Ernest Renan
Joseph Ernest Renan, born 28 February 1823 at Trguier and died on 2 October 1892 in Paris , is a writer , a philologist , philosopher and historian French.
Fascinated by science, Ernest Renan immediately adheres to the theories of Darwin on the evolution of espces.Il establishes a close relationship between religions and ethnic and geographical roots. An essential part of his work is also devoted to religions with such a history of the origins of Christianity (7 volumes from 1863 to 1881) and his Life of Jesus (1863). This book which marked the intellectual circles during his lifetime contains the thesis, while controversial, that the biography of Jesus must be understood as that of any other man, and the Bible as being subjected to critical scrutiny as does What other important historical document. This sparked heated debates and anger of the Catholic Church.
Ernest Renan is now considered an intellectual with reference texts known as Prayer on the Acropolis (1865) or What is a Nation? " (1882) where he formulated the idea that a nation is more on a desire for association than a real common past (historical, racial or linguistic)
His interest in its UK home was also constant Soul Breton (1854) in his autobiographical text Memories of My Youth (1883)
Summary |
Key dates in his life
Received first aggregation of Philosophy in September 1848 he became Doctor of Letters in response to a thesis on the Muslim philosopher Averroes completed in 1852. In 1849 and 1850 , he was responsible for mission in Italy.
In 1856 , he became a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres , while that on 11 September 1856 , he married Harriet Cornelia Scheffer, the daughter of the painter Henry Scheffer who is the niece of the painter Ary Scheffer. Several portraits of Ernest Renan Scheffer signed Henry, Rene de St. Marceaux and Leopold Bernstamm today evoke the memory of the great man, that of his wife and their children Ary Renan (born 1858) and Naomi (b. 1862) which will become the wife of John Psichari , the Museum of Romantic Life , at the Hotel Scheffer-Renan, at rue Chaptal in the heart of New Athens in Paris.
In 1860 , he made the occasion of the French expedition an archaeological mission to Lebanon and Syria. Professor of Hebrew at the College de France in 1862 , it quickly suspended for remarks considered sacrilege in Jesus Christ. In its opening price of the Hebrew language, Chaldean and Syriac in the Collge de France , Ernest Renan is an apocalyptic description of the heaviness of spirit Semite who objects to the genius Aryan and his heir European culture enriched with Greek sources.
In 1863 , the publication of his Life of Jesus, a book written during his stay in Ghazir Lebanon, knows a great success and scandal. Pope Pius IX , very affected, called him a "blasphemer European", and 1864 , the Minister of Education Victor Duruy removes its course.
In 1865 , he traveled in Egypt , in Asia Minor and Greece.
In 1869 , he appeared under the label of an independent parliamentary seat in Seine-et-Marne , which earned him an electoral defeat.
On 13 June 1878 , he was elected to the French Academy , the chair 29 in place of Claude Bernard.
In 1883 he became director of the College de France.
He was elevated to the rank of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.
Complete Biography
Ernest Renan was born February 28, 1823 at Trguier in a family of fishermen , and his grandfather, who acquired a certain ease, had bought a house where he had established himself, his father, captain of a small ship and committed Republican, had married the daughter of Royalist traders from the nearby town of Lannion. All his life, Renan felt torn between his father's political beliefs and those of his mother. He was five when his father died, his sister Harriet, twelve years his senior, became the moral leader of the family. Having unsuccessfully tried to open a school for girls Trguier she went to Paris as a teacher in a school for young girls. Ernest, meanwhile, was educated at the seminary in his hometown, now college-Ernest Renan. The assessments of his teachers describe him as "docile, patient, diligent, careful." The priests gave him a solid education in mathematics and Latin , the mother completed. She was only half Breton , his paternal ancestors had come from Bordeaux and Renan confessed that his own nature and the Gascon Breton were constantly clash.
