spite of the assertion of Papias and others that
Matthew wrote a gospel in "Hebrew" (Syro-Chaldaic),
and the accredited supposition that our gospel of
Matthew is a Greek translation of that *' Hebrew" one,
Renan rejects an authorship by Matthew, and ascribes
the gospel which goes by his name to an unknown
compiler, whom he calls pseudo-Matthew. There were,
in existence, according to Renan, collections of the
sayings of Jesus, classified according to their subjects.
Pseudo-Matthew took the gospel of Mark as he found it
to begin with, and intercalated, in the narrative, fuller
reports of the sayings of Jesus in those collections, and in
the Gospel of the Hebrews. Several additions to Mark,
such as the legends of the childhood of Jesus, pseudo-
Matthew made probably from the Gospel of the Hebrews.
When he had before him narratives of incidents more
fully recorded than in Mark, he thrust them into
the text of Mark, without expunging the narratives of
them already existing there; hence the "doubles" so
visible in pseudo-Matthew. Further, pseudo-Matthew
modified, and softened, several of Mark's versions of the
sayings and doings of Jesus, which, with the lapse of time,
had become distasteful to the early Christians. Renan's
critical acumen is nowhere more conspicuously displayed
than in the passages in which he indicates the use which
i66 LIFE OF
the pseudo-Matthew makes of Mark and of the Gospel
of the Hebrews. Of course it is the amplitude of
the reports of the sayings of Jesus which renders the
Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew so far superior to that
of Mark, though inferior in the historical value of
its narrative. Renan supposes that the gospel of the
pseudo-Matthew was written in Syria after the arrival
there of the Gospel of Mark, the deficiencies of which
were observed, and that it was written in Greek for
Greek-speaking Judeo-Christians. In order to give it an
authority greater than that belonging to the name of
Mark, the new gospel w^as ascribed to St. Matthew.
Renan places about a.d. 85 the final redaction of the
Gospel as we now have it "according to St. Matthew."
The Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew had not, Renan
thinks, reached Rome from Syria by a.d, 95, about
which time Luke is supposed to have composed, at
Rome, the third gospel. Wherever Luke agrees with
Matthew, Matthew agrees with Mark. Luke knew only
Mark and not Matthew, whose admirable reports of the
sayings of Jesus are consequently not reproduced in
Luke. Luke adds much to Mark, from oral tradition
and otherwise; perhaps he had before him a Greek
translation of the Gospel of the Hebrews. Luke is the
most hterary of the evangelists. Much of his first three
chapters, the pastoral episode of the shepherds and
the angels, with the canticles which were to serve as the
basis of a new liturgy, are the invention of his genius.
Renan, with his quick eye and subtle sympathetic insight,
notes in Luke two characteristics. One, which might be
expected in a friend and follower of Paul, is his sympathy
RE NAN, 167
with well-intentioned pagans and heretics; his is the
parable of the good Samaritan. Another is his glorifi-
cation of poverty, and sympathy with the lowly and with
the penitent sinner : his is the parable of Lazarus and
Dives. According to Matthew and Mark, both the male-
factors crucified with Jesus revile him; according to
Luke, one of them is penitent, and Paradise is promised
him. On the other hand, Luke softens what, with the
course of time, it seemed requisite to soften. The Eli^
Eli^ lama sabachthani of Matthew and Mark had come
to appear discordant with the growing conception of the
divinity of Jesus. The despairing ejaculation, ^^My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken nieV becomes, in Luke,
^^ Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.^'' In his estim-
ate of the Synoptic Gospels, Renan considers the Gospel
of St. Matthew the most important, from its evidently faith-
ful and eminently ample reports of the sayings of Jesus.
Indeed, all things considered, it is, in Kenan's judgment,
not only the most important of Christian books, but the
most important book ever written. " The world has read
habitually a book in which the priest is always in the
wrong, in which respectable people are all hypocrites, while
those in authority show themselves to be scoundrels, and
all the rich are damned. The Catholic Church has
prudently put on one side this, the most revolutionary
and dangerous book that there is, but has not been alto-
gether able to prevent it from bearing fruit. ... In our
own day the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew, against
the Pharisees, is still the most ferocious satire on those who
cover themselves with the name of Jesus, and whom, if he
returned to the world, he would pursue with scourges."
i68 LIFE OF
With the story of the Gospels, and of the second
Christian generation, is artistically yet naturally inter-
woven that of the contemporary Roman Empire. There
are masterly sketches of the emperors of the Flavian
dynasty, the aged, awkward, and parsimonious Vespasian,
with his rather coarse jocularity, and his son Titus,
enamoured of the Jewish Berenice and tolerant of the
Jews. The Roman aristocracy looked down on these
two Flavii as parvenus, and the philosophers dreamt of
turning the Empire into a municipal republic ; but both
aristocrats and sages had reason to regret their moderate
rule when Vespasian and Titus were succeeded by the
last of the imperial Flavii, the diabolical Domitian,
whose reign Renan compares to " a vampire gorging
itself on the corpse of expiring humanity, an open war
declared against all goodness." At the same time the
monster played the part of a restorer of the decaying
pagan worship, a pretension which enhanced the cruelty
of his persecutions of the Christians. The empire
breathed again with the accession of Nerva, the first of
the five successive emperors by whom the Roman world
was governed so wisely and so well as to reconcile the
philosophers to the principate. Yet under these wise
emperors the Christians suffered a permanent persecu-
tion worse than the intermittent persecutions of Nero
and Domitian. From Nerva to Marcus Antoninus these
great and beneficent rulers were not only conservative
guardians of the pagan religions, but, for reasons of state,
were more severe than their predecessors in dealing with
private associations formed even for charitable and
philanthropic purposes. Of such the Christian churches
RENAN. 169
naturally seemed the most dangerous, since their mem-
bers kept themselves apart, performed no civic duties,
refused to recognise the divinity of the emperors, and
dimly threatened to become an imperium in imperio.
Such a man as Tacitus could see nothing in Christi-
anity but a ** detestable superstition." Such a man
as Pliny, when Imperial legate in Bithynia, puts to
death, as a matter of course, those who are brought
before him charged with being Christians and refusing
to deny the charge. The great and wise Trajan approved
what Pliny had done. " There is no uncertainty now,"
Renan says. " To be a Christian is to contravene the
law, to deserve death. From Trajan onwards, Christi-
anity is a state crime." The local authorities and the
fanatical populations of the provinces acted on this
presumption. ** Whoso never sacrificed, or when passing
before a sacred edifice did not send it a kiss of adoration,
risked his life."
Many pages of Renan's volume are devoted to the
birth and growth of those heresies touching the divine
and human nature of Jesus, which increased and multi-
plied as the years rolled on, and which make much of
the early history of Christianity so tedious, unedifying,
and even irritating. But in the letter of Clement to the
Corinthians, in the effect which it produced at the time,
and the immense authority which it wielded afterwards,
we see in Renan's pages the germ of what was to
become the predominating authority of the bishops of
Rome, an authority exercised with a practical wisdom
characteristic of Rome, and which, whatever else may be
said against it, was useful to the progress of Christianity
I70 LIFE OF
in suppressing the war of sects and parties, and sub-
stituting for innumerable little religious and discordant
republics the unity given to the Christian world by a
powerful ecclesiastical monarchy at Rome, with general
councils for its parliaments occasionally. The time
came when, of course, this despotism of Rome proved
to be as maleficent as it had once been useful.
Renan's literary reputation was now so great that any-
thing from his pen was assured of a wide-spread welcome,
and the publishing house of Levy had no reason to regret
the bargain made with Renan by its deceased founder.
His new volume of collected essays. Miscellanies of Travel
and History {Melanges de Voyage et d^ Histoire)^ published
in 1878, the year after Les Evangiles, contained articles,
chiefly philological, of his earliest years, which he had
not ventured to reprint in the Essais de Critique et de
Morale^ or in the Essais d"* Histoire Religieuse, Travel is
represented in them by the " Twenty Days in Sicily,''
noticed previously, and by " UAncienne Egypte "
(Ancient Egypt), in which he gave an account of what
he had seen, learned, and thought during his visit to
Egypt, with Mariette for his companion and guide.
The article contains an interesting parallel between
Egypt and China, as both of them exhibitions of
the reign of absolute mediocrity, and owing their
profusion of chronicles to their use of the art of
writing long before it was known to the Aryans. In
an article on the Caesars, Renan defends, a propos of
Augustus, the patronage of genius by princes. Patron-
age by the people would be better, but it is only
once or twice in Greece, and a little in the Italian
RE NAN, 171
republics of the Middle Ages, that the people have
encouraged genius. The great modern republic, the
United States, lives, as far as art and pure science are
concerned, on borrowings from Europe. Other articles,
testifying once more to Renan's wide range of sympathy
and keenness of insight, deal with the Shah Nameh of
Firdusi, in which the poet of Mohammedanised Persia
seems to regret the old religion of Zoroaster, the Golden
Meadows of Magoudi, full of racy anecdotes and sayings
of the Abbaside caliphs (of whom the Haroun al Ras-
chid of the Arabian Nights is the popular type), while
in the article on Mohammedan Spain, the supposed
Christian hero, the Cid, is shown to have been a mere
adventurer, a condottiere, now fighting for Christ, now
for Mohammed. There is a very agreeable sketch of Ibn
Batuta, the Arab traveller of the fourteenth century, who
rambles from Tangier to China, finding everywhere
countrymen, for everywhere are Mohammedans, and *' the
Mussulman has no other country than Islam." The
Mohammedan lover of travel could in those days indulge
his taste for wandering very cheaply and pleasantly. Every-
where he finds his own language, and hospitality w^as a
duty which one Mussulman owed to another. For thirty
years Ibn Batuta led a delightful wandering life, and
among the interesting quotations which Renan gives
from his book is an account of Mecca during an
affluence to it of the customary pilgrims. A volume on
the Desert and the Soudan enables Renan, as its reviewer,
to exhibit the customs, language, and religion of the
Arabs, preserved in all their primitive purity in the Soudan,
and not losing, as in great towns, their best characteristics.
172 LIFE OF RENAN,
Reviewing another volume on Kabylia, Renan takes
great pains, in an article on " Berber Society/' to sketch
the strange social condition of the Kabyles of Algeria,
a people descended from the Numidians of Massinissa
and Jugurtha, with a language and even an alphabet of
their own, neither of them Aryan or Semitic. The
modern Berbers are pure democrats, without chiefs
and without a military class. The tribes and villages
are always at war with each other, but within the tribe
and the village there is a plenitude of customs establish-
ing a close fraternity for mutual help and the support of
the poor by the community. Renan saw in the Kabyles
social democracy realised, and as they have been for
centuries as they are, they strengthened his favourite
belief that no great polity can issue from democracy as
democracy. One of the most interesting articles in the
volume is an article on Joseph Victor Le Clerc, the early
friend and patron of Renan, whose solid erudition and
patient labour were of the old school which Renan loved.
Reference has been already made to the Histoire Litter-
aire de la France^ edited by Le Clerc, with Renan's occa-
sional assistance. Among Renan's contributions to it was
a dissertation on the condition of the fine arts in France
in the fourteenth century, another proof of his versatility.
During some of the years of Renan's biography already
surveyed, and all those still to be surveyed, proceeded
the issue of the monumental work, the Corpus Semzticarum
Inscriptionum. Renan's only contribution to it was the
section containing Phoenician inscriptions, but he was
the founder of the opus magnum^ and to the end of his
life he watched over its development with parental care.
CHAPTER X.
[1878-92.]
A FTER abandoning the Church and the Christian
"^^ faith, Renan found himself in possession of a
philosophy of life which, gradually developed, sustained
him in his difficult struggle. The true, the good, and
the beautiful were the new Trinity which he worshipped,
and to worship them was happiness enough. It has
been seen how, in the preface to his translation of the
Book of Job, he declared for Duty to be performed at
all hazards, without hope of reward here and hereafter.
Kant's categorical imperative had never a more earnest
devotee than Renan. He was not visited by that
longing, so often felt by the thoughtful, for a revela-
tion from above, dissipating all doubts, throwing
celestial light on the duty and destinies of man, and
annihilating the problematic in life. In the prayer which
closes his remarkable essay on " The Metaphysics of
the Future" {La Metaphysique de rAvemr\ written in
i860, he thanks his "Heavenly Father" because He
" has not chosen to bestow a clear reply to our doubts,
in order that faith in goodness should not remain with-
174 LIFE OF
out merit, and that virtue should not be a calculation.
A distinct revelation would have assimilated the noble
to the vulgar soul : evidence in such a matter would have
been an attack on our freedom. Thou hast desired that
our faith should depend on our inward disposition."
To all this Renan added in time the hope expressed in
the letter to M. Berthelot, that beyond the grave there
might be a purely spiritual reward for devotion to the
spiritual in this life. Such was the creed which had
been fruitful for him in well-being and well-doing, in
noble effort not without result for the world, and in more
ways than the spiritual for himself.
Suddenly a change came over the spirit of his dream,
and educed from him utterances which gratified the
worldly, but perplexed and pained the grave and serious
among his friends. In former years Renan recognised
the aim of Nature to be good, and for its realisation,
however distant in the eternal future, she demanded
man's strenuous co-operation. But now Renan pro-
fessed to doubt whether Nature had any aim of that
kind at all, whether we were not being duped to no
purpose whatsoever, whether human existence was not
a **poor farce" in which our part was assigned us by an
unconscious artist, and which only gaiety could render
agreeable. Schopenhauer's pessimism prescribed the
extinction, so far as possible, of all earthly desire, and
promised everlasting repose in Nirvana. Renan's pessi-
mism led him to a very different conclusion. Gaiety
and good-humour, he proclaimed, were to be cultivated
by the select few who followed science and virtue, in
case these should turn out to be phantoms. As to the
RENAN. 175
many, let them enjoy themselves. For them, whatever
might be the fate of the Cosmos, there were what even
the austere Wordsworth, extenuating the faults of poor
Robert Burns, called " the primary felicities of love and
wine." Time was that in almost the only indignant, not
to say ill-natured composition which Renan ever penned,
his paper on "The Theology of Beranger," he fell foul
of the genial song-writer, and reproached him for having,
with Lisette by his side and glass in hand, toasted, as it
were, the God whom Renan himself sought, he says,
"in trembling," and who, in Beranger's lyrics, had become
" a God of grisettes and topers." But now, in a public
address of his later years, Renan thus apologised to
Beranger and to his God of grisettes and topers: *'The
Frenchman is joyous; his favourite phrases imply a feel-
ing of the gaiety of life, and the idea that at bottom
nothing is very serious, and that a little irony admits
us to a knowledge of the intentions of the Eternal one.
. Formerly I slandered the Dieu des bonnes gens'' —
Beranger's genial deity. ^' Mon Dieu! how much in
the wrong I was. He is not at all a bad god, he never did
any harm," etc. Renan protested even against temperance
societies : why should not the poor man forget his sorrows
in a bumper ? though care should be taken that he gets
tipsy amiably, and does not, in his cups, beat his wife.
"Is Renan also among the Hedonists?" might well
be the exclamation of pleasure-lovers whom he had
offended by his censure of Beranger !
The Dialogues Philosophiques^ which are among the
most singular of Renan's writings, were written, as already
mentioned, under most depressing influences, and lay in
176 LIFE OF
his desk for five years, before they were published in
1876. Renan described them as conversations between
different " lobes " of his brain, and protested that no one
of the theories broached in them was to be fathered on
his brain as a whole. It would not be difficult, however,
to extract from the Dialogues Kenan's philosophy of life
and being at the time, but the proceeding is undesirable,
since something will be said hereafter of the ultimate
expression which he gave, not in dialogue but in mono-
logue, to that philosophy. Suffice it to say that in the
Dialogues the aim of the Cosmos was represented
to .be the evolution of a single organised entity, con-
taining in its infinitude all organised beings that had
existed or did exist. This, in very brief summary,
was Kenan's apocalypse, an apocalypse of science. The
sceptical world of Paris, looking beyond the grave
into nothingness or a blank futurity, hailed in the
Dialogues Philosophiques Kenan's record of his new
excursion into the unknowable, just as George Sand,
it will be remembered, welcomed enthusiastically the
letter to M. Berthelot. Kenan now resolved to give
the Dialogue a strictly dramatic form, which would
fit it for performance in a "philosophical theatre" — if
such were ever established — and, meanwhile, would in-
terest his legion of readers. Four contributions — to the
unacted drama of France, * 'Caliban" (1878), the "Eau de
Jouvence" (1881), "Le Pretre de Nemi" (1886), and
" L'Abbesse de Jouarre " (1886) — were the result. In the
preface to " Caliban " Kenan announces that philosophy
has arrived at the stage of knowing that nothing can be
affirmed, " Man sees clearly, at the hour which is striking,
RENAN, 177
that he will never know anything of the supreme cause of
the universe, or of his own destiny. Nevertheless, he
wishes to be talked to about all that." So Renan talks to
him through quasi-dramatic puppets, who are the mouth-
pieces of various types of characters with their diverse
views of life, Renanesque and anti-Renanesque. In
" Caliban," Prospero has returned to his Duchy of
Milan, and is experimenting in his laboratory instead
of attending to affairs of state. The people murmur,
Caliban heads a successful revolution, and from a
drunken, brutal, mutinous savage is transformed into
an astute statesman. Instead of avenging himself on
Prospero, he protects his old tyrant both from the
populace and the Church! "Cahban" was written at
a time when the victory of the Republicans over the
Reactionaries seemed assured. Renan bows to the
inevitable, and in Caliban's protection of Prospero
adumbrates the freedom given by democracy to science.
In the "Eau de Jouvence" Prospero re-appears as the
inventor of a sort of elixir vitce, and is persecuted by
the Church as a magician. He is protected for the
sake of his elixir by a Pope, worldly and sensual, but
superstitious. The drama closes with Prospero's
euthanasia. As his end approaches, enter Caliban, who
with his old master exchanges friendly words. "With-
out Caliban," Prospero assures him, "there could be
no history. The grumbling of Caliban, the savage
hatred which impels him to supplant his master, form
the principle of movement in humanity" — Renan's
political philosophy at that date. The scene of "The
Priest of Nemi" is laid at Alba Longa, in the earliest
12
178 LIFE OF
days of the legendary history of Rome. He is an
enlightened priest, with a horror of shedding blood,
even the blood of animals to be sacrificed to the God-
dess of whose shrine he is the keeper. Consequently
he is unpopular, and in the end he is assassinated,
having come to the melancholy conviction that in
so far as he has weakened — and it is not far — the
religious prejudices of his countrymen, he has also
weakened in them the moral fibre which those preju-
dices strengthened. The inference is obvious. The
story of the Abbesse de Jouarre must not be repro-
duced here. In spite of, nay because of its pruriency,
it was by far the most successful, commercially, of all
these dramatic pieces, and went through no fewer than
twenty-five editions !
In 1879, the year after the publication of Caliban,
appeared the sixth and penultimate volume of the
Origines, LEglise Chretienne (The Christian Church).
