Renan, ERNEST, was born at the little town of Tréguier, in the department of Côtes-du-Nord (Brittany), on the 27th February 1823. In his Souvenirs d'Enfance he has sought to mark the various influences that wrought in him during his childhood and early youth. He was a Breton Celt by his father's ancestry, a Gascon by his mother's; and all his critics have agreed with himself in recognising in his moral and mental habit the blended characteristics of this double descent. The centre of the life of Tréguier (originally a monastic village) is its minster, and to this atmosphere of the place Renan attributes in large measure his early bent to those studies which he increasingly pursued for more than half a century. His father, who was a sailor, died while Ernest was still a child, leaving his widow in straitened circumstances, with the care of one daughter and two sons. To his mother and sister Renan owed a special debt which he has expressly acknowledged in his Memorials of his childhood. It further deepened the religious influences of his native village that he remained there till his sixteenth year as a pupil in its school. All his teachers were priests, and he himself describes them as men of primitive piety and simplicity, but wholly unacquainted with the movement of things outside their own parish. The education they gave was that which had been the tradition in the church for the preceding two centuries. 'They taught Latin in the old fashion, but above all they sought to turn out good men.'
The young Renan gave early promise of his future distinction, and in 1836 he was one of the lads chosen by the Abbé Dupanloup for a place in the Catholic seminary of St Nicolas du Chardonnet, in Paris, conducted by himself on methods entirely his own. The feelings of the boy on this change from the simple life of his Breton village were what might be those 'of a Mussulman fakir suddenly transported into a crowded boulevard.' The one aim of the Abbé Dupanloup in the training of the youth under his charge was to turn out priests with the accomplishments and temper of mind that would render them effective men of the world, able to serve the church in spheres where her interests could best be furthered. Dupanloup was respected and beloved by all his pupils; but, according to the most distinguished of them, whom he afterwards came to regard as a viper he had nursed in his bosom, his system was 'too little rational and too little scientific.'
The boy had from the first been destined for the church, and he proceeded regularly along the course it prescribed. After three years 'rhetoric' at St Nicolas du Chardonnet he was entered as a student of St Sulpice, the great seminary of the diocese of Paris. But before entering that seminary itself and beginning his theology proper he had to complete a two years' course of philosophy in a school at Issy, which formed a branch of the great seminary of St Sulpice. His next two years, therefore, were spent at Issy near Paris, in the study of such philosophical teachers as the church had stamped with its approval. Descartes adapted to Catholic orthodoxy, and the Scotch philosophy as taught by Reid, were the main subjects of study. At the conclusion of his course at Issy he was in all things, personal habits and temper of thought, a docile son of the church; though one of his teachers had already divined the essential tendency of his mind, and had plainly told him 'that he was not a Christian.' But it was the last stage of his novitiate that was to show what direction he was eventually to take. At St Sulpice his attention was mainly turned to the study of Hebrew, and to this study, of his own accord, he added that of German. As the result of these combined studies (for Renan is careful to state that his questionings first came to him from historical and philological, and not from metaphysical considerations) the traditional construction of Christianity had become impossible for him. Quitting St Sulpice in 1845, he finally abandoned all thoughts of the church as a profession. At this crisis of spiritual struggle and general anxiety regarding his future, his sister Henrietta, to whom Renan has paid the highest tribute of brotherly affection, proved his invaluable friend and consoler. By her assistance and counsel he was placed in a position in which he could follow out that purpose which had been gradually shaping itself in his mind—a life of study untrammelled by creeds or formularies.
Thenceforward Renan's life was the uneventful one of the scholar. In 1848 he became agrégé de philosophie, and thus attained a distinct academic status. In 1850 he was appointed to a post in the department of manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. By the publication of successive mémoires his name became known in connection with Oriental studies, and in 1860 he was made one of a commission sent by the government of Louis Napoleon to study the remains of Phœnician civilisation. In 1861 he was chosen by the professors of the Collège de France to fill the vacant chair of Hebrew in that institution. As his views on traditional Christianity, however, were now notorious, the emperor, inspired by the clerical party, refused to ratify his appointment; and it was not till after the fall of the imperial government (November 1870) that he was actually established in possession of the chair. Travels in Italy, in Scandinavia, and the East, all in connection with special departments of research, have only been a component part of a career exclusively that of a student and writer of books. In 1878 he was chosen member of the French Academy. Renan married a niece of the famous painter Ary Scheffer.