In 1838 , Renan had won every prize at the seminar Trguier. His sister spoke to him during the summer school principal in Paris where she taught and he himself spoke to Father Felix Dupanloup , who had created the seminar Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet , a school where young aristocrats Catholics and most gifted students seminars should be educated together to strengthen the link between the aristocracy and clergy. Dupanloup had therefore come Renan, who was only fifteen years and had never left Britain. "I learned with astonishment that there were serious laymen and scholars .
Among his family lineage, one can mention the philosopher Olivier Revault Allonnes of which he is the great-grandfather, and Ernest Psichari , which he is the grandfather.
How did Renan courses
"I followed the College de France, fairly regularly for three years, the course of Renan. Everyone knows how Renan was his Hebrew lessons. He does little or nothing prepared. In that time, he explained the text of the Psalms. He took a verse, read it, translate it, read the Greek Septuagint for the comparison, citing speculation of Oratorian Houbigant or some modern critical for correcting the text, weighing every word, so to speak, and not s 'prohibiting or digressions or repetitions. His opinion was that a professor from the College of France should work to his audience, and he worked, in fact before us, a little slower, I suppose, that in his study. After all, his course was a very good introduction to textual criticism of the Old Testament. He often spoke of something else, but this is mainly that one could learn "
- Alfred Loisy , Things Past.
Ideas and theories
- He appears fascinated by the quest for truth and unselfishness, only allowing the system to consolidate human knowledge from generation to generation, while perpetuating the same mistakes and blind selfishness of the individual are necessarily cancel out resulting in the The effect of antagonistic forces and are committed to leaving no trace. (See also article Noosphere .)
- His relationship with religion are complex. He criticizes as a system of thought while affirming its importance as a unifying factor in human societies and the danger of turning away too hastily. In The Future of Science , he summarizes the situation by saying: "When I'm in town I do not care who goes to Mass, but when I am in the country, I laugh instead of one who do not go. "
- Renan immediately rallied to the idea of natural selection put forward by Charles Darwin.
- It shows generally worried about the future of humanity, fearing his "death by exhaustion of the generosity of hearts, like the industry may one day be exhausted by the coals." Perhaps our descendants will live as they like "thinking only of lizards lazily enjoy the sun."
- In his book General History and systems of comparative Semitic Languages (1855), he established a close relationship between religions and ethnic and geographical roots, thesis he developed in 1862 in his opening speech at the College de France , between the "psyche Desert Semitic peoples (" the desert is monotheistic ") to the" psyche of the forest "of Indo-Europeans whose polytheism seems shaped by a changing nature and diversity of the seasons .
- But he fought the idea that race would be the origin of the Nation, and thus opposes any form of pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, etc..
Some questions about the universe
- "Nature is not obliged to comply with our small conveniences. In this declaration of rights: "I can not be virtuous without any particular chimera," the Lord is our right to reply: "Too bad for you. Your dreams can not force me to change the order of fate. "
- "This Supreme resultant of the total universe, we can not say one thing, it's good. Because if it was not good, the total universe, which exists from eternity, would have destroyed. Assume a banking house existing since eternity. If this house had the slightest flaw in its databases, a thousand times she had gone bankrupt. If the balance of the world does not culminate in a bonus to shareholders, long ago that the world no longer exist. Kenan and Brittany
Renan was recognized during his lifetime, both by the inhabitants of the region as Trgor by all Britain, including his enemies, as a great intellectual Breton. He spoke Breton in his youth and did not lose the use .
