M. RENAN IN 1848.*
IN the year 1815, Cardinal Newman was received by the Pope himself into the Church of Rome. From that time, he tells us in his immortal Apologia, he lived in perfect peace and con- tentment; not one doubt ever assailed him. In the same year, a very different character pursued a directly opposite course. Joseph Ernest Renan, then in his twenty-second or twenty- third year, finally parted from the Church of which it had been hoped that the brilliant pupil of Dupanloup would prove the ornament and defence. He too has remained free from all doubt,—but not from all regret. The quasi-agnosticism of Renari has not brought him, despite his apparent com- placency, either peace or contentment. The ardent Breton possesses a mind in which the characteristic qualities of the French intellect are not found. It lacks clear- ness, definiteness, the dogmatic spirit. M. Renan has never lost his sense of the mystic charm of the religion he has abandoned. He has always contemplated it with a singular tenderness, and would still, were it possible, dwell within its forms, could these be denuded of their substance. The book before us is, after its fashion, an "Apologia "too, a plea for freedom against faith urged almost with the impassioned fervour of an unquestioning believer. Written in 1848, but • Me ruittre of Sciemee : Ideas of 1848. By Reeled Timm. Translated from the Frowb. London Chttpmien anti Hell, now for the first time published, it lacks the attraction of his later style, and has none of the qualities which lend such an indefinable interest to his Souvenirs. On the other hand, it displays more earnestness than many of his more recent works ; the logic is closer, and the inductions more widely based. It will be read with more profit than the Vie de St. Paul, though with less interest than the author's fragment of autobiography.
The aim of the book is less to vindicate science in its more exclusive physical and biological sense, than to make people "understand the possibility of a scientific philosophy which would no longer be a system of vain and empty speculation, aiming at no real object, but a science which would no longer be dry, barren, exclusive, but which in becoming complete would become religious and poetical." In these words we have the key to the origin of the change which took place in his opinions, or rather, which was accomplished in them, three years before the Revolution of 1848. It was at first rather against the unfruitful scholasticism of the seminary than against religion that the student of St. Sulpice found himself in revolt. Unsatisfied with verbal controversies, he desired to penetrate to the realities of sacred things, and thought he saw the way in comparison and criticism of the texts which form the visible basis of Christianity. In these pages the evolution of his mind is not presented, but we know that the result of his investigations was the conviction that the facts and doctrines of Christianity must, without exception, be regarded. in precisely the same light as the facts and theories of ordinary history and science. In other words, the mysteries of faith must be submitted to the judgment of the reason, and of the reason only ; and the end was, that the difficulties which Newman felt without being disturbed by them, destroyed the religion of the Breton Seminarist. Yet he was no adept in the process to which he trusted. His erudi. tion lacks both accuracy and width, his logic is far from con- vincing, and his imagination has always been his master. The edifice he has built up has, to say the least, less substan- tial basis than the fabric he has sought to add the dal* of to the dust-heap of antiquity. Nay—to pursue the metaphor —he would, like the Positivists, with whom be has much in common, retain the architecture of Christianity for the con, structions of science. That man, and not God, is the true measure of man, is the key-note to Renan's philosophy as set forth in these five hundred closely printed pages, and in the literary record of his life. We believe the philosophy to be unsound, even from a purely untheological point of view. Man does not know his exact place in the great economy of which so small a portion is cognisable by him. The endless evolutionary struggle is visible enough, but its meaning is not apparent to humanity. Whither it tends no man can say, but not, we may be sure, merely to the profit or glory of man. M. Renan is inconsistent with himself. If, in some measure„ agnostic, he is no denier of God's existence, yet in his scheme God has no place.
The upshot has been that the quondam Su!picien, destitute of a creed, has no followers. He cannot, in truth, regard his life-work with contentment, for complacency is not content. 'neut. He himself tells us that the faith he once held has been replaced by a void. The void, be hopes, will one day be filled by a further term in an endless series of progressive religious systems. But he attempts no synthesis of the next term ; he merely analyses the processes by which the present stage has been attained, and condemns them. He has, indeed, a method, a "way," as the Chinese would say, but it leads nowhere. He is a fronclear, but without anger; his distrust is void of all dislike ; he even admires what be condemns. Never- theless, though his method is insufficient, it is far from being. untrue. More than forty years ago, the young man of twenty. three saw the meaning and importance of evolution. His mis. take has been to accept evolution as the whole truth. The great philosophical advance of modern times consists, as he rightly says, in the substitution of the category of evolution for the category of being, of the relative for the absolute, of move- ment for immobility. But this is merely the application to phenomena of reason in replacement of mere verbal dialectics. To measure all things by reason, is to measure the cosmos, material and spiritual, by man. "Humanity alone," he writes, "is admirable, and God exists in humanity's perception of the good and the beautiful." But in some sense or other the good and the beautiful must inhere in the things when they are seen, or at least the qualities are there which, brought into relation with the mind, produce the a3sthetic and moral emotions. And the mind itself must possess ab origins, either the feeling for beauty and goodness, or some quality capable of becoming developed into that feeling.