In this volume Renan speaks, on the authorship
of the Gospel ascribed to St. John, the final word
which he did not speak in the preceding volume, Les
Evangiles. There he came to the conclusion that the
pro-Judaic Apocalypse, in which St. John's hand or
inspiration was clearly visible, could not have been
written or inspired by the author of the anti-Judaic
Fourth Gospel, but Renan left unanswered the question,
"Who then did write it? " Renan's matured conviction
is that the Fourth Gospel embodies the traditions of that
mysterious personage, the Presbyter John (who was
probably a disciple of the Apostle of the same name) and
those of a certain Aristion, both the presbyter and
RENAN, 179
Aristion being in possession of an apostolical tradition,
probably derived from St. John, respecting incidents in
the life of Jesus. Renan adheres to his former statement
that the Gospel ascribed to St. John contains facts in
the life of Jesus which are historical, and which supple-
ment the narratives of the Synoptics, but also that the
sayings of Jesus in it are no more authentic than those
placed in the mouth of Socrates by Plato. To make
confusion worse confounded, Renan goes the length of
granting the possible truth of the theory of some later
sectaries, that Cerinthus, the known adversary of St.
John, was the author of the Gospel ascribed to him !
Renan rejects the Johnian authorship of the General
Epistle ascribed to St. John, and supposes it launched
in his name to prepare the way for the pious fraud
which issued the Fourth Gospel as the work of that
Apostle. Renan thinks it likely that all the three
epistles ascribed to St. John are the handiwork of the
Apostle's homonym, the Presbyter John. The Fourth
Gospel, Renan says, introduced a new Christology.
Jesus, the incarnation of the Word who was God, ceases
to be human, to be a Jew, and can know neither tempta-
tion nor weakness. With the Gnostics he will become
an aeon, an emanation, a pure entity who made the body
of Jesus merely an earthly domicile from which he
escaped before the Passion. With wonderful patience
as well as abihty, Renan catalogues and characterises the
brood of heresies which sprang out of Gnosticism, and
which, ever multiplying by a sort of fission, were a danger
to the Church. The chief heresiarch was Marcion, whom
Renan calls great, and whose attempts, like those of other
i8o LIFE OF
Gnostics, to bring over to them the Church into which
at first they sought and received admission, are skilfully
described. Marcion's Gnosticism was distinguished by
its simplicity as well ' as thoroughness. Jehovah, the
harsh and cruel Jewish God, the Demiurgus of the
world, was inferior to the supreme and beneficent God.
The aim of the rigid and loveless law given by this
God of the Old Testament, was to subject the other
nations to his favourites the Jews, and not having suc-
ceeded, he promised to send them his son. But the
supreme; beneficent God sent his son, in the seeming
form of a man, to introduce a law of charity and to
combat Jehovah. Jesus is not the Messiah promised to
the Jews : he came to abolish the law and the prophets
and all the work of Jehovah. Paul was his only Apostle,
but even PauFs teaching, inasmuch as he acknowledged the
law to have been divinely given, fell short of Marcion's.
Marcion took the Gospel of Luke as the most Pauline of
any, and re-fashioned it to suit his theory. In Marcion's
Gospel Jesus had neither ancestors, parents, nor pre-
cursors. He was not born ; birth, according to Marcion,
was a stain; he did not suffer, he did not die. Every-
thing that connected Jesus with Judaism was expunged
in Marcion's gospel. To such a length did Marcion
carry his detestation of the Old Testament, that when
his Jesus descended into hell, and then ascended
into heaven, the accursed of the Old Testament, Cain,
and so forth, accompanied him, while Abel, Noah,
Abraham, favourites of Jehovah, were left behind and
below ! Marcion, like other Gnostics, looked on matter
as evil. An evil, too, was human life led on the earth
RENAN. i8i
which belonged to the Demiurgus Jehovah. To propa-
gate the species was to increase the subjects of the bad
Demiurgus, and it was condemned by Marcion. The
glorification of martyrdom was a prominent characteristic
of Marcionism, since martyrdom Hberated the Christians
from life which is an evil.
Marcion had followers in greater numbers than any
heresiarch before Arius. But he, and the crowd of heresi-
archswho preceded and succeeded him, were banned by the
Church of Rome, which combated their heresies, and these
in time died out. For the organisation of the Church of
Rome was being perfected, and its authority becoming
supreme. It is very acutely remarked by Renan that, as
the hopes of the re-appearance of Jesus to judge the world
faded away, the Church obeyed a tendency to make its
organisation durable. This was not aimed at so long as
such hopes prevailed; why work for the future when the
Second Coming is at hand? An effort was made by
forging the Second Epistle of St. Peter to strengthen
those hopes; but time worked against their fulfilment,
and a belief in the millennium, too, died out. Unless it
were heretical, or belonged to one of the decaying Judaeo-
Christian communities, every church had a bishop. Into
his hands had passed the powers of the Presbyters who
originally, with their subordinate deacons and deaconesses,
administered the affairs of a church. To exhibit, with the
authority belonging to a chief apostle, the power inherent
in a bishop, along with his duties, with those of the
functionaries of the church subordinated to him, and
last but not least, with those of each member of the
church, the three pastoral epistles were written, pur-
1 82 LIFE OF
porting, and only purporting, to come from St. Paul,
though containing some things not unworthy of the
Apostle. Not only is there ordained in them a strict
surveillance of the morals of the flock, but a rule of
orthodoxy is established. The obstinate heretic is to
be rejected. Marcion and other heresiarchs who
flocked to Rome, found to their cost this monition
unsparingly put in force.
The volume opens with a vivid sketch of the
character and career of the Emperor Adrian, the
accomplished, the versatile, the witty, hovering like a
beneficent deity over the vast dominions subject to
him, building and re-building cities and temples,
promoting the execution of great public works, en-
couraging philosophy, and improving the laws and their
administration. Adrian, a sceptic at heart, was tolerant
and disinclined to allow the execution of the laws penally
aflecting the Christian to be pushed to extremities. It
was under the otherwise beneficent rule of Adrian's
successor, Antoninus Pius, that the persecution of the
Christians was carried out on a considerable scale. The
Christians as they increased in numbers became more
conspicuous, and therefore more unpopular. Their
seclusion from the world, their refusal to join in the
religious observances of their fellow-citizens, made these
Puritans of the Roman Empire disliked by the populace.
The dislike thus created was intensified by absurd
charges against their morals; their proceedings when
they met for worship being represented as stained
by the most dissolute practices and darkest crimes.
It was especially in the provinces, and unknown to the
RENAN, 183
Emperor, that the persecutions were most frequent,
the authorities aiding and abetting the populace. Any
physical calamity was regarded as due to the wrath
of the Gods offended by the existence of a community
who refused to acknowledge them, and then arose the
terrible cry, " Christianos ad leones ! " Renan admits, as
most impartial students of the time admit, that the
Christians often voluntarily courted martyrdom as a
testimony to their sincerity, and as opening to them the
doors of heaven. But this was not the case with the
venerable and saintly Polycarp, of Smyrna, the friend of
the Apostle John, the well-known story of whose martyr-
dom is told by Renan with a pathetic simplicity. He
had always declared that martyrdom if not to be shunned
was not to be courted. He did not court it, but he did
not shun it when his choice lay between death and the
denial of his Saviour. A few years later the most
notable of the new school of Christian apologists, the
valiant but imprudent Justin, was martyred in Rome
itself. When recording the death of Justin, Renan
reminds his Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen that
their Church too could persecute cruelly when it had the
power, and through one of the best of French kings: —
" How many precursors of the future suffered equally
under the reign of the just and pious Saint Louis,"
persecutor of Jews and heretics !
In the April of 1880 Renan came to London to deliver
the Hibbert Lectures of the year; the subject, "Chris-
tianity and Rome."
"The moment chosen," says Sir M. E. Grant Duff, ** was an un-
Uicky one, for a good many people who would have liked to have
1 84 LIFE OF
* sat under him ' were far away " — the country was in the throes of a
General Election followed by the change of ministry which sub-
stituted in the Premiership Mr. Gladstone for Lord Beaconsfield. " I
was myself in the North of Scotland, looking after my election, and
many of my friends were in a similar plight. I got back just in time
to hear the last lecture — 14th April— and to admire the extraordinary
perfection of the lecturer's enunciation. Every one in the room who
knew French must have heard every word. He came to stay with
me at Twickenham, and at a house which from the days of Lord
Chancellor Clarendon downwards has seldom, I think, opened its
door to a better man. I asked the Breakfast Club to meet him, but
the disturbance caused by the great political contest still kept people
away from London, and that body was represented only by Sir T.
Erskine May, Lord Arthur Russell, and myself."
Renan was, however, abundantly feted and caressed
by friends and admirers who remained in London in
spite of the poHtical crisis. From a paper on "M.
Ernest Renan at Home" {Pall Mall Budget, 28th
January 1892), I take the following reminiscence
of his visit to London. When the Rev. H. R.
Haweis paid him in Paris a return visit, Renan was
domiciled in the College de France as its Rector or
Director, an office to which he had been elected in 1873
by his brother-professors. He prized it above all other
French educational institutions, and looked on the dis-
tinction of administering its affairs as the greatest that
he had as yet received; and he received it from the
Third Republic.
**We spoke of those dear friends in England who had passed
away since M. Kenan's visit, especially of Dean Stanley, for whom
Renan had entertained a sincere admiration which was thoroughly
reciprocated by the versatile Dean. I remember dining with M.
Renan in London one night when the Dean sat opposite us. Dean
RENAN. 185
Stanley's French accent left much to be desired, but his volubility
was indisputable, and although nothing but French was spoken, I
was filled with wonder and surprise at the brilliant flow of anecdote
and repartee which Stanley kept up across the table with M, Renan
in the least idiomatic and most fluent French which I ever heard.
Still both these illustrious men by sheer force of will and bonhom77iie
found out how to be thoroughly intelligible and interesting to each
other at dinner-time.
*' Mr. Henry Irving was another mutual friend the mention of
whose name recalled the interesting occasion on which I introduced
him to M. Renan. Mr. Irving had placed a double box at our
disposal. M. Renan watched the great actor's subtle impersonation
of the immortal Jew with the keenest zest and with such occasional
interjections as * Ah ! c'est admirable ! c'est fort ! c'est antique ! '
At the close of the second act, Mr. Irving invited us to his private
room. Both began speaking simultaneously, but as Mr. Irving
spoke no French and M. Renan no English, an inevitable pause
ensued. Mr. Irving then turned to me and said, * I love M.
Renan; will you tell him that I think I acted perhaps better
than I do sometimes — I was so anxious to please him, and tried
to do my best.' After I had translated, M. Renan replied,
* Pray, assure Mr. Irving that I have made a special study of
the people of Israel for many years, but I never received so vivid
an impression of the cultivated Jew of that period as I have to-
night.* Mr. Irving replied, *I am glad M. Renan has seized my
point.'"
Of Kenan's acquaintance with Tennyson during this
visit to London a pleasant reminiscence has been
already given. Renan 's four Hibbert Lectures were
delivered, in French of course, in St. George's Hall, and
were well attended and duly applauded. He sketched
the history of Christianity in Rome and the Roman
empire from its beginning to its establishment by Con-
stantine. Evidently Renan did not give his hearers
credit for a familiarity with the six volumes which had
i86 LIFE OF
then appeared of his Origines du Christianisme, unless,
perhaps, it were the Vie de Jesus. With the exception
of some introductory remarks on the thoroughly aristo-
cratic nature of the pagan religion of old Rome, so
little suited to attach the people to it, there was
scarcely anything in the four lectures which had not
been said in the six volumes, page after page of which
was read to his unsuspecting hearers. The lectures at St.
George's Hall were followed by one to the members of
the Royal Institution, on Marcus Aurelius. This lecture
gave Renan no more trouble than the other. He had
already prepared, though not published, his concluding
volume of the Origines, Marc AurUe et la Fin du Monde
Antique. The lecture at the Royal Institution was little
more than a summary of it.
That volume on " Marcus Aurelius and the End of
the Roman World," was issued in 1881, and nobly com-
pleted the great work which it closed. A deep and two-
fold interest is aroused by the spectacle of one of the
best of men, absolute ruler of the greatest empire that
the world had yet seen, and at the same time disclosing
in his Meditations his inmost thoughts on himself, on
human nature, and human life. His reign was that of
a philanthropist as well as of a philosopher. He reformed
the laws by humanising them. Institutions for aiding
the poor, adult and young, were made more effective
than ever. The cruel position of the slave was greatly
mitigated. Some way' was made with a reformation of
manners, although even Marcus Aurelius could not
wholly succeed in his efforts to put an end to the
savage brutalities of the amphitheatre. He summoned
RENAN. 187
philosophers from all parts to Rome, and though the
gold of the philosopher was dimmed by many quacks
and impostors who thought of nothing more than the
rewards showered on the sect, Marcus selected only
those of genuine worth to be attached to his person
and to advise him in carrying out his reforms. "For the
first time," Renan says, " the ideal of Plato was realised,
the world was governed by philosophers." In point of
fact, philosophy had become a kind of religion, the only
religion of cultivated men. Great people had in their
households sages, who were to them at once guides,
philosophers, and friends.
The pacific emperor was summoned to the Danube
to confront a coalition of the barbarians against Rome,
and acquitted himself admirably of his uncongenial
duties as a general. But his ennui was great, and he
relieved it by writing his famous Meditations, The
vanity of all things is present to the mind of him who
wrote them, yet he is sustained and fortified by a deep
sense of his duty to himself as a man, and to others as an
emperor. For himself he is grateful to the gods, not for
making him an emperor, but from the first a philosopher,
for the good instructors whom he had in youth, for
having been enabled to share the old age of his mother,
for his affectionate (?) wife, and for having always at his
command wherewith to aid the poor and the affiicted.
He is not a man of systems or of dogmas, and hence
the "singular elevation" of his book. "Take away
the Christian dogmas from the famous Iinitation of
Christy and the book loses part of its charm. The
book of Marcus Aurelius, having no dogmatic basis, will
i88 LIFE OF
preserve its freshness everlastingly. To all, from the
atheist, or him who thinks himself one, to the man most
engrossed by the particular creed of any religious com-
munion, it is fruitful in edification. It is the most
purely human of all books." But as the years rolled
on, as old friends died off, and Marcus felt that while
admiring him people were tired of him and his philo-
sophical rule, above all as his son Commodus, whom he
had proclaimed his successor by an act beyond recall,
displayed incorrigible vice, an infinite sadness is read-
able between the fines of the later Meditations, Marcus
sighed for death, and it soon came to him.
Christianity was never more extensively persecuted
or more severely punished than under this best of
emperors. Renan seeks to explain this flagrant ano-
maly. To begin with, Fronto, the preceptor of Marcus,
had a bitter hatred for the Christians. They were
hated too by the philosophers who surrounded Marcus,
and by the men of letters of the age, who regarded them
as the dupes of illiterate teachers. Marcus himself
adhered as an emperor to the Roman tradition, and like
his favourite sage Epictetus saw in the heroism of the
Christian martyrs only the obstinacy of deluded
fanatics. Renan compares the position of the
Christians in a centre of the Roman Empire, to that
of a Protestant missionary preaching against the Virgin
and the Saints in a fanatically Roman Catholic town in
Spain. Now that we know the ultimate destiny of
Christianity in the Roman Empire, we blame Marcus
for not having been more tolerant. " But," says Renan,
" we ought not to reproach a statesman for not having
REN AN. 189
effected a radical revolution in anticipation of events
which were to happen several centuries after him.
Trajan, Adrian, Marcus Aurelius could not master
principles of general history and of state policy which were
not apprehended until the eighteenth century, and which
could be revealed only by our latest revolutions/' If the
Roman Empire was cruel to Christianity, the Christian
Louis XIV. persecuted his Protestant subjects.
When the wise, the good Marcus Aurelius died, a.d.
180, the Church so harshly persecuted during his reign
was more or less completely constituted. Episcopal
authority is everywhere, and is based on apostolical suc-
cession. A sort of primacy is conceded to the Church
of Rome. The canon of the New Testament is closed.
The divinity of Jesus is acknowledged. Christianity has
broken completely with Judaism; the sacred day of the
week is the first not the seventh, while baptism is substi-
tuted for circumcision. The eucharist is no longer
merely a commemoration but a sacrifice. The piety of
the Christian communities was of rather an ascetic kind,
and while marriage was invested with a high religious char-
acter, the tendency was to encourage ceHbacy. The
Christian communities were little groups of pious people,
leading pure lives and forming each a happy family, the
members of which, coming together once a week to join
in a simple and edifying worship, exerted a powerful
attraction on the better class of pagans outside them.
The national religion of Rome was aristocratic, not
popular, and the immoralities of the gods had become
repulsive. The philosophers endeavoured to appeal to
the higher religious aspirations of humanity, but they
I90 LIFE OF
addressed the cultivated classes, not the uninstructed and
the poor. The Stoics, moreover, had nothing to say to
the sinner, whom Christianity pardoned and welcomed.
Neither stoicism nor paganism offered, like Christianity, a
life beyond the grave in which the anomalies of this life
were to be redressed, and those who loved each other
might meet again. In such a world as that of the Roman
Empire, such a religion as the Christian could not but
conquer the worship of Jupiter. Persecution itself aided
Christianity by showing with what courage and strength
it inspired its martyrs.
As the years rolled on, and the Christians increased
in numbers, conquering the world instead of being
conquered by it, while at the same time the expectation
of the approaching end of all things died out, the moral
fibre of the Christian community became relaxed. It
was no longer easy for the believer — indeed, he was no
longer expected as in the early days of the Church — to lead
the purely Christian life of poverty and abnegation of
every kind. Then monasticism arose. The monastery
was to the circumambient Christian communities what
these had been to the pagan world. Again the years
rolled on, Christianity became the state-religion of Rome,
and afterwards of the barbarians who overthrew the
Western Empire. The influx of barbarians into the
Church brought with it a tendency on the part of the
Church to compromise with the idolators. Their poly-
theism was transformed into the worship of saints. The
world from the sixth to the tenth century was, Renan goes
the length of saying, more grossly pagan than it had ever
been before. Along with the indulgence shown to
RENAN. 191
barbarian polytheism, Greek metaphysical notions were
accepted, and in the Church councils "it is the dogma
which is most superstitious that carries the day." At
last the work of Jesus became so hidden in the additions
made to it by superstition, metaphysics, and priest-craft
that the reform of Christianity had for its aim to restore
the religion which he preached. Something in that
direction was effected by the sixteenth century reformers,
but they retained a faith in the miraculous, and, in our own
day, science has made miracle unbelievable. " Between
Christianity and science there is, therefore, an inevitable
conflict I one of the two adversaries must succumb.''
As is not uncommon, however, with Renan, this
strong statement is qualified by another. Not only
is religion but a Church is to survive. Country and
the family are the two great bonds which knit men
together, but they are not all-sufficing. " Besides
them there must be an institution to give nourish-
ment to the soul, to console, to admonish. Such an
institution is the Church, which cannot be dispensed
with, except under the penalty of making life of a
despairing aridity, especially for women. The ecclesias-
tical association of the future is, however, not to be
allowed to weaken society as constituted in the State.
The Church is to have no temporal power, but on the
other hand is to be perfectly free." The State is to
have nothing to do with it, is neither to control it nor
patronise it. Renan's wish seems to be that the Church
should consist of a number of small and free com-
munities like those of the early ages of Christianity.
And the rehgion of the future? Renan thinks that
192 LIFE OF
there will be a great schism in the Roman Catholic
Church.
