L'humanité … veut un Dieu-homme. Elle se satisfera.

Drames philosophiques, Oeuvres complètes III, 559.

There can scarcely be a sense in which Vie de Jésus does not mark a crossroads. The book's publication in June 1863 led to Renan's first serious encounter with international celebrity. Of all his works it perhaps represents his one authentic brush with immortality. If so, its appearance was timely, for in the February before Vie de Jésus came off the presses, its author reached the age of forty, that frontier of reassessment and recollection induced by first intimations of life's finitude. Indeed, researching his subject in Syria in 1861, Renan had, as he recalls, ‘been touched by death's wing’ (IV, 12). His sister, to whose memory he dedicates his book, had been its victim and when he left her body behind near Byblus, he also left there something of his youth. In one respect the high point of Renan's intellectual and artistic development, Vie de Jésus is in another the protest of his middle age against the prospect of extinction. When Renan, in a recollection of Horace, added the single word ‘Exegi’ to his finished manuscript,¹ he was perhaps saying nothing less. It was time to set his life in enduring bronze.

The critical path that leads Renan to his biography of 1863 and even to regarding it as the keystone of his entire life's edifice is already signposted by his Essai psychologique sur Jésus Christ of 1845. From the moment of his first anxieties at Saint-Sulpice over his faith and calling, it is as though each new phase in his career and writing becomes an act of remembrance and dedication to the Christ he has forsaken. Renan's subsequent dualist theories of language, race, knowledge itself, suppose a central term modelled on the cultural hinge which in his mind and memory Jesus represents. His sense of personal dissatisfaction and the irony in which it is progressively cloaked seem constantly to refer him to the same missing archetype. Now, almost twenty years after invoking Wiseman's theory of extraordinary natural laws to explain the supernova of Jesus' appearance on earth, the former seminarist is drawn to begin the major academic project of his maturity, the Histoire des origines du christianisme and its Semitic sequel, at its historic and historical mid-point, to reopen the book of his own and humanity's past, at its central page. The haunting dream sequence in the Cahiers de jeunesse, so reminiscent of Jean Paul Richter, in which Renan envisages a face-to-face encounter with Jesus, is in this respect as symptomatic as it is prophetic. ‘Who would I have’, he reflects, ‘were you to elude me even after eighteen hundred years?’ (IX, 244). Renan's readiness in his later biography to regard Jesus as a flesh and blood character rather than a mythical entity in the manner of Strauss may initially be seen as a response to this deep-seated need. Jesus is a ghost from the past but also a lost friend and an intimate reality.² If it has become commonplace to claim that there is much autobiography in Renan's portrait of 1863,³ it is because his profoundest longings were reflected back to him in that divine mirror. Renan's Jesus, suggests Laudyce Rétat in a subtle and complex observation, is an embodiment of Renan's own relationship with Jesus.⁴

But that of his world, too. What is true of Renan individually may also be held true of his century. Vie de Jésus stands at the fulcrum of nineteenth-century thought and art and reflects the age's innermost divisions. The traumas experienced by Richter, Nerval or Vigny in contemplating a mortal and comfortless Christ, the secular alternatives to Christian teaching promised by science or socialism, the attentions of Christologists such as Bauer or Strauss, collectively bear witness to the same combination of anxiety and fascination at a time of general religious decline, intellectual uncertainty and political unrest. The cult of infancy that starts with Rousseau, the regret for the psychological integrity of time lost which ends with Proust, seem always to derive their inspiration from the child of Nazareth as do those nineteenth-century voyages of wonder and exploration which eventually inspire an entire Europe to spread corrupting hands across the uncolonised globe. The common ground is the temptation afforded by unsullied soil or unsullied spirit to the divided and decadent, by the secret that seemed to have evaded a tired and introspective continent but which, it was felt, still lay buried in some uncomplicated region of mind or world. When Renan travelled to ancient Phoenicia in 1860, he was undertaking an academic but also a ritual journey to civilisation's birthplace and the presumed heart of its modern malaise. In a different form, the same thought is expressed in the introduction to the first edition of Vie de Jésus, which Renan concludes with the reflection that an understanding of religious history is only possible for a former believer like himself (IV, 83): where his Vie de Jésus can be considered the epitome of nineteenth-century consciousness is in its being the book of an age still capable of recalling its Christian origins with sympathy and nostalgia, even as it was persuaded to renounce them as childish fantasies.

As the example of Proust most comprehensively demonstrates, the conflicting demands of this age find a convergence in that form of literature whose rise to prominence coincides most nearly with that of the post-Revolutionary world order, prose fiction. To Balzac's definition of the novel as ‘un carrefour de problèmes’, might be added the reflection that the genre itself marks a crossroads for modern, secular man.⁵ For the novel's development is at once consistent with the emergence of the new middle class, its liberal and democratic drive, and with the lack that such drive creates—with the need, that is, sensed by this same class for those forms of security and coherence previously associated with political order and religious conviction. Novels tell of meaning, pattern, structure, of that ‘sense of an ending’ of which Frank Kermode writes, at the same time as of a world where experience has begun to show endings to be unpredictable and the meaning of life to be obscure. Proust's quest for maternal protection through the medium of his own narrative here coincides with Sartre's description of the nineteenth-century novel as a source of reassurance for the bourgeoisie and subsequently with Barthes' recognition that the novel serves to provide a contingent world with the image of a lost essence.⁶ With the novel we are entering the world of self-administered illusion, of the hunger for significance in a climate of doubt and change, for the strength of something akin to faith in a meaningful life in a period of religious scepticism. Standing indeed on the same symbolic axis as Christ himself, the novel is an ironic substitute for His message to fallen mankind of recoverable innocence, value, mediation. Were a single book to succeed in registering and exploring the many facets that are combined in such a function—spiritual, philosophical, artistic—its centrality could hardly be mistaken, and it is at this point of meeting that we again encounter Renan's Vie de Jésus.

Colin Smith's persuasive account of what is termed the ‘fictionalist element’ in Renan's thought provides an initial frame of reference. Smith returns us to certain thought systems of the nineteenth century as precursors of what Hans Vaihinger would later systematise into the principle of ‘as if’, and shows that Renan was himself disposed, by temperament as much as intellectual influence, to acknowledge that a degree of consciously sustained falsehood, the need to think and act as if what could be proven false were true, is necessary to the moral and emotional well-being of mankind. ‘God is subjective but we must act as if he possessed objective reality; Jesus was a mortal man but we may profitably think of him as if he were God incarnate and rose from the dead.’⁷ As early as the Cahiers de jeunesse and again in L'Avenir de la science, Renan entertains the prospect of the emptiness of abstract thought reduced to its ultimate terms. Existence requires the cosmetic ‘boursouflure’ of discursiveness, approximation, symbolic content, if it is to be preserved from the A = A of analytic stalemate: ‘Things obtain their value from what humanity sees in them, from the sentiments it has attached to them, from the symbols it has derived from them’ (III, 879). Persuaded by his experience in Rome in 1849 that such symbolism is centred in religious faith and worship, Renan's conclusion becomes the prediction of Antistius in Le Prêtre de Nemi of 1885: ‘Humanity desires a God who is both finite and infinite, real and ideal; it adores the ideal; but it needs the ideal to be personified; it wants a God-man; it will have one’ (III, 559). This appreciation on the part of the author of Vie de Jésus of the human craving for a symbol of value is, of course, consistent with his own loss of faith, but it may be added that he is objectively justified in sensing that valuelessness is a secular state and the fiction of value a secular need. The ultimate fiction may thus be regarded as a need to abjure the secular, and its ultimate form, at least in secularised Christian societies, is a fiction of Christ.

