[In the following excerpt, Mott praises the intellectual courage and literary imagination of The Life of Jesus.]

[The] greatest scandal to Renan's opponents was the publication of the Life of Jesus on June 24, 1863. Though certainly not so intended, it seemed like a gage of defiance designed to insult and irritate. That Renan had such a work in hand was no secret. Taine, who saw much of him at Chalifer, writes:

He read me a long piece of his Life of Jesus. He constructs this life delicately but arbitrarily; the documents are too much altered, too uncertain. For the period of Nazareth, he puts together all the gentle and agreeable ideas of Jesus, removes all the gloomy ones, and makes a charming mystical pastoral. Then, in another chapter, he gathers every threat, every bitterness, and attaches these to the journey to Jerusalem. In vain Berthelot and I told him that this is putting a romance in place of a legend; that, by a mixture of hypotheses, he spoils those parts that are certain; that the clerical party will triumph and pierce him in the weak spot, etc. He will hear nothing, see nothing but his idea, tells us that we are not artists, that a simply positive and dogmatic treatise would not reproduce the life that Jesus lived and must be made to live again, that he does not care if people howl, etc., etc. Lack of prudence and caution.¹

Hints had even come to the general public. Sainte-Beuve had heard the substance of the work and let the readers of the Constitutionnel into his confidence in 1862, and on the verge of publication, in reviewing Dupanloup's Avertissement à la jeunesse et aux pères de famille sur les attaques dirigées contre la religion par quelques écrivains de nos jours, an attack on Littré, Maury, Renan, and Taine, Bersot suggests that, instead of paying any attention to these charges, Maury had better continue to busy himself with erudition, Taine with his History of English Literature, Littré with his dictionary, and Renan with the correction of the proofs of his Life of Jesus.² Even a distinguished foreigner like Senior noted (May 1) the substance of several long conversations held during the previous ten days with Renan on the subject of his unpublished, though already printed work, Histoire critique des origines du Christianisme.³

The advance notice in the Débats was written by the sturdy, but liberal-minded Jansenist, de Sacy,⁴ and perhaps no fairer estimate of the work has been published. Out of the four Gospels and his own conjectures, Renan constructs, for this first volume of his Origins of Christianity, a sort of fifth Gospel, from which, to de Sacy's regret, miracles are absent. It is the “fruit of long labor and great inward agitations.” The writer “seeks to conciliate the most exalted mysticism with the most hardy skepticism, the rigor of historical method with a transcendental imagination.” The book is full of interest; the things have been actually seen, but de Sacy prefers the simplicity of the old Evangelists. “I believe in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; I do not believe in the Gospel of M. Renan.” The remainder of the notice consists of an argument for liberty of criticism.⁵

The review in the Débats (August 28, 1863) was written by Bersot, who undertook the ticklish task unwillingly and against the advice of friends. He was not, indeed, a specialist in biblical studies. Thus the greater part of the article is taken up with a discussion of eighteenth-century skepticism as contrasted with the modern critical method. He imagines how the book might have been otherwise done, is surprised at the idea of a trick in the Raising of Lazarus, and realizes that the portrayal of Jesus as a delicate, charming young man, will wound, though not purposely. Jesus always hangs between science and art, and Renan, much in the manner of Ary Scheffer, has painted his picture. To this Renan privately answers, when thanking Bersot for his review:⁶ “I assure you that I wrote the book with a sentiment far superior to petty vanity. … I do not believe that this way of trying to reconstruct the original physiognomies of the past is so arbitrary as you seem to believe. I have not seen the personage; I have not seen his photograph; but we have a multitude of descriptive details about him. To try to group these into something living is not as arbitrary as the entirely ideal procedure of Raphael or Titian.”

The Catholic party greeted the book with howls of rage and with calumnies for which Renan thought he had a right to bring legal action for slander.⁷ The most innocent of these tales was that Rothschild had subsidized him with a million francs. The most virulent of the printed libels was a pamphlet, Renan en famille,⁸ a series of pretended letters between Renan and a supposed Sister Ursule, introduced, with the obvious intention of inflicting as much pain as possible, by a letter from the spirit of Henriette, in which she is made to say: “Blot out my name at once from that book, which is as badly written and heavy as it is abominable, and from that preface with its grotesque pretentiousness and its pitiable French.” It is reported that the guests in a hotel at Dinard threatened to leave if Renan were allowed to remain there, and certainly a local newspaper published some malignant verses, beginning, “Breton, no! Jew sprung from the blood of Judas Iscariot, what have you come here for?” Even Jasmin published an offensive poem⁹ in which “he left his sphere and forced his rustic pipe.”¹⁰ And the feeling did not soon abate. Taine tells with great glee the story of a young mistress of Plon-Plon, who complained bitterly that, on the trip to Norway in 1870, she had to sit at table with such an impious renegade.¹¹ Renan remained also a popular subject of caricatures, none of which seem to have been very brilliant.