** One section of it will persist in its idolatry and remain by the
side of the modern movement like a parallel stretch of stagnant water.
Another section will remain alive, and abandoning the errors of super-
naturalism, will join itself to liberal Protestantism, to enlightened
Israelitism, to idealist philosophy, and march towards the conquest
of pure religion, a religion in spirit and in truth. But, whatever
may be the religious future of humanity, it is beyond doubt that the
place of Jesus in it will be immense. He was the founder of Chris-
tianity, and Christianity remains the bed of the great religious river
of humanity. There affluents coming from the most opposite points
of the horizon have commingled. In this combination no stream
can now say, * This is my water. ' But let us not forget the primi-
tive and original brook, the source in the mountain, the upper
course where in a little spot of earth there first flowed what has
become a river as broad as the Amazon. Of that upper course it
has been my wish to form a picture, happy if I have faithfully repre-
sented what on those lofty summits there was of strength and vigour,
of sensations now glowing, now icy cold, of divine life, and of com-
mune with the sky. Rightly do the creators of Christianity take their
place in the foremost rank of those to whom mankind do homage.
These men were very much our inferiors in the knowledge of reality,
but they had no equals in strength of conviction, in devotedness.
And this it is which makes the founder. The solidity of an edifice
is in proportion to the sum of virtue, that is to say, of sacrifices,
which has been deposited in its foundations."
In 1878, Renan's fame had been crowned by his
election to the French Academy, in succession to the
great physiologist, Claude Bernard. In the spring of
1879 the new Academician delivered his address on
being formally received. As usual, his address consisted
largely of a panegyric on his predecessor, and Renan's
versatility was once more displayed in his appreciative
RENAN. 193
estimate of Claude Bernard's discoveries and scientific
method. At the same time he did not conceal his
heterodoxy when, after reiterating one of his earliest and
most cherished convictions, that modern science had
made the universe infinitely grander and more beauti-
ful than it appeared to the non-scientific ages, he added
that the disappearance of a faith in the supernatural
" will only bestow more sublimity on the ideal world,"
and so on. Among the addresses of welcome which
Renan was called on to deliver on the reception of new
Academicians, was one on Pasteur, in which again
Renan showed his mastery of a subject apparently, and
only apparently, alien to his studies, and described
Pasteur's career as " a train of light in the great night of
the infinitely little, in those ultimate abysses of Being
in which life is born." In Renan's address of recep-
tion to Ferdinand de Lesseps there is a very noticeable
passage. While Lesseps himself, and so many others,
were hymning the Suez Canal as a great work of peace,
Renan took a very different view of it. One Bosphorus,
he said, had hitherto sufilced to trouble the world.
Lesseps had created another and a more important one.
In the event of a naval war the canal would be the point
which all the world would make for in order to occupy it.
Lesseps had marked out the arena for the great battles of
the future.
It was partly a symptom, partly a result of the seemingly
sceptical mood into which Renan had fallen for a time,
that he translated the most sceptical book in the Bible,
Ecclesiastes. Renan's EEcdesiaste appeared in 1879.
The Preacher, Renan's Cohelet, proclaims the vanity
13
104 LIFE OF
of all things, knowledge, science, literature, power,
riches, the love of women, life itself. He sees wicked-
ness triumphant and virtue miserable. Nor has he any
hope that this anomaly will be redressed in a future life.
Man is as the beast: "As the one dieth so dieth the
other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath
no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity." But
Cohelet does not, and in truth need not, like Job,
curse his day, and raise an indignant protest against the
decrees of the Creator. Cohelet's lot on earth has
taught him that there is something worth living for.
" Go thy way ; eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine
with a merry heart. . . . Live joyfully with the wife
whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity,
which .he hath given thee under the sun." And ever
and anon Cohelet rises into a graver strain, and for
moments preaches duty and reverence to the God
who judges all things. Cohelet's combination, or alter-
nation, of doubt and faith, Renan, in his preHminary
" study " on Ecclesiastes, pronounces to be " the true
philosophy." I deny, he seems to say, but at the same
time I not only allow you, but I wish you, to affirm.
" However the sceptic may argue, the necessary beliefs
are above all attack. . . . Ring out, church bells, the
more you ring, the more will I allow myself to say that
your warbling means nothing definite ! If I were afraid
of silencing you, ah ! then I should become timid and
discreet.*' Renan rejects altogethei the orthodox
ascription of Ecclesiastes to Solomon. He conjectures
it to have been written about B.C. loo by a Jewish
philosopher and Sadducee. He belongs to a class
RENAN, 195
represented in the Bible only by Ecclesiastes, and re-
vived in the wealthy Israelites of Paris and other great
European towns of the nineteenth century. Of this
modern type of Jew Renan gives a very clever and, once
in a way, a somewhat sarcastic description, too long for
quotation here.
Renan was verging on sixty when he resolved on
writing the autobiographical volume, which appeared
in 1883, Souvenirs d^Enfance et de Jeunesse (Memoirs
of Childhood and Youth). One of his objects was
doubtless to indicate the steps by which a tonsured
seminarist had become the author of the Vie de Jesus,
and thanks to the Souvenirs, the reader of these pages
has been pretty amply enlightened on that subject.
Renan tells very little of his biography after he severed
his connection with the Roman Catholic Church, but
looking at himself as he was and as he is, he takes his
readers into his confidence and unbosoms himself very
freely. He avers that he has kept in spirit, if not in
letter, his first clerical vows, better indeed than many
priests leading a life to all appearance regular. He
has never sought after success; on the contrary, it bored
him. The pleasure of producing and living sufiices him.
On the whole, if he had to live his life over again, he
would alter nothing in it. He has every reason to be
satisfied with his lot, and, indeed, did not his principles
forbid it, he would believe that special providences had
guided him from a humble origin to be what he has
become. The age in which he has lived may not be
found to have been the greatest, but it will certainly be
found to have been the most amusing of all, and he
196 LIFE OF
speaks of his own life as a charming promenade which
it has been accorded to him to take through this
mysterious world of ours. The autobiographical interest
of the volume, the sketches of scenes and persons of
many kinds, given in his own fascinating style, made the
Souvenirs one of the most successful of Renan's books.
In the preface to the Souvenirs^ the quasi-optimistic
mood in which, for the nonce, Renan finds himself, recon-
ciles him to the French republic, then apparently con-
solidated. After all, he says, our personal tastes, perhaps
our prejudices, ought not to lead us to run counter to
what our age is effecting. Perhaps our age is in the
right. The world, Renan thinks, is marching towards
"Americanism," towards Democracy pure and simple,
towards a state of things in which personal distinction
is little prized, in which politics are handed over to
inferior men, and the rewards of life are given to
vulgarity, charlatanism, and the art of puffing. But
democracy will at least offer to the intellect that which
the intellect chiefly requires, freedom. The royal patron-
age formerly extended to talent had its good side, but
also its bad. The concessions which in those days,
gone for ever, intellect had to make to the Court, to
society, to the clergy, were worse, in Renan's view, than
the little disagreeables to be suffered from democracy.
But there is one passage in his otherwise rather cheerful
confessions which breathes of deep regret, though not at
all bitterly expressed. He laments that when the pro-
fessor at Issy charged him with not being a Christian,
he did not forego the subsequent residence at St.
Sulpice. In such a case he would have followed his
RENAN. 197
inclination for physiology and the natural sciences. But
he went to St. Sulpice, and was there drawn towards the
historical sciences, " small conjectural sciences which are
unmade as soon as made, and which will be neglected in
a hundred years." Renan sees the day dawning when
man will no longer attach much interest to his past.
The riddle of existence, of the world, of " God, as they
wish to call him," is to be read in chemistry at one end
of the scale, in astronomy at the other end, and above
all in general physiology. The regret of Renan's life
was that he had chosen inquiries, which will never be
more than interesting, "into a reality which has for ever
disappeared." But this regret, it will be seen, did not
hinder Renan from pursuing to the end of his days the
inquiries which engrossed him at the beginning of his
career. A mission had been assigned to him, and he
could not escape from fulfilling it.
In 1884 appeared the Nouvelles Etudes d^Histoire
Religieuse (New Studies of Religious History), another
volume of republished contributions to periodicals.
Among its miscellaneous contents, all of them full of life
and interest, is that essay on Buddhism which Renan offered
as his first contribution to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and
which was declined by its proprietor and editor. In this
essay Renan had summarised, in his own inimitable way,
that strange religion of Nihilism which, encrusted with
innumerable myths and legends, has more followers than
any other, and has gained such devotees as Schopen-
hauer in the Christian Europe of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Renan prizes highly the doctrines of abnegation,
humanity, and humility, taught by Sakya-Muni (the
198 LIFE OF
Buddha), and places him among non-Christian teachers
by the side of Jesus. In an essay of much later date,
published in the same volume, he examined a recent
theory maintained in France, which went even farther
than Strauss had gone in his first Life of Jesus,
and while denying that the Buddha had ever
existed, resolved his biography into a series of myths.
Following his usual practice in such cases, Renan sub-
stituted for myths legends containing a kernel of truth,
and, considering the ethical superiority of Buddhism to
the Hinduism out of which it sprang (just as Christianity
sprang out of Judaism), he maintained that there must
have been a real historical personage who founded
Buddhism. The subject of another paper is St. Francis
of Assisi, Renan's favourite saint, whom he delights to
call a second Jesus. Here again, through all the legends
which have gathered round St. Francis, there is clearly
seen the resemblance of the saint to the portrait of him
painted by his biographers. Beautiful indeed is Renan's
sketch of the founder of the Franciscan order, one which
might have worked a revolution in the religious world
had not the astute Church of Rome transformed it into
something very different from the ideal conceived by St.
Francis. Renan paints him in his delicious valley in
Umbria, " the Galilee of Italy," realising in his daily life
the Sermon on the Mount, wedded to poverty, loving
not only men but all things that have life, with nothing
in him of the Eastern fakir or Buddhist ascetic, joyous,
companionable, sociable even with brigands, delighting
in the songs of the troubadours, and himself the author
of that lovely canticle of thanksgiving to the Creator for
RE NAN, 199
all that he has created, from the sun and moon and
the elements to " our mother earth " with its fruits and
herbs and bright-blossoming flowers. The address on
Spinoza has been already adverted to.
Kenan's reputation and popularity were now at their
height. The chiefs of French literature who had
achieved fame when he began his career, Hugo and
Lamartine, Michelet, Quinet, and Littre, were in their
graves. Renan was recognised as indisputably the
foremost man of letters in contemporary France. Even
his superficial Hedonism, if it made his austerer friends
wince, increased his vogue with others. He was a
favourite guest in the highest circles, and Madame
Renan's receptions at the College de France rivalled
what had been the success of Madame Mohl in her
husband's life-time. The demands made on Renan to
deliver speeches and addresses on all sorts of occasions,
and to all sorts of audiences, were incessant. Besides his
frequent addresses on the reception of new academicians,
he delivered lectures to Jewish associations on the glories
of the Judaism of old and the composite character
which its ancient proselytism had given to the Jewish
race. At the Sorbonne he answered the question
" what is a nation ? " by showing, without even mention-
ing Alsace and Lorraine, that the inhabitants of provinces
constituted as these were formed a nation, which should
not be annexed without its w^ill by a foreign conquering
power. He distributed the prizes and gave good advice
to the pupils of the Lyc^e Louis le Grand (Voltaire's old
seminary), and addressing an association of Paris students,
he bade them avoid the prevalent pessimism, and enjoy
200 LIFE OF
themselves while they were young as well as study hard.
To a society for the propagation of the French language
he showered praises not only on that graceful tongue, but
on French gaiety, and French wine. At a banquet in
honour of his old friend Berthelot, it is Renan who is
the mouthpiece of the company, and who dilates on the
merits of the guest and advantages of science. Renan is
the spokesman of the Acad^mie des Inscriptions at the
funeral of its distinguished member Villemain, and when
former hearers of Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz
present to the College de France memorial-medallions
of those three of its former gifted professors, Renan,
in a graceful speech, returns thanks for the welcome
gift. It was Renan who pronounced the "Farewell"
to Tourgenieff at the Paris railway station when his
coffined corpse was borne homeward, happily character-
ising him as the interpreter of "that great Slav race
whose appearance in the front of the world's stage is the
most unexpected phenomenon of the century."
But the most personally interesting of all Renan's
addresses are two which he delivered in his native and
still-loved Brittany. In August, 1884, he was present at a
gathering held in his honour at Trdguier, his birthplace.
Forty years before he had quitted it for Paris, and in the
interval he had paid it only a rare flying visit. He found
the old ecclesiastical town outwardly very much the same
as in the days of his boyhood, and the Paris newspaper-men
who came to report the proceedings were lost in wonder
at the contrast between the brilliant city where they plied
their pens, and the survival of hoar ecclesiastical an-
tiquity which they found at sombre and lifeless Tr^guier.
RENAN, 201
Renan's address of thanks was naturally a touching one.
While so much remained, so much else was gone for
ever; he had lost the mother — she died under his roof at
eighty-five — and the sister who had watched over his early
years. Of his excellent teachers only one survived. As
to himself, he was old in body — rheumatism made him
walk with difficulty — but in soul he was the same. His
ruling passion from first to last had been the love of
truth. Veritatem dilexi is the epitaph which he would
wish to have inscribed on his tomb — and this last resting-
place he should like so much to be in those old
cloisters of the cathedral which he had haunted as
a child and had been re-visiting; "but the cloister
is the Church, and the Church, very wrongly, will
have none of me.'* To obey truth he had snapped
asunder the dearest ties. In acting thus he was a
genuine Breton, one of " an unsophisticated race, which
is simple enough to believe in truth and goodness."
The Bretons are the true sons of the Celtic Pelagius, who
denied original sin. " A criticism which the Protestants
are always addressing to me is, * What does M. Renan
make of sin ? ' Mon Dieu^ I think that I know nothing of
these melancholy dogmas. I confess to you, the more I
think of it the more I find that all the philosophy of the
world is summarised in good humour," a remark very
characteristic of Renan in his old age. The great recipe
for happiness, such as he has fully enjoyed, he will
leave with them. " It is not to seek for happiness, but
to preserve an unselfish aim, science, art, the good of
our kind, to be of use to our fatherland." The cordiality
of his reception at Tr^guier led him to seek a summer
202 LIFE OF
domicile in his native region, especially as he wished to
have once a year months of a quietude which Paris
would not allow for the composition of the second great
work of his life, of which more hereafter. He found
what he sought at Rosmapanon, on the Breton coast,
near Lannion, in a solitary house, only a few yards
from the sea, and among pleasant woods. Its former
occupant appears to have been a harsh man. The
neighbouring peasantry allowed no fruit to ripen in his
garden, nor a single vegetable to be gathered for his
table. With the substitution for him of the kind-hearted
Renan all this was altered, and the police no longer
needed to keep an eye on the kitchen-garden of that
house by the sea ! Here he received the Welsh Archaeo-
logical Association, to whom he told the anecdote of
Tennyson at Lannion, already given. In Paris, Renan
did not forget that he was a Breton. He was a
constant guest at the monthly dinner of Bretons
resident in Paris, founded by his friend, the Breton poet
Quellien, and samples of his speeches on those occasions,
full of gaiety and geniality, were printed in his Feuilles
D'etachees,
This volume of " Detached Leaves," stray papers, was
issued in 1892, the year of Renan's death. It contained
two essays, one a criticism on Amiel's well-known journal,
the other "Examen de Conscience Philosophique'' (Inter-
pretation of Philosophic Consciousness), containing more
matured expressions of his views on man and the Cosmos
than those in the Dialogues Philosophiques. In the pre-
face, morever, to the Feuilles Detachees, Renan speaks his
last word on those mysteries of Being, of life and of death,
REN A IV. 203
which were seldom long out of Kenan's meditative mind.
The Examen was written away from Paris, at Rosma-
panon, in solitude by the sea. Once more, according to
Renan, there is no trace of a God in the visible universe,
least of all in the planet earth. " Atheism is logical.
The fieri — the process of Being always Becoming
by an internal development without external interven-
tion — is the law of the whole universe which we
perceive/* Yet this universe, which Renan insists on
calling almost unconscious, produces, he affirms (strangely
it appears to me), not only human consciousness,
but prescribes to man self-sacrifice, duty, virtue, and
takes care that these its commands are obeyed, al-
though poor man feels that in obeying them he is the
victim of illusion. Renan discovers an adequate image
of his almost unconscious, yet wonderfully creative uni-
verse, in so lowly an organism as the pearl-oyster :
" In the depth of the abyss, obscure germs create a consciousness
singularly ill-served by organs, but nevertheless prodigiously skilful
in attaining its ends. What is called a disease in this little living
cos7nos produces a secretion of ideal beauty which men seize on,
and for which they lavish gold. The general life of the universe is
like that of the oyster, vague, obscure, singularly obstructed, and
consequently slow. Suffering creates the mind, the intellectual and
moral movement of humanity. Disease of the world if you will, in
reality pearl of the world, the spirit of man is the aim, the final
cause, the last and certainly the most brilliant result of the universe
which we inhabit."
But Renan cannot rest satisfied, like the Positivist
and the Agnostic, with a knowledge of mere phenomena.
So far as I understand his abstruse ratiocination, and
on such matters it behoves one to speak with diffidence,
204 LIFE OF
Renan finds in the varying orders of infinity established
by the infinitesimal calculus a symbolism which en-
courages him to hope. On the supposition that the
starry universe, sections of which we see with our eyes and
telescopes, is infinite (and the contrary supposition that
it is finite may be true), then it is conceivable, Renan
says, that there is a superior universe, a knowledge of
which may be reserved for us.
" Perhaps one day a God will reveal himself to us. The eternity
of our universe ceases to be assured from the moment we are allowed
to suppose that it is subordinated to an infinity. This superior
infinity may dispose of the inferior, utilise it, apply it to the
purpose of its superior. . . . From this point a God, with special
volitions of his own, and who does not appear in our universe, may
be held to be possible in the bosom of infinitude, or at least it is as
rash to deny as to affirm such a possibility."
In his critical essay on Amiel's Journal Renan had
expressed his dissent from the doctrme of the necessary
and universal immortality of the soul, and virtually said on
this point, " Plato, thou reasonest ///." Renan's preference
was for a bodily resurrection, and a resurrection only of
those who had been dominated by a love of the good
and the true. This seems to have remained Renan's
view when, two years afterwards, he wrote the Fxamen: —
*' To sum up, the existence of a superior consciousness of
the universe is much more probable than the immortality of
the individual. On this last point we have no other basis for our
hopes than the assumption, a large one, of the goodness of the
Supreme Being. For him one day everything will be possible. Let
us hope that he will then choose to be just, and that he will bestow
life and conscious feeling on those who shall have contributed to the
triumph of the good. It will be a miracle. But the miraculous, that
RENAN. 205
is to say the intervention of a superior being, which does not take
place at present, may one day, when God will become conscious, be
the normal rule of the universe. The Judeo-Christian dreams which
place at the terminus of humanity the reign of God still preserve
their grandiose truth. The world, governed now by a blind or
powerless consciousness, may be governed some day by one more
reflective. Reparation will then be made for every injustice, every
tear will be dried. And God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes " (Rev. xxi. 5).
What was a belief to the writer of the Revelation
ascribed to St. John was still, after nearly eighteen
centuries, a faint hope for Ernest Renan.
