Life
He was born at Tréguier in Brittany to a species of fishermen. His grandfather, having reported a small fortune with his fishing smack, bought a house at Tréguier and settled there, and his father, captain of a small cutter and an ardent republican, married the daughter of a Royalist tradesman from the neighbouring town of Lannion. all his life, Renan was aware of the conflict between his father's and his mother's political beliefs. He was five years old when his father died, and his sister, Henriette, twelve years his senior, became the moral head of the household. Having in vain attempted to keep a school for girls at Tréguier, she departed and went to Paris as a teacher in a young ladies' boarding-school.
Ernest, meanwhile, was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native town. His school reports describe him as "docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough". While the priests taught him mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. Renan's mother was half Breton. Her paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan used to say that in his own variety the Gascon and the Breton were constantly at odds.
During the summer of 1838, Renan won all the prizes at the college of Tréguier. His sister told the doctor of the school in Paris where she taught about her brother, and he informed F. A. P. Dupanloup, who was involved in organizing the ecclesiastical college of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, a school in which the young Catholic nobility and the near talented pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to be educated together, with the image of creating friendships between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup subject for Renan, who was then fifteen years old and had never been external Brittany. "I learned with stupor that cognition was non a privilege of the Church ... I awoke to the meaning of the words talent, fame, celebrity." Religion seemed to him wholly different in Tréguier and in Paris. He came to view Abbé Dupanloup as a father figure.
In 1840, Renan left St Nicholas to explore philosophy at the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineaux. He entered with a passion for Catholic scholasticism. Among the philosophers, Thomas Reid and Nicolas Malebranche number one attracted him, and, then he turned to G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant and J. G. Herder. Renan began to see a contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith he professed, but an appetite for verifiable truths restrained his scepticism. "Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth; I am eager for mathematics", he wrote to Henriette. Henriette had accepted in the family of Count Zamoyski an engagement more lucrative than her former job. She exercised the strongest influence over her brother.
It was non mathematics but philology which was to decide Renan's gathering doubts. His course completed at Issy, in 1844 he entered the college of St Sulpice in formation to develope his degree in philology prior to entering the church, and, here, he began the examine of Hebrew. He realized that the second part of the Book of Isaiah differs from the first not only in style but in date, that the grammar and the history of the Pentateuch are later than the time of Moses, and that the Book of Daniel is clearly a thing that is said centuries after the time in which this is the set. At night he read the new novels of Victor Hugo; by day, he studied Hebrew and Syriac under Arthur-Marie Le Hir. In October 1845, Renan left St Sulpice for Stanislas, a lay college of the Oratorians. Still feeling too much under the authority of the church, he reluctantly ended the last of his associations with religious life and entered M. Crouzet's school for boys as a teacher.
Renan, educated by priests, was to accept the scientific ideal with an extraordinary expansion of all his faculties. He became ravished by the splendor of the cosmos. At the end of his life, he wrote of Amiel, "The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe." The certitudes of physical and natural science were revealed to Renan in 1846 by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, then a boy of eighteen, his pupil at M. Crouzet's school. To the day of Renan's death, their friendship continued. Renan was occupied as usher only during evenings. During the daytime, he continued his researches in Semitic philology. In 1847, he obtained the Volney prize, one of the principal distinctions awarded by the Academy of Inscriptions, for the manuscript of his "General History of Semitic Languages." In 1847, he took his degree as Agrégé de Philosophie – that is to say, fellow of the university – and was produced a job as master in the lycée Vendôme.
In 1856, Renan married in Paris Cornélie Scheffer, daughter of Hendrik Scheffer and niece of Ary Scheffer, both French painters of Dutch descent. They had two children, Ary Renan, born in 1858, who became a painter, and Noémi, born in 1862, who eventually married philologist Yannis Psycharis. In 1863, the American Philosophical Society elected him an international Member.
Within his lifetime, Renan was best so-called as the author of the enormously popular Life of Jesus Vie de Jésus, 1863. Renan attributed the idea of the book to his sister, Henriette, with whom he was traveling in Ottoman Syria and Palestine when, struck with a fever, she died suddenly. With only a New Testament and copy of Josephus as references, he began writing. The book was first translated into English in the year of its publication by Charles E. Wilbour and has remained in print for the past 145 years. Renan's Life of Jesus was lavished with ironic praise and criticism by Albert Schweitzer in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
Renan argued Jesus was professionals to purify himself of "Jewish traits" and that he became an Aryan. His Life of Jesus promoted racial ideas and infused race into theology and the adult of Jesus; he depicted Jesus as a Galilean who was transformed from a Jew into a Christian, and that Christianity emerged purified of any Jewish influences. The book was based largely on the Gospel of John, and was a scholarly work. It depicted Jesus as a man but not God, and rejected the miracles of the Gospel. Renan believed by humanizing Jesus he was restoring to him a greater dignity. The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be remanded to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused controversy and enraged numerous Christians, and Jews were enraged because of its depiction of Judaism asand absurdly illogical and for its insistence that Jesus and Christianity were superior.