Such was not, of course, the attitude of opponents of elevated sentiments, though their hostility was just as bitter. Cousin called the book an atheistical work.¹² Dupanloup and Gratry, among many, wrote opposition Lives of Jesus. The Empress with strange moderation said to Mme. Cornu: “It will do no harm to those who believe in Christ; and to those who do not it will do good.”¹³ She appreciated Renan's purpose. “No, indeed,” he wrote to Sainte-Beuve,¹⁴ “I have not wished to separate from the old trunk a single soul that was not ripe.” What, on the other hand, the representative pious Catholic felt is perhaps best expressed in a letter written to Bersot by Montalembert (June 16, 1863?): “It must be easy for you to fancy what a Christian has to suffer in reading the Life of Jesus. Imagine what you yourself would feel if your father were treated publicly as a charming impostor. Just imagine that Jesus Christ is for us more than a father, that he is our God, that all our hopes and all our consolations are based upon his divine personality, and then ask yourself if there could be for our hearts a more deadly wound than that here given.”¹⁵

Renan seems, on the whole, to have been strangely obtuse to the offensiveness of his book to believers. He sent copies with an affectionate dedication to former comrades of Saint-Sulpice, some of them already bishops.¹⁶ He was, indeed, so engrossed in his own idea that he could not sympathize with the opposite view, and seems to have felt the same naïve surprise at the rumpus over his Life of Jesus as he felt at the Abbé Cognat's refusal in early years to continue their discussions of Christianity.¹⁷ In spite of all warnings, he went directly ahead, convinced that what he was doing was what needed to be done.

Meanwhile the book sold by the thousands, and during the latter half of '63, Paris talked of nothing else.¹⁸ Renan did not utter a word in reply to attacks, a policy he had learned from the wise de Sacy. To a certain extent he had become insensible to abuse. “By character,” he writes Bersot,¹⁹ “I am entirely indifferent to such things; I do not believe they impede the progress of sane ideas. As for my book, it goes the better, and I might suspect my publisher of inspiring such opposition. Each edition of 5,000 is exhausted in eight or ten days and a letter from Lévy just received tells me that in this last period, the sale, far from slowing up, even goes faster. I say this without vanity, for it does not prove the book either good or bad. But it does prove that the means employed to smother it are not very efficacious.” By November 60,000 copies had been sold, and translations had appeared in Dutch, German and Italian. The popularity of the most celebrated novels had, as Sainte-Beuve remarks, been surpassed.

Constructive criticism was furnished by Scherer in the Temps²⁰ and by Havet in the Revue des deux Mondes (August 1).²¹ Another excellent criticism was that of Albert Réville.²² After disposing of the dogmatic critics, including deists, Catholics and Protestants, Réville gives his own views, concluding that, on the whole, Renan has lessened rather than enlarged Jesus. The two main objections are Renan's confidence in the Fourth Gospel and his treatment of the Raising of Lazarus, which puts Jesus in the position of at least consenting to a pious fraud.²³ Both of these points Renan modified in the thirteenth, which was the first revised, edition, the Lazarus story being there regarded as a result of popular confusion, and the fourth Gospel being treated not as emanating from St. John, but as still containing incidents transmitted from an eyewitness of the crucifixion.

So far as the year 1863 is concerned, the whole matter is summed up in Sainte-Beuve's masterly Lundi of September 7.²⁴ Writing for the Constitutionnel and wishing to keep on good terms with the government, Sainte-Beuve was not, as he confesses to Renan,²⁵ entirely free, yet such restraint as he felt hindered him surprisingly little in conveying his liberalism and his sympathy.²⁶ Showing utter contempt for the corsairs of literature, who interrupt a scandalous tale to defend the divinity of Christ, he treats real opponents with a sort of respectful irony. These are personified in three objecting friends, a Catholic, a free-thinker and a political opportunist, who call on him under the pretext of asking his opinion, but really to express their own, which is “what is generally done when one goes to ask an opinion.” “Feeble and foolhardy,” “surrender and concession,” “dangerous agitation,” such are the three judgments, summing up, minus the abuse, the attitude of the unfriendly press and public. Sainte-Beuve himself appreciates thoroughly, though with some few delicately expressed reserves, the artistic qualities of the book. Renan is not content to destroy, he builds, for he knows that nothing is destroyed until something is put in its place. The Life, addressed to the public, has reached its address. It is a narrative, not of absolute fact, but probable and plausible, “not very far from the truth.” Renan, “to be historian and story-teller from this new point of view, had to begin by being above all a diviner,²⁷ a poet drawing inspiration from the spirit of times and places, a painter able to read the lines of the horizon, the least vestiges left on the slopes of the hills, and skilled in evoking the genius of the region and the landscape. He has thus succeeded in producing a work of art even more than a history, and this presupposes on the part of the author a union, till now almost unique, of superior qualities, reflective, delicate and brilliant.”²⁸