Professor Smith is not concerned with reconciling the ‘as if’ principle in Renan with literary fiction as it is also being discussed here, although his recognition that ‘for Renan religion is largely an aesthetic affair’, invites that reconciliation in the form taken by Renan's Vie de Jésus from 1863. Many commentators have been quick to recognise in his book characteristics which seem more nearly those of the novel than a work of exacting historical or biblical scholarship⁸ but few have been prepared to examine Vie de Jésus in this light, much less acknowledge these affinities as a vital part of its function and importance. But if Vie de Jésus may also be read as an instance of literary fiction, its form and its subject propose a challenging integration. In Renan's own terms, a fiction Christ is required by a world unable to conceive its traditional symbol of transcendent value as a fiction. In the language of the age of the novel, Vie de Jésus affords a society setting aside the Christian story of the divine Christ of truth, the substitute of ‘the great coherent lie’.⁹

In one respect, of course, such an integration is by no means unique to Renan. The emergence of the early Christian novel, typified in Victorian England by Newman's Callista, Kingsley's Hypatia or Wiseman's Fabiola, in France by Chateaubriand's early contribution to the genre, Les Martyrs, assuredly has much to tell us about Renan's most celebrated undertaking. In making, indeed, the observation that Renan's Life was the first of its kind written for the Catholic world,¹⁰ Schweitzer underlines the degree to which nineteenth-century Europe as a whole, Protestant as well as Catholic, had, in the course of secularisation, become sensitive to Christianity in a new way. Renan's book may have its intellectual origins in the work of German Protestant theology, but the latter's contribution to Christology had been neglected in the popular imagination for the very reasons that made Renan's reworking of it such a success: the inclination of the Victorian reader to endow Christianity with sentiment and romance. What smacks to Schweitzer of the Catholic in Renan—his feeling for the lyricism of the Gospel story, its aesthetic charm, plasticity, even sensuality—is precisely what offered satisfaction to an age disposed as a whole to preserve the religious in the association of pious feelings with literary pleasure.

We must be prepared in Renan's case, however, to distinguish between the satisfaction of such feelings and their ironic exploitation. The former seminarist knew and understood the Catholic mind and its tastes well enough to be able to cultivate them, but he might more readily have subscribed to Carlyle's sentiments writing in Past and Present of his age's hypocritical sensibilities: ‘You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt’ (Collected Works, 1870-1, XIII, 172). ‘We mostly read badly’, contributes the author of Vie de Jésus himself, introducing his translation of Ecclesiastes of 1882, ‘when we read on our knees’ (VII, 555).

The equivalent work to Vie de Jésus from an earlier period in Renan's career and in the development of his century is L'Avenir de la science, in that it still enshrines the Revolutionary belief in the achievement of social and intellectual progress through the human will and acts of human intervention. The equivalent Romantic Christology is that of the influential Strauss, for whom Christ is no more but no less than a noble symbol of man's pursuit of transcendence. Conceived in the mode of Hegel, both works posit active engagement with traditional Christianity and its translation into a modern idiom via the medium of myth. In Strauss' Leben as for Renan evoking the ‘great moral teacher’ of 1848, Jesus is revisited only to the extent of serving as a model of the human spirit triumphant. If Renan, fifteen years later, chooses on the other hand to invest the Christian story with the opaqueness of what he now terms ‘legend’, it is in response to that change of values in contemporary French society and thought inaugurated by the Second Empire which invites human history to be deemed impenetrable and human nature itself subject to drives other than that of the questing intellect. The new relationship is again that revealed by Renan's earlier Averroès et l'averroïsme with respect to history or perhaps Fromentin's Dominique before the mystery of Madeleine: what was optimistically held to be the province of mankind in development is now restored to the obscurity of its own laws and nature.

But the ironical undertow already discerned beneath this transfer is always present and Sainte-Beuve perhaps sensed the true character of Vie de Jésus when he said that it reminded him of the transformation undergone by the one-time brigands who became the Knights of Malta: ‘C'est d'un effet singulier à première vue’ (Nouveaux lundis, 7 September 1863, 1866, VI, 23). The transposition of history into art noted by Renan in his essay on Augustin Thierry of 1857 is the most symptomatic indicator of this process as much as it is anticipated by his revisions of stance and style in ‘Les Historiens critiques de Jésus’. Art in its formal plasticity is the residual mode of the historian in his tactical surrender to the other: time, nature, or ignorance. Thus conceived, the Christ of history stands apart from the analytic intelligence, while his erstwhile critic or adversary becomes his ironically respectful advocate. In its most developed form, this ironical historical art is then at one with the novel. As an impression is to an academic painting or the noun to the active verb, the novel is the historian's place of atemporal retreat and concealment. Ultimately Renan's book concerns the new age's own taste for religious artefacts and religious sentiments; his Christian novel is an ironic rejoinder to Christian novels, his Christ of fiction a badge of convenience worn for a world beset by fiction.

The use of fiction as a vehicle for the exploration of the mentality which brought fiction into being is, of course, a strategy associated with Renan's novelist contemporary, Gustave Flaubert. Men of the same generation and of similar dispositions and temperaments, both seem to have concentrated the energies of their intellectual maturities on an enquiry into the psychology of fiction and its relevance to modern societies. Both writers sense that the cult of the fictional is related to their generation's loss of intellectual and moral integrity in its surrender under the Second Empire to political despotism, materialism and feminised values, and both typify the response of the beleaguered intelligentsia of the age in their ironic flirtation with its own tastes. If Renan adds a dimension which in Flaubert, explicitly at least, is lacking, it is from his perspective as a historian that the fictionalist tendencies of the time are most clearly manifest in the contamination of historical truth and, as a historian of religion, that any enquiry into such tendencies must always return us to the foundations of Western religion and the interpretation accorded to the life of Christ. Whereas Flaubert eschewed ‘les beaux sujets’ in his disdain for the triviality and mediocrity of his age, his own analysis thus led Renan to what is arguably the greatest subject of all. What is mediocre in Renan's eyes is not the man, but the minds that have nailed him to fiction's cross.

Flaubert's two modern novels of the Second Empire period, Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale, highlight the misunderstanding and mismanagement of life induced by fiction's influence. As Emma Bovary fails to find in real marriage, motherhood, adultery, the satisfaction that she has been led to expect from them by clandestine reading of pulp romance at her convent, so Frédéric in L'Education sentimentale experiences what Cortland terms ‘the collision of dream and reality’,¹¹ as a result of the fiction he entertains of his love for Madame Arnoux. Life to each is a disappointment because it fails to resemble the image received from literary fiction; what Flaubert conceives to be ‘sentimental’ about the generation he depicts in his great novel of 1869 being its inclination to invest reality with fictional feelings and fictional meanings.

The internal contradiction that has then not escaped the novelist's commentators, is that the instrument employed to portray such attitudes is the very one that is seen as its cause; the behaviour of the characters is echoed in the form in which that behaviour is recounted, generalising it as a condition in which writer and reader as much as protagonist are embroiled, and creating the conditions for authorial irony. Through the self-conscious replication of subject in form, clarity of transcendent meaning is blocked by the immanence of the text in a parody of the cloying immanentism of the age. The ‘book about nothing’ to which Flaubert aspired as the pinnacle of his artistic ambition, constantly recoils upon itself, burying its own head in the folds of endless circularity.

