SOURCE: Noonan, John T. “Renan's The Life of Jesus: A Re-examination.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 11 (1949): 26-39.

[In the following essay, Noonan argues that The Life of Jesus is a deeply flawed work expressing many of the prejudices of nineteenth-century religious skepticism.]

They admit certainly a real and historical Jesus, but their historical Jesus is not a Messiah or a prophet or a Jew. They do not know what He wanted; they understand neither His life nor His death. Their Jesus is, in His own way, an eon, an impalpable, intangible being. Pure history does not know any such being.

(Ernest Renan on the Protestant Liberals)¹

Why have we not laughed from the beginning at any rationalist or rationalizing ‘Life of Jesus’? Because neither the author nor the public were really emancipated from the magic of Christian faith.

(George Santayana)²

And devils went out from many, crying out and saying: Thou art the Son of God.

(Luke 4:41)

The earliest rationalizers of the supernatural in Christ's works approached Him to ask, “Do we not say well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?” (John 8:40). The approach of obstinate unbelief to Jesus in the next 2,000 years was to take shape as varied as the prejudices and mythologies of the ages and the countries wherein the Faith was preached; but this short saying contains the essentials of its protest. There is evident, first of all, the confidence with which the rationalizers' hypothesis is set forth, the self-congratulation of the non-believer at having found at last the real key to Jesus' strange power. Secondly, there is emphasis on but a partial aspect of Jesus' works; and even that partial aspect is misrepresented. Here, the Jews ignore the beauty of His moral teaching, and concentrate only on His supernatural activities, representing them, of course, as diabolical. The whole God-man, Christ in His integrity, is not considered. The interrogators, proud of their discernment, then propound their explanation: an explanation which consists only in an appeal to the popular mind of the age. They attempt no direct refutation of the truth of Jesus' works or sayings; but they insinuate, first, that He is an alien to their civilization, and, secondly, that a plausible alternative explanation of His power can be constructed. The appeal is not, fundamentally, to reason, but to current preconceptions that would decide the case before examining it.

We are inclined today—Gentiles or Christians—to look with amused superiority at the hopeless inadequacy of these astute Jews' explanation; and we are inclined to dismiss with a kind of laughing charity the later slanders of Celsus and Porphyry and Trypho, and to confess candid amazement that reputable Roman jurists could have believed that Christianity was a perverted cannibalism. These, too, were all rationalizations, cast in the mold of the age's prejudices, of the supernatural power of Christianity. The attack on Jesus in the nineteenth century was, perhaps, less crude; and with a greater knowledge of Christian teaching, it could, perhaps, be subtler. But does its appeal to the preconceptions and prejudices of its age, its refusal to explore the facts directly, its partial dwelling on only one side of Jesus' life, differ essentially from the fatuous explanation of the Pharisees? Today is Renan's Life of Jesus invested with any more historical dignity than, say, Diocletian's apocryphal Acts of Pilate?³

Renan's work is, however, a classic—the literary masterpiece of nineteenth century religious liberalism; and as such, it offers itself as a fruitful source of instruction in the spirit of its age. Further, just as the observable laws of disintegration in every Christian heresy, in their repeated pattern of decay, set against the orderly maturing of the dogma of the Church, offer a strong negative motive of credibility—so too the inadequacy of every rationalist drawing of Christ but brings into more marked relief the integrity and the accuracy of the Catholic presentation of Jesus. That the non-believer must distort the texts, suppress the facts, and, above all, appeal not to evidence, but to the popular superstitions of his time is all clear testimony that the integrity of truth is present only in the Faith. A re-examination of Renan, can, then, still have value; an appraisal of his portrait of Jesus may exhibit immutable moral laws at work; and observation of the principles, methods and results of unbelief may become a negative means of demonstrating the seamless wholeness of truth.

To investigate once more this creative work of propaganda is not, therefore, to attempt the superfluous task of refuting it. That gentle and subtle distillation of scholarly acid, Père Lagrange's Christ et Renan, is, of course, the direct antidote to Renan; and, indirectly, the mere accumulation of eighty more years of biblical criticism have brought about Renan's total rejection on any scientific level. The falsehood has been dissected; our interest lies in restoring its anatomy, to understand its composition and the reasons for its nineteenth century growth.

