It was because he grasped this vital point that Renan’s discussion of the religious question is so instructive. For him, religion is essentially an affair of personal taste. Here we have another indication of the clear way in which Renan was able to discern the tendencies of his time. He published his Etudes d’Histoire religieuse in 1857, and his Preface to the Nouvelles Etudes d’Histoire religieuse was written in 1884. He claims there that freedom is essential to religion, and that it is absolutely necessary that the State should have no power whatever over it. Religion is as personal and private a matter as taste in literature or art. There should be no State laws, he claims, relating to religion at all, any more than dress is prescribed for citizens by law. He well points out that only a State which is strictly neutral in religion can ever be absolutely free from playing the rôle of persecutor. The favouring of one sect will entail some persecution or hardship upon others. Further, he sees the iniquity of taxing the community to pay the expenses of clergy to whose teachings they may object, or whose doctrines are not theirs. Freedom, Renan believed, would claim its own in the near future and, denouncing the Concordat, he prophesied the abolition of the State Church.
The worst type of organisation Renan holds to be the theocratic state, like Islam, or the ancient Pontifical State in which dogma reigns supreme. He condemns also the State whose religion is based upon the profession of a majority of its citizens. There should be, as Spinoza was wont to style it, “liberty of philosophising.” The days of the dominance of dogma are passing, in many quarters gone by already, “Religion has become for once and all a matter of personal taste.”
Renan himself was deeply religious in mind. He was never an atheist and did not care for the term “free-thinker” because of its implied associations with the irreligion of the previous century. He stands out, however, not only in our period of French thought, but in the world development of the century as one of the greatest masters of religious criticism. His historical work is important, and he possessed a knowledge and equipment for that task. His distinguished Semitic scholarship led to his obtaining the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, and enabled him to write his Histories, one of the Jews and one of Christianity.
It was as a volume of this Histoire des Origines du Christianisme that his Vie de Jésus appeared in 1863. This life of the Founder of Christianity produced a profound stir in the camps of religious orthodoxy, and drew upon its author severe criticisms. Apart from the particular views set forth in that volume, we must remember that the very fact of his writing upon “a sacred subject,” which was looked upon as a close preserve, reserved for the theologians or churchmen alone, was deemed at that time an original and daring feat in France.
His particular views, which created at the time such scandal, were akin to those of Baur and the Tubingen School, which Strauss (Renan’s contemporary) had already set forth in his Leben Jesu.[[12]] Briefly, they may be expressed as the rejection of the supernatural. Herein is seen the scientific or “positive” influence at work upon the dogmas of the Christian religion, a tendency which culminated in “Modernism” within the Church, only to be condemned violently by the Pope in 1907. It was this temper, produced by the study of documents, by criticism and historical research which put Renan out of the Catholic Church. His rational mind could not accept the dogmas laid down. Lamennais (who was conservative and orthodox in his theology, and possessed no taint of “modernism” in the technical sense) had declared that the starting-point should be faith and not reason. Renan aptly asks in reply to this, “and what is to be the test, in the last resort, of the claims of faith is not reason?”
[12] Written in 1835. Littré issued a French translation in 1839, a year previous to the appearance of the English version by George Eliot. Strauss’s life covers 1808-1874.
In Renan we find a good illustration of the working of the spirit of modern thought upon a religious mind. Being a sincere and penetrating intellect he could not, like so many people, learned folk among them, keep his religious ideas and his reason in separate watertight compartments. This kind of people Renan likens in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse to mother-o’-pearl shells of Francois de Sales “which are able to live in the sea without tasting a drop of salt water.” Yet he realises the comfort of such an attitude. “I see around me,” he continues, “men of pure and simple lives whom Christianity has had the power to make virtuous and happy. . . . But I have noticed that none of them have the critical faculty, for which let them bless God!” He well realises the contentment which, springing sometimes from a dullness of mind or lack of sensitiveness, excludes all doubt and all problems.
In Catholicism he sees a bar of iron which will not reason or bend. “I can only return to it by amputation of my faculties, by definitely stigmatising my reason and condemning it to perpetual silence.” Writing of his exit from the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, where he was trained for the priesthood, he remarks in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse that “there were times when I was sorry that I was not a Protestant, so that I might be a philosopher without ceasing to be a Christian.” For Renan, as for so many minds in modern France, severance from the Roman Church is equivalent to severance from Christianity as an organised religion. The practical dilemma is presented of unquestioning obedience to an infallible Church on the one hand, or the attitude of libre-penseur on the other. There are not the accommodating varieties of the Protestant presentation of the Christian religion. Renan’s spiritual pilgrimage is but an example of many. In a measure this condition of affairs is a source of strength to the Roman Church for, since a break with it so often means a break with Christianity or indeed with all definite religion, only the bolder and stronger thinkers make the break which their intellect makes imperative. The mass of the people, however dissatisfied they may be with the Church, nevertheless accept it, for they see no alternative but the opposite extreme. No half-way house of non-conformity presents itself as a rule.
Yet, as we have insisted, Renan had an essentially religious view of the universe, and he expressly claimed that his break with the Church and his criticism of her were due to a devotion to pure religion, and he even adds, to a loyalty to the spirit of her Founder. Although, as he remarks in his Nouvelles Etudes religieuses, it is true that the most modest education tends to destroy the belief in the superstitious elements in religion, it is none the less true that the very highest culture can never destroy religion in the highest sense. “Dogmas pass, but piety is eternal.” The external trappings of religion have suffered by the growth of the modern sciences of nature and of historical criticism. The mind of cultivated persons does not now present the same attitude to evidence in regard to religious doctrines which were once accepted without question. The sources of the origins of the Christian religion are themselves questionable. This, Renan says, must not discourage the believers in true religion, for that is not the kind of foundation upon which religion reposes. Dogmas in the past gave rise to divisions and quarrels, only by feeling can religious persons be united in fellowship. The most prophetic words of Jesus were, Renan points out, those in which he indicated a time when men “would not worship God in this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers would worship in spirit and in truth.” It was precisely this spirit which Renan admired in Jesus, whom he considered more of a philosopher than the Church, and he reminds the “Christians”[[13]] who railed against him as an unbeliever that Jesus had had much more influence upon him than they gave him credit for, and, more particularly, that his break with the Church was due to loyalty to Jesus. By such loyalty Renan meant not a blind worship, but a reverence which endeavoured to appreciate and follow the ideals for which Jesus himself stood. It did not involve slavish acceptance of all he said, even if that were intelligible, and clear, which it is not. “To be a Platonist,” remarks Renan, “I need not adore Plato, or believe all that he said.”[[14]]
[13] Renan complains of the ignorance of the clergy of Rome regarding his own work, which they did not understand because they had not read it, merely relying on the Press and other sources for false and biassed accounts.