RENAN, ERNEST. — Orientalist, b. at Tréguier in Brittany on 17 Feb. 1823, d. in Paris on 2 Oct. 1892. Orphaned of his father at the age of five, in 1838 R. entered the minor seminary of S. Nicola du Chardonnet in Paris; in 1841 he moved to that of Issy, where the first philosophical crisis manifested itself. His doubts continued, growing more acute, during his stay at S. Sulpice, where R. began the study of Hebrew with Prof. Le Hir (q.v.) and became enamored of the biblical criticism of the German rationalists. In 1845 he abandoned the seminary and the faith.
In 1849 he obtained permission to be sent on a scholarly mission to the libraries of Italy, where he worked extensively on his thesis on Averroism. In 1851 he secured a position at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. R. returned several times to Italy and the East (1860, 1864 ff.) for scholarly research and health reasons. In 1862 he was appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, from which he was suspended (1864) following the Catholic reaction to his *Vie de Jésus*. In June 1878 he was elected to the Académie française.
For ideological reasons, for his great stylistic skill, and for a certain theatricality of character, R. earned an undeserved fame and opposition. His exegesis is at times superficial and subjective. R. himself admits in the preface to *Life of Christ* that texts, where necessary, must be gently pressed to yield an interpretation to taste. For his time, his works of a philological nature possessed an inestimable scientific value. As a historian of the Jewish people and the origins of Christianity, R. displays keen intelligence, as well as undeniable stylistic artistry, but his work is guided by skepticism, by a rationalistic and often fanciful exegesis, and by evident sympathy or antipathy toward his subject matter; it suffices to compare the romantic profile of Jesus with the bitter portrait of St. Paul.
His principal works are: *Averroës et l'averroïsme* (Paris 1852; 3rd ed. ibid. 1869); *Études d'histoire religieuse* (ibid. 1857); *Le livre de Job traduit de l'hebreu* (ibid. 1858); *Le Cantique des Cantiques traduit de l'hebreu* (ibid. 1860); *Observations épigraphiques* (ibid. 1867); *Nouvelles observations épigraphiques* (ibid. 1867); *L'Ecclésiastique traduit de l'hebreu avec une étude sur l'âge et le caractère du livre* (ibid. 1881). There is also the *Histoire des origines du christianisme* (8 vols., ibid. 1863–83), which opens with the famous *Vie de Jésus* (ibid. 1863), a work that achieved enormous success. In the same year an Italian translation appeared (in Milan, with a prologue notable for its anti-Catholic animus by Filippo de Boni) and in various other languages. The following volumes followed: *Les Apôtres* (1866); *St Paul* (2 vols., 1869); *L'Antéchrist* (1873); *Les Évangiles et la seconde génération chrétienne* (1877); *L'Eglise chrétienne* (1879); *Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique* (1881). Lesser success attended the *Histoire du peuple d'Israël* (5 vols., ibid. 1887–93). Biographical in character are the works *Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse* (ibid. 1883) and several others published posthumously. All the works cited, and others besides, are on the Index (cf. ed. of 1948, pp. 400–401).