By Ernest Renan
LONDON: WATTS & Co., 5 & 6 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E-C-4,
A.D. Howell Smith's translation, partly revised by P. Rogers, 2002
Ernest Renan
(Fuller comment on Renan can be found below, by Albert Schweitzer)
French historian, and philosopher of religion, Renan was among the leading 19th-century critics of the historicity of early Christian documents. Educated at the ecclesiastical college in his native town of Tr�guier, he began training for the priesthood, with a scholarship to the school of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet. He later went on to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where he underwent a crisis of faith that finally led him to leave the Catholic church in 1845. Renan had come to view the church's teachings as incompatible with the findings of historical criticism, though he continued to hold a quasi-traditional faith in God.
The 1848 revolution in France was greeted by Renan a new and better religion in the making. His enthusiasm for the revolution's messianic expectations is still visible in his L'Avenir de la Science (1890; The Future of Science). He continued to study the history of Christian origins, regarded by him as a human science alongside the sciences of nature. Though by now quite anti-clerical, he was sent by the government to Italy in 1849, to help in classifying manuscripts that had previously been inaccessible to French scholars.
Returning to Paris in 1850, Renan lived with his sister Henrietta and worked at the Biblioth�que Nationale. His doctoral thesis, Averro�s et l'Averro�sme (1852; "Averro�s and Averroism�), on the thought of that medieval Muslim philosopher, was highly praised; and he continued with a collection of scholarly essays, �tudes d'histoire religieuse (1857; Studies of Religious History), which inculcated an historical, humanistic approach to religion. In his Essays on moral subjects (1859), he denounced the materialism and intolerance of the Second Empire (1852-70) in the name of an aristocratic ideal: intellectuals, acting as "bastions of the spirit," must, says Renan, resist tyranny by intellectual and spiritual refinement.
Renan had counted on his Life of Jesus to secure for him the chair of Hebrew at the Coll�ge de France. Before the book was ready, he was elected in January, 1862. But in his opening lecture, on February 21, he referred to Jesus in the words of Bossuet, as "an incomparable man." By its implied atheism, this outraged the religious conservatives, and the ensuing uproar caused Renan to be suspended. He decided to live by his pen for the next few years and had to wait until 1870, before the chair was restored to him.
When the Vie de J�sus (Life of Jesus) appeared in 1863, it was hotly denounced by the church. Though not Renan's best historical work, it is written with an elegant charm that still claims the attention of 21st century readers. It presents a "mythical" account of the making of Christianity by the popular imagination and has a place, like his other historical works, in the literature of messianism.
After a journey in Asia Minor in 1864-65 with his wife, he published Les Ap�tres (1866; The Apostles) and Saint Paul (1869), to follow the Vie de J�sus as parts of a series on The History of the Origins of Christianity. Both volumes, with their brilliant descriptions of how Christianity spread among the rootless proletariat of the cities of Asia Minor, illustrate his desire that the intellectuals of the 19th century should lead the masses toward a new enlightenment.
Although Renan's Vie de J�sus was critiqued for arbitrariness and aestheticism, by two of his most famous successors in the historical criticism of the gospels: D.F.Strauss and Albert Schweitzer, it has the distinction of being the first to bring home to the general public the problems relating to the historicity of the Gospels. Because of its flowing prose style, it remains the best-known of the innovative, critical 19th-century lives of Jesus.
From Howell Smith's Preface (excerpts)
LIKE many another "infidel," Ernest Renan grew up in an atmosphere of piety. He was born in the Breton fishing-town of Treguier in 1823. When he was only five years old his father, a ship-outfitter, was drowned at sea. Henceforth the home influence of a sensitive and impressionable child was exercised by two women, Renan's mother and his sister, Henriette, who was twelve years his senior. The latter was the bread-winner of the family and proved a second mother to the young Ernest. In his manhood she became his most trusted counsellor and friend.
