080. ERNEST RENAN HIS LIFE, AND HIS LIFE OF JESUS

ERNEST RENAN HIS LIFE, AND HIS LIFE OF JESUS The northwest province of France is Brittany, and the northwest department of Brittany is Finistere. Next east of Finistere is the department of C6tes-duNord. Into the northernmost part of C6tes-du-Nord there runs a narrow tongue of the sea, and at the southern extremity of this little bay is situated the ancient cathedral town of Treguier. The bishopric passed away with the Revolution, but there remained a conglomeration of monastic edifices which served for the establishment of an ecclesiastical college. Cut off from all trade and industry, Treguier became a town of priests and a nursery of Catholic learning.

It was here that Ernest Renan was born in the year 1823, and, until his death at the age of sixty-nine, he bore the marks of his birthplace and of his early surroundings. He was of a yielding and even effeminate nature; in his childhood he preferred the society of girls, for boys called him "Mademoiselle" and would not play with him. His chief pleasures were those of the imagination; he was a natural dreamer; he spent hours in the nave of the cathedral, gazing upward at the airy lightness of its arches, or outside the structure, absorbed in contemplation of its soaring spire. He had much reverence for God as an object of vague and sensuous aspiration, though the thought of God as a God of truth and holiness seems never to have occurred to him. Everything beautiful and artistic found ready access to his mind; for the moral he had no eye or ear. In this respect he was like Goethe. Perhaps, like Goethe, he owed his aesthetic bent to his story-telling mother; though in the great German gayety and fancy sometimes gave place to a sense of the sublime, which was never seen in Ernest Renan. Neither one, however, got beyond the worship of Beauty, and Renan’s prayer to Athene on the Acropolis of Athens vividly reminds us of Goethe’s apotheosis of Helen of Greece. Both of them thought a return to paganism to be the only way of salvation. In his later days the brilliant Frenchman contributed to the "Revue Des Deux Mondes" a series of articles entitled "Recollections of My Youth." He tells us in his introduction that they must not be taken too seriously; like Goethe’s "Wahrheit und Dichtung" in which truth is mingled continually with poetry, they present to us ideal pictures rather than photographs of real life. We may be sure, however, that the author does not give too dark a view of his own character or of the incidents of his personal history. They furnish us material for a most interesting psychological study.But they do more than this. They enable us to correct a false impression with regard to the real grounds of Renan’s desertion of the Roman Church and his subsequent opposition to the accepted doctrines of Christianity. The man and his beliefs are in this case so inseparable that a careful review of his "Recollections" will yield us much of practical as well as theoretic instruction. When the idealistic and critical young Renan was put to school in mediaeval Trguier, it was like planting an oak in a flower-pot; there was certain to come a time of expansion and the growing tree was sure to burst the barriers that kept it in. The honest priests who taught him knew nothing of the nineteenth century; they imparted the knowledge of Latin by the hardest and most old-fashioned of methods; to them submission and devotion were the only virtues and an ecclesiastical ambition the only ambition that they could either permit or comprehend. The place was enveloped in an atmosphere of mythology. Miracles were not unfrequent. Upon the eve of the festival of St. Yves, Renan tells us, The people assembled in the church, and on the stroke of midnight the saint stretched out his arms to bless the kneeling congregation. But, if among them all there was one doubting soul who raised his eyes to see if the miracle really did take place, the saint, taking just offense at such a suspicion, did not move, and, by the misconduct of this incredulous person, no benediction was given.

He was born with a disposition which he calls ** moral romanticism "; and, if we omit the word "moral," we may grant the correctness of his self-characterization. It is certain that for him morality was merely a matter of sentiment, and even his " Life of Jesus" finds in the Saviour of the world only the hero of a romance. But this taste for the ideal helped to make of him a most industrious student. As a natural consequence of his assiduity in study he was destined for the priesthood. The priests, his teachers, furnished his only pattern in in life; he aimed to become a professor in the College of Trguier. Commercial pursuits seemed mercenary and degrading; the priesthood offered every needed opportunity for scholarly growth and aesthetic culture; he chose, therefore, the clerical calling.