Lagrange has brilliantly analyzed the combination of irresponsible aestheticism and doctrinal Hegelianism which mark Renan's work.⁴ These ingredients are the personal contribution of Renan. But it is, perhaps, unfair to our distinguished author to consider his work either as an unscrupulous aesthetic tour de force, deluding, in its basic scepticism, even the writer's pious rationalist friends, or as an Hegelian exercise in dialectic, multiplying conflicts to produce a higher synthesis. Such mere personal predilections would not have produced the classic of a great age's mythology.

Contradictions, indeed, abound in the Life of Jesus, but it is important for us to understand that they were not created wantonly by Renan. They were rather, produced by the facts themselves when they were bent to fit a nineteenth century pattern. It is this larger pattern—the work, not of Renan alone, but of a generation's state of mind—that we must investigate.

In the pattern of the approach of unbelief to Christ there are at least two principles which are timeless. One has already been indicated—the necessity of accepting only part of the evidence, of then re-creating Christ in the shape of the age's prejudices, and leaving as a result only an eon, an intangible, impalpable being. The second timeless principle is an unexpected testifying, almost forcefully extorted by the facts, to Christ's uniqueness. The devils of Palestine were the first to give witness of this character, hating Christ, yet wonderfully attracted to the recognition of His divinity. A profound ambivalence reveals itself, and the unbeliever in the presence of the facts discloses unwillingly by his own lips that he is confronted by the Sign of Contradiction. The polarity of Christ, exhibited in His first meetings with the Jews, is demonstrated again in His examination by the more sophisticated incredulity of Renan's generation.

These two elements, the prejudiced re-shaping of Christ and a sense of His polarity, are, so to speak, constants, familiar in the approach of unbelief in every country and every century. The third principle which governs the larger framework of Renan's book is the special contribution of the nineteenth century. It fuses the two constants into the special nineteenth century mold and produces the nineteenth century's synthetic Christ. It is the nineteenth century dogma of rationalism. Every event in the cosmos, Renan argues, has a cause, but only a natural cause; and the human reason is capable of exploring these causes completely. Santayana rightly emphasizes the dependence of this dogma on the “magic of the Christian faith”; and in fact, Renan's Life was built on a strong residue of Christian tradition. Essentially, rationalism was an inheritance of the scholastic demonstration of the universality and intelligibility of causality and the scholastic proofs of the order and benevolence of nature. Rationalism, however, arbitrarily and unreasonably, limited the scholastic principle to the natural order alone and, denying a First of Final Cause, cut the principles from any rational context. Causality, benevolence, order, then, fell from the status of rationally demonstrated truths to rationalist matters of faith. But in their limited and perverted form they were, paradoxically, preserved by the Christian faith which rationalism denied. Every rationalist certitude, in effect, was supported “magically” by the Christian theistic confidences, ingrained in the intellect of Europe by centuries of faith, which the age of rationalism accepted uncritically as its own. Divorced from a theistic frame of reference, however, the fundamental Christian notions now naturalistically conceived, became mere dogma, in the pejorative sense of dogma—the assertion and test of popular orthodoxy, unsupported by intelligible proof, yet hallowed as immutable. Still, even rationalistic assumption, by retaining some idea of the order of nature, had its advantages and kept the reason from complete anarchy. Its enormous influence on Renan cannot be overestimated: it held him to a goal of finding a reasonable explanation for all the Gospel events; it bound him to accept only a naturalistic explanation as reasonable.

To estimate properly the weight of nineteenth orthodoxy on Renan it is fruitful, perhaps, to compare the Life of Jesus with a twentieth century work, Santayana's The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. Santayana, like Renan, is at once an aesthetic and an atheist. But unlike him he has no concern for nineteenth century prejudices. More logical, then, having denied God, he also denies causality completely. “Existence,” he declares, “is necessarily unintelligible. Just as logically anything may happen, so the fact that anything in particular happens is irrational. It may be part of a sequence often repeated; but the fact that such a sequence ever occurs or occurs often remains an utterly arbitrary and inexplicable fact.” In a chaotic world, there is no order, causality, or reason. At the same time, Santayana is freed from the limitations of a narrow rationalism, and he faces all the facts of the Gospels in their entirety. He does not, of course, end his scrutiny of the facts in belief, for he has denied such preambula fidei as causality and God. Still, he is not compelled to falsify the facts to fit a pattern: he is unembarrassed at recognizing miracles. The painful evasion, the truncated quotations, the curious special pleadings of Renan are unknown to him.

