In Taine’a great contemporary, Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a very different temper is seen. The two thinkers both possessed popularity as men of letters, and resembled one another in being devoted to literary and historical pursuits rather than to philosophy itself.
Renan was trained for the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. He has left us a record of his early life in _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_. We there have an autobiography of a sincere and sensitive soul, encouraged in his priestly career by his family and his teachers to such a degree that he had conceived of no other career for himself, until at the age of twenty, under the influence of modern scientific doctrines and the criticism of the Biblical records, he found himself an unbeliever, certainly not a Roman Catholic, and not, in the ordinary interpretation of that rather vague term, a Christian. The harsh, unrelenting dogmatism of the Roman Church drove Renan from Christianity. We find him remarking that had he lived in a Protestant. country he might not have been faced with the dilemma.[10] A _via media_ might have presented itself in one of the very numerous forms into which Protestant Christianity, is divided. He might have exercised in such a sphere, his priestly functions as did Schleiermacher. Renan’s break with Rome emphasises the clear-cut division which exists in France between the Christian faith (represented, almost entirely by the Roman Church) and _libre-pensée_, a point which will claim our attention later, when we come to treat of the Philosophy of Religion.
[10] Cf. his _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_, p. 292.
Having abandoned the seminary and the Church, Renan worked for his university degrees. The events of 1848-49 inspired his young heart with great enthusiasm, under the influence of which he wrote his _Avenir de la Science_. This book was not published, however, until 1890, when he had lost his early hopes and illusions. In 1849 he went away upon a mission to Italy. “The reaction of 1850-51 and the _coup d’état_ instilled into me a pessimism of which I am not yet cured,” so he wrote in the preface to his _Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques_.[11] Some years after the _coup d’état_ he published a volume of essays (_Essais de Morale et de Critique_), and he showed his acquaintance with Arabic philosophy by an excellent treatise on _Averroes et l’Averroisme_ (1859). The following year he visited Syria and, in 1861, was appointed Professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He then began his monumental work on _Les Origines du Christianisme_, of which the first volume, _La Vie de Jésus_, appeared in 1863. Its importance for religious thought we shall consider in our last chapter; here it must suffice to observe its immediate consequences. These were terrific onslaughts from the clergy upon its author, which, although they brought the attention of his countrymen and of the world upon Renan, resulted in the Imperial Government suspending his tenure of the chair. After the fall of the Empire, however, he returned to it, and under the Third Republic became Director of the Collège de France.