But if these great possibilities are held to be chimerical,
what remains for us poor sons of men to do and to
think? Time was when Renan, following Kant in his
second Kritik^ believed that the love of goodness and of
truth, that the determination of saints, martyrs, and the
noble-minded of all ages to sacrifice themselves for what
they deemed to be the good and the true, testified to the
existence of a deity who directly inspired those feelings.
For the Renan of the Examen, God has vanished from
our universe, though possibly domiciled, more or less
nascent, in another. Yet we are not now, as Renan
once advised, to accept the epicurean philosophy of
the Preacher. Renan's earlier nobleness shows itself
again, and he is not to be reproached for his inconsist-
ency. We are to be good, and true, and self-sacrificing
because the " voices of the universe bid us be good,
true, and self-sacrificing, in a language coming from the
infinite, perfectly clear in what it commands, obscure
in what it promises." In the preface to the Feuilles
De/achees^ a preface probably written two years after
2o6 LIFE OF
the Examen, Renan approximates to a distincter theis-
tic faith. God is not visible in our Cosmos, but he may
have created it and be behind it, so to speak. The
following is the very ingenious illustration of Renan's
meaning, given not long before he was summoned to
the grave, and knew what there is to be known " behind
the veil.'' His denial of a supernatural intervention
is based, he says, on the experience of thousands of
centuries : —
" But thousands of centuries are a nothing in infinite time. What
we call long is relatively short by another standard of largeness.
When the chemist has arranged an experiment which is to last
a year, during the time fixed he does not any more touch his appar-
atus. All that goes on in his retorts is there regulated by the laws of
the absolutely unconscious; but this is consistent with the interven-
tion of a will at the beginning of the experiment, and with another
intervention at its close. During the interval millions of microbes
may have been produced in the apparatus. If these microbes
possessed sufficient intelligence they might allow themselves to say,
' This world is not governed by any special volition. ' They would
be right as regards the short period granted to their observation, but
as regards the great totality of the universe they would be mis-
taken.''
The chemist is, or may be, God, his apparatus our
planet, we the microbes.
** What we call infinite time is perhaps," Renan adds, "a minute
between two miracles. * We do not know,' is all that we can
say as regards that which is beyond the finite. Let us deny
nothing, let us affirm nothing, let us hope.'*
If the Deity of this passage is not and cannot be
seen by us, he is at least the God of our own Cosmos.
RENAN, 207
He is nearer to us than Kenan's former God of the
infinitesimal calculus.
However busy otherwise with his pen and with his
lips, Renan had for six years been steadily advancing
the last great work of his hfe, when, in 1887, was issued
vol. i. of his Histoire du Peuple d^Israel (History
of the People of Israel). In Kenan's view the Origins
of Christianity itself were set forth in this history of the
Jews from their first appearance in Asia to the coming
of Jesus. Christianity was not only the sequel, it was
the offspring of Judaism. From the great prophets of
Israel Jesus drew his earliest inspiration, and they had
their roots in the ^' antique ideas " of the patriarchal life
of the Hebrews. The books ascribed to Daniel and to
Enoch, and such a work as the Assumption of Moses,
suggested to Jesus his Messianic mission, and furnished
him with his eschatology. Strictly speaking, a history
of Israel should have preceded that of the Origins of
Christianity. But, Kenan says, in his fine preface, the
duration of life is uncertain, and he began at the
middle of his subject, specially attracted as he was by
the character of Jesus, and the constant spell cast on
him by "the dreams of a Kingdom of God which should
have for its law love and self-sacrifice."
Of the five volumes of the History of Israel the two
last appeared after Kenan's death; the first three seem
to have been prepared for the press during his lifetime.
Though composed by him in years of much physical
suffering, the book lacks none of the characteristics
which gave a charm and a value to the history of the
Origins of Christianity. The period, some 4000 years,
2o8 LIFE OF
surveyed in the later work, is far more extensive than
the century and a half of which the story is told in
the earlier. The documents on which chiefly a history
of Israel must be based are the books of the Old
Testament, the accumulated literature of a thousand
years, in which, until the era of the prophets, masses of
legend are almost inextricably commingled with frag-
ments of genuine history. In the hands of successive
ancient editors, artlessly combining old documents and
new, altering and interpolating to make the text sup-
port their own view as to the manner in which events
ought to have happened, or had been said to have
happened, the narrative, and even the prophetic, sections
of the Old Testament, have been so transformed as
to perplex at every turn the interpreter. Though
aided throughout by the results of German research,
Renan found it immensely difficult, sometimes almost
impossible, to disentangle the true from the false, and
with nothing but the faintest and very often doubtful
indications to decipher the early history of the Hebrews.
For these reasons, and from the vaster period embraced
in it, conjecture had to play in it a far greater part
than in Kenan's history of early Christianity. In his
preface to the History of Israel he candidly avowed that
the reader must suppose the margin of the book strewed
with perhapses, even after the ample use which he him-
self had made of them in the text. But he brought
to his task the same commanding, if often daring in-
genuity, the same lynx-eyed research, the same dexterity
in throwing from the most unexpected quarters side-lights
illuminating the obscure, which were displayed in his
REN AN. 509
earlier work. The book abounds, too, with admirable
French translations of passages of the Old Testament,
of which those from the Psalms are specially striking.
Renan's Hebrew scholarship, as well as wonderful
tact, enables him to suggest many emendations of the
original ; and of their merit, by comparing them with the
translations in our own Authorised Version, the un-
learned reader can judge for himself, often, I think, to
find them most felicitous.
About 4000 years ago, in Renan's view, the Aryan race
makes its appearance with its centre in Afghanistan, and
the Semitic race, with its centre in Arabia. In mental
endowments, in language, above all in religion, these
two races — Renan repeating once more his favourite
theory — present the greatest contrast to each other. The
Aryan is naturally a polytheist; the Semite tends to
monotheism. The Aryan deifies the elements and
powers of nature, and has a special god for every great
sphere of things. When in danger on the sea, the Aryan
Greek invokes Poseidon ; when he is sick, he offers vows
to Asclepius ; for a good harvest he prays to Demeter.
The Semites, as early as we know them, believe in a
myriad of spirits, called collectively Elohim, a plural
noun which by governing a verb in the singular
establishes their unity. But none of these Elohim
have names of their own like the Aryan gods, and
the Semite prayed to them in all cases as to a Sovereign
God. True, this Sovereign God has a different name
for each of the tribes who worship him. With one he is
Baal, with another Moloch, with another Chemosh, but
to save his theory of Semitic monotheism Renan explains
14
iio LIFE OF
that all Semitic tribal names for the Deity signify the same
thing — the Highest, the Omnipotent, and so forth.
It was not at once, but in the course of time, that the
Elohim became for the tribe of the Semitic Israelites the
one God, who, in the language of the Elohistic writer of
the first verse of Genesis, " in the beginning created the
heaven and the earth/' Monotheism was founded by
the Semites, and received from Judaism by Christianity
and Islam has, outside India, triumphed over the poly-
theism of the great Aryan race to which the European
nations chiefly belong. The very language of the
Semites forbade the growth among them of mythology,
which is the mother of polytheism, nomina niunifia. For
the primitive Aryan every word enclosed a possible myth
The Semitic roots are hard, inorganic, realistic, infertile
both of mythology and metaphysics. The nomadic life,
which was that of the ancient Semites, strengthened their
tendency to monotheism. The very nature of that life
forbids the erection of temples and statues.
Semitic nomads wandering into Mesopotamia came
into contact with the inhabitants of the region of Padan
Aram — a sort of annex to Assyria — and there they found
a people in possession of Babylonian literature and
science, but speaking a language like their own. Hence
the new-comers could assimilate the Babylonian legends,
among them those of the creation, and the deluge, with
that of the probably mythical Abraham. To explain the
great superiority of the accounts of these matters given in
the book of Genesis to those which have been disclosed
to us by the decipherers of the cuneiform inscriptions,
Renan has an ingenious theory. The newly-initiated
REN AN, 211
nomadic Semites, ignorant of the art of writing, and
dependent on memory, reduced the diffuse Babylonian
legends to something simple and concise which they
could easily carry about with them. They infused a moral
meaning into the story of the deluge, which became a
punishment for the sins of mankind. In addition to the
worship of the Elohim, these pastoral Semitic wanderers
were now endowed with a rational cosmogony which the
world has inherited from them.
Some of these tribes, known as Hebrews, tracing their
descent to Terah and his supposed son Abraham,
wandered into Syria. One of them, according to Renan,
distinguished from the rest of the Hebrews by its serious-
ness and attachment to the worship of the Supreme
God, was known as Israel. The Beni-Israel, sons of
Israel, is Kenan's favourite name for them. He will have
it that the Beni-Israel included a clan superior to the rest,
the Beni-Joseph, who, immigrating into Egypt, and finding
themselves well received there, invited the rest of the
tribe to follow them. They did so, and settled in the
land of Goshen, where they led a pastoral life. To this
is the beautiful and touching story of Joseph and his
brethren, reduced by modern criticism ! Renan restricts
to a century the sojourn of Israel in Egypt. This sojourn,
he considers, was injurious to the religion of the Beni-
Israel. They adopted from Egypt the golden calf, the
brazen serpent, the lying oracles, — all of them fatal gifts,
• — along with the Ark which plays so great and perhaps
useful a part in the subsequent history of Israel. With
the overthrow of the shepherd kings, whom Renan con-
siders to have been Semites, and the accession of a native
212 LIFE OF
dynasty, began the maltreatment of the Israelites in
Egypt. Under harsh task-masters they had to slave in
the construction of the great works, urban and others,
undertaken by Rameses the Second, whom Renan calls
an Egyptian Louis XIV. In the anarchy which he be-
queathed to his successors, the Beni-Israel escape to the
peninsula of Sinai. Renan is not at all assured that
there ever was such a person as Moses ; but on the whole
is disposed to aamit his probable existence, though
it is likely that he was for the escaping Israelites a
sort of Abd-el-Kader much more than the legislator
whom tradition and imagination combined to make him.
Among the numerous *' perhapses " of this section of
Renan's narrative, one thing stands out as tolerably clear
to him. It is that with the march of the Israelites
through the desert of Sinai, this mountain becomes to
them the Olympus of their new national god Jahve
(our Jehovah), whose worship, mingled as it became with
that of the golden calf, of the brazen serpent, and the
national gods of Syria, for many centuries eclipsed that
of the Elohim. Renan can scarcely find language in
which to express his disgust at the degradation of the old
patriarchal religion. Jahve is a national, that is to say, a
wicked God. He perverts Israel. He makes it cruel, un-
just, treacherous, selfish, thinking only of its own interests.
" Happily," Renan exclaims in the midst of his sorrow and in-
dignation, "happily there was in the genius of Israel something
superior to the national prejudices. The old Elohism will never
perish ; it will survive, or rather will assimilate Jahveism. The
monstrous excrescence will be extirpated. The prophets, and in
particular Jesus, the last of them, will expel Jahve, the exclusive
RE NAN. 213
god of Israel, and will return to the beautiful patriarchal formula
of a father, equitable and good, the one God of the universe and
of mankind."
But many centuries of legend and history have to be
traversed before Renan and his readers arrive at this
welcome consummation.
Each triumph of the Israelites in their gradual conquest
of Palestine was celebrated in songs which, with some
that arose out of their flight from Egypt, survived, unwrit-
ten, in the memory of the people. As the years rolled
on, these songs received legendary additions, the whole,
in the writing ages, assuming a narrative shape, prose con-
necting and elucidating the popular lyrics, and forming
such a work as the Book of the Wars of Jahve, which
contributes some material to the early chronicles of
Israel. Of these lyrics the chaunt of Deborah is the
grandest. Slowly coalescing into a nation, the Israelites
passed from the rule of the Judges, resembling, Renan
thinks, the Roman dictatorship, to a monarchical govern-
ment under Saul. Renan considers David to have been
a successful and fortunate bandit-chief, among whose
unscrupulous acts was his desertion to the Philistines,
the national enemy of Israel. But David gave Israel a
capital in Jerusalem, and by fixing the Ark there, made
it the centre of the religious worship of the nation. He
established a standing army, and founded a dynasty
which lasted five hundred years. Few men, according
to Renan, were less religious than David, though legend
made him a saint, and the authorship of psalms, only
one or two fragments of which he could possibly have
written, was ascribed to him. What David began in
2T4 LIFE OF
making Jerusalem the religious centre of Israel, Solomon
completed by building the first temple, and installing in
it the Ark. But while doing this Solomon was by no
means a fanatical devotee of Jahve. Jahve might be
supreme in Jerusalem, but on the Mount of Olives, facing
Zion, pagan deities were freely worshipped, among them
Chemosh, the god of Moab, and of the famous Moabite
inscription. One of the functions of the prophets of the
future was to denounce such idolatry.
Solomon's reign was splendid but costly. Renan
compares it in both respects to that of Louis XIV., at
whose death his over-taxed subjects rejoiced. Solomon's
death was followed by the successful revolt of the ten
tribes, whom his exactions and forced labour had alien-
ated; and by their establishment of the kingdom of
Israel under Jeroboam, there was left only the little
kingdom of Judah to Solomon's successors, whose sove-
reignty did not extend beyond fifteen or twenty miles
from Jerusalem. The discontent of the northern tribes
with Solomon's luxurious harem had already probably
found expression in the Song of Solomon, and the
establishment of the kingdom of Israel was followed
by the execution of a much more important literary
work. Under David and Solomon the use of writing
had considerably extended. According to Renan, about
B.C. 930, some scribes of the new northern kingdom of
Israel committed to writing (i) a book of legends con-
taining those preserved by oral tradition from the beginning
of things to the exodus; (2) a book of heroes, coming
down to the kingship of David. Of this primal chronicle
of Israel more hereafter.
REN AN. 215
Between the authority of the kings of Judah and
that of the kings of Israel there was a great difference.
While the kings of Judah became in a measure legitimate
sovereigns, ruling by a sort of right divine, it was not so
with the kings of Israel, the offspring of a rebellion,
though a successful one. It was therefore to the kings
of Israel, in so far as they encouraged the worship of
heathen deities, that the boldest resistance could be
offered in the name of Jahve by the prophets, who had
long ceased to be mere sorcerers or diviners. Samuel
himself, it will be remembered, had been consulted by
the youthful Saul as to the whereabouts of his father^s lost
asses. Since the time of Samuel the prophets of Jahve
had been more or less powers in the state. The struggle
between them and the kings of Israel, who encouraged,
or tolerated, pagan worship, came to a head when Ahab
was confronted by Elijah. Renan thinks that possibly
Elijah existed, but considers the accounts given of
him to be legendary, or distorted by long-subsequent
Jahveists, and is of the same opinion as regards Elijah's
successor, Elisha. " Wherever Elijah and Elisha enter,
the fabulous enters with them." The prophets, or pro-
phetism, triumphed in Israel and m Judah . in Israel
with the success of Jehu and the murder of Jezabel, in
Judah with the assassination of Athaliah and the accession
of a descendant of David to the throne. To Renan,
Ahab, calumniated by the Jahveist chroniclers, is a re-
markable sovereign, brave, mtelligent, moderate, who did
much for his people ; while Jehu, the protege of Elisha,
was in cruelty and treachery a worthy precursor of Philip
IL of Spain.
2i6 LIFE OF
The two triumphs of prophetism just recorded
occurred between b.c. 860 and 850. About the latter
date, Renan conjectures, a writer in Israel, who from
his use of the name of Jehovah (Jahve) is in modern
times designated the Jehovist, undertook a very grand
task. It was to take the two books, one of legends, the
other of heroes, or of the wars of Jehovah, and adding to
them floating traditions of his time, with the results of
his own creative ingenuity, to construct a sacred history
from the creation onwards. Some twenty-five years
later, and without any knowledge of the work of his
predecessor, though a rumour of its existence may
have reached him, a notion of a similar kind occurred
to a writer in Jerusalem, probably a priest in the Temple
there, and called also in modern times the Elohist, because
in his narrative he speaks of Elohim, and does not use the
name Jehovah (Jahve) until he has reached the point at
which it was supposed to have been formally promulgated
by Moses. Much of the oral tradition possessed by the
Jehovist was also at the command of, and was used by, the
Elohist, who had over the other the advantage given by
documents existing at Jerusalem on the lives of David
and Solomon. Further, Renan supposes, about the time
of Hezekiah, the works of the Elohist and- the Jehovist
were combined in one, but yet so as to show in numerous
passages the handiwork of the Jehovist and of the Elohist
respectively. Since the acceptance of a theory of some
such kind it has been one of the main objects of biblical
critics to discover and assign to each of the two the
passages belonging to each.
Considerations of space forbid anything like a re-
RENAN, 217
production of Renan's characteristics of each author,
and his indication of the passages which may be assigned
to each. Some of them, however, must be touched on.
The account of the creation in the first chapter of
Genesis is the Elohist's, the discrepant account of it in
the second chapter is the Jehovist's. To the Jehovist
is to be assigned the account of the garden of Eden
and of the fall. To the Pentateuch the Jehovist con-
tributed what Renan calls the Book of the Covenant
{L Alliance)^ the commands and code contained in
Exodus XX. 24 to xxiii. 19 inclusive. Here, while re-
maining the one God of Israel, Jahve shows himself
just, humane, merciful, the protector of the weak,
punishing injustice and cruelty. But it is not to be
supposed that, apart from its embodiment of the then
existing customary law, such a code had any legal force,
or represented anything more than the personal theories
of the Jehovist. Certainly the precepts respecting the
Sabbatical year were never applied in practice. While
the glory of framing this benevolent code belongs to
the Jehovist, to the Elohist belongs that of promulgating
the Decalogue, which is purely ethical, and in which
nothing is said of sacrifice or ritual. With the Decalogue
Jahve and Elohim become one.
Some fifty years (probably B.C. 800) after the composi-
tion of the Jehovist narrative of the early history of Israel,
there appeared in the person of Amos, " the herdsman of
Tekoah," the first of that new school of prophets
whose utterances have been preserved for us in writing,
who were teachers of the pure theology and morality,
which, in Renan's view, anticipated the teaching of
2i8 LIFE OF
Jesus. In portraying these prophets, Renan puts forth
all his strength. He is struck with wonder and admira-
tion at the spectacle which they present. Here are
men deriving the great authority which they exert as
reformers of the popular creed and social ethics from
nothing more than their own assertion that they are
inspired by God, and are interpreters of His will. They
proclaim themselves called on to effect a profound
revolution in His worship, and another in the social
arrangements of the nation. The monotheism which
they preached, when all the world and many of their
own countrymen were sunk in idolatry, has become the
creed of the foremost nations of the Aryan race. In the
midst of Oriental tyranny and servility the Hebrew
prophets were the first to proclaim the rights of man.
Renan is not blind to their faults, and to the exaggera-
tion sometimes conspicuous in their teaching. Their
symbolism was sometimes grotesque, their denunciations
of the arts of life were often one-sided, and the theocracy
which they upheld was injurious to patriotism and national
self-reliance. In their occasionally blind fury and
fanaticism, Renan compares them to the Radical and
Socialistic journalists of his own contemporary France;
but their aberrations sink into insignificance in the
light of their transcendent merits. Save for them and
for what, so to speak, led up to them, Renan declares
that he would have disdained to write the history of
a petty nation whose ordinary life was in no way superior
to that of the Moabites and the Edomltes, and who, like
them, would have been forgotten but for the prophets.
