SIR M. E. GRANT-DUFF ON M. RENAN.
IN the very interesting but also very amazing volume which Sir M. E. Grant-Duff has just published on M. Renan, whom he declares, even when "judged by the teachings of the Galilean lake" to have been "still a saint," the expression applied by one of the writers in the Spectator to his hero, "a Voltaire aucr6," is spoken of as " a silly phrase," because it suggests a resemblance between two minds in every respect as unlike each other as it is possible for two brilliant men of the same nation, who busied themselves to some slight extent with the same subject, to be. It was never suggested that the minds of Voltaire and Renan were alike ; but it is certain that the influence they exerted on the Christian faith of their European admirers was in many respects identical ; nor are we sure that that of the " Voltaire suorg" was not, on the whole, decidedly the more destructive of the two. There are many minds which resist sceptical scorn, but which cannot resist sceptical patron- age. Voltaire adopted the one attitude towards our Lord, M. Renan the other. And we imagine that it would be difficult to say which of the two has undermined Christianity with more effect. Rena', as Sir M. Grant.Dull reminds us, said of Voltaire that he had done more serious injury to historic studies " than an invasion of barbarians." And surely Voltaire might retort that Renan had done more to make Christians pity and apologise for their Master, than all the Deists and Atheists who ever wrote. M. Renan may have been a saint, if amiability makes a saint. Sir Mountstuart thinks that he governed his life by the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, i a remark in which he is thinking, no doubt, of the command to love your enemies. But there are other and more difficult precepts for our modern civilised communities than that. And we cannot say that we regard the sentimentalism of M. Ronan as at all Christlike. He seems to have held that if you could but infect mankind with vague ideal emotions, it did not much matter how you managed it. "From the festivals of Adonis to the services of Holy Week," he said, " the stories and pictures best fitted to open the source of tears have not failed to any cult. It is so sweet to weep over a redeeming God, over a victim who has offered himself up for the salvation of the faithful ; " and, if we understand M. Renan rightly, it is all the sweeter if you are fully aware that you are feeding your mind upon a fable, and not upon the truth, for then you may take your poetical sorrows more lightly, and need not fie in grim earnest about them. This amiable saint of Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff's is a great apologist for religious emotions without any real justi- fication for them, for sentiments founded upon fictions, for religions of which he had silenced the central pulse for ever in all who followed his teaching. The great figure in his Christianity is one who, in his view, conspired with his own disciples to work a mock miracle for the purpose of inspiring faith ; and yet M. Renan maintained that, though he bad criticised everything in Christianity, he had in effect " upheld everything." Yes, be upheld it just as a conjuror upholds what he only pretends to lift from the ground. Nor did he even always pretend to uphold holiness of life. In his reminis- cences of his youth he throws out a hint that Nature knows nothing of chastity, which had a thoroughly corrupting ten- dency; nor does even Sir M. E. Grant-Duff himself say a word for the " Abbesse de Jouarre." M. Renan, in truth, did not take religious principles seriously,—at all events, in the sense which the Germans or the English attach to the word " serious." In his inner thought, he appears to have confounded the regions of fact and fiction, and assigned to a consciously dis- honest enthusiast the place of the redeemer of the world, so far at least as he acknowledged any. Sir Mountstuart paints M. Renan as pursuing truth through everything, and hesitating at no sacrifice to attain it. But then, what did he mean by truth P Apparently, the right to explode illusion, and then sentimentally reinstate it as an act of favour on the throne from which, as a matter of right, he had cast it down.
We do not doubt for a moment that M. Renan gave what he believed to be as good a guess at the origin of Christianity as his historical learning and his sympathetic nature enabled him to give. We do not doubt for a moment that it cost him considerable pain to make that guess, and that it would have pleased him better in many respects to say that he sincerely hold Christianity to be a gift from above, if only be could have thought it so. But he did not in any in- telligible sense regard religion as a gift from above at all. For him revelation had no meaning. So far as we can judge, he expected his sister Henrietta, after her death, to help him about as much (or as little) by revealing her maturer views to him from the world beyond, as he expected from the action of divine grace. Religion was to him not the gift of God, but the speculation of man. " Revele-moi, 6 bon genie," he writes to her, " it moi quo to aimais, ces verites qui dominent la mort, empechent de la craindre, et in font presque aimer ; " and he certainly expected as much (or as little) reply from her as he expected from his prayers to him whom he termed " the Proteus whom no reason limits and no language ex- presses." To our minds, Renan was never serious in his religion at all. No man could be serious who was content, as he was, with one whom be regarded as a mock miracle-monger for a divine exemplar, and who could, in his old age, scatter hints that, after all, the rigid purity of Christianity was a sort of preternatural superstition, and that what Mr. Arnold called the service of Lubricity, might be more natural.