When we have seen this freer honesty of Santayana, we can then realize how profoundly Renan's less candid methods have been determined by a narrower creed. They represent his earnest effort to make his account of Christ meet the demands of his age. Every event in the Gospels must be reasonably and naturally accounted for. Renan does not shrink from the task. He would not have been content with the simple-minded singleness of explanation of later eschatologists or the school of contemporary religions. He tries to face all, or at least most, of the aspects of Christ. The intellectual dishonesties and inconsistencies that appear most glaringly in him of all the rationalists are, indeed, only pathetic testimonies to the conscientious ardor with which he upheld the popular dogma of his age.

If the nineteenth century's credulity, then, sets up the framework in which Renan paints, it may now be well to consider some points of this painting in detail—not, it is to be repeated, by way of refutation—but simply to understand how the framework forces the artist to conform. We may note in particular in this detail the partial presentation of the facts, the unwilling fluctuation towards recognition of Christ, and the rigid obedience to the popular dogma of naturalism. The naturalist articles of faith are the popular credo with which the book begins. Renan avows candidly that it is disbelief in the supernatural which motivates his book.⁵ But this candor is modified by cleverness, when Renan asserts this assumption, not in the name of any philosophy, “but in the name of universal experience.” History, he asserts, records no miracles.⁶ His reasoning, put baldly, runs as follows: miracles, the mundane intervention of the supernatural, are not possible in the Gospels because they are impossible everywhere; they are impossible everywhere, because they are possible nowhere. Historical testimony to miracles is, by its very nature, unworthy of consideration: “a supernatural account always implies credulity or imposture.”⁷ Contrast for a moment Santayana's more honest account correcting this stubborn obscurantism: “Historical evidence, impartially collected, is far from supporting the assumption that miracles are impossible; and logically, it is untenable.”⁸ Renan qualifies his dogmatic assumption with the following two-edged thrust: “Observation, which has never once been falsified, teaches us that miracles never happen but in times and countries in which they are believed, and before persons disposed to believe them.”⁹ This, as a valid objection, is perhaps as reasonable as remarking that battles never occur except in times and countries at war and between armies ready to fight them. As Santayana more justly observes of the relation between faith and miracles, “The efficacy of prayer has itself regular conditions and degrees. Faith seems to be chief of these”; and he adds that faith is not be to confused with illusion.¹⁰

Renan, indeed, lays down his own terms for acknowledging a miracle and flatly asserts that they have never been met. His conditions are: (1) that a scientific commission have full power to choose the setting of the announced miracle and full authority to investigate all details concerning it; and (2) that the miracle be repeated. Yet in his own day, he could have pursued his tests at Lourdes, if a priori conceptions had not first decided him that he would be testing the non-existent. It may not be uncharitable to assume that if he had investigated and had seen the miraculous, he would have echoed Zola, “I will not believe, if all the sick at Lourdes rise from their beds.”¹¹ Our Lord Himself has analyzed this “hardness of heart”: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if one rise again from the dead” (Luke 16:31); an honest moral disposition is indispensable to a recognition of the supernatural.

