Renan Remembers

Ernest Renan
 

My life at present involves much to-ing, the logical consequence of which is an equal amount of fro-ing.  And as my own not inconsiderable infirmities render me unfit to operate my own car safely, I have become something of an expert in cadging rides whenever possible and trying to game the Uber ap when cadging fails.  The Stonebridge medical facility where Joan is currently residing is a mere seven miles away, but the ruthless algorithm by which the Uber-masters operate severely limit my options.  And while I am in the free-form moment of this essay, I ought to say I actually deplore the misuse of the word “algorithm”, an example of which is prominent in the foregoing sentence, but what the hell?  Go with the flow.

 

There are few things to do while riding in the backseat of a car as it drives through repetitious landscape, but one thing you can do is read.  Ordinarily one does not choose one’s current reading because of the small format in which it is published, though that was the motive behind the invention of the small-format paperback also known at the pocket book.  If you do a lot of travelling in the back seat of a car and you also like to read books, it is useful to have a product that can minister to both needs.  But I don’t really like paper covers on my books, especially on books that I am going to be reading intermittently, with much intermittent putting them in and pulling them out of pockets or bookbags.  Such books soon become ragged and lumpy.  Reading a ragged paperback is very annoying to me.  Hence I regard the cultural contribution of book-binders to rival that of book-printers.  Fortunately I have a fair number of small-format hardbacks on my shelves.  The backseat book that I plucked from a shelf almost at random and have been consuming in intermittent small draughts with pleasure, is the autobiography of Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French orientalist: Memories of Childhood (Souvenirs d’enfance, 1883).  Some controversy surrounds this book.  And certainly some opprobrium lurks about my particular copy of it.   It was formerly in the possession of the Porter Library of the Kansas State College of Pittsburg, where it bore the identifying call number 848.8 R29s.  In that institution, likewise,  it was powerfully if coarsely repaired with black Monster Tape.  There is however no evidence that anybody ever checked it out.  Its “Due Date”, though hoary, is virgin.  What is indisputable in that my edition is six and a half by four and a quarter inches in format, in other words, perfect size-wise.

 

But Imagine a cultural world in which a British publishing house could profitably publish an extensive list of books in the French language.  For such was the “Collection Nelson”, published by an eminent Edinburgh publisher whose Paris office joined with other similarly eminent French houses (in this instance that of Calmann-Levy) to bring out a series of French classics. This collection began in an age when it was simply assumed that an educated English person would read French as an educated French person would read English.  This was the world reflected in my essay three weeks past, “The Man in the Red Coat.”  Renan’s most famous book by far was a tender but non-mythological biography of Jesus, a book that has remained in print continuously since its publication in 1863.  The Pope called Renan “the master blasphemer of Europe”.  I take some comfort in the fact that this papal opinion was possibly antecedent to that on papal infallibility.  The Académie called Renan an “immortal”.  You pay your money, and you take your choice. 

 

Many readers are partial to literary biographies, including that special branch of the genre that we call autobiography.  This perhaps is because though very few of us are likely ever to be the subject of a biography, each of us possesses a more or less structured autobiography in our minds.  At least it is difficult for me to imagine that there lives a man with soul so dull as never to contemplate at some level the interstices of at least one life—his own, of course.  To examine the contours of one’s own life is no easy task.  The easiest form of deception is self-deception, and usually one of the most comforting forms.  But the biographical mode offers models of description and explication which most of us can recognize as having relevance to our own lives, sometimes as admonition and at others inspiration.  One of the very first poems I was introduced to as a child was Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”  Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing leave behind us footsteps in the sands of time.  It is also of course possible to leave only some muddy footprints on the oriental rug instead.

 

Renan was an honest man of the most ruthless sort, which means a man honest about and to himself.  Born into modest material and cultural circumstances in the sticks of Brittany in the first generation after end of the Revolution, he was well along in a course leading to the priesthood when his philological learning proved superior to his religious training and eventually to his basic Christian faith.  In some ways he transferred the patterns of his discarded religious belief to the notions of nationality and nationhood itself.  Having spent most of my own life in allegedly exalted academic spheres, I am well aware that there is such a thing as stultifying secular dogma that can be quite as oppressive and blinkering as the religious sort.  But I would be misrepresenting the spirt of his autobiography if I failed to emphasize its modesty and geniality.  Though his Life of Jesus was destined to be the source of much cultural conflict, the author as revealed in his autobiography was gentle and genial.  The history of scholarship is replete with a certain kind of rags-to-riches narrative in which people of modest birth found recognition and preferment based on intellectual capacity and energy.  That is, learning has always been to some extent a realm of meritocracy.  Not every disadvantaged scholar was a Jude the Obscure.  In the thirteenth century John Pechkam, born in a peasant’s cottage, became the learned primate of England.  Ernest Renan, this hick from the sticks, was from the same mold. 

volumes from the Collection Nelson

 

 

Ernest Renan

 

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.