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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Ernest Renan Biography RENAN, re-nän', Ernest (1823–92). A French religious historian and Semitic philologist, born at Tréguier in Brittany, Feb. 27, 1823. Of his childhood he told in Souvenirs d'enfance (1883). He lost his father in youth and owed it to a devoted sister that he could begin with neighboring priests the studies for which his frail health seemed to designate him. He was soon summoned to Paris and promoted to Saint-Sulpice, the chief training school of the French priesthood. At 22 he abandoned his study for orders and taught Latin in a clerical school, still aided by his sister's savings, till at 25 he won his doctorate with such distinction as to assure a position that was already recognized by an academic prize for an essay Sur les langues sémitiques. He won a second prize in 1850 for an essay, Sur l'étude du grec dans l'occident au moyen-âge, was sent by the Academy to Italy, where he prepared an epoch-making work on Arab philosophy, Averroès et l'Averroisme (1852), and to Syria (1860), where he found inspiration for his Vie de Jésus (1863), the first of seven volumes that occupied him from 1867 to 1881, dealing with the origins of Christianity to the death of Marcus Aurelius. To this he added as an introduction L'Histoire du peuple d'Israël (1888–94). Though elected professor of Hebrew in the Collège de France (1862), he was not allowed to lecture, because of his expressed unorthodoxy. This gave wide popularity to his ideas and allowed him more leisure to propagate his enthusiastic belief that politics, education, and ethics itself would be regenerated by the progress of science, especially of history and philology. The Vie de Jésus was widely translated (popular ed., New York, 1912); 300,000 copies were sold in France alone, and for every later work of Renan there was a popular as well as a scholarly demand. Les apôtres (1866) and St. Paul (1869) were followed by a volume of essays on contemporary questions (1868). Then came the Franco-German War, which evoked from Renan two remarkable letters to David Strauss, the radical biblical critic of Tübingen, showing a patriotism free from every taint of chauvinism. The Republic restored his professorship and he now published L'Antechrist (1873); Les évangiles et la seconde génération chrétienne (1877); L'Eglise chrétienne (1879); Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (1881). Volumes of essays with the titles Etudes (1857), Essais (1859), Mélanges (1878), Nouvelles études (1884), Discours (1887), accompanied or followed his more connected work. His Drames philosophiques were first collected in 1888. A vision of L'Avenir de la science, written in 1848, was given to the world as a sort of parting gift in 1890. During his last years Renan enjoyed all the honors, public and private, that Paris could give to a favorite scholar. He was made Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and administrator of the Collège de France, dying as he had wished, at his post (Oct. 2, 1892). Renan saw so many sides of his subject that he was never as sure of any of them as he was of his own critical wit. He was by turns hazy, cautious, mythical, ironic, idealistic, skeptic, all with a romantic sentiment and a rosy optimism that regarded the nineteenth as "the most amusing of centuries," to be contemplated with "benevolent and universal irony." He had a lofty conception of moral duty and held that "few persons have a right not to believe in Christianity." He knew that he himself was "a tissue of contradictions, one half fated to be employed in destroying the other," and he said this fact gave him "the keenest intellectual pleasure that man can enjoy." He typifies the skepticism of modern France, its awakening religious curiosity, its dilettante shrinking from "the horrible mania of certainty," its Protean inconsistency and its easy tolerance, born of a conviction that no faith is worth a struggle, much less a martyrdom. Of Renan's works there is no uniform edition. To the writings named above may be added many linguistic studies in the Mémoires of the Academy and in the Journal Asiatique, important contributions to the monumental Histoire littéraire de la France (vols. xxiv–xxx), translations of Job (1858), The Song of Songs (1860), Ecclesiastes (1881), and many lesser essays. The titles and dates of the Philosophic Dramas are Caliban (1878); L'Eau de jouvence (1880); Le prêtre de Némi (1885); 1802: dialogue des morts (1886); L'Abbesse de Jouarre (1887). There are English translations of the whole Histoire du peuple d'Israël and of the Origines du christianisme, of the Etudes and Nouvelles études, of Job and the Song of Songs, and of the Souvenirs. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 693-694. |