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a simple one: Jesus was an extraordinary person—Renan spoke of a man of ‘colossal
proportions’—but he was not the son of God. In this story there were no miracles
and no examples of divine intervention. Rather, Renan wrote a purely human
biography of Christ as a man who had broken decisively with ‘the Jewish faith’204
and as such it is not difficult to understand why he managed to offend the
theologically orthodox. However, Renan’s message was an infinitely more sophisti-
cated one than this reaction would allow: for, as he told the readers of his Souvenirs,
if he had broken with the Church he had remained ‘faithful to Christ’.205 Jesus, in
his view, ‘will never be surpassed’.206
195 Ibid. 808.
196 Ibid. 818.
197 Ibid. 819.
198 Ibid. 866.
199 Ibid. 845.
200 See Renan, Œuvres complètes, vi.
201 Ibid. iv. See Perrine Simon-Nahum, ‘Le Scandale de la Vie de Jésus de Renan’, Mil Neuf Cent, 25
(2007), 61–74.
202 See Stephen Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1961 (Oxford, 1964).
203 See Renan, Œuvres complètes, iv. 375–427.
204 Ibid. 369.
205 ‘Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse’, ibid. ii. 876.
206 Ibid. iv. 371.
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Christ, Renan wrote, had lived in a world of ‘uniform vulgarity’, but in that
world Jesus had embodied ‘everything that is good and elevated in our nature’. He
had not been without fault—‘he had overcome the same passions as we struggle
with’—but he had shown a perfect idealism, a purity of heart, a selfless dedication
to the interest of humanity, and a scorn for ‘the vanities of the world’. To that
extent, Renan concluded, it was possible to regard the ‘sublime person’ of Christ as
having been ‘divine’. This was not because he was identical with the divine but for
the reason that Jesus had enabled his species to take ‘the greatest step towards the
divine’.207 His achievement, therefore, had been to evoke the boundless loyalty of
his disciples and to sow among them the seed of a doctrine which, in their hands,
would become not a dogma but a ‘new spirit’ in the world. The final lines of
Renan’s Vie de Jésus thus read as follows: ‘His creed will be renewed without cease;
his tale will bring forth tears without end; his sufferings will soften the best of
hearts; and every century will proclaim that, among the sons of men, no one was
born greater than Jesus.’208
Renan, then, was a man of decidedly divided allegiances, a man who felt deceived
by the God of his youth but who loved him still.209 The void left by this present
state of unbelief had, however, to be filled and, to that end, the still-young Renan
set out to turn science into a religion. This he did most forcefully in L’Avenir de la
science, a text written at the end of the 1840s but not published until 1890. It was
very much the work of a young man, betraying all the confidence of someone who
believed that ‘science alone can supply mankind with those vital truths without
which life would be intolerable and society impossible’. To this he added that ‘it is
no exaggeration to say that science contains the future of humanity, that it alone
can provide an explanation of its destiny and teach it the way to attain its end’.210
Such extravagant claims rested, first, upon a rejection of the validity of all
metaphysics and of all references to the supernatural—‘the task of modern criti-
cism’, Renan wrote, ‘is to destroy every system of belief tainted by supernatural-
ism’211—and, second, upon an affirmation of the necessary autonomy of science
and, therefore, its divorce from theology. More specifically, Renan equated science
with philosophy and, in turn, philosophy with philology, defining the latter as ‘the
science of the products of the human mind’212 and as ‘the science of humanity’.213
This is not the place to dwell upon either the strengths or inadequacies of Renan’s
argument, as of greater interest is his conclusion that, when applied to human life,
this ‘universal experimental method’ would reveal that the world has a purpose and
that this purpose was the development of mind or consciousness towards a point of
perfection. Thus, ‘the end of humanity’ was to ‘realize the highest human culture
207 ‘Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse’, 370.
208 Ibid. 371. The central weakness of this, and similar, attempts to domesticate Jesus was
excellently summarized by Albert Schweitzer when he remarked that ‘the mistake was to suppose
that Jesus could mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves’: The Quest of the
Historical Jesus (London, 1954), 397.
209 This is the sentiment with which Renan closes L’Avenir de la science: see Œuvres complètes,
iii. 1121.
