ERNEST RENAN AS A HISTORIANOF RELIGIONS

Ronald Williamson

Ernest Renan is a good, though by no means perfect, model ofthe kind of co-operation that could and should take placebetween those engaged in the scholarly study of worldreligions and civilizations such as Buddhism and Hinduismand those engaged in the critical study of, for example,the New Testament documents and the period in the historyof Judaism and early Christianity which constitutes themilieu from which those documents came .

For most students of Christianity interest in Renanbegins with an attempt to evaluate his place in the nineteenth-century 'Quest of the Historical Jesus' . There are goodgrounds for believing that commonly-accepted judgements onRenan's part in the 'Quest' are inadequate . Typical of suchjudgements is the brief dismissal of him in Stephen Neill'sThe History of the Interpretation of the New Testament :3861-1961 (1) . The appearance in 1974 of two new editionsof Renan's famous, or infamous, Vie de Jesus (2), suggeststhat the time may be ripe for a reappraisal of his work (3),an important part of which was concerned with the disciplinevariously known as 'Comparative Religion', 'the comparativestudy of religion', or 'the science of religion' . The recordof the history of this discipline, as it has recently been setout by Professor Eric J . Sharpe in his book ComparativeReligion : A History, needs to be supplemented, if I may beso bold as to make the suggestion, by the inclusion of atleast a brief reference to Renan . I was surprised to findon looking at the index to Sharpe's book, that although oneon the Burnoufs is listed (4), Renan's name is absent . I wasalso surprised to discover that W . Montgomery Watt, in the

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section on Averroes in his book Islamic Philosophy andTheology, makes no mention of Renan, although a lengthydoctoral thesis by Renan on Averroes and Averroism wasaccepted in 1852 . it needs to be affirmed that on severalcounts Renan's place in the records of those who havecontributed to the scientific study of religion was welland truly earned and that therefore there is a gap in Sharpe'shistory and in Montgomery Watt's account of those who havewritten about the Islamic philosopher, Averroes .

From Professor Sharpe I understand that if anyone isentitled to be known as 'the father of comparative religion'it is Friedrich Max Muller . In itself it may be of littleimportance, but it is worth noting that Muller, in theInaugural Address he gave to the Royal Asiatic Society in1891, referred to Renan as 'my old friend Renan' and hestates that it was Renan who had 'done so much to make thestudy of Eastern antiquity a living study' (5) . In severalof Muller's works there are references to Renan, sometimesexpressing disagreement with his conclusions, but alwayswarmly appreciative of his scholarship (6) . A corre-spondence between Renan and Muller began in 1855 with Renanaddressing Muller as 'Monsieur' . By 1858 Muller was'Monsieur et ami' and by 1860 'Mon cher ami' . In a noteattached to the Avertissement to his doctoral thesis onAverroes and Averroism Renan states that thanks to Muller hehad been able to consult a previously unedited Arabic textwhich Steinschneider had edited for the Bodleian Library, thesection of which relating to Averroes Muller had kindlycopied out for him .

Professor Sharpe, in the section of his study devotedto Muller, discusses the origins of the term 'Science ofReligion' . He does not claim that Muller invented the term .The German word, 'Religionswissenschaft', he notes, datesback to the first decade of the nineteenth century . Sharpealso notes that both Leblanc and Emile Burnouf had used theFrench expression 'la science des religions' . Emile Burnoufin fact claims, on the opening page of his La science desreligions, that it was he who had for the first time appliedto the new scientific study of religions that emerged in thenineteenth century the phrase 'Science des Religions' .

To discover who first used the term 'science ofreligion' is no doubt a largely unprofitable exercise .What is important, however, is to note that in the creationof what Sharpe has called 'the new alliance which was beingproposed between science and religion' (7) Renan played asignificant part . In the Essai psychologigue sur Jesus-Christ

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written by Renan during his pre-ordination retreat in 1845(though not published until 1921) Renan laments the absenceof an adequate 'scientific explanation of Jesus Christ' andin the Essai offers his own. In his Conclusion he statesthat he regarded the first part of the Essai as 'a scientificwork' and that he is glad to have built to the glory of Jesus'a scientific monument' . In the Preface to his doctoralthesis of 1852 on Averroes and Averroism he states that oneshould ask of the past only the past itself (8) . Thecontribution of the nineteenth century, he goes on, was tosubstitute the 'historical method' for the theologians''dogmatic method' in studies relating to the human spirit .He then lists the various sciences which exist in this areathe 'sciences of languages', the 'sciences of literature andphilosophy', etc ., observing in passing that each of theseis an historical science . He concludes his list with areference to what he calls 'the science of the human spirit',part of which is the story of Averroes and Averroism whichin his thesis he proceeds to tell .