Ambivalence and irony of this kind are, of course, already present in Renan's Etudes d'histoire religieuse and Essais de morale et de critique of the 1850s as in his earlier experiment in fiction, Patrice. What he terms ‘tact’ in his essay on the Académie Française from 1859 is as faithful a summary as any of Flaubert's address to his sentimental world. Where Vie de Jésus nonetheless marks a development from these earlier ‘essays’ and ‘studies’ not only concerns the book's subject, but is of the same order which separates an artist's sketch from a fully-fledged painting, or a statement of literary methodology from its comprehensive application. Renan, we are reminded by Mary Darmesteter,¹² drafted Vie de Jésus in Palestine in the space of a few months, away from Western reference books and libraries, and the fluency and autonomy of this genesis is retained in the finished work. With Vie de Jésus we are dealing with the thing itself, the vertiginous masterpiece, whose ironic concentricity approaches Flaubert's own ideal.

I have managed to endow all this with a sense of organic development, something entirely absent from the Gospels. As a consequence, I trust that my readers will be met by living beings and not those pale, lifeless phantoms: Jesus, Mary, Peter, etc … turned into abstractions and reduced to types.

As with the vibrations of a sound plate, I have attempted to produce the bow stroke which arranges the sand grains in natural waves.

(E. Renan and M. Berthelot, Correspondance, 1847-1892, 12 September 1861, p. 284)

Renan writing here from Beirut in 1861 to his chemist friend Berthelot begins to give an indication of where this affinity lies. For what is at issue here concerns the uncertain boundary and ironic interplay between history and imaginative art.

Art in some form can never be said to be wholly absent from historiography, in that all writing entails the literary skills of formal organisation, communication, persuasion. The historian may even feel justified, in pursuance of his legitimate goal of recreating the general character of an epoch or the personality of a given individual, in borrowing the techniques of dramatist or novelist to round out individual lives into psychologically coherent entities on the basis of established models of human development. It is thus that Renan, writing in the fifth chapter of Vie de Jésus, can explain his approach to his own central character:

… the development of character is everywhere the same; and there is no doubt that the growth of so powerful an individuality as that of Jesus obeyed very rigorous laws.

(IV, 131¹³)

The exploitation by generations of novelists of ‘faits divers’ culled from journalism as a starting point for fictional intrigue is another such point of contact between the two domains whose aims of social understanding, psychological or political analysis, constantly mesh with one another. When Balzac wrote of being at once ‘secretary to his age’ and the student of its ‘secret laws’, he was saying as much: the historian and the novelist are familiar bedfellows in their concern to record and investigate the government of individuals and societies.

As Lukács in his study of the historical novel suggests, however, what distinguishes Balzac's age from that of Flaubert is the breakdown following the Revolution of 1848 of the belief that the historical past could be distinguished from the present and thereby usefully contribute to an understanding of it, and it is at this point that the erstwhile historian finds renewed common cause with the novelist in the purely anecdotal exploration of history.¹⁴ Renan's rejection in his letter to Berthelot of a taxonomic approach to the inhabitants of the Biblical past in favour of what he terms ‘living beings’, is indicative of a shift away from the ideal of historical knowledge and historical perspective towards a view of these beings as mere constituents of an imagined present. In the same way, his insistence on the importance of ‘organic development’, achieved by the aesthetic coherence of his own writing, points to the abandonment of any truly historical register for what amounts to a form of literary naturalism. Where indeed Vie de Jésus may begin to be conceived as a kind of novel is in an ideological context, involving the replacement of the historical transcendence of the previous age by perceptions of society and the individual founded on the model of organic nature, whose own ‘rigorous laws’ render history irrelevant and reduce to Flaubertian ‘nothingness’ the historian's endeavours.

Darwin's Origin of Species was published in French in 1862¹⁵ and, in October 1863, a few months after the appearance of his own best-selling work, Renan gave to the Journal des débats his ‘open’ letter to Berthelot, ‘Les Sciences de la nature et les sciences historiques’. In it he expresses regret at not having taken a career in natural science, and concedes that history should recognise its minor place in the grander design of evolution: ‘The entire destiny of planet earth is thereby explainable even if as yet unexplained’ (I, 639). Where Renan's earlier version of the historical process, as instanced by the appeal of Wiseman's theory of natural cataclysm or his own seismic vision in L'Avenir de la science, still allows for the exceptional as an explanation of historical causality, this revised one admits only to the unbroken chain of organic constancy: ‘the relentless action of ordinary causes’ (I, 637). By the same token, his previous vision of the historical sciences as the avenue to man's true understanding of himself and his destiny now has to be placed against a conception of the historian deprived of his primary status in the intellectual hierarchy; ‘In fine, what goes by the name of history is the history of the last hour, as though, in trying to understand the history of France, we were confined to knowing what happened in the last ten years’ (I, 644). It is a view which will lead him to write in his later Souvenirs of history as a ‘little conjectural science’ (II, 852) and the irony of these words from the pen of an historian is inseparable from the subordination of history to art highlighted by Vie de Jésus.

What Renan's book owes to this new understanding of historical time and historical causation initially concerns the perceived limits of scientific knowledge that derive from it, and the perception of human behaviour and human societies which these epistemological limitations reflect. The celebrated discussion of the miraculous in the 1867 preface to Vie de Jésus, perhaps represents the best example of what is now authentically Positivist in his own thinking: miracles cannot be refuted a priori; they simply lie outside the province which knowledge, in its present state, permits itself to explore. Equally, the explanation given by Renan of the personality and development of Jesus sits well on a view of the individual, however unusual, as always subject to what, in his public exchange with Berthelot, he terms ‘ordinary causes’. For in contrast to the Jesus of the Essai psychologique from his last months at Saint-Sulpice, the hero of Vie de Jésus emerges as the wholly natural product of his Galilean homeland and tribal roots, just as his subsequent formation is shown to be the result of contemporary political and social circumstances. If Renan required any corroboration for this determinist mechanism, he could also have found it in the work of his friend and countryman, Taine, whose Histoire de la littérature anglaise appeared in the same year as Vie de Jésus, including its preface containing the much-quoted trilogical formula of environmental causation by ‘la race, le milieu, le moment’.

Not least, Renan's readiness to depict in Jesus a very fallible mortal who is flattered by his followers into living out his dramatic role, seems destined to underline the conformity of the individual to other normalising pressures: in a manner fit to recall the collectivism of Zola or the faceless puppets of Maupassant's social analysis, it is the group or the crowd who now determine the conduct of the man. The hero of Vie de Jésus is doubtless far removed from the cynically exploitive Duroy of Maupassant's Bel-Ami of 1885, but he shares something of the same capacity for flexing to the social breeze. In this respect the quality of ‘charm’ to which Renan repeatedly draws attention in his hero is less a personal charisma, more a kind of absolute compliance with the world around him.

Here it becomes pertinent to make an initial incursion into the subject of Renan's chosen title. For the omission of the definite article—‘Vie de Jésus’, not ‘La Vie de Jésus’ as it is commonly mis-styled—itself suggests an emphasis on the generic rather than the particular, the organic rather than the individualist. A comparable response seems to have led Maupassant again to give that most universal of all titles ‘Une Vie’ to his first novel as though no life was distinct from any other. To apply to the life and the events whose uniqueness is the basis of all Christian teaching, if not the entire culture of the West, what, in these terms, is ‘vie’ is to aim indeed at calculated symmetry: what is mortality most mediocre on one side is the name of all aspirations to individuality and transcendence on the other.