210 Ibid. 756.
211 Ibid. 768.
212 Ibid. 839.
213 Ibid. 850.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
373
possible’, and this Renan identified as ‘the most perfect religion’.214 Here were the
elements of a future religion and one which, in L’Avenir de la science, he categorized
as being a form of ‘pure humanism’, as being ‘the cult of everything that pertains to
man, the whole of life sanctified and raised to a moral value’.215
Renan was at pains to specify that what he had in mind was markedly different in
content from what, on the surface, looked to be similar pronouncements by
Auguste Comte. The latter, he wrote, had failed ‘to understand the infinite variety
of the changing, capricious, varied, indefinable material that constitutes human
nature’.216 If human nature were such as he described it, Renan continued, ‘every
noble soul would hasten to commit suicide’.217 In brief, Renan considered that his
notion of intellectual culture was broad enough to embrace ‘things of the heart and
of the imagination’,218 that it was far removed from a dry and analytical scepti-
cism—‘we are the believers’, he wrote219—and that it could find a place for both
poetry and the contemplation of beauty.220 Unlike Comte, in other words, Renan
sought to overcome the tension between religion and science not by creating a fake
and unconvincing imitation of Catholic organization and ritual but by imbuing
science with religious sentiment and by inviting science to give a new religious
purpose to life. Only science, Renan avowed, could solve our ‘eternal problems’.221
Its task was ‘to make God perfect’.222
Over the next thirty years Renan continued to articulate versions of this position
but he did so, it has been argued, with less and less conviction, such that he came to
be seen as the very embodiment of intellectual cynicism and disenchantment, as a
combination of pessimism and dilettantism.223 This was nowhere more evident
than in the political views he came to espouse, where scientism appeared to give way
to a version of conservative authoritarianism. This can be explained in terms of
Renan’s reaction to the traumatic events of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870,224
but, with equal plausibility, evidence of its origin c
an be found in the very text that
had announced ‘the scientific organization of humanity’.225 The clue to this lies in
Renan’s then acceptance that ‘a rational and pure religion is only accessible to a
small minority’.226 In the context of the Second Republic, he countered this by
saying that morality could be summarized in the maxim ‘to elevate the people’227
and accordingly that government was under an obligation to enlighten the people,
to rid us of barbarians. However, Renan was equally of the conviction that
government could not be handed over to the forces of ignorance, that universal
suffrage was legitimate only when ‘everyone shall possess that share of intelligence
without which one does not deserve to be regarded as a human being’,228 when the
214 Ibid. 1018–19.
215 Ibid. 809.
216 Ibid. 847.
217 Ibid. 848.
218 Ibid. 780.
219 Ibid. 778.
220 Ibid. 809.
221 Ibid. 814.
222 Ibid. 757.
223 See Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1985), 237–66;
Charlton, Positivist Thought, 123–5; G. Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy (Cambridge, 1992),
236–45.
224 ‘La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France’, Œuvres complètes, i. 323–407.
225 ‘L’Avenir de la science’, 757.
226 Ibid. 983.
227 Ibid. 999.
228 Ibid. 999–1000.
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majority ‘represents the most enlightened reason and opinions’.229 When this did
not apply, he wrote, ‘the ideal government would be a scientific government, where
competent specialists would treat governmental questions as scientific ones and
would seek their rational solution’.230 There was, in other words, always something
of the intellectual aristocrat about Renan.
It was in circumstances of acute national humiliation that Renan penned his
long essay, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, and not surprisingly a
sustained comparison between France and Prussia was at its heart.231 ‘In Prussia’,
Renan wrote, ‘a privileged nobility, a peasantry living under a quasi-feudal regime, a
military and national spirit . . . a hard life [and] a general level of poverty. . . . have
preserved the conditions that constituted the might of nations’.232 The victory of
Prussia, he continued, was ‘the victory of the disciplined man over the undisci-
plined, of the respectful, careful, attentive, and methodical man’. So too it was ‘a
victory of science and reason’ and ‘of the ancien régime, of the principle which
denies the sovereignty of the people’.233 In praising Prussia, then, Renan was
praising what he saw as a monarchical, aristocratic, and semi-feudal regime, one
untouched by the spirit of democracy and equality and one where moral discipline
(including the virtue of chastity) and the military ethos had been retained. It was
also a country that recognized the utility of science. As Renan observed, the
Prussians had applied science to the ‘art of killing’.
The contrast with France could not have been more marked. In broad outline,
Renan’s view was that France had been in decline since the Revolution of 1789.