Henriette lost all belief in the Supernatural long before her brother had entertained a single doubt of his hereditary faith. Yet she put no obstacle in the way of Renan's ambition to become a priest. His first school was the ecclesiastical college at Treguier, where he soon showed such brilliancy that, through the kind efforts of Dupanloup (afterwards Bishop of Orleans), he was sent to a superior college in Paris. Thence he passed to the Seminary of Issy, and afterwards to St. Sulpice and St. Stavistas (the lay college of the Oratorians). It was during his stay in the last of these establishments that Renan reluctantly came to the conviction that he could never enter the Catholic priesthood. According to his own account, the critical study of the Bible was the main factor of his change.
When he announced his decision�he was now twenty- two�the older men among his instructors sought to dissuade him, hoping that his faith might return when he had settled down to his clerical duties. Dupanloup, however, agreed that he ought to choose a lay career and offered to help him with money.
Renan obtained a post as usher in a boys' school, where he started a lifelong friendship with Berthelot, the famous chemist, who was then eighteen. His duties occupying only the evenings, Renan had plenty of time at his disposal for reading during the day. In 1849 the French Government sent Renan on a scientific mission to Italy. On his return to Paris he received a small post in the Bibliotheque Nationale, which, together with the savings of Henriette, who had now come to live with him, kept the two alive.
In 1852 was published Renan's work on the most renowned Islamic philosopher of the Middle Ages, Averroes. This brought him his doctor's degree and established his reputation as a thinker. He married two years later, and in 1859 he published new translations, with commentaries, of the Book of Job and the Song of Songs.
The chair of Hebrew and Chaldaic at the College de France now became vacant, and Renan offered himself as a candidate. Naturally, he was bitterly opposed. Napoleon III was then the ruler of France and his wife, the Empress Eugenie, supported the Catholic reactionaries. The Emperor was bound to conciliate so powerful a body of his subjects, without whose support he could not retain his precarious authority. But he did not lack admiration for Renan, and wishing to do something for him, he sent him on an archaeological mission to Syria.
Renan sailed for the East with the devoted Henriette as his companion, and they made their first stay at Beirut. A few months later his wife joined him, but was compelled by her home duties to return to France in the following summer. Henriette remained behind and shared, as far as she could, her brother's investigations of Phoenician antiquities. In July, 1861, Renan had finished his work, and the two paid a visit to the Upper Lebanon. Renan was now engaged in making his first draft of the 'Vie de Jesus,' his sister copying it out for him page by page.
The brother and sister went back to Beirut, in order to prepare for a journey to Cyprus, where the mission was to reach its end. Time, however, was found for excavations at Gebeil (the ancient Byblus), in the fabled land of Adonis. Here Renan and Henriette were struck down with a severe attack of fever. Henriette's case proved fatal. Renan returned to France. The mission bore fruit in the important 'Corpus Inscriptiontem Semiticarum,' of which he was the editor. A richly illustrated report of the mission's achievements was published in 1864.
The previous year had seen the appearance of the 'Vie de Jesus. Shortly before the issue of his most popular work Renan had obtained the chair of Hebrew and Semitic languages in the University of Paris, which had been left vacant through the death of Quatremere, under whom he had studied. The Catholics were furious. Even among the Liberals there was suspicion of the new professor, and it was feared that Renan was sympathetic to the Imperial regime.
His inaugural address provoked more than one interruption, the
climax coming when he referred to Jesus as "a man so great that ... I should not wish to contradict those who, impressed by the unique character of his movement, call him God." This damning with faint praise, as they were bound to consider it, gave offence to the Catholics. Four days later Renan was suspended from his professorial duties, although he retained his salary and for two years taught Hebrew in his own house to those students who desired it. The publication of the 'Vie de Jesus' prevented his reinstatement.