In general, facing the factual Gospel testimonies, Renan dismisses the miracles lightly as delusions; but in the case of Lazarus, he does not scruple to charge pure fraud on the part of Lazarus' family,¹² and his handling of the evidence here is instructive in his fidelity to nineteenth century orthodoxy. His reconstruction of the case involves a simple denial or suppression of the only texts on which any story could be based at all. He ignores: (1) the flat statement that Lazarus had been buried for four days (John 11:17); (2) that Jesus had predicted his death (John 11:13); (3) that Mary and Martha are completely griefstricken and have no hope now in Jesus' aid (John 11:23-33); (4) that Jesus is surrounded by a number of sceptical Jews who are eager to see his power refuted (John 11:37); and (5) that Martha explicitly protests that Lazarus “is decaying”, with an implied reference to the unpleasant smell of the corpse (John 11:39). Of course, John may have been an unmitigated liar, but it is absurd to accept the reality of the framework and then deny the heart of the story. Renan is, of course, placed in an embarrassing position here by his admission that the contemporary and hostile eyewitness belief in a miraculous resurrection “contributed sensibly to Jesus' death.”¹³ It was, according to Renan, “a publicly notorious” event that the leaders of Jewish orthodoxy could not afford to leave unnoticed.

Renan's explanations here seemed even to him so feeble that in the thirteenth edition of his Life of Jesus he was prompted to bolster them by a new idea that the Apostles misinterpreted Jesus' parable of Lazarus the beggar and that that was the ultimate basis of the Lazarus legend. This rationalization obviously has still less in common with the facts.

A corollary of nineteenth century dogma on miracles was a fixed distrust of those who were witnesses of them. The a priori rejection of the supernatural leads thus to an arbitrary treatment of the sources. At first, Renan hesitates for a moment and commits the literary absurdity of contending that “the most beautiful thing in the world [the Gospels] has proceeded from a purely popular elaboration”;¹⁴ but then contradicting himself, with better taste, he maintains carefully that the Gospels are substantially historical, that they are the work of eyewitnesses or the friends of eyewitnesses, that they present the character of their hero “with a great degree of truthfulness.”¹⁵ At the same time, he contends that the Gospels' authors are gullible and enthusiastic inventors.¹⁶ He declares that they were “men of feeble intelligence,” for “they believed in apparitions and spirits.”¹⁷ It is a strange logic which accepts as at least substantially accurate the report of Jesus' sayings, and rejects as fictional the account of his deeds. Apocryphal sayings, attributed to great personages at some historic moment, are far commoner in history than a complete set of apocryphal deeds. There is much sense and science in textual criticism on textual grounds; but the rejection of a saying or incident simply because it contradicts a priori assumptions would destroy the science of history. Renan accepts the reliability of his authorities on his own fiat alone, and only where he chooses; he denies them the reality of the very motive which impelled them to write, their knowledge of the signs and wonders of Christ.

Renan compares the Evangelists to four old soldiers of Napoleon who in 1850 or 1860 compose four biographies of him.¹⁸ Let us follow him in this comparison. The central events of Napoleon's career, the “sign” of his military genius, the heart of his appeal to military men are his battles; and, provided that we were convinced that these four hypothetical chroniclers had really known and served a great emperor—quite apart from the external corroboration of other histories—we would rightly be charged with obstinate blindness if we denied that Napoleon had fought a single battle. What, then, we might ask, inspired his chroniclers to write? Why was he beloved by them? Surely his military epigrams alone did not form the basis of his reputation. Is Renan any less absurd—at least once he has accepted the eye witness authenticity of his documents—in denying Christ's miracles? The miracles are the very soul of the Gospels, the proof, in the Evangelists' minds, of Christ's authority. Moreover, the fact of the miracles and their extraordinary effect is as fully corroborated by the external testimony of the existence and growth of the worship of Christ as a deity in the heart of Yahwist Judaea as the fact of Napoleon's battles is corroborated by the independent testimony of their political consequences.

Renan's doctrinaire distrust of the Gospels as legendary is yet more strangely marked by his treatment of the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha, his good sense recognizes, are “insipid and puerile”;¹⁹ but he does not attempt to explain the obvious superiority of the canonical Gospels, which, in his eyes, are equally puerile fancies. Only a real difference in veracity could, of course, afford the explanation, and Renan will not openly face the difficulty. He later contrasts the “grotesqueness” of Jesus' childhood with Luke's account of His teaching in the Temple.²⁰ But he offers no comment on how Luke's “fiction” avoids the gross blunders of the other.

Renan's final attempt to support his picture of the “feeble intelligence” of the Evangelists is the contention that “the documents are in flagrant contradiction with each other.”²¹ But this bold assertion is made here without reference and is subsequently supported only by entirely arbitrary deductions. Christian commentators from the beginning have, of course, appreciated the variety of approach in the Gospels. Papias (circa 90 a.d.) is, I believe, the first biblical critic to note this.