But what Sainte-Beuve chiefly praises is Renan's courage. It is true the author did not have to flee Paris, as Rousseau had done a hundred years before, but he had drawn upon himself a strife with “a notable and little amiable portion of humanity for the rest of his life,” enough to intimidate one of less firmness. “Those of us who have the honor of M. Renan's acquaintance know that he has strength enough to face the situation. He will show neither irritation, nor bad temper; he will remain calm and patient, even serene; he will retain his quiet smile; he will preserve his loftiness by never answering. He will vigorously pursue his work, his exposition henceforth more solid, more historical and scientific; no cries or clamors will cause him to deviate a single instant from his aim.”²⁹

Such words seem bold enough, yet Sainte-Beuve wrote personally to Renan: “You have won for us the right of discussion on this matter, hitherto forbidden to all. The dignity of your language and of your thoughts has forced the defenses,”³⁰ and again, at a later date, when thanking for an article on Port-Royal: “I place my intellectual honor in having my name associated with yours in this reform which is to be undertaken at the present period of the century. I have come too late and am about to finish. You are in full career, and you can long endure and fight. Your approval gives me the illusion that on some points my thought is entwined with yours.”³¹ Whatever may be the final judgment on the Life of Jesus, it was a resounding and ultimately triumphant blow for intellectual liberty in France.

Renan's conception is, without question, imaginative, but is controlled by experience and learning. He does not doubt; he affirms positively that Jesus was entirely human and that the miracles never took place. Neither materialistic nor mystical, he is reverent, enthusiastic, original and individual. His own experiences in the East give an extraordinary life to his pictures of ancient times. “You could not believe,” he wrote Berthelot (November 9, 1860), “how many things in the past are explained when one has seen all this.” A new sentiment enveloped biblical scenes and personages. With Le Génie du christianisme, Chateaubriand had swept the great mass of half indifferent readers into orthodoxy; but now his direct influence was spent, and this same mass was aroused and moved with a totally different result by the Life of Jesus. What was particularly irritating to the clergy was the fact that the child wonder of Tréguier, who had been expected to charm the worldly into the church by his genius, was, instead, leading people into paths that they considered the paths of perdition. And all the world was reading and discussing the abominable book. The leaders sharpened their knives for the victim. Renan lost his professorship in the Collège de France, but he became one of the most celebrated men of the world. Henceforth, not a word he uttered was spoken unheard.

Far from believing that he was doing harm, Renan proceeded to publish (March 4, 1864) a cheap edition for the poor, “the true disciples of Jesus,” so that they too might come to love the Master as he himself loved him, not as God, but as a man overflowing with the divine spirit. “The sweetness of this unequaled idyll” would be a consolation and a support to those who had to bear heavy burdens.³² He indeed believed in his work. It was to be an antidote to brutal skepticism and arid indifference. As he says in his dedication to the pure soul of his sister Henriette, “If at times you feared for it the narrow judgment of the frivolous, you were yet always persuaded that truly religious souls would in the end find it good.”

Renan read all the serious criticisms of his work. No insult or calumny prevented him from profiting by what was urged. “As to those,” he says, “who need to think in the interest of their belief, that I am ignorant, light-headed, or a man of bad faith, I shall not pretend to change their idea. If such an opinion is necessary to the repose of any pious persons, I should feel a real scruple about disabusing their minds.” The thirteenth edition (1867)³³ is carefully revised; though the changes are not so extensive as would appear from the differences in pagination, which are largely a matter of typesetting. A preface and appendix are added, there are slight ameliorations of style, and many important modifications and additions to the notes. The Lazarus story, in particular, is so altered as to remove any suspicion of connivance in trickery on the part of Jesus,³⁴ and the Gospel of John is no longer treated as being the direct work of the Apostle.³⁵ No evidence that was produced was, however, strong enough to convince Renan that the fourth Gospel did not contain fragments that emanated from an eyewitness of the crucifixion. This thirteenth edition is the final form of the Life of Jesus, and, whatever the various schools may think of it, it is still a living book.³⁶

Notes

1. Taine, Vie et correspondance, vol. iii, p. 245.

2. Débats, April 27, 1863. Dupanloup's pamphlet consisted of a collection of citations from articles and books by the four writers. Bersot objects that to present such passages out of their context is unfair and that the appearance of the tract on the eve of the vote on Littré's candidacy for the Academy was an act of bad faith and against liberty of conscience. The following passage is quoted: “I will strip their works and tear away all their disguises. I wish to place them under the necessity of either denying my charges by affirming that they believe in God, the soul, immortality and religion, or of accepting publicly the title of atheists and materialists from which they shrink.” (P. 9.) Dupanloup had been a member of the Academy since 1854. This time he was successful in defeating Littré, and in 1871, when Littré was finally elected, he resigned from the Academy, though his resignation could not be accepted and no successor was chosen till after his death in 1878. He did not live to see his two other abominations, Renan and Taine, take their academic seats.