Some quotes from the book's academic Balcou Jean , Renan and Britain :
- "While it is obvious that not all Breton Renan Renan. "(P. 9)
- "Ernest Renan is one of the most important authors of French culture, no one questions that. He and two other Britons, Chateaubriand and Lamennais oriented romanticism, a literary historian as Thibaudet had already established by showing that the nineteenth century was based entirely on this foundation granite. "(P.10)
- "... It is in the work of Renan the permanence of a Breton and Celtic music. "
- "... Over the fate of an exceptional man facing modernity, and modernity that makes this, we touch, beyond history, as it must call a new area of Britain. "
- "... I was, I am patriotic and I do not lose interest in the Great French nation or homeland Brittany Little . "(P. 27)
- "... We Britons, we're tough ... In this I was really Breton . "
Racism
Ernest Renan was the victim of prejudices of his time. Witness, for example this quote a scandal if we judge according to our current criteria: "Nature has made a race of workers. This is the Chinese race, a wonderful dexterity of hand, almost no sense of honor; govern it with justice by taking her to the benefit of such a government an ample dowry for the benefit of the conquering race She will be met, a race of tillers of the soil, the negro: be good for him and human, and everything will be in order; a race of masters and soldiers, that the European race. Let everyone do what it has done and everything will be alright "(Ernest Renan," The intellectual and moral reform ", 1871)
Judaism
It is important, before giving extracts in mind that Renan did not hide his admiration for the Jewish people, "the only one that has to happen a long time for this chimera of individual survival" and that he blamed - at after an analysis based on dating of texts ( Proverbs , the Ecclesiastes , the Book of Job , etc..) - that have left eventually contaminate the concept, decided by him absurd. Judaism thus became a religion like others, giving up what had long been his honor in front of them (Renan was a philologist by profession).
Youth in clerical Ernest Renan, Jean Pommier reports that Renan had put on the cover of his Bible the word of Nehemiah , who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem: Magnum opus facio, non possum descent (I am a great work and I can not come down). In his History of Israel, Renan emphasizes again that
"Nehemiah was a response that should always have in mind those who have some duty to perform in life:" I am a great work and I can not come down. " "- Ernest Renan, History of Israel quoted in Jean Guhenno , Journal of the dark years, October 31, 1941, Gallimard, 1947.
Yet we also find in his writings: "The man can do great things without believing in immortality, but we need to believe in him and about him. . One can thus understand the thinking of George Sand about Renan: "Renan repair stubbornly with one hand what it destroys the other."
Science and the predilection
"Love science. "- Renan said.
"The existence and nature of a being does not prove that its particular acts, individual volunteers, and if the Deity had wanted to be perceived by the scientific sense, we would discover in the general government of the world acts on the stamp which is free and wanted, meteorology should be constantly disturbed by the effect of the prayers of men, astronomy sometimes lacking. Yet no case of such a derogation has been scientifically observed, no miracle has occurred before a learned body, all those we encounter or are the result of imagination and legend, or have passed in front of witnesses who lacked the means necessary to ensure the illusions and determine the miraculous nature of a fact. "- Metaphysics and its future, 1860.
"When science will describe everything that is knowable in the universe, then God will be complete if we made the word synonymous with God's total existence. In this sense, God is rather that it is: it is in fieri, is on track to do so. But stop there would be a very incomplete theology. God is more than the total existence, it is also the absolute. It is about where mathematics, metaphysics, logic is true, it is the location of the ideal, the principle of good living, beauty and truth. Considered in this way, God is fully and unreservedly, he is eternal and unchanging, without progress or become. "- The natural sciences and historical sciences, letter to Marcellin Berthelot , 1863.
Art
"Our race did not begin developed by the taste of comfort and business. This race was a moral, brave, warlike, jealous of liberty and honor, loving nature, capable of devotion, much preferring to life. The trade, industry has been exercised for the first time on a large scale by Semitic peoples, or at least spoke a Semitic language, the Phoenicians. In the Middle Ages, Arabs and Jews were also our teachers actually trade. All the European luxury, from antiquity to the seventeenth century, came from the East. I say the luxury and not art: it is the infinity of one another ... "- From the origins of language, Michel Lvy, 1864, p. 15
Renan, however, could not ignore the commandment "Thou shalt not graven image" (and therefore the possibility to take it literally) and the admonition not to try to compete with the Creator in representing the human face appears in the Koran (it is only true according to the Sunnis).
