RENAN, ERNEST

RENAN, ERNEST (1823–1892), French philologist and historian of religion.

The work of Ernest Renan can be fully understood only in light of the religious crisis that marked his life as well as those of many of his contemporaries. In his autobiography, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (1883; Memories of Childhood and Youth), he relates how discoveries in the natural sciences and rational criticism of the Bible shook his belief in Christian dogma when he was a young seminary student at the Grand Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice in Paris. In 1845, convinced of the incompatibility of Catholic orthodoxy and the demands modern rationalism, Renan gave up on the priesthood in order to study classical languages and philosophy. A member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1856 on, he was granted the Hebrew chair at the Collège de France in 1862. But he was suspended after his inaugural lecture, in which he implicitly denied the divinity of Jesus by describing him as "an incomparable human being." Several months later, the success of his bestseller Vie de Jésus (1863; The Life of Jesus) assured Renan's reputation. He became a major intellectual voice for the generation that came to political power and gained control of the reformed university system after 1870 under the Third Republic, a regime that heaped honors upon him. Reinstalled in his position at the Collège de France, he became its administrator in 1883. In 1878, he was elected a member of the Académie Française, and he was given a state funeral at his death in 1892.

In the early twenty-first century Renan is most often remembered for his definition of a nation in terms of a free political choice. This definition, given in Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (1882; What Is a Nation?), was opposed to that of most German thinkers. But in his own time, during which political debate was obsessed with the question of secularism even while thousands of pilgrims flocked to Lourdes, Renan became famous primarily as a spokesperson for the rational approach to religion. His intellectual project crystallized around 1848. In L'Avenir de la science (The Future of Science;a manifesto written in 1848 but published in 1890), he outlined a history of the human spirit that was inspired by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel but borrowed its methodology from the positive sciences, scholarly historical criticism, and comparative philology. Considered an "embryogeny of the human spirit" (De l'origine du langage, 1848; On the Origin of Language), Renan's historical project focuses on the manifestations of spirit—language and religion—throughout time. Thus it is divided into two main parts, a study of Semitic languages and a history of Christianity.

Renan's works, like those of John Stuart Mill and É mile Littré, illustrate the diversity of nineteenth-century positivism. The Future of Science advocated a science that would bring humanity to a rational consciousness of itself. On this basis, Renan constructed a philosophy of history that differentiated the three stages of syncretism, analysis, and synthesis. The first stage is that of a poetic and religious intuitive apprehension of the world in its totality. The second stage is that of modern scientific rationality, which only produces a fragmentary consciousness of reality. This will then give way to the stage of synthesis, at which a fully mature science will rationally reconstitute the lost sense of totality. Even though the embryogeny of the spirit and the model of the three stages may call to mind Auguste Comte's sociology and law of the three states, Renan nevertheless made a distinction between his own ideas and Comte's. His stages were not precisely datable temporal eras, but moments of the spirit that, allowing for recurrences, could in fact coincide; meanwhile, Comtean sociology is primarily concerned with society in its current state, while Renan's "embryogeny" investigates the moment of origin, seeking to isolate the principle of the spirit's development.

Renan was an apostle of rationalism, but not the radical proponent of scientism that a hasty reading of The Future of Science might suggest. His life and work were marked by a tension between the demands of reason and a nostalgia for the comforting beliefs of his youth. Indeed, Renan appealed to rationality as a principle unique to scholarly studies. He took the natural sciences as his model, and the expression "embryogeny of the human spirit" harks back to the work of contemporary anatomists. But his intellectual ambition was to reconcile science and religion. The Future of Science looks forward to a time when science will reconstitute a sense of the totality of the universe, which will merge with the impression of the universe that syncretic metaphysical thought forms intuitively. The Life of Jesus attempts this reconciliation in a specific case: in that work, Renan provides a rational explanation for miracles without negating the historical reality of Christ. Like that of Comte, Renan's work thus exemplifies the complex relations between positivism and religion in the nineteenth century.

See alsoComte, Auguste; France; Mill, John Stuart; Nationalism; Positivism.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Renan, Ernest. Oeuvres complètes d'Ernest Renan, édition définitive établie par Henriette Psichari. 10 vols. Paris, 1947–1961.

Secondary Sources

Burrow, John W. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. New Haven, Conn., and London, 2000.

Lee, David C. J. Ernest Renan. In the Shadow of Faith. London, 1996.

Petit, Annie. "Le prétendu positivisme d'Ernest Renan." Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines 8 (2003): 73–101.

Pholien, Georges. Les deux "Vie de Jésus" de Renan. Paris, 1983.

Retat, Laudyce. Religion et imagination religieuse: leurs formes et leurs rapports dans l'oeuvre d'Ernest Renan. Paris, 1977.

Richard, Nathalie. "La Vie de Jésus de Renan: un historien face à la question des miracles." In Religion et mentalités au Moyen Âge. Mélanges en l'honneur d'Hervé Martin, 87–99. Rennes, 2003.

——. "Analogies naturalistes: Taine et Renan." Espaces Temps, nos. 84–85–86, (2004): 76–90.

Nathalie Richard