From the very first, and in explaining his method, Renan is determined to distinguish himself from the German schools. And, in fact, the Life of Jesus was only discussed in Germany during the nineteenth century by theologians. The eighteenth century had seen the Orientalist, Reimarus, rejected by the theologians as a deist. Certainly these theologians did not resemble ours. They were emancipated enough to write “the gospel according to Hegel.”

But they did remain more or less attached to Protestant Evangelicalism, and, anxious not to break with the gospels, they were content to eliminate whatever seemed to them intolerable to the modern world. Bruno Bauer had broken a lance with all Christian tradition, but he was still dogmatic, with the dogmatism of hate. Renan would not hear of dogma of whatever kind.

“The theologian is an interested party because of his dogma. Reduce this dogma as far as you will, it still remains for the artist and the critic a weight insupportable. … Let us announce boldly: critical studies relating to the origins of Christianity will only say their last word when they are cultivated in a purely laic and secular spirit, after the methods of the Hellenists, the students of Arabic and Sanscrit, who, strangers to all theology, think neither of edifying nor of scandalising, neither of defending dogmas nor of overthrowing them.”¹

We sincerely wish that non-Christians would approach the origins of Christianity in this spirit, provided only that they are also prepared to accept the supernatural if the evidence is strong enough. But Renan was far removed from this impartiality: “To write the history of a religion it is necessary, firstly, to have believed it (otherwise we should not be able to understand how it has charmed and satisfied the human conscience²); in the second place to believe it no longer in an absolute manner, for absolute faith is incompatible with sincere history.”³

Notice first the degree of discernment he awards himself as a former seminarist; yet observe also that even complete antecedent negation gives no guarantee of impartiality. Often as Renan has changed his opinions, there is one point on which he has never changed. He, too, has a Credo to which he has held unswervingly—the denial of the supernatural. And by the supernatural he does not only mean miracles, prophecies, and sacraments, but even the existence of a God distinct from the world. He rejected atheism as being bad taste, deism as too narrow a conception, and if he believed that a superior mind should not rank itself with the pantheists it was because he wished to retain the use of the word “God” as a “Category of the Ideal.”

Moreover, these discussions on deism and pantheism serve only “little minds.” “Were the men who have best comprehended God—Sakya-Mouni, Plato, St. Paul, St. Francis d'Assisi, and St. Augustine (at some periods of his fluctuating life)—deists or pantheists? Such a question has no meaning.”⁴ But if he thought it worthy of himself to float above these questions in which the “little minds” of Spinosa and Hegel exhausted themselves (for these men did count for him although he would have rejected Descartes and Bossuet, Pascal and St. Thomas Aquinas) Renan did set forth in a purely Oriental form his conviction of how God came to be. “Humanity makes divinity as the spider spins its web.”⁵

When then, rejecting “individual supernatural facts,” he claims to maintain “the supernatural in general,” he is simply yielding to the prepossession for keeping Catholic words but using them with a purely Hegelian meaning. He remarked of Feuerbach that he was not an atheist, but rather a religious man, or that if he were an atheist it was after the German fashion, “devoutly and with unction.”⁶

Later on he laughed at himself, and at this unction, but at first he did not laugh; he believed he had a mission, and he had no tenderness for the Catholicism he had abandoned. He believed the Church irrevocably lost. “The temples of Jesus, truly present, will crumble; the tabernacles believed to contain his flesh and blood will be shattered. Already the roof is open to the daylight, and the rain of heaven wets the face of the kneeling believer.”⁷

Was Renan then in the frame of mind of a historian who thinks “neither of defending dogmas nor of upsetting them”? On the contrary, all his philosophical remarks witness to a lofty assurance, an absolute conviction. God, being at the term of human activity, how could He have intervened in the course of history? His mind was so thoroughly secularised that it necessarily assumed the denial of Christian dogma. He retained only the equivocal use of the word “God”—an old word, a little heavy, perhaps, but which has on its side “a long prescriptive right; to suppress it would be to throw humanity out of its track, and to separate oneself in speech from the simple beings who adore so well after their fashion.”⁸

Language then does not express thought—at any rate when God is mentioned. It was necessary to remind the reader of these sayings, before reading this Life of Jesus, where sincerity is paraded so prominently, the conscience of the man of to-day distinguished from that of the Oriental, or even, we are forced to say, the sincerity of Jesus distinguished from that of His critical historian. Renan's reproach to Lamennais must also be weighed—that he “did not understand the irony of a certain sort of respect.”⁹

Sceptics, advanced free thinkers, but men who do stop short somewhere, have pointed this out exactly like Catholic apologists. “It may be a little overdoing it,” writes M. Séailles in the same ironic and measured style, “to attribute motives to a God who does not exist. Renan misuses mythology; he creates beings out of words.”¹⁰ Mgr. Dupanloup had said more simply, “He speaks like you, but does not think like you.”¹¹

On this point every one agrees—Renan first excluded God from history and then spoke of Him as if He existed. What did the word religion mean for him?