In his L'Avenir de la science, written in 1848 thoughnot published until 1890, Renan wrote in Chapter XV (of vitalimportance to the historian writing about the beginnings ofthe scientific study of religion) that 'the comparative studyof religions, when it is definitely established on the solidbasis of criticism, will form the most beautiful chapter inthe history of the human spirit' (9) . In his Preface,addressed respectfully to Eugene Burnouf, Renan enunciateswhat he calls his favourite thesis, namely that 'the scienceof the human spirit should above all be the history of thehuman spirit', and he adds that such a history is impossiblewithout the patient philological study of those works whichare the products of the human spirit in different ages .

But apart from terminology Renan made a considerablecontribution to the scientific study of religions in a numberof essays, articles and books produced during nearly fiftyyears of active authorship . One of the distinctionsachieved by Max Muller was to win the Laureat du Prix Volneyof the French Academy of Inscriptions . In doing so he wasfollowing in Renan's footsteps, for in 1847 Renan obtainedthe prize with an essay of 1,518 pages on the history ofSemitic languages . This essay was the germ of Renan's laterbook on this subject published in 1855 . Renan gained afurther prize for an essay on the influence of Greek inWestern Europe from the fifth to the fourteenth century .The winning of the Volney prize led to a friendship withEugene Burnouf whose lectures initiated Renan, alreadyfamiliar with the chief Semitic languages, into the world of

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Indian thought and religion . In 1847 Renan had become amember of the French Asiatic Society . In 1851 he visitedLondon to study the Syriac manuscripts in the BritishMuseum . S . Munk, in his Melanges de philosophic juive etarabe (10) pays tribute to Renan as 'a distinguishedorientalist' .

With his Etudes d'histoire religieuse, published in1857, Renan inaugurated a new literary genre in the Historyof Religions field . It was a collection of articles thathad appeared in a number of different journals, including,in this case, articles on 'The religions of antiquity','The history of the people of Israel', 'The criticalhistorians of Jesus' (a judicious critique of Strauss),and one on 'Muhammad and the origins of Islam' . But it wasBuddhism that became one of Renan's absorbing early interests .Two studies of it appeared in his Nouvelles etudes d'histoirereligieuse published in 1884 . Renan explains in the Preface,however, that his work on Buddhism has been composed in thelast months of Eugene Burnouf's life and was intended forthe Revue des deux mondes . The editor of that journal, whomRenan describes as 'the least Buddhist of men', rejectedRenan's manuscript because he could not believe that whatit contained was true . No one, he insisted to Renan, couldhold such views . There could be no such thing as real, fleshand blood, Buddhists ; no one could be so stupid'. SoRenan's studies of Buddhism had to wait until 1884 for theirpublication - over thirty years . It thus came about thatRenan's first article in the Revue des deux mondes was onMuhammad and Islam .

What Munk described as 'his excellent monograph onAverroes and Averroism' appeared in 1852 . I am notcompetent to evaluate Renan's study . But I find it a littlesurprising that Montgomery Watt, in his account of modernstudies of Islamic philosophy, mentions Munk's Melanges butnot Renan's monograph . Whatever be the value of Renan'saccount of Averroes and Averroism in his book, his Preface,like all his prefaces, is well worth reading . In it he setsout briefly his philosophy of history . The historian, heaffirms, does not approach his subject with the expectationthat it will yield lessons for the present . Nor is the truehistorian interested only in the greatest periods of the past .Once it is admitted, he writes, that 'the history of thehuman spirit is the greatest reality open to our investiga-tions', then every piece of research which throws light ona corner of the past acquires significance and value . Helater affirms that the 'critical judgement' of the historianexcludes 'dogmatic judgement' and that it is a sign neither

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of indifference nor scepticism to refrain from the lattertype of judgement . One is a true historian, he concludes,only in so far as one knows how to reproduce freely inoneself the different types of the life of the past, tounderstand their originality, and to accept them as at timesgood and beautiful and at times bad and ugly .