Of course it is quite open to any one to believe that an amiable sceptic who has worked hard at the history of a religion, who has found it wanting in solid foundations, and who has made considerable sacrifices to say so,—and all this M. Renan did,—is a. great lover of truth. And if that were all that we know of M. Renan, we should not for a moment hesitate to admit it. Unfortunately it is not all. What is still more cha- racteristic of him than even these traits, is that after under- mining, as he held, these solid foundations of Christianity, he trifled with the serious meaning of that which he bad in his own belief established, and tried to persuade both himself and his fellow-countrymen that he had not really assailed the religious validity of Christianity at all, but had left it, if not ex- actly where it was, in a better position than before. In fact, he made of the fiction into which he resolved it, a sort
of whipped cream of sentiment, and went about assuring everybody that this whipped cream was a no less good, perhaps even a better, food for the soul than the belief
in revelation, which be had to his own satisfaction dis- pelled. It is this that incenses us against M. Renan, and the type of thinker that M. Rena.n represents. If there be no
clear light shed from any mind infinitely higher than humanity on our life, let us bend our heads in humiliation, and endeavour with the best fortitude we can to bear the hardness of our fate, but let us not go about exulting in the beauty of our own prismatic fancies, and call that religion.
Religion is something that binds us, and not something that we are free to toy with as M. Ronan toyed with his Christian dreams. Religion, according to M. Renan, was an " aspiration towards the ideal world," and the gulf between that and what we mean by religion, is as wide as the whole diameter of being. Christianity relies on inspiration, not on aspiration. And M. Renan does not believe in inspiration, but only in aspiration. As an infant may sigh for the moon, without getting it, so man may sigh himself out towards the Infinite in all directions, and be none the better for it. There is a fine piece of writing which Sir Mountatuart Grant-Duff quotes from Renan's essay on Feuerbach, which he calls "very amusing and very true," but which seems to us very sad and very false, though admirably expressed. Feuerbach said that he had " quarrelled with God and the world," though how he could quarrel with God in whom he had no belief, as he had quarrelled with the world in which he did believe, we do not know. But here are M. Renan's comments on the state- ment :—
" Quand un Allemand so vante d'etre impie, it ne faut jamais le croire star parole. L'Allemand n'est pas capable d'6tre irreli- gieux ; is religion, c'est-h-dire l'aspiration an monde ideal, est le fond memo do sa nature. Quand it veut titre athee, it l'est devote- meat et avoc uno sorte d'onction. Que si vous pratiquez le culte du beau et du vrai ; si la saintet6 de la morale park 1 votre cceur ; si toute beaut6 et toute verite vous reportent au foyer de is vie sainte ; qua si, arrives la, vous renoncez it in parole, vous enve- loppez votre tete, vous eonfondez 6. dessein votre pens& et votre langage pour ne lien dire do limite en face de l'infini, comment osez-vous parlor d'atheisme P Quo si vos facultes, vibrant simul- tanement, n'ont jamais rendu ce grand son unique qua nous appelons Dieu, je n'ai plus rien a dire ; vous manquoz do relement essentiel et earacterisque de notre nature."
The whole pith of these remarks depends, it will be observed, on the assumption that religion means nothing but an aspira- tion after the ideal. It meant nothing more to M. Renan. But it meant a great deal more to Feuerbach, and it means a great deal more to most Englishmen. To us, if religion does not come from above, does not bind us, does not impress us with the imperative of a higher will, and the providence of an infinite wisdom, it is notbing,—a mere toy with which we trifle, a fairy-tale with which we flatter ourselves, wax in plastic hands. There is nothing in it to lean upon, nothing that a serious man can take into account, nothing beyond the phantasms of our dreams. To our mind, the German, and the Englishman too, is quite capable of being " irreligious ; indeed, his irreligion is a much more formidable thing, just as his religion is a much more formidable thing, than anything which M. Renan conceived under either name. To him, re- ligion was an aspiration, and irreligion inability to aspire. To us, religion is obligation,—obligation to a very real and almighty master ; and irreligion is like the condition in which a battle-horse finds itself when, in the thick of the battle, it has suddenly lost its rider, a condition of fatal liberty, of overwhelming confusion. To M. Renan, religion was a fairy-tale, and irreligion just that dullness of the fancy which renders fairy-tales vapid and unmeaning. We can hardly wonder, therefore, at his light, amiable, and sentimental surmises and doubts,—the child's-play of a radiant but irra- tional fancy.
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