Renan's position on his sources, as well as on the miracles, is, then, at once arbitrary and unreasonable. His popular distortions here, however, merely lay the groundwork for the treatment of Jesus Himself; for Jesus Himself, not the miracles or Evangelists alone, has always been the real stumbling block of disbelief. The ancient mythologies and early heresies consisted in travesties of Christ's divinity. Modern mythology has consisted in parodies of His humanity. Of these parodies, Renan's is one of the more distinguished. In the image of the nineteenth century humanist, the man of sweetness and light, Renan fashions his portrait of Jesus.

Jesus, according to nineteenth century taste, was a man “of infinite sweetness, vague poetry, and universal charm.”²² He was “the most charming rabbi of them all.”²³ His discourses were adapted to the “cheerful imaginations of the Galileans.”²⁴ It was “the charm of his speech” which captivated their “simple minds.” “His preaching was gentle and pleasing.”²⁵ Renan admits that this picture of “idealism and poesy” is true only of the early Jesus; on his third visit to Jerusalem, as Renan inimitably expresses it, “the cheerful moralist” becomes “a gloomy giant.”²⁶ Let us explore, then, only the accuracy of Renan's portrait of Jesus in Galilee. It is in Galilee, in the Sermon on the Mount, that this young man of “amiable character” declares that at the last judgement He will say to the wicked, “I will profess unto them I never knew you; depart from me, you that work iniquity.” (Mt. 8:23). Here too, Jesus announces “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be cut down and shall be cast into the fire.” (Mt. 7:19). Again it is in Galilee that Jesus proclaims to these simple Jews “fascinated” by his “extraordinary sweetness”, that “many shall come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Mt. 8:11, 12). It is in Galilee, sending out his twelve Apostles, that this cheerful dreamer declares of those who do not receive his messengers, “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement, than for that city.” (Mt. 10:15). Here too the young moralist strangely attacks his “kindly and simple” audiences, “Woe to thee, Corozain, woe to thee, Bethsaida, for if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of Judgement than for you. And thou Capharnaum, shalt thou be exalted up to heaven? Thou shalt go down even unto hell.” (Mt. 11:21-23). Are these sentiments calculated to appeal to the “cheerful imagination” of the inhabitants of the doomed towns? At least it is clear that they cheered no nineteenth century heart. Again, in Galilee, according to the contemporary testimony, it is not Jesus' “sweet and penetrating influence” that attracts the crowd: they admire him not for his meekness, but for his vigor: “For he was teaching them as one having power, not as the Scribes and Pharisees.” (Mt. 7:29). The actions of “the most charming rabbi of them all” do not “exhale sweetness” to his Galileen spectators. Rather, “there came fear upon all, and they talked among themselves saying, ‘What word is this for with authority and power He commandeth the unclean spirits and they go out.’” (Luke 4:34)

Renan, in fine, has falsified the historical Jesus here beyond recognition; for he has only dared to face one aspect of the truth. Renan's Jesus is not the founder of the “final religion,” but the gossamer creation of the founder of French dilettantism. Like Renan and Oscar Wilde, he is simply a man of “exquisite feeling.”

Renan climaxes his myth of the heroic dilettante with a picture of Jesus' religion carefully sketched in accordance with the most cultivated nineteenth century taste. Comte or Matthew Arnold might have been proud to have been its inventors. Jesus' religion rested, Renan asserts, on the feelings of the human heart.²⁷ It was without priests “and without dogma.” “Nothing”, in short, “could be less priestly than Jesus' attitude.”²⁸ It is, perhaps, surprising to find a sophisticated critic like Renan falling into the naive Protestant error of seeking Jesus' theological manual in the pages of the Gospel narratives. It is less astonishing to discover that Renan's sole positive evidence that Jesus founded a religion of “pure spirit” rests on the manipulation of the truncated text of John 4:21-23. John 4:22 states the distasteful historical fact that salvation in this pure religion comes from the Jews. Renan, without any textual authority whatsoever, on purely his a priori assumption, cheerfully dismisses the verse as “interpolation.”²⁹