Of the long series of Renan's works, which by their combined learning and literary power made him the first man of letters in Europe, we can here note only those which call for special mention in a summary account of his career. His work as an author began with a paper Sur les Langues Sémitiques (1847), afterwards developed into his Histoire Générale des Langues Sémitiques (1854). Checked and supplemented as it has been by subsequent scholars, this treatise is still regarded by specialists as having made an epoch in the history of Oriental studies. In his Averroès et l'Averroïsme (1852) he gave one proof among many others of his familiarity with the life and thought of the middle ages. In addition to these and other works dealing at length with special themes he wrote frequent essays, afterwards collected in his Études d'Histoire Religieuse (1856) and Essais de Morale et de Critique (1859), which arrested wide attention by their grace of style and originality of suggestion. His European reputation, however, dates only from the publication of the Vie de Jésus (1863), which one of his most discerning critics has described as 'one of the events of the century.' With the Vie de Jésus also began what its author regarded as the special work of his life, the Histoire des Origines du Christianisme. In Renan's conception the history of Christianity, in the true sense of the term, is possible only from the close of the 2d century after Christ. Previous to that period materials do not exist for an adequate narrative based on data that justify a dogmatic construction of the development of Christianity. The tracing of the Christian origins, therefore, must be a work essentially tentative, and one that, justifying con- jecture, calls for the finest critical faculty in him who attempts it. It was with this conception of his task that Renan wrote the ten volumes, the labour of nearly thirty years, in which he has embodied his construction of the evolution of the Christian religion and theology. Among works of its kind it stands alone in literary value, though many of its large generalisations have not commended themselves to severer scholars. Of all the volumes that have appeared none excited the extraordinary interest of the first. In the Vie de Jésus the combined weakness and strength of Renan's method were exaggerated to caricature on a subject of supreme and universal interest, and one, moreover, which even from the boldest critics had hitherto exacted the tacit admission of its special place in the heart of humanity. Few readers, even in France, received it without large reserves on the score of good taste and right feeling, while in Britain its preciosity of sentiment and effeminate exquisiteness of manner jarred even on those who were at one with the writer in his general point of view. Of the volumes that followed the Vie de Jésus, that on St Paul and that entitled Marc-Aurèle et la Fin du Monde Antique are specially noteworthy, the one as assigning to the apostle a much inferior place in the history of the Christian church to that which Protestants at least have assigned him, the other for its brilliant delineation of the last stages in the life of paganism. In completion of the task he had set before him, Renan undertook what, as he has himself told us, should have been the natural beginning of his work, the history of the people of Israel. Three volumes of this history appeared between 1887 and 1891, and a fourth completes the author's plan.
Besides this main product of his genius and industry, Renan has from time to time published other volumes, in which he has expounded his views on the current questions of the day, as well as on the profounder questions of human life and destiny. In his Questions Contemporaines and his La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale he has expressed his opinions on the tendencies of modern France, and indicated in what lies her hope for the future. As it is his deepest conviction that all dogmatism is out of place in the discussion of absolute questions, he has chosen the form of dialogue as the most fitting vehicle of his philosophical speculations. The Dialogues Philosophiques and the Drames Philosophiques are attempts in this kind to express the many-sided aspects in which life presents itself to different minds.
In 1883 Renan published Souvenirs d'Enfance, in which he has traced in his most delicate vein of humour and sentiment the early influences from persons and things amid which his childhood and youth were formed. As a supplement to this volume he also published L'Avenir de Science (1890), conceived and written in 1848, and expressing the views he then entertained regarding the tendencies of modern thought. Taken with the preface of 1890, this book throws a vivid light at once on the history of its author's opinions and on that double nature he inherited from his Celtic and Gascon ancestry. In his earlier work sentiment is often strained beyond the limit of virile feeling; his later writings often reveal the Gascon by unseasonable persiflage and epicurean suggestion. He died 2d October 1892, and was buried in the Panthéon.
Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan's contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters. His only predecessor in universality of contemporary fame, in combined erudition and special endowment, is Erasmus, to whom, moreover, both in traits of talent and by the times of dissolution in which they exercised their function as general critics and scholars, he suggests an interesting and evident parallel. Both gave their best years to the work of expounding Christianity; the one vies with the other in the long series of volumes which make the record of their life's labours; the scholarship of both was called in question by their contemporaries; both living in an age of religious revolution were accused by extremer men of undue concession to traditional opinion; and in the work of both it is the element of a many-sided and elusive personality that distinguishes it from the other work of their time.
Renan's Histoire des Origines du Christianisme consists of the following volumes: Vie de Jésus (1863), Les Apôtres (1866), Saint Paul (1867), L'Antechrist (1873), Les Évangiles et la Seconde Génération Chrétienne (1877), L'Église Chrétienne (1878), Marc-Aurèle et la Fin du Monde Antique (1880), Index général (1883); its great complement, Histoire du Peuple d'Israël (5 vols. 1887-1894). Other writings are: Le Livre de Job (1859); Le Cantique des Cantiques (1860); L'Écclésiaste (1882); Histoire Générale des Langues Sémitiques (1854); Mission de Phénicie (1865-74); Études d'Histoire Religieuse (1856); Nouvelles Études d'Histoire Religieuses (1884); Averroès et l'Averroïsme (1852); Essais de Morale et de Critique (1859); Mélange d'Histoire et de Voyages (1878); Questions Contemporaines (1868); La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale (1871); De l'Origine du Langage (1863); Dialogues Philosophiques (1876); Drames Philosophiques, including Caliban, L'Eau de Jouvence, Le Prêtre de Nemi, L'Abbesse de Jouarre (1888); Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse (1883); Discours et Conférences (1887); L'Avenir de Science (1890); the Hibbert Lectures (1880) delivered in London, on The Influence of the Institutions, Thought, and Culture of Rome on Christianity; with Victor Leclercq, the Histoire Littéraire de France au XIVe Siècle; and Mu Sœur Henriette (1895; trans. as Brother and Sister, 1896).
For critical estimates, see Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis (tome ii.); Scherer, Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine (tome viii.); G. Monod, Les Maîtres de l'Histoire (1895). See also Grant Duff's In Memoriam (1893) and Mme. Darmesteter's Life of him (1897).