But it is not as a historian of Buddhism or medievalIslamic philosophy that Renan is best known . To most Britishreaders he is known for and by his Vie de Jesus, which is infact simply the first volume of the seven which makes up hisHistoire des origines du christianisme . ' The Vie appeared in1863 ; the final volume of the series on the origins ofChristianity in 1882 . In 1887 there appeared the firstvolume of his history of the Jewish people, which was to runto five volumes, the last of which was completed in 1891,though Volumes IV and V did not appear until 1893, the yearafter his death .

There are many things that could be said, and whichneed to be said, in defence of Renan's Vie de Jesus . Eversince Albert Schweitzer dismissed it in a quotation fromChristolph Luthardt as a work that 'lacks conscience' and asone that turns the story of Jesus into a romantic, senti-mental Galilean idyll, both judgements which could be sharplycontested, Renan's Vie has not been taken very seriously byBritish New Testament scholarship as an attempt to reconstructthe history of Jesus . The Vie undoubtedly does have faults :the chief being perhaps that the portrait it paints of Jesuslooks suspiciously like Renan himself . But the work deservesa better fate than the superficial comments, quick dismissalsor total neglect, which is what it has received at the handsof most British writers (11) . The reason for this somewhatnegative attitude to the Vie is not hard to find, Renan'sstubborn insistence that a history of Jesus could be writtenwithout recourse to the church's Christological dogmas, whichRenan had abandoned, meant that the Vie appeals neither tothose who cannot bring themselves to separate the Jesus ofhistory from the Christ of dogma nor to those who, whileaffirming their faith in the Christ of the Church's kerygma,allow themselves the luxury of considerable scepticismregarding the historical Jesus .

In fact an impartial examination of the Vie, togetherwith the vitally important Preface attached to the thirteenthedition in 1867, reveals that Renan anticipated in asignificant way many of the findings of modern criticalinvestigation of the historical Jesus question. He had, ofcourse, been deeply influenced by Strauss, though in his

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study of the critical historians of Jesus in his articlein his Etudes d'histoire religieuse, he subjects Strauss'Life to a careful scrutiny and in the end rejects his 'mytho-logical' hypothesis . Renan was acutely aware of the problemof sources, a problem he discusses in the first chapter ofthe Vie, offering finally as his definition of the gospelsthe phrase 'legendary biographies' . He would probably bejudged by most modern New Testament scholars to be wrong inhis assessment of the historical value of the Fourth Gospel,though he offers a lively, if somewhat unconvincing, defenceof his view in an Appendix to later editions of the Vie .

One of the great merits of Renan's work, and thisapplies not only to his Vie but also to his critique ofStrauss and the Essai psychologique sur Jesus-Christ of1845, is the clarity with which he recognized the problemof the relationship between the historical Jesus and theChrist of the Church's proclamation and Christologicaldefinition . For him the origins of Christianity involveda sequence from the history of Jesus through legendaryaccretion to dogmatic definition . Rightly or wrongly, havingrenounced the dogmas of the Church, he believed that therewas a recoverable history of Jesus . This he attempted towrite, using both the New Testament's four gospels and the'fifth gospel' accessible to him on his visits to Palestine .Whatever the faults of Renan's Vie it has at least the meritof taking seriously Jesus the Jew and attempting to offer anexplanation of how that Jesus became the Christ of theChurch's faith . Part of the explanation for Renan was thepowerful personal impact which, he believed, Jesus must havemade upon his followers . Unfortunately he chose to describethis quality as 'charm' and in the Vie there are numerousreferences to the 'charming' Galilean . What is not alwaysnoticed by those who are rather contemptuous of what theyconsider to be Renan's sentimental romanticism in thisrespect is that in his L'Avenir de la science Renan uses theword 'charme' to describe what Muller in Lecture I of hisIntroduction to the Science of Religion calls 'the Infinite',what Renan does not hesitate to call God . So, although Jesuswas for Renan a man among men, he was an 'incomparable man',to use the phrase he used in the Inaugural Lecture at theCollege de France as the newly-appointed Professor of Hebrewin 1862 (12) .

