I
Renan drew himself in his Life of Jesus, as one may see by comparing it with his Memoirs of My Youth. He projected himself upon Jesus and wrote a life of Renan instead. He portrayed in the volume his individual traits and gave his own characteristics to Jesus. His picture of Jesus is not a true one. Unconsciously he read into Jesus's life predominating features of his own personality, and also of his sister Henrietta's. He emphasised Christ's love of flowers, his indifference to the external world, his obsession with a utopian ideal and a mission in life. He found in Jesus a love for the simple and common folk, and a partiality towards women and children. He admired Jesus's exaltation of beggars and sympathised with his making poverty an object of love and desire. He saw no external affectation in Christ, who was bound only to his mission, and who was a revolutionist besides. Jesus had only some of the qualities Renan attributed to him.
"Never did any one more loftily avow that disdain of the 'world' which is the essential thing of great things and great originality," said Renan of his Master. Thus was he describing himself unconsciously and presenting the plan of life which he, Renan, had followed.
If we read the analysis of Jesus's character and teachings in the last three chapters of the Life of Jesus and then turn to Renan's analysis of his own character in his autobiography, we shall see that the author had projected himself upon Jesus, as it were, and identified himself with the Master he worshipped. He finds in himself, he tells us in his autobiography, love of poverty, indifference to the world, devotion to his mission, affection for the common people, esteem for simplicity, contempt for success and luxury, fondness for poverty, dislike for the world of action, such as mercantile life—in short, he dwells on all the meek and lowly traits that he has, and arrogates to himself Jesus's practices, and attributes to his master idiosyncrasies of his own. In an unguarded moment he forgets his customary modesty and gives us the clue to himself in these words: "I am the only man of my time who has understood the character of Jesus and of Francis of Assissi." In this bit of self-portraiture is the whole secret of his Life of Jesus. Critics were attacking him for drawing a false picture of the founder of Christianity, but it did not dawn on them why the portrait was distorted. "Jesus has in reality ever been my master," says Renan.
How strongly Renan identified himself with and projected himself upon Jesus may be seen from the fact that the memoirs written at the age of sixty are in the same tone as the Life of Jesus, published twenty years earlier. He also tells us in the memoirs how the Life of Jesus originated. From the moment he abandoned the church, he says, with the resolution that he should still remain faithful to Jesus, the Life of Jesus was mentally written.
A few more traits that may be mentioned, which he felt he had in common with Jesus, were his aversion to incurring intimate friendships. There is reason to believe that Jesus did have friends, but Renan, who did not cultivate friendship (though he had a good friend in Berthelot), tried to persuade himself that Jesus was also like him in this regard. Again Renan deemed himself a dreamer, like Jesus, who was, however, also a man of action. Renan also saw his own effeminacy and kindliness in Jesus, who, however, vented himself of vigorous utterances.
Renan also fancied he found in Jesus his own inherent hostility to Jewish culture; his own anti-Semitism. As a matter of fact, Jesus owed much to Jewish culture, though he wanted the Jews to abandon some of their customs and to revise the Mosaic laws; the feeling among Jews was that Jesus, instead of being anti-Semitic, wished to be their leader and Messiah and King. Renan reads into Jesus his own anti-Semitism. Those who are familiar with Renan's writings are aware of the many slurring and contemptuous references he makes to the Jews. In fact, one of the paradoxes of his life is that with his liberality and gentleness, with his abandoning of all Christian dogma, he entertains a bitter feeling towards the people who gave him his ideal man, the people who originated, even by his own admission, many of Jesus's maxims. Renan states that Jesus profited immensely by the teachings of Jesus, son of Sirach, of Rabbi Hillel and of the synagogue. Renan unjustly made Jesus have his own failing, anti-Semitism.
Strangely enough, Renan's treatment of the story of Jesus (outside of his giving Jesus traits of his own) has been very largely a Jewish one. It is for this reason that all devout Christians were offended. Renan treated Jesus as a man and refused to credit all the legends connected with him. Renan did not believe that Jesus was born without a human father; that he was a member of a Trinity; that he could perform supernatural miracles. In short, Renan did not accept Jesus as a son of God, though giving him traits almost divine and free from human frailties. The picture of Jesus in the life is an idealised Jewish portrayal.
Renan serves as one of the best examples of a free thinker remaining a devotee of his faith, though discarding all the tenets on which it rests. His early religious training had a permanent influence on him, and he was a Christian all his life, even though he differed with the church. In one of his last and most profound essays, the "Examination of the Human Conscience," he gives us a confession of his faith. Here he appears as a pantheist, but ventures incredible guesses that there may be a supernatural. His church mind plays havoc with his Spinozism, and we see his early infantile influences. Intellectually at times he stands high, higher it may be said without irreverence than his master Jesus, since he had at his command a knowledge of science and philosophy with which Jesus was unfamiliar. The greatness of Renan appears in his Philosophical Dialogues, in his Philosophical Dramas, in his Future of Science, in the Anti-Christ and other essays and books. When he moralises he is a monk; when he speculates on philosophic and scientific subjects, he is a thinker. George Brandes's Renan as a dramatist is an excellent study.[F]
Yet literature scarcely offers such an instance of a man projecting himself upon a historical character. Such a projection is similar to the seeking, in an unusual degree, by nervous people of moral shelter and consolation in some other person. The reposing of Renan on Jesus gives us an insight into the birth of worship of religious founders. Pfister, a disciple of Freud, and himself a Christian pastor, says: "In the divine father-love, he, whose longing for help, for ethical salvation, is not satisfied by the surrounding reality, finds an asylum. In the love for the Saviour, the love-thirsting soul which finds no comprehension and no return love in his fellowmen is refreshed."
A complete psychoanalytic study of Renan, which this essay does not pretend to be, would make a fuller inquiry into his relations with his mother, his affection for his sister and her influence on him and his never-swerving admiration for the priests who were his early teachers. He has left tributes to all of them. They ruled his life. In his unconscious a fixation upon them was buried. His love for them kept him a Christian, when intellectually he was a free thinker. They are present in his Life of Christ, and the psychoanalyst can see them guiding the pen of Renan. They are always with him. Had they not loved him and he them so intensely, had he not inherited so strongly those meek, effeminate and kindly traits, his temperament might have been as unchristian as his intellect.
We see why the extreme liberal and the orthodox Christian were offended by his Life of Christ, and why hundreds of pamphlets and articles were written against it. It was really a portrait of the author, and the unconscious Christian in him puzzled the radicals, while his conscious intellect seemed like blasphemy to the devout followers of dogmas. He gave his own idealised traits to his hero, and the freethinkers complained Renan made Jesus a god anyhow, while it seemed an insult to the Christians that mere moral virtues instead of divinity should be thrust upon Jesus, who they felt did not need Renan's compliments.