The key-note of the new school of prophecy is struck
RENAN. 219
by Amos. The Jahve, who was the tribal deity of the
Hebrews, just as Chemosh was of the Moabites, is now
the God not of Palestine merely but of the universe,
" he that formeth the mountains and createth the wind
and declareth unto man what is his thought, — that
maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the
high places of the earth." The " Lord God " of Amos
is not, as Jahve had been, and as the Gods of the
Heathen were, to be propitiated by sacrifices, " Though
ye offer me burnt-offerings and your meat-offerings^ I ivill
not accept them; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of
fat beasts . . . but let judgment run doivn as waters^ and
righteousness as a mighty stream^ To " oppress the
poor, to crush the needy,'' is a crime of crimes. That
justice is venal, is among " the manifold transgressions,"
and ** the mighty sins," denounced by Amos. Justice
is denied to the humble through a conspiracy of the
wealthy with the judges. *' They afflict the just ^ they take
a bribe, and they turn aside the poor from the gateP
After Amos Hosea represents God as saying: ^^ I will
have mercy and not sacrifceJ' To Amos and Hosea
nothing essential was added, Renan thinks, by subsequent-
prophets, not even by Isaiah, though, according to
Kenan, he is the greatest of them all, besides being
a man of superb literary genius : he " writes like a
Greek,'' Kenan's highest formula of praise. Under the
good Hezekiah, a king according to Isaiah's own heart,
the new piety of the prophets flourished practically as
well as theoretically, and to the saintly people who
surrounded the king Kenan assigns the authorship of
much of the book of Psalms, "perhaps the most beauti-
220 LIFE OF
ful, and certainly the most fruitful creation of the genius
of Israel." After a reaction from the pietism of the
reign of Hezekiah, a successor worthy of him, the
iconoclastic Josiah, ascends the throne of Judah, and
with him appears the terrible Jeremiah. With the reign
of two reforming kings there had grown up a need
for a Law sanctioning the principles and practices of the
new theocracy. The Book of the Covenant was little
known beyond the Temple; indeed, Renan thinks that
it may have existed only in a single copy. The result
was the Book of the Law, which its composers ascribed
to Moses, which Josiah was told (b.c. 622) had been
fouiKi in the Temple, and which comprises all of
our present Deuteronomy, from verse 45 of Chapter
iv. to the end of Chapter xxviii. Renan thinks
that the book was manufactured by the priests, and
that, though Jeremiah's name is not mentioned in con-
nection with the transaction, he was the soul of the
whole of the " pious intrigue." The book of the Law
was, in Renan's opinion, ** the worst enemy of the
universal religion dreamt of by the prophets of the
eighth century." Jahve, though remaining as God of
the universe, a just deity, becomes again the special God
of Israel, therefore a partial one. He promises to heap
all possible prosperity on Israel, as a bribe to it to
remain faithful to him ; and infidelity to him is to be
punished by death. This part of the new code has
never been surpassed even by the code of the Dominican
inquisition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Here again was a relapse from the old Elohim to the
old Jahve.
RENAN. 22t
With the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians (b.c.
721), the kingdom of Israel disappeared, leaving the
kingdom of Judah, the inhabitants generally of which
may now be called Jews. With the capture of Jerusalem
by the Chaldeans (b.c. 588) came the final captivity
of the Jews, and their exile to Babylon. Ezekiel was
among the exiles who confidently expected a restoration,
w^ith a view to which was formed the book known as
Leviticus, " full of formalism and fanaticism," as usual
ascribed to Moses, and inspired by Ezekiel, as Deuter-
onomy had been inspired by Jeremiah. But a far greater
prophet of the captivity than Ezekiel was the unnamed
one whom Renan calls the second Isaiah — the real
author of Chapters xl.-lxvi. of the prophetic book
ascribed to Hezekiah's Isaiah. To the second Isaiah,
Jahve, the God who made the heavens and the earth,
takes a very special interest in the Jews, and assigns to
them the religious primacy of the nations. But ultimately
he is to bring to the worship of himself all the people
that on earth do dwell. " Look unto me, and be ye saved,
all the ends of the earth, I have sworn by myself that
unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear^
Renan opines that in the second Isaiah, " the thought
of Israel reaches the greatest height that it has ever
attained."
With the restoration of the Jews, and the building of a
newtemple at Jerusalem, the compilation of the Book of the
Law, such as we now have it in the Pentateuch, was in all
essential respects completed, and once more Jahve was
substituted for Elohim in the national worship. " The
second Isaiah," says Renan, " had hoped for something very
222 LIFE OF
different. His Jerusalem, open dayand night to receive the
nations, had nothing in common with that Httle shut-in Jeru-
salem to which no one could be admitted without all sorts
of formalities. The idealist seer would have been very
much astonished if he had been told that, to sacrifice to
Jahve on Sion, circumcision was a necessary preliminary."
For more than two centuries the Jewish nation slept a
deep sleep under the influence of the soporific ad-
ministered to it in the form of the Law. The very
completeness of their servitude to the Law roused them,
however, to revolt, when Antiochus Epiphanes crowned
his persecution of the Jews by polluting the temple at
Jerusalem. Renan traces to this heroic struggle under
the Maccabaeans the origin of a Jewish belief in rewards
and punishments after death. Hitherto the Jews had been
taught that loyalty to Jahve would bring them worldly pros-
perity; none of their teachers or prophets had promised
them a recompense beyond the grave. If they had been
punished in this Hfe, it was for their sins, or the sins of
their fathers. But how were they now sinning in shed-
ding their blood for the sake of their religion? They saw
apostates rewarded and the faithful subjected to the most
frightful punishments for not denying their faith. The
first distinct and emphatic expression in any Jewish writ-
ing of a belief in a future state of rewards and punish-
ments, is found in the so-called Book of Daniel. Three
centuries before, Ezekiel had spoken of an apparently
mythical Daniel as a wise and righteous man, worthy of
being ranked with Noah and Job. A pious Jew of the
time of the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, assumed
the name of Daniel to encourage his suffering country-
RENAN. 223
men by writing of what he feigned that Daniel had
suffered, during the captivity, along with a mystical pro-
phecy, which foreshadows among other things the ultimate
triumph of the Jews. In this book (Chapter xii. 2) of
the pseudo-Daniel stand written the memorable words :
" Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall
awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and
everlasting contempt'^ In time the faith thus expressed be-
came that of many Jews, the Sadducees rejecting it. As
a dogma it was accepted in spirit by the Founder of
Christianity, and became one of the corner-stones of the
Christian religion. No Jews, however, believed in the
necessary immortality of the soul. For them a life after
death was a mark of special favour to reward the good, or
of special reprobation to punish the bad. The Jews did
not believe in a soul apart from the body, hence their
doctrine of the resurrection, and those of the resurgents
who were to be rewarded were to enjoy themselves, not
in heaven, but on earth. Christianity in the third century
combined the doctrine of the resurrection of the body
with the Platonic belief in the immortality of the soul.
In Renan's opinion the dominant belief of the actual
Christian, especially of a spiritualist, is generally in the
immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body
is kept out of sight and mind. To the Maccabaean age
also belong, according to Renan, the quasi-monastic
Essenes, strict among the strictest followers of the law
(although they substituted offerings for sacrifices in the
Temple of Jerusalem), and carrying their asceticism so
far as to prohibit marriage, except under very singular
conditions. The superficial resemblance between
J
224 LIFE OF
Essenianism and Christian monasticism has produced
a theory that the latter sprang out of the former, but
Renan will not allow the slightest influence to have been
exerted by the much earlier Essenes on the founders
of Christianity, who were probably ignorant of their
existence.
The capture of Jerusalem by Pompey (b.c. 63) ended
the Asmonaean dynasty founded by Jonathan, brother of
Judas Maccab?eus, and Palestine became a Roman pro-
vince, very tolerably administered. It is to this time
that Renan now assigns the composition of Ecclesiastes,
from which it is evident that the belief in a life
beyond the grave was not held by a writer who may be
regarded as a type of the educated and thoughtful Jew
of that age. The new dogma of the resurrection, and of
rewards and punishments after death, was accepted by
the Pharisees, who were the well-to-do bourgeois of Jeru-
salem, strict followers of the law, carrying the people
with them. To the wealthy official and hierarchical
classes belonged the Sadducees, worldly, sceptical, who
rejected the doctrines of the resurrection and made the
most of life on this side of the grave.
Towards the end of the work Renan gives a vivid
account of the character and career of Herod the Great,
whose reign in Palestine recalled, in its purely profane
splendour, that of Solomon himself. Renan com-
pares him to Mehemet AH, but acquits him of the
legendary massacre of the innocents : " Jesus was only
born four years after Herod's death." The History of
Israel closes with an interesting passage, in which, nearly
thirty years after the appearance of the Vie dejesus^ Renan
RENAN, 225
makes the emphatic asseveration : — " After constant
reflection I persist in thinking that the general physiog-
nomy of Jesus was such as it is represented in the
Synoptic Gospels." Whatever Renan may have thought
earlier, Christianity, as well as Judaism, he now declares,
will disappear, but in the course of thousands of years
they have given birth to the cardinal phenomenon of
our age, SociaHsm.
'* Judaism and Christianity represent in antiquity what Socialism
is in modern times. Socialism will not definitely carry all before it.
Freedom, with what follows from it, will remain the law of the world.
But the freedom of each will be purchased at the expense of con-
siderable concessions made to all. Social questions will no longer
be suppressed ; they will more and more take precedence of political
and national questions."
Surely this last is a prophecy in course of fulfil-
ment.
15
CHAPTER XI.
CONCLUSION.
'X'HE final chapter of the History of Israel had for
'*' heading the statement and pious exclamation,
Finito LibrOj sit Laus et Gloria Chris to, and at the end,
" Finished the 24th October 189 1." The fifth and last
volume, of which, it is too evident, Renan had not seen
the proofs, was not published until 1894, when its
author was no more. He was suffering acutely, and
more or less continuously throughout the years during
which he was working at the History of Israel. At the
beginning of 1892 he knew that his condition was hope-
less. During a midsummer visit to Brittany he rallied a
little, but feeling much worse he decided to return to
Paris and die, since he must die, at his post in the
College de France. During his last months he suffered
agony so terrible as sometimes to deprive him oif the
power of speech, but to the end he was gentle and
kind to all around him, and assured them that he was
happy. He often said to them that death is nothing,
that he did not fear it, and congratulated himself on
having reached threescore years and ten, the Psalmist's
normal limit of life. He had wished to meet death with
LIFE OF RENAN, 227
his faculties unimpaired, and his wish was granted. On
the very day of his death he dictated a page of an essay
on Arabian architecture. One of his last wishes was
that the poor of Rosmapanon should be remembered,
and among his last words to his devoted wife were these:
"Let us submit to the laws of that nature of which we
are one of the manifestations. The heavens and the
earth abide.'' He died at the College de France on the
2nd October 1892, a few days before our own Tenny-
son, whom he knew and duly admired.
The Government and the Chamber rightly decided
that a state-funeral should be given to him who at the
time of his death was at the head of the serious literature
of France. Within the court of the College de France,
which was draped in black, were grouped official dig-
nitaries, representing the President of the Republic;
judges were there with members of the French Academy,
representatives of the university, of the chief learned and
scientific bodies of France, of the diplomatic body.
Without, to accompany the catafalque to the cemetery of
Montmartre, where Renan's remains were deposited in
the Scheffer family vault, was an escort of troops of all
arms, as befitted one among whose distinctions was that
of having been a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.
Afterwards the French Chamber decreed that the
remains of Renan, with those of Michelet and Quinet,
should be transferred to the Pantheon, which, as a rest-
ing-place for the remains of famous men, is at once
the Westminster Abbey and the St. Paul's of France.
Mirabeau was its first tenant.
The life of no eminent Frenchman presents a more
228 LIFE OF
stainless record than that of Renan. He began his
active career by nobly sacrificing his prospects of
worldly advancement to his convictions, and from entire
devotion to them he never swerved. He lived the
frugal, indefatigable, laborious life of scholars of the
olden time, while, unlike most of them, he was conspicu-
ous in the gravest controversies, religious, intellectual,
and political, of an age of intense conflict in every sphere
of thought and action. Ever speaking his mind freely on
the chief topics, sacred and profane, passionately debated
in his day and generation, he aroused the fiercest and most
merciless of all antagonisms, that inspired by the odhwi
theologicum. But to none of his orthodox assailants did
he ever reply; from his own vivid remembrance of his
youthful devotion to the orthodox creed he could under-
stand and pardon the enmity which his frankness drew
upon him. Only once, and then playfully and almost
indirectly, did he deign to refer to absurd calumnies
reflecting on his personal honour, with which he had
been assailed by some infuriated scribes of the clerical
press. There is one characteristic of Renan, as a writer
on an absorbing theme of his time, which it seems to
me has been overlooked even by his French panegyrists,
although indeed it is of a kind which naturally perhaps
induced them to ignore it. Unlike several of his most
famous contemporaries among French men of letters,
although deeply attached to his country, deeply alive to
what was glorious in its history, and keenly appreciating
the graceful and brilliant qualities of his countrymen, he
never flattered them, he never indulged in that exagger-
ated glorification of France and the French to which
RENAN. 229
Victor Hugo was so prone, and which, by stimulating
the national vanity and turning the national head,
has been most pernicious to the people which greedily
swallowed the adulation offered it. No Frenchman ever
lamented more than Renan all that was involved in,
and that followed on, the cataclysm of Sedan. But he
did what was better and more useful than shed tears, he
pointed out to his countrymen the faults of character
and conduct that had brought on them their terrible
disasters, and he preached to them the austere and pain-
ful discipline of self-reform, in which alone their recovery
lay.
Renan was often inconsistent, but his inconsistency
w^as never the offspring of opportunism, or exhibited with
an eye to his own interest. Under the Second Empire
he freely criticised Imperialism, under the Third Republic,
Republicanism. Though he sometimes hankered after it,
an active and personal part in political life was denied
him, perhaps fortunately, since his insight and independ-
ence would not have allowed him to attach himself
ardently to any party in France which had a chance of
exercising authority or influencing legislation. But there
was one sphere of usefulness in which, from his character,
position, and reputation, he was fitted and able to do
good. He pleaded persistently for a reform of the
higher and highest education of France, for more
freedom in its organisation, more elasticity in* its
methods, for the expansion of the substantial and the
serious in its programme, and the displacement of the
merely rhetorical and showy. It seems that much that
he advocated in this way has been adopted by the Third
230 LIFE OF
Republic, which he looked on with no great favour and
some suspicion. Before he died he was able to con-
gratulate France on the development of an historical
school, earnest, studious, and accurate, which owed
much to his efforts and example.
In spite of the seemingly rather reckless levity which
is exhibited in some of his later writings, Renan's morality
was stainless. "Every one," says his personal friend,
Sir M. E. Grant Duff, " who knows anything about him
at all, knows that his conduct from birth to death was
simply that of a saint — a saint whose opinions may have
been as detestable as possible, but who, even if judged
by the teachings of the Galilean lake, was still a saint."
He modestly charged himself with not sufficiently en-
deavouring to promote the interests of others; but those
who knew him declare him to have been one of the most
friendly and helpful of men. All who have been in his
company speak enthusiastically of the fascination of his
manner and his conversation. M. G. Monod describes his
manner as " having something of the paternal affability
of the priest; the benedictory gesture of his plump and
dimpled hands, and the approving motion of the head,
were indications of an urbanity which never deceived,
and in which one felt the nobility of his nature and his
race." One peculiarity of his conversation was very
characteristic of the man. He hated controversy in
private as in public, and has recorded in his Souvenirs
his habit of agreeing with his interlocutor rather than
engage in discussion. In this he was very different from
Dr. Johnson, who, Sir Frederick Pollock says, " would
have execrated Renan's books if he could have read
RE NAN. 231
them, and opened his arms to Renan himself after five
minutes' conversation, if tliey could have met. It was
the utmost refinement of performance on a fine instru-
ment, and without any stiffness or artificial display.
Renan's speech might be said to revive the Homeric
simile of words falling even as snow-flakes. It was
uniform, continuous, soft, and yet brilliant; every part
was crystalline, and seemed to have its place in the
whole by a sort of inevitable felicity." Renan's personal
appearance could scarcely be called prepossessing. An
American visitor to him at the College de France, in the
year preceding his decease, describes him seated at his
desk : — " rotund and episcopal, his hands crossed over
his shapeless body, from which the large head emerges,
rosy and silvery, the face broad, with big features, a great
nose, enormous cheeks heavily modelled in abundant
flesh, a delicate and mobile mouth, and grey Celtic eyes.''^
Renan's opinions on the purely human origin of
Christianity and Judaism, and on the legendary character
of much of the Bible, bear so near an afifinity to those
with which the world has been familiar for more than a
century, that his heterodoxy may offend some but can
scarcely startle any. Doubtless it is otherwise in the case
of his daring expeditions into the infinite of the unknown
and the unknowable. His "thoughts that wander
through eternity " contrast with the general sobriety of
English philosophical speculation, even that of our most
advanced thinkers. The nearest approach to Renan's
high-soaring conjectures on ontology and the ultimate
destiny of man, is to be found in John Stuart Mill's
^ Theodore Child in Harper's Magazine, vol. xxiv., 1892.
232 LIFE OF
posthumous essays on religion, though his mild sur-
mises are far, very far, transcended in aim and scope by
Renan's audacious hypotheses. These are dreams, but
the dreams of a man of genius, whose mind from youth
onwards had been constantly exercised by problems
which agnosticism pronounces to be insoluble on this
side the grave, and very naturally declines to handle.
But surely, though to be regarded of course merely
as conjectures, Renan's are interesting, as showing
how the greatest of possibilities appeared to the intellect
and imagination of such a mind as his. He was not,
and did not pretend to be, a systematic thinker. Indeed
his philosophy seems to have partaken of the fieri
which he loved to discover in the universe. Here again,
therefore, the reader will find Renan sometimes incon-
sistent, affirming what he has contradicted and con-
tradicting what he has affirmed. But in the end, as
at the outset, whatever his temporary aberrations, Renan
is seen holding fast to the faith of his youth, that good
is for ever good, and evil for ever evil, that truth must be
sought and goodness followed at all hazards, so that we
may not fail to co-operate in carrying out the ultimate
aim of existence, the triumph of good over evil. In
a fine essay on Renan's friend, the late M. James
Darmesteter, whom France and its highest literature have
recently lost, M. Gaston Paris admirably describes
Renan's as a "complex and even deceptive nature,"
which, while "infinitely mobile on the surface, beneath
the varying play of light and shade" is nevertheless
"unchanging in its depths."^
' Contemporary Review for January 1895.