In the centuries-old ways of unbelief, then, Renan has been forced to consider only parts of the evidence, and supported by this partial evidence he has made a parody of Christ and Christ's religion to suit his contemporary prejudices. But he is too painfully aware of other facts to rest quite content with his partial synthesis. Further, he cannot evade the strange polarity of Christ. He frankly recognizes that “among the sons of men, there is none born who is greater than Jesus.”³⁰ He grants willingly that the morality of the Gospels is “the highest creation of the human conscience”,³¹ and that this morality is “an absolutely new idea” which owes its origin to Jesus alone.³² He contends, “that which in others would be an insupportable pride must not in Him, Jesus, be regarded as a presumption.”³³ He considers it a maxim that “Love is not enkindled except of an object worthy of it,” and infers Christ's greatness from the love that He inspired.³⁴ Again, noting that “Christianity was impressed with an original character which will never be effaced,” he ascribes the imposition of this ineffacable character to Jesus alone.³⁵ He scouts the idea that the disciples created Jesus: “He was, rather, in everything superior to his disciples … St. Paul himself bears no comparison with Jesus.”³⁶ Finally, he indignantly repudiates the possibility that Jesus may have been insane: “It has not yet been given to insanity to influence the progress of humanity.”³⁷ But, rather, Jesus is “at the summit of human greatness. He established the final religion.”³⁸ “All history is incomprehensible without Jesus.”³⁹

Here, perhaps, we might ponder the discerning remarks of Santayana, “A Lucifer might believe in the existence of a divine Christ without deigning to imitate Him”;⁴⁰ and we might recall how the devils of Palestine confessed their God against their will. (Luke 4:41)

If Renan coupled a readiness to believe in miracles with this open homage to Jesus' religious spirit, he could not but believe Jesus to be divine. In these constant and reiterated admissions of Jesus' moral supremacy as absolutely without parallel, he is “not far from the kingdom of God.” But he quickly draws back from entering, and, facing the urgency of the facts again, he is found to contradict the testimony of his moral sense rather than allow himself to abandon his nineteenth century mythology.

Accordingly, these sweeping tributes to Jesus' greatness are found to come to very little in any particular case treated by Renan when he finds Jesus' actions distasteful or disturbing to his assumptions. Jesus, unlike Renan, believed in miracles. The greatest of mankind was, then, guilty of what Renan calls “a beautiful error—which was one day the means of showing his deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist.”⁴¹ But if Renan is right in his conclusion, is “beautiful” the right adjective to apply to the delusion? Is it not, on Renan's basis, the source of an ugly credulity which has gripped Christian people from Peter to the present?

As Jesus not only believes in miracles, but professes to perform them, Renan's disapproval deepens. He cherishes the thought that Jesus “had the reputation of thaumaturgus imposed on him.”⁴² But he is finally driven to declare openly, “Acts which would not be considered as acts of illusion or folly held a large place in the life of Jesus.”⁴³ Jesus, indeed, was so much the dupe of his age and his own self-confidence as “to think that he performed miracles.”⁴⁴ In short, this “genius” who founded “the final religion” was, at least much of the time, signally deluded about the very religious powers he professed to hold. Such delusion might reasonably appear dangerous rather than lovely, and ultimately Renan, too, concludes that many of the recommendations of this deluded teacher “contain the germs of a true fanaticism.”⁴⁵ Is this judgement reached inexorably by Renan's own rationalistic logic, to be reconciled with his tribute to Jesus' “perfect idealism as the highest rule of the virtuous life”?⁴⁶ Does the contradiction lie with Renan or Jesus?

A deluded fanatic is hardly an authority on morals, and in direct contradiction to his paean on Jesus' religious teaching, Renan reluctantly concludes that, because of Jesus, “a fatal germ of theocracy was introduced into the world.”⁴⁷ And again, Renan, on his rationalist basis, cannot but be irritated by Jesus' promise of immortality to Mary Magdalene, and so is driven to see in it only an act of prideful self-exaltation.⁴⁸ Renan sitting as the moral judge of his self-confessed master of morality is not, perhaps, a happy self-portrait.