Though as opposed to democracy as Carlyle, M. Renan does not altogether despise the crowd, whose labour he thinks has been too much neglected in. the history of philosophy. The remark is an acute one ; there is a sort of silent digestion and elaboration of the wisdom of the few by the many that pre- pares the way for the men of genius of a succeeding age, who are, to use M. Renan's expressive phrase, "the editors of the inspirations of the multitude," and, it may be added, the suggestors of the inspirations of the generations that follow. At this moment, too, when the greatest of the classical languages runs some risk of depreciation, his observations upon classical studies will be turned to with interest :—
"The classical languages are in many respects the sacred book of the modern peoples. They contain the roots of the nation, her titles, the sense of her words, consequently of her institutions.
Every modern idea is grafted upon an antique term, all actual development is the emanation from a precedent In the re creation of the past, in the exploration of every part of humanity, whether it be conscious or not of its mission, erudition prepares the basis necessary to philosophy Whether we like it or not, Greek and Latin are forced upon us by facts."
One is tempted to linger over these pages, whose earnestness compensates for the lack—which, however, is far from absolute —of the peculiar interest which distinguishes M. Renan's later writings. They are full of acute and penetrating remarks, free from the least taint of bitterness or contempt. A sort of gentle resignation, perhaps a little too complacent, reigns in them ; and the tone of the work is melancholy but not de- spairing. M. Renan is the most regretful of iconoclasts ; he has to the full the courage of his opinions, but he does his utmost to soften the blows he feels himself compelled to give. With his political and social views we need not here concern ourselves ; he was in 1848, as he still is, a sort of French Whig, The platitudes of democracy he has always been too clear.
visioned not to reckon at their true value; he is well aware of the superficiality of his countrymen, and dares to portray the French mind in forms and colours which are more true than flattering. The English he regards as "insipid merchants," given up to a quietism and prosperity that are a shame to England, and testify to her nullity.
One passage in the book reads like a page from the Souvenirs. Though long, we venture to close this review with the extract, not merely on account of its intrinsic interest, but because of the reflection it gives of M. .Renan's nearest approach to a creed, a worship of the vague. It will serve also as a good specimen of the powers of the translator 1— "One day my mother and I, in one of those short excursions
on the coast of Brittany which leave such sweet memories with all who winter there, came upon a small village church and sat down to rest there. The walls of the church of rough- hewn granite and covered with moss, the neighbouring houses built of primitive blocks, the closely serried tombs, the mouldering and overthrown crosses, the numerous skulls ranged in tiers on the steps of the tiny house which served as an ossuary, all those showed that people had been buried there from the most remote days, when the Saints of Brittany made their appearance for the first time on these waves. On that day the terror-stricken feeling of the immense oblivion, and the vast silence amidst which human life is swallowed up, was such as to haunt me still, and to have become one of the elements of my moral existence. Among all these simple, humble folk that lie there, in the shadow of the old trees,
not one, not a single one, will live in the future In those days I served the God of my infancy, and an upward look at the stone cross on the steps of which I was seated, a glance at the tabernacle visible through the windows of the church, was suffi- cient to explain all this to me. The sea was at a stone's throw. I could sniff the winds from heaven, which, penetrating to the very brain, awakened a kind of indefinable and inde- scribable feeling of freedom and expansion. My mother also was by my side, and it seemed to me that the humblest life was capable of reflecting heaven through pure love. I considered those who lay there happy ; since then I have shifted my tent, and I account for the vast darkness in a different way. They are not dead those obscure children of the hamlet, for Brittany still lives, and they have contributed to the making of Brittany ; they played no part in the great drama, but they formed part of the vast chorus without which the drama would be cold and lifeless.
And when Brittany shall be no longer there, France will still be there ; and when France is gone, humanity will remain and when humanity is gone, God will remain, and humanity will have contributed to the making of Him, and in his vast bosom all that ever lived will live again, and then it will be true to the very letter that not a word that has furthered the Divine work of progress will be lost."
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