By the end of this period He had cast off all earthly ambitions. Nothing of earth existed for Him any more. A strange longing for persecution and martyrdom had taken possession of Him. It was not, however, the resolve to offer an atonement for the sins of His people which familiarised Him with the thought of death; it was forced upon Him by the knowledge that He had entered upon a path in which it was impossible for Him to sustain His rôle for more than a few months, or perhaps even weeks. So He sets out for Jerusalem, outwardly a hero, inwardly half in despair because He has turned aside from His true path. The gentle, faithful, long-eyelashed mule bears Him, amid the acclamations of the multitude, through the gate of the capital.
The third act begins: the stage is dark and becomes constantly darker, until at last, through the darkness of the scene, there is faintly visible only the figure of a woman—of her who in her deep grief beside the grave was by her vision to call to life again Him whom she loved. There was darkness, too, in the souls of the disciples, and in that of the Master. The bitter jealousy between Judas and John made one of them a traitor. As for Jesus, He had His hour of gloom to fight through in Gethsemane. For a moment His human nature awakened in Him; all that He thought He had slain and put behind Him for ever rose up and confronted Him as He knelt there upon the ground. “Did He remember the clear brooks of Galilee at which He might have slaked His thirst—the vine and the fig-tree beneath which He might have rested—the maidens who would perhaps have been willing to love Him? Did He regret His too exalted nature? Did He, a martyr to His own greatness, weep that He had not remained the simple carpenter of Nazareth? We do not know!”
He is dead. Renan, as though he stood in Père Lachaise, commissioned to pronounce the final allocution over a member of the Academy, apostrophises Him thus: “Rest now, amid Thy glory, noble pioneer. Thou conqueror of death, take the sceptre of Thy Kingdom, into which so many centuries of Thy [pg 188] worshippers shall follow Thee, by the highway which Thou hast opened up.”
The bell rings; the curtain begins to fall; the swing-seats tilt. The epilogue is scarcely heard: “Jesus will never have a rival. His religion will again and again renew itself; His story will call forth endless tears: His sufferings will soften the hearts of the best; every successive century will proclaim that among the sons of men there hath not arisen a greater than Jesus.”
The book passed through eight editions in three months. The writings of those who opposed it had an equal vogue. That of Freppel had reached its twelfth edition in 1864.[110] Their name was legion. Whatever wore a soutane and could wield a pen charged against Renan, the bishops leading the van. The tone of these attacks was not always very elevated, nor their logic very profound. In most cases the writers were only concerned to defend the Deity of Christ,[111] and the miracles, and are satisfied that they have done so when they have pointed out some of the glaring inconsistencies in Renan's work. Here and there, however, among these refutations we catch the tone of a loftier ethical spirit which has recognised the fundamental weakness of the work, the lack of any definite ethical principles in the writer's outlook upon life.[112] There were some indeed who were not content with a refutation; they would gladly have seen active measures taken against Renan. One of his most embittered adversaries, Amadée Nicolas,[113] reckons up in an appendix to his work the maximum penalties authorised by the existing enactments against free-thought, and would welcome the application of the law of the 25th of March 1822, according to which five years' imprisonment could be imposed for the crime of “insulting or making ridiculous a religion recognised by the state.”
Renan was defended by the Siècle, the Débats, at that time the leading French newspaper, and the Temps, in which Scherer published five articles upon the book. Even the Revue des deux mondes, which had formerly raised a warning voice against Strauss, allowed itself to go with the stream, and published in its August [pg 189] number of 1863 a critical analysis by Havet[114] who hailed Renan's work as a great achievement, and criticised only the inconsistencies by which he had endeavoured to soften down the radical character of his undertaking. Later on the Revue changed its attitude and sided with Renan's opponents. In the Protestant camp there was an even keener sense of distaste than in the Catholic for the sentimental gloss which Renan had spread over his work to make it attractive to the multitude by its iridescent colours. In four remarkable letters Athanase Coquerel the younger took the author to task for this.[115] From the standpoint of orthodox scholarship E. de Pressensé condemned him;[116] and proceeded without loss of time to refute him in a large-scale Life of Jesus.[117] He was answered by Albert Réville,[118] who claims recognition for Renan's services to criticism.
In general, however, the rising French school of critical theology was disappointed in Renan. Their spokesman was Colani. “This is not the Christ of history, the Christ of the Synoptics,” he writes in 1864 in the Revue de théologie, “but the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, though without His metaphysical halo, and painted over with a brush which has been dipped in the melancholy blue of modern poetry, in the rose of the eighteenth-century idyll, and in the grey of a moral philosophy which seems to be derived from La Rochefoucauld.” “In expressing this opinion,” he adds, “I believe I am speaking in the name of those who belong to what is known as the new Protestant theology, or the Strassburg school. We opened M. Renan's book with sympathetic interest; we closed it with deep disappointment.”[119]
The Strassburg school had good cause to complain of Renan, for he had trampled their growing crops. They had just begun to arouse some interest, and slowly and surely to exercise an influence upon the whole spiritual life of France. Sainte-Beuve had called attention to the work of Reuss, Colani, Réville, and Scherer. [pg 190] Others of the school were Michel Nicolas of Montauban and Gustave d'Eichthal. Nefftzer, the editor of the Temps, who was at the same time a prophet of coming political events, defended their cause in the Parisian literary world. The Revue germanique of that period, the influence of which upon French literature can hardly be over-estimated, was their sworn ally. Then came Renan and threw public opinion into a ferment of excitement. Everything in the nature of criticism, and of progress in religious thought, was associated with his name, and was thereby discredited. By his untimely and over-easy popularisation of the ideas of the critical school he ruined their quiet work. The excitement roused by his book swept away all that had been done by those noble and lofty spirits, who now found themselves involved in a struggle with the outraged orthodoxy of Paris, and were hard put to it to defend themselves. Even down to the present day Renan's work forms the greatest hindrance to any serious advance in French religious thought.
The excitement aroused upon the other side of the Rhine was scarcely less than in Paris. Within a year there appeared five different German translations, and many of the French criticisms of Renan were also translated.[120] The German Catholic press was wildly excited;[121] the Protestant press was more restrained, more inclined to give the author a fair hearing, and even ventured to express admiration of the historical merits of his performance. Beyschlag[122] saw in Renan an advance upon Strauss, inasmuch as for him the life of Jesus as narrated in the Gospels, while not, indeed, in any sense supernatural, is nevertheless historical. For a certain school of theology, therefore, Renan was a deliverer from Strauss; they were especially grateful to him for his defence, sophistical though it was, of the Fourth Gospel. Weizsäcker expressed his admiration. Strauss, far from directing his “Life of Jesus for the German People,” with which he was then occupied, [pg 191] against the superficial and frivolous French treatment of the subject—as has sometimes been alleged—hailed Renan in his preface as a kindred spirit and ally, and “shook hands with him across the Rhine.” Luthardt,[123] however, remained inexorable. “What is there lacking in Renan's work?” he asks. And he replies, “It lacks conscience.”
That is a just judgment. From this lack of conscience, Renan has not been scrupulous where he ought to have been so. There is a kind of insincerity in the book from beginning to end. Renan professes to depict the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, though he does not believe in the authenticity or the miracles of that Gospel. He professes to write a scientific work, and is always thinking of the great public and how to interest it. He has thus fused together two works of disparate character. The historian finds it hard to forgive him for not going more deeply into the problem of the development in the thought of Jesus, with which he was brought face to face by the emphasis which he laid on eschatology, and for offering in place of a solution the highly-coloured phrases of the novelist.