The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France by Robert D. Priest

Abstract

Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France. By Robert D. Priest. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 265. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-19-872875-7.)Robert D. Priest presents here Ernest Renan as Catholic seminarian, philologist, Semitics scholar, professor, and traveling erudit, and his book La Vie de (Paris, 1863) as a contribution to the nineteenth-century historical study of Jesus; the book portrayed a unique and wonderful religious leader, divinized to his detriment by the churches. author deals with the debates, acrimonious and otherwise, that followed publication, involving Renan directly as well as his defenders and adversaries. Priest also discusses Renan's audience that encompassed intellectuals, church people, and admirers whose religious and cultural lives were transformed by Renan and his Jesus, as well as Renan's legacy and the changes in nineteenthand twentieth-century French and European religious sentiment that occurred due to Renan's life and work.Renan, born into the very Catholic Breton culture of the nineteenth century and a sincere seminarian early on, produced an ingenious desacralization of the bib- lical text: There was an irrepressibly Catholic character to various editions of the Vie de Jesus, which sought in different ways to intercede between ordinary believers and the biblical text (p. 14). Renan wrote ofJesus, have felt him, I have touched him, he is my friend (cited on p. 27). This personal and intellectual stance was undergirded by his travels in Palestine, where, he said, The Gospel as a real book had its perfect commentary (cited on p. 54, emphasis in original). His ensuing work brought him appointment to the College de France, and responses to his appointment and his opening lecture marked the beginning of the passionate controversies that surrounded the man and his work ever after.For Renan, brought about a cultural and moral revolution that could only be explained by a uniquely inspiring and imposing personality. Renan rejected both miracles and divinity, but here he worked with historical explanations to counter any philosophical dismissals of the man. Only extended study of Christianity-its Jewish roots and its oriental qualities-could explain Jesus. Priest deals delicately with Renan's emphasis on the gentle, sexually contained, virtually androgynous appeal to both men and women: Jesus offered a model of male heroism that was grounded in celibacy and feminine sensitivity (p. 100); he created a morality of idealism and transcendence that churches ever afterward were unable to institutionalize.With a review of pamphlets, reviews, and newspaper articles, Priest provides a history of subsequent debates. While churchmen and conservative Catholics (such as ultramontanists, those fundamentalists of papal authority) were rabidly antiRenan-after all, he denied the divinity ofJesus-secular academics and other commentators were divided on the virtues and faults of the book. …