To this point, Renan has touched only on the obvious fanatical and theocratic implications of Jesus' teachings, and on what he calls gracefully, “the less inviting aspects”—Jesus' delusions as to his personal power. But he goes further in his rationalization of Christ to explain that at times indeed Jesus was irrational. He became “possessed of a singular taste for persecution and torment.”⁴⁹ He was “carried away by this fearful progression of enthusiasm.” “Sometimes one would have said his reason was distorted.”⁵⁰ When Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the last time, “he was no longer himself.” “His natural gentleness seems to have abandoned him; he was sometimes harsh and capricious.”⁵¹ In support of this thesis of Jesus' mental deterioration in Jerusalem, Renan brings in incidents as indubitably laid in Galilee, as Mark 9:18, as unmistakably early in Jesus' career as Mark 3:5, and as plainly contradictory to Renan's claims as Luke 8:45.⁵² To regard the last incident—which occurs, anyway, in the Galilee days—as an example of harsh caprice is simply malicious absurdity. Reference is here made, also to Luke 9:41, another early incident; and Renan's statement of the disciples' growing fear of Jesus is supported by Mark 4:40, the very early miracle of the calming of the Sea of Galilee, and by Mark 5:15, the similarly early incident with the demoniacs and the pigs. The charge that “his disciples at times thought him to be mad” made again by Renan in a context that implies this to be a late phenomenon,⁵³ is supported by a single reference, Mark 3:21, which describes in fact, the belief of some of Jesus' relatives, not that of his disciples, that “he was possessed,” in the early days of the Galilee preaching. Wilful misrepresentation cannot go much further.

Finally, Renan asserts that Jesus believed that He was “the universal reformer”⁵⁴ and announced that He would come in triumph to judge the world.⁵⁵ Renan dismisses these pretensions with a word: “His idea of the Son of God became disturbed and exaggerated.”⁵⁶ Yet, as even Renan concedes, Jesus' idea of His omnipotence and union with the Father was not an evolved idea, but the basis of His whole life: “The first thought of Jesus, a thought so deeply rooted in him, that it had probably no beginning, was that he was the Son of God, the friend of his Father … in his paroxysm of heroic will be believed himself all-powerful.”⁵⁷ Such thinking, unless supported by supernatural facts, might be safely diagnosed as lunacy. Renan observes dryly that Jesus' “excessively imaginative nature carried him incessantly beyond the bounds of human nature.”⁵⁸ May we infer, more succinctly, he was simply mad? Renan never dares to trouble rationalist piety with this direct, and on his ground, logical conclusion. His hesitations are more subtle. Genius and lunacy are indistinguishable, he argues, and inspiration is the same as madness.⁵⁹ “The most beautiful things in the world are done in a state of fever.”⁶⁰ So, too, even truth and falsehood do not exist, for they are inextricably mixed: “Everything great,” Renan declares, “rests on a legend.” Here Renan is close to the paradox of Santayana that human life itself is irrational: that the greatest of men should be preeminently irrational is then no surprise. That Renan does not proceed to this desperate conclusion, to which he is driven by the facts, not by his wishes, is a tribute to the strength of nineteenth century orthodoxy. Rationalism would not yet recognize that it ended in irrationality. That it logically ended there, if the conclusions were drawn, even in the work of a careful rationalist like Renan, affords a profound negative corroboration of Catholic scholarship. Here in the concrete sphere of biblical criticism, as well as in the abstract ranges of philosophy, denial of the supernatural leads to denial of the rational.

Eighty years later, the honey of Renan's style has somewhat cloyed. Nor can we, after two great wars, be expected to respond very quickly to the sentimental optimism of sweetness and light. The spirit of the Life of Jesus, meant to match another age's prejudices, has fled from it, and we contemplate today only the work's dry and creaking contrivances, once so subtly animated with malice. We see only the lifeless components of the masterpiece of religious liberalism: the dependence on a crude and narrow faith in naturalism, the inability to avoid a fitful testimony to Christ's supremacy, the half-conscious distortions, the half-unconscious suppressions, the fundamental necessity to destroy the Christ of history and to replace Him by a mythical humanist. An analysis of Renan's art of propaganda reveals to us old elements grouped in a new pattern. The anatomy of his dead work is for us now an important specimen in biblical criticism of the methods and results of those who have said in their hearts, “There is no God.”

