Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  It is in this very work that he declares: ‘Every attempt to put all races on an equal footing would be synonymous with excessive historical pantheism’.

  In 1848, Renan writes a new essay entitled De l’origine du langage,234 in which he analyses the ‘rigorous parallelism between language and the human mind’. ‘The mental essence of every people and its language are most closely connected. It is in the diversity of the human races that one should seek the most effective causes of idiomatic diversity’.

  During that same year, Renan claims first place in a high-level competitive philosophical examination for teachers, but it is politics that already arouses his interest. As someone who is more or less affiliated to Leftist milieus, he sympathises with the February Revolution.235 It is a fleeting sentiment: the June journeys are quick to cure him of this fever.

  He then pens L’avenir de la science,236 a work that is inspired by a rather naïve form of scientism and which would remain ‘dormant’ for more than forty years, before being published in 1890.

  Next, the former seminarist proceeds to declare himself a democrat. His notion of democracy, however, embodies a type of political and moral universalism whose legal basis is completely inexistent. In fact, Renan declares that humanity’s aim does not lie in achieving individual ‘happiness’ but in accomplishing ‘the greatest possible perfection of all’. ‘There is but one true doctrine, the transcendental one according to which mankind’s very purpose is to create superior awareness or, as previously termed, the greater glory of God.237

  Since people do not partake equally of mental fulfilment, Renan hopes for the appearance of an enlightened despot: ‘One would be allowed to espouse tyranny in order to manifest the mind’s triumph’. Indeed, Renan expresses a preference for the arbitrary over any political state that would respect everyone’s rights without ever creating anything: ‘Had Louis the 14th had cantankerous representatives that curtailed his budget, would he ever have built Versailles?’

  He then coldly remarks: ‘The death of a Frenchman is an event of moral significance. The demise of a Cossack, by contrast, is nothing more than a physiological fact. And as for the death of a savage, its importance in the grand scheme of things is hardly superior to the breaking of a watch spring; yet even the latter may give rise to major consequences, owing to the sole fact that the watch in question draws the attention of civilised men and stimulates their activity’.

  Religion and Religious Sentiments

  In 1849–50, Renan is granted the opportunity to oversee a study mission in Italy. He makes the most of the situation and writes a short novel entitled Patrice, which would only be published posthumously. The story itself would be of little importance if its hero did not actually express the very same sentiments that Renan himself clearly felt.

  While in Rome, Patrice, a young Breton, sends a letter to a young girl in his native country: ‘In your eyes, the grand harmony has not been disrupted! You know nothing of the struggle that opposes the holy to the truthful, the beautiful to the good and the truthful to itself’! He then cries out: ‘The misfortune that stems from my very essence is due to the excessively diverse elements that constitute it’! (In The Future of Science, one comes across the following words: ‘An unreasonably multifarious nature is but sheer torment’).

  In Patrice, one also encounters a notion that could serve as an introduction to Renan’s entire literary work: ‘Religion is false in terms of its object, meaning that it is pervaded by inherent falsity and deceitfulness with regard to what it orders people to believe; and yet, it is eternally truthful with respect to the subject, meaning to our need of it and to the religious sentiment that it corresponds to’.

  Upon his return to Paris, on 2nd December, 1851, Renan condemns the coup d’état. Akin to most liberals, from Tocqueville to Benjamin Constant,238 he perceives it as evidence of the fundamental harmfulness of universal suffrage, which ‘fosters plebiscites’. In 1852, he begins writing for Le Journal des débats239 and obtains his doctorate thanks to a thesis on Averroes and Averroism.

  Four years later, he marries the niece of painter Ary Scheffer; she would bear him three children, including a daughter, Noémie, mother of Ernest and Cornélie Psichari.

  Having been elected at the Academy of Inscriptions instead of Augustin Thierry, he writes to Gobineau in order to congratulate him on his Essay: ‘You have created one of the most remarkable, most vigorous and most intellectually original books, but have done little to be understood in France, or rather little to be misunderstood here’.