Another of the merits of Renan's history of Jesus isthe deep awareness it shows of the Jewishness of Jesus . itwas in his inaugural lecture as a Professor of Hebrew that hemade his notorious remark about Jesus and made it there, ashe later explains, because he could not bring himself to

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open a course of lectures on the language of the Jews withoutsome reference to a man whom he took to be the greatest ofthe sons of Abraham. It is no accident that over the lastchapter of the final volume of his Histoire du peupled'Israel he placed the motto Finito libro, sit laws et gloriaChristo . In the Vie Renan makes a serious attempt to relateJesus to contemporary Judaism. The chapter on the Esseneswhich Renan included in Volume V of his history of theJewish people is still worth reading, though it was writtenlong before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and isdependent almost exclusively on information derived fromPhilo and Josephus . Renan makes numerous references in theVie to the Essenes and to the affinities he believed toexist between them and Jesus, a conclusion he reachedbecause the gospels seemed to him to contain elements noteasily intelligible in terms of the strands of Judaismrepresented by the rabbis, Pharisees or Sadducees .

One special merit of the Vie springs from the fact thatRenan was a Breton . In a lecture given at the RoyalInstitute in London Renan described himself as a 'FrenchBriton' . His life in Brittany, Renan believed, enabled himto understand the first-century world from which the gospelscame . Coming from nineteenth-century, rural, maritimeBrittany, Renan appreciated the tendency of the primitivemind to indulge in the operation and elaboration of legends .His knowledge of Breton folklore and the Breton capacity forstory-telling equipped him, he thought, for the task ofinterpreting the gospels with their legendary biographies ofJesus . Of the local Breton saints he wrote, 'they are peoplewho for the most part have really existed, but whom legendhas surrounded by a brilliant network of fables' (13) .'I have seen the primitive world', he could write, becausehe believed that in Brittany before 1830 'the most distantpast lived on ' (14) .

In his Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse he tells howhis mother recounted the old Breton folk-tales, movingskillfully between the real and the fictitious in a way thatrevealed or implied that a story could be used to expressa truth without the story's being literally true in everydetail . In an essay entitled 'La Poesie des races celtiques'Renan says, in a discussion of Celtic heroes, 'Each oneappears as a kind of demi-god characterized by a supernaturalgift; this gift is almost always attached to a marvellousobject which is in some sense the personal seal of the onewho possesses it' (15) . The same kind of process was atwork, he believed, in the early Christian communities whichgave birth to the gospels . In the Preface to the thirteenth

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edition of the Vie Renan wrote, 'Now, the history ofreligious origins transports us into a world of women, ofchildren, of ardour and frenzy' . It was his personalknowledge of how the primitive mentality covers theremembered story of a revered figure or hero with legendaryembellishments that led him to protest against the way inwhich Strauss and others saw 'great deeds and great men assymbols of their times, and thus to shift the emphasisfrom the hero to the sentiments and ideas of the masses' (16) .Renan was willing 'to humanize a legendary hero, a son ofGod, but not to admit that individual greatness was due tothe people or the popular imagination' (17) . Renan himselfsaid that 'In order to reach the truth it is necessary toseparate the real facts from embellishments which credulousfaith and the taste for the marvellous has added to them' (18) .Such an undertaking Renan recognized to be difficult, thoughnot impossible . A kernel of historical truth could beextracted by the use of what he calls 'delicate approxima-tions', though Renan's own list of things one can say withhistorical certainty about Jesus is rather shorter than eventhe most critical of modern historians would give . As aletter to Berthelot written from Beirut in 1861 shows, he waswell aware that the 'marche organique' that he thought hehad succeeded in giving to the story of Jesus' life (whichhe had almost finished writing) was lacking completely inthe gospels themselves . He recognized that conjecture wasan inescapable part of a historian's work . In his Souvenirshe calls the 'historical sciences' in general 'littleconjectural sciences' and allows himself to express regretthat his career had been that of a historian considering areality in the past 'for ever disappeared' from view .

