RENAN, ERNEST. - Orientalist, b. at Tréguier in Brittany on 17 Feb. 1823, d. at Paris on 2 Oct. 1892. Orphaned of his father at the age of five, in 1838 R. entered the minor seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, and in 1841 he moved to that of Issy, where the first philosophical crisis is said to have manifested itself. The doubts continued, growing more acute, during his stay at St. Sulpice, where R. began the study of Hebrew with Prof. Le Hir (v.) and became passionately interested in the biblical criticism of the German rationalists. In 1845 he abandoned the seminary and the faith.
In 1849 he obtained to be sent on a scientific mission to the libraries of Italy, where he worked a great deal on his doctoral thesis on Averroism. In 1851 he obtained a post in the National Library of Paris. R. returned several times to Italy and to the East (1860, 1864 ff.) for scientific research and for reasons of health. In 1862 he was assigned the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, from which he was suspended (1864) following the Catholic reaction on account of his Vie de Jésus. In June 1878 he was elected a member of the Académie française.
For ideological reasons, for his great stylistic ability and for a certain theatricality of character, R. won a fame and an opposition that were undeserved. His exegesis is at times superficial and subjective. R. himself confesses in the preface to the life of Christ that the texts, where necessary, must be «gently pressed to obtain an interpretation of taste». For his times his works of a philological character had an indisputable scientific value. As a historian of the Jewish people and of the origins of Christianity, R. displays a keen intelligence, besides an undeniable stylistic art, but his work is guided by skepticism, by a rationalistic and often fanciful exegesis and by evident sympathy or antipathy for the subject treated; it suffices to compare the romantic profile of Jesus and the spiteful one of St. Paul.
His principal works are: Averroès et l'averroisme (Paris 1852; 3rd ed. ibid. 1869); Études d'histoire religieuse (ibid. 1857); Le livre de Job traduit de l'hébreu (ibid. 1858); Le Cantique des Cantiques traduit de l'hébreu (ibid. 1860); Observations épigraphiques (ibid. 1867); Nouvelles observations épigraphiques (ibid. 1867); L'Ecclésiaste traduit de l'hébreu avec une étude sur l'âge et le caractère du livre (ibid. 1881). There is furthermore the Histoire des origines du christianisme (8 vols., ibid. 1863-83), which opens with the famous Vie de Jésus (ibid. 1863), which had an enormous success. In the same year an Italian translation appeared (a by P. de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et littérature française, VIII, Paris 1939, vol. three pp. 359-359.
RENAN, ERNEST - Portrait.
Milan with a preface, notable for its anti-Catholic hostility, by Filippo de Boni) and in various other languages. There follow the vols. Les Apôtres (1866); St Paul (2 vols., 1869); L'Antéchrist (1873); Les Evangiles et la seconde génération chrétienne (1877); L'Église chrétienne (1879); Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (1881). Less success was obtained by the Histoire du peuple d'Israël (5 vols., ibid. 1887-93). Of a biographical character are the works Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse (ibid. 1883) and not a few others published posthumously. All the works cited, and others besides, are on the Index (cf. ed. of 1948, pp. 400-401).
Bibliography11 works
Angelo Penna