France, he wrote, ‘committed suicide’ on the day that it cut off the king’s head.234
In the interim, France had become completely demoralized and decadent. Her
people were idle, ill-disciplined, self-interested, ignorant, materialistic, and lacked
honesty. Her statesmen had proved themselves to be ‘children’. Her administration
was inefficient and her education system had been ‘swallowed up by nothing-
ness’.235 The French masses were ‘stupid and vulgar’. Worse still, France had
become ‘the most pacific country in the world’, captivated only by the pursuit of
wealth and the progress of industry.236 France, he wrote, increasingly had the
appearance of ‘a second-rate America, mean and mediocre, perhaps more resem-
bling Mexico or South America than the United States’.237 France, in brief, had
been ‘enervated by democracy’.238
These were the fundamental causes of France’s defeat and in response Renan
proposed not merely a lengthy period of national penitence but also a set of
remedies which effectively amounted to a ditching of democracy and the reconsti-
tution of a ‘developed and improved ancien régime’.239 This fortuitous phrase
enabled Renan to pass over the precise details of the monarchical system that he
was recommending in order to focus upon the measures required to secure ‘an era
of renovation’. These fell into two broad categories: political and educational
229 ‘L’Avenir de la science’, 1001.
230 Ibid. 1007.
231 ‘La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France’, 333–407.
232 Ibid. 364.
233 Ibid. 366.
234 Ibid. 338.
235 Ibid. 334.
236 Ibid. 348.
237 Ibid. 350.
238 Ibid. 332.
239 Ibid. 402.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
375
reform. In political terms, the ambition was to replace a ‘superficial democracy’
with an arrangement capable of giving full recognition to the claims of ‘natural
superiority’. In essence, this entailed a two-tier system of parliamentary representa-
tion, with the lower house, nominally resting upon universal suffrage, so designed
as to give predominance to electoral colleges composed of approximately 80,000
‘local aristocrats, authorities, and notables’ capable of acting as ‘the guardians of
morals and the overseers of public money’, and an upper house ‘representing the
capacities, the specialisms, and diverse interests’ of the social and occupational
groups that made up France. If the latter was to be composed, for the most part, of
hereditary and life members, for the former Renan recommended that the vote of a
married man should count as double. Parliamentary sessions were not to be held in
public so as improve the quality of debate and discourage demagoguery. Faithful to
the liberal programme of the past, Renan also called for administrative decentrali-
zation and freedom of the press.
Renan also envisaged measures designed to strengthen the moral fibre of the
French. These included compulsory military service for all and an active policy of
colonization. ‘The conquest of a country belonging to an inferior race by a superior
race intent on establishing a government there’, he wrote, ‘has nothing shocking
about it.’240 However, Renan was convinced that France’s ‘inferiority’ was above all
an intellectual one and that this could only be reversed through a radical reform of
the educational system. ‘The lack of faith in science’, he affirmed, ‘is the most
serious deficiency in France.’241
Renan’s proposals covered all levels of education from the primary school
upwards but the main focus of his attention fell upon the universities. At the
secondary level, Renan suggested that the French tradition of inculcating literary
and philosophical excellence should give way to the German pattern of technical and
scientific education
. This was to be accentuated further in the universities, Renan
going so far as to counsel the closure of Paris’s prestigious grandes écoles and their
replacement by five or six universities on the German model. Thus reconstituted,
the universities would become ‘the nurseries of aristocrats’ and their students would
parade their knowledge of science as ‘a title of nobility’. Nor did Renan seek to
disguise what he hoped would be their anti-democratic ethos. Reflection, he wrote,
‘teaches us that reason is not the expression of the ideas and views of the multitude
but that it is the result of the perceptions of a very small number of privileged
individuals’.242 In accordance with these views, Renan recommended that the
education of the masses could be safely left in the hands of the Church.
It was conclusions such as these that led critics to speak of Renan’s scepticism
and, even more bluntly, of his cynicism. Of greater interest is the fact that Renan
seemed intent on further advancing the claims of science at the moment when
many of those around him were beginning to distance themselves from the more
extravagant ambitions of scientism. Stated at its simplest, positivism denoted a
rejection of metaphysics and a belief that the adequacy of our knowledge was
240 Ibid. 390.
241 Ibid. 391.
242 Ibid. 396.
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Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
extended as it approximated to the model established by the physical sciences. A
science that had freed itself of metaphysical considerations would concern itself
only with discovering reliable correlations between empirically observable phenom-
ena. Any reference to transcendental entities was deemed to be illegitimate. The
clearest statement of such a scientific methodology can be found in Claude
Bernard’s Introduction à l‘étude de la médecine expérimentale, published in
1867.243 Science was here described as an autonomous discipline, distinct and
separate from philosophy, and Bernard did not hesitate from affirming the certainty
and reality of scientific knowledge.
The astonishing advances in the physical and natural sciences during the nine-
teenth century were unquestionably such as to capture the public imagination and
to encourage the conviction that the progress of science, when combined with
technological innovation, offered the prospect of rapid and unlimited improvement