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.
II
Authors also draw on the unconscious for their immoral characters. In Pere Goriot Balzac drew himself in Eugene Rastignac, but the author is also present in the villain of the novel, Vautrin or Jacques Collins, who appears likewise in Lost Illusions and The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. Vautrin, it will be recalled, tries to persuade Eugene to marry a girl whose father will leave her a million francs, if Eugene consents to have her brother, the more likely heir, despatched by a crony of Vautrin's. Thus Eugene would be enabled to become rich immediately instead of being compelled to struggle for years. Vautrin wants a reward for his services. Vautrin's words are really the voice of Balzac's unconscious; Eugene's inner struggles are Balzac's own; and though the young student rejects the proposition he takes up Vautrin's line of reasoning unconsciously, even though to drop it. Vautrin's Machiavellian viewpoint was at times unconsciously entertained by Balzac himself, though never practised. We know Balzac always sought for schemes of getting rich to pay his debts, and was always occupied with thoughts of his aggrandisement and ambition. He no doubt unconsciously entertained notions that riches, love, fame might be attained by violating the moral edicts of society; these ideas may have obtruded but a few seconds to be immediately dismissed. But once they made their appearance they were repressed in Balzac's unconscious, and emerged in the characters of Vautrin and other villains who are the author's unconscious.
Balzac understood that vice often triumphed and that the way of virtue was often hard. "Do you believe that there is any absolute standard in this world? Despise mankind and find out the meshes that you can slip through in the net of the code." Vautrin here gives Balzac's inner unconscious secret away. The author was not aware that he drew upon himself unconsciously in depicting Vautrin. This, of course, does not mean that Balzac agreed with Vautrin. We remember Eugene shouted out to Vautrin, "Silence, sir! I will not hear any more; you make me doubt myself." The author merely got his unconscious into one of his leading villains, just as Milton did in Satan, as Goethe did in Mephistopheles.
Vautrin is Lucien de Rubempré's evil influence also, and Balzac saw how disastrously he himself might have ended his life had he heeded his unconscious, his Jacques Collin.