And this, of course, is the crux of the matter at once for the Christian facing the challenge of Renan's book and for the historian-artist who created it. For Renan here disturbs a Schopenhauerian spectre by which his novelist contemporaries were also haunted: the illusion attending the principium individuationis. Frédéric Moreau begins the great journey to nowhere that is Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale with the thought that ‘the happiness which his nobility of soul deserved was slow in coming’ (tr. Baldick); the meteoric rise to social stardom of Georges Duroy is matched, conversely, only by the nullity and facticity of his own personality. In the same way, the obscuring of individuality serves to render arbitrary the historian's attempts to explain historical development in heroic terms. Shorn of their uniqueness, ‘normalised’ by the supposed constancy of natural law, earlier events and even the greatest of individuals are subsumed within a past where meaning is cloaked beneath the anonymity of ‘life’. ‘The abstract contempt for “external” history’, observes Lukács of the nature-based outlook of the Second-Empire, ‘gives historical events a grey, everyday character, reduces them to a simple level of spontaneity.’¹⁶ ‘The living tradition’, writes Renan exemplifying the point in his later study of the Gospels, ‘was the great reservoir from which all drew their water. Hence the explanation of this apparently surprising fact, that the texts which subsequently became the most important part of Christianity came into being obscurely and confusedly …’ (V, 51). Transcendent history's sun is now organic nature's sunflower, inclining before the light that is bestowed on it: the mystery of a process which gave rise spontaneously to legend, image, popular illusion.

One aspect of Vie de Jésus to which this new conception of history gives rise was noted by Taine himself when he detected a connection between Renan's methods of scholarship and writing and those of contemporary painting; ‘… he does not proceed from one precise truth to another, he gropes about, he feels his way. He has impressions. That word says it all’ (Taine, Vie et correspondance, II, 3rd ed., 1908, 242). Writing then himself in the 1867 preface to Vie de Jésus, Renan confirms what is suggested here: ‘I wanted to create a picture in which the colours were blended as they are in nature, which would resemble mankind, that is to say noble and childish at the same time’ (IV, 33). ‘All great things’, he explains later, ‘are done through the people; we can lead the people only by adapting ourselves to its ideas’ (IV, 242). As with a painting by Manet, a fortiori Monet, the fate of the historian is to be condemned to depict a world from which the intellectual and historical is missing. The corresponding characteristic to that accorded by Renan to his ‘charming’ but fraudulent hero belongs now with Vie de Jésus itself: the book's fundamental nature and source of its irony lies in its reflecting a picture-book world without depth of understanding, in its being a self-conscious mirror of what other people think they see.

It is, however, Renan's sense, developed in his subsequent study of the Gospels, that the spread of Christianity was itself an artistic rather than historical phenomenon that ultimately determines the nature of his own book in the context of the impossibility of disengagement from organic time: ‘It was the Gospel that won over hearts, that delightful mixture of poetry and moral sense, that account suspended between dream and reality in a paradise where time goes unmeasured. There is surely a degree of literary wonderment in all this’ (V, 94). The scientific insouciance, furthermore, that he detects in the Gospels—‘imprecise chronology, casual transitions, careless of reality’ (V, 93)—will become that of his own writing. ‘The overall effect is of an enchanted palace, built entirely of brilliant stones. An exquisite vagueness … leads the narrative to hover as in a dream between earth and sky’ (V, 153). Wardman is rightly sensitive to this correspondence between Renan's biography and its Christian models,¹⁷ but so is the author of Vie de Jésus himself: ‘There will always be lives of Jesus. What is more, the Life of Jesus will always enjoy great success when the writer has the necessary skill, boldness and innocence to translate the Gospels into the style of his times’ (V, 94). As Renan's choice of title may also be held to convey, there is at the heart of Vie de Jésus and central to its entire character an alternative sense of the generic applicable to a story on which humanity has imposed an indelible literary stereotype.

But there is a final twist to this intricate spiral and one which suggests the true relationship between Renan's Jesus and Renan himself. For, in contrast to his noble moralist from the opening paragraph of L'Avenir de la science, Renan now conceives Jesus' own personality as being governed by an artist's mentality and timing in the face of the disturbing enigma of life. Jesus himself is ‘ce grand maître en ironie’ (IV, 294), ‘embracing at the same time various orders of truths’ (IV, 265), ‘at once very ideal in his conceptions and very concrete in their expression’ (IV, 274). This artist Christ is himself also an ironist and a fictionalist, responding to his world as his biographers of old responded to him by living his life to its demanded, fictional conclusion: it is at the bidding of humanity's need for his story rather than history that he had to live as he did: ‘So closely was he identified with his idea, that his idea became him, absorbed him, turned his biography into what it had to be. There was in him what theologians call “communication of idioms”. There is the same communication between the first and penultimate book of this history’ (V, 157). Renan is writing here of his own Vie de Jésus and his own study of the Gospels, Les Evangiles. Perhaps he already sensed that the final irony of this pattern of circular ‘communication’ lay in his own achievement thereby of a form of ironic immortality.

Renan's introduction to Vie de Jésus of 1863 and his preface to the thirteenth edition of 1867 are valuable as signposts to this ironic interior. Forming two separate ‘introductions’, each originally conceived in different circumstances to meet different needs,¹⁸ they become englobed in the modern version of the finished work as though offering separate avenues to it. Alfaric is certainly justified in suggesting that Renan's earlier introduction ‘falsifies the perspective’ of the text itself,¹⁹ but any such falsification has perhaps to be viewed in the light of a work constructed from many such approximations and whose artistic aim, as defined by Renan himself, is ‘the making of a true whole out of parts which are only half true’ (IV, 30). The reversal of the chronological order of writing in the order of reading itself contributes to the intervalency of the two texts which together assume the character of self-conscious self-repudiation.

Significantly, indeed, the 1863 introduction to Vie de Jésus posits a rational history available to the rationalist historian. It is here that Renan presents himself as the erstwhile believer standing respectfully but necessarily apart from events and values from another age and another mentality: ‘The most beautiful thing in the world has thus proceeded from an obscure and purely popular elaboration’ (IV, 55). It remains possible, however, to reconstruct this past using modern analytical tools and modern analogies, and Strauss in particular is singled out for his fault in this respect ‘of taking up … the historical ground too little’ (IV, 44). Confronting the classic problem of the authority of the four Gospels as records of the life and teachings of Christ, ‘we will inquire only’, writes Renan, ‘in what degree the data furnished by the Gospels may be employed in a history formed according to rational principles’ (IV, 50).

Since they are, in part at least, concerned with the miraculous and the supernatural they must, to some degree, be considered legendary but retain their value as ‘des biographies légendaires’, for which a modern analogy might be sought in the account given by a group of former Napoleonic soldiers of their great leader: ‘It is clear that their narratives would contain numerous errors and great discordances. One of them would place Wagram before Marengo; another would write without hesitation that Napoleon drove the government of Robespierre from the Tuileries; a third would omit expeditions of the highest importance’ (IV, 74). On the other hand, ‘the character of the hero’, ‘the impression he made around him’, would be likely to emerge with clarity and truthfulness.

His own Vie de Jésus will thus apply the same logic in search of ‘the very soul of history’. Such an endeavour involves the recognition that any great life is ‘an organic whole’ demanding an imaginative response on the part of the historian which has its counterpart in the ‘tact’ and ‘taste’ of art: ‘In histories such as this, the great test that we have got the truth is to have succeeded in combining the texts in such a manner that they shall constitute a logical, probable narrative, harmonious throughout’ (IV, 81). Classical verisimilitude and ‘bienséance’, together with a classical sense of unity, are here invoked to serve the cause of classic historiography.