About this, too, he was definite enough. God being “The Category of the Ideal,” religion was that part of the ideal to which souls offer sacrifice. For him this was science, for others whatever they loved best. Towards the end of his life he described this religion in a brutal formula, in words unworthy of his grey hairs. “The means of salvation are not the same for all. For one it is virtue; for another passion for truth; for another love of art; for others curiosity, ambition, travel, luxury, women, wealth; in a lower stage morphine and alcohol; the most dangerous mistake in social morality is the systematic suppression of pleasure.”¹²

Must we say that this was simply lifting his mask and revealing what had always been at the bottom of his mind? Was his determination to speak as others spoke without thinking as they thought merely hypocrisy? Surely not, for a mere hypocrite would have gone straight forward for the priesthood without a shudder, like Paul de Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz. Whence then the posture into which he forced himself, of calling himself religious, Christian even, and true disciple of Jesus?

Was it that at the bottom of his soul the religious sentiment persisted, the remains of tenderness towards the God who had been the joy of his youth? Yet, this God did not exist!

On leaving the seminary Renan became what he always remained, a convinced devotee of science. Science was to him his particular Category of the Ideal. If he tinged it with religiosity was it merely that he might not turn towards gross scepticism? It may well be. It always disgusted this acute and subtle nature to ally himself with the group of free-thinkers who went the further length of emptying their glasses in honour of Béranger's god of good fellows. But he might have stood alone.

Nor was his religious affectation a form of diplomatic prudence, necessary at a time when those in power listened to the voice of the bishops,—for he faced the storm and bore with dignity the imperial disfavour.

He must then have been in mind undecided enough to rest satisfied with vague ideas, but in character firm enough never to disclaim what had been his thought. He certainly knew how much he changed, but he stuck fast to a certain basis, and, having reduced his ideal to nothing but a vague love of truth, he could claim to have always been faithful to it. Why did he always keep the words—God, religion, and even in that last epicurean baseness the expression “to win salvation,” except to avoid having disowned his original position?

And for the same reason he clung to his official admiration for Jesus. The lower he got on the slope which brought the former philosopher of the ideal down to the encourager of a debauchery which Epicurus would have rejected, the deeper and more horrifying became the gulf between his wanton toasts and his former gravity. When he began, and even when he was writing the Life of Jesus Renan still believed in the pure religion of the Ideal, and he attributed its origin to Jesus Christ.

It was assuredly a strange state of mind, an enigma for Frenchmen, and only to be explained by his attachment to German theology from the moment he left the seminary. He was careful to let us know that his faith was destroyed by historical criticism, not by philosophy. In company with more than one Catholic writer, M. Séailles refuses to believe this.

“The truth is,” he writes, “that in 1843, at the end of his stay at Issy, when he knew neither Hebrew nor German, and had read neither Gesenius nor Ewald, he found in his reason alone a dangerous enemy to his faith.”¹³ In fact, one might readily say with M. Cognat, that “Hebrew is even more innocent than woman of his intellectual emancipation”¹⁴. But Renan was able to read in French the Life of Jesus, by Strauss, for Littré had just translated it.

Without disparagement of his marvellous talent, it may be said that Renan had not a philosophical mind. His impertinent claim to have mastered problems over which great geniuses exhaust themselves, is in fact an admission of incompetence. Philosophical objections affected him. But he viewed them in a fashion which tried to reconcile them with religion, giving up, indeed, the definite faith of Christians, but without abjuring Jesus Christ. The morality of Kant re-assures him, but Kant does not save Christ for him, and he still clings to keeping Christ. “I have been studying Germany, and I felt as though entering into a temple. Everything I found there was pure, exalted, moral, beautiful and touching. Oh my soul, we have found a treasure, the continuation of Jesus Christ. Their goodness overwhelms me: how sweet and strong they are! I think Christ will come to us from there. This vision of a new spirit seems to me an event similar to the birth of Christianity. … France seems to me more and more a country utterly empty of all share in the great work of the renewal of life in the human race. … Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found there.”¹⁵ This new life was, without doubt, that Hegelian conception to which Strauss had dedicated Christ as a type of God's union with man.

Renan, leaving the seminary definitely because he had lost his faith, was about to enter the world with a new faith, which allowed him still to speak of God and of religion, and to call himself a Christian. It is not mere pleasantry when he states “that the world will be eternally religious and that christianity, in a broad sense, is the last word in religion.”¹⁶

By this remains of religious sentiment (of a very modern kind), almost as much as by his sweeping denial of the supernatural, he failed in the rôle he claimed of an impartial historian. Liberal Protestantism, Renan said, was incapable of writing the Life of Jesus because it still contained too much dogma. But he did not realise that he, too, had a dogma, the dogma of pure religion, without altars, without priests, without observances—not that religion preached by the deists, but that which might have been conceived by a Hegelian absorbed in developing and “organising God.”

