M. RENAN'S IRONICAL CONCEPTION OF IMMORTALITY. T HE more M. Ronan
is studied, the less he seems to be in any real sense a religious teacher at all, unless that spirit of airy caprice which is of the essence of the fairy-tale may be admitted as a constituent of true religion ; and this is just what M. Renan wishes us to believe, and what any one who has any real faith absolutely repudiates. To us, religion means first of all something which binds, something which is not elastic to our will, something which we cannot vary, as we vary our pleasures and our tastes and our lighter reveries. To M. Renan, apparently, religion, if it is anything, is a mid- summer night's dream, a kind of fairy-tale which he can vary as the colours vary in a bubble, or the hum of the insects in a garden varies its attraction for the ear. On Sunday there was a gathering of the Provençal enthusiasts at Sceaux, near Paris. The Society who call themselves the Felibres of Paris, and who hope to revive the Provençal language as the language of a literature peculiar to the South of France, celebrated their anniversary at Seeaux ; and the Felibres were generous enough to associate with themselves the Bretons who cultivate the language and religion of Celtic Brittany with the same tender enthusiasm with which the Provencals cultivate the language and religion of Languedoc. M. Renan was chosen to deliver an address, and while saying many true and graceful things about the local legends and associations which, instead of undermiaing the larger patriotism, really fill the larger patriotism with new significance, and lend the passion of home, as it were, to what would be otherwise its too abstract conceptions, he indulged himself in talking of the immortal life after a fashion which shows clearly enough that the immortal life has no serious meaning for him at all. He ended thus :—" I am old ; I have reached the time when one ought to dream of urnishing one's head with the thoughts which will occupy it during the life eternal. That will be so long ! It is, I imagine, the last images which will be the most tenacious, and which will fill our immortal soul during the ages that never end. Well, I have at this moment under my eyes most charming images; I am going to cherish them with the utmost care; I hope to place your festival of 1891 amongst the subjects on which I shall ponder through all eternity." Doubtless M. Renan was not serious. To us, he never seems to be serious when he talks of religion. He treats religious themes with the same light, airy, and arbitrary touch -with which he might manipu- late a fairy-tale. But he could hardly have shown how little serious he is in dealing with the immortal life, better than by suggesting that the spirit is to have its latest thoughts, however trivial they may be, perpetuated and petrified, as it were, through all eternity, and that he himself may perhaps be occupied during the ages that never end, with the sunny dreams of Provence and the language in which the Troubadours sang their rather extravagant songs of love and chivalry, or even with the gloomier, but not less arbitrary, traditions and superstitions of Brittany. Doubtless, in a graceful way, M. Ronan wanted to intimate that the immortal life is a mere dream. That exclamation of his concerning eternity, " Ce sera Si long !" betrays his real drift. And, indeed, that notion of occupying himself to all eternity with picturesque costumes, and the dialect and associations of the most showy, the least solid and durable, of all earthly kingdoms, indicates frankly enough the irony of the mood in which he was indulging. Let me not attack formally the belief in immortality,' he seems to say.. There is enough and too much of serious argument of that kind. Let me assume it as all true, and make it seem ridicu- lous by complimenting these good people with the assurance that I should like to be thinking of their fête-day and its motley gaieties to all eternity. Human life is a sort of caprice, sometimes dignified, sometimes grotesque. If it is to have an immortality at all, it is just as likely that its more capricious attitudes will be caught and stereotyped as any other,—just. as a butterfly is chloroformed and then pinned in a natural- ist's collection. I cannot imagine myself immortal, but if I am to be, I think I should be just as likely to be always dreaming of bright costumes, and fairy pageants, and lively masques, and passionate Southern vocabularies, and all the vivid romance of chivalry, as of anything else. And it is much better to hint to these good people indirectly, of what evanescent stuff their religious dreams are made, than to direct any serious assault on their religion.' And no doubt it is hardly possible to undermine a traditional religious belief more effectually than by this ironic mode of assuming that though the popular belief in human immortality may be true, there is nothing in man that is not absolutely trivial, nothing in him deserving of the eternity with which he is, as a matter of course, credited. And this is what M. Renan sets himself to show from beginning to end. At the very opening of his address, he says that, after having reflected long on "the Infinite which surrounds us," he has arrived at the conclusion that nothing is more certain than that we shall never know much about it; "but an infinite goodness penetrates life, and I am persuaded that the moments which man gives to joy ought to count amongst those in which he responds best to the views of the Eternal," And he evidently means by joy, joy of the butterfly kind, the joy which the sun brings to the creatures who can bask in it, the joy which picturesque celebrations bring to those who love festivity and social gaiety, the joy which all literary renaissance brings with it in "this age," as M. Renan terms it, "of the resurrection of the dead." The notion of a soul fixed in contemplating to all eternity the gaieties of an anniversary celebration of the foundation of a Provençal society, is so plainly ironical, that we rather suspect that it must have given offence to all the genuine Christians, if there were any, amongst "the Felibres of Paris." It was like suggesting that the soul should live for ever in the perception of a sweet scent, or a rich tone, or a graceful group, or a fair flower. That is a great descent even from the conception of worth by which M. Renan measures the present life of man. "Every one," he says, "is worth more or less in proportion to the joys which be has tasted in the beginning of life, to the share of goodness which he has experienced from those round him." But the share of goodness which men have experienced in the early part of their life from those round them, involves elements a vast
deal richer and deeper than the contemplation of the gaieties of a Provencal celebration; and one perceives, therefore, that M. Renan thinks the sweet thoughts of the eternal life are likely to be made up of material much more trivial and evanes- oent than the experiences upon which the worth of human character depends. That is one way in which he trains his hearers to depreciate the prospect of immortality. The worth of human life, he says, is to be measured by the share it has had in the goodness of those by whom the period of childhood has been surrounded ; but the worth of immortality is to be measured by the worth of the pleasurable images which happen to be uppermost in the mind at the close of the human career. Tenderness, goodness, human affections of the highest order, enter into the substance of the one ; the capricious amusements which most impress themselves on old men's memory will determine the value of the other. In both cases alike it is the amount of joyous experience which measures the worth of the result; but the joyous experiences of age being to the joyous experiences of youth as moonlight is to sunlight, or as water is to wine, the long immortality of those at least who die in old age, will necessarily be somewhat fdde and tedious, if there is an immortality at all. That is what M. Renan's language suggests, though he does not say it plainly out.
What M. Renan ignores is, that all serious belief in immor- tality is founded on the conviction that the human heart craves rest on an eternal righteousness and blessedness the communion with which is by no manner of means a light pleasure of that butterfly order to which be chooses to attribute all the signi- ficance of finite immortality. The "beatific vision" is a vision for which finite minds can only be prepared by suffering or willingness to suffer,—indeed, by the kind of suffering or willingness to suffer of which we have had a divine example. The only preparation for immortality is experience of a diametrically opposite kind from that on which M. Ronan dilates with a sort of epicurish cynicism as the possible amuse- ment of a wearisome eternity. To learn to fathom the depth of even the deeper human characters is a process which in- volves a great capacity for voluntary suffering. But to learn to grow up from the human standard of righteousness to the divine, is a process which involves the willing carrying of a cross in the infinite agony and blessedness of which M. Henan has long ago ceased to believe. Of course, having once reduced our nature to the level in which the capacity for ephemeral gaiety is all in all, he finds no difficulty in making the pros- pect of immortality look as absurd for man as it would be for ths butterfly itself.
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