The world depicted by Renan in his 1867 preface and the historian's role in confronting it are, however, of a very different stamp. Where one invites a reading of Vie de Jésus as a work of cautious scholarship supported by tasteful conjecture, the other presents rational scholarship as a travesty of history and the ironic disposition of the artist as the sole source of communion with a past of discord, folly and madness. Where one conceives the Gospel ‘legends’ as understandable and decipherable, the other compares them to the superstitious belief in ghosts and monsters. Where one presents Jesus as a glamorous hero to be treated with respect and adulation, the other depicts him as an appealing but fraudulent witchdoctor. Where one distances itself from his teaching in a gesture of gratitude and respect, the other identifies his dark beliefs alive in all human nature.

Refusing in this case to be drawn into any form of active controversy—‘that would have meant speaking of myself, something I never do’ (IV, 14)—Renan initiates a complementary discussion of the value to be attached to sacred writing which is also implicitly a discussion of the value of all writing: ‘Every rule of criticism assumes that the document which is the subject of study has only relative value, that such a document may be mistaken, that it may be corrected by a better document’ (IV, 17). What to the sceptic may be a falsehood, to the believer may be a truth; evidence of a single miracle would turn his own text into ‘un tissu d'erreurs’ (IV, 15). His own introduction to the edition of 1863 has been ‘retouched and completed’ (IV, 21), particularly where it deals with the controversial Fourth Gospel. We are in a realm where nothing written is ever what it seems or may have seemed but of ‘delicate approximations’ (IV, 15). ‘Because a thing is written down’, observes Renan majestically, ‘it does not follow that it has to be true’ (IV, 17).

The master of this shifting world is then truly the artist rather than the historian, ‘art holding the key to the most intimate laws of truth’ (IV, 19). Without it, a life of Jesus would be confined to a series of disconnected banalities, the meagrest of ‘faits divers’: ‘He existed. He was from Nazareth in Galilee. He was a magnetic preacher and his sayings left a profound mark on the memories of his disciples. His two principal followers were Peter and John, the sons of Zebedee. He aroused the hatred of the orthodox Jews who contrived to have him put to death by Pontius Pilate, then procurator of Judea. He was crucified outside the city gate. It was afterwards believed that he rose from the dead’ (IV, 25). Beyond this ‘le doute est permis’, and answers can only be formulated in the shape of questions. Earlier Protestant scholars, reflects Renan, have clumsily confined themselves to the ‘incidents’ of Jesus' life through want of any appreciation of ‘la théorie de la vie spirituelle’ (IV, 29). The epithet has, of course, two distinct meanings in French: in engaging with the spiritual we are engaging the ironic mind and understanding.

This is also the message which underlies Renan's reflections towards the end of his preface, on the nature of the society in which Jesus lived and the kind of character he must have been. To the ironic symmetries of art corresponds history's ironic purpose: ‘The world is a comedy at once infernal and divine, a strange round led by a genial dancemaster, in which good and evil, ugliness and beauty file past in their assigned stations, with a view to the fulfilment of an unknown purpose. History is not history if it does not alternately charm and revolt us, sadden and console us as we read it’ (IV, 30-1). A fortiori, humanity's religious origins are the arena for this historical comedy, for with them we enter ‘a world of women, children, passionate and deranged mentalities’, in which it is impossible to separate fraud from honesty, calculation from innocence, as much as it is inappropriate to evaluate it as we might choose: ‘Ne faisons pas le passé à notre image’ (IV, 32).

Jesus himself is, finally, to be viewed as part of this web of ignorance and imperfection, for he was its ‘charmer’, a magician who succeeded in satisfying its tastes and needs rather than a scholar, a moralist or a saint. History is a record of great deeds achieved by ‘consciences troubles’ and there is no great founder who has not ended his career by ‘desperate measures’ whatever the innocence of his original goals: ‘I had to make my hero handsome and charming (for, without any doubt he was); and this in spite of actions which, in our day, would be viewed in an unfavourable light’ (IV, 34). ‘If the picture had been without a shadow, this would have been the proof that it was false’ (IV, 33). We are, concludes Renan, dealing with human nature as the entomologist would observe the transformations of a chrysalis into a butterfly without prejudice or passion. But this analogy is significant in another way. Free and pure spirit he may seem but, like the butterfly, the historian is merely his more primitive self in another guise. The religious that marks humanity's pupal phase is stamped indelibly on all our futures: ‘Est Deus in nobis. …’ (IV, 39).

Whether or not it is appropriate to regard Renan's introduction and preface as integral to Vie de Jésus, assumes at this point less importance than the awareness that together they represent the attitudes of mind from which the biography itself takes its being. Read chronologically, the book's twin introductions tell of the retreat of the academic mind into the ironic and ludic as the result of the ideological shifts which characterise the period of Renan's maturity, whether they are those of history itself, society or politics. Judged inappropriate by Lagrange,²⁰ Renan's comparison in his 1863 introduction between the legends surrounding Jesus and those which sprang up in Napoleon's armies, plainly points at a contrast with the empire of falsehood and hysteria ushered in half a century later by a politically ‘charming fraud’. Inescapably, too, there is in this juxtaposition of values an account of psychosexual transfer from male- to female-centred values, the Apollonian to the Dionysian, and with it the withdrawal of the critical spirit, the intellect and the will behind the ironical mask imposed on it by the instinctual, the bodily and popular. In this regard, the introduction of 1863 is to Renan's later preface what L'Avenir de la science is to Vie de Jésus: where there was once critical and historical distance, there is now only the irony latent in pure parody. Most significantly, however, this exchange anticipates the life of Jesus himself as told by Renan. For Vie de Jésus is itself the story of noble masculinity lost, of illusions becoming the norm, of fiction being imposed upon the historically pure and of history's death at the hands of the fanatical multitude.

His new faith has not destroyed the old one and has taken away nothing of its poetry. He loves two things at once. The observer delights in this untroubled struggle. What a charming state of being, without being anything in particular.

(V, 159-60)

Writing here in Les Evangiles on the qualities of St Matthew's Gospel, Renan perhaps comes nearest to defining the nature of his own. For what we have termed the ‘fictional’ in Vie de Jésus is less an obvious presence, more a state of absence, the result of the weighing of intellectual and sentimental allegiances against one another to neutralise their monopoly on consciousness and preserve their value only as part of an artistic structure. ‘The true novel form’, says Cortland again of Flaubert, ‘is the amorphous state of the uncommitted mind.’²¹ There is nothing here of the calculated dialectics of Renan's later Dialogues philosophiques but something close to a suspension of time and self experienced by a reader immersed in a novel; sensing always its factitiousness, but lulled into compliance with it. The novel is also that which charms to deceive. This is Renan's subject but also his method of approach to it. His book is at once an investigation and a demonstration of what it investigates: the power of the plausible and spiritually satisfying to engage and progressively lay hold of the imagination.

Evidence of the presence of such a progression begins with what have frequently been identified as two contrasting atmospheres or moods in Vie de Jésus. Developing his account of Renan's method, Taine detected a tendency on the part of his friend to divide his Life of Jesus into complementary phases: ‘He gathers all the gentle and pleasant thoughts of Jesus together in the Nazareth period and leaves out the sad ones, creating a lovely, mystical pastoral. Then, in another chapter, he introduces all the threats and all the bitterness, which he relates to the journey to Jerusalem’ (Vie et correspondance, II, 245). Renan indeed writes of Jesus' early years in Galilee as being lived ‘amid enchanting scenes’, radiant with birds and blossoms to the point where ‘the whole history of infant Christianity has become in this manner a delightful pastoral’ (IV, 127), while the picture he paints of Jerusalem is that of ‘un monde odieux’, enveloped in an arid wasteland (IV, 214-15).