But Renan was, among other things and above all else,a historian . He was drawn to the study of history at anearly age . In his Souvenirs he tells how listening toextracts being read from Michelet's Histoire de Francedeeply moved him . One of his biographers said of him thatafter a visit to Italy in 1849 'Renan had fallen under thesway of the past' . In' his Hibbert Lectures Renan said,'What we love is history . History, well written, is alwaysgood .' Of special interest to him, as I have tried to show,was the history of religions . In the Preface to hisNouvelles etudes d'histoire religieuse he says that subjectsin that area had an attraction for him which was genuine andwhich he found irresistible . When he abandoned histheological studies in Saint-Sulpice and embarked upon hishistorical studies of religion he said that he was leavingwords for things .

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As a historian it was mankind that interested Renan,but not just mankind in the mass . In his Nouveaux cahiersde jeunesse we read, 'The enormous variety of men strikes me :Homer, a knight, a modern poet, Augustus, a nun, Jesus Christ,Voltaire, a rag-and-bone man, a peasant, a SinhaleseBuddhist monk, a yogi, an inhabitant of Siberia, SaintTheresa, a banker, a bourgeois, a politician, Muhammad,me . . .' (19) . His own lively interest in people, especiallythe poor, helped him, he was sure, as a historian of Jesus .

Renan insisted that he had no controversial or polemicalintentions in undertaking to write the history of earlyChristianity (20) . What he did feel was specially necessaryfor the critical writing of a history of the origins ofChristianity was 'a purely lay and profane spirit' (21) .The method needed was that used by Hellenists, 'arabists',and others, 'people who are strangers to all theology' (22) .A fundamental principle of Renan's philosophy of history,when the history involved was that of a religion, he stateson a number of occasions (23) . It is the principle that towrite the history of a religion it is necessary first of allto have believed (without that it would be impossible tocomprehend the power of religion) but then to have ceasedto believe in an absolute manner (for absolute faith isincompatible with sincere history) . In his L'Avenir de 1ascience, having referred to the literature of the Indianreligions, he goes on to say that just as those understandChrist who have believed in him, so, in order to understandthese 'sublime creations' (24), it is necessary to havebelieved or at least to have lived with . them .

Of special interest also is the fact that Renanbelieved his early studies of Buddhism and Islam to havebeen a vital part of his preparation to be a historian ofJesus and Christianity . As Secretary of the French AsiaticSociety he followed with great interest the contributionsin its journal on Buddhism . His own studies led him tobelieve that as well as striking contrasts there wereequally striking resemblances between Buddhism andChristianity . This led him to invite the historians ofearly Christianity to join hands with the historians ofthe religions of the Orient . It is regrettable that so longafterwards this kind of co-operation, the result of whichRenan believed would be mutual enrichment, has not takenplace more extensively. In his L'Avenir de la science Renancould express the view that there would be no final solutionto the problems confronting the historian of earlyChristianity until Eugene Burnouf had finished hisIntroduction a i'histoire du bouddhisme indien (25) .

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one thing that fascinated Renan in his own studies ofBuddhism was the development from the Buddha of history tothe Buddha of Buddhist legend, a development paralleled, hethought, by the development from the Jesus of history to thelegendary Jesus of the gospels, especially the apocryphalones . Renan was sure, however, that the existence oflegendary accretions did not mean that there was not behindthem a recoverable personal history . His examination ofstatues of the Buddha led him to conclude that although theyhad been executed in terms of the general oriental canons ofbeauty, there were particular features which could not beexplained in terms of a priori creation . For Renan, thelegend of the Buddha and the statues of him confirmed hisconclusion that although Christianity had gone further inattributing divine qualities to its founder than theBuddhist tradition, the process at work in both had been alegend-making rather than a myth-making one .

Whatever we make now of the suggestions Renan putforward about the similarities between Christianity andBuddhism (26) he was surely right in thinking that historiansof early Christianity would stand only to gain by listeningto what historians of other religions had to say . Associa-tions of those who study religions other than Christianityought to welcome those whose chief interest is in the historyof Jesus and early Christianity, though I suppose that someof these will want to exclude themselves because of theirhidden, or open, presumption that some segments of historyhave a unique value and that therefore they have nothingmuch to learn from the historians of history's othersegments .