The charm and the skill with which Renan handles his theme may well serve to hide the critical and literary blemishes of his work. His Jesus is a young carpenter of Nazareth, who was at first one of the disciples of the fiery revivalist, John the Baptizer, and took up his slogan, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Later he broke away from the group and formed his own body of disciples. "The Kingdom of Heaven" meant nothing less than the restoration of the ancient theocracy in all its glory... To the future king the name of Messiah was given. Jesus did not at first claim to be the Messiah. He preached an ethic of love and justice, of pity and self-renunciation, of humility and purity of heart, which should prepare his fellow-countrymen for the wonderul era that was shortly coming. Jesus enforced his teaching with simple parables, stories drawn from natural happenings, observable by all, and from the everyday life of the people. The Rabbis often used parables in their expositions. Parables with similar themes to those of the Gospels appear in the Talmud.
Simple folk loved Jesus and eagerly listened to his discourses. Among them he wrought many faith-cures. But his popularity with the Galilean peasants, whose attachment to Jewish Orthodoxy was rather loose, drew on him the keen resentment of the Pharisees, who, like Jesus, were Messianic in their outlook and much of whose ethical teaching resembled his, and still more the hostility of the Sadducees, who were pro-Roman and unfriendly to Messianic visions, and from whose ranks came the great hierarchy of the Temple.
Popularity with the multitude and opposition from their religious and political leaders spurred Jesus to greater boldness. He was no loner content with the role of a prophet of the Kingdom, a wandering "Son of Man" (Ezekiel had borne that title). He claimed to be himself the Messiah. He even foretold his death by violence, his ascent to God his Father's right hand, and his eventual return in triumph on the clouds of heaven, accompanied by a host of angels. His character underwent a measure of degenertion. "The Galilean idyll," which graced his earlier career, disappeared, and the gentle, persuasive teacher was turned into an angry enunciator, and his mind became obsessed with apocalyptic horrors. Even fraud now assisted his propaganda. According to Renan, the raising of Lazarus was a trick, planned by the subject of the pretended miracle with the aid of Martha and Mary.
The end was inevitable. With the aid of a treacherous disciple the enemies of Jesus tracked him down and, after a mock trial before the High Priest on a blasphemy charge, dragged him before Pontius Pilatus, precurator of Judea, who reluctantly sentenced him to crucifixion as a rebel against Roman rule. Jesus was buried by a wealthy Jewish sympathizer in his own family tomb. The story of his resurrection a day or two later was started by the hallucinations of a frenzied devotee, Mary of Magdala. A woman's love and folly had given to the world a risen God! Renan's reconstruction of the story of Jesus does not lack plausibility in many of its features, but he has certainly failed to present a figure worthy of any great respect. This deluded visionary and fanatic, even stooping to fraud, has no claim to the glowing panegyric with which Renan closes his narrative. That Jesus was not only lovable, but, in a sense, worshipful, Renan truly felt and would have his readers feel. Was it not his Catholic upbringing that induced this frame of mind rather than the calm survey of the facts which he believed a critical study of the Gospels substantiated?
At times Renan is even weakly sentimental. From an aesthetic viewpoint, if from no other, one must condemn his surmise that Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane cast a thought on the girls he might have wooed in Galilee. No wonder a young French lady put down the 'Vie de Jesus' with the remark: "What a pity it does not end with a marriage!" Renan, of course, did not accept without qualification the traditional views on the dating and authorship of the Gospels. But his conservatism would be hard to match to-day outside the ranks of the theologians.
Renan adhered to the opinion, first broached by Lachmann in the eighteenth century, that Mark was the earliest Gospel and, broadly speaking, reliable as a biographical source... His treatment of the Fourth Gospel is strangely arbitrary. Although not attributing it to John the son of Zebedee, he sees in it a valuable source of biographical data for the life of Jesus. His offensive interpretation of the story of Lazarus has no justification whatever, and is on a par with the vagaries of Paulus and Venturini, on which Strauss expended his scorn...
The question was later mooted whether any materials exist for a life of Jesus, even conceding his historicity. No more drastic critic of previous attempt at biographical reconstruction has been written than Dr. Albert Schweitzer's 'Von Reimarus zu Wrede' (translated under the title of 'The Quest of the Historical Jesus')... Circumspect readers of Schweitzer's lengthy work will regard his own efforts in the way of Jesuine biography as open to the same charge of arbitrariness which he shrewdly makes against so many other critics.