As Taine himself reveals through his use in the same context of a vocabulary more suited to the plastic arts, this structure is in one respect a reflection of the self-conscious plasticity of Vie de Jésus, its internal rhymes and symmetries. There are no historical or even biblical grounds for dividing the career of Christ in this way any more than for Renan's unhesitating claim that Jesus had brothers and sisters (IV, 100), or that he began his teaching before meeting John the Baptist (IV, 150). Like a painting or a novel, the book's first call is on the requirements of the artefact: the historical events and characters are servants to the form. In another, however, the polar structure of Vie de Jésus serves, like its two introductions, to replicate the overall journey represented by the narrative as clarity and enlightenment give way to a kind of intellectual darkness, simplicity and integrity to irony and illusion.

For at the beginning of Vie de Jésus, the character that emerges from the bountiful Galilean landscape is himself of spontaneous stature and generosity: ‘une personne supérieure’ (IV, 85), ‘l'homme incomparable’ (IV, 96). A son of the people but different by his elevated mind and spirit, Jesus has ‘a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with God, and an exaggerated belief in the power of man’ (IV, 111). Attractive in appearance, strong of character ‘he did not preach his opinions; he preached himself’ (IV, 133), his personal sense of his unique relationship with God his Father being translated into a single, simple idea: ‘A pure worship, a religion without priests and external observances, resting entirely on the feelings of the heart, on the imitation of God …’ (IV, 139). What Renan regards as the first of a series of key doctrines, each associated with a different phase in Jesus' life, is born in this personality entirely at one with himself and his world in ‘the kingdom of God’.

The presumed death of Joseph his father and Jesus' encounter with John the Baptist, however, induce an initial change in him, for he finds himself the subject of an exclusively maternal love and then befriending a young male companion. Imagined by Renan to be a man of Jesus' own age, John is an ally but also an influence and a rival: ‘Jesus thought himself obliged to do like John’ (IV, 152). The adoption of the practice of baptism, of fasting and ascetic isolation in the desert are the first indications of surrender to the popular imagination, just as his ideas now assume a popular, revolutionary colour. The kingdom of God is now ‘a refuge for souls in the midst of the empire of brute force’ (IV, 161). ‘The “world” is in this manner the enemy of God and his saints; but God will awaken and avenge his saints. The day is at hand, for the abomination is at its height. The reign of goodness will have its turn’ (IV, 158). Inspired by this ‘millenarism’, a growing group of disciples begin to identify Jesus as the Messiah and he in turn is inspired by their convictions: ‘the more people believed in him, the more he believed in himself’ (IV, 172). His days at Capernaum and on the shores of the Lake of Tiberias are the focus of the ‘delicate communism’ of the beatitudes, of his identification with the poor and the meek of the ‘continual feast’ (IV, 203), already distinct from the ascetic society of John, of weddings, hospitality, conviviality.

It is with Jesus' first real contact with Jerusalem around the year 31 that Renan, however, associates the completion of this progressive change in his hero's persona and conception of his mission. Once in the capital city, ‘the little Galilean community were here far from being at home’ (IV, 213). Jesus himself ‘was lost in the crowd’ (IV, 217). A stranger to the Temple and its ways ‘the charming teacher who forgave everyone, provided they loved him, could find little sympathy in this sanctuary of vain disputes and obsolete sacrifices’ (IV, 220). Confronted by the hostility of the Jews, Jesus now comes to see himself as the enemy of Judaism and to associate with unorthodox ‘Hellenes’ (IV, 227). As opinion contrives to identify in him the true ‘son of David’, it conflates with his own sense of messianic mission to create the living legend of his birth at Bethlehem, of a stable and a star: ‘Nothing great has been established which does not rest on a legend. The only culprit in such cases is humanity, willing to be deceived’ (IV, 242).

Chapter XVI of Vie de Jésus, concerning miracles, belongs to this context of increasing social pressures on the will and individuality of Jesus. Since miracles were held to be evidence of divinity, ‘Jesus was, therefore, obliged to choose between two alternatives—either to renounce his mission or to become a thaumaturgist’ (IV, 244). Uncomprehending of any distinction between the world of the natural and the supernatural, he accedes to acts which have encouraged belief in him over the centuries. ‘Socrates and Pascal’, remarks Renan, ‘had their delusions’, and, in an echo of the latter: ‘human frailties only engender frailty; great things have ever great causes in man's nature, though often evolved amid trivialities which to shallow minds veil their grandeur’ (IV, 251).

Pascalian doubleness and ‘finesse d'esprit’ now indeed become central to Jesus' own character and teaching with respect to the kingdom of God, the one persona able to satisfy society's needs for a message of consolation, the other to live out its own loftier ideals. ‘C'est parce qu'elle était à double face que sa pensée a été féconde’ (IV, 260). Jesus thus emerges as the ‘incomparable artist’, the great ironist capable by a kind of ‘exalted divination’ of embracing ‘divers ordres de vérités’: ‘The phrase, “kingdom of God”, expresses also, very happily, the want which the soul experiences of a supplementary destiny, of a compensation for the present life’ (IV, 264).

This ambivalent and ironical message, however, also serves as a trigger to a kind of self-assessment on the part of Renan's hero. Increasingly misanthropic and introverted like some wasted and benighted star whose energies are concentrated within itself, the ‘sombre giant’ (IV, 280) of his final years rediscovers self-esteem and personal integrity with this bifurcation of his mission:

He might still have avoided death; but he would not. Love for his work sustained him. He was willing to drink the cup to the dregs. Henceforth we behold Jesus entirely himself; his character unclouded.

(IV, 321-2)

But as he himself sinks into history there to rest in peace in ‘profoundly united to his Father’ (IV, 349), which was his first and only ideal, the world itself is fashioning his teaching and his image to its own other ends.

For his credulous disciples, every act of the master is now redolent with symbolism. An insignificant meal becomes ‘par une illusion inévitable’ (IV, 326), one of the central memories of Western consciousness; a phrase blurted out by a dying and disillusioned man an awesome message to a waiting world; a chance discovery by a woman of the people of an empty tomb the ultimate miracle to bear his name to eternity:

What had taken place? In treating of the history of the Apostles we shall have to examine this point, and to make inquiry into the origin of the legends relative to the resurrection. For the historian, the life of Jesus finishes with his last sigh. But such was the impression he had left in the hearts of his disciples and of a few devoted women that during some weeks more it was as if he were living and consoling them. Had his body been taken away, or did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterwards the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the resurrection? In the absence of opposing documents, this can never be ascertained. Let us say, however, that the strong imagination of Mary Magdalene played an important part in this circumstance. Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God!

(IV, 356)

All the elements that go to form this celebrated sequence, its associations with the feminine, the Tainean notion of ‘hallucination’, the power of ‘impression’, ‘in the absence of opposing documents’, point to it as a reflection on the process of polarisation that has occurred in the course of Jesus' own story, and of which Vie de Jésus itself is the testimony. As the historical Jesus withdraws from life into final solitude and death, the fictitious which he has briefly courted rushes in full flood to fill the vacant space. And so too for the historian of Jesus that his biographer might have been. What Renan indeed seems to have envisaged as he nears the conclusion of his own artistic ‘mission’, is a total correspondence between all its constituent elements, to the extent that the story of Jesus has become his story recounted by and for Mary, making the reader of a potential ‘Vie de Jésus’ the reader of its hallucinatory and hallucinating alternate. Illusion is inevitable when the soul of history vacates the world, leaving behind an empty tomb.