Professor E . Trocme of Strasbourg has recentlysuggested that Renan opened a door, in the Quest of theHistorical Jesus, that still happily remains open in that'the scholarly biography of Jesus is still very muchalive'(27) . For that New Testament historians should begrateful to him . Historians of religion should also begrateful to him, for not only can the history of religionin Europe in the nineteenth century not be written adequatelywithout reference to his voluminous writings, but also, paceProfessor Sharpe, it is impossible to write a full and fairaccount of the beginnings of the scientific study ofreligion without acknowledging Renan's vital part in theprocess (28) .

Finally, Renan should teach biblical and churchhistorians on the one hand, and historians of religion onthe other, that there is no gulf between them, but that only

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good can come for both out of listening to the other . Itis important not to forget the words of Muller spoken to hisaudience at the Royal Institution in 1870, 'He who knowsone, knows none .' That dictum is true for historians of eachand all the world's religions . Of its truth Renan's lifeand work is an eloquent reminder .

NOTES

* An earlier version of this paper was presented to theannual Conference of the British Section of theInternational Association for the History of Religions inSeptember 1976 .

1 Oxford University Press 1964, pp . 193-4 .2 Vie de Jesus, ed . P . de Boisdeffre, Gerard-Marabout

1974 ; and ed . J . Gaulmier, Gallimard 1974 .3 I hope elsewhere to discuss in detail the place of

Renan's Vie in the nineteenth-century 'Quest of theHistorical Jesus' .

4 The one listed is Emile Burnouf, not to be confusedwith the great Buddhist specialist, Eugene Burnouf, towhose daughter Renan was briefly engaged .

5 See Chips from a German Workshop, Vol . I, 'The TrueAntiquity of Oriental Literature', pp . 146-72, andespecially pp . 170-1 . Cf . ibid ., Vol . I, Intro . p . 13,where Muller refers to an 'eminent writer' (Renan) whonot many years before (the Intro . was written in Oxfordin 1867) had caused offence by remarking that the timehad come for Christianity to be treated in 'a trulyhistorical spirit' .

6 E .g ., in his Gifford Lectures, Natural Religion, deliveredat the University of Glasgow, 1888 (Longmans Green 1898)Muller gently accuses Renan of exaggeration for saying,in his Histoire des langues semitiques, that in Arabicthere are 500 synonyms for 'lion' .

7 Op . cit ., p . 30.8 P .v ., 'I1 ne faut demander au passe que le passe lui-

meme .'9 Cf . ibid ., Calman-Levy edition, Paris 1905, p . 279,

where he prophesied that the most important book tocome from the nineteenth century would bear the titleHistoire critique des origines du christianisme, andexpressed the hope that he might be allowed to write it .In the Preface to his L'Avenir de la science he saysthat his own Les origines du christianisme had absorbedhim for 25 years .

10 Preface, p . viii .11 One of the exceptions to the general rule regarding the

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attitude of British scholars is Bishop Charles Gore,who edited the Everyman Library edition of Renan'sLife of Jesus, J .M. Dent 1927 . In his Introduction Gorecriticizes Renan's view of the non-miraculous characterof life of Jesus, but supports his assessment of thehistorical value of the sources . See J . Carpenter,Gore : A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought, Faith Press1960, p . 147 n . 3 . A .Vidler, in Essays in Liberality,SCM 1957, refers to Gore's use of Renan's saying, 'lavdritd consiste dans les nuances' (p . 149) . I owe this lastreference to A .D . Rogers . Among a few others who viewedRenan's work favourably was E .C . Hoskyns, The FourthGospel (ed . by F .N . Davey, Faber 1947), pp . 28-35 (henotes how 'Renan refused to acquiesce in the currentopinion that a document written from a theological pointof view was altogether suspect, and could contain novaluable historical material', though he did not regardRenan's attempt to separate history from interpretationas wholly successful) . F .W .H . Myers, in 'Ernest Renan',Essay IV of 'Modern Essays', the second part of EssaysClassical and Modern, Macmillan 1921, offers a sympatheticstudy of Renan as a historian . Also cf . Alan H . Jones,'The Study of Early Christianity by "Independent" Frenchscholars during the period 1900-1950 with specialreference to Loisy, Guignebert and Goguel', unpublishedUniversity of Lancaster Ph .D . thesis 1977 . I owe to mycolleague, Alistai,r Mason, the information that Engels,'On the History of Early Christianity' (Die Neue Zeit,Vol . I, 1894-5, taken from, K . Marx and F . Engels,On Religion, Moscow 1957) quotes several times fromRenan, in one place describing Renan's Origines duchristianisme as a 'novel' . Mr Mason also informs methat there is a paragraph on Renan in Nietzsche,Twilight of the Idols (Penguin 1974 edition, pp . 67-8) .