RENAN, 233
In the survey, necessarily incomplete, of Kenan's
multifarious writings, I have ventured, so far as I
could without presumption, to express occasional
opinions on his manner and on his matter. In point of
style and treatment Renan is, by all those who are com-
petent to judge, acknowledged to be one of the most
consummate of modern literary artists. Moreover, for
the work which he had to perform, the interpretation to
modern Europe of the great religions which have moulded
the world, from his combination of vast learning with the
widest sympathies, his fitness was unique. He brought
to bear on the subjects of the two greatest of his works,
the histories of early Christianity and Judaism, not only
genius, erudition, patient labour, lynx-eyed vigilance of
research, a penetrating intellect which rejected the
supernatural in the history of man — Gibbon had all
these — but also what Gibbon had not — a deep religious
sentiment, which survived the dogmatic faith of
Renan's childhood and youth, and enabled him to
reverence, almost to worship, as the highest ideal of
humanity, the Founder of Christianity, to sympathise
with and therefore to understand the prophets and
psalmists of Israel, the Christian apostles, martyrs, and
mediaeval saints, the Protestant and Puritan reformers, —
while declaring that the creed of all of them had
ceased to be valid for the man of the second half of
the nineteenth century. If inevitable limitations of
space had not forbidden, I should have liked to linger
over those works of which so rigorous a critic as
Edmond Scherer declared that, as the poet Gray
considered it to be the height of felicity to lie on a
234 LIFE OF
sofa and read new volumes of Crebillon and Marivaux,
so it was his, with or without the sofa, to have new
volumes of Renan given him to read. I have been able
to bestow only an occasional glance at the contents of
Renan's miscellanies, but those of my readers hitherto
ignorant of them who may resolve to make their acquaint-
ance, will find themselves in a new world replete with
all that is attractive, interesting, instructive, from the life-
like description of Mahomet, mending his own garments
in intervals of prophecy, to charming gossip about the
Journal des Debats and its contributors under the Second
Empire, or touching anecdotes of heroism in humble
French life, told by Renan when awarding, in the name
of the French Academy, the Monthyon prizes of virtue.
Renan, of course, has his defects. One of them is a cer-
tain softness of mental fibre which leads him to exalt the
contemplative over the active life, to prefer this and the
other meek and meditative ascetic to such a command-
ing personality as that of the fiery and energetic apostle
of the Gentiles. In his intense desire to realise the per-
sons who figure in his great histories he sometimes trans-
forms conjecture into positive and emphatic affirmation;
and M. de Mezieres, in his address of welcome to
Renan on his admission to the French Academy, gently
reminded him that out of a single adjective he had
evolved quite an elaborate character of the evangelist
Luke. But Carlyle's favourite virtue, veracity, is
eminently Renan's. Everywhere in his writings you
see a man straining to give a faithful picture of
what he has to describe, an impartial estimate of the
character which he is portraying. He affirmed of himself,
RENAN. 235
not only that he never said anything that he did not believe
to be true, but that he always said everything that he
did believe to be true. Fontenelle declared that if he
had his hand full of truth he would only open his little
finger. This was not Renan's mode of proceeding, and
his frankness sometimes gave offence to his friends.
But veracity, like charity, covers a multitude of sins, and,
compared with the amount and range of his writings,
his sins in speech were few in number. Do we not
crave above all things from a gifted man, working in
Renan's intellectual sphere, that he shall tell us what he
really and truly thinks and feels, whether the world likes
it or not? This Renan did throughout life, and the
themes on which he spoke were often the most delicate
and difficult, the most controversial, as well as the loftiest
that can occupy the human mind. Never was there a
man of letters and of genius, writing much on the deepest
problems of religion and philosophy, on human destiny
and its relation to the infinite, who could more justly
than Renan claim to have for his epitaph the all-
including words, Veritatem dilexi—\ have loved truth.
INDEX.
*' Abbesse de Jouarre," 176, 178
Academy, Renan elected to, 192
Antichrist^ /', 1 56- 161
"Apostles, The," 124-134;
quoted, 125, 129
Avenir de la Science^ 57 ; de-
scribed, 57, 58 ; reasons for
delay in publishing, dd
Averro'es et VAverroume^ 63,
71
B.
Bernard, Claude, Renan suc-
ceeds at the Academy, 192 ;
his speech on, 193
Berthelot, Tklarcellin, friendship
for Renan, 53, 54 ; letter to,
120; 145, 174, 200
Bopp, Comparative Grammar,
. 54, 68
Buloz, founder of the Revue des
Deux MondeSj 70
Burnouf, friendship for Renan,
55,70
*' Caliban," 176, 177
Calvin, Essay on, quoted, 73-
74
Chateaubriand, ii, 15
*' Christianity and Rome," 183
Cognat, Abbe, describes Renan
as a lad, 22 ; goes w^ith him
to St. Sulpice, 27 ; describes
him there, 29; accompanies
him to Paris, 31, 32 ; import-
ant letter of Renan's to, 33 ;
enters sub-diaconate, 36 ;
Renan's confessions to, 41,
52
College de France, 92; Renan
appointed to the chair of
Hebrew, 93 ; his first lecture
at, 94-96 ; Renan's course
suspended, 97 ; his appoint-
ment revoked, 115; Renan
pleads for higher education in,
122, 143; elected Director,
184, 199, 226 ; Renan's death
at, 227
238
INDEX,
** Constitutional Monarchy in
France," 143
Cornu, Madame, Kenan's friend-
ship for, 88 ; quotes the Em-
press's criticism of the Vie de
[hus, 113
Correspondant, /?, recollections
of Renan in, 22
"Critical Historians of Jesus,
the," article of Renan on, 59
^'
De philosophic peripatetic A apud
Syros con line ntatio historica^
62
Dialogues et Fragments Philoso-
phiques, 120, I2l ; quoted,
121, 147, 175
Duff, Sir M. E. Grant, 97, iii,
113; account of interview with
Renan, 143; letter of Renan
to, quoted, 144 ; quoted on
visit to London, 183, 184;
description of Renan, 230
Dupanloup, Abbe, afterwards
Bishop of Orleans, superior of
the Seminary of St. Nicolas
du Chardonnet, 19, 20; con-
nection with Renan's school-
life, 22-27; views of, quoted
in Souvenirs, 26
E.
**Eau de Jouvence," 176, 177
Ecclhiaste, /', 193-195
Eglise Chritienne, l\ 178-183
*• Ethical and Critical Essays,"
71
Eugenie, Empress, opinion of
Vie dejhus, 113, 143
Ewald, 72; treatment of Book
of Job, 83
Feuilles Ditachees, 202 - 207 ;
quoted, 203, 204, 205, 206
"General History and Com-
parative System of the Semitic
Languages," 68, 69
Gibbon compared with Renan,
Goncourt, Edmond de, descrip-
tion of dinner after fall of
Sedan, 144-146
" Gospels and the Second Chris-
tian Generation, the," 163-
170
Guest, Lady Charlotte, her
Mahinogion, a collection of
Celtic lore, much liked by
Renan, 75
H.
Hague, the, Renan visits, 162,
163
Hegel, philosophy discussed by
Renan, 59
Hir, Le, Hebrew teacher at
St. Sulpice, 36, 37; advises
Renan on his studies, 46
Histoii-e du Peuple d'Israel,
207-225; quoted, 212, 213,
225, 226
Histoire Litteraire de la France
an xive. sihle^ 61, 62
L
"Instruction Superieure en
France, son Histoire et son
Avenir," 122
" Intellectual Activity of France
in 1849," 57
INDEX,
239
" Intellectual and Moral Re-
form of France, the," 151-155
Irving, Henry, interview with
Renan, 185
Issy, branch of Seminary of St.
Sulpice, Renan's life there,
27, 28-31
J.
Job, Book of, translated by
Renan, 78; quoted, 79-82,
Journal Astatique^ Renan con-
tributes to, 65
Journal de V Instruction Ptib-
liquBf 60
Journal des Dibats^ contribu-
tions by Renan, 66, 70, 71,
234
Journal des Savans^ contri-
buted to by Renan, 65
Lamennais, 11, 71, 86
Le Clerc, Victor, Renan's friend-
ship for, 61 ; article on, 172
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, Renan's
speech of welcome to, at
Academy, 193
L^vy, Michel, publisher, 64,
65, 170
Liberie de Penser^ la^ Renan
contributes to, 56, 57, 59
London, Renan visits, 183-
186
Lubbock, Sir John, 143
M.
Marc Atirele et la Fin du
Monde Antiquey 1 86- 1 92 ;
quoted, 192
Merimee, Prosper, criticises the
Life of Jesus, 118, 119
*' Metaphysics of the Future,
the," 173
Mezieres, M. de, speech of wel-
come to Renan at Academy,
234
Mill, John Stuart, 232
" Miscellanies of Travel and
History," 170-172
Mission de Phenicie^ 89
Moniteur, report against Renan
by Minister of Public Instruc-
tion published in, 113, 114
N.
Napoleon, Prince, Renan's
intimacy with, 140; Renan
accompanies on tour to the
North, 144
Napoleon III., 50, ^y, 88 ; policy,
139, 140, 142, 148, 152
Noemi, Renan's playfellow, 16
Nouvelles Etudes d'Histoire Re-
Hgieuse, 59, 70, 71, 197- 199
O.
"On the Study of Celtic
Literature," 75
'* Origin of Languages," 56
P.
Pall Mall Budget quoted on
Renan's stay in London, 184,
185
Pantheon, Renan buried at,
227
Paris, Renan enters Seminary,
31 ; sets up house with his
sister, 63 ; life at, 202
Pasteur, Renan's speech of
welcome to, at Academy, 193
" Poetry of the Celtic Races,"
74,75
240
INDEX,
'* Poetry of the Exhibition,"
74, 75; quoted, 76,77
Pollock, Sir Frederick, on
Kenan's style, 231
PrHre de Nef7iii le, 176, 177
Q.
"Questions of the Time," 139
R.
Renan, the father, profession,
12; death, 13, 18
Renan, Henriette, Renan's
sister, takes a school to pay
off the family debts, 13 ; en-
courages Renan in his doubts,
41; sends him money, 46,
53 ; keeps house for him, 63 ;
encourages her brother to
marry, 67; accompanies him
to Syria and dies of fever,
90; dedication to her of the
Vie de Jesus ^ 90
Renan, Madame, nee Scheffer,
67 ; accompanies her husband
to Syria, 90 ; receptions at the
College de France, 199
Renan, Joseph Ernest, parent-
age, 11-13, 14; school-life,
15-17 ; at Seminary of St.
Nicolas, 20, 21 ; life there,
22-27 ; enters branch of St.
Sulpice at Issy, 27-31 ;
goes to St. Sulpice in Paris,
31 ; doubts, 32-35 ; learns
Hebrew, 36 ; studies German
exegesis with Le Hir, 37 ;
leaves St. Sulpice, 46 ;
character, 47 ; comparison
with Voltaire, 48-51 ; starts
as tutor in Quartier Latin,
52 ; studies languages and
wins Volney prize, 54, 55 ;
friendship for Burnouf, 55 ;
wins prize at Academie des
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres,
56 ; writes for periodicals,
56-60; teaches at Versailles,
61 ; appointed on commission
of literary inquiry in Italy
and England, 61 ; appoint-
ment in Bibliotheque Nation-
ale, 62 ; becomes Doctor of
Letters, 62 ; writes De Philo-
sophid peripateticA apud
Syr 05 comnientatio historica
and Averro'es et V Averro'istne^
63; takes house with his
sister, 63 ; writes for Journal
Asiatique and Journal des
SavanSy 65 ; writes for
Journal des Debats and Revue
des Deux Mondes, 66; pre-
pares for marriage, 6j ;
publishes "General History
and Comparative Systems of
the Semitic Languages,"
68 ; elected member of the
Academy, 70; "Studies of
Religious History " and " Eth-
ical and Critical Essays,"
71-77; translates Book of
Job and Song of Solomon,
'j2f2>6 ; commissioned to ex-
plore ancient Phoenicia^ 2>7,
89, 90 ; writes Mission de
Phinicie^ 89 ; begins Vie de
Jesus ^ 90; appointed Professor
of Hebrew at the College de
France, 93 ; his first lecture,
94-96 ; his course suspended,
97 ; gives private lectures, 97 ;
finishes Life of Jesus, 98; hisap-
pointment revoked, 115; Dia-
logues et Fragments Philoso-
phiquesy 120, 12 1 ; V If is true-
tion Supirieure en France^ son
Histoire et son Avenir, 122;
INDEX,
241
visits the East, 123; writes
"TheApostles,"i24-i34; "St.
Paul," 134-138; "Questions
of the Time," 139; offers him-
self for election to the French
Chamber, 140-142; "Con-
stitutional Monarchy in
France," 143; goes to Scot-
land with Prince Napoleon,
144; enters into a contro-
versy with Strauss, 147-151;
" The Intellectual and Moral
Reform of France," 151- 155;
visits Rome, 156; "The
Antichrist," 156-161 ; invited
to Palermo, 161; "Twenty
Days in Sicily," 161, 162;
invited to the Hague, 162;
" The Gospels and the
Second Christian Genera-
tion," 163-170; "Miscel-
lanies of Travel and Plis-
tory," 170-172; "The Meta-
physics of the Future," 173;
"The Theology of Beranger,"
175; "Caliban," "Eaudejou-
vence," "Le Pretre de Nemi,"
"L'Abbesse de Jouarre," 176-
178; L! Eglise Chretienne,
178-183; comes to London,
183 ; Marc AurUe et la Fiti
du Monde Antique^ 186-192;
elected member of the
Academy, 192 ; VEcclhi-
flj/^, 193-195; Souvenirs d En-
fance et de Jeunesse^ 195-
197; Nouvelles Etudes d' His-
toire Religieuse^ I97-I99; re-
visits Treguier, 200; Feuilles
Ditachees^ 202-207; Histoire
du Peuple d'' Israel, 207-225;
death, 226 ; state burial, 227;
characteristics, 228-235
Renan, the mother, character,
13, 14, 18, 39; reconciled to
his abandoning the priest-
hood, 53 ; death, 201
Revue des Deux Mondes, con-
tributed to by Renan, 70, 71,
120, 121, 142, 161, 197
Rome, Renan visits, 156
Rosmapanon, Renan's country-
house, 202, 227
S.
Sacy, Silvestre de, advice to
Renan, d^y 67, 70
Sainte-Beuve, acquaintance with
Renan, 67 ; criticises the Life
of Jesus, 115, 116, 140
Sand, George, criticisms on
Renan, 119, 120
Scherer, Edmond, criticises the
Life of Jesus, 11 6- 118, 234
Seminary of St. Nicolas du
Chardonnet, 19, 22-26
Sicily, Renan visits, 161, 162
Song of Solomon, translation
by Renan, 78, 84, 85
Souvenirs d^Enfa^tce et de
Jeunesse^ mentions Noemi,
16, 18; describes Renan's
seven years' study for the
priesthood, 22, 24, 25, 26,
31; quoted, 37-39; end of,
55 ; describes Renan's intro-
duction to Levy, 64, 65, 75,
196, 230
Spinoza,Renan's address on, 163
Stanley, Dean, Renan's friend-
ship with, 185, 186
St. Paul, 134-138, 156
Strauss, his Leben Jesu, 37, 59 ;
controversy with Renan, 147-
151
T.
Tennyson, anecdote told by
Renan of his stay in Brittany,
75, 185
16
242
INDEX.
"Theology of Beranger," 175
Thierry, Augustin, advises Re-
nan, 66, 70, 71
Tourgenieff, Kenan's funeral
speech, 200
Treguier, Kenan's birthplace,
II, 17, 41; Kenan's later
visits, 200
" Twenty Days in Sicily," 161,
162
V.
Versailles, 61, 147
Vie de Jesus, 59, 60 ; begun,
90; dedication quoted, 90;
described, 98-112; quoted,
loi, 106, 109, no, III;
criticisms of, 1 12- 1 20
Villemarque, collections of Cel-
tic literature, 75
Volney prize won by Kenan,
54, 55, 68 , . , ^
Voltaire, compared with Kenan,
47-51, 112; Strauss's lectures
on, 147
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
By JOHN P. ANDERSON (British Museum).
I. Works.
II. Appendix—
Biography, Criticism, etc.
Magazine Articles, etc.
III. Chronological List of Works.
I. WORKS.
iclaircissements tires des langues
semitiques sur quelques points
de la prononciatiou grecque.
Paris, 1849, 8vo.
Extract from the "Journal G6n6-
ral de I'lnstruction Publique."
Aveiroes et TAverroisme, essai
histcrique. Paris, 1852, 8vo.
The second and third editions,
revised and enlarged, appeared in
1861 and 1866.
De philosophia peripatetica apud
Syros commentationem histori-
cam scripsit E. Renan. Parisiis,
1852, 8vo.
Histoire generale et systeme com-
pare des Langues Semitiques.
Paris, 1855, 8vo.
The second edition appeared in
^ 1858 ; third and fourth in 1863.
Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse.
Paris, 1857, Svo.
Numerous editions.
Studies of Religious History
and Criticism. Authorised trans-
lation from the original French
by 0. B. Frothingham. New
York, 1864, 8vo.
Studies in Religious History.
Authorised English edition.
London, 1886, 8vo.
Studies in Religious History.
London, 1893, 8vo.
De I'origine du laugage. Paris,
1858, Svo.
Memoirs sur Torigine et le car-
actere veritable de I'histoire
phenicienne qui porte le nom
de Sanchoniathon. Paris, 1858,
4to.
Extract from tom. xxiii. of the
**Mdm, de I'Acad. des inscrip. et
belles-lettres."
Essais de Morale et de Critique.
Paris, 1859, Svo.
A collection of articles which
appeared originally in the ** Revue
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
des Deux Mondes" and the "Journal
des Ddbats."
Nouvelles considerations sur le
caract^re general des peoples
semitiques, et en particulier
sur leur tendance au mono-
theisme. Paris, 1859, 8vo.
Le Livre de Job traduit de
THebreu, etc. Paris, 1859,
8vo.
The Book of Job translated
from the Hebrew, by Ernest
Renan. Rendered into English
by A. F. G. and W. M. T.
London [1889], 8vo.
Le Cantique des Cantiques traduit
de I'Hebreu, avec une etude sur
le plan, I'age et le caract^re du
poeme. Paris, 1860, 8vo.
Another edition. Avec 25
eaux-fortes d'apres les dessins
de Bida. Paris, 1885, fol.
M^moire sur I'dge du livre in-
titule : Agriculture Nabateenne.
Paris, 1861, 8vo.
Extract from torn. xxiv. of the
** Mem. de I'Acad. des inscrip. et
belles-lettres."
An Essay on the Age and Anti-
quity of the Book of Nabathoean
Agriculture, etc. [Translated
from the French byS. Symouds.]
London, 1862, 12mo.
Henriette Renan, souvenir pour
ceux qui Pont connue. Paris,
1862, 8vo.
Only 100 copies printed.
De la part des peuples Semitiques
dans I'histoire de la civilisation.
Discours d'ouverture au College
de France. Paris, 1862, 8vo.
La chaire d'Hebreu au College
de France. Explications kmes
collogues. Paris, 1862, 8vo.
Histoire des origines du Christian-
isme. 8 vols. Paris, 1863-83,
8vo.
Vol. i., Vie de Jdsus; vol. ii.,
Les Apdtres; vol. iii., Saint Paul;
vol. iv., L' Antichrist ; vol. v., Les
6vangiles ; vol. vi., L'Eglise Chr^ti-
enne; vol. vii., Marc-Aurfele; vol.
viii., Index G^n^rale.
Vie de Jesus. Paris, 1863, 8vo.
