Ernest Renan
Some ideas are truly tried and true. “A good book,” Milton wrote in his Aereopagitica, “is the precious
life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life
beyond life.” It seems wonderful to me
that a man in his eighties can still discover “new” master spirits with all the
pleasure and excitement of his twenties.
In my last days in Paris earlier this month I finally got around to
reading some Ernest Renan (1823-1892), one of the iconic European intellectuals
of the nineteenth century. His literary
and scholarly production in the fields of philology, philosophy, and history
was enormous, and I have barely scraped its surface with what are perhaps his
two most popular books: his Life of Jesus
and his very charming Reminiscences of
Childhood and Youth.*
Renan was born in Tréguier in Brittany, a literal
as well as a metaphoric backwater in the most westerly bump on the map of
France. His part of the country had not
been entirely enthusiastic about the Revolution, and he was born and raised in
a climate of colorful if reactionary Catholicism. For a brilliant boy living in the sticks, the
Church offered the nearly inevitable career path, and Renan began training for
the priesthood. History had other ideas,
and Renan would become, in the judgment of Pope Pius IX, “the great blasphemer
of Europe”.
That
was on account of Renan’s very popular biography of Jesus, and it is an opinion
available only to someone who has not actually read it. By the time Renan wrote it he had adopted the
scientific principle that supernatural events that did not occur in his own
century could not be safely attributed to earlier ones; but in this view he was
far from a pioneer. The scholarly
demythologizing of Christianity was well under way in the eighteenth century,
but what might be called its “popular” phases belong to the nineteenth. A new biographical approach to the person of Jesus
Christ would create a permanent distinction between the “historical Jesus” and
the theologized figure at the center of the Christian creeds. In 1835 a Protestant theologian in Germany,
Friedrich Strauss, published an analysis of the gospels in which the life of
Jesus was, to use his term, “critically examined”. He denied the divinity of Jesus and characterized
the supernatural elements in the gospels as folkloristic accretions dating from
the early centuries of the Christian movement and expressing in poetic form
their authors’ messianic hopes and beliefs.
Strauss’s book, the Leben Jesu,
sent shock waves through the Protestant world.
An English translation, made after the fourth German edition, appeared
in England in 1846. The translation was the
first published work of a brilliant young woman named Marian Evans who, under
the pseudonym George Eliot, would become one of the greatest of English
novelists. In her greatest novel, Middlemarch, she dramatized the upheaval
caused in the English church by “German scholarship.”
The
enormous erudition of Renan’s Life of
Jesus has long been overtaken by the vastness of more than a century of
intensive biblical scholarship; but his book’s generous spirit remains
remarkable. The first adjective that
comes to my mind is reverent. Renan was the heir of many intellectual
trends, including that of humanistic Romanticism at its best. Like Strauss and the other demythologizers he
had to abandon the traditional ideas of Jesus’s divinity. But he is so overwhelmed by the ethical
purity he discovers in Jesus’s life that he allows as metaphor what he must
forbid as theology. He very nearly
paraphrases Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.
Throughout his
biography of Jesus the reader will find exemplified a principle—I will call it
historical generosity--made explicit at the beginning of his short account of
his own early years. Historical
generosity is a rare virtue, and there is little of it in our contemporary
world. The preface to his Reminiscences (Souvenirs) is built around the charming Breton folk legend of a
vanished town called the ville d’Is, a kind of mini-Atlantis somewhere
submerged along the coast of Brittany. The
old mariners would claim that on occasion they could faintly discern in the
deep the church steeples of Is, and even hear the faint sounding of the church
bells. “Truth,” Renan writes, “whatever
one says, is superior to fiction. One
should never regret seeing things more clearly.
In seeking to add to the treasure of truths which make up the wealth
accumulated by humanity, we are the continuators of our pious ancestors who
loved the good and the true under the received forms of their own times. It is a very grievous error to believe that
one serves one’s country by denigrating those who founded it. Every era of a nation is a leaf in the same
book. The true progressives are those
who take as their point of departure a profound respect for the past….For
myself, I am never firmer in my liberal beliefs than when I dream of the
miracles of the Old Faith, and never more eager for the work of the future than
when I rest for a time to listen for the ringing of the bells in the ville d’Is.”
*Vie de Jésus published in 1863 as the
first of many volumes of a study of Christian origins; Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse published in 1883.