This is ironical writing of a high order, based in part on what an early commentator described as the ‘zigzags’ of Renan's style²²—a technical term from psychology like ‘hallucinée’, used in conjunction with ‘divine’, ‘sacred’, ‘God’—in part on the domination of interrogatives or other expressions of conjecture; most formidably, however, on the underlying implication that no clear historical nor spiritual message can escape from the rings of psychological and social exigency under which it is concealed. Appropriately, the first sentence of Vie de Jésus refers the reader to ‘the great event in the history of the world’, its last word is the name of Jesus himself; for with Jesus and because of Jesus we must always stand somewhere on the axis formed by fact and fidelity, in the strange half-light, that is, that Vie de Jésus has itself created for us.

The remarkable result was a book that was read by everyone and satisfied no one. The official Church was outraged by Renan's deceiver-Christ, the more so as it sensed the danger in the beguiling envelope. Historical criticism was dismayed by Renan's concessions to piety and sentiment. Even those who, temperamentally, might have been in tune with him, declared themselves baffled by what they saw as a sleight of hand. He was too much a sceptic and not enough of one at the same time.²³

In itself, the contributing thought was not new, nor was Renan's purpose to alter minds. He had added nothing of substance to the debate on the historical Jesus, nor to his own position with respect to Christian belief. Vie de Jésus reveals clearly enough this position to be what it always was: that of the high-minded idealist of L'Avenir de la science disposed to countenance the existence of a supreme being and to behave as its servant, while he yet remained scornful of attempts to formalise this attachment into a codified creed or set of tangible symbols. Equally, he appreciated the nature of more humble forms of belief sufficiently to recognise that they were beyond his influence or interference. ‘A single, supreme and unapproachable God’, he had written in his Etudes d'histoire religieuse, ‘is evidently too austere a dogma for certain eras and certain countries’ (VII, 226). It was not in any attempt to promote a rationalised or diluted belief that Renan wrote Vie de Jésus. This was more, though, than calculated disinterestedness. The power lay in the compelling yet disturbing nature of the art, in that which all could recognise as appealing but with which none could feel secure.

It is when viewed in this light that Vie de Jésus changes sense and changes subject to the point where what is superficially accessory to it becomes its authentic essence. The vehicle of ironic narrative employed by Renan is a reminder to all strands and levels of opinion that transcendent meaning is a mask we place upon reality as readily and as arbitrarily as those humble fishermen long ago. His Life of Jesus like their master as it depicts him has the invitingly empty quality of being all things to all men. If ‘nothing happens’ as is often claimed in Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, nothing happens in Vie de Jésus and for the same reasons: the self-nullifying ironic is the expression of the social and psychological disorientation renewed as well as resisted in modern, secular man. Renan, who wrote no study of the novel, seems nevertheless to have sensed like his great novelist contemporary that literary fiction as no other genre held the key to this new unfulfilled state of being, both in the sense of being its symptom and the illusory location of its cure. Poised as it is in the ironic space between truth and make-believe, the novel is at once a reminder of that space and an artificial bridge across it, parading incoherence as coherence, division as unity. To read it as to write it becomes an act consistent with the post-Christian human condition, a palm-strewn journey to a cross of print and cardboard. Michelet was right, in connection with Vie de Jésus, to speak of ‘the flaccid and sickly tendencies of the novel, serving the cause of homo duplex’ (Journal, ed. Claude Digeon, III, 168). What he failed to see was that all Renan's cruel and gentle message was there. Either there exists a living Christ of truth, or there is the ‘flag of our contradictions’ (IV, 351) flying over a novel eternally entitled Vie de Jésus.

As to Renan's authentically historical message, he reserved that for the remainder of his account of what he terms the ‘origins’ of Christianity, which Vie de Jésus already reveals to involve a paradoxical journey away from the true religion of mind and heart. The brief life of that religion was a moment when Jesus stood alone among the Galilean hills addressing his unseen Father, its evolution its necessary decadence. Born to live out that simple relationship, Jesus himself found the world more disposed to put its faith in a shadow. Renan was about to extend that message and to discover at the pinnacle of this faith of such frail foundation a Roman emperor teaching himself and the world to die.

Notes

1. Prosper Alfaric, Les Manuscrits de la ‘Vie de Jésus’ d'Ernest Renan, Les Belles-Lettres, 1939, p. 319. Horace, Odes, III, xxx, 1: ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’—‘I seek a monument of everlasting bronze’.

2. Cf. the preceding paragraph from the same page of the Cahiers de jeunesse (OC IX, 244), where Renan regrets ever having given the impression of being a follower of Strauss: ‘O Jésus, non, aurais-je pu te renier? Oh! mon coeur en est navré. Il me faut que tu aies vécu, et vécu dans l'idéal qu'on [nous] a laissé de toi. Cet idéal qui me ravit, ah!, si ce n'était qu'un type! Non, il me faut, pour t'aimer, que tu aies été mon semblable, ayant comme moi un coeur de chair.’

3. Alfaric, op. cit., p. lxiii: ‘Ce n'est plus un villageois galiléen du début de notre ère que nous avons ici; c'est un Français du XIX^e siècle, en qui la culture du temps a pris sa forme la plus haute et la plus affinée, c'est Renan avec toute la richesse et la séduction personnelle.’ But in the same vein, see also Gabriel Séailles, Ernest Renan: essai de biographie psychologique, Perrin, 1895, p. 137: ‘Renan ne sait pas assez s'oublier lui-même, il a voulu que Jésus lui renvoyât sa propre image et il s'est surtout complu à cette image’; and Mary James Darmesteter, La Vie d'Ernest Renan, Calmann-Lévy, 1898, p. 173: ‘Toutefois le livre demeure moins une reconstitution scientifique que le reflet d'un certain idéal moral que l'auteur portait en lui’.

4. Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse: leurs formes et leurs rapports dans l'oeuvre d'Ernest Renan, p. 287.

5. See the interesting review by Thomas R. Edwards: ‘People in Trouble’, New York Review of Books, XIX, (20 July 1972), 20-2. Presenting a group of contemporary novels, Edwards makes the observation that ‘the novel from its beginning has dwelt upon the secular life, men and women making do in a realm God hasn't visited for quite a while. Here people are on their own, they have careers instead of vocations, stories don't always predict their own endings, meaning is not found in events but gets attached to them more or less provisionally. … Living in a world whose mysteries may be meaningless, secular man is necessarily man in trouble …’ (p. 20).

6. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford University Press, 1967. Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, Gallimard, 1948, p. 169. Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, Seuil, 1953, p. 51.

