Renan, Ernest
RENAN, ERNEST (1823–1892) was a French Orientalist and essayist. Joseph Ernest Renan is a fragment of a mirror held up to nineteenth-century France. His life and work reflect especially the appeal of positivist science and its conflict with religion, particularly Roman Catholicism.
Born on February 28, 1823, in Tréguier, Brittany, Renan was raised a Roman Catholic and educated in seminaries until, at the age of twenty-two, he left both the seminary and the church. He wrote to his spiritual director that the church would not allow him the freedom to pursue the kind of scientific study that had increasingly fascinated him. Three years later, in 1848, he wrote L'avenir de la science (The Future of Science), a kind of apologia for his conversion to positivist science. In it Renan developed the ideas that would govern virtually all his later work. First, he thought that science would eventually supplant religion in developed societies. "Only science," he wrote, "can resolve eternal human problems." Second, he understood science as an inquiry that exhibits a comparative, skeptical, and nonjudgmental attitude toward its subject, and so distinguishes itself from doctrinaire religion as well as eighteenth-century rationalism.
The Future of Science was not published until 1890, two years before Renan's death; nevertheless, his attitude toward and confidence in science showed clearly in his work on Middle Eastern languages and religion. Renan's interest in the Middle East began during his seminary study in Paris, where he worked under Arthur Le Hir and Étienne Marc Quatremère. In 1848 he won the prestigious Prix Volney for his essay on the history of Semitic languages. In 1852 he was appointed an assistant to the keeper of Eastern manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he was in charge of Syrian, Sabaean, and Ethiopian manuscripts; this work, he once said, was the most rewarding he had done. During the same period, he published his doctoral thesis on the Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës).
As a result of this work Renan had begun to earn a reputation as an Orientalist and so was able to secure a place on a scientific mission to Syria that was organized under the protection of the troops of Napoleon III, who were occupying Beirut. Despite the tragedy of the death of his sister, Henriette, who had always aided and supported his work and who had accompanied him and his wife to Syria, the trip was a milestone for Renan because it cemented his interest in the Middle East and set him to work on what would be the major accomplishment of his professional life, the seven-volume Histoire des origines du christianisme (1863–1881) and its five-volume supplement, Histoire du peuple d'Israël (1887–1893).
The first volume of Origines was the controversial and enormously popular Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus). This little book, which first appeared in 1863, gave educated Frenchmen Renan's idiosyncratic portrait of Jesus. What made the book remarkable in its time, however, was its effort to draw the portrait of Jesus only along the lines roughed out by historical criticism and to project it against the larger background of the Middle Eastern religions. It showed Renan's comparative method at work, and because it failed to make or support the traditional religious claims about the divinity of Jesus or the uniqueness of Christian religion, it was widely condemned by the churches.
Renan returned to the Middle East again in 1864, this time to Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. It was on this trip that Renan composed the Prière sur l'Acropole, which expressed what he called his religious revelation that the perfection promised by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity actually existed in the Greek civilization that created science, art, and philosophy. Since religion is, in Renan's view, the way people often satisfy their craving for such perfection, he continued to pursue his research into the relationships among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His thesis was that Christianity adapted Judaism to the European temperament and Islam adapted it to the Arab.
Renan's historical sense was not always the best, and he clearly preferred to draw his conclusions from what he thought were psychological patterns of the races and religions he studied. He speculated a good deal more freely than scholars are accustomed to do today (for example, he described in detail the physical appearance of Paul of Tarsus), and he was ready to base his judgments on aesthetic principles as much as on historical fact. However, his prose style was provocative and so effective that he often had an impact in excess of the merits of his research. His work earned him appointment as professor of history of religions at the Collège de France in 1862 and again in 1870. In 1878 he was elected to the Académie Française. He died in Paris on October 2, 1892.
Above all, Renan has reserved a place for himself in the religious history of France because he, as much as anyone else, focused public attention on the potential and the consequences of a scientific approach to religious questions. Particularly for the group of French Catholic scholars who followed him, he served as a challenge and a warning to their effort to modernize the church.
Bibliography
Renan's works have been published in many languages. In French, his Œuvres complètes, 10 vols., edited by Henriette Psichari (Paris, 1947–1961), is the basic source. Among his works that have appeared in English editions, translated by various hands, are The Future of Science, History of the People of Israel, The Life of Jesus, and Studies in Religious History. Renan's two autobiographical pieces are also available under the English title The Memoirs of Ernest Renan (London, 1935).
The standard work on Renan in English is Francis Espinasse's The Life of Ernest Renan (1895; reprint, Boston, 1980), written only a few years after Renan's death. H. W. Wardman's Ernest Renan (London, 1964) is another English-language study. A useful bibliography can be found in Jacques Waardenburg's Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. 2 (The Hague, 1974), pp. 228–241.
New Sources
Yves Marchasson, "Ernest Renan," in Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible, Vol. 10, Paris, 1985, pp.277–344 provides succinct factual information on Renan's life, works, ideas and legacy. Laudyce Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse. Leurs formes et leurs rapports dans l'œuvre d'Ernest Renan, Paris, 1977, is the most comprehensive monograph in French. David C. J. Lee, Ernest Renan. In the Shadow of Faith, London, 1996 explores the conflicts surrounding the process of secularization in the light of Renan's biographical experience. Renan's commmitment to ideologies spread in academic conetemporary milieux (racism, traditionalism) have been scrutinized recently in various works: after the provoking, if somewhat biased, Orientalism, by Edward Said (New York, 1978), see Edouard Richard, Ernest Renan, penseur traditionaliste? Aix-Marseille, 1996 and Samar Majaes Abdel Nour, Ernest Renan et l'Orient: ambiguïté d'une relation passionnée, Lille, 1999.
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