  In 1859, in his Essais de morale et de critique,240 he declares: ‘The most unequivocal sign of the weakening of a given society lies in this indifference to noble struggles, an indifference that makes the great political issues seem secondary compared to industrial and alimentary questions’.

  In 1860, Renan sets off to visit the Orient. He is accompanied by his sister Henriette (who had, at that point, been acting as his secretary for a period of ten years) and his wife. It is a wondrous experience. ‘The Arab tent embodies the noblest surviving image of ancient times. The first time I beheld it was in a lost dale of Syria: it was pure, simple and noble. I could not help noticing the incomparable beauty of the herds, the camels’ good demeanour, and the very poetry of their tents. The bleating of the flock resounded every evening, as the gentle cries of the smallest lambs reverberated within’.

  It is here, on Holy Ground, that Renan pens the first manuscript of his Life of Jesus, sitting ‘inside a Maronite hut’.

  A year later, Henriette is taken ill with malaria. She dies in Byblos on 23rd September, 1861. Grief-stricken, Renan decides to go back to France.

  Immediately upon his return, he is appointed as the head of the Syriac, Chaldean and Hebrew Department at the Collège de France. Despite this acknowledgement of both his work and abilities, there were still many enemies for him to contend with; for he remained a ‘defrocked priest’ in the eyes of the devout, and the Church was highly influential. Indeed, priests still controlled public education and cardinals enjoyed full senatorial rights.

  On the day of his inaugural lecture (11th January, 1862), a boisterous crowd gathered in the gallery. The subject Renan had chosen was the ‘Role of Semitic Peoples in the History of Civilisation’. Soon, he declaimed the following words: ‘We do not owe the Semites our political existence, nor our art, poetry, philosophy or science. What is it, then, that we are indebted to them for? The answer is: religion’.

  He then concluded by saying: ‘As for the future, what is becoming ever more apparent to me is the triumph of Indo-European ingeniousness. The future, gentlemen, belongs to Europe and Europe alone. Europe shall conquer the world and spread its religion across the latter, a religion embodied by legality, liberty, respect for one’s fellow man, and the belief that there is always some divine aspect to humankind’.

  Although the first lectures take place without incidents, the religious milieus grow ever more restless. On the 22nd of February, a phrase uttered by Renan — with no ill intent, I might add — regarding the ‘incomparable man’ that Jesus was triggers a massive uproar. This results in the suspension of all his lectures on the 26th of February, as the course had ‘profoundly offended Christian beliefs’. Embarrassed, Napoleon III expresses his regrets to the sanctioned professor, who finds himself officially dismissed in June 1864.

  ‘Jesus the Prophet’ in the Face of Criticism

  It is all but a mere rehearsal, however. The real scandal breaks out in June 1863, when The Life of Jesus, the first tome of Renan’s seven-volume work entitled Histoire des origines du christianisme,241 is published.

  Commenting on the issue, Pierre Lasserre would write in 1923: ‘Renan’s work has been the most extensive and abundant vehicle of the historical mindset that pervaded every single field of knowledge during the 19th century and which renewed both the aspect and the very meaning of innumerable questions that had hitherto only been posed in a purely dogmatic manner’.

 
Having barely recovered from the revolutionary persecutions that had targeted it, religious orthodoxy found itself threatened by an entire wave of criticism in the middle of the 19th century, a wave that was due to the new sciences that began to flourish at the time, including philology, the philosophy of history, and epigraphy.

  In 1835, the Life of Jesus written by David-Friedrich Strauss, a professor in Tübingen (1808–1874), marked a major watershed. For the very first time, a scholar had proceeded to isolate the 4th Gospel within the synoptics and cast doubt upon its historicity. Following in the footsteps of traditional German thought, Strauss declared that religion was founded upon ideas, not facts. He attributed special importance to the role of myths, in which ‘the crucial element is not epitomised by an affirmation of reality but by the symbolic expression of a superior truth’.

  Renan, who published two significant articles on The Historical Criticism of Jesus, openly acknowledged his indebtment to the Tübingen and Strasbourg schools. He did not, however, espouse Strauss’ ‘mythological’ interpretation (which would be adopted by Alfaric242 and Couchoud243 during the 20th century).