7. Colin Smith, ‘The Fictionalist Element in Renan's Thought’, French Studies, IX (1955), 30.

8. Renan's friends were the first to view with suspicion the similarities they detected between Vie de Jésus and a work of fiction and they were soon followed by a host of others. Taine recalls joining Berthelot in admonishing Renan in this regard when he read them part of his manuscript in August 1862: ‘En vain Berthelot et moi nous lui disons que c'est mettre le roman à la place de la légende’ (Vie et correspondance, Hachette, II (3rd ed., 1908), 245). Michelet was inspired by his reading of Vie de Jésus a year later to thoughts of ‘combattre le roman par l'histoire’ (Journal, ed. Claude Digeon, Gallimard, III (1976), 168). P. Larroque, identifying himself as a ‘déiste rationaliste’, concluded: ‘M. Renan vient de construire un roman qui a obtenu un succès de vogue. Mais un roman, quelque plein d'intérêt qu'il puisse être, c'est trop peu quand avait été annoncée une oeuvre de science sérieuse’ (La Vie de Jésus selon M. Renan, Dentu, 1863, p. 4). The Tübingen school of criticism founded in the tradition of Bauer and Strauss had similar misgivings as Theodor Keim demonstrated in a series of articles for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung of September 1863: ‘Nur bleibt gerade hier die Frage offen: wahr oder wahrscheinlich? Geschichte oder Phantasie, ein Roman, wie ihn das Land etwa weckt oder die Zeit gern liest?’ (15 Sept. 1863, p. 4278). Meanwhile, official Catholic opinion at home remained merciless in its treatment of this feature of Renan's book. See, for example, J.-T. Loyson, Une prétendue Vie de Jésus; ou M. Ernest Renan, historien, philosophe et poëte, 3rd ed., Douniol, 1863, p. 71: ‘Quel délicieux roman!’; or Alphonse Gratry, Les Sophistes et la critique, Douniol/Lecoffre, 1864, p. 169: ‘Rien de commun avec l'histoire! … C'est donc un roman historique? Non, c'est un roman non historique: ce jugement émane de l'Institut.’ A scholarly modern critic, Alfaric, allows for the book's appeal ‘en dépit de son caractère fictif’ (op. cit., p. lxiii) and Chadbourne speaks in the same vein of Vie de Jésus as ‘a best-selling fictional work far inferior to other books of his Christian and Judaic history in historical value and even interest’ (‘Renan, or the contemptuous approach to literature’, Yale French Studies, II (1949), 96). Georges Sorel, Le Système historique de Renan (G. Jacques, 1905-6), Slatkine Reprints, 1971, argues from the more positive viewpoint that all modern history has its roots in the novel before concluding that: ‘Renan se trouvait dans des conditions singulièrement favorables à la composition d'un roman et, en effet, la Vie de Jésus fut un roman’ (p. 34).

9. Nelly Cormeau, Physiologie du roman, Nizet, 1966, p. 22.

10. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 2nd English ed., A. and C. Black Ltd., 1926, p. 181ff.

11. Peter Cortland, The Sentimental Education. An Examination of Flaubert's Education Sentimentale, Mouton and Co., 1967, p. 105.

12. Darmesteter, op. cit., pp. 172-3. It was in May 1860 that Renan was invited by Napoleon III to undertake the mission of archaeological exploration to Lebanon and Palestine which would eventually lead to the publication of Vie de Jésus. He arrived in Beirut, accompanied by his sister, on 29 October 1860 and returned to France almost exactly a year later on 24 October 1861. Following a series of expeditions into Palestine during the spring of 1861, he appears to have begun drafting Vie de Jésus in July and by mid-September is able to announce in a letter to Berthelot the near completion of his ‘gros morceau en portefeuille’ (E. Renan and M. Berthelot, Correspondance, 1847-1892, p. 284). Henriette's death on 24 September thus came as her brother neared the end of his project, interrupting it and leaving Renan to complete final work on what is sometimes known as ‘the first Vie de Jésus’ in Paris during the autumn. Subsequently Renan undertook a revision of his entire manuscript before its publication on 24 June 1863. See also Alfaric, op. cit., pp. xvi-xxvii; Pommier, Renan d'après des documents inédits, ch. VII; not least Renan's own account of his Phoenician expedition: La Mission de Phénicie, Impr. impériale, 1864-74.

13. Translations of this and other quotations in this chapter from the Introduction and text of Vie de Jésus are taken from the Everyman Library edition, Dent, 1927, which reprints the first anonymous English translation published by Trübner in December, 1863. Translations of Renan's 1867 Preface are my own.

14. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, tr. H. and S. Mitchell, Merlin, 1962, ch. III.

15. De l'Origine des espèces, tr. Clémence-Auguste Royer, Guillaumin, 1862. The original English edition appeared in 1859.

16. Lukács, op. cit, p. 211.

17. Harold W. Wardman, Renan: historien philosophe, C.D.U./SEDES, 1979, p. 21: ‘Il n'en reste pas moins que Jésus, tel que le dépeint sa Vie de Jésus, garde l'empreinte des impressions esthétiques et religieuses qu'a suscitées en lui sa propre éducation religieuse et sa lecture des Evangiles.’

18. Chiefly, of course, those imposed by public and professional incomprehension following the initial publication of Vie de Jésus. Closely contemporary with the second volume of the Origines, Les Apôtres, the 1867 preface to Vie de Jésus represents a concession to those aspects of human behaviour and human history on which Renan reflects in the introduction to his later volume: ‘Calomnies, contresens, falsifications des idées et des textes, raisonnements triomphants sur des choses que l'adversaire n'a pas dites, cris de victoire sur des erreurs qu'il n'a pas commises, rien ne paraît déloyal à celui qui croit tenir en main les intérêts de la vérité absolute. J'aurais fort ignoré l'histoire si je ne m'étais attendu à tout cela’ (OC IV, 462) See also below, ch. VII, note 16.

19. Alfaric, op. cit, p. lxii: ‘[L'Introduction] a fait prendre pour un travail de science pure ce qui ne voulait être d'abord, ce qui n'était vraiment qu'une oeuvre d'art.’

20. P. M.-J. Lagrange, La Vie de Jésus d'après Renan, Lecoffre, 1923, p. 63: ‘Tout est faux dans ce parallèle.’

21. Cortland, op. cit., p. 10.

22. Keim, art. cit. 15 September 1863, p. 4278.

23. George Sand, writing to Prince Jérôme Napoleon in November 1863, summed up something of this bewilderment and its causes: ‘Il y a des traits de lumière vive dans l'ouvrage, qui empêchent un esprit attentif de s'égarer. Mais il y a trop d'efforts charmants et puérils pour endormir la clairvoyance des esprit prévenus, et pour sauver d'une main ce qu'il détruit de l'autre. Cela tient, non pas comme on l'a beaucoup dit, à un reflet de l'éducation du séminaire, dont ce mâle talent n'aurait pas su se débarrasser,—je ne crois pas cela—mais à un engouement d'artiste pour son sujet’ (Correspondance, ed. G. Lubin, Garnier, XVIII (1984), 124-5). Cf. Jean Guitton, Oeuvres complètes: critique religieuse, p. 494: ‘Ce qui étonne en lisant Renan n'est pas qu'il soit sceptique, c'est qu'il ne le soit pas davantage; c'est que, niant l'essence, il retienne tant d'accidents; que vidant le témoignage de sa partie nucléaire, il ait tant de sympathie pour les enveloppes.’

Select Bibliography

Works by Renan

Renan, Ernest. Mission de Phénicie dirigée par M. Ernest Renan, Paris, Imprimerie impériale, 1864-74.

Studies wholly or partly devoted to Renan

Darmesteter (Mary James), La Vie d'Ernest Renan, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1898.

Keim (Theodor), ‘Das Leben Jesu von Renan’, Allgemeine Zeitung, Augsburg, 15 Sept. 1863, pp. 4277-9; 16 Sept. 1863, pp. 4293-4; 17 Sept. 1863, pp. 4309-11.

Pommier (Jean), Renan d'après des documents inédits, Paris, Perrin, 1923.

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

Twentieth-century sources, studies of related movements and authors

Cortland (Peter), The Sentimental Education: An Examination of Flaubert's Education Sentimentale, The Hague, Mouton and Co., 1967.