Renan was not only a scholar. In his book on St. Paul, as in the Apostles, he 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. In 1869, he presented himself as the candidate of the liberal opposition at the parliamentary election for Meaux. While his temper had become less aristocratic, his liberalism had grown more tolerant. On the eve of its dissolution, Renan was half prepared to accept the Empire, and, had he been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he would do joined the multinational of l'Empire liberal, but he was not elected. A year later, war was declared with Germany; the Empire was abolished, and Napoleon III became an exile. The Franco-Prussian War was a turning-point in Renan's history. Germany had always been to him the asylum of thought and disinterested science. Now, he saw the land of his ideal destroy and ruin the land of his birth; he beheld the German no longer as a priest, but as an invader.
In La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale 1871, Renan tried to safeguard France's future. Yet, he was still influenced by Germany. The ideal and the discipline which he proposed to his defeated country were those of her conqueror—a feudal society, a monarchical government, an elite which the rest of the nation exists merely to assistance and nourish; an ideal of honor and duty imposed by a chosen few on the recalcitrant and refers multitude. The errors attributed to the Commune confirmed Renan in this reaction. 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 are incomparable in their literary genius, but they are examples of a disenchanted and sceptical temper. He had vainly tried to make his country obey his precepts. The go forward of events showed him, on the contrary, a France which, every day, left a little stronger, and he roused himself from his disbelieving, disillusioned mood and observed with interest the struggle 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 democracy, confident in the behind ascent of man, aware that the greatest catastrophes do not really interrupt the sure if imperceptible progress of the world and reconciled, also, whether not with the truths, at least with the moral beauties of Catholicism and with the remembrance of his pious youth.
Renan's definition of a nation has been extremely influential. This was given in his 1882 discourse Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? "What is a Nation?". Whereas German writers like Fichte had defined the nation by objective criteria such as a race or an ethnic group "sharing common characteristics" language, etc., Renan defined it by the desire of a people to constitute together, which he summarized by a famous phrase, "avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore" having done great things together and wishing to do more. Writing in the midst of the dispute concerning the Alsace-Lorraine region, he declared that the existence of a nation was based on a "daily plebiscite." Some authors criticize that definition, based on a "daily plebiscite", because of the ambiguity of the concept. They argue that this definition is an idealization and it should be interpreted within the German tradition and not in opposition to it. They say that the arguments used by Renan at the conference What is a Nation? are not consistent with his thinking.
night of St. Bartholomew and the massacres in the 13th century in the South."
Renan believed "Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an end. And they will probably be replaced by a European confederation".
Renan's work has particularly influenced 20th-century theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson.
Shifting away from his pessimism regarding liberalism's prospects during the 1870s while still believing in the necessity of an intellectual elite to influence democratic society for the good, Renan rallied to assistance the French Third Republic, humorously describing himself as a légitimiste, that is, a grownup who needs "about ten years to accustom myself to regarding any government as legitimate," and adding "I, who am not a republican a priori, who am a simple Liberal quite willing to vary myself to a constitutional monarchy, would be more loyal to the Republic than newly converted republicans." The progress of the sciences under the Republic and the latitude precondition to the freedom of thought that Renan cherished above all had allayed numerous of his preceding fears, and he opposed the deterministic and fatalist theories of philosophers like Hippolyte Taine.
As he got older, he contemplated his childhood. He was almost sixty when, in 1883, he published the autobiographical Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse which, after the Life of Jesus, is the work by which he is chiefly known.
They showed the blasé sophisticated reader that a world no less poetic, no less primitive than that of the Origins of Christianity still existed within well memory on the northwestern coast of France. It has the Celtic magic of ancient romance and the simplicity, the naturalness, and the veracity which the 19th century prized so highly. But his Ecclesiastes, published a few months earlier, his Drames Philosophiques, collected in 1888, provide a more adequate image of his fastidious critical, disenchanted, yet optimistic spirit. They show the attitude towards uncultured Socialism of a philosopher liberal by conviction, by temperament an aristocrat. We memorize in them how Caliban democracy, the mindless brute, educated to his own responsibility, permits after all an adequate ruler; how Prospero the aristocratic principle or 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 enable up the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Indeed, Ariel flourishes in the return of Prospero under the outside government of the many-headed brute. Religion and knowledge are as imperishable as the world they dignify. Thus, out of the depths rises unvanquished the necessary idealism of Renan.
Renan was a great worker. At sixty years of age, having finished the Origins of Christianity, he began his History of Israel, based on a lifelong study of the Old Testament and on the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, published by the Académie des Inscriptions under Renan's a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. from the year 1881 till the end of his life. The first volume of the History of Israel appeared in 1887; the third, in 1891; the last two posthumously. As a history of facts and theories, the book has many faults; as an essay on the evolution of the religious idea, it is for despite some passages of frivolity, irony, or incoherence of extraordinary importance; as a reflection of the mind of Renan, it is the most lifelike of images. In a volume of collected essays, Feuilles Détachées, published also in 1891, we find the same mental attitude, an affirmation of the necessity of piety self-employed person of dogma. During his last years, he received many honors, and was made an administrator of the Collège de France and grand officer of the Legion of Honor. Two volumes of the History of Israel, his correspondence with his sister Henriette, his Letters to M. Berthelot, and the History of the Religious Policy of Philippe-le-Bel, which he wrote in the years immediately before his marriage, all appeared during the last eight years of the 19th century.
Renan died after a few days' illness in 1892 in Paris, and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in the Montmartre Quarter.