Numerous editions. It also forms
torn. i. of the *' Histoire des Origines
du Christianisme."
The Life of Jesus. London,
1864, Svo.
The Life of Jesus. Trans-
lated by C. E. Wilbour. New
York, 1864, 8vo.
Another edition. New York,
1870, 8vo.
People's edition. London,
1887, 8vo.
J^sus. Paris, 1864, 12mo.
This is the same work as the
" Vie de Jdsus " without the intro-
duction and notes,
Trois inscriptions pheniciennes
trouv^es k Oumm-El-Awamid.
Paris, 1864, 8vo.
Extract from the ** Journal Asia-
tique."
Mission de Ph^nicie dirig^e par
M. Ernest Renan. Paris, 1864,
4to.
Plates. Paris, 1864, fol.
Sur les Inscriptions Hebraiques
des synagogues de Cafr-Bereim,
en Galilee. Paris, 1865, 8vo.
An extract from No. 8, 1864, of
the ** Journal Asiatique."
Histoire litteraire de la France au
quatorzi^me si^cle. Discours
sur I'etat des lettres par V.
Le Clerc. Discours sur I'etat
des beaux-arts par E. Renan.
2 tom. Paris, 1865, 8vo.
Les Apotres. Paris, 1866, 8vo.
Forms also tom. ii. of the " His-
toire des Origines du Christianisme."
The Apostles. Translated
from the ori^jinal French, Lon-
don, 1869, 8vo.
Another edition, London
[1889], 8vo.
Histoire critique des livres de
I'Ancien Testament. Traduite
par M. A. Pierson. Avec une
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
iii
preface de M. Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1866, 8vo.
Etude sur Lamennais. Paris,
1865, 8vo.
This study on Lamennais ap-
peared in that writer's work, "Le
Livre du peuple, nouvelle edition."
Paris, 1865.
Nouvelles observations d'epi-
graphie hebraique. Paris, 1867,
8vo.
Questions Contemporaines. Paris,
1868, 8vo.
Saint Paul. Avec une carte des
voyages de Saint Paul, par
M. Viepert. Paris, 1869, 8vo.
Forms also torn. iii. of the "His-
toire des Origines du Christian-
isme."
La Part de la Farnille et de I'Etat
dans TEducation. Paris, 1869,
12mo.
La Monarchie Constitution nelle en
France. Paris, 1870, 12mo.
La Reforme intellectuelle et
morale. Paris, 1871, 8vo.
Essais d'histoire religieuse et
Melanges litteraires de D. F.
Strauss. Traduit de Talle-
mand par C. Ritter. Avec
une introduction par Ernest
Renan. Paris, 1872, 8vo.
Rapport fait a la Soci^te Asiatique
dans la seance du21 Juin, 1872.
Paris, 1872, 8vo.
Extract from No. 5, 1872, of the
** Journal Asiatique."
Pierre du Bois, legiste. Paris,
1873, 4to.
Only 20 copies were printed for
L'Antechrist. Paris, 1873, 8vo.
Forms also torn. iv. of the "His-
toire des Origines du Christianisme."
Rapport annuel fait k la Soci^te
Asiatique, dans la seance du
30 Juin 1875. Paris, 1875,
8vo.
Extract from No. 9 of the " Jour-
nal Asiatique," July 1876.
Rapport annuel fait k la Society
Asiatique, dans la seance du
28 Juin 1876. Paris, 1876, 8vo.
Extract from the "Journal Asia-
tique."
Dialogues et fragments philoso-
phiques. Paris, 1876, 8vo.
Philosophical Dialogues and
Fragments. From the French
by Rds Bihari Mukharji. Lon-
don, 1883, 8vo.
Spinoza. Conference tenue a la
Haye, le 12 Fevrier 1877, deux-
centi^me anniversaire de la mort
de Spinoza. Paris, 1877, 8vo.
Spinoza: 1677 and 1877. Ad-
dress, etc. [Translated by Mrs.
William Smith.] Pp. 147-170
of '* Spinoza; four Essays," etc.
Edited by Professor Knight.
London, 1882, 8vo.
Les Evangiles et la seconde gener-
ation chr^tienue. Paris, 1877,
8vo.
Forms also torn. v. of the "His-
toire des Origines du Christianisme."
Melanges d'histoire et de voyages.
Paris, 1878, 8vo.
Caliban suite de la Tempete, drame
philosophique. Paris, 1878, 8vo.
Preface to Jules Mohl's Vingt-sept
ans d'histoire des Etudes Orien-
tales. Paris, 1879, 8vo.
Lettre k un Ami d'Allemagne.
Paris, 1879, 8vo.
Relates to a passage in his recep-
tion speech at the Acad^mie Fran-
gaise.
L'Eglise Chr^tienne. Paris, 1879,
8vo.
Forms also torn. vi. of the "His-
toire des Origines du Christianisme."
Discours de M. E. Renan, pro-
nonc^ le jour de sa reception k
1' Academic Fran9aise le 3 Avril,
1879. Paris, 1879, 8vo.
Conferences d'Angleterre, Rome et
le Christianisme, Marc-Aur^le.
Paris, 1880, 12mo.
'* Hibbert Lectures."
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Lectures on the influence of
the institutions, thought, and
culture of Rome on Christianity,
and the development of the
Catholic Church. Translated
by C. Beard. London, 1880,
Svo.
The "Hibbert Lectures."
L'Eau de Jouvence, suite de
Caliban. Paris, 1881 [1880],
870.
Annaik, poesies Bretonnes par M.
N. Quellien. Avec une Lettre-
Preface de M. Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1880, 8vo.
Inscriptions phenicicnnes tracees
a I'encre, trouvees \ Larnaca.
Paris, 1881, Svo.
An extract from the "Revue
Archeologique," Jan 1881.
Rapport annuel fait a la Societe
Asiatique dans la seance du
29 Juin 1881. Paris, 1881,
8vo.
Extract from the "Revue Asia-
tique."
L'Ecclesiaste traduit de I'Hebreu,
avec une etude sur I'age et le
caractfere du Livre. Paris, 1882,
Svo.
Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation ? Con-
ference faite en Sorbonne, le
11 Mars 1882. Paris, 1882,
Svo.
Marc-AurMe et la fin du monde
antique. Paris, 1882, Svo.
Forms also torn. vii. of the " His-
toire des Origines du Christianisme."
Seance de 1' Academic Fran§aise du
27 Avril 1SS2. Discours de re-
ception de M. Louis Pasteur,
Reponse de M. Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1882, Svo.
Stance de I'Academie Franjaise du
25 Mai 1882. Discours de re-
ception de M. V. Cherbuliez.
Reponse de M. Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1882, Svo.
Le Judaisme comme race et
comme religion. Conference
faite au cercle Saint-Simon le
27 Janvier 1883. Paris, 1883,
Svo.
L'Lslamisme et la Science. Con-
ference faite a la Sorbonne le
^9 Mars 1883. Paris, 1883,
Svo.
Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse.
Paris, 1883, Svo.
An attested copy of the "acte de
naissance" of Renan is inserted in
the British Museum copy.
Recollections of my youth.
Translated from the French by
C. T. Pitman and revised by
Madame Renan. London, 1883,
Svo.
Second edition. London,
1892, Svo.
Nouvelles etudes d'histoire re-
ligieuse. Paris, 1884, Svo.
De I'idcntite originelle et de la
separation graduelle du judaisme
et du christianisme, conference
faite k la Societe des etudes
juives, le 26 Mai, 1883. Ver-
sailles, 1884, Svo.
An extract from ^he "Annuaire
de la Soci^t^ des Etudes Juives,"
3e Ann^e.
Discours prononce sur la tombe de
L Tourgu^neff le ler Qctobre
1883, par M. Renan. (Pp. 297-
302 of Tourgeneffs **(Euvres
Dernieres." Paris [1885], 12mo.
Seance de I'Academie Franyaise du
23 Avril 1885. Discours de re-
ception de M. F. de Lesseps.
Reponse de M. Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1885, Svo.
Philippine de Porcellet, auteur
presume de la Vie de Sainte
Donceline. Paris, 1885, 4to.
Extract from the "Histoire Lit-
tdraire," tom. xxix.
1802. Dialogue des Morts. (Re-
pres^nte k la Comedie-Fran9aise,
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
le 26 Fevrier 1886, jour anniver-
saire de la naissance de V.
Hugo.) Paris, 1886, 8vo.
Le Pietre de Nemi, drame philoso-
phique. Paris, 1886, 8vo.
L'Abbesse de Jouarre. Drame [in
five acts and in prose]. Paris,
1886, 8vo.
Discours et Conferences. Paris,
1887, 8vo.
Histoire du Peuple d'Israel. 5
torn. Paris, 1887-1894, 8vo.
History of the People of
Israel. From the French. 3
vols. London, 1888-91, 8vo.
Drames Philosophiques. Paris,
1888, 8vo.
Caliban, L'Eau de Jouvence, Le
Pretre de Nemi, L'Abbesse de Jou-
arre, Le Jour de I'An, 1886.
Le Livre des Secrets aux Phil-
osophes, on Dialogue de Placide
et Timeo, Extrait de I'Histoire
litteraire de la France, torn.
XXX. Paris, 1888, 8vo.
Congres des Societes savantes.
Discours prononces a la seance
generale du Congres le 15 Juin
1889, par M. Renan et M. Fal-
lieres. Paris, 1889, 8vo.
Re[^onse de M. E. Renan au dis-
cours de M. J. Claretie. Paris,
1889, 8vo.
Pages choisies, a I'usage des lycees
et des ecoles. Paris, 1890,
Svo.
L'Avenir de la Science. Pensees de
1848. Paris, 1890, Svo.
The Future of Science. Ideas
of 1848. Translated from the
French (by A. D. Vandam to
p. 284, C. B. Pitman from p.
284). Loudon, 1891, Svo.
Journal d'un Voyage en Arabic
(1883-84). Par Charles Huber.
[Edited by J. E. Renan.] Paris,
1891, Svo.
Feuilles Detachees. Faisant suite
aux Souvenirs d'Enfance et de
Jeunesse. Paris, 1892, Svo.
II. APPENDIX.
Biography, Criticism, etc.
A., P. A. D. — Les Erreurs du xixe
siecle, etc. Paris, 1865, Svo.
A reply to Kenan's "Vie de
J^sus."
Andrie, J, F. D. — Quelques mots
sur les mythes du Docteur
Strauss et sur la vie de Jesus
d'apr^s E. Renan. Berlin, 1865,
Svo.
Anglade, M. L'Abbe. — Impossible
de nier la Divinite de Jesus
Christ. Paris, 1863, Svo.
Contains strictures on Kenan's
** Vie de J^sus."
Arnaldi, D.— Vita di Gesu del
professore Ernesto Renan. Con-
futazione. Genova, 1863, Svo.
Autessanty, G. d'.— M. Renan
devant le bon sens. Paris,
1867, Svo.
Asseline, V. — Preuves de I'exist-
ence de Dieu, suivies de quel-
ques reflexions sur la Vie de
Jesus de Renan. Paris, 1864,
Svo.
Auger, Lazare. — Neuf pages de-
cisives sur la *'Vie de Jesus"
de M. Ernest Renan. Paris,
1863, Svo.
Auzies, C. — Les Origines de la
Bible et M. E. Renan. Paris,
1889, Svo.
g * * * * *^ H.— LaVieetlaMort
de Jesus selon Renan, Havet et
Ramee. Paris, 1863, Svo.
Balche, Alexandre de.— M. Renan
et Arthur Schopenhauer.
Odessa, 1870, Svo.
Barnouin, Dr.— Jesus-Christ et
M. Renan, etc. Avignon, 1866,
Svo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Barr^s, Maurice. — Dialogues par-
isiens. Huit jours chez M.
Renan. Paris, 1888, 12mo.
Baubil, F. H.— Vive Jesus ! Appel
au peuple du manifeste Deicide
de M. Renan. Paris, 1864,
8vo.
Baudon, P. L. — M. Ernest Renan
le prophete et le vrai fils de
Dieu. Etude critique. Paris,
1863, 8vo.
Bauer, Bruno. — Philo, Strauss
und Renan und das Urcbrist-
hentlium. Berlin, 1874, 8vo.
Beard, John R. — A Manual of
Christian Evidence, containing
as an antidote to current
materialistic tendencies, par-
ticularly as found in the
writings of Ernest Renan, an
outline of the manifestation
of God in the Bible, etc.
London, 1868, 8vo.
Beyschlag, W. — Ueber das *'Leben
Jesu" von Renan. Berlin
[1864], 8vo.
Bloch, M. — Renaniana. [On the
*»Vie de Jesus."] Pest, 1864,
8vo.
Block, Simon. — Monsieur Renan
et le judaisme. Vie de Jesus.
Paris, 1863, 8vo.
Boiteau, Paul. — Lettre k M.
Renan sur son article du Jour-
nal des D^bats du Decern bre,
1859. Paris, 1859, 8vo.
Bonald, L. J, M. de, Cardinal. —
Mandement portant condamna-
tion du livre intituM *' La Vie
de J^sus." Lyon, 1863, 4to.
Bonnetain, J. — Le Christ-Dieu
devant les si^cles. M. Renan
et son roman du jour. MUcon,
1863, 8vo.
Bourgade, F.— Lettre k M. E.
Renan k I'occasion de son
ouvrage intituM Vie de J6sus.
Paris, 1864, 8vo.
Bourget, Paul. — Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1883, 8vo.
Part 16 of "C^ldbrit^s Contem-
poraines."
Essais de psychologic con-
temporaine. Paris, 1885, 12mo,
Ernest Renan, pp. 35-110.
Brandes, Georg. — Eminent
Authors of the Nineteenth
Century, etc. New York
[1887], 8vo.
Ernest Renan, pp. 147-167.
Brunner, Sebastian. — Der Atheist
Renan und sein Evangelium.
Regensburg, 1864, 12mo.
Bussy, Charles de. — Les Apotres
selon^ Renan. Paris, 1866, 8vo.
L'Ame de Mademoiselle Hen-
riette Renan, a son fr^re Ernest,
auteur de la Vie de Jesus.
Paris, 1863, 32mo.
Cahuac, J. C. — La Verite. centre
I'erreur ou contre Renan.
[Agen, 1865], 12mo.
Cairns, Rev. John. — False Christs
and the true, or the Gospel
History maintained in answer
to Strauss and Renan. Edin-
burgh, 1864, 8vo.
Carfort, Adolphe, and Bazouge, F.
— Biographic de Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1864, 8vo.
Carle, Henri. — Crise des Croy-
ances. M. Renan et I'esprit do
systeme, etc. Paris, 1863, 12mo.
Carvalho, T. de. — Vida de Judas.
Renan. Refuta9ao das novas
irapiedades. Lisboa, 1864,
16mo.
Cassel, Paulus, — Ueber Renan's
Leben Jesu. Berlin, 1864,
8vo.
Castaing, A. — Jesus, M. E. Renan
et la Science. Paris, 1863,
12mo.
Catholic. — Le Rationalisnie ^tudie
dans la Vie de J^sus de M.
Ernest Renan par un Catho-
lique. Besan5on, 1869, 8vo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Chantrel, J. — Un bon Apotre.
Paris, 1866, 8vo.
A criticism on "Les Apdtres"
by Renan.
Ciiarmes, Francis. — Etudes his-
toriques et diplomatiques.
Paris, 1893, 8vo.
Reception de M. Renan d I'Acad-
^mie Frangaise, pp. 375-381.
Chauvelot, Barnabe, — A. M.
Ernest Renan. Paris, 1863,
8vo.
A reply to his " Vie de Jdsus."
Cheret, L'Abbe. — Lettres d'un
Cure de Campagne a M. Renan
sur sa Vie de Jesus. Paris,
1863, 8vo.
Chery, M. — Les Apotres de Ernest
Renan. Paris, 1866, Svo.
Chose, M. — DelaPhilosophie pour
Deux Sous a propos du livre de
M. Chose \i.e.y the ** Vie de
Jesus" of J. E. Renan].
Paris, 1863, 12mo.
Clabaut, L'Abbe. — E. Renan et
rivangile. Paris, 1863, Svo.
Cochin, Augustin. — Quelques
mots sur la Vie de Jesus.
Paris, 1863, 12mo.
Coco Zanghi, G. — Saggio di Ser-
moni con note critiche contro
la nuova opera di E. Renan,
Les Apdtres. Catania, 1867,
Svo.
Cognat, Joseph. — Monsieur Renan
hier et anjourd'hui. Paris,
1SS3, Svo.
Cohen, J. — Les Deicides, examen
de la Vie de Jesus, etc. Paris,
1864, Svo.
Colani, T. — Examen de la Vie de
Jesus, by M. Renan. Paris,
1864, Svo.
Colins, C. de. — A Monsieur
Ernest Renan. Paris, 1862,
12mo.
A letter occasioned by his speech
at the opening of his course of
lectures at the College of France.
Constant, B. — Les Contradictions
de M. Renan, etc. Paris, 1863,
Svo:
Crelier, L'Abbe H. J. — Le Livre
de Job venge des interpretations
fausses et impies de M. Ernest
Renan. Paris, 1860, Svo.
Le Cantique des Cantiques
venge des interpretations im-
pies de M. Ernest Renan.
Paris, 1861, Svo.
M. E. Renan guerroyantcontre
le surnaturel. Paris, 1863, Svo.
Cros, L'Abbe. — M. Renan demas-
que, ou lettre de M. I'Abbe
Cros k un de ses paroissiens sur
la philosophic de M. Renan.
Paris, 1863, Svo.
Croyant. — M. Renan en face du
miracle ; par un Croyant.
Paris, 1863, Svo.
Cruice, M. P., Bishop of Mar-
seilles. — De quelques discus-
sions recentes sur les Origines
du Christianisme, etc. Paris,
1858, Svo.
D., A. M. — Lettre d'un Homme
du Monde h. M. Renan. Paris,
1864, Svo.
On the " Vie de J^sus."
J) * * * * *^ H. F. — Le Cin-
quieme Evangile de M. Renan.
Paris, 1863, Svo.
Darmesteter, James, — Notice sur
la vie et I'oeuvre de M. Renan.
Paris, 1893, Svo.
Daspres, L. — Le Christ de I'his-
toire en face du Christ de M.
Renan. Paris, 1864, Svo.
Daumer, G. F. — Das Christen-
thum und sein Urheber. Mit
Beziehung auf Renan. Mainz,
1864, Svo.
Delaporte, P^re. — La Critique et
la Tactique, etude sur les pro-
c^d^s de I'anti- christianisme
moderne h. propos de M. Renan.
Paris, 1863, Svo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Delitzsch, F. — Jesus und Hillel.
Mit Riicksicht auf Ren an verg-
lichen. Erlangen, 1867, 8vo.
Delorme, J. — Les Contradictions
de M. Ernest Renan. Lyon,
1863, 8vo.
Deschamps, A. — Le Semitisme
et les idees d'un professeur
d'Hebreu. Paris, 1863, 8vo.
Des Granges, F. — Une Echappee
sur la Vie de Jesus d' Ernest
Renan. Paris, 1863, 8vo.
Desliaires, G. — La Vie de Jesus, les
Evangiles et M. Renan. Mar-
seille, 1863, 8vo.
Deutinorer, M. von. — Renan und
das Wunder. Miinchen, 1864,
8vo.