12 Renan used the word 'charme' to describe the numinousquality of God in his L'Avenir de la science, p . 476 :'Tout se rdduit a ce fait de la nature humaine : 1'hommeen face du divin sort de lui-meme, se suspend a uncharme cdleste, andantit sa chdtive personnalitd,s'exalte, s'absorbe . Qu'est que cela si n'est adorer?'Cf . Etudes d'histoire religieuse, p . 7 . The story ofhow and why Renan was suspended from his Chair for using,of Jesus, the phrase 'incomparable man' and the shockhis Vie administered to the Catholic Church need not betold here again .

13 Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, p . 80.14 Ibid ., p . 87 .15 The essay is contained in his Essais de morales et

critiques (1859) . The quotation comes from p . 390 of the8th edition, Paris 1921 .

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16 P . 50 of Gaulmier's edition of the Vie ; p . 14 ofBoisdeffre's .

17 G . Rearick, Beyond the Enlightenment: Historians andFolklore in Nineteenth Century France,

IndianaUniversity Press 1954, p . 156 .

18 'Les historiens critiques de Jesus', p . 142 .19 Nouveaux Cahiers de Jeunesse, Para . 90, pp . 143-4 .20 Preface to the 13th edition of the Vie, Gaulmier, p . 34 .

Cf . his Les Apotres (1894 edition), Preface, p . lv .21 Preface to the 13th edition of the Vie, Gaulmier, p . 39 .22 Ibid .23 Introduction to the Vie, Gaulmier, p . 107 . Cf . L'Avenir

de la science, p . 291 . See also Etudes d'HistoireReligieuse, pp . 6-7, where he adds the comment, 'on necomprehend bien que le culte qui a provoque en nous lepremier elan vers l'ideal' .

24 L'Avenir de la science, p . 291 .25 Ibid ., p . 279 .26 He suggests, e .g ., that Buddhist works contain parables

similar to those of the gospels . He notes similaritiesbetween the development of Christianity and Buddhism inrelation to poverty and wealth, and compares Jesus andthe Buddha in respect of other-worldliness (and evendiscusses the possibility of the influence of Buddhismon John the Baptist and, since Jesus was for a time 'theimitator of John', on Jesus .

27 Jesus and His Contemporaries, SCM, p . 7 . See also theinfluential work of his Strasbourg colleague, MarcelSimon .

28 Other examples of Renan's involvement in the study ofreligions include his interesting address to the Societedes etudes juives, 'Identite originelle et separationgraduelle du Judaisme et du christianisme' (Discours etconferences, pp . 311-40), his address 'Le Judaisme commerace et comme religion' (ibid ., pp . 341-74), and his'L'islamisme et la science' (ibid ., pp . 375-409) .Among other discussions of Renan on the history ofreligion are Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale,H . Pinard de Boullaye, L'Etude comparee des religions(2 vols .) . My attention was drawn to the last two worksby my colleague, Dr Ursula King. My colleague, Dr A .D .Lowe, drew my attention to L . Smolar, 'Ernest Renan andthe civilization of ancient Israel' (unpublishedUniversity of Maryland Ph .D . thesis 1973) .

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RONALD WILLIAMSON is a Senior Lecturer in New TestamentStudies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studiesof the University of Leeds . He is the author of Philo andthe Epistle to the Hebrews ( Brill, Leyden 1970) . He haspublished articles on New Testament subjects in New TestamentStudies, Theology, Expository Times, Scottish Journal ofTheology and the Epworth Review .

Dr R . Williamson, Dept of Theology and Religious Studies,The University, Leeds LS2 9JT