This is indeed a thesis—the thesis of the Life of Jesus. “‘Christianity’ has thus become almost a synonym of ‘religion.’ All that is done outside of this great and good Christian tradition is barren. Jesus gave religion to humanity as Socrates gave it philosophy. … Jesus founded the absolute religion, excluding nothing, and determining nothing unless it be the spirit [sentiment].”¹⁷ “Whatever revolution takes place will not prevent us attaching ourselves in religion to the grand intellectual and moral line at the head of which shines the name of Jesus. In this sense we are Christians.”¹⁸ He repeats this constantly, without troubling to change his formulæ greatly. “A pure worship, a religion without priests and external observances, resting entirely on the feelings of the heart, on the imitation of God, on the direct relation of the conscience with the heavenly Father, was the result of these principles.”¹⁹ “It has been by the power of a religion free from all external forms that Christianity has attracted elevated minds.”²⁰ “He founded the pure worship of all ages, of all lands, that which all elevated souls will practise until the end of time.”²¹ “It was a pure religion, without forms, or temple, or priest; it was the world's moral judgment delegated to the conscience of the just and the arm of the people.”²²

Clearly it is almost a monomania, and surely a sort of dogma—the positive complement of his denial of the supernatural. It would be strange if this dogma, which has to be proved, as it has not been revealed, had not affected the impartiality of the historian. As a matter of fact, Renan does not insist greatly on the positive side of his views. His formula, as we have seen, is supremely negative—the exclusion of external worship and of priesthood. He was inspired by the Hegelian idea of becoming—an idea as old as Heraclitus. The possibility of bringing contradictions into harmony suited his humour. But he had not resolutely accepted the identity of contradictions in the Idea which existed before the facts. Nor had he assented to the practical results according to Hegel, who had given a massive solidity to the Idea in the shape of the Prussian state. Renan's Idea was intangible, incorporeal, up in the air to such an extent that religion itself had to be robbed of all external support. All this means that his pure religion was also individualistic, and it was as such that it was understood and enjoyed in France. Who among us Frenchmen is seriously concerned in co-operating in the formation and organisation of the divine? But we still remembered the natural religion of Voltaire, and Renan lent a charm to this dry and unpoetic creed. In his own way he harmonised Voltaire and Rousseau. His rigid exclusion of the supernatural, of mystery, and of miracle satisfied the all too genuine French inclination for clear-cut ideas even if they lack height and depth; his moral sentiment satisfied the heart. Unhappily Renan from this time onwards was far below Rousseau in his sincere respect for the “holiness” of the Gospel. “Holiness” is not the atmosphere of the Life of Jesus. Such as he was, the ideal of the book was his ideal, and was that which he offered to the age he lived in. He loudly proclaimed the hope (and he was still sincere) of saving thereby whatever in religion is absolute and eternal—or rather whatever is of relative use now and in future … anyhow for the simple. This design is somewhat analogous to that of liberal Protestantism: it is only one degree lower in the amount of Christianity it contains. But it is only a question of degree. Resolved to reject the supernatural, and to look upon Jesus as the founder of “his” religion, he risked misunderstanding or even wilfully distorting the past. Renan was not the impartial historian that he claimed to be. Not to omit a shading off, which in his case would be serious, we must add to this the fact that his unbending principle was always varied by flights of fancy. But there remained always that aversion from the supernatural which was for this Breton the granite foundation of all thought. But he managed to escape from that systematic mentality that exposes many a German building, erected strictly according to rule, to a complete crash. History abhors contradictory assertions as much as philosophy, but the historian who knows how to measure his strength is modest in his assertions, and very often refuses to assert anything. As for Renan, he looked on contradictions as alternative ways of reaching truth. He carried this too far, but we shall have to note that his tact as a historian often saved him from sacrificing views which a more rigid mind must have excluded to safeguard the unity of his work.

Notes

1. p. x, French edition.

2. p. 31. The scruple is touching. But Mgr. Dupanloup recognised another note when he observed “It was again in reference to the unfortunate Lamennais that M. Renan wrote that those who come forth from the sanctuary and make war on the dogma that they have served have, in the blows that they strike, a sure hand that the layman can never attain, a special note of coolness and assurance … the audacity of an intimate. Avertissement à la Jeunesse, etc., p. 110, quoting Essais, p. 141, 2.

3. p. 31.

4. p. 69.

5. Job XL. Or less poetically “The universal work of all living things being to make a perfect God … reason … will one day undertake the supervision of this great work, and after organising humanity, will organise God.” (L'Avenir de Science, p. 37).

6. Liberté de Penser, vol. VI, p. 347.

7. Liberté de Penser, Vol. III, p. 470.

8. Etudes, p. 419.

9. Essais, p. 187.

10. Ernest Renan, p. 282, note 2.

11. Advertissement, p. 15.

12. Feuilles détachées, p. 382.

13. Ernest Renan, p. 17.

14. Quoted by M. Séailles, op. cit. p. 17.

15. Souvenirs, p. 385.

16. Questions Contemporaines, p. 337.

17. Life of Jesus, pp. 236-7.

18. Life of Jesus, p. 237.

19. p. 73.

20. p. 86.

21. p. 140.

22. p. 162.