  A ‘moderate critic’, he sifts through all known documents, yet questions neither the validity of the Gospels (which he perceives to be ‘the pure products of Palestinian Christianity’) nor the historicity of Saint John. The numerous variants detected by Mr Gaulmier (to which Prosper Alfaric dedicated an entire book entitled Les manuscrits de la ‘Vie de Jésus’ d’Ernest Renan,244 published by Belles Lettres in 1939) bear witness to the very scale of his efforts.

  What Renan sought to achieve, in fact, was, above all, the creation of the liveliest possible portrait of a ‘model man’ whose features were ultimately frozen in time by centuries of devout religious accounts. And it was this familiarity with his person that was bound to shock the orthodox most.

  The book ends with the following words: ‘The centuries shall proclaim Jesus unequalled among the sons of man’. This is because, from Renan’s perspective, Jesus was more of a divine man than a god in human form. Better yet, he is ‘the individual who allowed his species to take the greatest step towards divinity’.

  This notion of things falls into a current in which the very seeds of ‘Jesuism’ can already be detected. During that same period, Michelet proceeded to free the memory of ‘the great prophet Jesus’ from ‘theological Christianity’, while Auguste Comte245 laid the foundations of a cult of man. As for Cabet,246 he aspired to turn Christ into the precursor of socialism. On his part, Quinet simply nailed the Jesuits to the wall, and Victor Hugo presented Jesus as being ‘the sanguinary incarnation of progress’.

  Several decades later, Maurras would embrace an analogous distinction, albeit to draw different conclusions. One of the very first writers of the Action française political movement, Hughes Rebell, would state: ‘The merit of the Catholic Church lies in its sterilisation of Christianity’.

  Implicitly, the Life of Jesus also comprises the notion that however false its dogmas, religion is nonetheless right in its aspirations, particularly thanks to the elevational tendency that it inspires in man.

  The admiration that Renan felt for the evangelical ideal is sometimes combined with the view that aestheticism is superior to morality: anything beautiful is permissible. Ethics thus ceases to be a matter of punishment: ‘A mother does not require a system of moral philosophy to love her own child, just as no well-bred young woman chooses to remain chaste merely because of a specific theory. Likewise, no reasoning would ever drive a courageous man to throw himself into the maws of death’.

  Last but not least, Renan proposes a method that lies halfway between incredulity and belief: ‘We furthermore reject frivolous scepticism and scholastic dogmatism. For we are critical dogmatists! Although truthfulness is what we believe in, we make no claim to possessing absolute truth’.

  Cabal of the Devout

  Upon its publication, Renan’s Life of Jesus ignites people’s passions. Exalted by Saint-Beuve, Taine, Mérimée, Michelet and George Sand, the book is denounced by believers (At the time, Renan had already been condemned for a translation of Job published in 1858).

  Auguste Gratry, a professor of evangelical morality at the Sorbonne, exclaimed: ‘Mr Renan aspires to spread his Life of Jesus in both villages and learned milieus, and I shall follow him there, God willing, and demonstrate the falseness of his book’. R. H. Laillaut, a priest, labelled it an ‘impious book’ and denounced its readers as ‘libertines and effeminates’. Another man of the cloth, Father Lambert, who met Renan while at Saint-Sulpice, stated that he had washed his hands after casting the book into a fire.

  The refutations grew ever more numerous, eventually reaching a grand total of more than 300. At the library of Strasbourg, the ‘anti-Renan’ collection included no fewer than twenty-one bound volumes.

  Renan received hundreds of letters. Anonymous senders accused him of having been ‘given a million by Mr de Rothschild’. He received a letter from Marseille saying: ‘Your words are as useless as smoke itself, falling upon a stone that defies and scorns you, you pathetic fool!’ And another from the Netherlands: ‘Bow down into the dust, retract this irreverent work and recant your erroneous assertions; for everyone is well aware that you have chosen to write this shameful book solely to enjoy the resulting sales and earn a great deal of money, just as Judas the traitor sold the Lord to the Jews’. During Sunday Mass, sermons took over in targeting Renan: ‘So as to increase torment, there are two degrees of scorching in hell; and you shall be among those to burn most!’ Not to be outdone, the media followed suit: ‘God exists. Sincerely, Paul’.