Notes

1. Cited in G. Ricciotti, The Life of Christ (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1944), p. 192.

2. G. Santayana, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (New York: 1946), p. 5.

3. See Eusebius, The Eccelesiastical History, trans. Lake and Oulton (New York: Putnam, 1926), Vol. II, p. 343.

4. See M. J. Lagrange, O.P., Christ and Renan (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), pp. 12-17.

5. Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (New York: Random House, 1927). P. 33.

6. Renan, op. cit., p. 59.

7. Ibid., p. 60.

8. Santayana, op. cit., p. 77.

9. Renan, op. cit., p. 59.

10. Santayana, op. cit., p. 82.

11. See the interesting account, by a critic angrily hostile to Lourdes, of Zola's reaction to the cure of Marie Lemarchand of a tubercular lupus. “Zola's only comment was that the subject of hysterically-produced symptoms was not sufficiently known.” (E. Saunders, Lourdes; London: 1940, p. 254.)

    It is perhaps revealing also to listen to Zola himself. “I will admit that I came across some instances of real cures. Many cases of nervous disorders have undoubtedly been cured, and there have also been other cures, which may perhaps be attributed to errors of diagnosis on the part of doctors who attended the patients cured. These cures are based on the ignorance of the medical profession.” (E. Zola, Lourdes; Chatto and Windus, London, 1903, pp. 8-9.) In short, when the expert testimony contradicts one's assumptions, one is free to deny the competency of the experts.

    Miss Saunders own attitude to Lourdes is also instructive in the ways of unbelief. “The curing of an odd disease here and there, even an organic disease in its last stages, is not miraculous,” she remarks, lightly assuming the point in dispute. Then she falls back on Santayana's explanation that, after all, everything is absurd. “The truth is that if certain inexplicable cures are called miraculous, the sudden contradiction of the malady might be called miraculous as well.” (Saunders, op. cit., p. 284.)

    For competent medical testimony to the naturally inexplicable phenomena at Lourdes, see A. Guarner, De l'instanéité des Guèrisons de Lourdes (Paris: 1939); D. W. Walleyn, Het Lourdes-mirakel (Bruges: 1939); A. Carrel, Man The Unknown (Harper Bros., New York), especially pp. 148-150.

12. Renan, op. cit., p. 323.

13. Ibid., p. 324.

14. Ibid., p. 38.

15. Ibid., pp. 49, 50, 55.

16. Ibid., p. 54.

17. Ibid., p. 184.

18. Ibid., p. 132.

19. Ibid.,

20. Ibid.,

21. Ibid., p. 58.

22. Ibid., p. 120.

23. Ibid., p. 133.

24. Ibid., p. 166.

25. Ibid., p. 186.

26. Ibid., p. 125-126.

27. Ibid., p. 129.

28. Ibid., pp. 129, 132.

29. Ibid., p. 234.

30. Ibid., p. 251.

31. Ibid., p. 128.

32. Ibid., p. 132.

33. Ibid., p. 236.

34. Ibid., p. 385.

35. Ibid., p. 376.

36. Ibid., pp. 386-387.

37. Ibid., p. 386.

38. Ibid., p. 383.

39. Ibid., p. 65.

40. Santayana, op. cit., p. 174.

41. Renan, op. cit., p. 97.

42. Ibid., p. 255.

43. Ibid., p. 256.

44. Ibid., p. 251.

45. Ibid., p. 298.

46. Ibid., p. 383.

47. Ibid., p. 290.

48. Ibid., p. 331.

49. Ibid., p. 292.

50. Ibid., p. 293.

51. Ibid., p. 293.

52. Ibid., p. 293

53. Ibid., p. 293.

54. Ibid., pp. 151-152.

55. Ibid., p. 161.

56. Ibid., p. 294.

57. Ibid., pp. 151-152.

58. Ibid., p. 293.

59. Ibid., p. 389.

60. Ibid., p. 389.