Islam
"Islamism :" , . Indeed, there accuses Islam of opposing freedom and consequently the progress of mankind :Renan's statements about Islam in his lecture at the Sorbonne in 1883, provoking reaction Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani , Muslim intellectual then travel to Paris, which opposes a rebuttal in The Journal of Debates.
The Nation and the Race
- "The truth is that there is no pure race and that basing policy on the ethnographic analysis is to focus on the chimera. The noblest country, Britain, France, Italy, are those where the blood is the most mixed. Germany makes it an exception in this regard? Is it a pure Germanic countries? What an illusion! While the South was Gallic. All the East, from Elba, is slave. And the parties that they claim actually pure are they indeed? This brings us to one of the problems on which it is most important to get clear ideas and prevent misunderstandings. "
- Discussions on race are endless, because the word race is taken by historians and philologists by anthropologists physiologists in two entirely different meaning. For anthropologists, race has the same meaning as in zoology, it indicates a real descent, a blood relationship. But the study of languages and history does not lead to the same divisions as physiology.
- "The language calls to assemble and it do not force. The United States and England, Spanish America and Spain speak the same language and do not form one nation. Instead, Switzerland, if done well, since it was made with the consent of its parts, has three or four languages. It is in man something more than language: it is the will. The desire to Switzerland to be united, despite the variety of idioms, is a fact much more important than similarity often obtained through the harassment. "
- What is a Nation? " , lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, March 11, 1882, Calmann Lvy, 1882, p.16
Premonition future wars
Unlike Victor Hugo, for whom the twentieth century would see the advent of world peace, Renan, to the monolithic culture of Prussia, provides that this attitude will "only lead to wars of extermination, similar to those various species of rodents or predators engaged for life. That would be the end of this fruitful blend composed of many elements and all necessary, which is called humanity " . The two world wars will confirm this painful feeling.
Clashes Trguier (1903-1904)
Even after his death, Ernest Renan continued to arouse bitter controversy between "secular" and "clerical," especially in his hometown where he had acquired a house, now become the Museum "The House of Ernest Renan" of trguier. In 1903, the erection of his statue on the Place du Martray front of the cathedral, inaugurated by the Chairman Emile Combes in person, was seen as a provocation by the clerics who protested vigorously and replied by the construction of an "ordeal repair", also called "ordeal of protest", still visible on one of the docks of Trguier.
The front facade of the Maison de Renan "to Trguier
The back cover, garden, home of Ernest Renan Trguier
The statue of Ernest Renan Trguier
Drawing of "The Little Jounal" incidents between 1903 and Trguier
The "ordeal repair" (1904) to Trguier
Click on a thumbnail to enlarge Works
- The origin of language ( 1848 )
- The Soul Breton ( 1854 )
- General history and comparative systems of Semitic languages ( 1855 )
- Studies of Religious History ( 1857 )
- Moral Essays and criticism ( 1859 )
- What is a Nation? " (Lecture given on 11 March 1882 at the Sorbonne )
- What is a Nation? " ( 1882 ) Full Text Online Library Rutebeuf
- Prayer on the Acropolis ( 1865 )
- Early History of Christianity - 7 volumes - ( 1863 - 1881 )
- The intellectual and moral reform of France ( 1871 )
- Philosophical dramas
- Recollections of My Youth ( 1883 )