3. N. W. Senior, Conversations with Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire.

4. Lévy feared that the edition might be seized by the government. Renan therefore requested de Sacy, Sainte-Beuve, and other liberal journalists to say that in their opinion such things had a right to be printed. See letter to Bersot August 28, 1863.

5. Débats, June 24, 1863, the date of publication.

6. August 28, 1863; Bersot et ses amis, p. 188.

7. Anti- and pro-Renan biographies were written. Carfort and Bazonge, Biographie de Ernest Renan, Paris, 1863, a pamphlet of about a hundred pages, dated December 10, 1863; E. Le Peltier, Vie de E. Renan, Paris, 1864, a pamphlet of thirty-one pages, dated October 10, 1863. Referring to the preceding brochure, Peltier says that, having learned that two fanatics in Brittany were falsifying Renan's biography, he had hastened to write his defense first. Neither is of any value.

8. By Ch. de Bussy, Paris, 1866.

9. Lou poèto del puple à mossu Renan, Agen, Août, 1864.

10. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, vol. x, p. 170.

11. Letter of August 31, 1870.

12. Letter to Bersot, August 14, 1863.

13. Grant Duff, p. 70. Such opposition Lives, written to counteract the effect of Renan's, were apparently addressed exclusively to the French public. I cannot find that they have been translated. The continued popularity of Renan's work contradicts the Abbé Freppel's prediction in his Examen critique that “no one would talk of Renan's book in three or four months.”

14. Nouveaux Lundis, vol. vi, p. 15, note.

15. Bersot et ses amis, p. 19.

16. Jules Simon, Quatre Portraits.

17. Renan's letters to Cognat and Cognat's account in Renan hier et aujourd'hui.

18. In his account of Renan's reception at the Academy, G. Valbert tells the anecdote of a lady who, after having devoured the Life of Jesus, said with a sigh: “I am so disappointed that it does not end in a marriage.” Revue des deux Mondes, April 15, 1879, p. 941. As there are other similar anecdotes, e. g. of the English lady who wondered how the story would turn out—it is obvious that they are all apocryphal, a mere method of implying romance.

19. August 28, 1863; Bersot et ses amis, p. 189.

20. Scherer Mélanges d'histoire religieuse.

21. Havet's article, “L'Évangile et l'Histoire,” gives a laudatory account of Renan's book with a few reflections, and then proceeds to the objections, which may be summed up in the general statement “that his criticism in detail is not always sufficiently firm and severe. M. Renan knows all that can be known, and no one has anything to teach him … he voluntarily refuses to follow his own criticism to the end.”

22. La Vie de Jésus de M. Renan, 1864, a reprint from the Revue germanique et française.

23. These are also among the main objections of the Strassburg school, as set forth by Colani, Examen de la vie de Jésus de Renan, 1864.

24. Nouveaux Lundis, vi, p. 1 et seq. Sainte-Beuve also republished from the Constitutionnel his note recommending the book on the day of publication.

25. Letter of September 19, Nouvelle Correspondance, p. 183.

26. Sainte-Beuve was a valuable asset to the Constitutionnel. His name is signed to his articles in type as heavy as the titles, a distinction accorded to no other contributor.

27. In an essay on Ampère, Sainte-Beuve says, “In M. Ampère you always find one who divines beneath him who knows.”

28. Pp. 16, 17.

29. Page 20.

30. September 19, 1863, Nouvelle Correspondance, p. 185.

31. November 17, 1867; ibid., p. 246.

32. This edition, the title of which is simply Jesus (Jésus par Ernest Renan, 1864, in-18, xii and 262 pp.), was sold for one franc 25 centimes. A notice, followed by the introductory essay, was published in the Débats for March 2. Here Renan omits his Introduction, all of Chapter I except the first paragraph, Chapters xvi, xix, xxvi, and xxvii, together with other scattered passages, particularly that about Lazarus and much of the last chapter, in fact, everything that might give rise to misunderstandings.

33. This edition is announced in the Débats, September 1, by Bersot, who notes the important changes and quotes the preface, almost four columns of the newspaper.

34. Ed. 1863, pp. 359-364; ed. 1867, pp. 372-375. The criticism of this narrative cannot be understood by those who have read only the revised edition.

35. In the text, for example, “John, who claims to have seen” becomes “The fourth evangelist, who here introduces the Apostle John as an eyewitness.”

36. An illustrated edition with a new preface—published in the Débats, February 21—was brought out in 1870. For critical remarks on the Life of Jesus, see the chapter on The Origins of Christianity.