  Renan prohibits himself from answering (‘I’m playing dead under the downpour of insults coming from the clerical party’, he writes to Berthelot),247 and even from disproving his adversaries’ claims, as the sales of his book continue to increase. 100,000 copies are sold within a few months and ten translations prepared — an incredible success by any means.

  Michel Lévy, Renan’s editor, wrote to him saying: ‘Thanks to the livid pastoral letters of our honourable bishops and archbishops, the fifth edition sold out even more rapidly than I had ever hoped’.

  Considering what clerics are capable of nowadays, Renan’s ‘audacious attitude’ can only conjure up a smile. The Church has evolved, and exegesis and theology have not been the last to de-sacralise ‘holy history’. According to Mr Jean Gaulmier, it is, above all, a sort of poem that one is expected to perceive in the Life of Jesus: ‘Jesus is not only the most charming of all rabbis, but also the hero of an immense dramatic tale that symbolises the human condition’ (as stated in the preface of the new edition). ‘The Life of Jesus is a kind of pastoral, an idyll; it is a bucolic dream experienced by Renan’ (in Les Cahiers rationalistes,248 January 1975).

  The Acropolis — the Centre of the World

  Others have labelled Renan a ‘mystical rationalist’.

  In fact, as noted by Taine,249 ‘he had no system, just an overview and some impressions’. As a rebel, he was not fond of order; and as a poet, he aspired to rigour. This erudite once said: ‘I was born romantic. What I require is something within my soul that pushes me to the edge of the precipice’. Hence, as written by Pierre Lasserre, his ‘desire to continue kneeling before the relics of a God that he denied’.

  The fact is that Renan, who spread piety without faith, bore a profound admiration for religion, an admiration that lasted his entire lifetime. In the preface to Prêtre de Nemi,250 he would state: ‘I have critiqued everything and, regardless of what people may think of it, upheld everything as well. Our criticism has contributed more to the conservation of religion than all apologies ever have’. In Patrice, one could already read the following words: ‘Apart from a small number of men who display an ability to scientifically chart their critical refusal to adhere to Christianity, I have little respect for unbelievers. The latter are right, but not for the reasons that they think’.

  In his essay entitled L’âme bretonne,2
51 which came out at the start of the 20th century, Charles Le Goffic252 declared: ‘Rebellion is the normal state of the Celtic mentality. Remember Pelagius, Abélard, Renan, Broussais, Lamennais, and the anarchist Chateaubriand!’

  In November 1864, having grown weary of the endless polemics, Renan heads for the Orient once again. He travels around the Nile region, visits Henriette’s grave, journeys to Antioch and arrives to Athens.

  This time around, his illumination is boundless. In his eyes, the Acropolis becomes the very centre of the world. In comparison, the Orient that he had once admired seems impious, a genuine imposture. Here, he does not find a ‘single trace of charlatanism, no superficial adornments of any kind’. At the foot of the Parthenon, while drafting a new creed, Renan discovers his true god: Dante’s ‘Jupiter, the Sovereign’. He dedicates a prayer to Pallas Athena: ‘Oh, nobility! Oh, simple and true beauty! Oh, divine worker, mother of all industry, protectress of labour! Thou art the energy of Zeus, the spark that kindles and keeps aflame the fire in both heroes and men of genius! Bestow upon us the ability to become accomplished spiritualists!’

  His Prayer on the Acropolis would be published in 1876, in the French magazine Revue des deux-mondes. Reading it brings to mind Taine’s presence on the summit of Saint-Odile, Barrès’253 voyage to Sparta, and the revelation experienced by Maurras in Athens, an account of which is included in the first edition of Anthinéa.254

  Between May and June 1869, Renan runs for office in the electoral district of Meaux, under the label ‘advanced independent candidate’. He opts for the following slogan: ‘No Revolution, No War’. It is his opponent that claims victory.