- History of Israel ( in 1887 - one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three ), 5 volumes
- The Future of Science, thoughts of 1,848 ( 1890 )
- Politics
- Contemporary Issues ( 1868 )
- Literature
- Moral Essays and criticism ( 1859 )
- Henriette Renan, remembrance for those who knew ( 1862 )
- Blends history and travel ( 1878 )
- Speeches and Conferences ( 1887 )
- Detached leaves ( 1892 )
- Patrice ( 1908 )
- Fragments intimate and romantic ( 1914 )
- Travel: Italy, Norway ( 1928 )
- Corneille, Racine and Bossuet ( 1928 )
- Philosophy
- Averroes and Averroes ( 1852 )
- On Philosophy Peripatetic, apud Syros ( 1852 )
- Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments ( 1876 )
- Philosophical Examination of Conscience ( 1889 )
- History and religion
- Study of Religious History ( 1857 )
- The Book of Job ( 1858 )
- The Song of Songs ( 1860 )
- Literary History of France in the fourteenth century ( 1865 ), in collaboration with Victor Le Clerc
- The intellectual and moral reform of France ( 1871 )
- Conferences of England ( 1880 )
- Ecclesiastes ( 1881 )
- New studies of religious history ( 1884 )
- Buddhism ( 1884 ), Editions Lume
- Studies on the religious policy of the reign of Philip the Fair ( 1899 )
- Blends religious and historical ( 1904 )
- Psychological essay on Jesus Christ ( 1921 )
- Linguistics and Archaeology
- History of study of Greek in Western Europe since the late fifth century to the fourteenth ( 1948 ), unpublished, Le Cerf, 2009
- The origin of language ( 1 848 - 1 858 )
- General History of the Semitic languages ( 1855 )
- Mission Phoenicia ( in 1864 - one thousand eight hundred seventy-four )
- Correspondence
- Intimate Letters ( 1896 )
- New intimate letters ( 1923 )
- Correspondence with Berthelot ( 1898 )
- Letters from the seminar ( 1902 )
- Emanuelle ( 1913 )
- Letters to his brother Alain ( 1926 )
- Correspondence ( 1927 )
- Papers Youth ( 1906 )
- New Papers Youth ( 1907 )
- Early work ( 1931 )
- Mission Phoenicia ( one thousand eight hundred and sixty-five - one thousand eight hundred seventy-four )
- The poetry of the Celtic races.
- The Future of Science ( 1890 )
Bibliography
- On Renan and Britain.
- Rene d'Ys , Renan in Brittany, 1904.
- Leon Dubreuil , Rosmaphamon or old age Renan, 1946.
- R.-M. Galand, Celtic Soul Renan, 1959.
- Jean Balcou , Ernest Renan, the heretic, in "Literary History and culture of Britain", Champion-Slatkine, Paris-Geneva, 1987.
- Jean Balcou, Renan and Brittany, Champion, 1992.
- Renan on philosopher.
- Paul Bourget , Ernest Renan, testing (Quantin, 1883).
- Brunschvicg , On the philosophy of Ernest Renan in Journal of metaphysics and morality, Grade 1, 1893 , p. 87-97
- R. Dussaud , The Work of Ernest Renan Scientific, 1951.
- On political ideas of Renan.
- Edward Richard , Ernest Renan traditionalist thinker? Presses Universitaires d'Aix-Marseille, 1996, 402 p.
Sources and references
- (In) "Ernest Renan," in Encyclopaedia Britannica , 1911 See also
- Portraits of Ernest Renan, in particular
- Henry Scheffer , painter
- Ren de Saint-Marceaux , sculptor
- Leopold Bernstamm , sculptor
- Publication
- Exhibition catalog "Ernest Renan", 1992-1993, Muse de la Vie Romantique , Htel Scheffer Renan, Paris
Related articles
External Links
- Biographical information on the website of the French Academy
- Website as a tribute to the work of Ernest Renan
- Museum of Romantic Life, Htel Scheffer Renan, Paris
- November-December 2007 - Review Exergue No. 18: Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation (1882)
- Biography of Ernest Renan by Adolphe Nepvou of Carfort Bazouge and Francis, Douniol (Paris), 1864 on the site Gallica
- Archive Ctes d'Armor: birth [1]
Preceded by
Claude BernardChair 29 of the French Academy
1878-1892Followed by
Paul-Armand Challemel Lacour
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