Ernest 1823-1892 Renan

Vie de Jesus.

Henriette had told him to write the life of Jesus. They had begun it together in Syria, she copying the pages as he wrote them, with a New Testament and a Josephus for all his library. The book is filled with the atmosphere of the East. It is the work of a man familiar with the Bible and theology, and no less acquainted with the inscriptions, monuments, types and landscapes of Syria. But it is scarcely the work of a great scholar. Renan still used his literary gifts to pursue a scientific ideal. He produced the Apostles in 1866, and St. Paul in 1869, after having visited Asia Minor with his wife. His object was "to evoke from the past the origins of Christianity." In St. Paul, as in the Apostles, Renan shows his concern with the larger social life, his sense of fraternity, and a revival of the democratic sentiment which had inspired L'Avenir de la science.

The Franco-German War was a turning-point in Renan's history. Germany had always been to him the asylum of thought and disinterested science. Now his heart turned to France. In La Reforme intellectuelle et morale (1871) he endeavoured at least to bind her wounds, to safeguard her future. At the same time the irony always perceptible in his work grows more bitter. His Dialogues philosophiques, written in 1871, his Ecclesiastes (1882) and his Antichrist (1876) (the fourth volume of the Origins of Christianity, dealing with the reign of Nero) show a disenchanted and sceptical temper. Gradually he aroused himself from his disillusioned mood, and observed with genuine interest the strug gle for justice and liberty of a democratic society. The fifth and sixth volumes of the Origins of Christianity (the Christian Church and Marcus Aurelius) show him reconciled with democ racy, confident in the gradual ascent of man.

Later Works and Death.

In 1883 he published Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, which have the Celtic magic of ancient romance and the simplicity, naturalness and veracity prized in the 19th century. But his Ecclesiastes, published a few months earlier, his Drames philosophiques, collected in 1888, give a more adequate image of his fastidious, critical, disenchanted, yet not unhopeful spirit. They show the attitude towards uncultured

Socialism of a philosopher liberal by conviction, by temperament an aristocrat. We learn in them how Caliban (democracy), the mindless brute, educated to his own responsibility, makes after all an adequate ruler; how Prospero (the aristocratic principle, or, if we will, the mind) accepts his dethronement for the sake of greater liberty in the intellectual world, since Caliban proves an effective policeman, and leaves his superiors a free hand in the laboratory; how Ariel (the religious principle) acquires a firmer hold on life, and no longer gives up the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Religion and knowledge are as imperishable as the world they dignify. Thus out of the depths rises unvanquished the essential idealism of Ernest Renan.

At sixty years of age, having finished the Origins of Christianity, Renan began his History of Israel (3 vols., 1887-91) based on a lifelong study of the Old Testament and on the Corpus Inscrip tionum Semiticarum, published by the Academie des Inscriptions under his direction from the year 1881 till the end of his life. He died on Oct. 12, 1892.

There is no collected edition of Renan's works. There is an English translation of the Vie de Jesus in Everyman's Library (1927). His Correspondance has been edited in 2 vols. (Paris, 1926-28). For Henriette Renan see Prof. Giraud, Soeurs de grands hommes (1926) and Renan's Lettres Intimes (1923) .

See Desportes and Bournand, E. Renan, sa vie et son oeuvre (1892) ; E. Grant Duff, Ernest Renan, in memoriam (1893) ; Seailles, E. Renan, essai de biographie psychologique (1894) ; G. Monod, Les maitres de l'histoire (1894) ; Allier, La Philosophie d'E. Renan (1895) ; M. J. Darmesteter, La vie de E. R. (1898) ; Platzhoff, E. Renan, ein Lebens bild (1900) ; Brauer, Philosophy of Ernest Renan (19o4) ; W. Barry, Renan (1905) ; Sorel, Le Systeme historique de R. (19o5-o6) ; J. M. Robertson, Ernest Renan (1924).