D'Hulst, M. — ij'Examen de con-
science de M, Renan. Paris,
1889, 8vo.
M. Renan. Paris, 1892,
8vo.
Extracted ixovuLe Correspondant.
Disdier, Henri.— Lettres detachees.
No. 12. Lettre k Ernest Renan,
etc. Geneve, 1863, 8vo.
Du Boulay, John. — English Com-
mon Sense versus Foreign Fal-
lacies in questions of religion.
London, 1864, 8vo.
Contains remarks on the "Vie
de Jdsus," etc.
Duff, Sir M. E. Grant.— Ernest
Renan. In Memoriam. Lon-
don, 1893, 8vo.
Dumoulin, J. — Le bon sens d'un
homme de rien contre les non
sens d'un homme de Science
Refutation des livres de M.
Renan. Paris, 1870, 8vo.
Eichhoff, F. A. — Reponse aux
]&vangiles de G. d'Eichthal et
h, la Vio de Jesus d'Ernest
Renan. Paris, 1864, Svo.
Elmslie, W. G.— Ernest Renan
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Seailles, Gabriel. — Ernest Renan;
essai de biographic psycholo-
gique. Paris, 1895 [1894], Svo.
Seigneur, G. — La Question Divine,
M. Hello et M. Renan. Paris,
1859, Svo.
Sepp, J. N. — Thaten und Lehren
Jesu. Unter eingehender Bezie-
hung auf die jiingsten Werke
von Renan und Strauss. Schaff-
hausen, 1864, 8vo.
Soiling, G. — Monsieur Renan et
PAllemagne. Wiesbade, 1879,
Svo.
Sourdes, A.— A propos du livre
de M. Renan [the Vie de J^sus].
Paris, 1863, Svo.
Spitzen, 0. A.— Vijfde Evangelic
of Evangelic volgens Ernst
Renan [in his *' Vie de Jesus"].
ZwoUe, 1863, Svo.
Stephens, E.— Modern Infidelity
disarmed, in a reply . to M.
Renan's Life of Jesus. London,
1876, Svo.
Strauss, D. F.— Krieg und Friede.
Zwei Briefe an Ernst Renan
nebst dessen Antwort, etc.
Leipzig, 1870, Svo.
Sulzbach, A. — Renan und der
Judaismus. Frankfurt-an-Main,
1867, Svo.
Taylor, Isaac. — The Restoration
of Belief, etc. London, 1864,
Svo.
The present j^osition of the
argument concerning Christianity:
Ernest Renan, pp. 360-383.
Tiraonide, pseud. — Renegat? Ou
question indiscrete a M. Renan.
Paris, 1864, Svo.
Tripard, M. — Philosophic de M.
Renan dans la Vie de J^sus.
Besan9on, 1864, Svo.
Trogoff de Kerbiquet, L. de. — La
Defense de I'fivangile. £pitre
en vers h. M. Renan. Paris,
1863, Svo.
I7
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Tulloch, John.— The Christ of
the Gospels and the Christ of
Modern Criticism : lectures on
M. Kenan's *'Vie de Jesus."
London, 1864, 8vo.
Urdaneta, A. — Jesucristo y la In-
credulidad. Obra escrita respon-
der a la "Vida de Jesus" de
Mr. E. Renan. Carcacas^ 1866,
Svo.
Valeri, J. B. — La Divinidad de
Jesucristo. Refutacion auslitico
de la vida de Jesus de Ernesto
Renan. Lima, 1864, Svo.
Verneilh, Felix de. — L'Art du
moyen age, et les causes de
sa decadence d'apres M. Renan.
Paris, 1862, 4to.
Vidart, L. — El Panteismo Ger-
mano-Frances. Apuntes criticos
sobre las doctrinas filosoficas de
Mr. E. Renan. Madrid, 1884,
Svo.
Vigoureux, F. — La Bible et la
critique. Reponse aux "Souv-
enirs d'enfance et de jeunesse "
de M. Renan. Paris, 1883,
Svo.
Villeneuve, H. de. — L'Amusez-
vous de M. Renan et le Credo
du P. Didon. Paris, 1892, Svo.
Vloten, Dr. J. van. — Jezus van
Nazareth en zijne beginselen,
etc. Amsterdam, 1863, Svo.
Wallon, H. A. — La Vie de Jesus
et son nouvel Historien, Paris,
1864, Svo.
Weidemann, K. A. — Die neuesten
Darstellung des Lebens Jesu von
Renan, Schenkel und Strauss.
Gotha, 1864, Svo.
Weill, A. — Le faux Jesus-Christ
du P6re Didon et les faux pro-
ph^tes d'Ernest Renan. Paris,
1891, Svo.
Weisinger, A. — Aphorismen gegen
Renan's Leben Jesu. Wien,
1864, Svo.
X. — La Divinite de Jesus Christ
a propos du livre de M. Renan.
Paris, 1863, 12mo.
Young, John. — The Christ of His-
tory. With an appendix, con-
taining a brief criticism of M.
Renan's "Vie de Jesus." Lon-
don, 1868, 8vo.
Zeller, E. — Strauss and Renan.
An essay, etc. London, 1866,
Svo.
Magazine Articles, etc.
Renan, Ernest. — Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 90,
1861, pp. 626-639. — Eraser's
Magazine, vol. ^^^ 1862, pp.
579-593. — Harper's New
Monthly Magazine (with por-
trait), by J. McClintock, vol. 28,
1863, pp. 398-405.— American
Quarterly Church Review, by
J. S. Kidney, vol. 19, 1867,
pp. 204-224. — North British
Review, vol. 48, 1868, pp.
63-85. — Appleton's Journal
(with portrait), vol. 3, 1870, pp.
190-192.— Methodist Quarterly,
by G. Prentice, vol. 52, 1870,
pp. 6-28. — London Quarterly
Review, vol. 50, 1878, pp. 45-77.
— Fortnightly Review, by G.
Saintsbury, vol. 33, 1880, pp.
625-643.— Nineteenth Century,
by F. W. H. Myers, vol. 9,
1881, pp. 949-968. — West-
minster Review, vol. 120, 1883,
pp. 437-470. — Dublin Review,
vol. 92, 1882, pp. 221-225.—
Academy, by Paul Bourget,
June 16, 1883, pp. 420, 421.—
Atlantic Monthly, vol. 52,
1883, pp. 274-281. —Saturday
Review, May 5, 1883, pp. 563,
564. — Church Quarterly Review,
vol. 16, 1883, pp. 444-463.—
Quarterly Review, vol. 171,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Kenan, Ernest.
1890, pp. 336-385. — West-
minster Review, by W. H.
Gleadell, vol. 136, 1891, pp.
387-403 ; same article, Eclectic
Magazine, Nov. 1891, pp. 691-
701.— Academy, by J. Owen,
May 9, 1891, pp. 443-445.—
Harper's Magazine, by Theodore
Child, vol. 24, 1892, pp. 330-
334.— Pall Mall Budget, Jan.
28, 1892. — North American
Review, by Col. R. G. Inger-
soll, vol. 155, 1892, pp. 608-
622.— Saturday Review, Oct. 8,
1892, pp. 408-409.— Spectator,
Oct. 8, 1892, pp. 491, 492.—
The Monist, by Moncure D.
Conway, vol. 3, 1893, pp. 201-
210.— Dial (Chicago), Oct. 16,
1892, pp. 234, 235.— Academy,
by J. Jacobs, Oct. 8, 1892, pp.
311, 312.— Athenaeum, Oct. 8,
1892, pp. 484, 485.— Contem-
porary, by G. Monod, vol. 62,
1892, pp. 632-646.— Revue des
Deux Mondes, by E. M. de
Vogue, Nov. 15, 1892, pp. 445-
462. — Revue Encyclopedique,
by F. Pillon, tom. 2, 1892, pp.
1559-1586.— New World, by J.
Darmesteter, vol. 2, 1893, pp.
401-433.
Abbess of Jouarre, Nation,
by A. Laugel, vol. 43, 1886,
pp. 370, 371.
and D'Eichthal. New
Monthly Magazine, vol. 129,
1863, pp. 231-252.
and FranjCe. Fortnightly
Review, by J. Mazzini, vol. 21,
1874, pp. 153-174.
and Sainte-Beuve. London
Quarterly Review, vol. 33,
1870, pp. 457-480.
and St. Paul, Quarterly
Review, vol. 150, 1880, pp.
243-269. — Revue des Deux
Renan, Ernest.
Mondes, by B. Aube, Aug. 15,
1869, pp. 877-904.
Another View of. Atlantic
Monthly, March 1893, pp.
431-432.
Antechrist. Edinburgh Re-
view, vol. 140, 1874, pp. 485-
515. — Theological Review, by
C. K. Paul, vol. 10, 1873, pp.
557-575. — London Quarterly
Review, vol. 41, 1873, pp. 135-
164 ; Christian Observer, by
E. B. Elliott, vol. 75, 1875, pp.
275-287, 373-382, 463-475.—
Revue des Deux Mondes, by
A. Reville, Dec. 15, 1873, pp.
750-782.
The Apostles, Fortnightly
Review, by H. Rogers, vol. 5,
1866, pp. 513-536; same article,
Littell's Living Age, vol. 90,
1866, pp. 479-493.
Autobiography. Modern Re-
view, by R. R. Suffield, vol. 4,
1883, pp. 495-519.— Athenaeum,
May 19, 1883, pp. 627, 628.—
Literary World (Bost), July 28,
1883, pp. 236, 237. —Mac-
millan's Magazine, vol. 48,
1883, pp. 213-223.— Spectator,
vol. 56, 1883, pp. 10, 11, 79,
81. — Scottish Review, vol. 3,
1883-84, pp. 61-75.— Nation, by
A. Laugel, vol. 36, 1883, pp.
421, 422, 441, 442.— Contem-
porary Review, by J. L. Davies,
vol. 44, 1883, pp. 279-289.
A Chat about. Fortnightly
Review, by A. D. Vandam,
vol. 52 N.S., 1892, pp. 678-
684,
Confession of Faith. Spec-
tator, vol. 58, 1886, pp. 1694-
1696.
Critical Essays. Christian
Examiner, vol. 77, 1864, pp.
83-98.
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Renan, Ernest.
Dialogues and Fragments.
Mind, by G. C. Robertson, vol.
4, 1879, pp. 132-135.— West-
minster Review, vol. 106, 1876,
pp. 109-136.— Spectator, vol.
57, 1884, pp. 319, 320.
Did Love of Truth make Mm
an Infidel? Catholic World,
vol. 36, 1883, pp. 829-848.
Dramas, Atlantic Monthly,
vol. 63, 1889, pp. 558-562.
English Conferences, Dial
(Chicago), by B. Herford, vol.
1, 1880, pp. 65 67.
Feuilles D^tacMes, Nation,
March 10, 1892, pp. 187, 188.
— National Review, by S. J.
Low, vol. 19, 1892, pp. 338-
348.
Funeral of. Nation, Oct. 27,
1892, pp. 316, 317.
Gaiety of. Spectator, Feb,
27, 1892, pp. 297, 298.
The Gospels. Fortnightly
Review, vol. 28, 1877, pp. 485-
509.
Inconsistencies of, Dublin
University Magazine, vol. 75,
1870, pp. 325-336.
Later Works of. Fortnightly
Review, by A. Lang, vol. 47,
1887, pp. 50-60 ; same article,
Eclectic Magazine, vol. 108,
pp. 329-336.
Lectures on Rome and Chris-
tianity, Dublin Review, by W.
E. Addis, vol. 4, 3rd series,
1880, pp. 333-359.
Life of Jesus. North Ameri-
can Review, by C. T. Brooks,
vol. 98, 1864, pp. 195-233.—
Christian Examiner, by 0. B.
Frothingham, vol. 75, 1863, pp.
313-339.— Victoria Magazine,
by R. H. Hutton, vol. 1, 1863,
pp. 385 - 396. — Blackwood's
Magazine, vol. 96, 1864, pp.
Renan, Ernest.
417-431.— British Quarterly Re-
view, vol. 38, 1863, pp. 271-
304. — Dublin Review, vol. 54,
1864, pp. 386-419.— Christian
Observer, vol. 63, 1863, pp.
780-786 ; vol. 64, pp. 143-148.—
Eclectic Review, vol. 118, 1863,
pp. 268-278.— Edinburgh Re-
view, vol. 119, 1864, pp. 574-
604. — Journal of Sacred Litera-
ture, vol. 32, 1863, pp. 150-164,
344-362.— Knickerbocker, vol.
63, pp. 247, etc.— Littell's Liv-
ing Age (from the Reader) y vol.
79, 1863, pp. 32-38.— National
Review, vol. 17, 1863, pp. 524-
563. — North British Review,
vol. 40, 1864, pp. 184-209.—
Temple Bar, vol. 10, 1864, pp.
44-62. — Westminster Review,
vol. 80, 1863, pp. 537-543.—
Continental Monthly, by P.
Schaff, vol. 6, 1864, pp. 651-
663. — Princeton Review, by J,
P.Westervelt, vol. 38, 1866, pp.
133-140.— London Quarterly,
vol. 21, pp. 457, etc., and vol.
22, pp. 235, etc.— La Petite Re-
vue, Nos. 2, 4, 7, 10, 13, 1863-
64. — Revue de Musique Sacree,
by E. G. Rey, Sept. 1863.— Le
Monde, by A. Mazure, Nov. 11,
1863. — Journal des D^bats, by
E. Bersot, Aug. 23, 1863.—
Revue Contemporaine, by A.
Claveau, July 15, 1863.— Revue
Ind^pendante, by C. Deloncle,
Aug. 1, 1863.— La Verity, July
19, 1863,— Le Monde, Oct. 12,
1863.— Revue Chretienne, by E.
de Pressens^, Aug. 15, 1863. —
Revue des Deux Mondes, by E.
Havet, Aug. 1, 1863. — Archives
du Christianisme, by S. Des-
combaz,Sept. 1863. — Le Monde,
Aug. 2, 16, Oct. 9, and Nor. 1,
1863. — Courrier du Dimanche,
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Renan, Ernest,
by A. Dumoulin, Aug. 9, 1863.
— La Correspondance Litteraire,
by L. Lalanne, July 25, 1863.—
Bulletin du Bibliophile, by S.
de Sacy, Aug. 1863.— Le Temps,
by E. Scherer, July 7, 14, 28,
Aug. 12, and Sept. 29, 1863.—
Revue du Progrfes, by C. Selles,
July 1863. — Le Correspondant,
by the Abbe Meignan, Oct. 25,
1863. — Revue Germanique, by
A. Nefftzer, Sept. 1, 1863.
Christmas Thoughts on,
Macmillan's Magazine, by F. D.
Maurice, vol. 9, 1864, pp. 190-
197.
Marcus Aurelius. Nation,
by A. Laugel, vol. 33, 1881, pp.
489, 490, 510, 511.
New Studies in Religious
History, Nation, by A. Laugel,
July 17,1884, pp. 50, 51.— Mac-
millan*s Magazine, vol. 60,1884,
pp. 161-170.
On HiTnself. Spectator, Aug.
29, 1885, pp. 1131, 1132; same
article. Eclectic Magazine, vol.
105, pp. 706-708.
Origin of Christianity. Na-
tion, by A. Laugel, vol. 30,
1880, pp. 8, 9, 41, 42.—
London Quarterly Review,
vol. 58, 1862, pp. 76-114.—
Revue des Deux Mondes, by
G. Boissier, March 1, 1882,
pp. 40-76.
The People of Israel. Revue
des Deux Mondes, by F. Brune-
tiere, Feb. 1, 1889, pp. 672-694 ;
Renan, Ernest.
by J. Darmesteter, April 1,
1891, pp. 513-552.
La Fhilosophie de M. Renan.
Revue Nationale, by E. Poitou,
Oct. 10, 1864.
Le PrHre de Nemi. Nation,
by A. Laugel, Dec. 10, 1885,
pp. 483, 484, 506, 507.
Recollections of. Congrega-
tionalist, by R. W. Dale, vol.
12, 1883, pp. 539-550, 638-645.
— Nineteenth Century, by
Frederick Pollock, vol. 32,1892,
pp. 711-719.
— — Sketch of his Life and Work.
Popular Science Monthly, by G.
Monod, vol. 42, 1893, pp. 831-
840.
Souvenir sd^Enfance. Monthly
Magazine, vol. 158, 1876, pp.
571-582.
Strauss and Ecce Homo.
Edinburgh Review, vol. 124,
1866, pp. 450-475 ; same article.
Eclectic Magazine, vol. 68,
1867, pp. 265-280.
Strauss and Schleiermacher.
Princeton Review, by J. P.
Westervelt, vol. 38, 1866, pp.
133-140.
A Talk on Religion with.
Nation, by L. de Lautreppe,
Feb. 23, 1888, pp. 152, 153.
Table- Talk of. Fortnightly
Review, by H. Le Roux, vol.
52 N.S., 1892, pp. 685-688.
Theory of. Continental
Monthly, by H. M. Thompson,
vol. 5, 1864, pp. 609-619.
IIL— CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS.
Averroes et PAverroisme - 1852
Histoire des Langues Semi-
tiques - - - 1855
Etudes d' Histoire Religieuse 1857
De I'origine du langage - 1858
Essais de morale et de
critique
Nouvelles considerations
sur le caractere general
des peuples semitiques -
1859
1859
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Le Livre de Job - - 1859
Le Cantique des Cantiques- 1860
Histoire des Origines du
Christianisme - 1863-83
Vol. i.— Vie de J^sus.
,, ii.— Les Ap6tres.
„ iii.— Saint Paul.
„ iv.— L'An^^christ.
„ v.— Les Evangiles.
,, vi.— L'Eglise Chr^tienne.
,, vii. — Marc Aur^le.
„ viii.— Index G^n6rale.
Vie de Jesus
Mission de Ph^nicie -
Discours sur I'^tat des
beaux-arts en France au
quatorzi^me si^cle
(In torn. ii. of the "His-
toire Littdraire de la France
au quatorzi^me si^cle.)
Les ApOtres
Questions Contemporaines-
Saint Paul
La Part de la Famille et de
I'Etat dans I'Education -
La Monarchie Constitu-
tionnelle en France
La Reforme Intellectuelle et
Morale
L'Ant^christ - -
Dialogues et fragments
philosophiques
1863
1864
1865
1866
1868
1869
1869
1870
1871
1873
- 1876
Leslfevangiles -
1877
Melanges d'histoire et de
voyages
1878
Caliban suite de la Tempete
1878
Lettre k un Ami d'Alle-
magne
1879
L'Eglise Chr^tienne
1879
Conferences d'Angleterre -
1880
L'Eau de Jouvence
1881
L'Ecclesiaste -
1882
Marc AurMe et la fin du
monde antique
1882
Souvenirs d'Enfance et de
Jeunesse
1883
Nouvelles etudes d'histoire
religieuse
1884
Le Pretre de Nemi -
1886
L'Abbesse de Jouarre
1886
Discours et Conferences
1887
Histoire du Peuple d'ls-
rael .... 1887-94
Drames Philosophiques
1888
Pages Choisies k I'usage des
Lycees et des Ecoles
1890
L'Avenir de la Science.
Pens^es de 1848 -
1890
Feuilles Detachees -
1892
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