Joseph Ernest Renan

From Philosopedia

Renan, Joseph Ernest (28 February 1823 - 12 October 1892)

Renan’s Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus, 1863) gave a Humanist interpretation of the Christ as “an incomparable man” and created an international sensation. Jesus, he wrote, was man like any other, and his biography needed to be written as that of any other man.

Renan has the distinction of having nineteen specific works included on the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading. In addition, the Pope personally attacked Renan as a “French blasphemer.” Vie de Jésus made the list in 1863, L’antechrist in 1881, and L’église chrétienne in 1881.

His faith, Renan claimed, was destroyed neither by metaphysics nor philosophy but by historical criticism. In 1848 he gained the Volney Prize for a memoir on the Semitic languages, and in 1852 published his work on Averroës and Averroîsm. In 1856 he was elected member of the Academy of Inscriptions.

In his Life of Jesus, Renan wrote,

No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.

Being a professor of Hebrew in the Institute of France, Renan was denounced by the bishops, who deprived him of his chair which, incidentally, was restored in 1870.

Joseph McCabe accused one work, Barry’s Renan (1905), of being “a Catholic libel.”

Renan’s sister Henriette was his invaluable assistant and, like him, never returned to the Church. Canon Barry’s life of Renan states that she received the last sacraments from “a good Maronite priest” when she was dying. Renan, however, said that the man was “a sort of fool” who forced his way to Henriette when brother and sister were unconscious with fever in Syria, and that the priest had daubed her with his holy oil. In Psichari’s Soeur Anselmine, his son-in-law wrote that Renan’s last days were tranquil and that he told him, “I know that when I am dead nothing of me will remain.”

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